Having recently completed the Iliad in Homeric Greek, I decided to write down my thoughts about the process.

The Iliad is difficult to read. Incredibly difficult. It is perhaps the earliest piece of European literature ever recorded, and after several millennia it still can amaze the modern reader with the artistry of its execution. Many of the words used in the Iliad are hapax legomena, a term that is itself Greek and refers to words that occur only once. In this case, the phrase means that the word only occurs in the entire history of the Greek language once, and that one time is in Homer’s Iliad. I understand that there are 1097 words in the Iliad like this. However, there are also other words that may occur somewhere else, once or twice, but which are just as obscure. As a result, the gulf standing between the modern reader and the Iliad is deeper and harder to bridge than almost any other surviving work of literature. Certainly, there are surviving texts from the ancient Near East and the Far East which are older, but none with anything approaching the mastery of language or depth of vocabulary that one finds in Homer.

Homeric Greek was already considered archaic in Athens during the Golden Age of Greek literature, and even after learning the specialized vocabulary, Homer’s Greek is still more difficult than the Greek of Plato and other classical authors by several orders of magnitude. Words that have one meaning in Attic are far trickier in Homeric Greek, and there is a wealth of words that all seem to mean the same thing. Right from the start, as Apollo is raining death down on the Achaeans (literally) with his arrows, three different words are used for “arrow” (ἰος, οἰστος, κηλον) in a very short space of time. Irregular forms abound and archaic and irregular spellings can often confuse one word with another, similar word.

The only comparison I can give to the experience is to imagine for a moment that you’ve just learned English as a foreign language. This would be the equivalent of learning Koine Greek, which is relatively easy to learn (relatively being the key word) because it’s standardized, a bit simplified, and uses a fairly set and universal vocabulary. It is the Greek of Alexander the Great’s Empire and the successor states, and then of the Eastern Roman Empire. Classical (Attic) Greek would be like learning to read Shakespeare. It’s the language of good authors like Xenophon, Sophocles or Plato. It is a stage of Greek that is more fragmented and represents the intellectual product of disparate city-states at the height of their power and influence, each with its own dialectical particularities. Going back further to Homer is perhaps not as hard as reading Beowulf, but certainly as difficult as Chaucer.

Even though it became easier as I went on, it still never became “easy” to read. Yes, the Iliad was originally meant to be recited, and therefore memorized, and so the same stock phrases reappear. Homer often pairs the same adjectives with the same nouns, and Homer’s favorite verbs, even if they are not as common in Attic, find ample usage and became familiar. However, it’s still hard. Myths are referred to and names are casually dropped. Homer expects that his readers are familiar with a great deal of information that even modern readers familiar with the classical world don’t have.

The assumption that the stories are familiar to the audience becomes immediately evident at the very beginning of the book. Agamemnon speaks up against the seer Calchas for telling the Achaeans to send Chryseis, Agamemnon’s female slave, back to her father to end the pestilence afflicting them (all translations are my own; I have tried to keep words on the same lines as they appear in the original to give a sense of the word order in the original):

μάντι κακῶν, οὐ πῶ ποτέ μοι τὸ κρήγυον εἶπας
αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ’ ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι
ἐσθλὸν δ’ οὔτε τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ’ ἐτέλεσσας (I. 106-108)

Evil seer, you have never spoken agreeably to me
Always is an evil sense beloved by you in prophecy
But a good word have you never spoken or fulfilled

Homer doesn’t bother to remind the reader that Agamemnon already hates Calchas. The ancient reader would know that when the Achaean fleet could not sail from Aulis to Troy because the winds were averse, Calchas correctly told Agamemnon the only way to rectify the situation was for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. Though some versions of the myth say that the goddess Artemis saved the girl from death and took her to Tauris, Agamemnon never saw her again, which could hardly endear the seer to the king.

Homer also expects his audience to know the outcome of his story. He was not attempting to craft a plot-driven thriller, replete with unexpected twists, in order to maintain the audience’s attention. At one point, in Book XV, he quite matter-of-factly has Zeus tell Hera exactly what is going to happen in the rest of the epic:

φεύγοντες δ᾽ ἐν νηυσὶ πολυκλήϊσι πέσωσι
Πηλεΐδεω Ἀχιλῆος: ὃ δ᾽ ἀνστήσει ὃν ἑταῖρον
Πάτροκλον: τὸν δὲ κτενεῖ ἔγχεϊ φαίδιμος Ἕκτωρ
Ἰλίου προπάροιθε πολέας ὀλέσαντ᾽ αἰζηοὺς
τοὺς ἄλλους, μετὰ δ᾽ υἱὸν ἐμὸν Σαρπηδόνα δῖον.
τοῦ δὲ χολωσάμενος κτενεῖ Ἕκτορα δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
ἐκ τοῦ δ᾽ ἄν τοι ἔπειτα παλίωξιν παρὰ νηῶν
αἰὲν ἐγὼ τεύχοιμι διαμπερὲς εἰς ὅ κ᾽ Ἀχαιοὶ
Ἴλιον αἰπὺ ἕλοιεν Ἀθηναίης διὰ βουλάς. (XV. 63-71)

Fleeing they will fall by the many-banked ships
Of Peleides Achilles: He will raise up his companion
Patroclus: glorious Hector will slay him with his spear
Beside Ilion after Patroclus vanquishes many
Other strong men, among them my divine son Sarpedon.
Divine Achilles enraged will slay Hector.
And after that [the Trojans] pursued in turn away from the ships
I might ceaselessly cause it to pass that the Achaeans
Take high Ilion by Athena’s plans.

There was no “spoiler” here when Homer told his audience not to expect a happy end. The story was one that everyone already knew, and so the beauty was in how it was told. In placing this emphasis, Homer set up one of the most enduring debates surrounding literature. I would add that I agree that plot-driven storytelling tends to be of a lower aesthetic quality by virtue of its focus.

Another interesting point is that the characters are not shown as static or two dimensional. They are fully rounded beings, with flaws as well as virtues. Even the immortal gods have their flaws; they actually fight amongst themselves in Book XXI. And although the reader knows that the Trojans are “in the wrong”, so to speak, Hector comes off as a good man who loves his family and only wants to avert the death of everyone he loves and the destruction of his city. Achilles spends most of the book pouting by his ships like a petulant child because his own sex slave, Briseis, is taken away from him by Agamemnon to replace the slave that Agamemnon lost when he had to give her back to her father, the priest of Apollo, to stop the plague raging in the Achaean camp:

ἦ μοῦνοι φιλέουσ᾽ ἀλόχους μερόπων ἀνθρώπων
Ἀτρεΐδαι; ἐπεὶ ὅς τις ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς καὶ ἐχέφρων
τὴν αὐτοῦ φιλέει καὶ κήδεται, ὡς καὶ ἐγὼ τὴν
ἐκ θυμοῦ φίλεον δουρικτητήν περ ἐοῦσαν. (IX. 340-344)

Do the Atreidai alone among mortal men love
Their wives? Any good and sensible man
Loves his own and cares for her, just as I
Loved her deeply, even though she was the prize of my spear.

He persists in his petulance even when Odysseus and Ajax offer, on behalf of Agamemnon, to restore Briseis, along with seven other women. It must be said that neither Achilles nor Agamemnon come off as sympathetic in this childish argument. Not only that, but when Briseis finally speaks for the first and only time in the Iliad, in Book XIX, she doesn’t seem to reciprocate Achilles’s affections as she weeps upon seeing the body of Patroclus:

Πάτροκλέ μοι δειλῇ πλεῖστον κεχαρισμένε θυμῷ
ζωὸν μέν σε ἔλειπον ἐγὼ κλισίηθεν ἰοῦσα,
νῦν δέ σε τεθνηῶτα κιχάνομαι ὄρχαμε λαῶν
ἂψ ἀνιοῦσ᾽: ὥς μοι δέχεται κακὸν ἐκ κακοῦ αἰεί.
ἄνδρα μὲν ᾧ ἔδοσάν με πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ
εἶδον πρὸ πτόλιος δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ,
τρεῖς τε κασιγνήτους, τούς μοι μία γείνατο μήτηρ,
κηδείους, οἳ πάντες ὀλέθριον ἦμαρ ἐπέσπον.
οὐδὲ μὲν οὐδέ μ᾽ ἔασκες, ὅτ᾽ ἄνδρ᾽ ἐμὸν ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεὺς
ἔκτεινεν, πέρσεν δὲ πόλιν θείοιο Μύνητος,
κλαίειν, ἀλλά μ᾽ ἔφασκες Ἀχιλλῆος θείοιο
κουριδίην ἄλοχον θήσειν, ἄξειν τ᾽ ἐνὶ νηυσὶν
ἐς Φθίην, δαίσειν δὲ γάμον μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσι.
τώ σ᾽ ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί. (XIX. 287-300)

O Patroclus, who cheered my grieving heart most,
I left you alive when I departed from this hut,
Now I find you, leader of peoples, dead
Coming back : how I endlessly receive evil upon evil.
For the man to whom my father and noble mother gave me
I saw cleaved asunder by sharp bronze before my city,
And three beloved brothers, whom one mother bore me,
Followed him on the same ruinous day.
You would not let me cry in any way, when swift Achilles
Killed my husband and wasted the city of divine Mynes,
But you promised that the divine Achilles
Would take me as his wedded wife, bear me in his ships
To Phthia, and celebrate a wedding with the Myrmidons.
For you, constantly kind, now dead, I will always weep.

If the heroes are flawed, and sorrow, loss and the inevitability of death comprise the Leitmotiv that winds its way through the books, then it is not surprising that the language itself is often extremely dark.

… ἄμυδις δέ τε κῦμα κελαινὸν
κορθύεται, πολλὸν δὲ παρὲξ ἅλα φῦκος ἔχευεν (IX. 6-7)

… the black waves together
Crash, casting much seaweed out of the brine

… ἂν δ' Ἀγαμέμνων
ἵστατο δάκρυ χέων ὥς τε κρήνη μελάνυδρος
ἥ τε κατ' αἰγίλιπος πέτρης δνοφερὸν χέει ὕδωρ (IX. 13-15)

… then Agamemnon
Sat down shedding tears like a brackish fountain
Which from goat-abandoned rocks pours out fouled water

The expressions not only repeat adjectives that have negative connotations associated with a “dark” mood, but also with a certain sort of uncleanliness. The dark waves are casting out rotting seaweed. The murky water of the fountain is so polluted that even goats shun its very presence. In five lines, Homer has conveyed incredibly powerful images of despair and disgust. Even in his grandiloquence he can be efficient with his words.

There is also a richness of wordplay in the epic. The Iliad is filled with clever statements of this sort, such as

Δύσπαρι, εἶδος ἄριστε, γυναιμανές, ἠπεροπευτά, (ΙΙΙ. 39)

Un-Paris, most handsome, woman-crazy, deceiver,

The phrase is repeated again in Book XIII. “ Paris” means “balanced, even” and Hector calls him “Dyspari” or “uneven, unbalanced”, essentially turning his very name into an insult. The brothers clearly have a very difficult relationship as hardly a kind word passes between them. Interestingly, this difficult relationship is mirrored in Patroclus’s relationship with Achilles. Paris tells Hector he would “blame the blameless” (ἀναίτιον αἰτιάασθαι) at XIII.775, and Patroclus says the exact same about Achilles. At the same time, there is a clear contrast because Achilles never says an ill word about Patroclus, while Hector never utters a kind word about his own brother.

Another example of word play is on display when Helen comes to the walls of Troy to watch Paris fight Menelaus. The Trojan women say among themselves:

οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς
τοιῄδ’ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν
αινῶς αθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν (ΙΙΙ. 156-158)

Which can be translated roughly as:

It is no cause for anger that the Trojans and well-greaved Acheans
Have for a long time suffered because of such a woman,
So wonderously like the immortal goddesses to the eyes is she.

However, the phrase “it is no cause for anger” is οὐ νέμεσις, which means, literally “not nemesis”, where νέμεσις means “retribution” or more literally “distribution of what one is due”. The mention of the word in such close connection with the comment that Helen looks like a goddess is dramatic irony, because a fragment of the Cypria, the poem that precedes the Iliad in the Epic Cycle of Troy, states as follows:

τοὺς δὲ μέτα τριτάτην Ἑλένην τέκε, θαῦμα βροτοῖσιν
τήν ποτε καλλίκομος Νέμεσις φιλότητι μιγεῖσα
Ζηνὶ θεῶν βασιλῆϊ τέκε κρατερῆς ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης. (Athenaeus 334b)

After these she gave birth to Helen as her third, the wonder of mortals
Whom at one time the beautiful-haired Nemesis, coupled in love,
To Zeus the King of the gods bore under harsh compulsion.

In other words, the women of Troy mention νέμεσις, not even realizing that they are naming the divine mother of Helen. The ancient audience, however, would be only too aware of this story and the clever irony hidden in those lines.

Finally, when Achilles mentions his mother’s prophecy about his fate, we see an example of word play that works its way through the entire epic, like an echo reverberating from book to book:

εἰ μέν κ' αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται:
εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ' ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν,
ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν
ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ' ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη. (IX. 412-16)

If then I remain here to conquer the city of the Trojans
I shall have no homecoming, yet my renown will be undying:
If however I go home to my beloved fatherland,
My good renown will perish, but long my days
Will be, and death will not quickly take me.

Achilles comes from Phthia, a name which literally means “decay, perishing”, and the word he uses when he says his fame will be undying if he stays at Troy is ἄφθιτον (aphthiton), which also sounds like not-Phthia. The word “decay” is used in various ways, as a verb, a noun and an adjective on different occasions, constantly reminding us that Achilles will die at Troy, even though his actual death is not depicted in the Iliad. For instance:

… oὐ μὲν γάρ τι κακώτερον ἄλλο πάθοιμι,
οὐδ᾽ εἴ κεν τοῦ πατρὸς ἀποφθιμένοιο πυθοίμην,
ὅς που νῦν Φθίηφι τέρεν κατὰ δάκρυον εἴβει (XIX. 321-323)

… what else worse could I suffer,
Other than perhaps to hear of my father’s perishing [apophthimenoio],
Who now in Phthia sheds tender tears

And then a few lines later:

πρὶν μὲν γάρ μοι θυμὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἐώλπει
οἶον ἐμὲ φθίσεσθαι ἀπ᾽ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο
αὐτοῦ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ, σὲ δέ τε Φθίην δὲ νέεσθαι, (XIX. 328-330)

Once my heart held a hope in my chest
That I would perish [phthisesthai] alone away from horse-grazed Argos
At Troy, and you would return to Phthia,

There are some lighter moments, particularly in Book XIV, when Hera seduces Zeus in order to distract him and allow Poseidon to come to the aid of the Achaeans. She tries to convince Sleep (Hypnos) to make sure Zeus falls asleep after they have sex, and Sleep is afraid to do so. He reminds Hera how he was nearly cast from Olympus when he put Zeus to sleep so that Hera could cast Heracles’s ship off course. She finally convinces him by promising to give him one of the Graces as a wife:

Ὕπνε τί ἢ δὲ σὺ ταῦτα μετὰ φρεσὶ σῇσι μενοινᾷς;
ἦ φῂς ὣς Τρώεσσιν ἀρηξέμεν εὐρύοπα Ζῆν
ὡς Ἡρακλῆος περιχώσατο παῖδος ἑοῖο;
ἀλλ' ἴθ', ἐγὼ δέ κέ τοι Χαρίτων μίαν ὁπλοτεράων
δώσω ὀπυιέμεναι καὶ σὴν κεκλῆσθαι ἄκοιτιν. (XIV. 264-268)

Sleep, why are you so eager to keep such things in your thoughts?
Or are you saying that Far-Seeing Zeus so helps the Trojans
That he would be as angry about this as about his own child?
But come now, and one of the younger Graces to you
I’ll give to wed and she will be called your wife.

I believe Book XIV also has the earliest recorded use of the verb “fuck” in any Indo-European literature:

εἰς εὐνὴν φοιτῶντε, φίλους λήθοντε τοκῆας. (XIV. 295)

Going to bed, fucking unbeknownst to their loving parents.

The verb, φοιταω, literally means “to go back and forth” and is used elsewhere to mean wandering aimlessly, but is also cognate with the Latin futuo (futuere), from which are derived the French foutre, Italian fottere and Spanish joder (earlier Castilian foder). Here, it is clearly being used in that second, sexual sense. I experienced the same surprise when I came across this line as when I read Deuteronomy 28:30 in Hebrew and saw “and he will fuck her” along with the annotation that the verb in question is to be replaced by a less offensive one when the passage is read aloud. I have yet to see an English-language Bible that faithfully translates that passage.

While Homer can be extremely wordy at times, the extreme compactness of Greek also forces the English translator to use entire phrases where Greek uses a single word, which certainly tempts the translator to rework the original. Reading the original text gives a sense of forceful immediacy that I didn’t feel when I read the Iliad in translation back in college.

The epic reinforces the notion that fate is inescapable. Every person has a destiny that he must fulfill and nothing can stop that. At the same time, there is an element of free will within the boundaries of fate. Certain things will happen, and certain things must happen, but within that framework there is room for personal glory and shame, and these motivations keep men from despairing over the things they cannot change. At times, though, there is a hint that even fate can change, as in Book XX, where Zeus expresses a fear (perhaps rhetorical, it should be noted) that Achilles might change his own fate:

εἰ γὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς οἶος ἐπὶ Τρώεσσι μαχεῖται
οὐδὲ μίνυνθ᾽ ἕξουσι ποδώκεα Πηλεΐωνα.
καὶ δέ τί μιν καὶ πρόσθεν ὑποτρομέεσκον ὁρῶντες:
νῦν δ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ θυμὸν ἑταίρου χώεται αἰνῶς
δείδω μὴ καὶ τεῖχος ὑπέρμορον ἐξαλαπάξῃ. (XX. 26-30)

Even if Achilles were to fight alone agains the Trojans
They could not hold back the swift-footed Peleion a little.
And they trembled upon seeing him before:
Now when he grieves bitterly over his companion
I fear he might even bring down the city wall to spite his fate.

This concern that Fate might not be accomplished on its own is echoed later in the same book, when Poseidon speaks to the gods who are on the side of the Achaeans, attempting to persuade them to save Aeneas from certain death at the hands of Achilles even though Aeneas is on the other side:

ἀλλ᾽ ἄγεθ᾽ ἡμεῖς πέρ μιν ὑπὲκ θανάτου ἀγάγωμεν,
μή πως καὶ Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται, αἴ κεν Ἀχιλλεὺς
τόνδε κατακτείνῃ: μόριμον δέ οἵ ἐστ᾽ ἀλέασθαι,
ὄφρα μὴ ἄσπερμος γενεὴ καὶ ἄφαντος ὄληται
Δαρδάνου, ὃν Κρονίδης περὶ πάντων φίλατο παίδων
οἳ ἕθεν ἐξεγένοντο γυναικῶν τε θνητάων.
ἤδη γὰρ Πριάμου γενεὴν ἔχθηρε Κρονίων:
νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει
καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. (XX. 300-308)

But let us go and take him away from death
Lest Cronides [Zeus] become angry if Achilles
Kills him: he is fated to avoid death
That later the race not be without fruit or disappear
Which is of Dardanus, whom Cronides loved above all children
Whom he begat with mortal women.
Already Cronion is made an enemy of Priam’s race:
Now the strength of Aeneas will lead the Trojans
And the children of his children who will come after him.

As we know, the Romans later adapted the survival of Aeneas into their own foundation myth, though the Greeks only said that he would survive the fall of Troy and the destruction of its people. Even that, however, he was only able to do because Poseidon stepped in to ensure that Fate followed its appointed course.

As I mentioned earlier, the overall tone is one of loss, sorrow and death. To underscore this, Hector dies in Book XXII, and the remaining two books are devoted to how Achilles and Priam deal with the grief of having lost a dear friend (some say lover) and son, respectively. In the final book of the epic, Achilles mentions how the gods apportion joy and sorrow to mortals:

δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει
δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων:
ᾧ μέν κ᾽ ἀμμίξας δώῃ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος,
ἄλλοτε μέν τε κακῷ ὅ γε κύρεται, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ ἐσθλῷ:
ᾧ δέ κε τῶν λυγρῶν δώῃ, λωβητὸν ἔθηκε,
καί ἑ κακὴ βούβρωστις ἐπὶ χθόνα δῖαν ἐλαύνει,
φοιτᾷ δ᾽ οὔτε θεοῖσι τετιμένος οὔτε βροτοῖσιν. (XXIV. 527-533)

Two wine-jars stand on Zeus’s floor,
From one are given evil gifts, and from the other blessings:
To he whom Zeus, Delighting in Thunder, gives a mixture,
Sometimes he meets with evil, sometimes with good:
To whom however he gives only of the dreadful, on him [Zeus] has placed an evil mark,
And ravenous evil drives him across the sacred earth,
Wandering without honor by the gods or men.

The book is certainly something of a bleak read in any language, and it is easy to see why schools choose the Odyssey for literature classes, filled as it is with adventure and ending as it does on a happy note. The Iliad does not end on such a happy note. Hector’s body is finally returned to Priam that the Trojans might mourn him. Many are dead, and many more will yet die:

ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο. (XXIV. 804)

So they celebrated the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.

I’m sure that most people have read the Iliad in translation. Taking it on in Homer’s original Greek is a rewarding task, if a daunting one. It was an incredible amount of work, but anyone who gets through the entire Iliad will be able to read almost anything written in Greek with little to no effort (except perhaps the Odyssey, which has its own set of unique words but is shorter, at 12,110 lines to the Iliad’s 15,693). I read the Oxford Classical Texts edition, which has a simple critical apparatus at the bottom of each page showing variant readings and a mostly useless introduction that for some reason is in Latin.