The Iliad: How They Die

The Greeks and Trojans fought man to man. It was personal. You saw your opponent fall.

He fell to the ground in the dust, like a poplar….

He crashed down on his face, and his armour clattered about him.

Life and strength collapsed where he lay.

Death was darkness.

…darkness covered his eyes, and he crashed, like a tower….

…and black night covered over his eyes.

…he crashed from the chariot, and the hateful darkness took him.

It was the same experience for both sides. No remote weaponry separated winners and losers.

So he fell, and the bronze of his crafted armour rang over him

…..many of the Trojans and Achaians lay stretched side by side, face down in the dust.

They lay dead on the ground, a sight now to gladden the vultures, not their wives.

It was the fate of the warrior to die.

…over his eyes came the surge of death, and strong fate took him.

…filled the measure of their fate at the hands of king Agamemnon, and sank down into Hades.

Hades is below the earth and from Hades you do not return. Earth could sustain life, but it does no more.

…all these, one after another, he brought down to the nourishing earth.

…he crashed in the dust and his hand clawed earth.

…the life left his bones.

I am rereading The Iliad after many years. During my previous reading I was disgusted by the fighting and maiming and dying and those warriors who gloried in it. But it is not glorious to claw the earth, and surely that is the point.

Classical Myth: Troy

A tourist took this picture of the walls of Troy today, a reminder that we all go down in the end. Some power fades slowly, some quickly and with violence.

This is my last post on Barry Powell’s Classical Myth. In it he devotes several chapters to the Trojan War, including what came before and what came after. His chronological account is valuable because we know the story in bits and pieces from many sources. Powell quotes extensively from Homer, but also from Euripides, Aeschylus and Virgil. He gives us the modern interpreters: Tennyson, Yeats, Cafavy and the artists — Lorrain and Turner and all those Greek pots.

That is how it stretches, from some unrecorded events in the Bronze Age through oral song through Homer’s version and then on through Ovid and Virgil to Marlowe and Shakespeare and James Joyce. We cannot top those towers or stop those stories.

If you are interested in myth, here my earlier posts on the book Classical Myth:

Getting Started

Myths of Creation

The Olympians

Fertility and Death

Heroes and Heroines