The Iliad and what it can still tell us about war
Photograph: Corporal Adrian Harlen/PA Images
The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus.
The Iliad charts not the famous causes of the conflict (the Trojan prince Paris's abduction of Helen) nor its spectacularly bloody end (the Greeks' ruse of the wooden horse and the brutal sacking of the city). Instead, the subject of the poem is menis, fury – specifically, the wrath of the Greeks' best warrior, Achilles.....
The Iliad still has much to say about war, even as it is fought today.
It tells us that war is both the bringer of renown to its young fighters and the destroyer of their lives. It tells us about post-conflict destruction and chaos; about war as the great reverser of fortunes. It tells us about the age-old dilemmas of fighters compelled to serve under incompetent superiors. It tells us about war as an attempt to protect and preserve a treasured way of life. It tells us, too, about the profound gulf between civilian existence and life on the front line; about atrocities and indiscriminate slaughter; about war's peculiar mercilessness to women and children; about friendships and sympathies across the battle lines. It tells us of the love between soldiers who fight together.
Most of all, it tells us about the frightful losses of war: of a soldier losing his closest companion, of a father losing his son....
One of its most arresting characteristics, however, is the way it casts us forward and back, hinting at both a lost, peaceful world "back home", and the horrors of the post-conflict world to come. This is a quality that does much to lend the poem its pathos, and its constant sense of loss. ....
It is perhaps in the relationships between the combatants that modern soldiers might most readily see their own emotions mirrored.
In his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, American psychiatrist Jonathan Shay finds parallels between the pathologies of Vietnam veterans whom he has treated, and Homer's Achilles. He argues that Achilles is suffering from what we would now call combat trauma, the death of Patroclus causing his character fatally to unravel.
In particular, Shay compares the comradeship and passionate loyalty of American soldiers in Vietnam to that between Achilles and Patroclus – who grew up together, fought alongside each other, and whose relationship is the subject of some of Homer's most tender writing. In book 16 ....
Former Guardian war reporter Audrey Gillan....in 2008 spoke to soldiers from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment who had been involved in a particularly brutal firefight in Basra four years earlier. Lance Corporal Martin Hill remembered the end of a fellow soldier: "He was dead. You could see his skin changing colour and his eyes were dilated. We went through every emotion possible then. Blokes were screaming out and crying."
This is a long way from ramrod backs and stiff upper-lips.
Shay records one of his patients recalling his own fury: "I really loved fucking killing, couldn't get enough. For every one of them I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away [sic]. Every time you lost a friend it seemed like a part of you was gone. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy."
The Iliad is a cavalcade of loss, an endless parade of men summoned briefly to life only to be consigned to death....
[But] life does have meaning in The Iliad, a meaning that is bound up both with a warrior's kleos, the glory he achieves in the field, and, paradoxically, with a hero's willing, onward surge towards death.
How are we, then, to read the poem amid the horrors and contradictions of our own wars, conflicts that have destroyed countless Andromaches and Astyanaxes?
Bleak as The Iliad is, it is made all the bleaker by its divine characters. The poem's gods, who urge on the fighters and intervene to help their favoured heroes, are flimsy and flippant compared to their mortal counterparts, a source of troubling light relief rather than profundity. The life-and-death struggles of the human characters seem weightier and more agonisingly present when set against the meaningless existence of the gods.
This is a hard world: the war isn't "for" anything, certainly not some greater good, but is merely part of the blind workings of an inexplicable fate that even Zeus, king of the gods, must bow to.
When the warriors die, there are no flights of angels to sing them to their rest, only the prospect of a ghastly, ghostly, absence of meaning....
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