Glimpses of the Iliad

A translation of the poem and its ancient audience

Most general readers and students think of the ancient Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey as very long books, full of uninterrupted blocks of text. This monolithic presence on the page reinforces ideas of the poems’ epic nature, both in terms of genre and literary culture: they are big deals. Yet the poems’ ancient audience members lived before widespread literacy and books; they would have usually heard single selections—episodes of individual songs and scenes—sung after dinner, at weddings or religious festivals, athletic games, all manner of feasts and drinking parties, or evening bonfires in pastures, worksites, battle camps. They would have recalled the poems’ lines and characters in conversations and in solitude.

So when contemporary readers hold a copy of the Iliad and see hundreds of pages of uninterrupted long lines, we could observe that this in itself is not a good translation, or representation, of the ancient contexts in which its stories were sung. Especially in the world of oral poetry, the audience was part of the life of the poem; how can a translation carry across their presence, and ancient performance contexts? How did the story of Achilles’ anger at Troy, which we know as the Iliad, live in archaic hearts?

Glimpses of the Iliad offers excerpts from the epic poem paired with vignettes imagining ancient audience members as they heard the poem, and felt it resonate within their everyday lives. My aim is to rejuvenate the early life of the Iliad through first emphasizing its oral composition and circulation before literacy and writing, and then by exploring the range of ways it was deeply meaningful to men as well as women, of higher or lower classes, of different backgrounds and abilities: chieftains and servants, veterans and children, farmers and artisans, citizens and priestesses, young and old.

In my translations I introduce words and sometimes phrases which are not in the Greek text, but are homophonically inspired by words that are. I translate the first word of the Iliad in Greek, mēnis (a supernatural wrath) as “menace.” Or, in Book 19 Achilles says Agamemnon roused anger in him diamperés—through and through—which I render as “damnably.” I use the homophonic translations to enhance or build upon a meaning which is already present, or to introduce a new image or idea: the Greek word for herd, “agélē,” becomes “the agile herd.” Here, these words are italicized, with a note containing the Greek words which inspired them.¹

This impulse to play with homophonic translation stems from a long fascination of mine with the fact that our word “kill” lives in the middle of how we pronounce Achilles. I want readers to be aware of the homophonic interventions not only so they will be aware of the liberties I’m taking, but also so they can feel invited to sound out the transliterated Greek words. This also lets me include the energy of lexical associations that become accidental images (limēn: a harbor, and then a lemon) which are a central part of my pleasure in reading the Ancient Greek.

Working in different meters and with white space, I hope to underscore the episodic nature of the poem’s original performative contexts, and to give a subtle sense of both generic and metrical variety within the epic. We can imagine ways the ancient poets and rhapsodes utilized pause and pacing while singing lines of dactylic hexameter (a meter as rich with potential for substitutions and rhythmic variation as English iambic pentameter) which most translations may not account for. Further, in thinking of an oral poet and a preliterate/pre-page audience, short lines read out loud can still accumulatively sound like longer lines. Two lines of trimeter can sound like a line of hexameter; three tetrameters like two hexameters; one heptameter like the first half of a ballad stanza. My translations aim to rebalance meter between the eye of the beholder (where metrical attentions such as scansion often focus it) and the ear of the listener.

If this translation is not as faithful to the Greek text as other translations endeavor to be, it is faithful to the following elements of epic: 1) the element of improvisation. Ancient Greek epic poets would have felt a freedom to tweak and make additions to the poem. In this way, I am not only translating “Homer” but also responding to the same tradition in which he was trained. 2) Epic’s original heterogeneity of genre. By employing different meters, I hope my translation mirrors the various kinds of song—pastoral, lament, lyric—ancient audiences would have sensed. 3) Epic’s episodic circulation. Contemporary readers are invited to imagine the shorter and more focused aural encounters with the poem which ancient audience members would have often experienced. 4) Experiencing epic first as a community, then as an individual. We tend to read these stories alone, then talk about them together, in a class or with friends. Yet the short prose glimpses of ancient audience members show how epic is rooted in the act of listening together, even as that togetherness can happen in a variety of contexts, from elite occasions to everyday recollections.

*Some of this preface contains material from a translator’s note previously published in Exchanges.

from Book 12

Where they had always been before
(11.828-832, 847-848; 12.1-33, 430-38)²

A morning breeze, refrigerant as if nocturnal, diffuses the dining hall as Glaudike sweeps up, the bristles of her horsehair broom collecting bits of broken loaves and barley cake. A few guests remain after the dinner that began last night, but most men who stay awake past dawn to talk want only to keep talking. She avoids the hall in the stretches after midnight, when men who want no words hit their peak of wanting. That sort sleeps now. Though sweeping really has just one volume, she works as quietly as she can through remarks regarding trade, temple construction, timing of letters.

Then she wets a cloth, once a woven towel but so well-used its pieces moved to the rag basket, and starts skimming off table scraps to throw to the dogs. She gathers the fish plates, sticky with sauce and bones and all shaped like fish, one especially brightly painted: a yellowfin tuna looking astounded. She stacks finger-washing bowls flecked with rosemary leaves and rose petals. Refills the wobbly lamps and replaces the wicks. Wipes down the tables with an olive oil lather that leaves them shining. She cleans up every trace of the feast, as if it had never happened. She’s done it before and she’ll do it again: this resetting, this restarting, this undoing of an evening.

Last night a visiting bard sang from the angry Achilles story, and she overheard the part where Apollo and Poseidon take down the wooden wall the Greeks built around their ships, years after the war ends. At a pause in work, she and Telephia went to their spot where, unseen, they can hear visiting singers: sitting below a courtyard window, close enough to the pantry’s rear wall they can also hear if Hecamede shouts their names.

They sat down at the moment in the story when Patroclus was cleaning and curing Eurypolus’ battle wound, an arrow in the thigh. Patroclus, son of Menoetius, who had been shaking his head and heart at his friends’ suffering. Patroclus, who had been on his way with a message for Achilles. Eurypolus stopped him, saying we are done for; all our best are wounded or dead, and the Trojans just get stronger. One moment of many in the war everyone knows the Greeks won when they were certain they would lose.³ And since even their doctors were wounded, Eurypolus asked Patroclus for help:

---

But lead me, saving me, to my black ship—
cut this arrow from my thigh,
rinse the black blood with warm water,
and daub gentle remedies of herbs
and pharmacy, the good things you learned,
so they say, from Achilles, who learned       
from Cheiron, most righteous of the centaurs. 

---

So they say … As if he lived in Glaudike and Telephia’s time. As if he hadn’t just spent nine years camped out on a beach with Patroclus. This is one way the girls feel a sliver of themselves within the poem, talking to Patroclus: we’ve heard this about you, is it true? Are you what they say you are? The girls linked arms and listened, leaning against the ashlar and imagining the Greek camp, a chaos of worry centered on Patroclus, who says oh no, who says yes, who says I will not leave you like this. Who uses a knife to remove the arrow, washes the wound, opens a pouch of dried yarrow (the petiolate leaves, not the flowers’ flat corymbs) and across the gushing gash sprinkles the grains:⁴

---

a pain-killer root that staved off all his pains—
and the wound ran dry, and the blood paused its flow.

So enclosed there inside the tent flaps
the determined son of Menoetius
cared for battle-bashed Eurypolus –

but out there, they fought on, great waves
of Argives and Trojans. Neither the trench
of the Danaans nor the broad wall

above it were destined to remain —
the wall they raised for the sake of their ships,
and laid a trench around, neglecting

to give hecatombs glorious enough
to the gods, so the wall could keep cradled
within its hold their swift ships and plunder

unending. It rose against the will
of the immortal gods, and so could not
dig its heels in the ground for long.

As long as Hector kept his life
and Achilles his wrath, and the city
of lordly Priam remained unrazed,

the looming wall of the Achaeans
held firm its stance. But when every
last best of the Trojans was gone,

and many of the Argives—some
dead and some living on—and the city
of Priam perished in the tenth year,

and the Argives in their ships to their dear
fatherlands returned, then it was
that Poseidon and Apollo devised

a plan to annihilate the wall,
assembling the strength of all the rivers
that flow from the heights of Ida

to the sea—Rhesus and Seven-Ways
and Goat-Stream and Rosy Waters,
and Granicus and Aesepus,

and godlike Scamander, and Simoeis,
by whose banks so many leather shields

and helmets, and the time of men
born half-divine, collapsed in the dust—

the mouths of all these Bright One Apollo
curved to flow in a single course,
and for nine days he hurled their surge

against the wall; and Zeus rained down his rain
without surcease, to even more
quickly bury the wall-bits, imploded

to submerge with sea. Then the Earth-Shaker
himself, holding his trident in his hands,
led the charge, and sent sailing into waves

the cornerstones and crossbeams of wood
and rock the Achaeans’ sweat had built—
he made all smooth the strong-flowing lay

of the Hellespont, and again
he blanketed the long sea-shore with sand,
with the wall now annihilated.

And the rivers he set back in their courses
where they had always been before,
and let loose again their lovely-flowing waters.

---

Glaudike hums what threads of these lines she can recall, glancing across the tables of the dining hall which she has cleansed, refreshed—as if never had any meal been shared nor wine spilled, nor plate broken nor argument broken out. No Greek wall ever built on the Trojan shore.

This afternoon she will spin a stock of carded wool. Each hand will maintain its own moving tension, balancing distaff and whorl and transformation of unshaped fluff into a whiskered line, blending into the winding. Last night she heard how even the Achilles song knows such balance:

---

And everywhere, all over, the ramparts and parapets
were splattered with the blood of men from both sides,
both Achaean and Trojan.

                                       They could not force the Achaeans
to flee, but both sides held, as a canny woman who works
the wool with her hands holds it even—guiding the whorl

and twisting the fleece, she balances their measures so
she can secure, for her children, her shabby pay;
just as evenly,

                       the battle and the battling
wore on and on, until Zeus gave the gift of eminence
to Hector, Priam’s son, the first to spring inside the Achaeans’ wall . . .

---

The song knows the woman’s work so well that when the fight gets this close, she appears, weighing and wringing; the taut work she toils over for the sake of her children flashes against the war. Glaudike’s bundles of spun wool go to the household that owns her. When will I spin for my own children, she wonders, just as Mama spun for me. Her mother’s somehow there, too—in the song, outside the war. Soldiered suspense becomes the woman’s wool suspended, and whatever pay she makes is not enough, nor equal to her efforts. The troops knew this feeling, too, she imagines. On both sides.

Hector’s Face
(12.462-3)

Brasidas shifts in his stone seat. The performance must be almost over; he is hungry. The wind hums with coriander and asafetida, pancakes and cheese pies, grilled pike, skewered beef; he thinks about getting up now to be one of the first to eat. But he is too close to the singer to leave without everyone seeing him (there goes Brasidas, they would think, he could not wait), so he presses down his hunger as if flattening dough with the palm of his hand. Hector is about to break past the Greek wall protecting their ships; he seems about to vanquish his enemies. How strong he is—he throws a stone that utterly busts the great gates apart, from their hinges to the solid bar locking them closed.

Then the singer describes Hector’s countenance, and Brasidas’ throat closes, suddenly thick. That—that was the way my brother’s face looked that afternoon, long ago, when he knocked hard at our door. That awful day. My dearest brother, who used to know everything.

---

radiant Hector leapt inside,
his face like sudden night—

1. pharmacy, pharmakon: drug, cure, illness; paused, paúsato: ceased; enclosed, klisíēsi: in the shelters; battle-bashed, beblēménon: wounded; imploded, álíploa: submerged; lay, leĩa: smooth.

2. Here, Book 12 begins with the last lines of Book 11. Book divisions are generally agreed to have been a Hellenistic editorial invention; audiences before the 3^rd century BC would not have had any concept of the Iliad as divided into ‘books,’ particularly since the very idea belongs to a culture of writing and reading which the poem pre-dates.

As one scholiast wrote, “ . . . the division by letters (i.e. the division into twenty-four books) is the work of grammarians. The poet (i.e. Homer), however, in imitation of the nature of things, makes it one body, and the lines are in an uninterrupted sequence” (Nünlist). In the air of oral poetry the poem is a river, unceasing; once pinned to the page, divisions like dams or locks were inserted to shape and contain such flow.

The staunching of Eurypolus’ wound which ends Book 11 leads us to the Book 12 prolepsis where the Greek wall is washed away from the Trojan shore, like so much black blood from a wound.

3. The Iliad refers to the allied forces we call the Greeks not as Greeks, but as Achaeans, Danaans, and Argives.

4. The flowering herb we call yarrow, which is known and still used for its blood-staunching properties, keeps many names and variations. Bloodwort, Devil's Plaything, Nosebleed, Old Man's Pepper, Sanguinary, Soldier's Woundwort, Staunchgrass, Moonshine, Cerise Queen. Its Latin botanical name is Achillea millefolium. The first part memorializes Achilles as herbal healer at Troy, trained by the wise centaur Chiron in the arts of herbs as well as war. The second part, thousand leaf, refers to the plant’s many featherlike leaves. Plumajillo in Spanish, “little feather.” In French, herbe de St. Joseph. Also Carpenter’s Weed.

*and the time of men \ born half-divine: The shields and helmets are metonyms representing warriors, and, remarkably, the poem tells us that an entire epoch, “the time of men born half-divine,” also “collapsed in the dust” at Troy.

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Katie Hartsock‘s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize and was one of Kirkus Review’s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work appears in journals such as Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, At Length, Iron Horse Literary Review, Image, and RHINO. A chapbook, Love-Gifts To Be Delivered via Subterranean Rivers, is forthcoming from Aureole Press. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.