Should we learn anything from the Iliad? If so, what? (Catherine Project 6)

Catherine Project, Spring 2024, Homer -- Response 6, Il. 21-24

Should we learn anything from the Iliad? If so, what?


It is very difficult to know what the Iliad thinks its audience should do with it. The narrator very rarely directly addresses the audience, and for that matter reveals very little about himself. The Iliad draws no explicit lessons from its story and provides no morals – it simply tells a story, and when it reaches the end of that story it falls silent. While it is hard for me to believe that it was intended simply for entertainment (where we might be foolish to take it too seriously, like an ancient Game of Thrones), there is little in the text to disprove such a hypothesis.

But stories in the Iliad similar to the Iliad are told with a purpose, to change behavior. The Iliad has no professional singers of stories (though 2.595, 18.604, 24.720-1); stories in the Iliad (unlike the Od.) are not entertainment, but are deadly serious. Phoenix tells the story of Meleager to try to persuade Achilles to abandon his rage and defend his companions (9.529-99); Achilles tells the story of Niobe to try to persuade Priam and himself to abandon their grief and to eat (24.599-620). It seems likely to me that the Iliad also intends its audience to take its stories seriously and use them to shape their own lives.

Even so, we might reject the Iliad’s lessons. We might object to specific lessons on the grounds that they do not comport with our own sense of a life well lived, e.g. that we should wage war, including butcher children in cold blood, to avenge a woman’s abduction (24.727-36; cf. Herodotus 1.1-5). More generally we might object to the Iliad’s worldview: one might object the Iliad depicts a kind of Bronze Age boy’s adventure story, where its focus on men’s honor, glory, and heroic action against a background of war, divine deceit and cruelty, mortal unhappiness (24.525-6), and unavoidable death ignore the humdrum realities of an uneventful, peaceful life, not to mention humor and wit, genuine joy, and the experiences of women.

Nevertheless, I personally find myself reading the Iliad and thinking that, for better or worse, this is how the world is. I think we might be able to draw the following lessons:
  • Even Niobe with her beautiful hair remembered to eat (24.602). Even in the most adverse circumstances, we cannot be unhappy forever. We must reach an end to our tears, move on, and once again eat, drink, and have sex (24.130 -> 24.676, the moving return of Briseis).
  • Zeus does not fulfill all of men’s plans (18.328). Human decision and action occur in an indifferent world. Some things we plan and hope for may happen; other things, the world will prevent.
  • it was Athene cheating me, and now evil death is close to me… Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious / but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it (22.304-5; cf. 24.214-6). Even when the cruel world has cheated us (like Athena cruelly deceived Hector in the guise of Deiphobus), it is still within our power to choose to face adversity with dignity and courage. More generally, since we must die, we must decide what we want to fight for with the limited time that we have (cf. 12.322-8, 21.103-13).
  • Once I shone among the young heroes… May the gods, for what you have done for me, give you great happiness (23.645-650). I find this particular act of superfluous generosity by Achilles to Nestor incredibly moving, but I find it difficult to generalize a lesson from it – be superfluously generous to all, even those who cannot compete?
In addition we might appreciate how the Iliadic narrator sees the world from his omniscient perspective, above all in his juxtaposition of joy and grief: to feel Andromache’s acute grief, but also simultaneously to remember the joy of her divinely blessed wedding (22.470; cf. 6.484 “smiling in her tears”). Iliadic mortals are not capable of such a perspective: Iliadic laments focus on the mourner’s terrible present and future, not the lost blessings of the past (e.g. the three laments ending the Iliad). Achilles tells us that, at best, Zeus gives to us both from the cup of blessings and from the cup of evils (24.525-551). We all experience evil; we should grieve; but if we have the ability and strength we also should not forget that we have had great joys as well.


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