Old glory

Where did it go?

“Two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies.”

Achilles thus identifies the decision at the heart of the Iliad. Does the greatest of Greek warriors choose the fleeting pleasures of life on earth, or the immortal glory of death in battle?

At this late date it's probably not a spoiler to say that things weren't as clear-cut as Achilles thought. Homer has a long tale to tell. Yet the allure of glory drives the epic, and it has captured the imagination of listeners and readers during the millennia since Homer spun it out.

Recently, however, glory has fallen on hard times. Soldiers who die in battle are accorded honor, but this far short of the undying glory of which Achilles spoke. So the question for us is: Are we missing something the Greeks knew? Or did Homer get it wrong in the first place?

Homer might have been overstating his case. He was the one who wanted to be immortal, for his storytelling. And it worked. Witness this essay.

The modern sensibility is still moved by tales of courage under fire. Saving Private Ryan was a hit with critics and audiences. But it's hard to say that the Spielberg film captured our zeitgeist the way Homer's account of the Trojan War did his.

Part of the issue might be that our age doesn't celebrate war the way Homer’s did. In Homer's day, fighting was hand-to-hand and face-to-face. To kill someone in battle was a personal feat. Most people who die in combat these days do so as the result of a push of a button, often far away. The killer isn’t splattered with the blood of the killed.

It's tempting to say that war has become too destructive to celebrate. Certainly the death tolls of the world wars of the 20th century were vastly greater than those of wars in premodern times.

But corrected for demographic scale, the devastation back then might not have been much less. Wars often ended with the annihilation or enslavement of the population of the losing side.

Maybe we’ve become too civilized to celebrate war. Our celebrities aren’t warriors but athletes and entertainers. To the extent this is true, it seems like a good thing. You don't have to kill people to become a hero today, only score touchdowns or sing hit songs. Homer, an artist, could have appreciated that.

There's still the possibility that Homer had it wrong. Or that our reading of Homer is wrong. It's worth remembering that he set his tale centuries before his own time. And given the gods that flit in and out of the story, it would be a stretch to say he intended to produce a realistic portrait of Greek life. Maybe the Iliad is to be understood as comparable to the Edward Zwick movie Glory, made in the 1980s about the Civil War of the 1860s, which casts that earlier time in a heroic glow Homer would have recognized.

Then there is the argument that the Iliad is not really about war at all. Or that it’s about war in the incidental way Moby Dick is about whaling. Achilles, like Ahab, is wrestling with the meaning of life in the face of death. The bloody battle with whales, in the first instance, and Trojans, in the second, is less important than the fight going on inside the protagonist.

But that dodge oversimplifies. A story doesn't have to be about one thing or the other. It can certainly be about both. Glory mattered to Achilles. It resonated with the audiences for the Iliad down the centuries.

It doesn't resonate in the same way anymore. That’s probably one reason the Homer most people these days know is Bart’s dad.