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Context
Nearly three thousand years after
they were composed, the Iliad and the Odyssey remain
two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told, yet next
to nothing is known about their composer. He was certainly an accomplished
Greek bard, and he probably lived in the late eighth and early seventh
centuries b.c. Authorship is traditionally
ascribed to a blind poet named Homer, and it is under this name
that the works are still published. Greeks of the third and second
centuries b.c., however, already questioned whether
Homer existed and whether the two epics were even written by a single
individual.
Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person
wrote the epics, his work owed a tremendous debt to a long tradition
of unwritten, oral poetry. Stories of a glorious expedition to the
East and of its leaders’ fateful journeys home had been circulating
in Greece for hundreds of years before the Iliad and Odyssey were composed.
Casual storytellers and semiprofessional minstrels passed these
stories down through generations, with each artist developing and
polishing the story as he told it. According to this theory, one
poet, multiple poets working in collaboration, or perhaps even a
series of poets handing down their work in succession finally turned
these stories into written works, again with each adding his own
touch and expanding or contracting certain episodes in the overall
narrative to fit his taste.
Although historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence
suggests that the epics were composed between 750 and 650 b.c. they are
set in Mycenaean Greece in about the twelfth century b.c.,
during the Bronze Age. This earlier period, the Greeks believed,
was a more glorious and sublime age, when gods still frequented
the earth and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman attributes
populated Greece. Because the two epics strive to evoke this pristine
age, they are written in a high style and generally depict life
as it was believed to have been led in the great kingdoms of the
Bronze Age. The Greeks are often referred to as “Achaeans,” the
name of a large tribe occupying Greece during the Bronze Age.
But Homer’s reconstruction often yields to the
realities of eighth- and seventh-century b.c. Greece.
The feudal social structure apparent in the background of the Odyssey seems
more akin to Homer’s Greece than to Odysseus’s, and Homer substitutes
the pantheon of deities of his own day for the related but different
gods whom Mycenaean Greeks worshipped. Many other minor but obvious
anachronisms—such as references to iron tools and to tribes that
had not yet migrated to Greece by the Bronze Age—betray the poem’s
later, Iron Age origins.
For centuries, many scholars believed that the Trojan
War and its participants were entirely the creation of the Greek
imagination. But in the late nineteenth century, an archaeologist
named Heinrich Schliemann declared that he had discovered the remnants
of Troy. The ruins that he uncovered sit a few dozen miles off of
the Aegean coast in northwestern Turkey, a site that indeed fits
the geographical descriptions of Homer’s Troy. One layer of the
site, roughly corresponding to the point in history when the fall
of Troy would have taken place, shows evidence of fire and destruction
consistent with a sack. Although most scholars accept Schliemann’s
discovered city as the site of the ancient city of Troy, many remain
skeptical as to whether Homer’s Trojan War ever really took place.
Evidence from Near Eastern literature suggests that episodes similar
to those described in the Iliad may have circulated
even before Schliemann’s Troy was destroyed. Nonetheless, many scholars
now admit the possibility that some truth may lie at the center
of the Iliad, hidden beneath many layers of poetic
embellishment.
Like the Odyssey, the Iliad was
composed primarily in the Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek, which
was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the coastal settlements
of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey. Some scholars thus conclude that
the poet hailed from somewhere in the eastern Greek world. More
likely, however, the poet chose the Ionic dialect because he felt
it to be more appropriate for the high style and grand scope of
his work. Slightly later Greek literature suggests that poets varied
the dialects of their poems according to the themes that they were treating
and might write in dialects that they didn’t actually speak. Homer’s
epics are Panhellenic (encompassing all of Greece) in spirit and
use forms from several other dialects. This suggests that Homer suited
his poems to the dialect that would best complement his ideas.
The Aftermath of the Iliad
he Trojan War has not yet ended at
the close of the Iliad. Homer’s audience would
have been familiar with the struggle’s conclusion, and the potency
of much of Homer’s irony and foreboding depends on this familiarity.
What follows is a synopsis of some of the most important events
that happen after the Iliad ends.
The Death of Achilles
In the final books of the Iliad, Achilles
refers frequently to his imminent death, about which his mother,
Thetis, has warned him. After the end of the poem, at Hector’s funeral
feast, Achilles sights the beautiful Polyxena, the daughter of Priam
and hence a princess of Troy. Taken with her beauty, Achilles falls
in love with her. Hoping to marry her, he agrees to use his influence
with the Achaean army to bring about an end to the war. But when
he travels to the temple of Apollo to negotiate the peace, Paris
shoots him in the heel—the only vulnerable part of his body—with
a poisoned arrow. In other versions of the story, the wound occurs
in the midst of battle.
Achilles’ Armor and the Death of Ajax
After Achilles’ death, Ajax and Odysseus go and recover
his body. Thetis instructs the Achaeans to bequeath Achilles’ magnificent armor,
forged by the god Hephaestus, to the most worthy hero. Both Ajax
and Odysseus covet the armor; when it is awarded to Odysseus, Ajax
commits suicide out of humiliation.
The Palladium and the Arrows of Heracles
By the time of Achilles’ and Ajax’s deaths, Troy’s defenses
have been bolstered by the arrival of a new coalition of allies,
including the Ethiopians and the Amazons. Achilles killed Penthesilea,
the queen of the Amazons, before his death, but the Trojans continue
to repel the Achaean assault. The gods relay to the Achaeans that
they must perform a number of tasks in order to win the war: they
must recover the arrows of Heracles, steal a statue of Athena called
the Palladium from the temple in Troy, and perform various other
challenges. Largely owing to the skill and courage of Odysseus and Diomedes,
the Achaeans accomplish the tasks, and the Achaean archer Philoctetes
later uses the arrows of Heracles to kill Paris. Despite this setback,
Troy continues to hold against the Achaeans.
The Fall of Troy
The Achaean commanders are nearly ready to give up; nothing
can penetrate the massive walls of Troy. But before they lose heart, Odysseus
concocts a plan that will allow them to bypass the walls of the
city completely. The Achaeans build a massive, hollow, wooden horse,
large enough to hold a contingent of warriors inside. Odysseus and
a group of soldiers hide in the horse, while the rest of the Achaeans
burn their camps and sail away from Troy, waiting in their ships
behind a nearby island.
The next morning, the Trojans peer down from the ramparts
of their wall and discover the gigantic, mysterious horse. They
also discover a lone Achaean soldier named Sinon, whom they take
prisoner. As instructed by Odysseus, Sinon tells the Trojans that
the Achaeans have incurred the wrath of Athena for the theft of
the Palladium. They have left Sinon as a sacrifice to the goddess
and constructed the horse as a gift to soothe her temper. Sinon
explains that the Achaeans left the horse before the Trojan gates
in the hopes that the Trojans would destroy it and thereby earn
the wrath of Athena.
Believing Sinon’s story, the Trojans wheel the massive
horse into the city as a tribute to Athena. That night, Odysseus
and his men slip out of the horse, kill the Trojan guards, and fling
open the gates of Troy to the Achaean army, which has meanwhile
approached the city again. Having at last penetrated the wall, the
Achaeans massacre the citizens of Troy, plunder the city’s riches,
and burn the buildings to the ground. All of the Trojan men are
killed except for a small group led by Aeneas, who escapes. Helen,
whose loyalties have shifted back to the Achaeans since Paris’s
death, returns to Menelaus, and the Achaeans at last set sail for
home.
After the War
The fates of many of the Iliad’s
heroes after the war occupy an important space in Greek mythology.
Odysseus, as foretold, spends ten years trying to return to Ithaca,
and his adventures form the subject of Homer’s other great epic,
the Odyssey. Helen and Menelaus have a long and
dangerous voyage back to their home in Sparta, with a long stay
in Egypt. In the Odyssey, Telemachus travels to
Sparta in search of his father, Odysseus, and finds Helen and Menelaus
celebrating the marriage of their daughter, Hermione. Agamemnon,
who has taken Priam’s daughter Cassandra as a slave, returns home
to his wife, Clytemnestra, and his kingdom, Mycenae. Ever since
Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia at the altar of Athena, however,
Clytemnestra has nurtured a vast resentment toward her husband.
She has taken a man named Aegisthus as her lover, and upon Agamemnon’s
return, the lovers murder Agamemnon in his bath and kill Cassandra
as well. This story is the subject of Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon. Meanwhile, Aeneas,
the only great Trojan warrior to survive the fall of Troy, wanders
for many years, searching for a new home for his surviving fellow citizens.
His adventures are recounted in Virgil’s epic Aeneid.
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