Books: Olympian Satire

THE ANGER OF ACHILLES: HOMER’S ILIAD (383 pp.)—Translated by Robert Graves—Doubleday ($4.95).

What has been overlooked by most classicists as well as by the grammarians of ancient Greece. Translator Graves theorizes, is that the Iliad was meant to be entertainment, not solemn tragedy. In Graves’s view, the poem is a satirical work in which Homer lampooned the princelings at whose courts he recited, while pretending to hymn the heroes of the past. In this view, Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, is the prize buffoon. And when Hector, the Trojan leader, offers to stake the whole war on a single combat, the Greeks respond at first with resounding silence. Then Menelaus, whose wife Helen set off the strife by running away with Paris, grudgingly accepts the challenge—but quickly lets himself be talked out of it. When at last Ajax is chosen by lot, he and Hector spar for a minute and then agree it is really too dark to fight.

Jogging Verse. Each Greek leader, of course, has his day of bloodshed—even Agamemnon is transformed for a few lines into a ferocious slaughterer of Trojans. Homer found this a necessary dodge, Graves believes, because powerful men in the poet’s time considered themselves descendants of Troy’s besiegers. While Homer composed in verse, presumably because it made the Iliad easier for court singers to memorize. Graves uses a combination of jogging, rhymed verse—for invocations, hymns and similes—and clear, unornamented, semicolloquial prose. His opening invocation suggests the rhymed couplets of Alexander Pope’s Iliad: Sing, MOUNTAIN GODDESS, sing

through me

That anger which most ruinously Inflamed Achilles, Peleus’ son And which, before the tale was done, Had glutted Hell with Champions—bold,

Stern spirits by the thousandfold . . . Then, with the air of a minstrel who stills his lute and steps forward to address his audience, Graves breaks into prose: “You wish to know which of the gods originated the quarrel between these Greek princes, and how this happened? I can tell you . . .”

Squalling Grammarians. Traditional translations make much of Homer’s epithets (Hera is “white-armed”; Odysseus generally “crafty”). Graves uses them sparingly, and sometimes ironically. The gods are treated with something less than respect; Zeus is a blowhard who hardly ever means what he says, and Hera, his wife, might be a garden-club president. When Zeus, who favors the Trojans, remarks that Hera protects the Greeks as if they were her own bastards, she replies pertly: “Revered Son of Cronus, what a thing to say!” Cartoonist Ronald Searle’s illustrations wittily support Graves’s wry treatment of the Olympians. Whether or not Graves’s Iliad will endure as a satire, it is certainly the most charming translation in English since Pope’s, and may also be the best. At the end of his preface, Graves promises to pour a libation of red wine “to Homer’s shade, imploring pardon for the many small liberties I have taken.” It seems likely that he will get his pardon from Homer, and also, as he forsees, a squall of protest from Homer’s loyal grammarians.