Quote:
Originally Posted by 6charlong
This thread is apparently closed but I finally finished with The Iliad and I wanted to mention what I took from the book.
I was impressed at what a standup fight war was to old blind Homer. It was a lot like factory work: when the sun goes down everyone goes home, eats supper and hits the sack to be ready to get up the next day and go back to work. Given their technology this was probably workable but I'd be very surprised if both sides didn't sent out patrols at night and someone had to police up the bodies which would have been a big operation.
In general, the tactics he describes were pretty much unbelievable. He describes chariots being driven through the opposing force with a driver and an archer who, oddly, is only there to shoot at heros from the opposing side. Of course, the tactic involved is trampling the enemy infantry with a team of horses. I noticed that the one most often killed here was the driver rather than the hero with the bow. That was surely a reasonable counter tactic by the opposing infantry. I realize both Greeks and Trojans lived in aristocratic societies and the hero thing supported the Superman ideal but it was issues like this that stretched my credulity and turned the narrative away from a description of a war into something else.
The only infantry tactic Homer describes is: "There they are! Let's get 'em!" It's seriously hard to believe this from the people who invented the phalanx.
They use gods to explain the irrational fortunes of war rather than looking for the reasons things happen, the source of tactical thinking. It's hard to believe that a commander as incompetent as Agamemnon could keep the loyalty of men in combat far from home. There is nothing in this story to hint at where the Greeks and Trojans acquired discipline.
In the end I had to conclude that The Iliad has little to do with war or history. It seems to be a well written religious tract lying at the heart of Western Civilization. The story involved me and the language, seen through interpreters, was engaging. I read the Lattimore translation on my book reader and listened to the Stephen Mitchell translation on audio working back and forth between the two experiences. I think it works better in aural form but I had to rely on the text version to pick up the details.
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The text stems (partly) from an oral tradition that likely dates back to Into-European unity, and some elements are very, very old - such as the use of bronze weaponry, the boar's head helmet, etc. Older still are some of the stock phrases that he uses, whose exact cognates can be found in other Indo-European languages (such as 'undying fame', which has an exact cognate in Sanskrit), making these elements (currently) over 4000 years old (The Iliad is believed by many scholars to have been written in the 8th century B.C., just to compare)! Thus, Homer was not describing warfare as it would have been during his lifetime, but rather as it would have been hundreds of years earlier (around 1200 B.C.), probably inserting some modern warfare elements as well, and with a sprinkling of pre-historic in there for good measure, too. Also, quite a few of the 'players' in the Iliad are also of divine or semi-divine origin, and there is a lot more of the mythic in there mixed in with the historic than one would be led to believe at first glance, so a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief is probably good here.