Why is the iliad a classic

The two enemies, one old and one young, sit down and weep together over what they both have lost. Hector is the real hero of the Iliad , and he dies at the hands of Achilles, who desecrates his body and drags it around the walls of Troy, Venus then restores his body to perfection before it is returned to Priam.

It is not at all what we expect from a story about a great war hero. Hector, in fact, is just the opposite of the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, make-my-day kind of hero that we so admire. But that is not what Homer gave them—or us. Hector, in some sense, prefigures Christ, for he was not at all the Greek ideal of a hero, godlike in beauty and strength.

Rather, he was a hero that was defiled and humiliated. There is no book on the Civil War—or any war—that compares with the Iliad. And your children will be a little wiser and a little more human for having read it.

Wheatley, our head of school, and, knowing the death of Hector is imminent, they often express the fear that they are going to cry in class. The Iliad and Odyssey are the beginnings of Western literature.

The story of that war and its aftermath continues in the Aeneid , which our students read in the eighth grade. Written by the great Roman poet Virgil and modeled on the Iliad and the Odyssey , the Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, who was destined to escape from the burning city of Troy and found a new city, Rome.

And the destiny of Rome, Virgil tells us, was to civilize and rule the world. Rome brought an unprecedented two hundred years of peace and prosperity to the ancient world, preparing the way for the coming of Christ and the spread of the gospel to the ends of the known world. And the story continues in the ninth grade, when students read Greek drama and follow other heroes who return home from the Trojan War.

In the cycle of vengeance that is the curse of the House of Atreus and the unspeakable fate of Oedipus we see that the Greeks were certainly not afraid to ask the dark and hard questions. But in doing so they prepared the way for the even darker and harder answer—the Crucifixion. And then our ninth graders read the Divine Comedy , written at the opening of the Renaissance, almost one thousand years after the fall of Rome.

In this great Christian epic, Dante must travel through Hell in order to learn about the true nature of man and the reality of sin. I hope you can see that literature taught in this way is a continuous story. That is what literature should be, but rarely is. The Olympians are divided over the fate of Troy, just as the mortals are - in the Iliad the Trojan war is a cosmic conflict, not just one played out at the human level between Greeks and non-Greeks.

Ominously for Troy, the gods on the Greek side, notably Hera queen of the gods , Athena goddess of wisdom and war , and Poseidon god of the land and sea , represent a much more powerful force than the divine supporters of Troy, of whom Apollo the archer god and god of afar is the main figure.

The Iliad is only one poetic work focused on the war for Troy; many others have not survived. But such is its quality and depth that it had a special place in antiquity, and probably survived for that reason.

We know virtually nothing about Homer and whether he also created the other poem in his name, the Odyssey, which recounts the return journey of Odysseus from the Trojan war, to the island of Ithaca. This tradition of oral composition probably reaches back hundreds of years before the Iliad. Early epic poetry can be a way of maintaining the cultural memory of major conflicts.

The Iliad was composed as one continuous poem. In its current arrangement most likely after the establishment of the Alexandrian library in the early 3rd century BC , it is divided into 24 books corresponding to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.

Likewise the Greek attack on Troy was a collective quest drawing on forces from across the Greek world. Pan-Hellenism, therefore, is central to the Iliad. A central idea in the Iliad is the inevitability of death as also with the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh. The poignancy of life and death is enhanced by the fact that the victims of war are usually young.

Achilles is youthful and headstrong, and has a goddess for a mother, but even he has to die. We learn that he had been given a choice — a long life without heroic glory, or a short and glorious life in war. His choice of the latter marks him out as heroic, and gives him a kind of immortality. It's too small, too slight. Adopting some recent though contested theories in archaeology and epigraphy the study of inscriptions , she in effect supersizes the impoverished ruins of Hisarlik to dovetail with Homer's wealthy and powerful Asian city of Troy.

It has the effect of elevating Homeric myth to the status of history. In this way the epic is brought closer to us, domesticated, stripped of some of its mythopoeic strangeness — its antiquity.

We are asked to believe that the Trojan War was real and Homer a kind of war correspondent. There are moments in The Iliad — Achilles and Priam shedding tears over the corpse of Hector; Hector's farewell speech to Andromache — when the mythic, epic past takes on a contemporary colouring and Homer seems to speak directly to us in an emotional language we understand.

And yet much of The Iliad not only describes but celebrates the viciousness of war. Homer kills off combatants by name, and many more that are unnamed. The battle scenes at the core of the poem glorify the victor, demean the victim, and turn killing into mere work: a hard day at an open-air office. Book 10 relates a grim night-time reconnoitre that results in the summary decapitation of a Trojan who is speaking when the blade strikes — "and the shrieking head went tumbling into the dust" in Robert Fagles' acclaimed translation.

It's a kind of macabre slapstick. A really bad joke. When first encountered, the Homeric hero Achilles is little more than a champion angry that his military superior covets his prize — a captive girl named Briseis.

Achilles stalks off to his tent, spends most of the poem sulking as his comrades fall around him, and returns to the fray when Patroclus, his best friend or possibly lover, is killed by the Trojans. His ultimate revenge is to slay the Trojan champion Hector — a husband, father and man of his people. This accomplished, Achilles the anarchist drags Hector's corpse behind his chariot for 12 days. The whole thing is completely, inexplicably, over the top. An incident that is rarely discussed — perhaps, like a trauma, it is easily suppressed — occurs at the funeral of Patroclus.

Onto the blazing pyre Achilles throws a menagerie of sacrificial beasts and "12 sons of the high-spirited Trojans" in Green's translation after first cutting their throats.