Is There More for Christians in the Works of Homer?
Christopher Nolan’s release of The Odyssey renewed the buzz around Homer and his two epic poems. Works of such defining significance are never far from the public discourse though. Unfortunately, in the Christian classical education realm most of that conversation focuses on the moral shortcomings of the ancient Bronze Age world. The heroes of both The Iliad and The Odyssey relentlessly pursue glory that will secure immortality in memory through violence and plunder. Christians quickly write off the works of Homer as the hopeless futility of a pre-Christian world. They show the folly of the Bronze Age warrior ethos that sought women, riches, violence, and glory. But is this approach any better than that of modern progressive academics? They also scoff at the poems as relics of the Dark Ages glorifying violence, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and Greek ethnocentrism. In either view, what value is there in reading Homer if these themes are all the reader can glean from them? Furthermore, how can these works have endured as the foundations of Western Civilization with a message so base? There must be far more to these poems than either approach allows. There is more available to the Christian reader specifically. Homer’s epics are not merely cautionary tales of paganism. They have stood the test of time because they supply a rich and enduring picture of the human soul.
The Iliad
The opening lines of The Iliad invoke the Muses to sing of the rage of Achilles. Agamemnon has wronged Achilles, and Achilles is angry about it. His rage and its ramifications are the theme of the poem. After a successful raid, Agamemnon took Chryseis, daughter of the priest of Apollo, as his victory prize. The girl’s father begged for her return, but Agamemnon refused, insulting the man to boot. Chryses prayed to Apollo, who smote the Greeks with a plague. Achilles implored Agamemnon to return Chryseis and appease Apollo. It would be dishonorable for the king to be left without a war prize, so Agamemnon agrees to return the girl, but only after taking Briseis, the woman awarded to Achilles. In protecting his own honor, Agamemnon dishonors Chryses, Apollo, and Achilles. Achilles is outraged. He nearly kills Agamemnon in response. No reader would disagree that Achilles is firmly in the right. It’s what Achilles does with his rage though that undermines his moral standing.
Achilles refuses to fight the Trojans anymore. He withdraws to his tent and rebuffs any entreaties of his comrades to swallow the conflict with Agamemnon and return. Not only does he absent himself from battle, but he asks his sea nymph mother Thetis to beg Zeus to intervene on behalf of the Trojans against the Greeks. Achilles in his wrath is now praying for the death and defeat of his fellow Greeks. He only eases up enough to let his best friend Patroclus enter battle with Achilles’ armor to rally the Greeks.
When Hector kills Patroclus, thinking him Achilles at first, the wrath of Achilles erupts again. Achilles rejoins the fight with new armor and goes on a gory rampage. He even fights the river god Xanthus who is angry about the number of slain bodies with which Achilles has clogged the river. His rage crescendos when he finally fights Hector. Achilles not only kills Hector, but ties him to his chariot and parades his body around Troy. The rage of Achilles has carried him past revenge to the level of inhuman cruelty.
The rage of Achilles cuts him away from his own humanity. He has descended to the level of the animals by so dishonoring Hector’s body. Carrion destroys bodies of the dead. Humans do not. His humanity is not restored until his rage has been dealt with, which comes at the end of the poem. Hector’s father Priam comes secretly to beg for the return of the body of his son from Achilles. Achilles’ wrath finally abates as he sees Priam come to “endure what no one on earth has ever done before–I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”[1] At this moment, Achilles sees in the old king his own father, whom he knows will one day have to weep over Achilles as Priam weeps for Hector. The image breaks Achilles:
Those words stirred in Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.[2]
In this scene, one of the most beautiful in all of literature, Achilles and Priam weeping together, the soul-destroying wrath of Achilles has finally been pacified. Achilles returns the body of Hector to Priam and promises a truce to allow the Trojans time for a proper burial. As Priam sleeps in the shelter of Achilles’ dwelling that night, Achilles lays down to sleep “with Briseis in all her beauty sleeping by his side.”[3] With his rage pacified, Achilles is once again human.
By showing Achilles weeping with Priam and sleeping beside Briseis, Homer shows something of what has gone on in Achilles’ soul. The great rage that is the subject of The Iliad dropped Achilles to a level of vicious subhuman behavior fit for the animals, not men. Priam’s request for Hector breaks that wrath. Once the wrath is broken, Achilles returns to what a normal human being does: lives in proper fellowship with other humans. Achilles mourns with the mourning Priam, eats with Priam and his own companions, and sleeps with Briseis. Wrath allowed to spiral out of control dehumanizes the person and destroys his soul. It cuts him off from normal human relationships. Only when that wrath has been checked can restoration take place.
Make no mistake, Homer’s characters are pursuing the ancient Greek conception of immortality through lasting glory. Yet, to reduce The Iliad to a barbaric glorification of violence is mistaken. War was an inescapable reality of life in the ancient world that the modern audience fails to comprehend. Because of that, the ancient world valued great warriors who were noble and courageous in combat. Therefore, the great literary works celebrate those who display those traits. However, while The Iliad celebrates feats of martial prowess, it has more to teach about the inhuman extreme of violence run amok and the damage done to the individual who does not restrain himself. To miss this by reducing the poem to a cautionary tale about life as a Bronze Age pagan would be to lose out on a beautiful story of uncontrolled anger, redemption, and restoration of humanity.
The Odyssey
If The Iliad contains Homer’s description of the soul-destroying wrath of Achilles and its consequences, it also shows the pursuit of glory central to the ancient Greek warrior ethos. To hear Homer’s critique of this worldview, one must turn to The Odyssey. When the two poems are taken together the reader gets to see that a life of glory is little comfort in the grave, and home and family are far more valuable. Odysseus examines the illusory lifestyle offered to him and rejects it in favor of returning to his wife, son, and kingdom.
When Odysseus first appears on the scene in The Odyssey, he is on the island of the nymph Calypso living partly as her lover, partly as her slave. Hermes has been sent to order Calypso to release Odysseus to return home. Though Odysseus lives with the beautiful goddess, Hermes cannot find Odysseus at first. Odysseus spends his time off alone by the seashore, “weeping there as always, wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish, gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears.”[4] Odysseus lives with Calypso in eternal sensual pleasure, yet he longs and weeps for “his foiled journey home.”[5]
Calypso agrees to release Odysseus and send him on his way, but she makes one last attempt to convince him to stay with her. She reminds Odysseus that she is immortal and eternally beautiful, that his wife Penelope will age and die. Penelope in her youth could not rival Calypso’s beauty: “Hardly right, is it, for mortal woman to rival immortal goddess? How, in build? In beauty?”[6] Add to this that Penelope has aged twenty years since Odysseus last saw her and it is plain the reminder to Odysseus that he can have eternal pleasure with the never-aging goddess, or return to his mortal wife whose beauty will fade with age. Calypso tacks on the ominous warning that if Odysseus “only knew, down deep, what pains are fated to fill [his] cup” before he reaches home, he would remain in her captivity.[7]
Odysseus meets both of these arguments with the true ordering of his affections. Yes, his wife cannot match the immortal beauty of a goddess. Penelope is mortal and will age too. Yet, he says, “I long–I pine, all my days–to travel home and see the dawn of my return.”[8] Though he has infinite sensual enjoyment and safety here with Calypso, there are joys that are worth more than bodily pleasure. Odysseus’ wife, family, and home are of enduring worth. Though they be not of immortal pleasure like Calypso, they hold a permanent worth that cannot be matched by base pleasures. Odysseus longs for something of greater and lasting value that a life of pleasure cannot offer, and so he rejects Calypso’s final plea to stay. And, if the journey will be long and sorrowful from this point to Ithaca, it will be worth it. He has already suffered much on his journey home: “Add this to the total–bring the trial on!”[9]
If the hedonistic life with Calypso could not hold Odysseus, he quickly is tempted to long for another highest good in life: the glorious death that could secure immortal fame. After setting out on a raft from Calypso’s island, he is struck by a storm sent by the vengeful Poseidon and shipwrecked. As he faces the prospect of an ignominious and gloryless death drowning in this storm, his mind in regret travels back to the Trojan War and a longing for glory:
Three, four times blessed, my friends-in-arms
who died on the plains of Troy those years ago,
serving the sons of Atreus to the end. Would to god
I’d died there too and met my fate that day the Trojans,
swarms of them, hurled at me with bronze spears,
fighting over the corpse of proud Achilles!
A hero’s funeral then, my glory spread by comrades–
now what a wretched death I’m doomed to die![10]
While he had just chosen family and home over infinite pleasure, he now in his despair switches his loves from those to a glorious death that would secure a hero’s funeral and remembrance. If only he had fallen at Troy like Achilles, he would be spared this shameful and forgotten end at sea at the hands of Poseidon. While resolute to face anything to get home when he was with Calypso, now he regrets it all and wishes he could have died a hero’s death on the plains of Troy. A death with glory would be superior to this.
Odysseus of course survives the storm and lands on dry ground on the island of Scheria, where he is taken into the court of the king and queen. There he recounts his long story of his trip home, and Homer weaves in just where a life set on immortal glory truly leads. In his recounting, Odysseus tells the story of traveling to the Underworld at the behest of the witch Circe to consult with the dead prophet Tiresias on how to avoid the wrath of Poseidon, who wanted to stop Odysseus from reaching home. While there, Odysseus meets the shade of the hero Achilles, the one whose death in a blaze of glory Odysseus coveted while near drowning. When he meets Achilles, Odysseus tells him there is “not a man on earth more blest than you.”[11] Odysseus instructs Achilles not to grieve his own death because the Greeks revere him as a god now. What more could the glory-obsessed culture of ancient Greece want than that? Achilles has the answer:
No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man–
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive–
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.[12]
Odysseus has it all wrong. Achilles thought he wanted a glorious death in battle. He now realizes that life of any kind is superior to the greatest and most glorious death. In these lines, Homer through Achilles undercuts the whole mindset of the hero seeking lasting fame. Fame is about as lasting and worthwhile to the human as the wispy bodies of the souls in the Underworld who drift around as ethereal as smoke in their gloomy eternity. No, the life of a hero is not what it was always presumed to be, coming from someone on the other side of the pale. But not just anyone; the greatest hero of the ancient world sets Odysseus straight about what truly matters in life.
The story of Odysseus explores the right ordering of loves. While Ithaca constantly beckons Odysseus throughout the poem, the “man of twists and turns” detours in what he truly seeks.[13] He sees the “Rock & Roll” lifestyle of infinite pleasure with the never-aging, never-fading Calypso, or the death in a glorious blaze of Achilles. Yet, neither of those things will fulfill the longing of his heart. There are goods higher than both. The joy of home, the love of his faithful wife, and the duty of fatherhood offer far more happiness than he could ever find with Calypso and Achilles.
The stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey are filled with aspects of the pagan life, but they are not just stories of “pagans doing pagan things,” as is often accused by Christians who read or teach the poems. If they were only that, there would be no value in reading them. They do, however, fall short of the ultimate answer. Achilles pacified his wrath and experienced some form of restoration, but not fully. He died and went to the Underworld like everyone else in his time. Odysseus chose the greater value of home and family over sex and glory, but home and family are finite too. The only true restoration and satisfaction come from union with Jesus Christ, of whom Homer and his heroes knew nothing. Nevertheless, to write off these tales as artifacts of barbaric Bronze Age paganism is to give up an intricate, rich, and beautiful look into the longings of the human soul. The Christian ought not to miss the opportunity to mine these enduring truths from two of our greatest stories.
Endnotes
[1] Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), 605, Book 24, lines 590-591.
[2] Ibid., 24.592-599.
[3] Ibid., 24.794.
[4] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 155, Book 5, lines 92–94.
[5] Ibid., 5.169.
[6] Ibid., 5.234-236.
[7] Ibid., 5.228-230.
[8] Ibid., 5.242.
[9] Ibid., 5.246-247.
[10] Ibid., 5.338-345.
[11] Ibid., 11.548.
[12] Ibid., 11.556-558.
[13] Ibid., 1.1.
