The poem follows the woman in her grief.
So we know-- so I'll just read the whole passage now.
Odysseus was overcome as he heard him
and his cheeks were wet with tears.
He wept as a woman weeps when she throws herself
on the body of her husband who has fallen
before his own city and people, fighting bravely in defense
of his home and children.
She screams aloud and flings her arms about him
as he lies gasping for breath and dying.
But her enemies beat her from behind about the back
and shoulders and carry her off into slavery
to a life of labor and sorrow.
And the beauty fades from her cheeks.
Even so piteously did Odysseus weep.
That's an amazing image, I think.
And it's because we're reading usually
quite fast, we don't always, always
realize how powerful it is.
And only Alcinous, the king of the Phaeacians
hears this stifled lamentation and infers
that this might well be the subject of the song itself.
The simile isn't content simply to illuminate
its immediate visual and emotional context.
The woman Odysseus is likened to reminds
us of one particular woman amongst all the Trojan women we
have encountered, and that is of course Andromache,
the widow of Hector.
So it's quite amazing.
You get the Greek hero compared to the widow of the Trojan
hero.
She laments, but her lamentations
are interrupted by her captors who herd her and her sister
into captivity and slavery.
This we know from other contexts.
So the poet fades out the simile with a simple finality.
And the beauty fades from her cheeks, a cruder translation,
I believe it's Fagles, says, while with most pitiful grief,
her cheeks are wasted.
The metaphor, it's worth noting, is
conducted in the present tense.
The action is in the past, but the metaphor is in the present.
And that often happens with Homer,
that he brings the metaphorical element up pretty close.
The impact of Demodocus's poem on Odysseus is to make it real,
to make his own experience real, to bring it back to life.
And no man is capable of being unmoved
by the sound of this fate.
And to be unmoved in a sense in the way
that Andromache was moved.
The experience belongs not to the victorious Greeks,
but to their foes.
And yet after victory they can feel for and more importantly
feel with their victims.
This is also I think the power of the Homeric poems
themselves, that they are about wars and victors
but the victims have a palpable, and at some points,
an equal reality with the victors.
Though the insistently male orientation of "The Iliad"
has been noted before, there is even
in that poem, a strong sense that in the world that
underpins the epic deeds of the main story
there exist people whose heroism on a different scale merits
inclusion if only by way of simile.
And so we come across another really strange simile
in "The Iliad" in Book 12, and again using
Samuel Butler's version.
"Even so, the Trojans could not route the Achaeans,
who still held on.
And as some honest, hardworking woman
weighs wool in her balance and sees
that the scales be true, for she would
gain some pitiful earnings for her little ones,
even so was the fight balanced evenly between them
till the time came when Zeus gave the greater
glory to Hector son of Priam, who
was first to spring towards the wall of the Achaeans."
What, we may ask, once this startling image has
had its incongruous impact, is this spinner,
a mother with hungry children, perhaps a widow since she's
the sole provider, or a woman whose husband is away at war,
what is she doing, this Penelope who
weaves and weaves in the thick of battle,
not only with the heroes but with Zeus
himself, to whom she ultimately is the point of comparison?
Is she another one of the bereaved?
As we feel that in a sense Odysseus
is in that earlier passage.
In Book 8, we have already seen Zeus with his golden scales.
And the scales come time and time again.
But these are the scales we remember.
Even heroes can be even handed in describing their foes.
And again, this even handedness isn't only
Homer's, it belongs to the heroes themselves.
Standing on the battlements Priam
notes how much larger the gathering of men
is than when he and his armies fought in Phrygia, as allies
against the Amazons.
He spots Odysseus and describes him as a fleecy and ram-like
man, keeping his ewes in line.
Again, really weird image.
So he's like a ram.
Antenor, another character on the wall,
interposes and he recalls how Odysseus and Menelaus
came to discuss Helen with Priam before the war began.
And he recalls how well they spoke,
first Menelaus, and then Odysseus who seems slow
witted to begin with but then became eloquent and dazzled
and persuaded them.
So it is a powerful image of impartiality
that we come away with.
What do I imagine we should learn from "The Iliad"
as modern readers, as modern poets?
What can we learn from such an old poem, which
is pre-dramatic, pre-psychological,
which in many ways is alien to us
even though because of familiarity we
think we understand it.
The first thing that we should I think dwell on
is the fact that the poem was probably not
produced by an individual poet.
It was produced as you're aware, probably
as part of an oral tradition, a series of poets,
singer poets, composed it.
It was then transmitted as a text by performers.
It was formulaic, oral formulaic,
and it was possible for people to remember great chunks of it
and to repeat it from memory.
This is not a particularly unusual feature
of early poetry.
It happened with Nahuatl poetry.
It happens with old English poetry,
with Beowulf and the other poems.
So it is from an oral tradition.
But when we reflect on this, what is an oral tradition?
What is a tradition where we cannot identify an author,
where there is no one at whose door we can lay responsibility
for the poem?
There is no I in the Iliad.
There is occasionally a you.
Strangely enough, the poet occasionally
addresses for example with Patroclus,
several times he says you did this, you did that.
But very seldom does he--
but no at no point does he speak as an I.
Well, at the very beginning he does.
But it's a kind of generalized I.
So in a sense it's an authorless poem.
It is a spoken poem.
It's a poem which belongs to a tradition.
It belongs to a Greek tradition.
But it's about a period in which the Greeks themselves
were not particularly cultured.
It's about a period when the Greeks were piratical
if you like, predatory.
When the East, Troy and the cities of the East,
were prosperous and settled and rich.
And people came with excuses of various kinds to prey on them.
So it was a period when the Greeks were not
particularly distinguished for culture if you like.
It's also a period when the Greeks were not
particularly united.
When they come to Troy they have a culture
which is remarkably united, with allies coming to fight
with it to defend it and so on.
But the Greeks themselves come from a variety
of different places, a variety of different backgrounds.
And as Achilles makes quite clear,
he is in a position where he could
be free to go home at any time.
Whereas the Trojans have no choice.
The Trojans are compelled to defend themselves.
The Greeks are there by choice.
So there's this complete difference
of cultures, this complete difference of motive,
if you like.
The power of this impersonal writing,
which fully as it were, dignifies the Trojans
and to some extent the Greeks is achieved by various means.
First of all, there is, with the absence
of a narrative voice as such, the characters
themselves speak often in their own voices.
There's a great deal of speaking going on in the poem,
speaking which reveals character,
speaking which reveals--
which is pre-dramatic but it can be quite dramatic.
And characters are known through their speech.
That reminds us of Ben Jonson's famous statement:
speak that I may see thee.
They become visible through the ways in which they speak.
And each of them is differentiated in their speech,
differentiated in terms of the length of the length
the phrase, the use of meter, even in terms of diction.
So there is a great deal of differentiation of character.
There is also a sense in which nothing is described.
Things are enacted.
It's a language of enactment rather than a description.
There are lots of formulas in the writing.
As we know, there are lots of lines which are repeated.
There are lots of lines which are
repeated between "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."
So there are oral formulas which make
the language more memorable.
There are lots of epithets.
So people are called by a series of adjectives and a noun,
which describe them, which evoke them in a way, which
is not always appropriate.
And there are the epic similes.
We just looked at two of them.
We've looked at the image of Odysseus
as a woman as a weigher, of a woman with the scales.
So I think these are all ways in which the characters are
presented.
But none of them is presented in a psychological way.
I think that we strain, I think if we
try to identify a psychology in Achilles,
though he has very strong motives,
though he has very strong actions,
I think we would be straining it to say, he has a psychology.
The poem is also in a sense, though pre-dramatic, it's
very staged.
There are four areas of activity.
At the top of everything else, there's Olympus with the gods,
with a very limited cast of gods.
And then there is the Greek camp with the ships
as it were, fringing it the area before the ships
and battlements.
And there is the wide plain between the camp of the Greeks
and Troy, between the two rivers.
And that is the plain of battle.
And the rivers themselves of course,
are quite clearly differentiated.
And then there's Troy itself.
Behind Troy, there are mountains again.
These are where the gods act as well.
So these are the four zones.
There's the top of the amphitheater
where the gods watch.
And we watch with them in a sense.
Then the Troy and the camp and the battle place.
So this is the stage area.
And then there is a very clear time organization.
And that I think is one of the miracles of "The Iliad"
is the way in which it concentrates in time.
It chooses the few days in the 10 years of the Trojan War
when the Trojans for a very brief moment
had the better of things.
And so it's again, it's odd that a Greek poem
should choose the time when the Trojans almost, as it were,
are victorious.
It's not the most dramatic or necessarily
the most crux-y if you like of the days,
but there we are there.
There are 21 days that pass in the opening scenes.
Another 21 days pass in the closing scenes.
But most of what happens from Book 2 to Book 23
takes place during the four days, four days
and three nights.
The central day dawns in Book 11.
And it sets in Book 18.
So there's quite a long chunk of the poem
is in one day, almost a third of the whole poem.
So we start in kind of fast motion then time slows down.
And we get an increase of activity
and then time speeds up again towards the end.
The opening books give us information obliquely
but with quite a lot of power.
And the ending point us towards inevitable defeat,
the inevitable Trojan defeat.
So can we say that Homer sides with Troy?
Because it's on his side of the Aegean,
assuming that Homer ever existed.
He's always supposed to come from Asia Minor.
Or can we-- or is it wrong to talk in these terms?
I suggest that it's wrong to talk in these terms.
The poem begins with Achilles.
It ends with the death of Hector.
It begins with the ransoming of a child, Chryseis,
and it ends with the ransoming of a child's body,
Priam ransoming Hector's body.
But again I don't think that in any way
we are right to talk about the poem taking sides.
It is presentation, not representation.
Troy is, as I've said before a handsome and a civilized city
between two rivers.
Epithets describing it include with broad streets,
horse pasturing, and marble.
By contrast, the Greek camp is temporary, without a history,
without elegance.
Though because time has passed, some of the defenses
are quite substantial.
They're built and breached during the course of the poem.
The bivouacs seemed to be mapped in Homer's mind.
And with Ajax at one end and Achilles at the other
and with intelligence and as it were,
vanity at one end, and a kind of stupidity at the other.
They have temporary women.
And they're flanked by the ships, which remind us
of arrival and departure.
There's a lot of stylization going on here is really
what I'm trying to say.
The big difference, I think, between the two
is one of civilization and lack of civilization.
And the big difference between Olympus and the military camps
is the restriction as it were, of the numbers of people
involved and of course, the fact that the Olympians, apart
from having quite a jolly sexual life, which goes on
through the poem, are also above the above the fray and only
just occasionally get involved in battle itself.
And what makes the killings tolerable and intolerable
I think is the way in which the poet humanizes the victims.
They're in every respect better than their victors,
except that they are less powerful and less strong.
Because I'm rather overrunning, I just I
wanted to end with the most Homeric of the modern poets
if you like.
And that is a poet called Edwin Muir,
who wrote a very brilliant poem about the death of Hector.
It's called "The Ballad of Hector in Hades."
And I'd just like to look at that.
And just as a way of, in a sense, showing the kind of debt
that we can owe to Homer if we take the lessons of his poems
seriously.
And the lessons have to do with withdrawing the subjectivity,
our subjectivity as writers sufficiently from the poem
to allow the reader to invest in them,
the creation of, if you like, templates
rather than of strong images.
And I think that what Homer teaches,
I wish I'd had slightly more time to develop it.
I think that what Homer teaches us
is that our prejudices in contemporary poetry in favor
of a voice and image can be as restricting
if you like as the decorums of 18th century approaches.
There are rules which we obey without necessarily reflecting
on them.
And we can come back to that in questions if we wish.
So this is the Edwin Muir's poem "The Ballad of Hector
in Hades."
Yes, this is where I stood that day beside this sunny day.
The walls of Troy are far away and outward comes no sound.
I wait, on all the empty plain, a burnished stillness lies,
save for the chariot's tinkling hum and a few distant cries.
His helmet glitters near.
The world slowly turns around.
Some new slight compels my feet from the fighting ground.
I run.
If I turn back again, the Earth must turn with me.
The mountains planted on the plain,
the skies clamped to the sea.
The grasses puff a little dust where my footsteps fall.
I cast a shadow as I pass the little wayside wall.
The strip of grass on either hand sparkles in the light.
I only see the little space to the left and to the right.
And in that space, our shadows run.
His shadow there and mine.
The little flowers, the tiny mounds,
the grasses frail and fine.
But narrower still and narrow my course is shrunk and small.
Yet vast as in a deadly dream and faint the Trojan wall.
The sun up in the towering sky turns like a spinning ball.
The sky with all its clustered eyes,
grows still with watching me.
The flowers, the mounds, the flaunting weeds, wheel
slowly round to sea.
Two shadows racing on the grass silent and so near,
until his shadow falls on mine and I am rid of fear.
The race is ended far away.
I hang and do not care.
While round bright Troy, Achilles
whirls, a corpse with streaming hair.
What Muir has created in this poem
is a sense of that last day of Hector's life,
that day in which he realizes he's going to be defeated
and begins by fleeing.
He flees the way that a deer does
or a hare does away from his assailant.
He flees because he wants to survive.
But he also stops, betrayed of course by a goddess
to hold his ground.
And he thinks that he will fight.
He thinks before he fights that he will actually surrender.
He thinks he'll go up to Achilles
and say, I'm really sorry, Achilles.
We'll give you back Helen.
We'll give you lots of gold.
Just go away and leave us.
Then he realizes that he's murdered, he's killed,
Patroclus and that he has no chance.
And so he faces his fate.
But first he flees.
And his flight is parallel of course
to the flight of Patroclus, the chase of Patroclus
around the walls of Troy.
And as Homer or the oral tradition
as it were, describes his flight around Troy so brilliantly,
the city of Troy is evoked.
Three times he goes round and each time more detail is seen.
And each time you have the sense of the people
of Troy looking down on the fleeing Hector and the chasing
Achilles.
And you have the sense that Hector
is longing for them to do something to stop Achilles.
Achilles keeps edging him away from the wall.
So that he can't, as it were, be stopped.
It's a very powerful image of fear, but of fear overcome.
And of course a fate faced, though not overcome.
There is this, I guess the gist of what I'm trying to say
is that there is this amazing and beautiful, if you like,
objectivity about Homer.
He's willing for his heroes to have negative motives.
He's willing for his heroes to want to survive even when
they know they're going to die.
And he's willing for great cities
to be destroyed without sentimentality,
with a sense that this is what happens,
that this is the way that history works.
And this is the way the gods, in their brutality as it were,
treat men.
And this is the say--
and there is no point really in sentimentalizing.
No poet I think after Homer has been
so unsentimental, so objective.
If you read Virgil you get the great and beautiful
elegiac sadness of "The Aeneid."
It has nothing in common at all with the power of "The Iliad"
or "The Odyssey."
That's all I really want to say and we
might want to ask questions and have a discussion.