Why the iliad is a classic

His ultimate revenge is to slay the Trojan champion Hector — a husband, father and man of his people. This accomplished, Achilles the anarchist drags Hector's corpse behind his chariot for 12 days. The whole thing is completely, inexplicably, over the top. An incident that is rarely discussed — perhaps, like a trauma, it is easily suppressed — occurs at the funeral of Patroclus.

Onto the blazing pyre Achilles throws a menagerie of sacrificial beasts and "12 sons of the high-spirited Trojans" in Green's translation after first cutting their throats. Homer glides over the incident. But to fully grasp the poem's complex character you need to press the pause button at this point.

We're looking at mass human sacrifice, nothing less. There are multiple reasons for The Iliad's defiant vitality. One is the attraction of first things — to cultural roots — at a time of fragmentation. Another is the rhetoric of relevance used time and again to plead the case for Homer.

The literary culture is awash with new translations, adaptations, and even films of Homer, but very few clear-eyed critics; at least none blessed with the perspicacity of William Hazlitt, whose critical edge was never dulled by the immense cultural prestige of the two epics that kickstart the Western literary tradition.

We are in reality so far removed from the 8th century BC that we don't even know if there was a Homer. Or a real Trojan war. The epic is so strange and archaic and wreathed in myth — in Book 5 the goddess Aphrodite is speared on the battlefield and forced to flee to Olympus — that too much talk of its "enduring realities" obscures its equally real unrealities.

The Iliad review: What is it about this blood-soaked classic that transfixes people? Please try again later. The Sydney Morning Herald. By Luke Slattery January 1, — 1. There is no book on the Civil War—or any war—that compares with the Iliad.

And your children will be a little wiser and a little more human for having read it. Wheatley, our head of school, and, knowing the death of Hector is imminent, they often express the fear that they are going to cry in class.

The Iliad and Odyssey are the beginnings of Western literature. The story of that war and its aftermath continues in the Aeneid , which our students read in the eighth grade.

Written by the great Roman poet Virgil and modeled on the Iliad and the Odyssey , the Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, who was destined to escape from the burning city of Troy and found a new city, Rome. And the destiny of Rome, Virgil tells us, was to civilize and rule the world. Rome brought an unprecedented two hundred years of peace and prosperity to the ancient world, preparing the way for the coming of Christ and the spread of the gospel to the ends of the known world.

And the story continues in the ninth grade, when students read Greek drama and follow other heroes who return home from the Trojan War. In the cycle of vengeance that is the curse of the House of Atreus and the unspeakable fate of Oedipus we see that the Greeks were certainly not afraid to ask the dark and hard questions.

But in doing so they prepared the way for the even darker and harder answer—the Crucifixion. And then our ninth graders read the Divine Comedy , written at the opening of the Renaissance, almost one thousand years after the fall of Rome. In this great Christian epic, Dante must travel through Hell in order to learn about the true nature of man and the reality of sin. I hope you can see that literature taught in this way is a continuous story.

That is what literature should be, but rarely is. And I hope you can see that the Greek and Roman classics first told those stories that reverberate through all of literature.

The classics of Greece and Rome are not optional: if we skip them, we have no hope at all of teaching literature with any real understanding or meaning.

The classics of Greece and Rome provide us with a set of connected stories and a cast of characters that teach us what it means to be human. They are also the basis of literature, teaching us about natural man man at his best and worst, but natural man. Chaucer , Shakespeare , and all of our great English writers take this basic canon for granted; references to it are everywhere. At the turn of the millennium, there were many lists of the greatest works of the twentieth century.

Ulysses, of course, is the Roman name for Odysseus. The poignancy of life and death is enhanced by the fact that the victims of war are usually young.

Achilles is youthful and headstrong, and has a goddess for a mother, but even he has to die. We learn that he had been given a choice — a long life without heroic glory, or a short and glorious life in war.

His choice of the latter marks him out as heroic, and gives him a kind of immortality. But the other warriors too, including the Trojan hero Hector, are prepared to die young. But they can be affected by death. After his death, she will lead an existence of perpetual mourning for him.

Immortality in Greek mythology can be a mixed blessing. The Iliad also has much to say about war. The atrocities in the war at Troy are committed by Greeks on Trojans.

Achilles commits human sacrifice within the Iliad itself and mutilates the body of Hector, and there are other atrocities told in other poems. The Trojan saga in the early Greek sources tells of the genocide of the Trojans, and the Greek poets explored some of the darkest impulses of human conduct in war. In the final book of the Iliad, Achilles and Priam, in the most poignant of settings, reflect upon the fate of human beings and the things they do to one another.

A knowledge of Homer became a standard part of Greek education, be it formal or informal. Ancient writers after Homer, even the rather austere Greek historian Thucydides in the 5th century BC, assume the historicity of much of the subject-matter of the Iliad. One can only imagine its value today had it survived.