with a bronze-tipped arrow, hitting his right buttock
up under the pelvic bone so the lance pierced the bladder.
He sank on the spot, hunched in his dear companion’s arms,
gasping out his life as he writhed along the ground
like an earthworm stretched out in death, blood pooling,
soaking the earth dark red ... (13.749-55)
Men die in the Iliad in agony; they drop, screaming, to their knees, reaching out to beloved companions, gasping their life out, clawing the ground with their hands; they die roaring, like Asius, raging, like the great Sarpedon, bellowing, like Hippodamas, moaning, like Polydorus.
And death is the end: Homer offers no comforting vision of life beyond the grave. In the Chanson de Roland Archbishop Turpin promises the heroes of Charlemagne’s army a place among the blessed, a promise fulfilled in the poem, for when Roland dies an angel and two saints carry his soul to Paradise. For Homer’s heroes no such rewarding prospect presents itself. For most of those whose life is violently suppressed in the poem, the formulas used concern themselves simply with the physical destruction of the body, followed by the extinction of life in it: “and hateful darkness seized him,” “darkness engulfed his eyes.” Where, very rarely, a phrase suggests the departure of the life for some other destination, it is not Paradise but the House of Hades, lord of the dead. Only one soul in the poem comes back from that house: it is Patroclus, who haunts Achilles’ dreams, calling for his burial so that he can rest at last. “Even in Death’s strong house,” says Achilles, “there is something left, / a ghost, a phantom—true, but no real breath of life” (23.122-23). Patroclus is concerned for proper disposal of his body and indeed it is for the body, not the soul, that the Homeric heroes feel concern: many of the champions who fall mortally wounded have been fighting to gain control of the corpse of a prominent foe or to save the corpse of a comrade from the enemy. Archbishop Turpin finally prevails on Roland to blow his horn and summon Charlemagne by pointing out that though it is now too late for the king to save them, he may be able to bury their bodies in a church and save them from wolves, pigs and dogs. But as is clear from their prayers and from the visitation of the angels who come to take the soul of Roland to Paradise, it is the soul, not the body, that is their real concern. The contrast between the two attitudes is clear to see in the Homeric parallel to the angelic escort that comes for Roland. Zeus sends Apollo to rescue the corpse of his son Sarpedon, almost unrecognizable now since it is “covered over head to toe, / buried under a mass of weapons, blood and dust” (16.743-44). Apollo lifts the body out of the melee, washes the blood off it in a running river, and gives it to the brothers Sleep and Death, who are to transport it to Sarpedon’s home in Lycia for due burial with tomb and gravestone. “These,” says Zeus, “are the solemn honors owed the dead” (16.789). But the poet does not encourage illusions about the fate of the body once the life has gone out of it; if not rescued for burning and burial, it may shrivel in the heat of the sun, it may become food for the birds of the air, the dogs of the earth, the eels and fish of the waters. And if not protected by divine interference, its wounds will be host to flies, which will breed worms.
Nevertheless the Iliad is a poem that celebrates the heroic values war imposes on its votaries. War has its deadly fascination for those who have grown up in its service. “It is well that it is so terrible,” said Lee, as he watched Hooker’s doomed columns start across the river at Fredericksburg, “or we should grow too fond of it.” And though the warriors of the Iliad often rail against their condition, they can also enjoy to the full war’s intoxicating excitements. They revel in the exultation of victory as they taunt a fallen adversary with threats of exposure of his corpse, or with a bitter sarcasm, as when Patroclus mocks one of his victims, who, his face crushed by a stone, dives from his chariot: “Look what a springy man, a nimble, flashy tumbler!” (16.868). Even Hector, by far the most civilized of all the warriors at Troy, can list with pride and a kind of joy his credentials as a seasoned fighter.
“War—I know it well, and the butchery of men.
Well I know, shift to the left, shift to the right
my tough tanned shield. That’s what the real drill,
defensive fighting means to me. I know it all,
how to charge in the rush of plunging horses—
I know how to stand and fight to the finish,
twist and lunge in the War-god’s deadly dance. ” (7.275-81)
And though, in a series of recurrent formulas, war is characterized as “dreadful,” “man-killing,” “hateful,” to list only a few of the epithets, it can also appear, again in a recurrent formula, as “bringing glory to man.” Warriors are described as “eager” or even “yearning” for battle, and one of the common words for combat, charmê, comes from the same root as the word chairô—“rejoice.” In one passage, in fact, this etymology is emphasized as two warriors, holding the line in a desperate situation, are described as charmêi gêthosunoi—“rejoicing in (the joy of) battle.”
In some of Homer’s descriptions of killing, the victor’s joy of battle and the hideous suffering of the victim are evenly balanced. As in the account of the death of an obscure Trojan charioteer, Thestor, who, terrified by the approach of Patroclus,
cowering, crouched in his fine polished chariot,
crazed with fear, and the reins flew from his grip—
Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.
So with the spear Patroclus gaffed him off his car,
his mouth gaping round the glittering point
and flipped him down facefirst,
dead as he fell, his life breath blown away. (16.478—89)
The hallucinatory power of this passage stems partly from the deliberate, craftsmanlike way Patroclus delivers his blow, partly from the hypnotized, terror-struck passivity of the victim. Its realism has been questioned: could one man really pull another out of a chariot in this way? Perhaps he could—if the spearhead were triangular and the blunt rear angles of the blade became wedged in the flesh and if, as seems likely, the wounded man would follow the motion of the spear in withdrawal, rather than resisting it. But clearly Homer is walking the borderline of credibility here. He does it for a reason: that simile. It emphasizes the grotesque appearance of violent death by a comparison with a familiar fact of everyday life: Thestor is gaping like a fish on the hook. The spear-thrust destroys his dignity as a human being even before it takes his life. But the simile does something more: it shows us the action from the point of view of the killer—the excitement of the hunter dispatching his prey, the joy of the fisherman hauling in his catch. The lines combine two contrary emotions: man’s instinctive revulsion from bloodshed and his susceptibility to the excitements of violence. And they are typical of the poem as a whole. Everywhere in Homer’s saga of the rage of Achilles and the battles before Troy we are made conscious at one and the same time of war’s ugly brutality and what Yeats called its “terrible beauty.” The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.