WAR OF WORDS
The War that Killed Achilles
– Caroline Alexander (Viking; 2009)
When
a boy, the Autodidact first opened The Iliad having no more than a vague
idea about it; that it had to do with ancient Greeks. The paperback bookstore
had a Penguin Classics version for relatively cheap, found while browsing the
shelves. The version was not the famous Lattimore version in poetic verse, but
one in prose translation. It didn’t have an inspiring cover, it wasn’t the
largest book among others, or the shortest. It was just something about the
title; a name, a string of letters pronounceable and exotic. Notwithstanding,
it seemed an ambitious read for a kid living deep in the American provinces
when telephones were still rotary and the library and a couple of bookstores in
town comprised the resources for the reading public. This kid loved to read in
a household whose modest shelves held the Bible, Christian commentaries, some
bestsellers, Churchill’s histories, Time Life coffee table books, Encyclopedia
Britannica, and that was about it.
So,
The Iliad was a foray into the dark unknown. From the other side of the
Greek Dark Ages, from the other side of the European Dark Ages and the
Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars, this kid curled up
in a chair and opened a book 2,500 years old without the faintest grasp of what
it was about; much indeed as some kid must have must have drawn up his knees behind
his elders in the firelight of some 700 BC meeting place and listened, for the very
first time, to a blind poet who had somehow survived the dangerous roads to
come to tell a famous story.
Idomeneus,
Diomedes, Ajax, Hector, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles and Patroclus, the
Myrmidons, the Achaeans and the Trojans and, of course the Gods, swooped down
into this kid’s head in an explosion of dirty tricks, horrible deaths, and what
seemed like a vicious knife fight that might never end. I couldn’t put it down.
The Autodidact had seen the World War II movies: John Wayne and a lot of other
actors on ships, in planes and tanks and landing craft; wisecracking privates
and stern commanders racing across deserts and oceans, huddling in jungles, hitting
the beaches.
But
this was different. Hollywood didn't like to show the screaming wounded. It didn't
like to show you who that Jap really was; his mother and father and sister; or
who the Americans really were, their families, etc. that's only come later.
Back then, in the 1950's, it was Us and Them, and we were all heroes and they
were all villains. Crazy, paranoia, attempts at myth and legend that failed for
lack of dimension, heart and soul.
The Illiad told the Autodidactic kid about
that the dude who just got the spear through his groin and the blood gushed out;
how his parents would mourn and what a great guy he had been when he was home
and not trying to kill other guys and what agony it was and how he didn't just
die but he sank into a world of shadows and eternal sorrow.
Different.
I can't say it made me watch fewer war movies and enjoy them. Hey! i was a kid!
But it caught my transient attention and something of it sank into my synapses,
something made the juvenile Autodidact's thoroughly unconcious processes crank,
heave and fall into gear.
And
the kid took something of it away with him, without understanding it so's you'd
know it, but something nevertheless sank in and stayed.
Only
when older did the Autodidact hear the story of the whole Trojan War, its outline,
from the theft, or seduction, of Helen, to the Trojan horse and the burning of
Troy - Ilium – though he knew from the Iliad that the war was all about a
spurned husband and a treacherous adulterer. And only then did it occur to the
Autodidact that the Iliad didn’t start with Helen leaving her husband, and it
didn’t end with the burning of Troy. Why?
Now
Caroline Alexander’s book has taken the story, torn it apart, and put it all
back together for the Autodidact. Ms. Alexander is an inspired writer of
narrative history and evidences rigorous preparation. For anyone interested in
Greek history, Western Literature, or simply why John Wayne so grimly pursued
Glory in all those movies without, so far as this Autodidact can remember, ever
uttering the word itself, this book is required reading.
Ms.
Alexander explores this question and the other ones raised by it: If the Iliad
doesn’t cover the whole Trojan War, where’s the rest of it? Is The Iliad simply
a surviving fragment? And why did The Iliad survive more than 2,000 years as a
whole story and not the one(s) that did tell the whole story? It doesn’t even
cover the death of Achilles, although Achilles is the main character. And why
Homer? Who was he and was he even one guy or a single name for a stream of
storytellers across the Greek Dark Age?
The
War That Killed Achilles says that Homer was one guy at the end of a string
of guys who told the story, but he was the One. The cohesion of the story, its
language, and its intricate themes which flew right over the head of the
Autodidact when he was a kid, mainly because of the great holes of knowledge
which have characterized the Autodidact’s education then and ever since,
persuasively point to a poet of
extraordinary abilities to synthesize the traditions of the story and weave it
into something new. That something new is what makes the Iliad, in all its
apparent incompleteness, a complete dissertation on war and peace, on life and
death. The story is like Paris. It seduces with the accepted and popular
appearances: its themes of Glory, its beautiful poetry. It illuminates existential
dilemmas as it proceeds inexorably toward the ending that every listener
already knows, yet we can’t take our eyes off it.
This
book also takes into account what is known about other stories of the Trojan
War which are fragmentary or only found in other ancient writings that allude
to them. It takes names and lineages that would have been understood by the
inhabitants of the dark age in which the story evolved, of gods and heroes and
families and other tragedies that would have been known, so that the reader can
get a sense of what the audience already knew when Homer told his story.
And
it rightly centers the focus on Achilles, a man with one foot on Mount Olympus
and one foot in an early grave. He knows he is fated to die young unless he
sails home pretty quick. He is both unsentimental about war and impervious to
lures of Glory. He falls into sulking inactivity by an outrage to his honor,
even as his comrades die in battle after battle and the Achaeans are nearly
destroyed, but then he is spurred to action by another outrage that demands
revenge, even knowing the path down which it must lead him.
The
War That Killed Achilles is a modern condensation of background to supply
that which we, millenia later, as scions of
Western Civilization see only dimly through the filters of hundreds of
wars, thousands of years. The brilliance of the Iliad is that a kid can read it
without knowing any of this and find himself somehow grasping the fascination
of it, then, decades later, return to the place he thought he knew and find the
terrible beauty that still speaks, still holds us to the end we already know is
coming.
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