Heroes and the Homeric Iliad

Heroes and the Homeric Iliad

By Gregory Nagy

1. Admired through the ages as the ultimate epic, Homer's Iliad, along with its companion-piece, the Odyssey, was venerated by the ancient Greeks themselves as the cornerstone of their civilization.1 By force of its prestige, the Iliad sets the standard for the definition of the word epic: an expansive poem of enormous scope, composed in an archaic and superbly elevated style of language, concerning the wondrous deeds of heroes. That these deeds were meant to arouse a sense of wonder or marvel is difficult for the modern mind to comprehend, especially in a time when even such words as wonderful or marvelous have lost much of their evocative power. Nor is it any easier to grasp the ancient Greek concept of hero (the English word is descended from the Greek), going beyond the word's ordinary levels of meaning in casual contemporary usage.2

2. What, then, were the heroes of the Iliad? In ancient Greek myth, heroes were humans, male or female, of the remote past, endowed with superhuman abilities and descended from the immortal gods themselves.3 The prime example is Akhilleus, more commonly known as Achilles in the English tradition. This, the greatest hero of the Iliad, was the son of Thetis, a sea-goddess known for her far-reaching cosmic powers.

3. It is clear in the epic, however, that the father of Achilles is mortal, and that this greatest of heroes must therefore be mortal as well. So also with all the ancient Greek stories of the heroes: even though they are all descended in some way or another from the gods, however many generations removed, heroes are mortals, subject to death. No matter how many immortals you find in a family tree, the intrusion of even a single mortal will make all successive descendants mortal. Mortality, not immortality, is the dominant gene.

4. In some stories, true, the gods themselves can bring it about that the hero becomes miraculously restored to life after death - a life of immortality. The story of Herakles, who had been sired by Zeus, the chief of all the gods, is perhaps the most celebrated instance.4 But even in such a case, the hero has to die first. It is only after the most excruciating pains, culminating in his death at the funeral pyre on the peak of Mount Oeta, that Herakles is at long last admitted to the company of immortals. In short, the hero can be immortalized, but the fundamental painful fact remains: the hero is not by nature immortal.

Addendum: the Odyssey is the most extended narrative about immortalization. But it happens only on a symbolic level. The Odyssey makes it clear that Odysseus will have to die, even if it happens in a prophecy, beyond the framework of the surface narrative.

5. The gods themselves are exempt from this ultimate pain of death. When the god Ares goes through the motions of death after he is taken off guard and wounded by the mortal Diomedes in Scroll 5 of the Iliad, we detect a touch of humor in the Homeric treatment of the scene, owing to the fact that this particular "death" is a mock death.5 In the world of epic, the dead seriousness of death can be experienced only by humans.

6. Mortality is the dominant theme in the stories of ancient Greek heroes, and the Iliad and Odyssey are no exception. Mortality is the burning question for the heroes of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and for Achilles and Odysseus in particular. The human condition of mortality, with all its ordeals, defines heroic life itself. The certainty that one day you will die makes you human, distinct from animals who are unaware of their future death and from the immortal gods. All the ordeals of the human condition culminate in the ultimate ordeal of a warrior hero's violent death in battle, detailed in all its ghastly varieties by the poet of the Iliad.

7. This deep preoccupation with the primal experience of violent death in war has several possible explanations. Some argue that the answer has to be sought in the simple fact that ancient Greek society accepted war as a necessary and even important part of life.6 Others seek a deeper answer by pointing to the poet's awe-struck sense of uncontrollable forces at work in the universe, even of a personified concept of Force itself, which then becomes, through the poet's own artistic powers, some kind of eerie esthetic thing.

8. But there are other answers as well, owing to approaches that delve deeply into the role of religion and, more specifically, into the religious practices of hero-worship and animal-sacrifice in ancient Greece. Of particular interest is the well-attested Greek custom of worshipping a hero precisely by way of slaughtering a sacrificial animal, ordinarily a ram.