I love a good sentence, and having perpetrated many thousands of sentences myself, I know how difficult a thing it is write a good one. Great sentences are more than difficult to write; they approach impossibility as a limit. When you run across a great sentence, you do not forget it. The greatest sentence in English that I know of is the following:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.  John 1:14

I can think of several other sentences that are nearly as beautiful as this one, the Authorized Version’s translation of the pedestrian Greek. But great sentences are not what I am concerned with in this post.

I am concerned with great paragraphs. Paragraphs interest me more than sentences because paragraphs are big enough to express connected thoughts in. A sentence makes a statement, but a paragraph can make an argument. And a paragraph gives the poetically inclined writer room in which to raise or lower his voice, quicken or slow his tempo, and deploy the whole panoply of rhetoric. English sentences that attempt to do these things wind up being long, and long English sentences that succeed are always something of a tour de force.

A paragraph can appeal to me by the neatness with which it develops an argument; or by the effectiveness with which it marshals details to produce an effect; or by the sound it makes, whisper or roar; or by the rising level of excitement within it; by its satirical bite; or for many other reasons

In this post, I will print a number of paragraphs that interest and move me, without commenting on them. To experience how these paragraphs affect me, try saying them out loud, in your boldest stentorian voice, before someone who loves or at least abides you.

Isaiah 60:1, King James Version

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentilesu shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, by the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee. The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the LORD.

from The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, an Athenian (Richard Crawley translator)

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world- I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately preceded the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable leads me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a great scale, either in war or in other matters. 

from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.

 

from A Letter to Lord Chesterfield by Samuel Johnson

Is not a Patron my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it: till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which providence has enabled me to do for myself.

from Samuel Johnson’s commentary on Shakespeare

“But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice, bot of this familiarity he is so proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the Duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy.  It must be observed that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.

 

from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. 

from A Grammar of Assent by John Henry Newman

 Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to students are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which they get by heart and think very fine, at length come home to them, when long years have passed, and they have had experience of life, and pierce them, as if they had never been known to them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then they come to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of their own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.

from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the ‘levee;’ a pile of ‘skids’ on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the ‘point’ above the town, and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote ‘points;’ instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, ‘S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!’ and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.

 

from My Mark Twain by William Dean Howells

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes–I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

 

 

from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

He [Bergotte] was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self- sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there — to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only if then ! to fools. (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

Il était mort. Mort à jamais ? Qui peut le dire ? Certes, les expériences spirites, pas plus que les dogmes religieux, n’apportent la preuve que l’âme subsiste. Ce qu’on peut dire, c’est que tout se passe dans notre vie comme si nous y entrions avec le faix d’obligations contractées dans une vie antérieure ; il n’y a aucune raison, dans nos conditions de vie sur cette terre, pour que nous nous croyions obligés à faire le bien, à être délicats, même à être polis, ni pour l’artiste cultivé à ce qu’il se croie obligé de recommencer vingt fois un morceau dont l’admiration qu’il excitera importera peu à son corps mangé par les vers, comme le pan de mur jaune que peignit avec tant de science et de raffinement un artiste à jamais inconnu, à peine identifié sous le nom de Ver Meer. Toutes ces obligations, qui n’ont pas leur sanction dans la vie présente, semblent appartenir à un monde différent, fondé sur la bonté, le scrupule, le sacrifice, un monde entièrement différent de celui-ci, et dont nous sortons pour naître à cette terre, avant peut-être d’y retourner revivre sous l’empire de ces lois inconnues auxquelles nous avons obéi parce que nous en portions l’enseignement en nous, sans savoir qui les y avait tracées – ces lois dont tout travail profond de l’intelligence nous rapproche et qui sont invisibles seulement – et encore ! – pour les sots.

 

from Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!”

 

Great books, by people like Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, are great because of the amount of truth that they encompass — so great that we are tempted to call them universal in their significance.

There, I’ve paid proper homage to the big guys. Now I’m talking about a book that deals in truths that no one would call universal. They are local to a place (a small town in Minnesota) and a profession (public high school teaching) and a phase of civilization (American civilization, mid to late twentieth century). The book is Staggerford, by Jon Hassler, and it accurately reports the truth of its setting and subject matter, with humor and pathos

The central character of the novel is a 35 year-old unmarried high school English teacher named Miles Pruitt. The story is told if not in Miles’ voice at least from his point of view. He has studied Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer in graduate school, and now must spend 45 minutes every day proctoring a last period study hall crowded with bored and restive students; and every day he must suppress the groans and giggles that erupt when some student’s anonymous flatulence — never more than 15 minutes into the period — takes the stuffy room by storm.

His trials are more than olfactory. He is strongly attracted to a charming younger woman on the faculty who becomes engaged to the school’s dumb jock principal and his superior salary. He must deflect the attentions of a beautiful, intelligent, and troubled female student who is in love with him. He must help his principal — the guy who got his girl — find a diplomatic resolution to a standing protest by the families of the school’s native American students; the native Americans are bored rather than aggrieved and everyone knows it, but the impasse takes all of Miles’ patience and cynicism to resolve.

To ease the pain of his existence, Miles almost always talks ironically — provoking the further irony that his colleagues don’t understand him.

No, this book is not filled with universal truths, but it seems to me, now that I’ve written all the above, that its truths may be something more than little and local.

A few years ago, as my wife and I were leaving a restaurant in Newburyport, Massachusetts, she noticed a flyer on a bulletin board advertising a “Poetry Appreciation Day”. This event was to be a gathering of poetry lovers at the town hall in Newburyport, the following month. Anyone who cared to could read their favorite poem out loud before the gathering, and explain what importance the poem had for them.

My wife urged me apply to be a reader at the gathering. “You like poetry”, she said, “and you would enjoy talking about one of your favorite poems.” She was right, and I applied to be a reader and was accepted.

A month later, I found myself sitting on a stage in the auditorium of the Newburyport town hall with about a dozen other people who were going to read their favorite poems. I was one of only two adults on the stage; the rest were high school students. Sitting next to me on my left was a girl who appeared to be asking herself “How the hell did I get myself into this?” I asked her what poem she had chosen to read — I didn’t recognize the name of the poem or author that she said —and I told her that she was going to be great. She did not appear to believe me.

Whatever qualms the young poetry lovers were feeling, they read their poems with conviction and gusto. Only one of them read a poem by a poet of whom I had heard, though; this poem was by Constantine Cavafy. The rest of the poems were free verse, and personal — outpourings of feelings that had not been submitted to the discipline of art. Or maybe these poems bore the marks of art, and the genre was simply too strange to me for me to perceive it.

It was clear to me after the event that the new generation of poetry lovers is unacquainted with the work of Francis Turner Palgrave, the friend of Tennyson and compiler of the anthology known as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, originally published in 1861. Palgrave included in his anthology only short lyric poems — Lycidas is one of the longest poems in the book — and no poems by then living authors. Palgrave’s selection was extremely influential on the practice of English language poets up until recently. It was one of the books that well educated English soldiers took with them into the trenches of World War I, and in many cases their “war poetry” is in fact a dialog between Palgrave and the realities of the war. Robert Frost read his copy of Palgrave so often that he had to have it rebound.

Palgrave’s Golden Treasury has never been without its detractors. William James said that it was more like an aviary than a book. The poets whose work it enshrines, some complain, are almost all men. But Palgrave’s taste was sure — at least it agrees with, or has formed, modern taste — and there are few pages in the book that a sensitive reader would want to tear out and submit to the shredder.

This book, as I saw, made no appeal to the young poetry lovers sitting on the stage with me.

The poem that I read was “Here Lies a Lady” by John Crowe Ransom, a formal poem in regular meters. The poem is about the death of a young wife and mother after “six little spaces of chill and six of burning.”. After I read the poem, I explained that I liked it because I, like Ransom, can be made to feel uncomfortable by too direct expression of emotion. Ransom, it has often been said, defended himself against a natural inclination to the pathetic by creating an elaborate, mock pedantic, ironic style that seems to say “I’m not really greatly moved,” his denial intensifying the emotion in the poem. (Randall Jarrell said that Ransom’s style works well except when he is not feeling much emotion to pretend not to be feeling.)

The poem:

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,
And of medicos marvelling sweetly on her ills. 

For either she burned and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads—
What was she making?  Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds—

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline
Till she lay discouraged and cold as a thin stalk white and blown,
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;
The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,
But was she not lucky?  In flowers and lace and mourning,
In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul
After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

Ransom said that as he wrote the third stanza, his cheeks became wetted.

As I read this poem to my audience, I sensed that Ransom’s little fable about the death of a wife and mother was holding its attention. Whether they saw the poem’s application to their own lives — that everyone’s life is six little spaces of chill and six of burning — I do not know. That is an application that only readers are likely to make who have read some of the older poetry, such as the poetry that Francis Palgrave selected for the delight and instruction for us, his posterity.

I have never in my life wanted to be an actor. For once, my ambition has assessed my gifts accurately. I don’t have an actor’s looks or presence. My voice is weak, and I have a hard time keeping it from trailing off in mid-sentence. I never dreamed about being part of Hollywood, and I’ve seldom given a thought to Broadway, except to relish someone’s wisecrack about it, that Broadway at night would be the most beautiful sight in the world, if only one couldn’t read.

And I can’t remember what made me decide to read Moss Hart’s memoir about Broadway, Act One, or understand why it is one of my favorite books, except perhaps for the witness that it gives to the truth of one of my favorite sentences in Thoreau’s great book Walden:

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” 

Moss Hart himself, reflecting on the ease with which one can lose one’s way and one’s self in the world of theatre, arrives at an Emersonian conclusion:

Every time I have departed from my own values and substituted those of others, I have suffered the consequences.

Moss Hart (1904 – 1961) was an American playwright, librettist, and stage director. Act One is his story of how he achieved his dream of being part of Broadway, in spite of discouragements and failures that would have made most of us settle for selling encyclopedias door-to-door. It is a story about heroic perseverance.

It was his dream of being part of Broadway that sustained him through the long years of an unhappy childhood and adolescence, as a member of a troubled and cash-strapped family. He was sustained, too, by his mother’s sister, Aunt Kate, who spent what little money she had on theatre tickets. Aunt Kate was eccentric — she dressed with a strange flamboyance that caused her to be ridiculed wherever she went — but her comments on plays, production, and acting were always penetrating and just.

His dream, of course, added to his misery while sustaining him. As he wrote:

“The non-athletic boy, the young.ster who liked to read or listen to music, who could not fight or was afraid to, or the boy who had some special interest that was strange or alien to the rest, like the theatre in my case, was banished from the companionship of the others by rules of the ‘tough’ world that was already beginning to prevail.”

He gained acceptance from the boys of his tough world — a neighborhood of mostly poor Jewish families in the Bronx — only by retelling for a group of them the story in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which he happened to be reading. They were spell bound by Hart’s retelling, and demanded that he keep reading the book and telling them what happened in the book as he read it. In this way Hart became aware that he had a gift for entertaining people.

But it was a long time before he was able to find a way to make his gift useful to Broadway. In the meanwhile, he knew only the monotony of poverty and the unhappiness of life in a family with a violent, mercurial father. His grandfather and father had been cigar makers; but they were put out of work by someone’s invention of a cigar-making machine, and Moss had to drop out of school to work to help support his family. He never completed high school.

His first job was unloading and storing shipments of furs for a furrier. The work left him exhausted by the end of the day. He also picked up an offensive odor from the furs; on the subway home, no one would sit near him. But worst of all, time was passing and he was doing nothing to realize his dream of being part of Broadway.

His description of working for a furrier is certainly vivid enough to impress any reader, but it will have special meaning for anyone who has ever worked at a job of soul crushing monotony for low pay.

But Broadway, when he finally got a foothold in it, introduced him to miseries greater in scale and intensity than anything he could ever have imagined before. He wrote a play titled The Beloved Bandit. How he came to write this play and how it came to be produced off-broadway is too involved a story to tell here. It is enough for the purpose of this article for me to say that the author makes his readers feel the humiliation of seeing one’s audience stand up and walk out of the theatre at the end of the first act, without deigning to voice their contempt for the wretched thing that they had paid good money to see.

        from Frank Capra’s 1938 movie version of “You Can’t Take It With You”

But he remained determined to be a part of Broadway. He began by writing play after play — tragedies modeled on Eugene O’Neil, and explorations of social questions modeled on George Bernard Shaw. He began to develop aesthetic distance — the ability to stand back from one’s own work and judge it as if it were someone else’s. He saw that his plays were slowly becoming better crafted but were still lifeless. Something about his approach was wrong.

Then a friend who had read one of his plays told him, “The comedy in it is what works best.” He had been unaware that he had written any comedy at all. He reread his play and found that his friend was right and found himself as a playwright.

Although I always knew that Moss Hart would become one of the great names in the history of Broadway theatre, that he would collaborate with George S. Kaufman on the writing of classic comedies such as “Merrily We Roll Along” (1934), You Can’t Take It With You” (1936), and “I’d Rather Be Right” (1937) — even so, his story of ordeals including homelessness and hunger, of success achieved through heroic doggedness in the looming shadow of final humiliating failure, keeps me turning the pages of this almost fairy tale, set in a time when New York City was still a place where a young person talented and plucky and lucky enough could meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Kaufman and Hart won over the critics as well as the audiences. “You Can’t Take It With You” is a very funny show”, wrote Robert Benchley in the New Yorker, December 26, 1936. “It is so funny that even when you are not laughing, you get a blow, for it is not only funny, but nice.” Maybe the reason I like Act One is that it conjures up a New York City at a time when plays could be reviewed by Robert Benchley and praised for being “nice” — still the city of dreams and not yet the city of nightmares.

          George S. Kaufman (left) and Moss Hart, 1937

When I’m reading Shakespeare, I ask myself why I ever waste time reading other writers, and I resolve to read nothing but Shakespeare from then on.

When I’m not reading Shakespeare, I hold back from picking him up and having a go at it again. I’m lazy and reading Shakespeare is work. He’s work, because he asks of you all the attention and nimble-wittedness than you can bring to bear on him. I like Rex Stout’s detective stories about Nero Wolfe and his cheeky factotum Archie Goodwin, and I make no apologies for liking them. But I have one thing to say against them. They keep me from reading Shakespeare, because reading them is not work.

The harder jobs pay better. Brain surgeons make more than school crossing guards. Reading Shakespeare pays better than reading Rex Stout. So I always go back to reading Shakespeare, eventually.

But he is work.

Matthew Arnold wrote that there are few lines in King Lear that he didn’t have to read several times before he understood them.  Shakespeare glories in puns and metaphors and stretching and pulling words until they mean things they have never meant before. Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson do not do this and because they don’t they are much easier to read.

In Cymbeline, Imogen tells her husband Leonatus that he must marry again if she should die before he does. Leonatus, loving husband that he is, says to her in reply what every wife would want to hear:

          How, how? Another?
You gentle gods, give me but this I have,
And sear up my embracements from a next
With bonds of death!

I understood Leonatus’ reply, more or less, on first reading. Context helped. But this wonderful language is not plain. I have to be at my reading best to understand and enjoy it.

In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses urges Achilles to act greatly once again:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. 

I understood most of this at first reading, even though Shakespeare here fails to manage his metaphors coherently. My literary conscience rebels and then submits to Shakespeare’s magnificent flouting of prose logic.

Christopher Marlowe, in contrast, has Dr. Faustus avow his damnable ambition lucidly:

O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor and omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
but his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
A sound magician is a demigod. 

This is great poetry, in my opinion, and it’s a lot easier to understand than Shakespeare. But it’s just not as much fun as Shakespeare.

One part of Shakespeare is not much fun, however, and that is the joking, the duels of wit, the brazen punning, wherein the speakers try to impart a backward spin to their every word the way Minnesota Fats imparted the same to pool balls. Jokes are no longer funny when they have to be footnoted.

But then there is the miraculous exception, the play that has the perfection of something found, not made: Henry IV Part 1. Here the horseplay is all perfectly understandable and fresh because it is a working and necessary part of the play, not a treat for the members of the audience who would rather be at a public hanging.

My enjoyment of Falstaff is so great and I cherish it so much that I have never been able to bring myself to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. I’m told that this play is a sad affair for lovers of the fat old rogue. But someday I’ll screw my courage to the sticking place and read it. It’s by Shakespeare, after all.

My copy of Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing: Questions From The Great Philosophers, by Lesek Kolakowski, arrived at my house in a roundabout way. When I ordered it online, I accidentally had it mailed to my wife’s niece in Alaska, for whom I had ordered another book, I forget which or when.

So this wonderful book went to Alaska where it waited patiently — and philosophically — on an Alaskan doorstep for several weeks, until my wife’s niece discovered it. This niece, seeing that I was the sender, mailed it to me.

I mention this book’s journey because of its aptness to its subject matter, which is broad like the North American continent between Alaska and Massachusetts, and wild like Alaska.

The author, a Polish intellectual best known for his critiques of Marxism, in this book writes about the fundamental question that each of thirty different philosophers poses to himself. What is real? asks Parmenides of Elea. What is the source of truth? Plato wants to know. Kant wants to know how knowledge is possible. What is the human spirit, Bergson wonders. William of Ockham asks whether ideas exist. And so on.

But the greatest question of all, it seems to me, is: Why is there something rather than nothing?

When I was in high school, my best friend and I would sometimes retreat to an old barn on my family’s property where, sitting on bales of hay, we would twist the tail the cosmos, confident in our ability to extort from it the answer to any question that we cared to pose. What is causality? Why nothing, really — only our expectation, founded on experience, that throwing an egg against a wall will be followed immediately by the egg cracking. (We didn’t know that this view of causality had been proposed several hundred years before our time by a man almost as young as we were, David Hume.)

But we had no such easy answer to that biggest of all questions, the only one really worth asking, it still seems to me: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

We first thought that there might be an ineluctable logical necessity that something exist. But, then, why does logic exist? Any answer to this question that we could think of was merely kicking the can a little farther down the road, because the answer itself was always something that existed.

Were we like a cat sitting on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board makes an announcement that throws all the traders into a panic? What would the cat think was causing all the commotion? That a mouse was running around among the traders’ feet? Would the question even occur to the cat? Are we cats on the Stock Exchange floor when we ask why there is something rather than nothing?

In Kolakowski’s book, this biggest of all questions is fielded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 – 1716). Surely Leibnitz would know. “His brilliant mind,” Kolakowski began by writing, “encompassed everything; whatever he touched was enriched by him.”

I read on eagerly, wishing to be enriched by Leibnitz. Kolakowski’s account of his ideas was expressed in plain non- technical English, which could not conceal, however, the strangeness and difficulty of his thought.

So why is there something, rather than nothing, according to Leibnitz? Because God is the sufficient reason of everything that is. And a sufficient reason, according to Leibnitz, is the reason why a thing is, and is what it is and not something else. The sufficient reason of something, being itself something, must have a sufficient reason of its own. Thus, there is a sequence of sufficient reasons, which must however originate in one absolute reason which needs no sufficient reason. This absolute reason can only be God.

I must admit I am a little disappointed in Leibnitz’s answer to the biggest question. I am disappointed because it is pretty much the answer that I came up with on my own, minus the terminology, and minus “ monads”, those irreducible absolutely simple particles of being that somehow are at the bottom of what is.

I am sure I am committing a foul outrage on Leibnitz’s logic, which must be powerful. He discovered calculus, after all, although not in time to prevent Newton from trying to patent it.

Still, I don’t believe that God can be found by logic. That means that the answer to the question, why is there something rather than nothing, cannot be found by logic, either. But the philosophers who raise the questions that we have to ask but cannot answer are giving voice to the needs of our minds, and for that I think we must honor them.

Anyway, there is something, rather than nothing. There is, for example, my toothache, which has been getting worse since I started to write this post. Its existence, mysterious but indubitable, now compels me to go get some Extra Strength Tylenol. But why is there my toothache, rather than nothing?

A beginning sketch of this article got posted and for that I apologize.k

I’ll post a finished article in a couple of weeks.

Your forbearance is appreciated.

Note: This post replaces one on the same subject that I published earlier.

O GODDESS! sing the wrath of Peleus' son,
Achilles; sing the deadly wrath that brought
Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air, — 
For so had Jove appointed, — from the time
When the two chiefs, Atrides, king of men.
And great Achilles, parted first as foes.

The Iliad, Book 1, lines 1 - 8,  trans. William Cullen Bryant

In this essay I try to explain why, fifty years after I first read the Iliad, I keep returning to it, and why I think that others might want to read it, too..

I also try to explain how I overcame the obstacles that I encountered in getting to know the Iliad well enough to read it with enjoyment — something that I hope may be of interest to others who are thinking about reading the Iliad, or who have tried to read it only to be discouraged on first encounter by the poem’s great length, seemingly sprawling and formless and monotonously given over to the graphic description of the slaughter of warrior by warrior.

I write about several well known English translations of the Iliad, and why I prefer some to others.

And I write for those who suspect that the Iliad is getting a pass for being so old, for having been so long honored, for being, in short, a Big Name.  Where so many have been digging for so long, there has to be gold. I have found gold, and in this essay I will try to illustrate with excerpts from the poem what that gold is like for me. In the meanwhile, I will let William Cullen Bryant speak for me, since his thoughts now represent my own:

[The Iliad is ] a work of an inexhaustible imagination, with characters vigorously drawn and finely discriminated, and incidents rapidly succeeding each other and infinitely diversified, — everywhere a noble simplicity, mellifluous numbers, and images of beauty and grandeur . . .

This essay is not a work of scholarship but an account of my experience as a reader of the Iliad. For scholarship, please see the section titled Some Books that Have Helped Me at the end of this post.

Note: All excerpts from the Iliad that appear below are taken from the 1871 translation by William Cullen Bryant.

What I Needed to Know First

The story that Homer tells in the Iliad was familiar to his audiences from beginning to end. But I was not as familiar with the story as I needed to be in order to read the Iliad with understanding and enjoyment. I had homework to do. I consulted handbooks of mythology. Rosemary Sutcliff’s book “Black Ships Before Troy” is an excellent retelling of the Iliad for young adults that includes the poem’s background in mythology. Robert Graves’ “Greek Gods and Heroes” is also useful. Today, synopses of the Iliad and lists of the principle characters are easily found online.

At the very least, I needed to be familiar with these parts of the mythological background of the Iliad:

• The birth of Helen and her brothers, Castor and Pollux.
• The marriage of Helen with Menelaus, King Sparta.
• The marriage of the sea goddess Thetis with Peleus, King of the Myrmidons.
• The birth of Achilles, son of Peleus and Thetis, and the prophesy relating to his glorious life and early death.
• The award of the golden apple, inscribed ‘’to the fairest’’, to Aphrodite by Paris, Prince of Troy, thus turning the goddesses not judged to be the fairest, Hera and Athena, into unappeasable enemies of Troy.
• The elopement of Helen with Paris.
• The Kings of Greece, true to their mutual oaths, go to war against Troy to bring Helen home to Sparta.

Why I Read the Iliad

In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there.
Virginia Woolf, ‘’On Not Knowing Greek’

The Iliad begins with an explosion of anger and ends on a note of fear, grief, and exhaustion. Between its beginning and end is a vast tableau of slaughter as warriors seek transitory earthly glory by killing other warriors. Why read something like that? Aren’t the day’s headlines appalling enough?

I have read and enjoyed the Iliad for different reasons at different times in my life.

I first read it because it was a story about heroes. In modern usage, the term “hero” refers to a person who does something extraordinary and praiseworthy; for example, a man or woman who rescues someone trapped in a burning building. But my interest was in heroes of an older traditional sort: men of some former time who were bigger, stronger, and more courageous than men of today. Such heroes walked among the gods and some were even offsprings of the gods. In this traditional sense, the term “hero” refers to something that a man is.

Stories about heroes in this older sense are thought to be very old indeed — as old as campfires and story telling. Their appeal, then, is to something basic in our nature, and if today’s serious literature is preoccupied with the unheroic side of men and women, stories about heroes still flourish in comic books and video games and movies. This latter fact may make it hard for some readers to enjoy stories about heroes, their appeal being to our primitive (i. e. lowbrow) side. But I’ve found that to understand and enjoy the Iliad, I have had to understand as best I can the appeal of this human writ large, the hero.

I have also developed a newer interest in the Iliad, now that I have achieved my biblically allotted three score years and ten (and a little more). I am suddenly conscious of not having much time left for reading or anything else. For this reason I am losing interest in life’s temporary, local, accidental features. I’m not interested in novels that depict, say, all the local good and local bad in lower middle class life in a certain village in Victorian England or anywhere else. I want a summing up of universal facts, an abstraction from life of its essence. “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature,” wrote Samuel Johnson in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare. The Iliad abounds in just representations of a general nature — representations of men and women, the young and the old, mortal and divine, all caught up in a terrible and apparently endless war. “The poems of Homer,” Johnson continues, “we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.” And this is so because Homer reaches down to the unlocalized general truth about humanity. It is all here: love, hatred, pride, fear, courage, devotion, and just about any other human quality you can think of, distilled into an essence.

However, the just representations of a general nature in the Iliad are found in the context of a warrior culture that is unique and peculiar to its time. Hector prays for his son that some day he may delight his mother by returning from battle carrying the armor of an enemy whom he has slain. Details like this force me to decide how well I want to participate, imaginatively, in a culture in which a mother would be delighted by such bloody trophies. This culture will always remain something exotic to me and unassimilated by my imagination. I have had to learn to accept, rather than enter into, certain elements of the Iliad.

On the whole, I find the Iliad, for all its savage strangeness, easier to accept on its own terms than the Aeneid, Vergil’s Latin epic that was modeled on, and written in competition with, the Iliad. The Aeneid celebrates the origin of the Roman people, the greatness of Rome, and the rule of the emperor Augustus. I enjoy the brilliance of Vergil’s poetry and the unforgettable pathos of many of his episodes, but I find it difficult to enter into his feelings for Rome. The Iliad presents fewer such difficulties. Homer’s evocation of the tragic essence of human existence is true to today’s headlines.

The People of the Iliad

Homer wasn’t a novelist and the Iliad isn’t a novel. An epic poem has its own conventions and requirements. But Homer had a great novelist’s ability to give life to characters with very few words.

The Iliad is about people — people in relation to each other and to a terrible war that is threatening to devour everyone and everything that has attached them to life. Homer portrays people with vividness, subtlety, and economy. (He portrays gods and goddesses with equal skill, but I find them less interesting than mortals because they have so much less at stake.)

I was surprised to learn from Jasper Griffin’s book Homer on Life and Death that some modern scholars have denied that Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and all the rest are characterized at all. This view makes all the characters in the Iliad to be no more than functional parts of the story. Maybe I am reading the Iliad in a naive and unsophisticated way, but I feel that if Achilles, for example, isn’t characterized — that is, if he isn’t, for the reader, an autonomous being who does and says what he does because his nature requires it — then there are no characters either in the plays of Shakespeare or in the novels of Mark Twain.

I believe that some readers find that Homer fails to characterize the personae of his poem because he does not endow any of them with personal eccentricities. Nestor, an aged leader among the Greeks, is garrulous, but he is not garrulous in the same way as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, whose speech can only be called Micawberesque. Nestor’s garrulousness is the garrulousness of all old men who have been relegated to the sidelines by age and who can console themselves only by recalling the great things that they saw, did, and suffered in their youth.

We know, for example, that Helen is filled with remorse and self-loathing as being the cause of the war. Would she be characterized any better if Homer also told us that she bites her nails? Robert Frost said that in art, a little bit of anything goes a long way. Homer’s people are characterized just enough to be real seeming, and no more.

The most important people of the Iliad are: Priam, king of Troy; Hector, a son of Priam, and the greatest Trojan warrior; Achilles, leader of the Greek forces from Phthia, and the greatest warrior on either side; Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces against Troy; Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon and the husband of Helen; Paris, a son of Priam who ran off with Helen, causing the war; Helen, as beautiful as a goddess and full of self-loathing for being the cause of so much suffering and death; and Odysseus, the cleverest man in either army.

I’m going to limit my discussion of these characters to the three who are central to the action of the poem and whose stories have interested and moved me most vividly: Achilles, Hector, and Helen.

Achilles

Achilles is the embodiment, in a pure concentrated form, of wrath (menin). It is Achilles’ wrath that the poet asks the “goddess” to sing about. It is Achilles’ wrath that sets the action of the Iliad in motion and it is only when his wrath is momentarily appeased that the action can be concluded.

Alexander Pope remarks in the introduction to his translation of the Iliad that no poet since Homer has ever chosen as “simple and single” a theme for a poem as Homer did, in choosing wrath.

Achilles is the merciless man of wrath who nurses his grievances, is dismissive of the suffering of others, and finds it impossible to ignore or forgive slights to his own dignity. (He is alive and among us today, in various incarnations but always easily recognizable.)

I don’t like him, and that is a sign that Homer has made him vivid enough for me that I start to mistake him for a real person. When I read Homer, I find myself on a boundary between art and real life. For Homer’s audiences, however, there would have been no such questions about artistic representation and reality because they regarded Achilles and the other warriors as historical figures.

Achilles possesses to an outstanding degree all the qualities of a great warrior: he is taller and bigger than ordinary men, and stronger; he can run faster and throw a javelin farther. He is semi-divine, his mother being the sea nymph Thetis, and he was trained in the arts of war by a centaur.

Even so, he is doomed. An oracle has declared that he must choose between a long life without glory, or a glorious but short life. He chooses the latter, as any warrior would — as the greatest warrior must. Achilles’ coming death overshadows the whole poem.

Achilles so far has a claim on our pity. But he repels pity by being himself pitiless. He has no pity, first of all, on the other Greeks, who are suffering terrible losses in battle while he sulks in his tent. Agamemnon sends him gifts to soften his anger and to persuade him to return to the war. Achilles rejects the offer:

                             I hate his gifts;  I hold 
In utter scorn the giver.  Were his gifts   
Tenfold, — nay, twenty-fold, — the worth of all  
That he possesses, and with added wealth 
 From others, — all the riches that flow in 
Upon Orchomenus, or Thebes, the pride of  
Egypt, where large treasures are laid up  
And through whose hundred gates rush men and steeds.  
Two hundred through each gate; — nay, should he give 
 As many gifts as there are sands and dust  
Of earth, — not even then shall Atreus’ son  
Persuade me, till I reap a just revenge  
For his foul contumelies. 

Achilles’ anger is excessive even by the standards of the warrior culture that formed him. Yes, Agamemnon treated hm with contempt, but the gifts that the Greeks offer him are more than enough to atone for the insult he suffered. Still, he will not be appeased. Achilles does not return to battle until his beloved companion Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector; and then Achilles fights only for a personal reason: to get revenge for the killing of Patroclus by killing Hector.

He is pitiless toward Lycaon, a son of Priam and half brother of Hector. He had ransomed Lycaon once before, and now encounters him for a second time; in the interval, Patroclus has been killed by Hector:

The illustrious son of Priam ended here 
His prayer, and heard a merciless reply:⁠—
“Fool! Never talk of ransom⁠—not a word.
Before the evil day on which my friend
Was slain, it pleased me oftentimes to spare
The Trojans. Many a one I took alive
And sold; but now no man of all their race,
Whom any god may bring within my reach,
Shall leave the field alive, and least of all
The sons of Priam. Die thou, then; and why
Shouldst thou, my friend, lament? Patroclus died,
And greatly he excelled thee. Seest thou not
How eminent in stature and in form
Am I, whom to a prince renowned for worth
A goddess mother bore; yet will there come
To me a violent death at morn, at eve,
Or at the midday hour, whenever he
Whose weapon is to take my life shall cast
The spear or send an arrow from the string.”

He spake: the Trojan’s heart and knees grew faint;
His hand let go the spear; he sat and cowered
With outstretched arms. Achilles drew his sword,
And smote his neck just at the collar-bone;
The two-edged blade was buried deep. He fell
Prone on the earth; the black blood spouted forth
And steeped the soil. Achilles by the foot
Flung him to float among the river-waves,
And uttered, boastfully, these wingèd words:⁠—

“Lie there among the fishes, who shall feed 
Upon thy blood unscared. No mother there
Shall weep thee lying on thy bier; thy corpse
Scamander shall bear down to the broad sea,
Where, as he sees thee darkening its face,
Some fish shall hasten, darting through the waves,
To feed upon Lycaon’s fair white limbs.
So perish ye, till sacred Troy be ours,
You fleeing, while I follow close and slay.
This river cannot aid you⁠—this fair stream
With silver eddies, to whose deity
Ye offer many beeves in sacrifice,
And fling into its gulfs your firm-paced steeds;
But thus ye all shall perish, till I take
Full vengeance for Patroclus of the Greeks,
Whom, while I stood aloof from war, ye slew.”

Achilles’ hatred has made him a lion.

Priam knows this and takes it into account when, as related in the twenty-fourth and final book of the Iliad, he comes to Achilles’ tent to ransom the body of his son Hector. Priam comes to Achilles under the protection of the god Hermes; even so, he must make his request with the greatest possible caution.

He knows that if he asks Achilles to pity him, the father of that very Hector who killed Patroclus, Achilles will be outraged; so, falling on his knees before Achilles, he asks him to think of his own aged father, in far off Phthia. Achilles weeps at the thought of his father and, in the closest approach to empathy that he will ever make, acknowledges that sorrow is the lot of all men.

Priam, encouraged by Achilles’ apparent softening, fearfully asks him to accept a ransom for the body of Hector. Achilles frowns and says:

Anger me not, old man; ’twas in my thought
To let thee ransom Hector. To my tent
The mother came who bore me, sent from Jove,
The daughter of the Ancient of the Sea,
And I perceive, nor can it be concealed,
O Priam, that some god hath guided thee
To our swift galleys; for no mortal man,
Though in his prime of youthful strength, would dare
To come into the camp; he could not pass
The guard, nor move the beams that bar our gates.
So then remind me of my griefs no more,
Lest, suppliant as thou art, I leave thee not
aUnharmed, and thus transgress the laws of Jove.

Achilles tells Priam to stay with him until the morning, when a god will escort him back to Troy in safety. Priam, however, fears that Achilles might suddenly remember Patroclus and become enraged, and returns to Troy with his son’s body during the night, when Achilles and the Greeks are sleeping.

Achilles’ wrath not only results in the deaths of many of his fellow Greeks, who go into battle without his support. It also results in the destruction of Troy, for Achilles’s wrath leads him to seek out and kill Hector. Hector is Troy’s main defense in the war, and his death guarantees Troy’s eventual destruction — a destruction not related in the Iliad. It is this latter far reaching consequence of Achilles’ wrath that provides the title of Homer’s great poem — not the Achillead, but the Iliad (Ilium being another name for Troy).

Hector

Hector, a son of Priam and the greatest Trojan warrior, is a sympathetic character. I like him, once again mistaking one of Homer’s creations for a real person.

Achilles may complain more than Hector complains, but it is Hector who has the most to lose. In her essay “On the Iliad”, Rachel Bespaloff describes Hector as “the guardian of the perishable joys”. Upon him depend a wife, a child, aged parents, brothers and sisters, and all of Troy. He is aware of all that depends on him and is tormented by what will happen to his wife and child if Troy should fall. Meeting his wife and son on the top of the Scaean gate, where they have been watching the battle, Hector says to his wife:

 Yet well in my undoubting mind I know
The  day shall come in which our sacred Troy,
And Priam, and the people over whom
Spear-bearing Priam rules, shall perish all.
But not the sorrows of the Trojan race,
Nor those of Hecuba herself, nor those
Of royal Priam, iLnor the woes that wait
My brothers many and brave⁠—who all at last,
Slain by the pitiless foe, shall lie in dust⁠—
Grieve me so much as thine, when some mailed Greek
Shall lead thee weeping hence, and take from thee
Thy day of freedom. Thou in Argos then
Shalt at another’s bidding, ply the loom,
And from the fountain of Messeis draw
Water, or from the Hypereian spring,
Constrained unwilling by thy cruel lot.

But he is, like other Homeric warriors, filled with desire for glory, and for the sake of glory he takes risks that horrify those who love and depend on him.

And he makes mistakes. When Achilles withdraws from the war, Hector proposes an all out attack on the Greeks, against the advice of all others. The attack is a disaster for the Trojans, and Hector is to blame.

When Achilles comes to the walls of Troy seeking Hector, Hector knows that he can no longer evade what will be the final test of himself as a warrior. He tries to face Achilles but then, terrified, flees before him. The gods intervene to make him stop, turn, and await Achilles’ fatal assault. His last experience in life is pure terror.

Hector receives the funeral rites that will enable his ghost to repose in the almost nothingness of the afterlife, rather than restlessly seek the funeral honors that have been denied it. The Iliad ends with the words “such were the funeral rites of Hector, breaker of horses.”

Some say that the traditional epithet for Hector, “breaker of horses”, is irrelevant in this context and for that reason is jarring. Some translations of this line, including Bryant’s, omit this epithet altogether. We cannot know whether Homer’s audiences found it irrelevant or jarring. I can only say that it heightens the pathos of Hector’s death for me. It conjures up the unique individual who now has lost all uniqueness and individuality in the blankness of death. The last line of the Iliad is for me the most moving.

Helen

Helen passes her days knowing that she is hated by most of the Trojans as the cause of the war with the Greeks. She judges herself as harshly as they do, and yet (Homer assumes that his audience knew this) she isn’t really to blame for the war.

Protected though she is by Aphrodite, Helen is as vulnerable to loss and grief as anyone else. Sometimes in the telling Homer mingles her loss with irony. When Menelaus and Paris prepare to decide the issue of the war in single combat, Priam, observing the opposed armies from the top of the walls of Troy, asks Helen to point out for him the leading warriors of the Greeks:

Helen, the beautiful and richly-robed,
Answered: “Thou seest the mighty Ajax there,
The bulwark of the Greeks. On the other side,
Among his Cretans, stands Idomeneus,
Of godlike aspect, near to whom are grouped
The leaders of the Cretans. Oftentimes
The warlike Menelaus welcomed him
Within our palace, when he came from Crete.
I could point out and name the other chiefsO
Of the dark-eyed Achaians. Two alone,
Princes among their people, are not seen⁠—
Castor the fearless horseman, and the skilled
In boxing, Pollux⁠—twins; one mother bore
Both them and me. Came they not with the rest
From pleasant Lacedaemon to the war?
Or, having crossed the deep in their good ships,
Shun they to fight among the valiant ones
Of Greece, because of my reproach and shame?”

She spake; but they already lay in earth
In Lacedaemon, their dear native land.

Helen must keep to herself her feelings of self loathing and shame, for she is surrounded by people who would not receive her confessions sympathetically. It is only to Hector, who has always treated her with kindness, that she can speak frankly:

Brother-in-law⁠—for such thou art, though I 
Am lost to shame, and cause of many ills⁠— 
Would that some violent blast when I was born 
Had whirled me to the mountain wilds, or waves 
Of the hoarse sea, that they might swallow me, 
Ere deeds like these were done! But since the gods 
Have thus decreed, why was I not the wife 
Of one who bears a braver heart and feels 
Keenly the anger and reproach of men? 
For Paris hath not, and will never have, 
A resolute mind, and must abide the effect 
Of his own folly. Enter thou meanwhile, 
My brother; seat thee here, for heavily 
Must press on thee the labors thou dost bear 
For one so vile as I, and for the sake 
Of guilty Paris. An unhappy lot, 
By Jupiter’s appointment, waits us both⁠— 
A theme of song for men in time to come. 

At Hector’s funeral, Helen mourned him as her friend and protector.

The Gods in the Iliad

When I first read the Iliad, I was astute enough to realize that the gods of Olympus are nothing like the God of the great monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They behave with great dignity on some occasions and on other occasions they’re 8quarrel among themselves like spoiled children.

Another difference from the deity of the monotheistic religions: they seem to be in a purely transactional relationship with their worshippers. They are, in fact, part of the same honor culture that Homer’s warriors are part of. They demand, as a mark of respect, that mortals make frequent costly sacrifices on their altars. In return, they will grant certain favors to the mortal who keeps their altars smoking with sacrifice. In the last book of the Iliad, the Olympian gods decide to allow Priam to ransom Hector’s body from Achilles in order to give it a proper burial; it was Hector’s due, since he had always sacrificed to them regularly.

Nothing could be more alien to the spirit of Homeric religion than the words of Psalm 51:

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. 

The Olympians are angered by a mortal’s tokens of disrespect toward them but do not care whether a mortal’s heart is broken or contrite or anything else.

The gods’ chief function in the Iliad is to emphasize, by way of contrast, the desperate nature of human existence. The gods and goddesses of Olympus have their petty concerns and resentments; they can even, like Aphrodite, be wounded in battle. But their wounds are not mortal and are easily healed.

One thing I try not to do when I read the Iliad is assume that I am experiencing the Olympians the way that Homer’s audiences experienced them. Was the piety of the Greeks of Homer’s time wholly perfunctory? The gods inspired awe and fear, but did a Greek ever love any of them? Was a Greek’s worship of a god ever a matter of disinterested adoration? Scholars may have answers to these questions. I have not found answers in my reading of the Iliad.

About Those Battles

Much of the Iliad is taken up with battles, usually between a single Greek and a single Trojan, although sometimes a god or goddess intervenes to aid one or the other of the warriors. These battles can at first produce an effect of monotony for some readers. But even here, Homer’s invention is unflagging. Alexander Pope observed in the preface to his translation that “No two heroes are wounded in the same manner, and [there is] such a profusion of noble ideas, that every battle rises above the last in greatness, horror, and confusion.”

Homer always gives us a short obituary of the warrior who is killed; in some cases this is only the name of his father and the place of his birth. In others, it may be an anecdote about the dying warrior’s youth and exploits. When I first read the Iliad, I found these short obituaries to be annoying and a distraction from the main business of the poem. Let’s get on with the story, my modern reading mind said.

But Homer’s readers, we can assume, were not as eager as we are in wanting to get on with the story. They knew the story already.

Homer not only depicts the horror of war. He also depicts the joy that warriors take in winning glory by killing other warriors. Of course, they hate the war, and when the Greek and Trojan leaders agree to settle the issue between them by single combat between Menelaus and Paris, warriors on both sides cheer the prospect of a quick end to the war. Still, it is the limitation of Simone Weil’s profound essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, that she does not acknowledge the seductive power of war. Robert E. Lee is supposed to have said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” That remark is a better guide to the Iliad than Weil’s passionate detestation of force.

The Beauties of Nature in the Iliad

Homer is observant of nature, but in the Iliad descriptions of nature are almost entirely found in similes, which usually occur at climactic moments of battle. He almost never introduces description of nature for its own sake.

Similes serve to intensify emotion by drawing attention to something, such as the dying moments of a wounded warrior:

  As within
A garden droops a poppy to the ground,
Bowed by its weight and by the rains of spring,
So drooped his head within the heavy casque.

Homer’s similes often compare things that strike modern readers as incongruous. This is because he is interested only in a particular quality shared by the things compared, as for example, the drooping of a poppy bowed down by its weight and the drooping of a warrior dying of wounds. Again, the falling of warriors in battle is like the falling of severed handfuls of wheat or barley as reapers advance across a field:

As when two lines of reapers, face to face,
In some rich landlord’s field of barley or wheat
Move on, and fast the severed handfuls fall,
So, springing on each other, they of Troy
And they of Argos smote each other down,

Homer’s most famous simile occurs at the end of Book Eight, which recounts a prolonged battle on the plains before the citadel of Troy. The Trojans, profiting from the absence of Achilles from the war and the neutrality of the gods, have advanced almost to the Greeks’ camp. They pitch camp when night falls:

So, high in hope, they sat the whole night through
In warlike lines, and many watch-fires blazed.
As when in heaven the stars look brightly forth
Round the clear-shining moon, while not a breeze
Stirs in the depths of air, and all the stars
Are seen, and gladness fills the shepherd’s heart,
So many fires in sight of Ilium blazed,
Lit by the sons of Troy, between the ships
And eddying Xanthus: on the plain there shone
A thousand; fifty warriors by each fire
Sat in its light. Their steeds beside the cars⁠—
Champing their oats and their white barley⁠—stood,
And waited for the golden morn to rise

The comparison of the Trojan campfires to the stars in the sky is not merely visual; it is also suggestive of the size of the Trojan army camped on the plain and ready for battle at first light. The calmness and beauty of the things compared — campfires and stars — makes an ironic contrast with the horror that is to be renewed in the morning:

The Trojans thus kept watch; while through the night
The power of Flight, companion of cold Fear,
Wrought on the Greeks, and all their bravest men
Were bowed beneath a sorrow hard to bear.
As when two winds upturn the fishy deep⁠—
The north wind and the west, that suddenly
Blow from the Thracian coast; the black waves rise
At once, and fling the sea-weed to the shore⁠—
Thus were the Achaians troubled in their hearts.

This is a more complex simile than most other of Homer’s. It first compares, implicitly, the Trojans who are pressing hard on the Greeks to the north and west winds pressing hard on the sea; and it compares the troubled state of the sea to the troubled state of the minds of the Greeks. The intensity of the storm at sea is suggested neatly by one detail, that it flings seaweed on the shore.

Homer’s similes give evidence of an observant love of nature on the part of the Greeks, but their purpose is not, as an end in itself, to describe nature. Their purpose is to illustrate and adorn the theme of the Iliad, the tragedy of warriors risking and meeting death in their quest for undying honor.

(I’m not sure what this means, but the classical writers, both Greek and Latin, use simile freely but metaphor almost never. “Oh my love is like a red, red rose” could be elaborated without offense to reason, and therefore would be acceptable to classical writers. But they would not tolerate “Oh my love is a red, red rose” , having no taste for surrealism.)

How I Read the Iliad

Modern readers of the Iliad form a different sort of audience from Homer’s original audiences, just by being readers rather than hearers. This means that we readers may be missing things that Homer’s original audiences may have picked up easily. The Homeric rhapsode may have varied his tone of voice in recitation to emphasize the emotions of the speakers or Homer’s ironies. Of course, we have never heard the Iliad recited as it was in the eighth century B.C. But it seems improbable that rhapsodes recited it with an inexpressive affect.

Here are a couple of ways I changed the way I read in order to read Homer better.

I Don’t Skim

One of the benefits of reading the Iliad is that it forces me to break the bad reading habits that I keep forming and reforming when I read contemporary throw-away stuff — detective novels and thrillers and other things that you would never think of reading carefully, or reading a second time.

The chief of these bad habits is skimming. When I recently read a detective novel, I got confused several times because I had skimmed over important details. But I didn’t flip back to find the details that I had missed because I knew that the details would be repeated a little farther on in the story. And they were repeated, because the author of the book expects his readers to skim and miss things.

You cannot read the Iliad this way. (Or Plato or Virgil or Dante or almost any other classical writer.). No classical writer expected to be read casually, nor would they ever have tried to accommodate casual readers.

The classics are really written. Everything counts, although parts of the poem do not all have the same degree of importance.

I Do Not Expect Homer to Explain Things To Me

It took me a while to get used to the fact that Homer expects the members of his audience to grasp the import of the things that are said and done in the Iliad.  He lets things speak for themselves. Homer present you with only what you need to see or hear and nothing more.

Homer’s narrative style reminds me of the great passages of Old Testament narrative:

And David sat between the two gates: and the watchman went up to the roof over the gate unto the wall, and lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold a man running alone.

And the watchman cried, and told the king. And the king said, If he be alone, there is tidings in his mouth. And he came apace, and drew near.

And the watchman saw another man running: and the watchman called unto the porter, and said, Behold another man running alone. And the king said, He also bringeth tidings.

And the watchman said, Me thinketh the running of the foremost is like the running of Ahimaaz the son of Zadok. And the king said, He is a good man, and cometh with good tidings.

And Ahimaaz called, and said unto the king, All is well. And he fell down to the earth upon his face before the king, and said, Blessed be the Lord thy God, which hath delivered up the men that lifted up their hand against my lord the king.

And the king said, Is the young man Absalom safe? And Ahimaaz answered, When Joab sent the king’s servant, and me thy servant, I saw a great tumult, but I knew not what it was. And the king said unto him, Turn aside, and stand here. And he turned aside, and stood still.

And, behold, Cushi came; and Cushi said, Tidings, my lord the king: for the Lord hath avenged thee this day of all them that rose up against thee. And the king said unto Cushi, Is the young man Absalom safe?

And Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is.

And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.

Here is a narrative style that limits itself rigorously to things seen and heard.  

Homer’s style, apart from rare editorial comments, is similarly spare. We are not told what to think when shown that Hector’s shield covers him from neck to ankles:

So the plumed Hector spake, and then withdrew,
While the black fell that edged his bossy shield
Struck on his neck and ankles as he went.

Very rarely, however, Homer will comment on the action. The Greek Diomedes and the Trojan ally Glaucus meet in the midst of battle and quickly realize that their families have been friends in the past. Diomedes says:

And let us in the tumult of the fray
Avoid each other’s spears, for there will be
Of Trojans and of their renowned allies
Enough for me to slay whene’er a god
Shall bring them in my way. In turn for thee
Are many Greeks to smite whomever thou
Canst overcome. Let us exchange our arms,
That even these may see that thou and I
Regard each other as ancestral guests.”
Thus having said, and leaping from their cars,
They clasped each other’s hands and pledged their faith.
Then did the son of Saturn take away
The judging mind of Glaucus, when he gave
His arms of gold away for arms of brass
Worn by Tydides Diomed⁠—the worth
Of fivescore oxen for the worth of nine.

Homer does not tell us, however, what Diomedes intended when he proposed this exchange, so profitable to himself.

Some Negative Counsels

The Iliad was composed a long time ago — so long ago that its age can be expressed in geological time; that is, it was composed a little more than 2,500 years ago, which is fully a fourth or third of the amount of time since the last ice age ended. A poem that old is bound to be informed by attitudes toward life and death that are very different from ours.

To understand and enjoy Homer, it is necessary to be aware of the difference between Homer’s assumptions about life and death and our own. Of course, if we could not agree with Homer about certain basic truths, he would be not merely foreign to us, but unintelligible. This is not the case.

I have formed some negative counsels for myself to steer me away from assumptions about Homer that I’ve come to think are false; as follows:

Do  Not Look For Similarities Between Warriors and Us

Do not assume that the Iliad’s claim to “relevance” depends on the Homeric warriors being just like us, after all. It is true that if human nature had not been fundamentally the same in Homer’s time as it is today, the Iliad would be largely unintelligible to us. At the same time, the world of the Homeric warriors was bound by conventions and codes of behavior that are alien from ours. When Homeric warriors behave in ways that are repugnant to us, the reason is not that Homer has chosen to celebrate an unusually bad group of men. Homer’s warriors were honorable men seeking glorify, the most honorable of all pursuits according to the ethos of the warrior class.

Do not try to find an anti-war message in the Iliad.

Paradoxically, the work of literature that describes the savagery and terror of war better than any other has no anti-war message for us, because Homer accepted war as one of the permanent features of human existence. (This remark applies equally well to Jean Renoir’s masterpiece “La Grande Illusion”, which many reviewers refer to as an anti-war movie.)

Do Not Expect Homer’s Warriors to Think and Act Like Christians

Do not expect Homeric warriors to behave as if they had been present at the Sermon on the Mount. Turning the other cheek and forgiving one’s enemies may be, for us, the foundation of morality; for Hector or for Odysseus it all would have been nonsense.

Resist facile comparisons.

A recent translation of the Iliad was published with a photograph on the cover of allied troops landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The publisher’s intention was understandable: to interest people in buying and reading this book by suggesting that its content is of enduring relevance, even to this day. But the soldiers who fought on Omaha Beach were were not Homeric warriors fighting for personal glory; they were parts of a vast military machine dedicated to achieving certain ends of its own, employing thousands of nearly anonymous soldiers who wore “dog tags” to identify their corpses by number.

Resist the Lure of Extra-Literary Questions

Any approach that you make to the Iliad will reveal to you whole fields of questions that are fascinating in themselves but that have only a slight bearing on the appreciation of the Iliad as poetry. These questions concern the historical reality of wars waged by Greeks against Trojans; the evolution and nature of the Homeric dialect; the question of authorship; the accuracy of the Iliad’s portayal of the implements and tactics of warfare; and so on.

These questions, as I wrote, are fascinating, but the answers to them would be of little help to readers hoping to grasp the Iliad as imaginative literature.

For example, the American scholar Milman Parry (1902 – 1935) discovered that the Homeric dialect has features that were meant for the convenience of rhapsodes who composed and recited epic poems without the use of writing. Parry’s exposition of these features has the fascination of a great detective solving a puzzle that had defied attempts by generations of scholars to solve it. When Parry’s discoveries first became known, many scholars believed that they would greatly help the appreciation of Homer’s works as poetry, but this has not happened. Parry’s discoveries simply demonstrated the extreme likelihood of what scholars had long suspected, that Homer composed his epics without the use of writing.

Similarly, questions about the historical reality of the Trojan War are fascinating, but knowing that a Trojan War did or did not take place would do little to help us understand and enjoy the Iliad.

The recommended reading listed at the end of this post includes the names of several books about the Iliad’s historical background, dialect, and so on. This essay makes no further mention of these questions.

The Iliad and the Tragic View of Life

The Iliad does not palliate death in any way: it shows it to be the final and absolute destruction of the personhood of the warrior. William Collins’ (1721 – 1759) poem “How Sleep the Brave” is illuminating in this context because its treatment of death of is, in almost every possible way, unHomeric:

How sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes best!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mold,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honor comes, a pilgrim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!

Spring does not return each year to decorate the Homeric warrior’s grave, the sod in which he is laid is not sweet, and his tomb is not blessed by personifications of Honor and Freedom. Homer knew nothing of such conceits, and would have found them to be the evasions of a mind too sickly weak to face the truth.

William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963), in the second half of his poem “Death”, comes close to the Homeric view of death:

He’s nothing at all
              he’s dead
shrunken up to the skin

            Put his head on
one chair and his
feet on another and
he’ll lie there
like an acrobat—

Love’s beaten. He
beat it. That’s why
he’s insufferable—

He’s come out of the man
and he’s let
the man go—
                  the liar

because
he’s here needing a
shave and making love
an inside howl
of anguish and defeat—

                                   which
love cannot touch—

just bury it
and hide its face
for shame.

Williams’ dead old man is not much like a dead Homeric warrior, but Williams like Homer sees that a dead man has “come out of the man” leaving nothing behind but an “it”.

Once dead, Homeric warriors are objects, mere ‘’prey for dogs and all birds’’. The gods may pity the Homeric warrior, especially if he has been a pious sacrificer at their altars, but there is little that even they can do for him when he dies.

Homer’s view of the relation of body and soul does not, like the Christian view, find the essence of human beings to be their souls, while their bodies are mere vessels of the soul that are cast off at the moment of death. Instead, Homer refers to the bodies of dead warriors as the warriors “themselves’’ (αὐτοὺς) — in contrast to their souls (ψυχὰς), which leave the bodies in the moment of death. The bodies become carrion, a ‘’prey for dogs and all birds’’, while the souls go to hell, where they are no more than smoke or shadows, without sense or volition. There is no recovery from this condition, no resurrection or redemption. Death, for Homer, is absolutely final.

It is a testimony to the tough mindedness of the ancient Greeks that a poem so desolate, so refusing of consolation, should have become a textbok for schools and the inspiration for later poets, historians, and tragedians.

The first work of literature produced in the western world — the Iliad — expresses a tragic view of life that is complete, entire, and deeply felt. There must have been earlier approaches to this tragic view, sketches or fumbled beginnings. They have been lost; not even references to them survive.

We as survivors of the twentieth century are well prepared to accept views of life that are tragic. What is harder for most of us to understand is the demand for glory that drove Homer’s warriors to kill and be killed. For between us and the world of those warriors lies the transforming emergence of Christianity, with its ethic of meekness and humility.

Choosing a Translation

The modern translations of the Iliad that I have read at least in part all seem to be accurate and scholarly — as far as I am qualified to judge. All these translations try to reproduce the original’s plainness and rapidity, and they do this fairly well.

The question “Which are the good translations?”, then, can only be answered personally. A good translation is one that you like well enough that it keeps you reading.

My two favorite translations are in verse, and by celebrated poets: Alexander Pope’s, published serially from 1715 to 1720, and William Cullen Bryant’s, published in 1871. I will say what I like about these translations below.

Differences Between Homeric Greek Versification and English Versification

Almost all modern translations are in verse. This surprises me, because poetry generally has lost its mass audience. I’m guessing that readers prefer verse translations of the Iliad in the belief that such translations must be truer to the style of the Iliad, which was itself in verse.

This belief is mistaken, for the most part. We can’t really know whether any verse translation reproduces the sound and feel of Homeric verse, because we don’t know what Homeric Greek sounded like when spoken by Homer’s contemporaries, and we have many questions about how Homeric verse produced the rhythms that distinguish it from prose.

We do know that Homeric verse differed from English verse in important ways.

All poetry in ancient Greek is quantitative; that is, it achieves rhythm through varying patterns of long and short syllables. The difference between long and short syllables in ancient Greek probably had something to do with duration, but we can only speculate.

The basic metrical unit of Homeric verse is the dactyl, a long syllable followed by two short syllables. A line of Homeric verse consists of five dactyls followed by a spondee (two long syllables). The final syllable in the line can be short instead of long.

Thus, a line of Homeric verse can be scanned like this:

LONG-short-short LONG-short-short LONG-short-short LONG-short-short LONG-short-short LONG-LONG (or LONG-short)

However, a spondee can be substituted for any of the dactyls. Spondees impart a slower, heavier movement to the line.

The possibility of substituting spondees for dactyls means that a line of Homeric verse can contain as many as 17 syllables (with no substitutions) and as few as 12 syllables (with spondees substituted for every dactyl). Such a variation in the number of syllables is not possible in the most common forms of English verse, which require a fixed number of syllable.

Traditional English poetry is accentual; that is, it achieves rhythm through patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. The commonest metrical unit in English poetry is the iamb, consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable; for example: be-GIN, re-VEAL. In place of any iamb, an English poet can substitute:

• A trochee, consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. For example: DIS-charge, RA-ven. Or,

• A spondee, consisting of two stressed syllables in succession. For example: DOWN-TOWN, DUMB-BELL, HUM-DRUM.

Although trochees and spondees can be used in place of iambs, most lines contain enough iambic feet to establish a predominant iambic rhythm.

The distribution of stresses on syllables in English can vary from speaker to speaker; I can hear some of my readers saying “Dumb-bell is a trochee! (You DUMB-bell.)” On some words, the stresses are on different syllables to indicate different meanings; for example, when friends present (preSENT) you with a birthday present (PREsent). The quantities of syllables of words in Homeric Greek are in most cases not variable.

A few older, classically educated English poets such as Spenser, Tennyson, and Bridges, have attempted to write quantitative verse in English, as experiments; it takes a finer ear than mine to detect rhythm in these experiments.

Longfellow used a dactylic hexameter line for his poem Evangeline, placing accented syllables where the Greek hexameter would place long syllables:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

We don’t know what Homeric verse sounded like, but it is not wild speculation to hold that it did not sound like Longfellow’s lovely verse.

One aspect of language, however, is more transferable from one language to another than most other aspects. This is syntax. Syntax has to do with the length and arrangement of clauses within sentences and of sentences within paragraphs. It can employ repetition and parallelism to achieve various sorts of emphasis. It can make poetry or prose stately and grave or brisk and lively.

The syntax of Homer’s verse is simple and unimpeded; it has an onward movement that carries your attention forward. Homer’s poetry was of unmatched greatness according to the testimony of the ancients, but it never tempts you to stop in your reading to savor particular felicities. It carries you along and forward. Any translation, in verse or prose, that reproduces Homer’s syntax is to that degree Homeric.

Below are my comments on the translation of Homer that I have read at least in part.

Chapman’s Homer

I love Keats’ sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”  I wish I could love Chapman’s Homer, too, but I can’t. Its quirkiness calls attention to itself. I want translations that are self-effacing.

Here is how Chapman translated the beginning of the Iliad:

Achilles’ bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd

Infinite sorrowes on the Greekes, and many brave soules losd

From breasts Heroique—sent them farre, to that invisible cave

That no light comforts; and their lims to dogs and vultures gave.

To all which Jove’s will gave effect; from whom first strife begunne
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis’ godlike Sonne.

What God gave Eris their command, and op’t that fighting veine?
Jove’s and Latona’s Sonne, who, fir’d against the king of men

For contumelie showne his Priest, infectious sickness sent

To plague the armie; and to death, by troopes, the souldiers went.         

These lines have energy and bounce, but the oddness of Chapman’s diction wears me down after a few pages. And Chapman gets Homer wrong on an important point: Achilles’ wrath did not give the slain warriors’ limbs to dogs and scavenger birds — it gave them, the warriors, to dogs and scavenger birds. It is the Homeric identification of the warrior with his body that makes all the wounding and death in the Iliad so terrible.

Pope’s Iliad

Most readers’ feelings about Pope’s translation are bound up with their feelings about the Augustan rhymed couplet in general, of which Pope was the great master.

The literary scholar and teacher Patrick Cruttwell wrote:

 I tried passages of Pope’s Iliad on my freshmen — and that did not work at all. They found it absurd, even indecent, to clothe material of such raw savagery in the formal diction and regular metre of Augustan verse.  (These are the boys who can see Vietnam, night after night, on their TV screens; these are the boys who saw and heard the Inferno-like pandemonium after Robert Kennedy was shot.)   Patrick Cruttwell, ‘’Six Phaedras in Search of One Phedre’’, in Delos: A Journal on and of Translation, 1968.

Professor Cruttwell’s students preferred Richmond Lattimore’s translation, about which see below.

De gustibus non disputandum est. I myself enjoy Pope’s Iliad as much as any other translation. It is lively and brisk; and, above all, it is poetry. Pope’s style is especially effective for rendering speeches such as Sarpedon’s address to Glaucus in Book 12:

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war:
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death’s inexorable doom;
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame, what we to nature owe.

When I read passages such as this, I can hardly believe that anyone ever doubted that Alexander Pope is a poet. Matthew Arnold, in his essay “On Translation Homer”, wrote that Pope’s use of rhymed couplets for his translation imparts an unHomeric movement to it, and this is certainly true.

But Pope’s translation is the only English translation that is a work of genius, deserving to be counted among the masterpieces of English literature.

Bryant’s Homer

Another verse translation that I enjoy is by William Cullen Bryant, the poet, newspaper editor, abolitionist, defender of labor unions, and translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Bryant’s translation of the Iliad (1871) is in clear and elegant blank verse. As a poet, Bryant is best known for “Thanatopsis” and for “To a Waterfowl”, which Matthew Arnold wrote was the best short poem in the English language.pp

Here is Bryant’s translation of the first eleven lines of the Iliad:

O Goddess! sing the wrath of Peleus' son,
Achilles; sing the deadly wrath that brought
Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air,
For so had Jove appointed, — from the time
When the two chiefs, Atrides, king of men.
And great Achilles oarted first as foes.
Which of the gods put strife between the chiefs.
That they should thus contend ? Latona's son
And Jove’s. Incensed against the king, he bade
A deadly pestilence appear among
The army, and the men were perishing.

Lattimore’s Iliad

Richmond Lattimore (1986 – 1984) was a distinguished American classical scholar and translator. His translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are prized for their line by line faithfulness to the original. Lattimore’s translations are so close to their originals that many people struggling through the original Greek use them as trots.

But it is just their closeness to the original that makes them, for me at least, almost unreadable.

Lattimore’s translations of Homer are printed with excellent scholarly introductions.

Recent Translations

In recent decades verse translations of the Iliad have been written by Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Fagles, Emily Wilson, and others. I myself do not see any reason to read these translations rather than the straightforward prose translations by Samuel Butler and E. V. Rieu, but a lot of people like them, and if they get people to read Homer, good for them.

However, Steven Shankman, editor of the valuable Penguin Classics edition of Pope’s Iliad, which he admires to the point of idolatry, has this to say: “It must be said, however, that in the achievement of perspicuity, modern poetic translators such as the accomplished and deft Robert Fitzgerald or the muscular Robert Fagles are often superior to Pope.”

But I would apply the “Hades” test to any modern translation before I commit myself to reading it. The beginning of the Iliad tells us that Achilles’ wrath sent warriors to Hades. Modern translators, wanting to spare their readers the humiliation of encountering names they don’t know, write phrases such as “the house of the dead” instead of Hades. This prevents the reader from understanding what Homeric warriors faced when they died, and why they found the prospect of feath terrifying. Hades was a god, the king of the dead, and a very unpleasant deity. His name was richly evocative of all that the Greeks found terrifying about the thought of death. There is no reason why modern readers should be prevented from ever encountering such references. Homer is weaker and paler when shorn of mythological references.

Do I Want to Study Homeric Greek?

The study of Homeric Greek rewards people who enjoy learning things. It frustrates people who want to know things, that is, who set knowing Homeric Greek as their goal. Greek in all of its dialects and historical varieties is a difficult language — complex, subtle, and full of inconsistencies. The things that make it difficult also help make it a language of unmatched expressive beauty and power, but it is not possible to separate what’s difficult from what is rewarding. 

It is, however, fun to learn, and if you can tolerate being a novice for keeps, you might enjoy studying Homeric Greek. Henry David Thoreau was a student of Homeric Greek and read his Greek Iliad at Walden Pond almost daily. In the chapter in Walden titled “Reading”, he wrote:

It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. If you enjoy studying.

You are more likely to enjoy studying Homeric Greek if you have studied a highly inflected language such as Latin, German, or Russian. Having studied these languages will have made you familiar with important grammatical concepts in Homeric Greek, such as case, declension, agreement, voice, conjugation, and so on.

What the hell. Give it a try.

Some Books That Have Helped Me

On Translating Homer (1861), by Matthew Arnold.

Arnold identified the qualities of Homeric verse that a translator into English should aim to reproduce: rapidity, plainness and directness in thought and in the expression of it, and nobility. This essay has been extremely influential, and I’m sure that modern translators sense Arnold looking over their shoulders as the write.

The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1939), by Simone Weil. This famous essay, published on the eve of World War II, is a profound meditation on the nature of violence. It is less valuable as a guide to the Iliad, because it fails to take into account the attraction of violence for the Homeric warrior. Robert E. Lee understood this attraction better; he said “It is well that war is so terrible; otherwise we might like it too much.”

On the Iliad (1943), by Rachel Bespaloff. This brilliant essay was published four years after Simone Weil’s essay, and some think as a response to it. Weil had written that force is “that x that turns persons into things.” Bespaloff agrees with Weil in detesting force, but also sees that force can, paradoxically, be an expression of life’s vitality.

Bespaloff writes perceptively about the chief characters in the story — Hector and Andromache, Achilles and Thetis, Paris and Helen, among others — and highlights the great artistry with which he wove them into the most tragic of stories.

Note: The essays by Weil and Bespaloff, in distinguished translations by Mary McCarthy, have been published together as a single title, War and the Iliad, by New York Review Books.

Homer (1980), by Jasper Griffin. This short essay by a great modern scholar is readable and filled with insight.

The Poetry of Homer (1938), by Samuel Eliot Bassett. The author, a professor of Greek at the University of Vermont, discusses the works of Homer as literature, the way scholars discuss the works of Shakespeare or Milton. He believed that scholars’ absorption by the fascinating questions of the origins and methods of composition of the Homeric poems had led to a neglect of Homer as poetry.

History and the Homeric Iliad, by Denys Page. This well-written book considers the evidence for an historical basis of the Trojan War.

Homer, by C. M. Bowra. This readable survey covers the historical and cultural background of the Homeric epics, as well as questions of their appreciation as literature.

The Justice of Zeus, by Hugh Lloyd Jones. This book argues that Zeus stood for discernible moral principles.

Appendix: How to Cuss Your Boss in Homeric Greek

The mainspring of the Iliad is the passionate quarrel that broke out between Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces at Troy, and Achilles, the greatest warrior among both the Greeks and the Trojans. In the course of the quarrel, Achilles addresses Agamemnon with these words, translated loosely:

Oh you who have grown fat from drinking wine — you who have the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer!

In Homer’s Greek, hthese three curses occupy one full line:

          οινοβαρες, κυνος ομματ´εχων, κραδιην δ´ελαφοιο

This line can be rendered phonetically as follows:

OY no bar ACE! coo nos OH mat ache AWN! craddy AIN della PHOY oh!

When you speak this line, drawl the capitalized syllables and speak the lower-case syllables quickly and crisply. And tell your boss that it means “Oh you who have the form and wisdom of a god/goddess!”

From time to time I am seized by Civil War fever and read a book about the Civil War. This time I picked up, more or less at random, a book called Bruce Catton’s Civil War. This book is Catton’s three most popular books about the Civil War bound as one: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953).

Catton was a newspaper journalist, not a professional historian. He became interested in the Civil War as a child growing up in Michigan, where there were still living a few veterans of the war, most of them eager to talk about their experiences. Catton liked to listen to them tell their stories. After service in the Navy in WWII, he began to write books about the Civil War. His books became popular with the reading public, which responded to his gifts as a storyteller.

But during all the half century that I have been interested in the Civil War, I have chosen not to read Catton. I am a snob. What appeals to the hoi polloi is not for me.

Except that now, I have started to read Catton — out of curiosity, of course. How bad are his books?

I can’t judge how good they are as history, not being a historian. But as a snobbish judge of writing, I am surprised by the quality of the writing. Catton’s prose is clear and elegant, and for the most part he avoids the cliches that swarm over much of what is written about the Civil War. He also avoids occasions of melodrama, not bothering for example to describe the meeting of Grant and Lee at Appomattox; he describes only Grant hurrying off to meet Lee.

He has his critics. Gore Vidal wrote that Catton is a “hagiographic” historian in the school of Parson Weems, author of the myth about Washington and the cherry tree. I haven’t gotten far enough into Bruce Catton’s Civil War to know whether Vidal’s criticism is just. I’m betting that it is; the public likes its history cosy and edifying. I told you I’m a snob. And Catton isn’t an analytic historian, the critics say, condemning him for not being what he never intended to be.

Even so, I’m impressed by the quality of Catton’s prose. It is of a much higher literary quality than even the more serious works of history appearing today, which are written in the style of superior magazine articles. Contemporary prose is written to be skimmed; the reading public is a public of skimmers. Books today must be grateful that a few people, at least, are taking time from their streaming movies to read them.

As time moves on, Bruce Catton’s books are being read by fewer and fewer people, or so I’ve read. I’m not surprised. But then, I’m a snob.

One of my English professors once wrote in an essay on Samuel Johnson that the older he got, the less he enjoyed the Romantic poets and the more he enjoyed poems such as Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” — that is, poetry of solid resounding statement, provided that it is informed by genuine experience of life.

For a long time I found it hard to understand the distinction that he was drawing between poets such as Johnson and poets such as Wordsworth. Wasn’t Wordsworth a poet of human life, at least as it is lived by the poor? Isn’t “Resolution and Independence” a resounding statement about their lives?

I still cannot fully understand the distinction, but I am experiencing it. Today, at aged 73, I find it difficult to wander lonely as a cloud, but am moved by “The Vanity of Human Wishes”, from which the following is an extract:

On what foundation stands the warrior’s pride,
How just his hopes, let Swedish Charles decide;
A frame of adamant, a soul of fire,
No dangers fright him, and no labours tire;
O’er love, o’er fear, extends his wide domain,
Unconquer’d lord of pleasure and of pain;
No joys to him pacific scepters yield,
War sounds the trump, he rushes to the field;
Behold surrounding kings their power combine,
And one capitulate, and one resign;
Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain;
“Think nothing gain’d,” he cries, “till nought remain,
“On Muscow’s walls till Gothic standards fly,
“And all be mine beneath the polar sky.”
The march begins in military state,
And nations on his eye suspended wait;
Stern famine guards the solitary coast,
And winter barricades the realms of frost;
He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay;
Hide, blushing glory, hide Pultowa’s day:
The vanquish’d hero leaves his broken bands,
And shews his miseries in distant lands;
Condemn’d a needy supplicant to wait,
While ladies interpose, and slaves debate.
But did not chance at length her error mend?
Did no subverted empire mark his end?
Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound?
Or hostile millions press him to the ground?
His fall was destin’d to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

The magnificent fullness of statement in this passages affects me more than cries from the heart.

But my favorite poem by Johnson is “On the Death of Dr. Robert Leveret”:

Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine, 
As on we toil from day to day, 
By sudden blasts, or slow decline, 
Our social comforts drop away. 

Well tried through many a varying year, 
See Levet to the grave descend; 
Officious, innocent, sincere, 
Of every friendless name the friend. 

Yet still he fills Affection’s eye, 
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind; 
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny 
Thy praise to merit unrefined. 

When fainting Nature called for aid, 
And hovering Death prepared the blow, 
His vigorous remedy displayed 
The power of art without the show. 

In Misery’s darkest cavern known, 
His useful care was ever nigh, 
Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan, 
And lonely Want retired to die. 

No summons mocked by chill delay, 
No petty gain disdained by pride, 
The modest wants of every day 
The toil of every day supplied. 

His virtues walked their narrow round, 
Nor made a pause, nor left a void; 
And sure the Eternal Master found 
The single talent well employed. 

The busy day, the peaceful night, 
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by; 
His frame was firm, his powers were bright, 
Though now his eightieth year was nigh. 

Then with no throbbing fiery pain, 
No cold gradations of decay, 
Death broke at once the vital chain, 
And freed his soul the nearest way.

Leveret was one of the odd marginal types who gravitated toward Johnson’s extended household and became members of it. Johnson held him in high regard and honored him in death with this poem, which seems to me now more to be prized than a niche in Westminster Abbey.