Homer is having a moment, not least because of Emily Wilson, whose Odyssey translation appeared in 2017 and recently became the basis for a Christopher Nolan movie (see my comments on the movie here). She is currently working on a new Odyssey translation. Her Iliad appeared in 2023, and just this past month, she published a volume of essays, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea. In both Homer translations and in Wine Dark Sea she discusses at length the art and difficulties of translation. In another post I plan to look at what she has to say about translating Homer and what it might suggest for biblical translation. What, for example, do her views on setting the right tone for a translation say about Eugene Peterson’s The Message? As I said, more on that another time.

Here I have in mind something entirely more urgent: war, and with war our self-styled Secretary of War, Peter Hegseth, he of the over-styled hair and the too-tight suits, of testosterone testing for the troops, of shooting small boats out of the water without warrant, of “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no wierdos, no wimps, no radicals,” of live-streamed executions, he who helped get us, the US, into war with Iran and who, along with his boss, hasn’t a clue about how to get us out of it—that Peter Hegseth. Listening to Emily Wilson’s reading of the Iliad, it was Peter Hegseth and his boss that more than once came unbidden to mind.

The Iliad is nothing if not violent. The poem lingers on death on the Trojan battlefield. The fighters, often named and given a brief bio, as if to humanize them, are hacked to death by swords, have their brains crushed by heavy stones, are disemboweled by long spears, and, in the climatic battle with Achilles, drowned in the local river. There seems entirely too much gore. It reminds me of Blood Meridian, the Cormac McCarthy novel I could never get through, or some of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. Gore for gore’s sake. But in the Iliad, in Homer, the gore is an implicit critique of the endlessness and pointlessness of war. The Iliad in sum is antiwar literature.

It’s also anti-divine, which is what led Socrates in Plato’s Republic to ban poets from the ideal city. The gods in the Iliad don’t come off well. They are not serious people. Serious people count the cost of what they do, especially in war. But not the gods in Homer. After all, they are immortals. The cost of war to them is minimal. They can be wounded in battle, but the wounds are soon healed, and they go on living. The cost to humans, however, is immeasurable, especially for those unnamed by Homer, the soldiers in the front of the battle, who lack the arms or the skill to go up against Hector or Achilles and who therefore die horribly on the battlefield, mourned only by their wives and children far away in, say, Pylos or Sparta. Occasionally, as when Sarpedon, son of Zeus, dies, the gods suffer grief for their human children, but not for long. The gods go on.

In Homer, the gods function in several different ways. They can be lightly anthropomorphized forces of nature: the mist or the lightening or the raging sea. They can be a mood of a warrior or a crowd, as when Ares fights alongside of Hector. They can be terrestrial figures in their own right, appearing on the battlefield or flying off to Mt Olympus. They have their own complicated families and even more complicated relationships. Mt Olympus is nothing if not a steamy divine soap opera.

Among these gods the least admired is Ares, the god of war. In Greek, he’s known as brotoloigos, “humanity’s plague.” He loves gore. He loves the killing. He represents the fury that can overtake warriors in the heat of battle when they lose all caution and want only to kill, the fury that leads too often to the massacre of innocents. He’s also a bit stupid. If the Olympian gods had cabinet posts, he would declare himself the Secretary of War.

In Book 5 of the Iliad, Ares is set loose on the battlefield on the side of Troy. He hacks and kills. His counterpart on the Greek side is a human killing machine, Diomedes. Diomedes, cautioned by Athena, at first avoids Ares, fearing to go up against a god, but in a dramatic reversal Athena steps in. Shoving aside Diomedes’s chariot driver, she takes the reins. The two, Athena and Diomedes rush towards Ares. When Ares throws his spear, she deflects it away, instead burying Diomedes’s spear in Ares’s divine flesh. Wounded, he flies off in a huff to Mt Olympus to his father, Zeus.

At this point, let me pick up the story in Wilson’s translation:

He showed his father how his deathless blood
was flowing from his wound, and he complained
in words that flew on wings.
“Great father Zeus,
are you not angry at their wicked deeds?
We gods are always hurting one another
and helping humans. (129-30)

His pathetic complaint goes on for a few more lines, but Zeus is having none of it.

Zeus replied with scowling brows,
“Shapeshifter [Ares], do not sit with me and whine.
Of all the gods who live on Mount Olympus
you are the one I hate the most. You always
enjoy hostility and war and battle. (130)

With this, Zeus, reluctantly, sends the divine medical doctor, Paean, to patch up poor Ares. Hebe, another deity gives him a bath, and at the end of Book 5, Ares takes a seat next to Zeus admiring his own beauty. In Wilson’s translation:

Hebe washed him clean,
and put fine clothes on him, and he sat down
by Zeus, the son of Cronus, feeling proud
of his magnificence. (131)

Hearing this as read by Emily Wilson, Peter Hegseth came immediately to mind. It’s all there in Homer’s Ares: the lethality, the lack of empathy for the victims of violence, the preening, the blaming of others when things don’t go well, the posturing to gain the approval of his boss, the clothes, and the self-admiration. And the stupidity.

What Homer exposes in the Iliad is the lethal stupidity of war—of many wars, that is. The Trojan war is over Helen of Sparta, or so the story goes. In the Iliad, it’s not Helen so much as Achilles’s anger that fuels the violence. And the ego of Agamemnon, who commandeers from Achilles an enslaved woman, Briseis, causing him to erupt in rage and then for most of the poem to sit nursing his grudge. And the arrogance of Hector, who begins to believe that he can single-handedly rout the Greeks. And, of course, the divine plot worked out between Zeus and Thetis, the divine mother of Achilles. None of this is necessary, none salutary, none noble. The result at the end of the poem is only desolation.

The voices of desolation in the Iliad are that of three women, Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen; and of old Priam, the king of Troy. They mourn Hector, and so much more. The most eloquent of the voices is that of Andromache, Hector’s wife. She says:

“You died young,
husband, and left me in your house a widow.
Your boy is still a little child, a son
born from unlucky parents—you and me—
and I do not believe he will grow up.
Before that time, this town will be destroyed
from top to bottom, because you are dead. . .

“. . . you piled grief and sorrow on your parents,
Hector, and left me the worst pain of all. . .” (607-608)

In Homer’s account, nothing, nothing at all, is built from war. War is utterly and only loss. In the end, the city of Troy will be destroyed. Homer does not narrate the destruction. No need for that. And the wall that the Greeks built to protect their ships will be washed into the sea. It will all be as if it hadn’t happened. Except for the poem and its stories of those who died there.

If Peter Hegseth had read the Iliad and pondered it, perhaps he would understand what he does not now understand, that violence builds nothing, preserves nothing. The violence he has perpetrated in his short time in office had not made American stronger. We are weaker now, more exposed to the violence of others. The world is a less safe place because of his actions.

Hegseth is Ares, and like Ares, he will not succeed.

Clay