In Our Time - The Iliad

Episode Date: September 13, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great epic poem attributed to Homer, telling the story of an intense episode in the Trojan War. It is framed by the wrath of the Greek hero Achilles, insulted by his leader Agamemnon and withdrawing from the battle that continued to rage, only returning when his close friend Patroclus is killed by the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles turns his anger from Agamemnon to Hector and the fated destruction of Troy comes ever closer. With Edith Hall Professor of Classics at King's College LondonBarbara Graziosi Professor of Classics at Princeton UniversityAnd Paul Cartledge A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture at Clare College, CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, the Iliad is one of the greatest works in world literature, one of the first and most influential. It explores a few crucial bloody weeks in the long Trojan war

when the Greeks might win at last, if only their greatest warrior, the godlike Achilles, will return to the fight and forgive, Agamemnon, the leader who pulled rank and put him into an implacable fury. The poem is composed in the 8th century BC and attributed to Homer, yet the story is set long before then, perhaps 400 years before, in the midst of a bronze age when immortal gods had mortal children. And here, everywhere, we see the consequences of that mortality. We meet to discuss the Iliad are Edith Hall, Professor of Classics as King's College London,

Barbara Gatsiosi, Professor of Classics at Princeton University, and Paul Cartlett, A.G. Levantis Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture at Clare College, Cambridge. Paul Cartlidge, what's the wider story of the Trojan War of which this is a part? It's a very big question. And if we were to take the whole context, it would be something like nine centuries that we have to think of, roughly between 1600 BCE and about 700 BCE. And within that, something is alleged to have happened, namely a massive great war, out of which comes this one surviving artifact, which is quite extraordinary, nearly 16,000 lines of dactylic hexameter epic, attributed to one composer,

but scholars are very, very divided on whether there was ever anybody called Homer or any one monumental composer. And the core is an alleged 10-year, I defy anybody to believe that there was such a 10-year siege, at Troy, and Troy is located by the ancients, as well as by us, on the Dardanelles or the straight between Europe and Asia. And there was indeed a big city there. It's been excavated over many, many years going back to the 19th century, and there's no doubt that if there was a real Troy, then this is the site. But after that, pretty much everything is in doubt,

and I'm speaking here as a historian. So this part we're going to deal with in the Eliad, why did they go to war? Can you explain that? I mean, most people know, which is terrific for us, but we might as well get it out the way. Okay. Cherchet la Fam is the crudest explanation. In myth, there is a story of the so-called judgment of Paris. Paris is nothing to do with the French city. This is the son of the King of Troy, Priam. and he was given a choice between three goddesses, three of the Olympian Greek goddesses,

though they might be worshipped in Troy as well as in Greece. And he made the mistake, as the other two goddesses saw it, of choosing Aphrodite, Aphrodite, the most beautiful goddess, the goddess of sex as well as Allure. The other two goddesses were thereby implacably hating Paris. So when war broke on, that's a long. Why did you choose Aphrodite? Oh, simply sex. No, it can't be simply sex. There must have been a reason she did.

She didn't just say sex, choose me, did she? So what happened? Crudely, the most beautiful woman in the world. Yeah, but they all promise him something. What did she promise him? Well, she happened to be married, and so there was a challenge for a young man, presumably in his early 20s,

who therefore went over as a guest of Helen, her name was, and her husband, and then did the dirty on Menelaire, slept with Helen, Maybe raped her, maybe, at any rate, violently seized her, or did Helen go of her own accord? At any rate, in one version, I stress only one version, Helen did actually go all the way back with Paris to Troy,

thereby occasioning a huge loss of face on the part of Menelaus, who just happened to be the brother of the most powerful Greek king of the day, Agamemnon of Mycini, and thereby hangs the Trojan War tale, which is of Agamemnon getting together a huge posse, a thousand ships, innumerable men, crossing, actually a very short crossing from Men and Greece to the Dardanelles, and the rest is the Trojan War. And we have gods taking different size in this, don't we? We do. We've already mentioned three of them, and over all of them is Zeus,

Father Zeus, the greatest, most powerful of all the gods. He rather favours Troy, interestingly, whereas, of course, Heera and Athena, who are the two disappointed goddesses, I implacably opposed to Troy and support the Greeks, though they're not called Greeks. They're called Achaeans or Danians or Argyves, and the battle commences. But it doesn't commence. Homer goes in Medias, rays. In the 10th year of the war, the Iliad begins. Sing Muse, or Sing Goddess, which is in effect the muse,

who is going to tell the tale. And he goes into it that way, and then gathers, goes to the Pasca, and goes to the future, and so and so forth. Thank you. Here you all. We've mentioned, we haven't mentioned yet, the anger of Achilles.

And it could be called down anger of Achilles the whole thing, couldn't it really? How did his anger, what provoked his anger, and what were the consequences? Well, anger is actually the very first word, because in Greek you can say, Roth sing, sing, goddess, or Roth.

goddess sing of Achilles and it is the first word. It structures the whole thing. It's 40 days basically. It's about 40 days where Achilles is unbelievably angry for 23 and a half books and then finally gives up his rage at the very, very end. And this was what was so brilliant about it. So it's also the theme. He's not the only one who's angry. When we plunge in Mediasreys into book one, the god Apollo is actually unbelievably angry because he's been dishonoured by the Greeks. How has it been dishonoured? He's been dishonoured because Agamemnon has taken away

the daughter of Apollo's high priest. She's called Chrysais, the priest is called Chrysys, and he calls down a curse on the Greeks because of the way that his family as priest has been treated. Apollo's the first one who's really, really angry. And sort of Achilles catches that, if you like. because we enter, I mean, the very first line is Roth goddess thing, but then it's of Achilles whose wrath was black and murderous

and sent down to Hades many souls of Achaeans. Seeing that period when Achilles' wrath killed off many, many men on his own side, that is how we open. And it's that 40 days where because Achilles gets very angry and refuses to fight all the way through until book 18, you know, two-thirds of the epic, the great warrior refuses to fight, and his refusing to fight that anger with Agamemnon with his supreme commander is what causes all those deaths of Achaeans.

What provoked there off? Well, Agamemnon has to give up the girl Chrysaius, who's an Anatolian priest's daughter, because otherwise the plague that Apollo has sent against the Akeans. We start in a moment where everybody feels that everything is in crisis. and so Agamemnon has to give up his girl. In response, he takes Achilles girl, who's got a simulet name, begins with B, Brissaeus,

just says, I'm going to have her then. And Agamemnon is Paul's rank, as you say, he is the supreme command. He says, actually, there's a great set of words in Greek where you can say, I am the top king, I'm the kingiest king of them all, and I got my scepter from the gods, and I'm absolutely allowed to do what I want.

Achilles says, well, actually, no, you're not. You may be, by hierarchy, the top one, by merit, I am the top one. So we go straight into this clash of who is actually a better warrior and who is, by heredity, the top king. So Achilles withdraws his muscle, really, retires his tent, which is a ship, and refuses to fight until reparation is made. It's never really made except by himself at the very end. So we have the Greek...

It is, actually. Agamaron gives him a lot of... of tripods. Yeah, but he doesn't give in to that. He gives into something else, which we'll come to. Well, you tell me then, because it seems to me that he doesn't care about Bricius and the tripods and the gold. He gets on with being in his silk. He may have had, what happens is that his terrible grief and wound to his

sense of honour and pride is trumped by the grief of bereavement. I just think it's a rather different thing with Patroclus than then it. It's about one kind of anger and grief being replaced by something bigger and worse. Bereedment is worse than being insulted. So the Greeks are against the Greeks as well as the Greeks being against the Trojans. I actually think the Greeks being against the Greeks is far more vicious and far more prominent in the poem than the Greeks against the Trojans. It's the squabbles between, and not just squabbles, I mean, raging, maniacal fits of absolute fury

and envy and anger and revenge and vindictiveness and insult. I mean, the language they use to each other is worse than anything you tend to hear on the battlefield against the other side. And that is a point that Homer, whoever he was, or the poets of this poem are really trying to make, is that Greeks are rivalrous, Greeks are brilliant, but they're very, very bad at cooperating. And the Greeks are rather proud of that.

They're rather like to feel that they're independent persons. Yes, it's part of their self-definition, as an ethnic group and a linguistic group is that they are highly rivalrous and competitive. That's a very crucial part of the ancient Greek character. That's what I was getting at. Barbara Gossiosi, can we or should we think of the story as set in a particular historical time?

Well, as you mentioned, in fact, in the introduction, and this is an important aspect of the Iliad, the story, even for the earliest audiences of the poem, was set in the distant past when human beings were closer to the greek, gods. They were godlike heroes. They were strong. They didn't cooperate, as Edith has just pointed out. And they were larger than life, stronger and institutionally less developed than the earliest audiences of the Iliad. By which I mean that the conflict that we have at the beginning of the

poem is interesting, but also exceptionally alarming because it results in the death of the people on whose side you're supposed to be fighting. So the earliest audiences would have looked at these heroes. So let's just get the dates right to keep the listener up with us. This is, it's composed, it's agreed about the 8th century, BC, EBC. End of the 8th century. Yeah, and written down 100 or so years later. But it's about something that happened about 400 years before that.

Probably. It might have happened. Might have happened. And the Greeks themselves wouldn't have an easy way of saying 400 years, although Herodotus said that. But the interesting thing is that Troy, was already a ruin at the time when the Iliad took shape, so that the stories and the epic stories were swirling around

this massive destroyed city and the stories about how it became destroyed were part of the imagination that was fuelled by the remains. And it's interesting because for Homer, these people who once fought there were stronger than men, are today. More interesting, more glamorous, but also more problematic. So you can look back at this mythical past, maybe 400 years, but partly imagined, partly mythical, and think about the

separation between gods and mortals, which has since become greater. So Achilles at the beginning behaves exactly like Apollo, as Edith said. But then he doesn't anymore. When Apollo gets reparation, he comes down, he stops the plague. When Agamemnon says, I give you back everything and more besides, suddenly Achilles says, no, reparation is not enough because my life is worth more than anything you can give me. Apollo doesn't have the problem of mortality. Achilles does. And that's where we get the separation between the logic of the God, Apollo, and the logic of Achilles. And so the gods are operating on two levels here. They're operating as gods, divine, they're going to stay there forever and playing around.

They're also operating as people who have partnered some of the people in the story itself. I mean, Achilles is semi-divine, Helen is semi-divine, and so it goes on, which complicates it when they want to stop their children being killed, for instance. Absolutely. So the gods themselves are on a learning curve. It's not just that Achilles has to learn that he's mortal. The gods have to learn that they're divine, and they shouldn't care so much about mortals. So in book 21, we have this standoff between the gods.

they line up against each other and they mimic the war that is happening on the battlefield. And Zeus is standing behind and watching at them and thinking it's very amusing because it is amusing that they should be fighting. And it's the goddesses who really drive this divine battle forward. And at some point, Apollo rather reluctantly, in fact, Poseidon says to Apollo, I suppose we should fight against one another. And Apollo says to him, why? They are only mortals. We shouldn't care as much. We should separate ourselves off from these creatures

who live and die like leaves on the tree. Have you any idea what the audience might have been for these performances? Because presumably they were oral for a long time and there were performances vastly. And Paul's given us some idea of the size of the thing. It took three days, we're told, or three evenings, to perform. Have you an idea who came to listen?

So the Illet is a very great mystery because if we started with a question, how did literature start, we would imagine that our first composition would be something for a specific purpose and occasion, such as a wedding song, a song to work in the fields with, battle, exhortation, funeral laments, and all these genres existed, and the Iliad refers to them. But what the Iliad was for is a far, far more difficult question to answer. And it's a great mystery because it's not a problem. pleasant poem. I think we've already

established that. It's not pretty. It's very demanding on an audience. It's three days long. So whatever this audience was, we have to imagine institutional backup for performance because you need to organize people to gather for three days, have food, toilet

breaks, sleeping, and so on. And from early on, we know that the poem was performed at city festivals. But it's rather like It intercuts Paul, from college, with the Olympic Games. As I understand, every four years, Olympic Games, and in the intermediate every four years, the culture festival goes on,

of which this is again and again the centrepiece. You're right, this is happening about the same time, and I think the key term here is pan-Helenic. In other words, it is somehow representing an episode, a long one, where, astonishingly and untypically, Greeks from different communities, managed to collaborate over a very long period. The Olympic Games is, of course, war minus the shooting. So in other words, in the Iliad you have war plus the shooting.

The Iliad is paramilitary exercise in a very nasty way. The Olympic Games is a little bit less. So I understand that people did come. You said that in great numbers from all over the islands like they did for the Olympic Games and various things. But the Iliad was a centrepiece. as far as we know or how far do we know?

We don't know very much I mean there's another tradition and this is where different cities' rivalries come in. Athens has very little actually to contribute to the story of the Iliad but they got in on the act by claiming that it was actually there and at one of their unique festivals

the Pan Athenia all Athenian games in honour of Athena that the first really serious, collaborative effort with many poets reciting the Iliad and, indeed, of course, the Odyssey, happened. So this is attributed to a particular tyrant, a man called Piscistras. We're in the sixth century, you see, a century or so later than we think probably the first monumental version of the Iliad was created somehow. Are people listening in the same way they're listening to a play?

Is it an amphitheatre? Are they sitting on stone's erupt? Yeah, it wouldn't be an amphitheatre without being a Roman thing but on the other hand they would be I think in some kind of theatre The Greek word theatre just means a space where spectators spectate When it comes to the Panathinaic performances

We know the space, we know where it's going to happen But we don't know where the poems were created We don't actually know precisely where Homer is attributed to more than one city Barbara's written a whole book on that So it's actually up in the air It's one of those fascinating things. Yet here we are discussing it as if it were real.

Well, it is incredibly real. I mean, I read it first in Greek way back 50 plus years ago, and it is the foundation of Western culture. It really is. It's the second, Barbara. I'd like to go to Edith. How much agency... This would basically seem to be a story of strong men

and stronger man and weaker men, but man, man, man, and war, war, mostly. What agency do women have in this? Well, they do have some agents. It's true that the economic structure is set up, that men make war and they go and they grab stuff of other places. You know, they go and get lots of riches and they get lots of cattle and they indeed get women. And they burn cities. Women are, on the other hand, trying to make babies, trying to make families. And unbelievably, for huge, unbelievable amounts that I'm trying to make beautiful textiles.

I mean, this is what they do. In terms of moral agency, there is a category of action, though. We definitely see women behind the scenes trying to organise their own lives in the early ad. So Briseas, for example, tells us in book 19 that she was really trying very hard to get married to Achilles to stop being just a concubine who we could sleep with at will, reject it will, but actually get some proper status. And we hear from Helen that the other Trojan women don't talk to her. So they have used their agency. They hate her because their men are and sons are dying.

So we hear these little glimmers from behind the scenes. In book six, Hecuba Queen of Troy and Theano, the High Priestess of Athena, do the most spectacular ritual to try to get Athena to stop the warrior who's currently rampaging around, who's called Diomedes. It's not actually their idea. It's Hellenus, their prophet, but they do do it. So they do do things. More importantly, it's their role to express the pain.

So in book one we have Thetis and all the nymphs of the sea lamenting preemptively for Achilles' fate. And in book 24 we have all the prominent women in Troy, including Helen. Starting with Cassandra, when she sees the corpse of Hector, we have Andromarchy and Hecuba and Helen, are the ones who do all the emoting. That is work. He suggested by one of you, and I truly cannot remember which one of you it is, that the Trojans were weaker because more of the women, expressed reservations and gave advice to them and because they were there in Troy

whereas the Greek women were back in the Greek islands Well, they are... You suggest, can you answer that then, well? Well, we see it particularly when Hector meets his wife in book six Andromaca. Andromache. He has to go back into the city

in order to ask his mother and the priestess to beg Athena for deliverance in the ritual that Edith has just described. And in doing so, we see how each and every one of the women important to him tries to keep him inside the city and safe. And they do it by their own methods. His mother tries to offer him some wine and is very worried about his physical well-being. And incidentally, in the margin of a medieval manuscript of the Iliad,

some monk wrote, mothers always try to feed you. So there is a continuation. there in what Hector's mother tries to do and what mothers in general try to do. And then we have Helen who tries to seduce him as I see it and says, sit next to me. It's so terrible that you have to fight for me, have a bit of comfort. And then his wife performs effectively a funeral lament in front of him and says, do you want me to end up a widow? You've got to stay here. You have to stay safe. And all of this, of course, potentially weakens his relationship. resolve to go back and there's great anxiety about when he will extricate himself and return

to his comrades on the battlefields. The Greeks don't have that problem. But again, he goes because of his sense of honour. There's honour, there's shame and not being brave, and there's the destiny that you have to follow. All these things are playing in and out all the time. Paul Cartledge, Achilles returns to the attack to be part of the Greek force when his friend Patroclus is killed. Now, this friend is an ambivalent figure. Some people think that was a homosexual relationship. Some thinks it was a relationship of brothers

because they were brought up together. So what do you think? Well, they're foster brothers, because when he was very, very young, and this is the ghost of Patrickluss himself speaking, and right at the end of the poem, he tells us how he killed accidentally the son of someone else, and so he was exiled from his home and Achilles' dad, Pilius, took him in,

so as you say, they were foster brothers. What their relationship was, in a sexual sense, is not made explicit at all. It's not indeed alluded to in Homer. But when we come to the classical period, by which time the institution of Peter Asty, that is an older and adult male and adolescent boy, in a mentoring as well as physical relationship, was normal among certain classes,

then by a process really of anachronising Eeschylus in his mermidons makes it absolutely explicit that there is a sexual relationship because it's the fies of Patricus that Achilles is particularly attracted to and that is a key part of physical, homoerotic, homosexual relationship

in the classical notion of Pederasty. Achilles is withdrawn from the struggle and Patricles says stays with him. Patrick Lus can't say, stand being out of the struggle. So Achilles lends him his arm up and says, go for it, but don't go too far. Because it goes too far, and a god

and two mortals kill him. And the lament and the revenge that Achilles takes is as great as the anger as getting out of the battle. What's your view on this here for? Well, to me, people have said it's a horrible poem.

I think it's actually one of the most exciting poems in world history. What happens the moment that Achilles hears that Petroclos is dead is that we enter an emotional sequence that goes on for five books where his rage, he tries to assuage his rage.

He first of all stands at the ships and he howls till the heavens resound and lights come off his head. Like, I am bad guys, I am back. And then he goes and gets his armour from his mother and he goes into battle and he has skirmishes with Hector which are disappointing.

We don't actually get the full showdown with Hector at that point. He kills off dozens of Trojans on the rampage. He even gets in the river where he kills off more and more and more, even the ones begging for their lives. Then, you know, when all of that is through, he still will not eat, he still will not wash, and we do the funeral of Petroclos. He makes his men, all the other Greeks are allowed to go back and sleep in their show.

He makes them howl all night long and drive their chariots all night long and then. This goes on for books and books, and he cannot get rid of his rage. What view do you take of that rage at that particular time, Barbara? So there is a way in which the rage is transformed. He doesn't care about Agamemnon anymore. Agamemnon says, great, you're back fighting here, have the gifts, and he says later. I don't care about that. And he focuses on the bereavement.

And the bereavement is described in great detail to the point that medical experts have said, these are the symptoms of bereavement and you can see them cross-culturally. And what we begin to see at the end of this poem is that the pain of Achilles at the death of his closest friend mirrors the death and the pain that Priam, the father of Hector,

feels when his own son is killed. I haven't got to that yet because what Gilles does because Hector has, finally finished off Butroclos and Achilles goes through, weighs through rivers, bushes people right, leaps him, but finally gets Hector out to fight

and quickly polishes him off and then drags him round the walls of Troy three times, Rex's body and then one of the great scenes, all of you write, Hector's father comes out and begs, to give him back the body of his son so that he can give him

a decent burial. Sure. And that's when Achilles becomes mortal and stops behaving like a half divine, half mortal. And in fact, the gods have already had a conversation about this because Apollo was horrified by the way Achilles was behaving and said quite clearly, Achilles has to learn pity and fear and shame. Pity and shame are the two things he identifies ours,

feelings that are appropriate for mortals, for human beings. And these, it is important to note this, are social feelings. You always feel them in relation to your community. And Apollo insists on this and teaches Achilles a lesson by running even faster than him, which is, of course, a point of honor for Achilles. And eventually, we arrive at the point in which Achilles is the son of his mortal father, whereas at the beginning of the poem he behaved very much as the son of his immortal mother. So we have that transition.

Paul, Paul Cartlis, did the Iliad reflect the Greek character at the time, or did it help form it? Well, I think there's no such thing as the Greek character. It reflects more race. It reflects an upper-class aristocratic mentality, which remained constant and indeed controversial. And of course, it was against that, that, for example, democracy arrived. as a reaction against, but it is a dominant ideology, and it certainly was very helpful for the aristocrats of the 8th century BC to have a poem that seemed to justify their superiority,

because it's a superiority of birth, as well as of education, upbringing, and consciousness. So, absolutely. Aristocracy is very stressed in the early out, isn't it? You can't be a noble warrior unless you're nobly born. You can do great deeds, but you're... Your background birth is a key factor in this. The first real bloodshed in the poem is actually when Odysseus

beats up with his sceptre, with the sceptre, the working class character who tries to start a mutiny Thersites. And the first blood that flows is when his back is actually, you know, slashed with the scepter. And it's an incredibly tense and exciting moment in book two. We have the big fight between a kid. and Agamemnon over merit and who does all the work versus privilege in book one. That is then mirrored down one class in book two when Thracitees tries a mutiny and says,

why are we all here doing all the work for nine years already when we can't sleep with our wives at home? And there's a very, very tense moment because he does get the men behind him in the camps for a few lines. And if you actually perform that live with people, there is a real tense moment. as to who's going to win, and it's all about laughter. And Odysseus manages to turn it round and turn the laughter against societies who, being lower class in great mind is also ugly. Then the men are running away

because Agamemnon's actually suggested. Perhaps guys, you know, we ought really to give up. We're not doing brilliantly, are we? So some of them start running off. And Odysseus it is who chases after him. When he meets a man of the aristocracy, he addresses them with reasonable words. of persuasion when he sees a lower-class man,

such as Thursday, he simply thumps him. Barbara. These episodes are part of a technique that Homer uses more generally, which is to ask the what-if question. What if Thersitius had persuaded the Greeks? What if Agamemnon's crazy plan of saying, oh, let's just go home, had obtained? All the way through the poem,

although we know that Troy is going to fall, There are these moments in which we have the counterfactual. Oh, and then Troy would have fallen right then had this happen, but it didn't happen. And this is a way of keeping the audience awake. We've got three nights or three days of recitation going, and there is a lot of exploration of possibilities that are not then fulfilled in the myth. It's an extraordinary how powerful sense of honour and shame are. I mean, neither side really wants this.

Both sides suffer. They can't see, well, I can't see, you see much gain. Everybody resents the fact on both sides that Paris took Helen away from Greece and so on and so forth. Well, they do and they don't. I mean, there are critical readings that say the tragedy, this is ever since the Second World War, people have read it as a great pacifist, polemic about the pain and the suffering of violence. I'm afraid we're talking about an ancient Greek war in society, whether it's the 13th, the 8th, or the 5th century BC, which is almost always at war where men are trained for war and men are

excited by war. And there may well have been lots of women who wish they'd hang it out and stop it, but that was all the aristocrats, aristocracy knew what to do. That is why they spent their whole time training. And I think they found the poetry of it very exciting. You've referred casually to Homer as if he were real. Now there's so much discussion about the unreality of Homer that we haven't gotten that much time. But what's your view of Was there one person or was the collection and this name of the blind poet added to it? What's the general view here? Starting with you, Barbara.

So to start with what we actually know, which is not much, clearly the poem came out of a long tradition of oral performance of composition and recomposition without the aid of writing. But also equally clearly, this poem was written down because we have it. So what happened in between various flexible stories about the, the Trojan War and this one monumental epic, which quite clearly tries to do the whole tradition by singing of only a few days, because it starts with the catalogue of ships, it announces the through the death of Hector the fall of the entire city. We don't know. But what I would say

is that clearly this was a poem meant for re-performance. You're not going to construct something as monumental, enormous and with such investment, without thinking this is something that is going to stay with us. If one person was solely responsible or whether we have, say, as some have suggested, a collaboration between an inspired oral poet and the technologies of writing coming in, this is something where I think intellectual modesty is required. A lot of my colleague homeris have said one thing or the other. I've had epic battles about this and careers. made and broken, but actually we have to remember that it is possible for great artefacts

to come out in various different ways, either one creative genius or a creative genius collaboration. My take is that the genius consists, whoever it was, in not describing the fall of Troy in the Iliad. Why is the Iliad called the Iliad? It's a nonsense because Iliad means the poem about Ilios or Ilius, or Ileon, Troy, and actually Troy doesn't fall in the Iliad. And it's not about the death of Achilles, which is the most interesting and exciting aspect because of what was then thought about the fact that he lived so short a life, and yet he lives on eternally in memory.

So those two absolutely cardinal facts about the Trojan War story excluded, though adumbrated, referred to, and so on, brilliant, absolute genius, that whoever it was, and I imagine there was one guy, I call him the monumental, I call him the monumental composer. I'm just going to say I'm actually going to go for hive mind here. It is so good because 500 years of different kinds of poetic talent went into it. Whoever put any finishing touches that did make the sunsets and the unity in the 40 days, wonderful hands off to them, but he could not, or she could not have done that so well

if they hadn't been so many brilliant minds already gone on. into it over 500 years. I don't know about, well, you obviously will tell me because I don't know, but it seems to me it was about the 6th century BC or BC that it was set in concrete. And that isn't 500 years. That's what you said. There's language in it that goes back to the 50th century BC.

Yeah, but I mean, never mind, you talk as if people, of course might, but you talk as if once it was put it, set in that way, it was continuously amended. I thought the other thing, once it was set in that way, people said, don't change your order. If I may. If I may. about the period of... Can I clarify here?

Because, again, the evidence we have is very incomplete about how fixed the text was in the 6th century. This is a matter of debate. But on the evidence we have, it cannot be entirely decided. There are variants that are recorded for us, but there are few. So the people who say we have a multi-text of Homer

right down to the Hellenistic period, and some people do argue that, don't have much evidence to go on. What we do have as evidence, and this is important, is that the rhapsodes, the people performing the Iliad and the Odyssey, had a lot of social pressure on them

not to change the text, so that already in the sixth century, one line apparently gets added, and there's a scandal about one line out of almost 16,000 because it's meant to be Athenian. That wasn't, actually, thank you for that, but it wasn't what I was saying,

we know from various things to do with the actual language in it, that it uses Misenian Greek quite often, and that it was almost certainly already in formation, in my view, by the 13th century or the 12th century, and that we're talking, therefore, about 500 years long before the Phoenician phonetic script has introduced and it's written down, 500 years of people playing around with, how should we do the bit where hea seduce is used,

how should we do the bit where societies fights up, and developing it, making it better and better. That's when I say hide mind. Have you any evidence for that? There's quite a lot of evidence that the language itself, because of the way that the Greek dialect developed and the missing W noise and so on, there is certainly,

there also in Linear B, which is the script of the Mycenaean Greeks, there are names like Achilles. I mean, these gods are already there. I'm one for a much, much longer period of development. We've also got lots of visual representations of minstrels in the Mycenaean era. So I'm for a much, much longer era of emergence than I think most of the scholars who are fashionable currently.

Well, I would as a historian add, to qualify that slightly, that so far as the social customs, the imagined background in which the heroes move, the houses they live in, etc., these are all, it seems, from the archaeological evidence, much nearer to the moment of monumental composition than to the Mycenaean period. So I'm entirely with you,

very long tradition, but an awful lot of the stuff that's the background noise, if you like, of the epic duels and whatever. That is more 9th, 8th century than it is 12th, 11th century. I'd like to talk about a couple of things. We're coming to the end. What about the repetitiveness of the language and the repetitiveness of the images attached to the heroes of the piece and heroes of the piece?

What does that give? So the repetitiveness has to do with the technique used to compose without the aid of writing so that you have formally ready-made bits of language that you can use which have the right rhythm and that you have pre-memorised so that you build it out of pieces of language that are already in your repertoire. For modern readers, the difficulty is that this sounds a little bit repetitive and I had students, of course, complained saying, well, dawn of the rosy fingers is nice once, but, you know, 50 plus times it becomes a little bit less thrilling.

But it is expressive because it links everything to how it should be. So Achilles is swift-footed. He should be running on the battlefield chasing the enemy, as he eventually does at the end of the poem. But for most of the poem, he's sulking, motionless in his tent. So the traditional language of Homer reminds us of how the story ought to go. and how things ought to be. And often there is a tension between the traditional formulations that are used and the specific situations that are described in the story.

Presumably the story was known to the audience. So what sense of jeopardy was there when they were listening to it? Might there have been? You may have watched Clint Eastwood Revenge movie 20 times. You're still going to get very excited just before that shootout. Some people are. Well, it all depends on how well it's performed, I think. If you've got a bard that can really make an electrifying atmosphere,

you know, I've seen Anthony and Sir Clairpatrick by Shakespeare about 100 times. I'm still always worried about whether they're actually going to, you know, kill themselves at the end or not, in the hands of good actors. But there is a genuine point about whether the myth was, as it were, fixed. In other words, the essential story components. And just give you one illustration from a later period, Agamemnon, is not killed. in Iskilis by Igistus, he's killed by Clytemnestra. In Homer, he's killed by Igistus, as any normal Greek would expect.

So, in other words, you can play around if you're in drama. You possibly can't play around if you're in the epic. Finally, what impact? Is it possible to summarise the impact? It's just enormous. What does enormous mean? Well, it's the Plato in composing the Republic, as we translate it, excludes poets from his ideal state because he wants to exclude Homer.

Homer is absolutely the elephant in every Greek's room. Alexander the Great had it rolled up and took it everywhere. He probably would not have invaded Bactria, Afghanistan, India and conquered Persia if he had not been enthused by the Iliad. That changed the history of the world. And of course the Romans considered themselves the heirs of the Trojan refugees and this story about the survival of Troy through Ineus travelling on to Italy and founding Rome

is foundational for Western culture so that's another way in which the idea is important. And you consider it's vitally important for the development of theatre, opera and so on and so forth? Absolutely. Basically, Western culture. Absolutely. Undivorcible. Thank you very much. Edithol. Barbara Gassiosi and Paul Cartlitz.

Next week we'll be discussing the history of automata, sophisticated machines apparently human, and are they or are they not going to replace us. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. First automata are Hephaestus's robot. That was good to say.

We should have talked about that. He said he built himself some robots because he's disabled. Tripods that move by themselves and... You know, you're still being recorded here for the watch. What did we do about? did we miss out? Well, I thought we missed out that Patricklis was killed

in the way he was by Hector only because Apollo intervened. Hector is killed by Achilles in the way that he is, only because of the intervention of Athena. It's very interesting. You and I might think Patricklis was killed by Hector,

Hector was killed by Achilles, but integral to the story, the gods and goddesses, they don't fade away, they don't set things in motion, they're actually there. But I thought I said when Patrick Lerner, I said he was killed by a god and two men.

You did, but you didn't specify which god and why Apollo. I don't admit much of the speed we were going. I wanted more grandeur. I wanted to talk about just the way that the literature is of such an elevated nature. So whether it's Athena sort of darting down like a meteor or its use shaking. No, all of it, whether it's somebody giving an oath. But also the encounter between level. Why didn't you?

Sorry? Because you wanted to know those sort of sociological things. I didn't want anything. I asked you questions you could have answered any way you wanted. But what about just a small section on the end on Prime and Achilles' meeting and the women are meeting because we haven't done the end of the poem at all? I give you that, but I think you covered a lot of ground. Yes, we do.

And I do think what I said to read it half-jurkingly is half true, that if you want to, if you come with ideas, about the piece, whatever it is, in this case the early land, that are very, very important to say. You'd easily be able to find ways to say them in the sort of porous questions I ask. I always want to speak when someone else is speaking. I find this as a structural feature of in our time, that I have a point to make when someone else is making their point,

and it goes. It just disappears, inevitably. I thought we covered a lot of ground, actually. Yeah, yeah. We never said that Helen was semi-divine. which is a fact of us. Yes, you did. No, no, you did. No, good, thank God I got that in. It's psychologically tortured.

They're all psychologically tortured. She's tortured. She wishes she wasn't there half the time. You know, Achilles is tortured. Heck he was tortured. It's the greatest sort of psycho-drama in world history as long as well as everything else. But then according to Stisicchorus and Euripanis, she wasn't there and Herodotus, so she wasn't in Troy at all.

Because surely they would have given her back. I mean, it makes sense. She says she misses her husband. and her parents and her little girl. She does say she misses a little girl. But she still goes and sleets with Paris when the opportunity arises. She is a tortured person.

She's not led to that because he's rescued from this battle with Manilaus, this hand-to-hand fight with Melania. And so there's the goddess who reckon... There's a funny moment, actually, when the goddess Aphrodite places, places... Paris in bed with Helen. And then Hector says to him, what are you doing here?

How did you get here? And he says, I don't rightly know. But we still know that they're having sex and we're not told that he raped her in that particular occasion at the end of book three. And I think it is this psychological torture. I mean, in Achilles' dilemma, shall I have a short and glorious life

or shall I just go home and live out to my old age? We didn't actually, I'm not actually, I'm not actually, I'm not actually, I'm not actually a, is, is there any consensus about the relationship in Achilles and Patroclus? There is no homosexual sex whatsoever between them in the Iliad. No. There's plenty outside the Iliad, but whoever put that thing together in the form it's in, not only decided not to, but actually make sure he tells us that they're each sleeping on opposite sides of the tent with their own women.

That is a detail that someone has gone out of their way to put it in. And I think that makes it much more profound. And if you do actually read, I'm not one of these people who thinks that Iliad is about post-traumatic stress disorder. However, when you read about what happens to ordinary soldiers, especially when they've got a weak commander they don't trust. Not trusting commander is a crucial thing. The passionate way they get just one other soldier in an intense friendship,

not at all sexual. But they call each other mom. they call each other pop, they baby each other. Because when you're stuck in some swamp in some part of the world that you don't know, that one intense relationship. And I actually think by not making it sexual, he has completely trumped the relationship with Brescice. I think that's a very good point.

I read it in your notes, I agree with it. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for getting us going. Thank you. Does anyone to your coffee? In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Evan Davis, and I'm here to briefly tell you about my new podcast, Sweet Reason. These are polarised times, debates on social media are pretty shouty sometimes and can pull to the extremes.

So in six programmes, we're trying a bit of an experiment. We'll be trying to have reasonable discussions on the most emotive of issues. Topics like patriarchy or whether people are too ready to take offence these days, identity politics, that kind of thing. I'll be with guests in the studio and out and about us, and my mission is to foster agreement, or at least to better understand disagreement. So do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.