Comments on Iliad Book One

Stanley Lombardo's Iliad audiobook is a great treat: a direct, plain, simple translation that retains the poetic power of the original.

Recently I listened to the opening lines of the poem, which include an argument between the gifted warrior Achilles and his commanding officer, Agamemnon.

The god Apollo has brought a plague to the Greeks encamped at Troy. Calchas, the prophet, traces the cause of the plague to Agamemnon's refusal to give back the woman Chryse to her father, Chryses the priest of Apollo. Chryses prayed to Apollo to strike the Greeks when Agamemnon refused the priest's generous ransom of treasure for his daughter.

Calchas tells the Greeks that Chryses must be given back, or the plague will continue. Agamemnon realizes his mistake, but wants to cover it up by taking someone else's woman. Achilles gets angry, questions Agamemnon's authority, and Agamemnon decides to take Achilles' war prize, a woman named Briseis.

How petty it all seems! First, Paris the Trojan prince takes Helen, and all the Greeks rally to get her back. Then Agamemnon takes Chryse in a raid on her city, and Chryses comes to get her back. And when Chryse goes, Agamemnon takes Briseis. When that happens, Achilles goes on strike and takes all his men with him.

Petty it may seem to us AD folk, who have lived for two thousand years with the ideal to love our neighbor as ourselves. But in the ancient world, reputation mattered over everything. The more stuff you could pile up, the better off you were. For powerful men, that included women.

When people saw that you had a lot of stuff, they figured you could afford to defend yourself, so they thought twice before attacking you. Having a lot of stuff was a defense mechanism in the ancient world. We see this kind of posturing in modern poker, where the object is to have the biggest stack of chips at the table. Whoever has the biggest stack can bully the other players, bluff when he has bad cards, and still be okay.

Despite all the justifiable materialism, however, it's clear from listening to Lombardo's rendition of Agamemnon that Agamemnon is out of line. For when he refuses the ransom from Chryses, he shames Chryses publically, a big no-no in a society where reputation matters. And then he goes on to humiliate Achilles in front of the other Greeks by taking away Briseis. A good leader or king certainly will have plenty of stuff, but he will also refrain from shaming people, unless he wants them to hate him.

Achilles isn't completely innocent, either. When you call your general "dogface," you're going to get a rise out of him.

But Achilles does suggest something that I had missed in previous readings of the Iliad:

All right, give the girl back to the god.
The army will repay you three and four times over
When and if Zeus allows us to rip Troy
down to its foundations.

This is eminently reasonable on the young hothead's part, but it suggests a results-oriented test of Agamemnon's authority, a performance bonus, if you will. If Agamemnon, the CEO of the war effort, can bring about the desired objective-- the fall of Troy, then he will be rewarded. But Agamemnon resists this gambit. He figures he ought to be honored regardless of the results. He wants, in other words, to be seen as a kurios, or patriarch, of a large household-- a father of sons, he who must be obeyed-- rather than the presiding officer over a bunch of accomplished men who are used to leading in their own cities.

Through this conversation, then, the audience sees a conflict developing between competing visions of the Greek war effort. Achilles wants to be treated as an equal in a democratic, cooperative temporary society. Agamemnon wants to be treated as a father in a traditional, hierarchical family household.

No wonder they fight.

***

Robert Fagles' translation was trumpeted when it came out in the early nineties, but it looks like a tricycle next to Lombardo's Ferrari.

Fagles cannot resist retaining just a little of that formal diction that makes readers go cold. Here's the passage in Fagles' work that I quoted above:

So return the girl to the god, at least for now.
We Achaeans will pay you back, three, four times over,
if Zeus will grant us the gift, somehow, someday,
to raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground.

By boiling down "raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground" to "rip Troy down to its foundations," Lombardo saves only one word, but over the course of the poem these add up. Plus, who wants to read "raze" when "rip" will do just as well or better? And why would you put "massive ramparts" unless you wanted someone to read the translation in a Monty Pythonesque voice ("HUGE tracts o' land")?

I'm biased, yes. Maybe there are Fagles enthusiasts out there. I came from Richmond Lattimore's translation, which is very close to the Greek, but which, as my mentor used to say, always sounds better after you've gotten through the better part of a pitcher of beer.

***

Note, finally, that Apollo in the Iliad has nothing to do with the sun, a connection frequently noted in children's and adults' mythology books. Apollo is seen in a much grittier light, as a kind of local god who favors the Trojans, and who specializes in plague and healing.

Comments

[Lee]

I like your poker chip comparison, and I really must order these audiobooks. And print out your commentary to refer to when I listen.

[Michael Leddy]

Really nice post - I'm glad that I found your blog. I too prefer Lombardo's Ferrari, and it always baffles me to hear Fagles' translations praised. To my ears, they're faux-lofty and stilted.
"Massive ramparts" indeed.

[DF]

There's a review of Lombardo that puts some of this translation preference in perspective, in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. It shows how reluctant some people are to give up the Shakespearean past of Classics translations, and probably explains also why Brad Pitt had to affect a British accent (or some weird facsimile thereof) in the movie Troy.

Here is the link:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1997/97.07.20.html

I write about the review in this post:

http://myth.typepad.com/breakfast/2006/08/comments_on_ili_1.html