Reading Homer’s Iliad Today: An Interview With Scholar Glenn W. Most
King Priam Begging Achilles For The Return Of Hector’s Body by Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov, 1824.
Many of us read The lliad for the first time in high school or college. Do you remember the first time you read The lliad, and what your first impressions were? Did it immediately grab you or did it appreciate with time?
I first read The lliad in high school—in English translation, of course. But I had the feeling that I already had some acquaintance with it, even though I did not know any of the details and was unclear on the exact ending. As Italo Calvino wrote, a classic is a book that one cannot read for the first time: it is such a part of one’s culture that one always feels that one has already known it. When I read it in high school, I found it enthralling. Despite the episodes of bloodshed (which I found so horrific that I had difficulty sleeping for weeks), I found the scenes of friendship, of loyalty, of risk, of self-sacrifice deeply moving. And the last book—in which Priam crosses at night from his walled fortress city to the encampment of his deadliest enemies in order to plead with the murderer of his son to give him back that son’s body—moved me so deeply that I could not help weeping when I read it then—or now.
What do we non-Greek readers lose by reading The lliad in its English translations?
It is better to read Homer in Greek than in English; but it is better to read Homer in English than not at all. Read in translation, Homer loses most of the sounds and the exact meanings of many of the words, and some of the interrelations between various words and sounds, and all of the meter. But a lot comes through: the moral vision, and the plot, and the characters, and the speeches, and the similes, and the speed, and the sorrow. Still, there is no doubt that reading a work in translation is like kissing through a screen door.
Much modern scholarship has been devoted to the question of whether The lliad was composed by a single poet (perhaps called Homer, perhaps not) or a work by many poets who differed in style and emphasis. Setting aside for a moment all the philological scholarship on the origins of the poem, as a reader, do you experience The lliad as a poem composed by a single poet or a poem woven from multiple voices?
Whenever I read The lliad, I respond to it as to a profoundly unified and complex vision of the world formulated in terms of a coherent and carefully organized plot, theme, set of characters, and use of language. To be sure, this unity seems sometimes to be marred by defects and inconsistencies of all sorts, most of them quite minor, some of them more serious. But I do not believe that the only way to explain all these problems is to suppose that there were multiple authors—for example, the Ancients, who studied Homer closely, concluded instead that he sometimes dozed—and I do think that, even though positing a single author is one way to explain its fundamental unity of purpose, it is not the only one. Homer, for me, is a multiple but ultimately harmonious voice expressing, but also criticizing, the complex and dissonant visions of his whole culture.
In your essay “Anger and Pity in Homer’s lliad,” you wrestle with one of the most notable features of The lliad, namely that the poem begins with a word for anger (translated “rage”) and ends with an expression of pity (Achilles returning the body of Hector to his enemy Priam). Do you see anger and pity as opposing forces in The lliad?
Not so much as opposing forces, but rather as complementary ones. When an Ancient Greek saw a friend being harmed by an enemy, he felt pity for the friend and simultaneously anger at the enemy: the two feelings were the two sides of the same coin, inseparable from one another and equally justified. Are we any different?
Do you consider Homer’s lliad an anti-war poem?
Absolutely no; and absolutely yes. Absolutely no, in the sense that Homer presupposes as simply true his culture’s view that war is an inevitable feature of human and divine existence and that glory in war is one of the greatest possible achievements. Homer does not imagine that there can be life without war and thinks that, given that there is always going to be war, we must prepare for it and acquit ourselves in it as nobly as possible. But absolutely yes, in the sense that Homer is fascinated by the price that must be paid for military victory and martial prowess —the price in young lives lost, in hopes snipped prematurely, in horrific bloodletting, but also, and even worse, in the brutalization of otherwise gentle souls, in the bestialization of better human potentials. In The lliad, men and countries quarrel over futile stakes, and in consequence, men die and whole cities burn to ash. Homer’s men fight other men and wound and slay them and die, and their women are left to mourn them—and to raise their sons to avenge them, bloodily. We might hypothesize that Homer inherited a bloody-minded epic tradition that he faithfully retold at the same time as he criticized it. But why should we suppose that he was the first Greek to notice that epic glory was purchased at a terrible price? Better, probably, to think that a complex and self-contradictory set of attitudes and emotions regarding war characterized Greek culture from the beginning.
This article was edited and reproduced from the 2011 program of An Iliad.
GLEN W. MOST was until 2020 Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and remains a regular Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has published books on Classics, on ancient philosophy, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion, on literary theory and on the history of art, and has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on such other ones as modern philosophy and literature. Most recently he has published co-edited comprehensive editions of the early Greek philosophers, a co-edited volume on scholarly methods in a variety of canonical written traditions, a co-edited volume of essays on mathematical commentaries in Chinese, Sanskrit, Babylonian, and Ancient Greek, a co-edited volume on myth and reason in Ancient China and Greece, an edited collection of essays on the Derveni Papyrus, a co-edited reader on plurilingualism in the history of science in a number of pre-modern scholarly traditions, a co-edited volume of essays on a sentence of Kafka, a collection of his essays in Italian on ancient and modern psychology, and another collection of his essays in Chinese on Ancient Greek poetry.