The Iliad, Book 2

School teachers spend their careers warning students against simply summarizing the plot of a book they've been assigned to write about. True enough. You're supposed to reflect on your book, not merely know how it's ordered. But the grandest classics are not like ordinary books. When coping with them, we still have to double check the course of action -- and often we're surprised at what we have already missed -- because to fail to do so is to go on ignorant of their complexities, and so miss the point of age-old reputations and age-old lessons. By the time we soldier through Book 24 of the Iliad ("and so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses") we'll hope to have processed the plot accurately enough for all the worthiest personal-and-yet-universal extracts to assert themselves.

So, Book 2.  

Zeus, having promised the sea-goddess Thetis that he would wreak some sort of havoc among the Greek (Achaean) troops outside Troy as vengeance for King Agamemnon having taken Achilles' woman away from him (Achilles is Thetis' son), -- lies awake on Olympus wondering how to accomplish this. He decides to send a dream to the king in the form of the Achaean wise man Nestor. The dream "Nestor" duly urges him to renew the war against Troy, because the gods have finally determined on Greek victory.

After he wakes, Agamemnon calls a council of his chiefs and tells them what has happened. All including Nestor agree that this dream must be trustworthy, and that now is the time for action. However, Agamemnon further decides that "according to time-honored custom" the troops should be tested before battle: he will announce to all of them that the siege of Troy has proved futile and that they should "cut and run."

When the king does this, the soldiers take him at his word and bolt for the ships. The goddess Hera is appalled and sends Athena down to stop the panic. The first man she goes to is Odysseus, who was furious at the panic to begin with. Commanded by Athena to calm the men, he ranges among them, exhorting his equals and lambasting the commoners to order. Last to be controlled is the strange,  deformed, obscenity-spewing Thersites, who finally earns a crack on the head with Odysseus' scepter and a relieved laugh from the armies.

With Athena beside him, Odysseus now speaks to the throngs and to Agamemnon. He acknowledges that the war has been long, but reminds them of the sign given to them at a sacrifice held before they sailed for Troy -- they all witnessed the omen of a snake devouring a nest of eight fledgling birds and their mother, and of the snake then being turned to stone; they all remember the explanation of this portent was that the war against Troy would last nine years, but that the city would in the end fall.

The men are cheered by this, and Nestor echoes Odysseus' encouragement. He seems briefly to allude to Achilles' absence from the scene -- "Let them rot, the one or two who hatch their plans apart from all the troops; what good can they win from that?" -- and he advises the king to marshal the men by tribes and clans so that any cowardice among them will stand out most shamefully. Agamemnon salutes Nestor for his advice,  comments briefly himself on his fight with Achilles ("imagine, I and Achilles wrangling over a girl"), and then the troops disperse to eat and make a sacrifice before battle commences.

The rest of Book 2 is a list of the legions making up the Achaean and then the Trojan army ("who were the captains of the Achaean army? Who were the kings?"). The largest Greek contingent is that from Mycenae, commanded by Agamemnon; his brother, Menelaus, leads the forces from Lacedaemon, "and his own heart blazed the most to avenge the groans and shocks of war they'd borne for Helen." Odysseus hails from Ithaca, Idomeneus from Crete. We get a glimpse of "Nireus the handsomest man who ever came to Troy," but who only commands three ships and is a lightweight. We see Achilles and his fifty ships' worth of men, out of action because of Achilles' rage at losing Briseis.

The goddess Iris now flies down from heaven to the Trojans in their assembly, demanding that the Trojan king Priam open the gates and send the army out to meet the invaders. Despite her disguise, Priam's son Hector recognizes divinity and obeys her instantly. He "breaks up the assembly," and the Trojans pour out onto the plain. They are much more quickly described, their two greatest heroes being Hector and Aeneas.

The Iliad, Book 1

Let's all make a pact, a New Year's resolution maybe, to approach the most gigantic classics a little bit at a time. By the chapter, by the "book." I've often grimly determined to do this with lots of things, with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for instance, whose three volumes, I think, could only be managed one paragraph at a time -- but so far I have always lost my nerve. With Gibbon, and with much more. Moby Dick, anyone?  

No more quavering. Let us at least get the rough outlines of the plot of the Iliad clear in our heads, so that we may not continue forever ignorant of a founding book of the Western world. Besides, reading it helps us decipher art.

Book one opens with sickness, and a quarrel over women.The Greek (or we should say, Achaean) army is camped outside the walls of Troy, suffering a plague sent by Apollo because the Achaean king Agamemnon has taken as a prize Chryseis, the daughter of one of Apollo's priests, and has refused to free her even for a ransom. A seer, speaking under the protection of the great warrior Achilles, reveals this publicly. Agamemnon is furious. He says that to stay the plague, one of the other captains may have the chore of returning the girl to her father, provided he is given a compensatory prize, that is, one of their women. This in turn outrages Achilles, who shouts that the army has already fought Agamemnon's (endless) war and seen him take extra plunder "whenever we sack some wealthy Trojan stronghold." He seems to loathe Agamemnon personally anyway, apart from any grievance. Agamemnon then declares that he will therefore take Briseis, Achilles' woman, and before Achilles can draw a sword on him, the goddess Athena swoops in from heaven and orders him to stop.

Achilles, though he is called a king, must submit to Agamemnon's authority as a greater one ("no one can match the honors dealt a sceptered king"). Nevertheless, he vows that because of this outrage, and the acquiescence of the army witnessing it,  he will not fight with them any more and that the time will come when they will need him desperately but be slaughtered without him. Nestor attemps to make peace between the two men, but cannot. Agamemnon sends two underlings to take Briseis away, while no less a hero than Odysseus respectfully escorts the priest's daughter back to her father. Achilles, weeping with rage on the beach, prays to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, to go to Zeus and beg him to harm the Achaeans and to further the Trojan cause. Thetis agrees to try, although she says she can do nothing until Zeus returns from a twelve day feast "at the Ocean River with the Aethiopians, loyal, lordly men."

In twelve days, while Achilles "grinds his heart out" for sorrow at losing Briseis, Thetis goes to Olympus to plead with Zeus. He reluctantly agrees to help "pay her dear son back" for his lost honors, reluctantly because his wife Hera already thinks he favors the Trojans too much over the Achaeans whom she loves. "Even now in the face of all the immortal gods she harries me perpetually," he complains. Thetis, having won his assent, dives back to her ocean home. Hera indeed immediately understands what has just happened, but Zeus tells her she cannot do anything about his decisions and silences her with threats to strangle her. She and all the gods are terrified; her son Hephaestus comes to her with a cup of wine and asks her to remember Zeus' power and have patience, or else all the joys of Olympus will be over. The book ends with laughter, music and feasting in heaven, and then with the picture of all the gods returning to their own houses, and of Zeus and Hera in bed.

(This translation of the Iliad is by Robert Fagles, first published in 1990.)

I haven't actually stopped reading

The trouble is, a Kindle allows you to read so much at once. The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 1 -- here, the teenaged genius discusses his annoying mother:

... though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish harassing System of Torment is by no means commendable, & when that is interrupted by ridiculous Indulgence, the only purpose answered is to soften the feelings for a moment which are soon after to be doubly wounded by the recal of accustomed Harshness. I will now give this disagreeable Subject to the Winds.

And he writes a lot about his debts and his weight loss. It is interesting and encouraging, though, to see him grow up, to read him become sympathetic, self-deprecating even about his poetry, and humbly anxious to maintain old friendships. "I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a hare-brained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults as to involve others in the consequences."  Old men kept his letters for fifty years.

Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington MacAulay. The Victorian schoolboy of legend read it or was assigned to read it, and out of it all, memorized it seems mostly this:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods...."

I liked the scholarly prose discussion of what happened to Rome's pre-imperial historical documents better than the poetry which MacAulay invented to try to recreate something of what they had said. It seems the Gauls burned Rome's archives in the 4th century B.C.E. when they sacked the city, and that Roman historians of later centuries knew perfectly well they had no documents upon which to base anything they wrote or thought they knew about that time. They had only, it seems, memories of popular legend and poetry; it would be as if American historians could only reconstruct the colonial period from childlike songs about Paul Revere's ride, or Washington crossing the Delaware. MacAulay's Lays are his imaginative reconstructions of what those word of mouth songs might have been; they concern the biggest topics of remote Roman history, like Rome's wars against more powerful Italian neighbors, or the class struggles between patrician and plebeian. It's astonishing, what MacAulay understood his readers would already know about what he was doing.

The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of the Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scaevola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the defense of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages. Not at all what you might think -- not at all gamy little exposes of Victorian marriages that were troubled, as written by the men and women involved. Rather, simply short stories by a variety of Victorian authors, Kipling, Conan Doyle, etc., about characters in troubled marriages. Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce Case" was not very interesting, and I have yet to move on to Doyle's "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange."

Also on my Kindle home page are the Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de l'Enclos -- very strange; are the French really that different? When she warbles on about "love," does she mean sex, does she mean the love that makes a couple married sixty years nurse one another through the last illnesses, or does she mean a kind of freewheeling indulgence (including sex), of every new crush that comes along and excites you and flatters your vanity? -- on the grounds that indulging so is only human nature and therefore one must be humane and sophisticated and true to it? 

The White House Cookbook. The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband. The Spectator. Under Two Flags by Ouida, who I think was somehow scandalous and terribly popular in another era. The Chaplet of Pearls by Charlotte Yonge, ditto. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, certainly ditto. Aristotle. Twenty-four Little French Dinners ... not by Aristotle, that last.

Poetry at Project Gutenberg

It's not great poetry, but it does just what the poet intended.


FOR ***

No eyes shall see the poems that I write
For you; not even yours; but after long
Forgetful years have passed on our delight
Some hand may chance upon a dusty song

Of those fond days when every spoken word
Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken
Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard
Murmured through forests as a charm unbroken.

It is the plain and ordinary page
Of two who loved, sole-spirited and clear.
Will you, O stranger of another age,
Not grant a human and compassionate tear
To us, who each the other held so dear?
A single tear fraternal, sadly shed,
Since that which was so living, is so dead.


Vita Sackville West, Poems of East and West

Project Gutenberg

The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope

One really can't review great poetry. One can only enjoy it. In high school, Pope was a ridiculous chore; now he's delightful.

"Soft yielding minds to Water glide away,
And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea."

But why does Ariel abandon the job of protecting Belinda right in the middle of the story?

"Sudden he viewed, in spite of all her art,
An earthly Lover lurking at her heart.
Amazed, confused, he found his power expired,
Resigned to fate, and with a sigh retired."

Rather an abrupt way to move the action along. And it's only Canto III.

When you have finished this, do move on to John Gay: "To a Lady, on Her Passion for Old China." The dishes, not the country.