To our modern eyes, certain aspects of the Iliad (and also of the Odyssey) are unexpected and remarkable. First, the sheer size of the poems, which would have made continuous performance impractical (estimates of the time required vary according to the imagined circumstances, but it could hardly be less than 24 hours for either poem). Second, in order to create such massive poems, the author did not pile story upon story, or (in the case of the Iliad) go through the whole history of the Trojan War, but instead contracted the time-frame into a narrative covering only five days, amplified by a few summaries of the passage of periods of time at the beginning and end (in Book 1, nine days for the plague and twelve for the gods’ visit to the Ethiopians; in Book 24, eleven days for Achilles’ mistreatment of Hektor’s body, and nine for Hektor’s funeral).
Another remarkable feature is the amount of time given over to direct speech by the characters, in the Iliad about 45 percent. Nearly half the time, the audience is not dependent on the narrator but listens directly to a character’s words and thoughts, almost as in a staged drama; and often in the most intensely emotional scenes (Hektor’s farewell to his wife Andromache in Book 6, Achilles’ anguished dialogue with his mother in Book 18) the change of speaker is shown only by a formulaic line lacking even an adverb, as unemotional as the bare speaker’s name in the text of a drama. Book 9, the dispatch of the Greek embassy and its discourse with Achilles, is about 81 percent direct speech.
Most of the speeches fall into certain categories: persuasive (often in assemblies), messages, and battlefield challenges, vaunts, supplications, encouragement, and rebukes. Of particular note are the soliloquies, directly presenting a character’s thoughts (instead of having the narrator tell us about them). There are eleven of these in the Iliad, all introduced by a normal verb of speaking as if they were uttered aloud (as they would be, of course, by the bard), sometimes leading to a decision, as in Hektor’s moving reflections and resolve to face Achilles (22.99-130), sometimes simply giving the character’s reaction to a situation (as in Zeus’ meditations on the buoyant Hektor and Achilles’ grieving horses, 17.441-55).
The personalities of the characters who thus reveal themselves to the listener are not only clearly drawn but often strikingly unexpected. At the very beginning of the poem, the Greek supreme commander Agamemnon betrays himself as brutal (towards a suppliant priest), coarse (in a reference to his wife), ineffective (in face of the plague), and arrogant and foolish in dealing with his disaffected ally Achilles; later, in the face of reverses in battle, he is the first to give up hope and suggest, before all the army, they give up and go home (9.17-28). The immoral wife who abandoned her decent husband to go off with a smooth-talking young foreign guest presents herself as a remorseful penitent who grieves for all the suffering she has caused, and is treated with respect by old King Priam - but still finds her seducer irresistible (Book 3); at the climax of the affliction of the Trojans in the poem, as they receive Hektor’s body, the poet dares to give her a lament for him, moving but still self-absorbed (24.761-75). The warrior leader of the Greeks’ deadly enemies, Hektor, is also kind to Helen, and a devoted family man (with a loving father and mother too), who goes into battle because of the responsibilities of his position (6.441-6) and is to many modern readers the most attractive man in the poem.
Among the legendary Greek heroes, we ourselves might find our ideal soldier not in Achilles, who prays for the defeat of his own allies and rejects a huge compensation for the insult he has received, but in the equally valiant and triumphant young Diomedes, tactful, respectful, and already a wise counselor. Menelaos and Patroklos, each in a subordinate position to a dominant figure (Agamemnon, Achilles), are characterized as gentle, sensitive men, loved and protected by their principals, though both are strong warriors too. There is also much to surprise us in the characters of the gods (see that section, below). Of course we cannot know how much of these conceptions of the figures in the poem is due to its author’s originality, or how different the expansive amount of speech in the Iliad and Odyssey may have been fTom other epics of the time.
The persona of the narrator also emerges in the Iliad, and is likewise rather surprising to us. The proem of the work emphasizes not the glory of the Greeks and their heroes in defeating and sacking the mighty city of Troy, but the suffering and losses inflicted upon them by a quarrel between their leaders. In the battle scenes, the fighters brag of their victories, but the narrator constantly reminds us of the grief of the victim’s survivors and the pathos of the death, far from home, of a young husband and father. He knows the outcome of the characters’ decisions and actions, and occasionally comments upon them, mostly because of their ignorance (‘‘Foolish man!’’) rather than fTom a moral standpoint. Together with his audience (whom he occasionally addresses directly, in ‘‘You would not have thought... ’’ style) he looks back on the great days of the past: the world he shares with his audience is the world of the similes (see that section, below).
World History
