In his book The Lyric Age, the historian A R Burn, whom I studied at school, said:

Homer and his age also gave Greece a pattern of conduct: the conception of the Hero.  In a sense, it is the discovery, often in part lost and made again, of the dignity of the individual.

For reasons set out in the extract from a book below, I do not agree.  Burn himself says that the Greeks were in a ‘spiritual vacuum’ like that of the pagan Northmen. They got no consolation from their religion – the spiritual vacuum.

Homer himself….is deeply pessimistic.  Life and its glory are fleeting; and the ghost-life to which he looks on in the House of Hades is that of a gloomy limbo, whose only pleasure is the remembrance of earth; a life, to disbelieve in which was, to later Epicureans, a liberation….It is to the credit of Homer and his patrons that they do not take such gods as these very seriously.  The gods are stage machinery in the traditional stories but when the scene is set on Olympus itself, more often than not the object is comic relief of a crude kind….The fact is that the gods of the bronze age, conceived in the likeness of earthly rulers, became less worshipful the more they became the heroes of stories….

There you have not just aspiritual vacuum, but a moral void.  And it is nowhere near the principle of humanity of Judeo-Christianity or the Enlightenment. 

It sounds just like the world of King Lear – and the Ring Cycle.  In the former, we mortals are like flies to wanton boys.  We have not got anywhere near the notion of ‘the dignity of the individual’.  It is something you notice in Shakespeare – in plays where humans appeal to ‘the gods’, we feel like we are in the spiritual vacuum of a primitive religion.  In the Ring, the gods are so hopeless – they are doomed – that we get  regular serves of sit-com.

And what should we expect of the ‘hero’?   The word can denote someone of great courage or the lead part in a story or play.   In a myth, the hero has superhuman qualities and undergoes great trials to save part of mankind. Slaying a dragon who guards the gold is a textbook hallmark of such a hero.   He often has a magic weapon – like Notung (with  which Siegfried breaks the spear of Wotan  that so captivated James Joyce) or Excalibur.

For the reasons set out below, Achilles may be a champion warrior, but he is otherwise alarmingly human and mortal, and anything but a hero in any sense. 

Shakespeare completed the annihilation of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida.  He put a big bomb under chivalry, romance, knighthood, heroes – the whole shebang – at about the time Cervantes was doing the same with Don Quixote. This play may be the most serious hatchet job of the lot.  Auden said ‘the play doesn’t conform to heroic convention’ and that Achilles ‘takes the extremely unheroic line of butchering the unarmed Hector.’  The American poet Mark Van Doren called Achilles ‘the chief of all curs’ and said ‘the heroes have accomplished their own degradation’.

We get similar failings in Siegfried, and in the degradation of the gods in Gotterdammerung.   Siegfried  is a stupid young man who has never grown up.  Even Wagner thought he was stupid.  The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad.   And he takes so long to get killed.

It looks to me that we have to wait for Beowulf to get our hero.  As it happens, by then God is on the stage. But so are the dragons.

Book Extract

Homer

The Iliad is a war story.  When a Trojan prince, Paris, takes off with a Greek princess, Helen, the Greeks make war on Troy.  It is King Agamemnon and his hero, Achilles, against King Priam and his hero, Hector.  But the Greeks quarrel and Achilles sulks.  He comes back after Hector kills his friend.  Achilles kills Hector but is reconciled by Priam to allow a decent burial.

The gods of The Iliad may be immortal, but they are many, and they are divided against each other.  Each ‘smells of mortality’ or, as was said of a candidate for execution, each is ‘desperately mortal’.  The God of Paradise Lost and the Old Testament is very different.  He is the only One.  He is omnipotent and omniscient.  But he is not impersonal.  He is about as personal as any God could get.  He has intimations not of mortality, but of humanity.  He did, after all, say that he made Adam in his own image.  In truth, that God is downright jealous.

The God of the Book has another human attribute.  He plays favourites.  He plays favourites with peoples, lands and cities.  So do the Greek gods.  In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Chorus refers to the god of war as ‘the moneychanger of dead bodies’, and you could find plenty in the Middle East who would say the same of Jehovah or Allah.

But the adherents of God have one very big advantage over the followers of the Greek gods.  God may be jealous; he may play favourites; he may smile or frown; but in judging us mortals, he is not, as the Greek gods are, arbitrary, capricious, or whimsical, or any of those other epithets that make lawyers jumpy when they talk of judges.  God does not play dice.  He has no Fate to succumb to.  He is not to us as flies are to ‘wanton boys’. 

The idea of the hero was to excel as a man and as a fighter and so win honour and glory.  If he wins enough, he might live on in name and to that extent be immortal.  There was a Greek word, agenor, that may be rendered ‘excessive manhood’.  We now call it testosterone.  Their testosterone can send these heroes out of control.  We talk of sporting heroes being ‘on fire’.  As Achilles rearms after the death of Patroclus, the poet sings ‘so now from Achilles’ headthe blaze shot up the sky’.  Achilles was on fire.

How do the heroes seek to achieve honour?  The answer is simple.  They kill or are killed.  They are the precursors of the Mafia dons.

Achilles is without pity.  He is a natural-born killer, as Hollywood might now say.  He redefines our idea of selfishness.  Achilles is not at Troy – he does not fight – for his king, his clan, or his nation.  He is there purely for himself and, later, his dead friend.  For Achilles there is no question of a conflict of interest between honour and loyalty.  The needs of his men are nothing beside the injury to his wounded pride. 

Achilles is the worst kind of aggressor – he is super-sensitive to insult or affront.  T.S. Eliot, apparently in his capacity as Chairman of the Virgil Society, called Achilles a ‘spoiled teenager’.  (How would Eliot have known?)  The capacity of Achilles to sulk is limitless.  This is a characteristic of a high-born, spoiled brat.  Achilles was a lethal prima donna; like a professional footballer with attitude – O.J. Simpson, for example.  One goddess knew just how to appeal to him – the ‘most terrifying man alive’. 

There is one thing we can say in defence of Achilles.  The insult offered to this god-born hero was mortal.  In the course of the argument with his king, which escalates, Achilles pre-figures Mohammed Ali when he says that ‘the Trojans never did me damage’.  Agamemnon responds with raw hate and drives the insult home in terms that are unforgivable:

But I, I will be there in person at your tent
To take Briseis in all her beauty, your own prize –
So you can learn just how much greater I am than you. 
Achilles goes to draw against this ‘staggering drunk’, the ‘most grasping man alive’.  The gods talk him out of drawing on his king.  Achilles settles for a curse and a prayer.  His prayer is that the gods will curse the Greeks – his own side, if he ever had one – and ‘mow them down’. 

What, after nine years, was the object of the Greeks?  Genocide – or at least that degree of annihilation that Joshua wrought on the villages that lay in his way at Canaan, or that Henry V threatened the French with before the gates of Harfleur.  When Menelaus looks like he might weaken and show mercy to a Trojan prisoner, his brother snarls:

Ah would to God not one of them could escape
His sudden plunging death beneath our hands!
No baby boy still in his mother’s belly,
Not even he escapes – all Ilium blotted out,
No tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!
Just how awful was the final solution reserved for the Asians of Troy only becomes apparent in The Trojan Women by Euripides.

Achilles finally snaps out of his sulk when Patroclus dies.  The death of a male friend enables him to put aside his sulking at the loss of a female prize – but at the cost of his going berserk and becoming ‘barbaric’.  He slaughters everything he can get his hands on before he corners Hector.

When Hector runs in fear, Achilles loses control of himself.  (He actually fights a river.)  Hector proposes that the winner of their inevitable duel will respect the body of the loser.  He gets an eye-balled response that Adolf Hitler would have applauded:

There are no binding oaths between men and lions –
Wolves and lambs can enjoy no meeting of the minds –
They are all bent on hating each other to the death.

Achilles is now the apostle of hate.  He is Satanic.  He tells Hector that he wishes his fury could drive him to hack away his flesh and ‘eat you, raw’ 

What do his faithful men do?  They wonder at the ‘lithe beauty of Hector’ and all those who come forward stab the body of Hector while laughing with their comrades.  This may be the low point of humanity for the whole of this poem.  When these celebrated soldiers, the mighty Myrmidons – the elite killing machine of the Greeks – are released from their dreadful fear of the great Hector, they revert to their primal Stone Age forbears and behave like animals out of the Balkans.  They are as much part of humanity as was the Waffen Death’s Head SS.  One lesson of The Iliad is that even the best of us – the heroes – live in a state of suspense between the gods and wild beasts.

Now, the descent of the Greeks into barbarism – their fall, if you prefer – shows how nasty and hollow is the conception of ‘hero’ and ‘honour’ that some wish to celebrate in Homer, but also how marvellous is the reconciliation that Priam makes with Achilles.  The end of the plea of Priam is high theatre indeed.  It comes when Priam utters these lines:

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before –
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

What a step for man was this. Not a god or God in sight (except that Achilles was the son of a god).  Just an old man doing his best for one he loves, a son who is already dead.  And in doing that, the old father dared to break the invincible bonds and the ineluctable logic of the vendetta.  As a result, men were able to stop being wound-up, man-killers, and put behind them those codes that impel men to kill others.  They could try to think of what it was like before their fall.  Achilles may have ‘felt like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.’

In truth, the old king Priam was repudiating the whole code of honour and glory.  Priam did not offer up his son for us.  He offered up himself for his son.  This is a high testament to humanity in a very inhumane age.  It is as if we are going two thousand years ahead to ask with Hamlet whether vengeance is all there is.

And so the issue of the poem is resolved – the whole poem is dominated by the wrath of Achilles – the very first word of the poem – and that wrath comes to an end when an old man has the courage to put his lips to the hands of a frantic killer.  In the Cowper version, Priam refers to a ‘humiliation not yet seen’.  Humiliation is the polar opposite of the sought-for condition of the hero.  The first of those blessed by the son of man in the Sermon on the Mount were ‘the poor in spirit’.  That is the last thing you could say of a hero of The Iliad. 

There is, however, another side.  The big-heads, the prime cases of selfishness, are the gods, and the Greek heroes, and Helen and Paris.  They all put themselves first.  The rest are just there to make up the numbers.  The heroes are the great takers of the world.  They are living denials of the first beatitude.  Aristotle got it just right when he said that a man living outside a group is either ‘a bad man or above humanity [a god] …. the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war.’

When you look at the behaviour of the Greeks against the Trojans, Asia looks more civilised than Europe.  But who amongst us takes the side of the Trojans?  Why, then, do we take the side of the supreme man-killers?  Why do we still sing the praises of those ratbags who caused or declared the war, or even those ‘heroes’ who had the misfortune to fight and die in it?  Who is there among us who will sing the praises of those who devised or directed the awful carnage at Gallipoli or on the Western Front? 

We should also see the ‘honour’ of the Greeks at Troy in its place.  They went to war over a high-level defection, what our police would now call a domestic.  Thousands would die for a slight to the honour of a husband, king, and people.  In order to get his ships moving, Agamemnon sacrificed the life of his daughter, Iphigenie.  For that, as we have seen, his wife murdered him when he came home.  For this her son murdered her when he came home.  No wonder that Freud did not fear these Greeks bearing gifts – he had to look no further than these heroes to find the best example of how we twist our minds.

The Odyssey of Homer, on which James Joyce modelled his Ulysses, is a book of nostalgia, of the yearning of Ulysses (Odysseus) for home, and of his adventures in getting there.  These travel adventure stories may have had more appeal for the ancients than us.  This one influenced Shakespeare in his Pericles.  I have referred to The Iliad at length to show why Homer was treated by the Greeks as their Bible, and why we mention Homer in the same breath with Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.  It also speaks of a streak of hostility and violence in the people who lived by that book.