The Iliad

 

This is one of the oldest books in the Western Canon. Most of us think we know it: Helen of Greece ran off with Paris of Troy, a war runs for ten years, and eventually the Trojan Horse happens and Troy falls in a rage of fire, pillage, and rape. All of this was because Paris had made the mistake of slighting Hera and Athena, who wanted their revenge against Paris. And apparently nobody thought to ask "Why the hell are we doing this?" Heck, for a lot of people it's a bit of chronological snobbery. "Look at those stupid ancients! Fighting a ten year war over a woman who clearly didn't want to stay with her husband!"

That. Is. Not. The Iliad. At all. 

The Iliad is not the ten year war. It is toward the end of the war. The humans are tired. They want to go home. A lot of people have died. And folks are just wanting it to be over. But the gods are not through. Hera and Athena are bound and determined to destroy Troy, to wreck that whole city to get back at Paris. The gods keep pushing and prodding the humans into greater and greater acts of violence.

And before you start scoffing at the stupid humans reacting to virtual gods.... go check Twitter. I mean, throw up in your mouth if you must, but go check Twitter. And then ask yourself how on earth some of those ragefests could possibly go on as they have?

"But Nathan," you may say. "That's humanity at its worst." And you're right, but that's not what Homer is showing. Homer shows something much worse. These heroes are doing what they're doing because they're at their best. Their virtues of loyalty, pride in country, courage in the face of  danger, are just as prone to being manipulated as their vices. And in so doing Homer makes a more chilling point: our virtues are actually easier to manipulate, because they are stronger. If someone can short-circuit your brain your virtues can keep you going on for a much longer time than your vices.

But even the idea that the gods' influence is inherently evil is... complicated. Because the ultimate "win" of the narrative, Achilles weeping with Priam, only comes about because Zeus tells Achilles to do so. Many of the moments of actual heroism and goodness that occur in The Iliad are because the gods intervened. So the whole "the gods are bad" is.... reductive. The gods are the gods. Whether you think they exist or not the group-think that they are shown to be doing in The Iliad is very real, and Homer's insight into how far and how long  it can be leveraged is nothing short of chilling.

The number one thing I did not expect is just the sheer anguish in The Iliad. People are killed brutally, explicitly, intimately, and cruelly. The pearl-clutching and "only focus on nice things" part of my brain (gotten from people who claim to want to preserver Western Civilization) spent over five hundred pages dying in the face of Homer's brutal onslaught. And Homer enjoys writing these deaths down, do not doubt it; there's a detail to the killings that speaks of obsession, of being unable to get it out of your head, and whether one likes to admit it or not that level of obsession is frequently pleasant.

But then Homer did something I didn't anticipate. He doesn't just kill people brutally; Homer give s a lot of them stories. And not just "Captain of the Guard" sorta stuff, but goes into sometimes long detail about where this particular corpse comes from. And how their family will miss them. And how nobody on the field of battle gives one solitary crap, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and now their tongue is on the other side of their head... along with all their brains. Most of The Iliad is about the ruination of family after family after family as fathers, sons, and husbands are brutally killed and looted. It actually gets numbing, how much death there is. 

And Homer doesn't skimp on the living, either. These are not simple characters, by any stretch. Even douche nozzles like Agamemnon have more than a few moments of sheer badassery and humanity.  I mean, you know someone has sympathy when they can find a good moment for Menelaus! The folks that are generally better human beings (like Odysseus) have more than a few moments of weakness, and everyone comes out... with a lot more nuance than I expected. This is easily one of the deepest and nuanced takes on characters I've ever read, especially considering just how large the core cast is, nevermind all the other stories Homer recounts!

That surprise is chronological snobbery on my part, by the way. I'll admit it, freely! It's so hard to look at the past with any amount of objectivity and appreciation in any day and age, but I can't help but feel the poison of our modern age in a particular way. Our demand for squeaky clean, moral characters, who gets over themselves and becomes more, all on their own, is not only not Western, but it's completely unChristian; all fall short of the glory of God. All. All. ALL. The ancients knew it. They embraced it.

Why don't we to this extent? Cause I guarantee you we don't. It's been mostly lost to us. George R.R. Martin plays at this level of sympathy, but even he comes up short. He's a lot closer to our canon than most people would like to imagine.

So why do conservatives try to sanitize our own heritage? Why do conservatives shy away from what made us great and insist on squeaky clean narratives where everything works out?? 

And call it conservatism? 

What, exactly, are conservatives trying to conserve?

And why do leftists not seem to understand they can't run away from it? No matter how hard they try?