The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

468 Pages·1998·2.75 MB·English

by  Homer, Robert Fagles (Translator)

Table of Contents

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

THE ILIAD

THE TROJAN WAR

THE TROJANS

THE GODS

ACHILLES

THE SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION OF HOMERIC NAMES

BOOK ONE: The Rage of Achilles

BOOK TWO: The Great Gathering of Armies

BOOK THREE: Helen Reviews the Champions

BOOK FOUR: The Truce Erupts in War

BOOK FIVE: Diomedes Fights the Gods

BOOK SIX: Hector Returns to Troy

BOOK SEVEN: Ajax Duels with Hector

BOOK EIGHT: The Tide of Battle Turns

BOOK NINE: The Embassy to Achilles

BOOK TEN: Marauding Through the Night

BOOK ELEVEN: Agamemnon's Day of Glory

BOOK TWELVE: The Trojans Storm the Rampart

BOOK THIRTEEN: Battling for the Ships

BOOK FOURTEEN: Hera Outflanks Zeus

BOOK FIFTEEN: The Achaean Armies at Bay

BOOK SIXTEEN: Patroclus Fights and Dies

BOOK SEVENTEEN: Menelaus' Finest Hour

BOOK EIGHTEEN: The Shield of Achilles

BOOK NINETEEN: The Champion Arms for Battle

BOOK TWENTY: Olympian Gods in Arms

BOOK TWENTY-ONE: Achilles Fights the River

BOOK TWENTY-TWO: The Death of Hector

BOOK TWENTY-THREE: Funeral Games for Patroclus

BOOK TWENTY-FOUR: Achilles and Priam

NOTES

THE GENEALOGY OF THE ROYAL HOUSE OF TROY

TEXTUAL VARIANTS FROM THE OXFORD CLASSICAL TEXT

NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

I. Editions and Commentaries

II. Critical Works

PRONOUNCING GLOSSARY

The Iliad

HOMER

TRANSLATED BY

Robert Fagles

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

BERNARD KNOX

Copyright © Robert Fagles. 1990
ISBN 0-670-83510-2

To the memory of my father and my mother and for Lynne, Katya and

Nina —

humeis gar theai este, pareste te, iste te panta, hemeis de kleos oion

akouomen oude ti idmen —

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Homer makes us Hearers,” Pope has said, “and Virgil leaves us Readers.”
So the great translator of Homer, no doubt unknowingly, set at odds the

claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one, as we would call the two
traditions now. Homer's work is a performance, even in part a musical event.
Perhaps that is the source of his speed, directness and simplicity that Matthew
Arnold heard — and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold chased
but never really caught. Surely it is a major source of Homer's energy, the loft
and carry of his imagination that sweeps along the listener together with the
performer. For there is something powerful in his song, “that unequal'd Fire and
Rapture” — Pope again — “which is so forcible in Homer, that no Man of a true
Poetical Spirit is Master of himself” while he experiences the Iliad. “In Homer,
and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.”

But it also brings to light the Homeric Question facing all translators: How to

convey the power of his performance in the medium of writing? “Homer makes
us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers.”

Yet the contrast may be too extreme. Virgil the writer was certainly no

stranger to recitation. Homer the performer, as the Introduction speculates, may
have known a rudimentary form of writing. And writing may have lent his work
some qualities we associate with texts in general — idiosyncrasies at times, and
pungency and wit — and with the Iliad in particular, its architectonics, its
magnificent scale, and the figure of Achilles. But even if Homer never used an
alphabet himself, he now seems less the creature of an oral tradition whom
Milman Parry discovered, and more and more its master, as envisioned by
Parry's son, Adam. Homer the brilliant improviser deployed its stock, inherited
features with all the individual talent he could muster. Never more so, in fact,
than in his use of the fixed and formulaic, frequently repeated phrase. Not only is
Homer often less formulaic, but the formulas themselves are often more
resonant, more apt and telling in their contexts than the hard Parryites had
argued for at first. So the original form of Homer's work, while a far cry from a
work of literature as we know it now, is not exactly a song either, pure and
simple. It may be more the record of a song, building over the poet's lifetime
perhaps, or what Marianne Moore would call “a simulacrum of spontaneity.”

Obviously at a far remove from Homer, in this translation I have tried to find

a middle ground (and not a no man's land, if I can help it) between the features

of his performance and the expectations of a con-temporary reader. Not a line-
for-line translation, my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in
rendering Homer's language as to cramp and distort my own — though I want to
convey as much of what he says as possible — nor so literary as to brake his
energy, his forward drive — though I want my work to be literate, with any luck.
For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more
literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a
modern English Homer.

Of course it is a risky business, stating what one has tried to do or, worse, the

principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist the writer later). But a
word or two of explanation seems in order, and the first refers to the more fixed
and formulaic parts of Homer. I have treated them in a flexible, discretionary
way, not incompatible with Homer's way, I think — especially when his
formulas are functional as well as fixed — while also answering to the ways we
read today. It is a matter of “riding easy in the harness,” as Robert Frost once
said of democracy, and my practice ranges from the pliant to the strict. With one
of the most frequently repeated phrases, for example — the line that introduces
individual speeches — I have been the freest, trying to anticipate the speaker's
nuance of the moment yet retaining, at least, the ritual of introductory words for
every speech. When Homer introduces a speech of “winged words,”

However, I rarely if ever omit that well-known phrase, though I like the flight

of the words to vary, with a quick burst at times and a longer drift at others,
according to what a character has to say. And so with Hector's flashing helmet,
in the epithet that clings to Hector's name: I like to ally its gleaming with his
actions, now nodding his head in conversation, now rushing headlong into the
front lines. But a flashing helmet it is, again and again, and not only to make his
own career appear more meteoric and abruptly snuffed out but also to support a
chain of tragic ironies throughout the poem. For the flashing helmet — Hector's
own at first — is soon replaced by the one he strips from Patroclus When he kills
him: the helmet of Achilles. So as prophecy would have it, when Achilles
destroys Hector in revenge he must destroy himself as well, his flashing mirror-
image embodied in his victim, and the helmet he will wear, fire-new and forged
by Hephaestus, flashes like the helmet of Ares when Achilles closes for the kill
(Book 20.45,22.158).1 The more the epithet recurs, in short, the more its power
can recoil. And the inevitability of its recoil for Hector is further stressed by a
repeated passage in the Greek repeated verbatim in the English version. The
words that describe the death of Patroclus are exactly those that describe the
death of Hector six books later (16.1001-5, 22.425-29): the first death, both in
the mind of Achilles the avenger and in the style of his maker, will have served

as warrant for the second. All in all, then, I have tried for repetition with a
difference when variation seems useful, repetition with a grim insistence when
the scales of Zeus, the Homeric moral balance, is at issue.

Turning briefly to Homer's metrics: though my way is more remote, it is also

meant to occupy a flexible middle ground, here between his hexameter line —
his “ear, ear for the sea-surge,” as Pound describes it — and a tighter, native
English line. If, as the Introduction claims, the strongest weapon in Homer's
poetic arsenal is variety within a metrical norm, the translation opts for a freer
give-and-take between the two, and one that offers a good deal more variety than
uniformity. Working from a loose five-or six-beat line but inclining more to six,
I expand at times to seven beats — to imply the big reach of a simile or some
vehement outburst in discourse or the pitched fury of combat on the field — or
contract at times to three, to give a point in speech or action sharper stress. Such
interplay between variety and norm results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war
peculiar to translation, between trying to encapsulate the meaning of the Greek
on the one hand and trying to find a cadence for one's English on the other, yet
joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. I hope it results, at any rate,
not only in giving my own language a slight stretching it may need and
sometimes gets these days, but also in lending Homer the sort of range in
rhythm, pace and tone that may make an Iliad engaging to a modern reader. It
may be a way as well, again at a far remove, of trying to suggest the tension in
Homer's metrics, his blend of mass and movement both — so much ongkos yet
so much grace and speed.

In aiming for these and other objectives in a version of the Iliad, I have had

many kinds of help. The greatest has come from my collaborator, Bernard Knox,
whom I would rather call a comrade. Not only has he written the Introduction
and Notes to the translation but he has commented on my drafts for several

years. And when I leaf through[1] those pages now, his commentary seems to
ring my typescript so completely that I might be looking at a worse-for-wear,
dog-eared manuscript encircled by a scholiast's remarks. Or is it something of a
battle-map as well? The vulnerable lines at the center are shored up by a combat-
tested ally, whose squads reinforce the weakest sectors and who deciphers
Homer's order of the day and tells a raw recruit what war — the movements of
armies and the sentiments of soldiers — is all about. And more, what tragedy —
in this, the first tragedy — really means. In Book 9 of the Iliad old Phoenix calls
for a man of words and a man of action too. My good fortune has been to work
with such a man.

Several modern scholars and critics, cited in the bibliography, have helped as

well, and so have several modern translators of the Iliad, in whole or part. Each
has introduced me to a new aspect of the poem, another potential for the present.
“For if it is true,” as Maynard Mack proposes, “that what we translate from a
given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true
that we see in it what we have the power to translate.”

So my debts to others are considerable, and here I say my thanks to William

Arrowsmith, Robert Graves, Martin Hammond, Richmond Lattimore,
Christopher Logue, Paul Mazon, Ennis Reese and E. V. Rieu. A few I have
known in person, most I have never met. Yet I suspect we all have known each
other in a way, having trekked across the same territory, perhaps having all
encountered the nightmare that haunted Pope — “that he was engaged in a long
journey,” as Joseph Spence reports, “puzzled which way to take, and full of
fears” that it would never end. And if you reach the end, the fears may start in
earnest. In any event, the translator I have known the best is the one to whom I
owe the most, Robert Fitzgerald, both for the power of his example and because,
at a sensitive moment, he heartened me to “fit on your greaves and swordbelt
and face the moil or the melee.”

Many other friends have come to my side, some by reading, some by

listening to me read the work-in-progress, and responding in close detail with
criticism or encouragement or a healthy combination of the (wo. Most
encouraging of all, none has asked me, “Why another Iliad?” For each
understood, it seems, that if Homer was a performer, then his translator might
aim to be one as well, and that no two performances of the same work — surely
not of a musical composition, so probably not of a work of language either —
will ever he the same. The timbre and tempo of each will be distinct, let alone its
deeper resonance, build and thrust. My thanks, then, to Marilyn Arthur, Paul
Auster, Sandra Bermann, Charles Beye, Claudia Brodsky, Beth Brombert, Victor
Brombert, Clarence Brown, Rebecca Bushnell, Robert Connor, Robert F. Go-
heen, Rachel Hadas, Robert Hollander, Samuel Hynes, Edmund Keeley, Nita
Krevans, Janet Lembke, David Lenson, William Levitan, Herbert Marks, J. D.
McClatchy, Earl Miner, William Mullen, Georgia Nugent, Joyce Carol Oates,
Joanna Prins, Michael Putnam, David Quint, Richard Reid, James Richardson,
Charles Segal, Steven Shankman, Michael Simpson, Raymond Smith, Paolo
Vivante and Theodore Weiss.

And several classicists have lent a steady hand: William A. Childs, George

Dunkel, Elaine Fantham, John Keaney, Richard Martin, Glenn Most and Froma
Zeitlin. The published commentaries of other scholars, cited among the further
readings, and even some unpublished have helped us on our way, thanks to the
kindness and alacrity of their authors. Our book was in its later stages when M.

M. Willcock sent the galleys of his second volume, Books 13 through 24. And
the remaining parts of the commentary-in-progress under G. S. Kirk's editorship
— his own work on Books 5 through 8, J. B. Hainsworth's on 9 through 12,
Richard Janko's on 13 through 16, Mark W. Edwards' on 17 through 20 and
Nicholas Richardson's on 21 through 24 — luckily arrived while each was still
in proof or typescript. The first impulse for the translation, however, came from
the late W. B. Stanford, who, one afternoon in County Wicklow many years ago,
sketched out my route for returning to the source.

The roofs of some great houses have extended welcome shelter to the

translator and his work. Theodore and Mary Cross have turned Nantucket into
Ithaca West with their Homeric hospitality. The Rockefeller Foundation
provided a resident fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio during May
1985. Princeton University gave me leaves of absence in the spring semesters of
1982, 1985 and 1989, and, more important, the chance to study Homer with
many students who have been an education to me. The Program in Hellenic
Studies at the university twice appointed me to a Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship,
first to begin the translation on Greek terrain, then to complete it there years
later. The secretariat of Comparative Literature, from its leader, Carol
Szymanski, to Gary Fuchs, to the Quietwriter and lately, the LaserJet, have been
invaluable in helping to prepare the final manuscript. And close to the zero hour
Deborah Fryer shared the task of placing the Greek line numbers throughout the
text.

To produce the book at hand, my editor, Kathryn Court, assisted by Caroline

White, has treated the writing and the writer, too, with energy, affection and
address. Beena Kamlani's efforts to copy-edit a fairly large and unruly
manuscript have been heroic. Ann Gold, with all her artistry joined by Amy
Hill's, has designed a volume to companion the two that came before it. Anita
Karl and James Kemp have drawn up the fine maps to guide the reader through
the wilds of Homer's world. Mary Sunden has labored long and hard with Joe
Marcey and Peter Smith to find this version of the Iliad some readers. And the
good people at Viking Penguin — Michael Jacobs, Christine Pevitt, Leigh
Butler, Paul Slovak, Marcia Burch, Faye Darnall, Maureen Donnelly, Daniel
Lundy, Cynthia Achar, Roni Axelrod — all have been loyal allies in New York.
In London Peter Carson and Paul Keegan have been generous hosts to the latest
Homer in the house. Before he left the publisher my former editor, Alan
Williams, who saw me through the troubles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, gave
my plans a happy push toward Troy. Prior to the present volume, Ben
Sonnenberg graciously opened the pages of Grand Street and ran three books of
the translation. Reginald Gibbons gave another book a timely berth in

TriQuarterly. And through it all, without the unfailing stay and strategies of my
friend and agent Georges Bor-chardt, assisted by Cindy Klein, this Iliad might
never have been published.

“The Classics, it is the Classics!” Blake exclaimed, with pointed reference to

Homer, “that Desolate Europe with Wars!” The violence of the Iliad can be
overpowering, as it was for Simone Weil and many others, yet, as the
Introduction observes, Homer makes that violence coexist with humanity and
compassion, as close together as the city at war and the city at peace emblazoned
on Achilles' shield. If the translation offers any sense of this, it is because the
translator has often consulted the familiar spirits of Adam and Anne Parry, and
always relied on the Muses summoned in the dedication, chief among them
Lynne.

R.F.
Princeton, New Jersey June 17, 1990

INTRODUCTION

THE ILIAD

“Iliad” is a word that means “a poem about Ilium” (i.e., Troy), and Homer's

great epic poem has been known as “The Iliad” ever since the Greek historian
Herodotus so referred to it in the fifth century b.c. But the title is not an adequate
description of the contents of the poem, which are best summed up in its opening
line: “the rage of Peleus' son Achilles.” The incident that provoked Achilles' rage
took place in the tenth and final year of the Achaean attack on Troy, and though
Homer does work into his narrative scenes that recall earlier stages of the war
(the muster of the Achaean forces in Book 2, for example, and Priam's first sight
of Agamemnon and the other Achaean chieftains in Book 3), the rage of Achilles
— its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences — is the theme of the
poem, the mainspring of the plot.

Chryses, a priest of Apollo, whose daughter has been carried off by the

Achaeans in one of their raids, comes to the camp to ransom her. But she has
been assigned, in the division of the booty, to the king who commands the
Achaean army, Agamemnon, and he refuses to give her up. Her father prays for
help to Apollo, who sends a plague that devastates the Achaean camp. Achilles,
leader of the Myrmidons, one of the largest contingents of the Achaean army,
summons the chieftains to an assembly. There they are told by the prophet
Calchas that the girl must be returned to her father. Agamemnon has to give her
up, but demands compensation for his loss. Achilles objects: let Agamemnon
wait until more booty is taken. A violent quarrel breaks out between the two
men, and Agamemnon finally announces that he will take recompense for his
loss from Achilles, in the form of the girl Briseis, Achilles' share of the booty.
Achilles represses an urge to kill Agamemnon and withdraws from the assembly,
threatening to leave for home, with all his troops, the next day. The priest's
daughter is restored to him, Apollo puts an end to the plague, and Briseis is
taken away from Achilles' tent by Agamemnon's heralds.

Achilles turns to his goddess mother Thetis, asking her to prevail on Zeus,

father of gods and men, to inflict loss and defeat on the Achaeans, so that they
will realize how much they need him. Zeus is won over by Thetis (to whom he is
indebted for help on a previous occasion), and in spite of the vehement
objections of his wife Hera (who, like his daughter Athena, hates the Trojans and
works for their destruction), he turns the tide of battle against the Achaeans. The
Trojan leader Hector, son of Troy's old King Priam, drives the Achaeans back on

their beached ships, round which they are forced to build a wall and ditch. At the
urging of his chieftains, Agamemnon sends ambassadors to Achilles, offering
him rich prizes and the hand of his daughter in marriage if he will return to the
fighting line. The offer is refused, but the pleas of one of the ambassadors,
Phoenix, an older man who belongs to Achilles' household, do have some effect:
Achilles withdraws his threat to leave the next day; he will stay until Hector and
the Trojans reach his own ships.

The battle resumes and now the Trojan onslaught breaches the wall and

threatens the ships. The Achaean chieftains — Agamemnon, his brother
Menelaus, Diomedes and Odysseus — are wounded one by one. Achilles' closest
friend, Patroclus, sent by Achilles to find out how things stand in the Achaean
camp, brings back the news and also pleads with Achilles to relent. He does so
only partly; he agrees to let Patroclus go into battle with Achilles' troops,
wearing Achilles' armor. This is enough: the Trojans in their turn are thrown
back. But Patroclus is killed by the god Apollo, Troy's protector, and by Hector,
who strips off Achilles' armor and puts it on himself.

Achilles' rage is now directed against Hector, the killer of his dearest friend.

He is reconciled with Agamemnon, and as soon as his mother brings him a
splendid suit of armor, made by the smith-god Hephaestus, he returns to the
battle, and after slaughtering many Trojans, meets and kills Hector. He lashes
Hector's corpse to his chariot and drags it to his own tent; he intends to throw it
to the dogs and birds of prey. For Patroclus he holds a magnificent funeral,
complete with athletic contests and human sacrifice. Whenever renewed grief for
the loss of his friend overcomes him, he drags Hector's body around Patroclus'
grave. But the body has been preserved from corruption by divine intervention,
and the gods now decide (not unanimously, for Hera and Athena object) to send
a message to Achilles through his mother: he is to release Hector's body for
ransom paid by King Priam of Troy. Achilles agrees, but what he does not
anticipate is the arrival in his tent of Priam himself, alone, in the middle of the
night. Instead of sending a herald, he has brought the ransom himself and begs
for the body of his son. Achilles is reminded of his own father, also an old man
who will never see his son again; Achilles knows, for his mother has told him,
that his death is to come soon after Hector's. He sends Priam safely back with
Hector's body to Troy and so, runs the last line of the poem, “the Trojans buried
Hector breaker of horses” (24.944 in the translation). We know already that the
death of Troy's main defender seals the fate of the city and that, as Thetis told
Achilles: “hard on the heels of Hector's death your death / must come at once”
(18.112-13).

This summary is the bare bones of an epic poem that consists in the original

Greek of 15,693 lines of hexameter verse, composed — probably in the late
eighth or early seventh century b.c. — by a poet known to later ages as Homer,
for whose life and activity no trustworthy information has come down to us. The
poem, in other words, is some 2,700 years old. How, the reader may well ask,
did it survive through such an expanse of time? By whom, for whom, and how
and in what circumstances was it composed? Perhaps the best way to proceed to
an exploration of these questions (no one can promise a complete and certain
answer) is backward — from the text of this book.

It is a translation, by Robert Fagles, of the Greek text edited by David Monro

and Thomas Allen, first published in 1902 by the Oxford University Press. This
two-volume edition is printed in a Greek type, complete with lower-and
uppercase letters, breathings and accents, which is based on the elegant
handwriting of Richard Porson, an early-nineteenth-century scholar of great
brilliance, who was also an incurable alcoholic as well as a great wit. This was
of course not the first font of Greek type; in fact, the first printed edition of
Homer, issued in Florence in 1488, was composed in type that imitated
contemporary Greek handwriting, with all its complicated ligatures and
abbreviations. Early printers tried to make their books look like handwritten
manuscripts because in scholarly circles printed books were regarded as vulgar
and inferior products — cheap paperbacks, so to speak.

Back to 1488, then, there is a continuous history of the printed text of Homer,

differing a little from one editor to another but essentially fixed. Before that
Homer existed only as a handwritten book. Such handwritten copies had been in
circulation in Italy for a hundred years or so before the first printed edition.
Petrarch had tried to learn Greek but gave up; Boccaccio succeeded and also in
1360 had a chair of Greek founded in Florence. But before Petrarch, Dante,
though he put Homer in his limbo of non-Christian poets, had never read him,
and could not have read him even if he had seen a text. For the best part of a
thousand years, since the end of the Roman Empire, the knowledge of Greek had
been lost in Western Europe. In the fourteenth century it was reintroduced into
Italy from Byzantium, where a Greek-speaking Christian empire had maintained
itself ever since Constantine made the city the capital of the eastern half of the
Roman Empire. The knowledge of Greek and the manuscripts of the Greek
classics, Homer included, came to Italy just in time; in May 1453 Byzantium fell
to the Ottoman Turks, and the Greek empire of the East came to the end of its
thousand-year career. During its long life it had carefully preserved, copied and
recopied a select number of the Greek masterpieces of pre-Christian times,
Homer prominent among them. The immediate predecessors of the printed
edition of Florence were bound manuscript books written on vellum or on paper