The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War
by Caroline Alexander: notes
The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War
by Caroline Alexander
A fascinating reading of the Iliad, which:
- Relates the events in the Iliad to events in the world today.
- Helps the reader appreciate the context in which people would hear
the Iliad
recited or sung shortly after its composition (around 750 to 700 BCE)
and its related poems that preceded it in the Greek Bronze Age aural tradition.
Quotes richly from Richmond Lattimore's The 'Iliad' of Homer (1961),
which she says [p. 274] is:
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The most faithful to Homer's Greek of all translations available in English,
both in literal word sense and in epic gravitas.
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Also notes the existence of Robert Fagles 1990 translation as [p. 274]:
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Colloquial and modern, a translation that many readers have found to be the most accessible.
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Simon Underwood's English Translators of Homer
(1998) is also noted for its [p. 274]:
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Succinct (seventy-nine pages) discussion of the most important translations and
changing sensibilities.
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The most highly recommended commentaries (6 volumes, one for each group of four books in the
Iliad) are [p. 273]:
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The most comprehensive, thorough, and handy commentary
... the six-volume series published by Cambridge University Press,
of which the late G.S. Kirk was the general editor.
While the line-by-line commentary can be technical, the series' many essays
on general themes ('The Gods in Homer',
'Typical Motifs and Themes') are clear and readable.
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Sections of Caroline Alexander's The War That Killed Achilles
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- Preface. 5 concise pages that conclude:
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Homeric scholarship goes back to the dawn of literary scholarship, to the work of
Theogenes of Rhegium, around 525 B.C., and in most Western —
and some non-Western —
universities continues to this day. ...
This book is not about many of the things that have occupied this scholarship,
although inevitably it will touch on the same themes.
This book is not an examination
of the transmission of the Homeric text or of what Homer has meant to every passing age.
It is not an analysis of the linguistic background of the epic,
and it is not about the oral tradition behind the poem;
it is not about formulaic expressions or whether 'Homer' should refer to an individual or a tradition.
It is not about Bronze Age Greece nor the historicity of the Trojan War.
This book is about what the Iliad is about;
this book is about what the Iliad says of War.
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- 1-page Note to the Reader that acknowledges Richard Lattimore's 1951
translation of Iliad as her source of quotations (except for Chapter Nine
which is entirely Alexander's own translation of Iliad Book 22:
"The Death of Hektor".
- 2-pages of three maps: "Landscape of the Trojan War".
- Chapters:
- The Things They Carried.
The carried-off Helen is associated by Alexander with a
"prototype ... Daughter of the Sun, the abduction of the Sun Maiden being a recurrent motif in old
Indo-European myth".
Her summary of the famous story makes it starkly clear how much deceit — whether motivated by love or pride or both —
and failure to keep promises of custom appear
in the Trojan war. Particular offenders are Paris, Helen, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus.
- Chain of Command.
Achilles' wrath is "the engine that drives the epic" [p. 19],
his fury being directed for most of the story at his commander-in-chief, Agamemnon,
not at the enemy Trojans.
- Terms of Engagement.
The mustering and facing off of armies; the opportunities for individual heroic combat;
and the involvement of the gods.
- Enemy Lines.
"An epic of war, the greater part of the Iliad
is concerned with killing and dying, and the deaths of some 250 warriors are recorded,
the majority in relentlessly inventive detail" [p. 64].
- Land of My Fathers.
Some of Achilles' parentage and background is discussed. Then the revelation:
"Life is more precious than glory; this is the unheroic truth
disclosed by the greatest warrior at Troy. More extraordinary than its subversion of a conventional story line
... is the Iliad's very deliberate confrontation with the core tenets of its own tradition" [p. 98].
- In God We Trust.
Zeus supports Troy in the conflict but is sometimes bored and disinterested or simply hoodwinked
so the battle rages somewhat independently of what Zeus wishes.
- Man Down.
Patroklos, a squire to Achilles and his best companion, has his moment of hubris,
wearing the armor of Achilles, and dies in combat with Hektor.
- No Hostages.
Achilles is now back in action with newly forged armor:
"The sacrifice was effective; the death of Patroklos broke the baneful spell of wrath
and has reunited the hero with his community" [p. 160].
The modern-day combat trauma [e.g. "I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy" [p. 169]]
of Vietnam veterans is compared with the state of Achilles after Patroklos' death.
- The Death of Hektor.
The author's own translation of the remarkable Book 22 of Iliad,
when Achilles finally meets Hektor in combat.
- Everlasting Glory.
In the end, "the Iliad never betrays its subject, which is war.
Honoring the nobility of a soldier's sacrifice and courage,
Homer nonetheless determinedly concludes his epic with a sequence of funerals,
inconsolable lamentation, and shattered lives.
War makes stark the tragedy of mortality.
A hero will have no recompense for death, although he may win glory" [p. 225].
- Acknowledgments. 2 pages.
- Notes. 44 pages of scholarship-level detail.
- Selected Further Reading. 5 pages.
- Index. 18 pages.
See also
Timeline of Foundations of Western Civilization.
See:
[Thanks for visiting.]
Links.
