John Dolan, 2017
adapted from the Iliad, attributed to Homer, c. 700 BCE

the fifty-eighth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Michael Cheney

I have mentioned a few times that I think requiring English teachers to include a Shakespeare play in their curriculum is ridiculous.  (Shakespeare is the only author mentioned by name in the California Common Core State Standards for juniors and seniors.)  Shakespeare’s primary strength is his dexterity in a dead language, Early Modern English.  Yes, if you watch a perfor­mance you can get the gist of the story through body language and intonation, which is why I kick off my Shakespeare units by showing “Skwerl”⁠—but the stories are generally borrowed from earlier sources or from history, and what makes Shakespeare worth studying does not reside therein.  You have to dig into the text.  That’s where you find the dense web of rhymes⁠—rhymes of sound and rhymes of meaning⁠—that enthrall the formalists.  You may get a feel for the broad themes by picking up the handful of phrases that still make sense on first listen after 400+ years, but only a careful close reading will uncover the little ideas packed into each line like the tiny gods of each leaf and pebble in a numinous landscape.  And what’s the point, when you could read an excellent book in contemporary English every day for the rest of your life and not even make a dent in the number of books published each year?  The only answer I can come up with is that we used to charge English teachers with the responsibility to introduce successive generations to The Canon, but in recent years priorities have shifted and syllabi have shrunk.  Milton fell out, Chaucer fell out, etc., etc., and eventually Shakespeare was left to serve as the singular personification of The Canon.  Making sure that the next generation has a broad familiarity with English literature has been reduced to “Well, at least make sure they’ve read Romeo and Juliet”.  Even though, again, that play is written in a distant cousin of the language we actually speak.

Of course, there was a literary canon long before a specifically English canon was even imaginable, and at its core was Homer.  But Homeric Greek is an even deader language than Elizabethan English!  I have taught passages from the Odyssey in my classes, but I teach it in translation⁠—the kiddos don’t have to deal with deltas or omicrons unless they get covid.  Which translation, you ask?  When I was first putting together my unit, I looked at liter­ally dozens of them, and finally narrowed it down to six… but I couldn’t settle on any of them.  One translation would be the clear winner for one stanza and then the worst option for the next.  So I wound up cobbling together a synthesis of all six.  I steered clear of translations written in archaic English, particu­larly those rendered in forced rhyming couplets⁠—but many of the modern ones weren’t suitable either, because they aim for maximum fidelity to the Greek and thus sound alien to a reader attuned to 21st-century English.  Preserving the text as a poem at all, even without the rhyming couplets, is an obstacle in itself.  The author of The War Nerd Iliad, who was a prize-winning poet himself before turning to war nerding, says in the introduction that he had “learned […] the hard way” that “prose is what our culture reads”.  Thus, he explains, he has adapted the Iliad into prose.  I say “adapted” rather than “translated” because… well, it’s probably easier just to show you what I mean.  The Iliad starts with Chryses, a priest of Apollo, appealing to Agamemnon, commander of the Greek army during its siege of Troy, to accept a ransom payment in exchange for the release of Chryses’s daughter Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has turned into his per­sonal sex slave.  When Agamemnon refuses, Apollo lets a plague loose among the Greeks, and the leading Greek warriors convince Agamemnon to relent and let the girl go home to her father.  Aga­memnon reluctantly agrees, but, in a fit of resentment, demands that the foremost of those Greek warriors, Achilles, turn over his own sex slave, Briseis, as a substitute for Chryseis.  Achilles quits the Greek army in a rage.  So here’s how a recent translation of the Iliad⁠—that by Peter Green, published by the University of California Press in 2015⁠—begins:

Wrath, goddess, sing of Achilles Pēleus’s son’s
calamitous wrath, which hit the Achaians with countless ills—
many the valiant souls it saw off down to Hādēs,
souls of heroes, their selves left as carrion for dogs
and all birds of prey, and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled—
from the first moment those two men parted in fury,
Atreus’s son, king of men, and the godlike Achilles.

Which of the gods was it brought them into contention?
Lētō’s and Zeus’s son: for he, enraged by the king,
spread a foul plague through the army, and men were dying,
all because Chrysēs his priest had been dishonored
by Atreus’s son. Chrysēs came to the Achaians’ swift ships
to win his daughter’s release, bringing ransom past counting,
in his hands the laurel wreaths of the deadly archer Apollo
on a golden staff, and made his plea to all the Achaians,
but first to the two sons of Atreus, the host’s field marshals:

“Atreus’s sons, and you other well-greaved Achaeans,
may the gods who have their homes on Olympos grant you
to sack Priam’s city, and win a safe homecoming!
But release my dear daughter, accept the ransom I offer,
show respect for Zeus’s son, Apollo, the deadly archer.”

Here’s how Dolan begins:

The captive girl is waiting to hear if she’s going back home.  She watches her old father, the priest, limp down the beach toward her master’s tent.

Her father’s carrying a bag and a wreath.  The wreath is a flag of truce from his god.  She’s trying not to think about it.  She needs to forget her old life.  Back then she was from a good family; she’d never even been out of the family compound without a slave to guard her.  Until the day the Greeks ran up from the sea.

Note the ways that Dolan reshapes the narrative for a modern reader.  He provides some context to help those who aren’t immersed in ancient Greek culture get up to speed: the purpose of the wreaths mentioned in the second stanza of the original, the fact that high-born women were kept sequestered from the public sphere in the Aegean world.  In this tale of gods and kings, he takes the bold step of making Chryseis the slave girl our first viewpoint character.  And he skips the invocation and pre-emp­tive summary of the events about to be related, as to modern readers these are weird rhetorical moves.  He doesn’t just sub­tract, though.  Here’s another comparison, selected more or less at random.  At this point in the story, Zeus has forbidden the gods to interfere in the Trojan War, but Ares learns that the Trojans have killed one of his sons.  Green:

Both muscular thighs Arēs struck with his flattened palms,
and, lamenting aloud, then made this declaration:
“You can’t blame me now, you who have homes on Olympos,
if I seek the Achaians’ ships to avenge my son’s killing,
though it may be my fate to be struck by the bolt of Zeus,
and to lie among other corpses in the blood and the dust.”

So he spoke, and commanded Terror and Rout to yoke
his horses, while he himself put on his gleaming armor.
Then would yet greater, less endurable resentment
and anger have been engendered between the immortals
and Zeus, had not Athēnē, in great fear for all the gods,
hurried out through the doorway, leaving the chair she sat on:
she took Arēs’ shield from his shoulders, the helmet from his head,
the bronze spear from his brawny hand, and set it down,
and lit into reckless Ares with words of rebuke: “You’re mad,
out of your senses, done for! Your ears listen, but uselessly,
your understanding and sense of shame have perished!
Didn’t you hear what the goddess, white-armed Hērē, told us—
she who indeed has come straight here from Olympian Zeus?
Or do you intend to get your quota of suffering,
and be forced back, in great distress, to Olympos,
to sow for the rest of us the seeds of great misfortune?
Zeus will very soon leave the Achaians and the high-spirited
Trojans, will come to Olympos and throw us into confusion,
laying hands on all alike, the innocent with the guilty.
So I’m telling you now to forego your wrath for your son,
since in times past there’s many a stronger, more dexterous fighter
has been killed⁠—and will be hereafter: it’s a difficult business
to safeguard the line and the offspring of every last mortal.”

So saying, she made reckless Ares return to his seat.

Dolan:

Ares goes into a fit, right at the table.  He roars, “I’ll kill those Trojans! I’ll kill every one of them! I don’t care what my father says, I don’t care if he hits me with a lightning bolt, I’m going down to Troy right now!”

He stomps out to hitch up his foul and eerie horses, Panic and Terror.

Athena says to Hera, “Mother! You know he’ll just get hurt!”  Hera runs out after Ares.  As easily as a mother takes her baby’s cap off, she yanks the huge helmet from his head, slides the shield out of his grip, and finally wrenches away his spear.  As she un­dresses him, she scolds, “Stupid boy, have you lost your mind? Father Zeus could squeeze you like a bunch of grapes! And if you make him angry, he’ll come here and do the same to all of us!”

Ares whines, “But they killed my son!”

She laughs, “What was his name, if you care so much about him?”

He scratches his filthy, blood-encrusted hair, then mumbles, “It started with an ‘a,’ I’m pretty sure…”

She grabs him by the scruff of the neck and leads him back to the banquet hall, saying, “Just forget about your son! Not that it matters, but his name was Askalafos, and he was nothing special. Better men than him have died in battle!”

She pushes him back down onto his couch.

The changes just in this short excerpt are many.  Phobos and Deimos (i.e., Fear and Panic) have been changed from Ares’s sons, tending to his horses, into the horses themselves.  The dressing-down Ares receives is changed from coming from his half-sister Athena⁠—goddess of war-as-military-strategy, whereas Ares is god of war-as-brutal-slaughter⁠—to coming from his mother, infantilizing him.  The notion that Ares didn’t even know his son’s name seems to have been a pure invention of Dolan’s.  And yet, for all that, this excerpt, and the rest of The War Nerd Iliad, is surprisingly faithful to the original!  Dolan follows the Iliad stanza by stanza and speech by speech, adding here, cutting there, making little changes, but preserving the overall shape of the story.  I was actually expecting the connections to be a lot looser.

Dolan says that finding an audience beyond students who get assigned the book in class wasn’t the only reason he “ditched the poetic meter”; another was that in modern times poetry, or at least epic poetry, carries with it the connotation that its subject is automatically staid and highbrow.  Dolan says that nothing could be further from the truth⁠—that the Iliad is full of “raw slapstick comedy” and “ultraviolence that makes [A] Clockwork Orange seem like a panto for Eton lads”.  Consider this passage, again selected more or less at random:

Ideomenus catches a Trojan named Erymas and stabs him in the back of the neck, so hard that the spear-point comes out through Erymas’ mouth.  His teeth go flying.  Blood gushes out of his mouth, nostrils⁠—even his eyes!  Erymas has no face left, just a red mush dotted with white teeth.

When I initially read this, I assumed that like Ares scratching “his filthy, blood-encrusted hair”, these details were added by Dolan⁠—that the original had said something like “Ideomenus smote the mighty Erymas” and Dolan had fleshed out the scene to add some gruesome color, in keeping with his agenda to keep the tone as raw as possible.  But no!  Here’s Green’s version:

Idomeneus speared Erymas with his pitiless bronze
in the mouth: the bronze point sheared clean through
beneath the brain, split the white bones apart,
shook his teeth loose, while both his eyes were flooded
with blood, and, as he gaped, from his mouth and nostrils
blood spurted, and death’s black cloud enshrouded him.

Gadzooks!  That’s a very close match.  Out of curiosity, I tracked down the translation of Alexander Pope, circa 1715, and here’s what I found:

Next Erymas was doom’d his fate to feel,
His open’d mouth received the Cretan steel:
Beneath the brain the point a passage tore,
Crash’d the thin bones, and drown’d the teeth in gore:
His mouth, his eyes, his nostrils, pour a flood;
He sobs his soul out in the gush of blood.

So I guess we chalk this one up to Homer!  But Dolan contends that in modern English, “poetic effects work best in paragraphs”, and he does prove to have a gift for poetic effects of his own.  They say that prose works through accumulation and poetry works through selection, and I liked a lot of the strings of words that Dolan selected.  Consider Iris, who is simultaneously the messenger of the gods and the personification of the rainbow.  Whut?  Again, Dolan recognizes that not every reader grew up immersed in Greek mythology, and explains: “Iris is sometimes a young woman with dainty wings sprouting from her milk-white shoulders, but when moved, she dissolves into the rainbow.”  We see this during one of Zeus’s tirades: “Iris, frightened, begins to evanesce, shimmering into something more like sun through rain than a human shape.”  That’s delightful!  And it leads to this, when Poseidon intervenes on behalf of the Greeks (in the form of “a monstrous dust-colored blur that shakes the earth”), and his brother Zeus sends Iris to deliver a message:

Iris bows, transluces, and flows through the sky to stand before Poseidon on the plain of Troy.  How ugly he is, all dirt-dark, wob­bling before her.

In her clear girl’s voice, she intones, “Poseidon, dark-haired prince of the earth, my lord Zeus brings you a message. You are to go up to the gods’ house, or down into your ocean.”

Poseidon seethes, his somewhat human shape fluctuating as he thinks of a reply.  Poseidon has trouble communicating with these bright young gods.  He grunts, “Three brothers! Me, Zeus, Hades!”

She shrugs, “My lord Zeus has instructed me to say that if you do not obey him, he will come down to fight you. He warns you not to challenge him, because he is stronger than you.”

Poseidon is hurt. He tries to explain to this luminous girl-god thing: “Three brothers! Equals! We drew straws! Zeus drew sky, brother Hades drew down-world; I, I got this, earth in between!”

This passage may not seem particularly poetic, but the phrase “luminous girl-god thing” is exceptional.  The juxtaposition of one trisyllabic Latinate word with three monosyllabic Germanic ones, the roller coaster moving from “girl” around to “god” and down to “thing”… obviously none of that is in Homer.  The treat­ment of Poseidon⁠—his mindset, his difficulty maintaining a hu­man pose as Athena does so effortlessly, his primitive speech⁠—also appears to owe much more to Dolan than to the original text.

But speaking of things that are primitive⁠—if Dolan’s aim was to keep an alien literary style from obscuring how primitive the world of the Iliad is, it succeeds.  This is a world before geo­metry, before philosophy, before democracy, in which a cluster of hierarchy-obsessed primates squabble over who gets to rape which of the slave girls, and then spend the rest of the book squaring off against another cluster of hierarchy-obsessed pri­mates, literally bashing each other’s heads in.  They have so re­cently emerged from the Stone Age that when one man does kill another, he usually gets killed a moment later while he frantic­ally tries to strip the rare and precious bronze armor from the corpse of his victim.  Religion is well established, but its central tenet is that the favor of the gods can be won by immolating farm animals.  These gods are imagined as fearsome and power­ful, but no more evolved than we are.  Here’s an example of a typical moment on Olympus.  (I’m using Dolan’s version, but I had a look at Green’s version of this scene and it’s very similar.)  Apollo has turned down a challenge to take on Poseidon in single combat, and his twin sister Artemis steps in:

She scolds Apollo, “Running away again, brother? You’re good at that. You said you’d fight Poseidon!”

Apollo ignores her, but Hera has enough pretext to attack Artemis.

She clamps a big, strong hand on Artemis’s fragile bow, shout­ing, “You like to hunt, do you? You like to kill women in childbirth with your toy bow? Now see how it feels!”

She rips the bow out of Artemis’s hand and starts spanking the Huntress with it.

Artemis writhes and screams while the other gods laugh them­selves breathless at the beating.  All Artemis’s arrows tumble out of her quiver, and her bowstring makes a twanging tune as Hera whacks her with it.

She runs sobbing to hide in her mother Leto’s robe.  Leto strokes her daughter’s bruises.

Hera waves a hand, saying, “Don’t worry, Leto, I won’t beat you. You’re a good mother. Just take your insolent daughter away. And both of you better remember, I’m Zeus’s first wife and always will be.”

Leto gathers up Artemis’s fallen weapons as Hera and Athena watch, sneering.  Artemis runs to Zeus, who takes her on his lap asking, “Who’s been beating you, girl?”

“Your wife Hera! She’s always the one starting trouble!”

Zeus chuckles, “You don’t say.”  He strokes Artemis’s hair, lets her cry her fill.

This is preposterous… and yet eerily familiar.  Like, this is how a lot of people think the government works.  I remember that dur­ing the 2000 presidential campaign, interviewees on NPR were saying that they were going to vote for George W. Bush because his mother was a tough old bag and would knock him back into line if he tried to do something stupid, like shoveling $100 billion per year to the top 1% or starting a disastrous war.  Like, here he is about to sign the legislation and out comes Granny to thwack him with an umbrella.  I don’t know whether it’s more shocking for one of the foundational texts of Western Civilization to think that that’s how power works or for a lot of people three thousand years later to still think that.  As for the savagery⁠—that’s familiar too.  Turning to a random page of the Green translation, I see the lines “Bone crunched, both bloody eyeballs fell in the dust at his feet, / he crumpled and fell. Menelaös set one foot on his breast, / stripped off his armor, and boasted over him”.  But just yesterday I posted an article about the Punisher’s TV series, and, like, it’s pretty much the same thing.  The idea behind The War Nerd Iliad is that the Iliad is not esoteric high art, not “a textbook”, but rather “a campfire story, the greatest of all tall tales”, relatable to regular people of today.  It’s not super encouraging that so many of our cultural artifacts would be similarly relatable to the primitives at whom the Iliad was originally aimed.

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