The Iliad Translated by Robert Fagle Introduction and notes by Bernard Knox

by Robert Homer / Fagles

The Iliad Translated by Robert Fagle Introduction and notes by Bernard Knox [Paperback] Homer

Paperback

Published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

I read most of this book about the Trojan war during March, the month that is named for the Roman god of war, Mars—who corresponds to the planet Mars. In March, where I live, you can just about make out Mars with its reddish hue at dawn, and sometimes in the evenings too.

Jupiter is also visible in my region in March, the biggest and brightest of all the planets. I've enjoyed seeing it high in the south-west on clear nights, and it has been a kind of companion as I read through The Iliad—in which Zeus and Ares, the Greek antecedents of the Roman gods Jupiter and Mars, join in the battle between the mortal 'demi-gods', Achilles and Aeneas, who have one immortal and one human parent each. Aeneas fights on the Trojan side which includes Dardanians, Lycians and Thracians, while Achilles is on the Argive side which includes Achaeans, Spartans and Cretans.

Other gods have parts in the story too, Hera (Juno in the Roman world), wife and sister of Zeus, plus her immortal relatives, Poseidon (Neptune), Athena (Minerva), Apollo (Apollo), Hephaestus (Vulcan), Hermes (Mercury), Artemis (Diana), and Aphrodite (Venus).
The planet Venus has become visible in my evening sky lately too, and also Sirius, the Dog Star, with whom the hero Achilles is compared when he's in full raging mode, so I'm more than ever convinced I read this book at the right moment.

And finishing The Iliad coming up to the Christian celebrations of Easter seems apt too. The death of Trojan prince Hector towards the end of the saga, a death that has been frequently foretold in the text, and the indignities piled on his body, including stabbing with a spear after death and the piercing of his feet, all that felt significant while I was reading about it on Good Friday. His mother Hecuba and his wife Andromache's grief and lamentation as they looked down on Hector's battered body from the walls of Troy made them seemed to me like prefigurations of the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalen. And the final restoring of Hector's body to his family rhymed with the Christian narrative too.

There's a type of resurrection in The Iliad as well though it doesn't happen for the unfortunate Hector. Instead, it concerns Ares, the god of war. He gets injured badly in the fighting at Troy, and seems at death's door, but then he's whisked off by some of the other gods, and within a short time, he's good as new and back on earth, interfering with the fates of men in sometimes comical ways.

Yes, for all the blood and gore in this bloody gory story, the immortal gods and their actions kept me smiling. They taunt one another constantly, and scheme against each other in the most devious ways, all while trying to make sure Zeus doesn't catch them interfering with his own devious schemes for the fate of the Trojans and the Argives. Zeus is the dominant figure and he's also the god in charge of weather. He's as unpredictable as we know weather can be. At one stage Aeneas says, "If only Zeus would stretch the ropes of war dead even", but he never does. Sometimes Zeus is with the Trojans, sometimes he's with the Argives, thundering and lightning and hailing at whatever side he's currently trying to impede—and then washing his hands of the whole business when it gets too messy, like some Pontius Pilate figure.

When Zeus allows the other gods to get involved, and sometimes even when he doesn't, they use tricks such as causing spears to deviate from their targets if the target happens to be one of their favorites, or else, if their favorite has lost his own spear, they return it to his hand, just like that. Or they shroud him "in swirls of mist" so that his enemy suddenly can't see him, and then whisk him away to safety. All the tricks we associate with magicians are on display. The gods also shapeshift, eg, pretending to be a friend giving advice on what course to take, then disappearing.

As I was reading all this, I was reminded of The Aeneid which I read a few months ago. I knew Virgil had modeled his long poem on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey but I hadn't realised just how closely he'd followed Homer's plots and narrative style. The shape shifting and other interferences and squabbling by the gods were all present in The Aeneid, plus the battle scenes with dozens of fighters who all get named, including their fathers and their fathers' fathers, genealogies that only appear once in each book, as the men so named fall in battle—amazing lists when you stop to think about it. At least Virgil, living as he did in the final years of the final decades before our era, had the leisure and the paper to write down all those names he'd researched/invented, but Homer, who is thought to have been an itinerant oral poet, and blind too, lived c800 before our era so his sagas were only written down much much later. Given the complications of the plot of The Iliad, the consistency of the narrative tone, and the multitude of characters, I find the itinerant poet's knowledge, memory, and imagination utterly incredible.

But as I was saying, Virgil, in his continuation of the demi-god Aeneas' story —"He is destined to survive. Yes, so the generation of Dardanus will not perish, obliterated without an heir, without a trace..."—repeats a lot of Homer's set pieces. There are funeral games described in The Iliad, in one of which a tethered dove is shot at, and the arrow cuts through the tether. Then an even better archer shoots the dove as she flies free. Virgil describes exactly the same scene in his funeral games section. And isn't the shooting of a dove so symbolic in books that are full of unending battles.
Virgil also personifies Rumor just as is done in The Iliad, and he uses the same method as Homer to provide breaks in the tension of battle scenes: similes drawn from nature. I'd enjoyed those passages a lot when I was reading The Aeneid so I reveled in Homer's nature interludes. Here's a few I noted from both the Robert Fagles translation, which I read from cover to cover, and from the Alexander Pope translation which I read a lot of because I'm fond of rhyming couplets:

"As the East and South winds fight in killer squalls
deep in a mountain valley thrashing stands of timber,
oak and ash and cornel with bark stretched taut and hard
and they whip their long sharp branches against each other,
a deafening roar goes up, the splintered timber crashing—
so Achaeans and Trojans crashed"(Robert Fagles)

"So pent by hills, the wild winds roar aloud
In the deep bosom of some gloomy wood;
Leaves, arms, and trees, aloft in air are blown,
The broad oaks crackle, and the Sylvans groan;
This way and that, the rattling thicket bends,
And the whole forest in one crash descends.
Not with less noise, with less tumultuous rage,
In dreadful shock the mingled hosts engage." (Alexander Pope)

Here's another sample:
"Down in a mass the Trojans pounded—Hector led them in
charging in as a heavy surf roars against the rip
at a river's mouth, swelled by rains from Zeus,
at the booming sea with matching thunder—in they came!"(RF)

"Whole Troy embodied rush’d with shouts along.
Thus, when a mountain billow foams and raves,
Where some swoln river disembogues his waves,
Full in the mouth is stopp’d the rushing tide,
The boiling ocean works from side to side,
The river trembles to his utmost shore…" (AP)

And this one, when Agamemnon's brother Menelaus kills one of the Trojan defenders, Euphorbus:
"There he lay
like an olive slip a farmer rears to strength
on a lonely hilltop, drenching it down with water,
a fine young stripling tree, and the winds stir it softly,
rustling from side to side, and it bursts with silver shoots—
then suddenly out of nowhere a wind in gale force comes storming,
rips it out of its trench, stretches it out on the earth—
so Panthous' stripling son lay sprawled in death,Euphorbus who hurled the strong ashen spear
Menelaus cut him down..." (RF)

"As the young olive, in some sylvan scene,
Crown’d by fresh fountains with eternal green,
Lifts the gay head, in snowy flowerets fair,
And plays and dances to the gentle air;
When lo! a whirlwind from high heaven invades
The tender plant, and withers all its shades;
It lies uprooted from its genial bed,
A lovely ruin now defaced and dead:
Thus young, thus beautiful, Euphorbus lay,
While the fierce Spartan tore his arms away."(AP)

So there is endless killing in The Iliad just as there is in nature but the narrator of the poem makes it incredibly moving over and over again. Lines like this:
"And courage-shattering Death engulfed him"
Or: "And red death came flooding down his eyes"
Or: "death's dark cloud closed down around him"
Or this: "As a garden poppy, burst into red bloom, bends,
drooping its head to one side, weighed down
by its full seeds and a sudden spring shower,
so Gorgythion's head fell limp over one shoulder
weighed down by his helmet." (RF)

But none of the deaths are quite so moving as that of Achilles' friend Patroclus, mowed down by Trojan Hector. It is as if the narrator knew him personally. Here's how the narrator describes Patroclus answering Hector's taunts with his final breath:
Struggling for breath, you answered, Patroclus O my rider
"Hector! Now is your time to glory to the skies...
now the victory is yours..."
I think this was the only place in the entire book where the narrator addresses a character with such personal words as "Patroclus O my rider", as if the whole saga were addressed to Patroclus (though I know it's addressed to the Muse of poetry). However, I didn't find any such second person address to Patroclus in Pope's translation and his death was much less movingly described:
"He faints: the soul unwilling wings her way,
(The beauteous body left a load of clay)
Flits to the lone, uncomfortable coast;
A naked, wandering, melancholy ghost!"
I'd love to know how Patroclus' death is rendered in other translations of The Iliad.

I haven't mentioned women much so far—apart from the goddesses—but as everyone knows, the Trojan war happened because Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, eloped with the wife of Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, king of Sparta.

Yes, it was "all for that blood-chilling horror, Helen" as Achilles roars when he hears of the death of Patroclus. But Achilles' rage may be partly because he knows that Patroclus died because of another woman, though indirectly. During most of the battles described in The Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus, his dearest friend from childhood, aren't involved in the fighting at all. Achilles, the strongest warrior of all the Argives, Spartans and Achaeans, stays away from the battlefield, sticking close to his fleet of 'beaked ships' alongside his men, and thinking about returning to his home in Argos. The reason for this disengagement is that he is violently angry with Agamemnon because the king had taken Achilles' favourite slave-woman Briseis in compensation for being forced by the god Apollo to return one of his own slave-women, Chryseis, to her father. This part of the plot cleverly mirrors the taking of Menelaus' wife Helen by Paris. As the battle rages on and it begins to look like victory will go to the Trojans, lead by the invincible Hector, Patroclus tries to persuade Achilles to forgive Agamemnon for taking Briseis, and join him in the battle. But Achilles is still seething against Agamemnon and he refuses, though he sends Patroclus and all their men to join the battle without him. It is only when Agamemnon finally returns Briseis to Achilles that Achilles joins the fighting himself and faces the fierce Hector:

"Then Father Zeus held out his sacred golden scales:
in them he placed two fates of death that lays men low—
one for Achilles, one for Hector breaker of horses—
and gripping the beam mid-haft the Father raised it high
and down went Hector's day of doom..."

So although Achilles kills Hector, he had acted too late, since, because of his continued resentment over Briseis, he'd already given Hector the chance to kill his much-loved friend Patroclus. That, for me, is the tragedy of The Iliad. Priam, Paris, Aeneas, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, all survive, but valiant Hector, who hadn't approved of his brother Paris's elopement with Helen, and even more valiant Patroclus, are sacrificed because of others' inglorious actions. And Briseis's speech on hearing of Patroclus' death is very moving too. She reminds us of the lot of all the slave-women who'd been taken in other battles:
"Patroclus—dearest joy of my heart, my harrowed, broken heart!
I left you alive that day I left these shelters,
now I am back to find you fallen, captain of our armies.
So grief gives way to grief, my life one endless sorrow!
The husband to whom my noble father and mother gave me,
I saw him torn by the sharp bronze before our city,
and my three brothers, how I loved you—
you all went down to death on the same day…
But you, Patroclus, you would not let me weep,
not when the swift Achilles cut my husband down,
not when he plundered the lordly Mynes' city—
So now I mourn your death—you were always kind..."

It's an amazing story and I enjoyed reading Robert Fagles translation. It wasn't exactly rhyming but the lines had an internal rhythm which meant fast reading. And Fagles was comically modern on occasion, eg, he constantly referred to armor as 'gear', and there were lines like this:
"Antilochus—you drive like a maniac!"
or this from Hera: "How do you have the gall, you shameless bitch, to stand and fight me here?"
Or this one: "But Odysseus—why, he's out of the dark ages!"

Now I'm beginning Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey to follow the story of the final days of Troy and the adventures of 'dark ages' Odysseus!

[Bea Crow · Rating 4 out of 5]

We read excerpts of this in high school; reread in its entirety before I read the Odyssey in advance of the Christopher Nolan adaption. The portions about the gods were much more interesting to me than the repetitive battle passages (who killed whom etc). They bear more than a passing resemblance to politicians making decisions in the interest of the “gods” that rule over us (money, oil, sovereignty, etc). I’m sure there’s a more eloquent way all of this has been said before

[James Varney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. The story surges in Fagles' translation. Along with Fitzgerald, this is my favorite translation of Homer. And Fagles has the simpler versions of the names - Fitzgerald uses the more complex forms - and that helps make "The Iliad" even smoother to the modern reader.

Fagles has a great way of describing Menelaus's desire for vengeance early, which gives the reader an idea of how supple much of the translation will be, and he, like Fitzgerald, strives to find different ways here and there to describe Hector "of the flashing helm," or how a warrior's "armor clashed about him" when he falls in combat.. He packs in the action and violence, too, such as when Pandarus and Aeneas attack Diomedes in Book 5:

"Shaft poised, he hurled and its long shadow flew
and it struck Tydides' shield, the brazen spearhead
winging, drilling right on through to the breastplate,
Pandarus yelling over him wildly now, "You're hit -
clean through the side! You won't last long, I'd say -
now, the glory's mine!"

But never shaken,
staunch Diomedes shot back, "No hit - you missed!
But the two of you will never quit this fight, I'd say
till one of you drops and dies and gluts with blood
Ares who hacks at men behind their rawhide shield!"

With that he hurled and Athena drove the shaft
and it split the archer's nose between the eyes -
it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze
cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw
and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.
He pitched from this car, armor clanged against him,
a glimmering blaze of metal dazzling around his back -"

It's hard to choose my favorite translation of Hector's challenge to Ajax in Book 7, but Fagles is great:

"But now
seeing the best of the Achaeans fill your ranks
let one whose nerve impels him to fight with me
come striding from your lines, a lone champion
pitted against Prince Hector. Here are the terms
that I set forth - let Zeus look down, my witness!
If that man takes my life with his sharp bronze blade,
he will strip my gear and haul it back to his ships.
But give my body to friends who will carry it home again,
so Trojan men and Trojan women can do me honor
with fitting rites of fire once I am dead.
But if I kill *him* and Apollo grants me glory,
I'll strip his gear and haul it back to sacred Troy
and hang it high on the deadly Archer's temple walls.
But not his body: I'll hand it back to the decked ships,
so the long-haired Achaeans can give him full rites
and heap his barrow high by the broad Hellespont.
And someday one will say, one of the men to come,
steering his oar-swept ship across the wine-dark sea,
'There's the mound of a man who died in the old days,
one of the brave whom glorious Hector killed.'
So they will say, someday, and my fame will never die."

This captures and foreshadows so much of the plot, and the glamour, and the language of Homer and "The Iliad," and Fagles invariably delivers on these moment.

In Book 8, here we see how the moderns (Fitzgerald, Fagles) deal with Hera, especially, in the spats with Zeus. After he stops Hera and Athena in their tracks as they try to disobey his order against the Gods taking active part in the combat, Fagles has Zeus thus:

"You and your anger -
rage away! I care nothing for that...
Not if you ventured down as far as the black abyss itself -
I care nothing for you, you and your snarling anger,
none in the world a meaner bitch than you."

And it's an odd point, this bickering between Zeus and Hera, and then some actual fighting between Gods who favor Greeks and those who favor Trojans. Despite this sort of thing happening over and over, we always get the catch phrase, "who live in bliss forever." Bliss?!

The end to Book 8, when Hector takes his final leave of Andromache inside Troy, after she, holding their newborn son, begs him to stay behind the city's walls - the whole scene is so touching, and so noble, so dooming for the whole family; it's one of the best, most poignant parts of Homer, for my money. Fagles is wonderful in this giant moment.

Fagles also has a touch in Book 9 that shows why Agememnon's plea to get Achilles to return to battle will fail, even with Odysseus and other wily ambassadors to bring it.

"Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king.
I am the elder born, I claim - the greater man."

Well, obviously that kind of end won't seal the deal with Achilles!
Fagles repeatedly gets at one the beating hearts of "The Iliad," a dark one that probably scares off a lot of modern readers. That is that these men are all cold-blooded killers (I feel Hector, my favorite, the least here - the Greeks are uniformly brutal, in my opinion). They revel in their lethality; gloat about their victories and even their criminal acts. It seems in Homer that if you get away with it, even robbery and the like, you win glory. And no dead Greek or Trojan ever seems to bring a moment's pause to the killer. This is true even before Achilles returns and goes berserk, even against the river. This all seems especially true of Odysseus and Diomedes on their night spy trip into Trojan lines in Book 10.

The poetic attention to gear is big in Fagles - when Agamemnon straps his on at the beginning of Book 11, or the more famous example of the Vulcan's special armor he forges for Achilles.

I think Fagles is a bit unfair when he has Poseidon compare Trojans to "jackals, leopards, wolves." Did Homer even know about leopards and jackals? But he, Fagles, has another triumph in Book 13 when Hector and Paris rally the Trojans around the Greek ships. But here there's this oddity I see in most translations: this day, or day and a half, when Zeus is giving all the "glory" to Hector, he really doesn't kill that many Greeks, and certainly not any great number of prominent Greek chiefs.

I think that goes to the fact Homer is Greek, writing for a Greek audience. Zeus seems particularly galled by Hector donning Achilles armor, which he has stripped from Patroclus. But this armor-stripping is standard fare, it's a key thing in all the combat. Plus, Hector's doom is already foretold, so why should Zeus get so bent out of shape in this one case? Because it's Hector/Achilles, viewed through Greek poetic lens.

But in Book 20, Fagles minces no words in showing readers an Achilles - *the* hero, mind - as just slavering after blood and remorseless killing, recalling his days as a pitiless slaver. He brags about all this even to Aeneas just before their brief tussle, which ends with Aeneas saved by the Gods - including Poseidon, who hated them so much a couple of books earlier!

This is probably more than most people need. Just took a lot of notes reading Fagles' Homer over the years and it's a wonderful achievement, a powerful poem and highly - highly - recommended to any reader who loves literature.

[Ty D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poem must’ve been in the clearance section of the Library of Alexandria. (Lol I’m kidding, it’s not that bad)

I appreciate Homer’s efforts and recognize that this would probably be a great tale recited in some bathhouse late night party, but it kind of misses the mark for me.

For starters, I definitely feel this needs to be orally recited and reading it in silence really doesn’t give it justice, which probably contributed to my disinterest.

The story itself is also really disappointing and I had a hard time staying engaged. It starts and ends in the middle of a greater conflict, so it feels like little progress is made. I know that this is a shallow way of viewing the poem, but it really was disappointing when I realized I had reached the final book and they still hadn’t wrapped up the war. I know there are more collections that continue on with this story, but I feel a little betrayed that I sat through 24 books to not really get a sense of completion.

The characters themselves are pretty interesting, and I love the interactions and interventions by the Greek gods, but I feel like there isnt enough of this. Some of the fight scenes are epic, but, I don’t know, I feel like some more godlike superpowers and brawls would’ve made it more interesting, but that’s just me. (There was a lot of this in the end, which I loved, but it was too little too late)

The Iliad is a pretty boring, but necessary part of greater Greek mythology. I wasn’t really a fan, but it’s a necessary evil for the absolute peak story that is the Odyssey.

In short, The Iliad walked so The Odyssey could run.

But that’s just my opinion in terms of actual engagement and entertainment value. The Iliad is filled with symbolism and concepts to dive into, and it’s super fascinating to see so many universal traits, tropes, and conditions in this incredibly old story.

[William Drehmel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have heard about the Iliad, but never had read it. The translation was pretty well done. It is an epic poem about the Greeks fighting withe the Trojans in what is now western Turkey. VERY gory and lengthy descriptions of war battles. I was tired of it by the end. I am going to take a break before giving the Odyssey a try.

[Gwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

basically just war and adultery. I did not enjoy:/ also Achilles is such a wimp!! also i love Patroclus.
the second star was the funny and interesting discussions I had with our class. it was actually pretty fun to discuss, but when you read alone, its a fight to stay awake.

[JJ Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astounding, sweeping, and brilliant feat of poetry and epic storytelling that leaves you satisfied and devastated all at the same time.
Reading this in full reinvigorated my love for the classics, and I can't wait to see what I pick up the next time I read it. A beautiful masterpiece

[Debbie Corson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very gruesome story and was surprising to me on how much the gods were battling right along with the mortals.

[Miguel Rezende · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read! Whole sometimes difficult to focus it was a great poem. In comparison to the Odyssey it is a bit slower.