Customer Reviews

The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Because I failed to "read the label" when I picked this book up, I had the completely wrong impression that "The War that Killed Achilles" was going to be a historical rendering of the real Trojan War. I didn't know there was enough information for a true history on this topic, so off I went to the library.

It didn't take long, even for me, to realize that this was an interpretation of The Iliad. Appropriately, as fate would have it, I'd had Homer's Iliad and Odyssey sitting on my bookshelf for well over a year. Many good intentions to crack the cover sat next to these works, collecting just as much dust as my handsome 2-volume set complete with stylish cardboard box. I admit it - I had been too intimidated to start them given the length, my experience with Euripides and Sophocles in high school, and the fact I had almost no context for these classics.

Enter Caroline Alexander stage right. Not only does Ms Alexander provide her interpretation of the key themes of The Iliad in simple enough language that I can follow, she provides the context which would make an actual attempt at reading The Iliad possible. Homer's many references to the mindset of 8th Century BC Greeks and contemporary (read: also really old) works would have been completely lost on me, and the accumulation very likely would have left me hating myself for trying.

I'm not well-read in the classics, but I now feel like I have some minimum degree of context to give The Iliad the ol' college try - it doesn't seem quite as intimidating as it did a few days ago. I hope a companion volume entitled "The Voyage that let Odysseus' Dinner Grow Cold" follows.

As of this writing there is one 1-star review which abuses Ms Alexander for wasting the reviewer's time with trivial information about The Iliad. That reviewer, obviously very learned in this subject matter, is not Ms Alexander's intended audience... I am.

The Iliad's Trojan War has always been portrayed as a war unlike any other war. A war full of opportunities for glory, bravery, loyalty, a personal fulfillment of destiny... But Caroline Alexander, with deft scholarship, shows that there has been a misreading of the Iliad, purposefully, that in the past could convince and justify young men going to war. Think of the generations of British school boys reading the Greeks (certainly prior to World War I) and being told that there was glory in war. Alexander shows that, instead, the Iliad actually shows the sadness and loss, the irremedial end of things that comes with war. And using the text, she shows that the main players are aware of it, too.

In addition, this book has a wealth of information in the footnotes. I never knew, for example, that Paris was Alexandu of Wilusa (probably, maybe) in Hittite documents. That piece of trivia will serve me well in many a discussion of the Trojan War :) . But seriously, it IS interesting that she places the war in the context of its era, and discusses many aspects of Greece and eastern coast of Turkey during that period.

I bought this book as an impulse buy at an airport bookstore, and might never have found it otherwise. That is a shame because it is a truly interesting and well written book that will please both the scholar and the general reader like myself.

Author Alexander's main points in this book seem to be that war is cruel, vicious and senseless, that most of those fighting in one have no personal reason to be fighting, little idea what the war is about and would rather not be risking their lives, that they are often following orders that seem to make no sense, that war leaders may be inept, that many lives (mostly young ones) will be brutally snuffed out and that there are few real winners in war. While certainly worthy of frequent repetition, these are commonplace observations.

In addition, she believes that the "Iliad" is not about the epic glory of war at all but is instead a deeply ironic antiwar work that has been misunderstood for nearly thirty centuries. This is her central idea and is a far from commonplace observation, but it requires evidence and careful argument to establish. Alexander fails to provide these.

Indeed Alexander does not attempt to make a systematic argument in support of her insight. She relies instead on scattered textual passages from the poem and other classical sources to support her point.

Thus, for example, she looks repeatedly to a few passages in which Achilles himself states that he has no personal reason to fight the Trojans and would rather be waging peace at home than war at Troy. Two such passages are referenced more than once: One is Achilles' statement to the effect that he would advise other Greek warriors to sail home and live in peace. The other is a statement from the "Odyssey" in which Achilles' ghost in the underworld tells Odysseus that he (Achilles) would rather be alive as someone's serf than be king of the underworld. Alexander also makes much of what she sees as Achilles' supposed challenge to Agamemnon's status as leader of the Greeks.

To these Alexander adds numerous references to highly realistic, pull-no-punches descriptions of pitiable death in battle, many involving characters who are sympathetic and appealing (Hektor not least among them). She also quotes occasional materials from ancient commentators and poets to the effect that both sides were ruined by the Trojan War.

Such scattered and selective references do not make the case, at least for me, especially since Alexander ignores passages that do not support her. In the first place, the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is never over policy or even generalship. It is about an insult to Achilles' honor. Moreover, not only does Achilles make no effort whatever to seize power, he does not even try to persuade anyone else to support him in his withdrawal of himself and his Myrmidons from battle. Moreover, he gets his mother to obtain Zeus' promise to let the Trojans press the Greeks nearly to destruction so that his return to battle will be desperately needed and will therefore not only repair his honor but enhance it. Achilles is concerned deeply with glory and honor and has no serious intention of abandoning the war. Nothing could stop him from sailing home, but he never attempts to do it.

Nor do the awful battlefield deaths refute this picture. The Iliad is fully aware of the horrors of war and does not prettify death and destruction in the slightest. Yet only Thersites tries to provoke mutiny and no one makes any serious effort to force the leaders to make peace. Thersites is the character who clearly argues that "glory" is an empty term and that death in this war is senseless and without value. Not only does he attract no support, he seems to be universally despised in the Greek army and is beaten senseless for his pains.

Alexander notes that no one dies well or happily in the Iliad. No one is rewarded for their valor and there is no heaven to receive them. But the Greeks had no heaven to receive anyone. The Greek "afterlife" consisted of a fragment of a human being with no memory and very limited awareness of any kind. No ordinary mortals received any rewards in the afterlife. I suspect that most ancient Greeks (a few philosophers aside) would find the very notion of dying well, let alone happily, inconceivable.

It seems to me that the Iliad, while fully sensible of the horrors of war, is equally at ease with the idea that glory, even undying glory, may be found there.

So while Alexander's favored theory must to my mind be regarded as, at best, not proven, I think the book is worth reading as an excellent introduction to the power and richness of the Iliad. Alexander is knowledgeable not only about the Iliad itself but about the works of lesser poets who wrote epic cycles of the Trojan War. She knows the works of Hesiod, of commentators and of other early Greek writers as well. Alexander writes clearly and engagingly and imparts her knowledge without condescending to less informed readers. Overall this is an informative and entertaining book that offers something to anyone even remotely interested in the Homeric epics.

Caroline Alexander does superb research as seen in her other books, "The Endurance" (1998) and "The Bounty" (2003). Here she does a running commentary upon "The Iliad" of Homer, quoting and summarizing to tell the tale of the Trojan War. If the reader wants the entire story, they are directed to Robert Fagles' translation edition (1990) which is my favorite. The author explains the background story well and points out the choices made by the characters (Greek gods and humans). At its heart, she asks, why all the slaughter? Ms. Alexander is an excellent writer and this short (nearly three hundred pages) book could be read in two nights.

This book will frustrate scholars of ancient literature, since it is long on plot summary and quotations from Homer's epic, but short on original contributions to the discussion of the poem. It's an excellent companion to the poem for non-specialists, since it gives a lot of background information. A much more interesting and thoughtful meditation on Homer's portrayal of war can be found in Simone Weil's the Iliad or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition.

If you're new to Homeric scholarship, The War That Killed Achilles may give a dip into some academic currents. But it's not deep, and it's not new, and it certainly has no revelations. The premise itself is faulty: that the Iliad is read as a pro-war epic, a sort of bronze-age action/adventure movie. Anyone who has read the Iliad and paid any attention to it knows that Homer is constantly referring to the senseless waste of war, a sentiment that appears in the first ten lines of the poem, but Alexander does not draw attention to this. A good example is her discussion of the way people die in the Iliad; she argues that it is designed to increase the gore and rev up the audience, but physicians have noted that Homer's descriptions, while very graphic, are also anatomically accurate, and more horrifying in consequence. In addition, she is curiously tone-deaf to many subtleties of Homer: when Helen is described weaving a tapestry of the great events, Alexander uses it as a springboard to discuss the world of women. But in fact Homer's point is that Helen, alone of the women in the poem, and Achilles, alone among the men, recognize that they are part of something that has a significance beyond the world as they live it: they have their lives, but they are also characters in an epic. In fact, this is the defining point for Achilles, the most complete character in the poem, one who recognizes his place in time: he is self-aware in a way that other character are not. Finally, Alexander ignores many of the poetic touches: Achilles' sense of humor, the irony in Andromache's appearances, the crushing sense of fate in Book 24.

Alexander's use of Lattimore's archaic, cranky, beautiful translation is also problematic: I suspect she did this because it was easy to get the rights for transcription of very long fragments; but Fagels' translation is better, less self-conscious, and at least as poetic.

Those who have read the Iliad but who want some greater insight, would do better to read Schein's The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad or Edward's Homer: Poet of the Iliad; both are more scholarly, and brimming with insight.

If you have even just a passing familiarity with the Iliad, this book is a brilliant exposition of the story, the timeless themes it explores, and the various oral traditions that informed Homer's written version. If you have never read the Iliad, then I can't recommend this book to you. While it can be thought of as "Cliff's Notes" on steroids, without some sense of the original text to anchor you, it really becomes just a dry description of a story that you have never read.

In "The War that Killed Achilles" Caroline Alexander sets forth the view that "one of the great ironis of literary history" is that the Iliad "came to be perceived as a martial epic glorifying war". Alexander's firm conclusion is that instead Homer depicted "the war as a pointless catastrophe that blighted all it touched, and that this perception of the Iliad's underlying theme was shared by ancient poets and and historians. It is a view perhaps engendered by Alexander's own times, an era in which the point of war in Vietnam and Iraq is at best elusive and, no matter how often images of heroism and noble sacrifice are evoked, the physical and emotional cost of war seems evident. But, I think it safe to say, Alexander would argue that such a view would be perfectly cogent in the particular word in which the Iliad was written (or composed or recited or dictated or whatever), the world of Greek colonists whose ancestors had fled from the Greek homeland in the aftermath of destruction and decline on the heels of the Trojan War. I should think it a mark of the genious of Homer (whomever or whatever you conceive "Homer" to have been) that the Iliad as a work of art can speak simultaneously as a heroic epic and as a lament of the futility of epic heroism. Anyone trying to grasp the real nature of Homer's great poems owes it to themselves to read Alexander's thoughtful study.

This is a book one would expect from one of today's elite combat veteran intellectuals, rather than an historian. Caroline Alexander writes about the Illiad the way the lost generation wrote about World War I, using scholarship instead of poetry. The vein she mines is how Homer shows not just the madness of the war, but the participants' knowledge of that madness, then their actions and feelings in light of their knowledge. As Alexander notes, there are 1,000's of books written about the Iliad, itself an oral performance. I think each era gets the Illiad book(s) that fit it, built on the past scholarship, new discoveries, and the tenor of the times. The War that Killed Achilles is the Illiad overview for our times, but its viewpoint transcends the moment, reaching from the Trojan battles to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One can argue with Alexander's view and conclusions, if one is sufficiently well informed or careful enough about reading the Iliad, but there is no arguing that she has important points to make, careful scholarship to support them, and a coherent, consistent presentation. Further, she is a skilled writer who moves the book along in an absorbing fashion that makes it as hard to put down as a good thriller. I enjoyed it so much that the minute I finished it, I started rereading it, for deeper understanding and for fun. I have read the Iliad many times; this book opened a conversation with it that makes me want to reread the source and to reach out to other writings about it.

I agree with the majority of other reviewers that Alexander's THE WAR THAT KILLED ACHILLES bristles with interesting observations and insights.

At the risk of being a killjoy, however, I take issue with Alexander's treatment of the embassy scene in Book 9 of THE ILIAD. Like quite a few commentators, she forgets Book I entirely, apparently having been thrown off the scent by Achilleus' disingenuous expression to Odysseus of contempt for dissemblers:

For hateful unto me as the gates of Hades [is] that one
Who indeed may hide in mind the rest, but say another.
--- ILIAD, Book 9, Lines 312 - 313 (my translation)


Alexander asks on p. 87, "What does Achilles want?" She continues in the same paragraph: "Achilles...not only rejects the Embassy but, as will be seen, goes further, challenging the very premises of the heoric way of life, which is to say the heroic way of war that epic traditionally extols." This is a misreading. Yes, Achilleus does explicitly inform the ambassadors that he now rejects his own heroic destiny and the popular valuation of fame and glory. But, in truth, he is hiding one thing in his mind while saying another. Significantly, Achilleus does NOT inform the ambassadors that he has secured from Zeus a promise to inflict defeat upon the Achaian army until Agamemnon abases himself by admitting by his transgressions to Achilleus personally:

Mother, since at least thou bore me being very short-lived,
Howbeit the Olympian ought to have vouchsafed me honor,
Zeus high-thundering; but now he honored me not e'en a little.
--- Achilleus to his goddess mother, ILIAD, Book 1, Lines 352 - 354 (my translation)
...............................................................
Thereof now having reminded him[,] sit beside [him] and grasp [his] knees,
If haply he might wish to give succor unto the Trojans,
And 'gainst both the sterns and 'bout the sea to crowd th' Achaians
Being slaughtered, that all may enjoy the king,
And even wide-ruling Agamemnon son of Atreus may know
His folly, who nowise honored e'en the best of th' Achaians.
--- Achilleus to his goddess mother, ILIAD, Book 1, Lines 407 - 412 (my translation)

No, despite his protestations to the Embassy, the Achilleus of Book 9 has NOT rejected his own heroic destiny; nor has he discounted the value of undying fame. Quite the contrary: he privately INSISTS upon both of them. And it's precisely for the SAKE of both that he spurns Agamemnon's offer of restitution. The thesis that Achilleus rejects, or even seriously questions, the heroic ethos finds no support anywhere in THE ILIAD apart from about 100 lines (from the caesura in line 316 through line 416) out of his reply to Odysseus in Book 9. Significantly, Homer's characters never for an instant doubt the value of mnemonic immortality. None of them wants to die young, but all of them appreciate the undying fame conferred by a poet's carmen gloriae.

What does Achilleus want? Personal apotheosis and total vindication, which he expects to achieve when Agamemnon is compelled by Heaven itself to confess his sins, publicly and abjectly, to Achilleus' face. THIS is why he doesn't follow through on the threat to take his marbles and go home: he sticks around because he expects Zeus to make good on his promise. The irony is that by the end of Book 8 (cf. Book 8, Lines 472 - 477) Homer's audience knows full well something of which Achilleus in Book 9 has no inkling, viz., the personal price he'll end up paying to get what he wants.

Fans of Alexander's THE WAR THAT KILLED ACHILLES may find another interesting perspective on Homeric violence in Jonathan Gottschall, THE RAPE OF TROY (Cambridge University Press, 2008).