3 Reasons Why The Iliad Is (Still) the Most Honest War Book Ever
I've been told that veterans and PTSD sufferers find comfort in this ancient epic, maybe this could help someone who needs it.
Despite what critics, scholars, and “experts” across the eons will try to tell you, The Iliad is neither a pro-war nor anti-war book.
It is a “war is” book.
If for no other reason than this, the epic deserves our attention.
One of the foundational works of Western Civilization, read by people the world over, The Iliad exists because, despite its descriptions of a form of warfare not seen for hundreds of years, about people dead for thousands more and heroes who might never have lived at all, its depiction of the reality of war remains as true today as ever.
Try as we might to rid ourselves of this prehistoric institution, war remains.
It matters not how many weapons we ban or disarm, nations we string together in global policing alliances or platitudes we sing in praise of higher values and peaceful pursuit. War will continue to remain so long as we refuse to see it for what it is.
Here are three reasons why The Iliad is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the truth about war:
1. The Official Reasons We Fight Don’t Matter
The war described in this book is so insignificant that for centuries leading up to the rediscovery of the ruins of Troy, the city the war was fought over, most people thought the work was entirely fictional.
Today, most archaeologists agree that the conflict was perhaps regional at best. Hardly the near-apocalyptic cataclysm so important all the gods got involved that Homer, The Iliad’s author, makes it out to be.
Even the ‘why’ it was fought is as old as time. The Greeks claim it was over a woman, while the Trojans saw that as a mere pretense to take everything they had. Of the two causes, Troy no doubt had the morally superior one–they were fighting to protect everything they held dear.
And yet, they lost.
At the end of the day, war doesn’t care whose cause is more righteous at all. It only cares about who is better at war.
Many ancient cultures understood this implicitly, which is why they treated war like something that happened naturally. They placed it under the purview of the gods because, like storms and earthquakes, the forces that govern them are beyond our control. One nation has more than another, while one ruler needs another to blame for the streak of disasters that have befallen his subjects. Even if you knew all the reasons, would you be any more capable of preventing what happens next?
Insofar as a cause is necessary, it is to make the soldier better at overpowering his enemy. And here, Homer proves his brilliance.
His epic shows us why individual people fight and why they refuse.
Events are kicked off when the Greek king of kings, Agamemnon, who’s been mired in a decade-long war in Troy because his sister-in-law was kidnapped and brought here, decides to take the daughter of a priest of Apollo by force. The priest’s prayers to his deity are answered, and the Greeks are hit with a plague.
Agamemnon, furious at having to give up his slave girl, demands the girl of his greatest warrior, Achilles, as a consolation prize.
In other words, the government creates a big mess and expects its top-performing citizen to pay for it.
Achilles then takes himself and his troops out of the fighting because booty and pride are terrible reasons to go to war.
But his best friend, Patroclus, unable to bear watching their friends and comrades getting slaughtered, begs Achilles to let him go in his armor. Because the truth is that what keeps soldiers going after the thrill of battle and the novelty of soldiering has been worn away by the cold brutality and sheer mindless chaos of battle are the one or two soldiers in your group closest to you.
And when Hector murders his closest friend, the war goes from a geopolitical affair to a vendetta, with Achilles’ stopping at nothing to get his revenge and not stopping even after he’s gotten it.
As if killing thousands of Trojans wasn’t enough, he forces the people of Troy to watch him defile their champion’s corpse, hooking Hector’s body up to his chariot and dragging it around and around the city walls.
Like so many millions of veterans who would follow him, Achilles went into the war for status, glory, and riches. But what kept him fighting was the love of his brother-in-arms. This cause is also what ultimately drove him to do the unthinkable.
2. War Persists Because It Is Tragically Beautiful
Achilles’s story–with its crushing dramatic irony and inescapable fate–endures because it is so damned interesting. The boy chose a short and glorious life over a long and unremarkable one without quite realizing all the pain and suffering that would entail, then does the best he possibly can to get the only thing that matters to him–not glory or fame but justice for a friend.
Even mundane moments come to seem timelessly sacred against the backdrop of the game of life and death.
Campfires spread out on the plain like starlight…
Charred meat spits and crackles over open flames…
The dawn comes on with rosy fingers…
If war wasn’t beautiful on some profound level, it wouldn’t be possible to write poetry about it.
The incredible feats of strength and valor that results in the shattered bodies of young men taken in their prime.
The laments of those who loved the lost contrasted with the relief and joyous outpourings of those who love the victorious.
The twists of fate and endless what-ifs we obsess over for those no longer with us.
Homer knows the sum total of what war is and unflinchingly portrays all of it.
War brings out the extremes in our nature, and it reveals our relationship to life at its most raw and unmediated.
We are shown what we are capable of, both good and bad.
War is terrible, and yet it is a root cause of nearly all the comforts we enjoy today, whether as a result of the peace forged from the last great war, spoils gained, or the research and innovation driven by military concerns from which civilian uses were derived secondarily.
Whether you approve of it or not, you have likely benefited from war.
3. There Are No Enemies In the End–Only Humans
In the poem's final book, Achilles achieves his glory and vengeance, yet still cannot get over the loss of his friend, Patroclus. It is not until King Priam, the father of Patroclus’s killer, crosses battle lines to visit Achilles in the night and beg for the return of his son’s corpse that the peerless warrior begins to make peace with all that has happened.
Achilles begins the epic openly rebelling against his king and ends it breaking bread with the enemy’s king. Gazing upon each other over dinner, Priam and Achilles cannot help but notice each other’s noble bearing and admirable qualities.
Had it not been for the war Achilles and Priam might have been lifelong friends.
Had it not been for the war, Achilles and Priam might never have met.
Both statements are true, and the paradox of human conduct in war lies in them.
Earlier in the book, the Greek hero Diomedes and the Trojan hero Glaucon decide to exchange gifts rather than duel because their grandfathers were friends. Had they met in the heat of battle, they might have killed each other, the fate of their existences turning on mere whims of chance.
So if the reasons people kill each other or worse on the battlefield are ultimately meaningless, and the fact that they are enemies mere random happenstance, then what’s left for the soldier forced to fight?
What Matters Is Whether You are True To Yourself
Because war hinges on chance and the machinations of forces completely outside of our control, Homer ‘s answer for how to conduct ourselves in war is so simple as to feel cliche:
Stay true to who you are, and accept that you cannot change what’s past.
The poem ends with Hector’s funeral. The Trojan War continued on, just as wars will continue after we are gone. Achilles would go on to kill more Trojans and eventually die at the hands of Hector’s brother. The bodies are long gone, the city reduced to rubble and built over until its location was forgotten for centuries.
What lasts isn’t the gold Achilles looted or the warriors he killed, but who he was.
Achilles refused to fight for an unjust king, brought hell on behalf of a murdered friend, and was kind to noncombatants who showed him respect.
This is why he is a hero.
Even the greatest warrior of all time cannot be asked to do more.