The Iliad as Constellation

Essay 1 of ? on The Iliad.

I.

The heroes of The Iliad missed their chance to live among the constellations in the night sky by a single generation. It is not a great loss, perhaps, to settle for immortalization in literature instead. But Achilles and his ilk will forever lack some part of the mythic character of the likes of Perseus and Orion. To have one foot in history is to be condemned to be, well, human.

Let us imagine, though, that there was such a constellation. Which scene from the Trojan War should it depict?

Survey the plot. Spoilers follow for the uninitiated, but Homer’s audiences would have known the plot going in; we should too. In the beginning is a tight cluster of events: Agamemnon offends the gods, Achilles offends Agamemnon, Agamemnon tries to punish him. Achilles, enraged, refuses to fight, and furthermore petitions for Zeus to turn the war against his own allies so they are forced to beg for his aid. Zeus assents.

Then follows a long span of violence. The armies crash and tangle. The heroes rack up kills on the scoreboard of "honor" as if in a video game. The plot moves, stoked at times by the gods themselves, but nothing which happens is of any real consequence...

... until it is. When the Greeks are pressed against their ships, Patroclus petitions the still-defiant Achilles to lend his armor, at least, and to allow Patroclus lead in his place. He agrees but warns Patroclus only to repel the Trojans, not to pursue. Patroclus triumphs—for a while. But he overreaches and in the end is struck down in the field by Hector. And unlike every death so far, Patroclus is so sympathetic and his death such an obvious and pointless folly that the intoxication of the game of war suddenly clears and we find ourselves thrust onto the plane of tragedy.

At now at last Achilles enters the fray—transformed now by heartbreak, erupting now in fury, and re-armed by the god of fire himself. The Trojans flee to their walls. Only Hector, now clad in the stolen armor, remains on the field. But his courage fails him too, and he runs, falls, and dies—a humiliating end for the greatest of the Trojans. Achilles will dishonor him further by hitching the corpse behind his chariot and dragging it around the city walls; this does will nothing to quell his rage. And now Hector's wife Andromache arrives late at the walls, knowing nothing of the battle, their infant son in arm...

The only thing left to do is grieve. Achilles carries out the funerary rites for Patroclus. But still his rage persists, until at last the gods themselves have had enough. Hermes is sent down from Olympus to secret King Priam through the Greek lines with a ransom for his son's body. The aged king appears as if from nowhere at the tent of Achilles and supplicates to him, touching the warrior's knees, leaving his own life entirely unguarded. And only then after the full length of the poem does Achilles' rage finally break: the two men weep together, grieve together; they share an awkward meal together. A bed is made up for the old king, and in the morning,Priam returns to his city to bury his son. So the poem closes.

In all: two tightly-wound clusters of events are separated by three hundred pages of mounting violence. Is this not itself a kind of constellation? I see two figures at the ends of a long line: a warrior, a spear, a victim? Who is killing whom? Achilles and Hector—is that it? Death, vengeance, rage—are these what The Iliad is about?

II.

Let us look more closely. In the opening scenes we see an "honor culture" which, after ten years of war, has forgotten the right sense of honor, and let the bonds of piety and mutual respect slacken until they bind no one at all. The king offends the gods, the warrior betrays the mission, everyone squabbles over prizes, and nobody listens to reason. The Greek alliance has rotted through, and when Agamemnon tries to punish Achilles' overstep he discovers he lacks the power to demand the respect he believes himself entitled to. Achilles can just sit out of the war and nobody can stop him.

Throughout this opening scene the "camera" of the poet's attention flits among the Greeks. With it, like a hot potato, goes the "onus" to be honorable—the option to do the right and principled thing rather than simply to demand one be respected. The narcissist Agamemnon believes himself a god, and so fails this test:

...so you can learn just how much greater I am than you
and the next man up may shrink from matching words with me,
from hoping to rival Agamemnon strength for strength!

The onus then comes to Achilles, who is almost in the right until he commits the very same crime. He too tries to teach respect:

...when your hordes of fighters drop and die,
cut down by the hands of man-killing Hector! Then—
then you will tear your heart out, desperate, raging
that you disgraced the best of the Achaeans!

Sitting out of the war is not enough to satisfy his rage, and so he launches the onus off to Mount Olympus by way of his mother, the goddess Thetis, and it sows its discord even there. Finally it lands at the feet of Zeus, who, unlike Agamemnon, is deserving of his kingship—in a Bronze-Age sense, at least. His might is such that he barely needs to raise his voice to put to rest the dissent in his court. And he is just—the other side to the coin of kingship—and therefore beyond reproach. Zeus owes a debt to Thetis, and so he grants the request, in spite of the trouble it will cause him. All it takes is a bow of his head:

No word or work of mine—nothing can be revoked,
there is no treachery, nothing left unfinished
once I bow my head to say it will be done.

Zeus's own house is in order. His promises and threats can and will be kept, and his will is therefore a known quantity. Everything else becomes simple; troubles vanish as quickly as they come on. Hera is upset by his verdict, but a few moments later the Olympians have settled back into their luxuriant existence, laughing uncontrollably, and:

That hour then
and all day long till the sun went down they feasted
and no god's hunger lacked a share of the handsome banquet
or the gorgeous lyre Apollo struck or the Muses singing
voice to voice in choirs, their vibrant music ringing.

The gods sleep easily that night, as they do every night.

Tacit in this sequence is an assertion of a fact of reality: that only if you truly possess godly power can you bend others to your will. The primordial ethic of "might makes right" is already obsolete by the time of Troy. It is not that it is false, but that it's irrelevant: the world has grown too large; when war requires a coalition it must be bound by human bonds. No longer does any mortal have the might. Only the half-god Achilles comes close, but it is in asserting his divinity that he errs. In fact, the age of gods mingling with earth is nearly at its close. The rules are changing. Respect must now be earned rather than extorted.

The feuding mortals are placed beside this standard and found wanting. And it is this deficiency, these follies, which lead in the end to all their grief.

Narrowly: it is Achilles' own pride which causes Patroclus' death and Achilles' own grief. Here then is one tragic image we could trace over the constellation: Achilles killing Patroclus himself. The choice to indulge his rage is in fact no less of a choice than that of throwing a spear, and its consequence no less inevitable. It must have felt righteous at the time—Agamemnon was out of line, after all! If Achilles had not been justified, his situation would be unrecognizable; nobody ever feels unjustified. But what Achilles did with his rage was not an assertion of some principle over pride. He imagined himself to be so crucial to the cause that he only had to externalize his anger—making it everyone else's problem—to get his way. You know: the way toddlers do.

He imagined himself, that is, to be the hero of the story. But the earlier heroes did not wield their reputations as weapons. They never viewed themselves in the third-person at all, but simply acted on the world and were acted on in turn. In this respect they were quite childlike in their own fashion—animalistic, rather, with none of the self-awareness of later generations steeped in stories. Achilles' rage was not a heroic act; it was not an act at all, but a surrender of agency to raw emotion; that is, to the gods, and therefore to the Fates. He sat back and waited for the world to give him what he deserved—so that's exactly what he got.

More broadly: we can see in our constellation the shape of an arrow which simply points, gestures, from all those mortal follies towards all that mortal grief. Now it encompasses not only Achilles' folly, but that of Agamemnon¹ and Paris as well, and of all the Greeks and Trojans embroiled in this pointless war over their pride. This is the shape The Iliad takes in the mind once its features have faded, as if one has stepped back from one's telescope to look with the naked eye. Only the bare figure remains, and what it depicts is this: that pride leads to grief—that the one causes the other. That:

if pride—
then grief.

Then, like a Greek philosopher, we conclude the contrapositive:

if grief is unbearable—
be not proud.

III.

This “constellation” picture I don’t intend just as a metaphor. This I think is an approximately accurate description of the way human memory remembers stories. As details fade, the emotional senses to the scenes still remain recognizable and retain their original relation to each other. In this way the many stories we take in become kind of a zodiac of forms, whose patterns we can then draw upon to narrativize and understand the world.

The Iliad is just such a constellation, with the feud of Agamemnon and Achilles and the deaths of Patroclus and Hector as its brightest and most identifiable stars. Each bears a particular color and character, and each approaches an idealized form: any quarrel for respect brings to mind their quarrel, and every foolish and preventable death, their deaths.²

To know The Iliad is to lose forever the mythic hero's ability to act without reflection. So steeped in stories, we no longer trust our naked instincts. Everything must be considered—from then on every act of pride will come with a reminder of the existence of grief; that, when grief visited the paragon of the Bronze Age man, not even he could do a thing about it. Defying the gods, defiling his enemy, roaring all he liked, obsessively circling the funeral pyre for a week straight—it all came to nothing.

A corollary follows: that the only way for a man to truly be immune to grief is to live without human bonds at all—like the hunter Orion, say, who wandered the wilderness with only his dogs. That this is what it takes to remain free of the yoke of humanity in turn implies that no one would knowingly choose a life of pure myth; not unless his grief became so great there was nowhere else to go. And once he learns see himself in the mirror of the third-person (like Narcissus, say) he no longer even has åny say in the matter.

It must be noted that pride, in this light, is not some evil or vice which we innately ought to know better than to indulge in. It is in fact a part of our nature, and serves a purpose as a defense mechanism against abuse and hierarchy, even if its proportions are more suited to a smaller world; a more animalistic age. That it is destructive to civilized life was at one point not known, and then it was; it had to be discovered. The Iliad I therefore see as a work of moral technology: an new minting of a concept of our own nature, like a software update to the human operating system, which allows us to learn from the folly of an era without having to repeat it for ourselves.

It seems to me that the point of The Iliad, the reason it was written, is to inject this constellation into the mind of its audience. But not, that is, as an argument: it is not an assertion of a historical-causal relationship between pride and grief. Does the one lead to the other, in reality? Who knows? Instead it works in the manner of art, that is, emotionally: it imposes this relationship on us as fact merely by the experience of it. Once we—our bodies—have felt something and taken it to heart, we—our minds—no longer have any say in the matter. We sit down to be entertained, but in doing so we open ourselves up and allow the poet to act upon us towards his own ends. The ideas within are sewn into the audience; when the art is worthy they will take and will tend to root and grow, while that art which we judge unworthy finds no fertile soil. Homer, for one, is worthy.

We know next to nothing about the poet Homer. But in my mind I see an old and blind man, whose heart has been broken countless times over by the warring instincts of the young and proud, and who, late in life, has resolved to apply all his wisdom and talent towards trying to do something about it—for if he can not, who could?—for in his own words,

The minds of the younger men are always flighty,
but let an old man stand his ground among them,
one who can see the days behind, the days ahead—
that is the best hope for peace for both our armies.

1. Agamemnon is not punished for his crimes in The Iliad, and his army does go on to win the war. But—as if to keep audiences from getting the wrong idea—a substantial chunk of The Odyssey consists of different characters telling the story of his brutal murder at the hands of his own cheating wife upon returning home. Kids, don't be like Agamemnon.

2. To me, The Iliad takes to this life as a constellation in the mind far more naturally than later stories do. This is perhaps due to its origin in oral tradition rather than in writing—our minds are much like the natural habitat in which it developed in the first place.