By Bergotte
There is a moment in the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad that has no real parallel in world literature. Priam, the aged king of Troy, has crossed enemy lines in the dark, slipped past the Greek sentinels, and entered the tent of Achilles — the man who killed his son, who dragged that son’s body through the dirt for twelve days, who has refused every plea for its return. And Priam does not beg exactly. He reaches out and takes Achilles by the hands — those terrible hands, stained with the blood of so many Trojans — and he says: Think of your father. He is old, just as I am. He, too, may be at the threshold of war, surrounded by enemies. He says: I have endured what no mortal has ever endured before. I have put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son.
What happens next is the thing. Achilles weeps. Not for Priam, at first — for his own father, for himself, for the grief he will cause the old man back in Phthia when he dies, which he will, soon, because he has chosen it. The two men weep together. And then Achilles helps Priam wash the body of Hector and wrap it for burial, and shares a meal with him, and they look at each other with something that is neither forgiveness nor reconciliation but perhaps the most ancient form of acknowledgement: I see you. You are like me. We are both going to lose everything.
This scene is approximately two thousand seven hundred years old. It has never stopped being true.
The question of who Homer was — whether Homer was a single poet or a tradition, a man or a composite, a historical person or a useful fiction assembled by later Greeks who needed their literature to have a face — is one of the great unresolvable puzzles of classical scholarship, and it matters less than it might seem to. What the poems do is not dependent on the biography of a poet. The Iliad and the Odyssey are, in the most precise sense of the phrase, works of collective intelligence. They emerged from centuries of oral composition, from generations of singers who shaped and reshaped the inherited material until the stories had the resilience and density of myth without losing the intimacy of observed life. They have the quality — unusual even among great books — of feeling both inevitable and astonishing on every reading. As if they could not have been otherwise and yet somehow had not been foreseen.
Scholars call the question of authorship the Homeric Question, and by the nineteenth century it had split classical philology into Analysts, who believed the poems were stitched together from multiple sources, and Unitarians, who argued for a single shaping intelligence. The American scholar Milman Parry settled something of the debate in the 1920s by studying living oral poets in Yugoslavia and demonstrating that the formulaic repetitions in Homer — the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn, the long-shadowed spear — were not signs of patchwork composition but features of oral technique, mnemonic devices that allowed a singer to compose in real time. The poems, Parry showed, were oral literature in the deepest sense: not composed for the page, but structured for memory and performance, shaped by the accumulated wisdom of a tradition in which no single voice was final.
And yet something like a sensibility persists across both works that feels singular — a particular way of looking at human suffering that is neither sentimental nor cold, a philosophical position achieved not through argument but through the accumulation of precisely observed moments. Call it the Homeric vision if you must, with the understanding that the name refers to the poems rather than to any recoverable individual. That vision is what we are after.
The Iliad is not what most people who have not read it expect. They expect adventure, heroism, the gleam of bronze in sunlight. And all of that is there. But the poem announces its subject in its very first word, which in the original Greek is mēnis: rage. Specifically the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, whose anger at being dishonoured by Agamemnon sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that costs thousands of lives and ultimately costs Achilles himself the thing he loves most — his companion, his other self, Patroclus.
The Iliad is a war poem that is deeply suspicious of war. It understands the seductions of battle — the surge of the warrior in the moment of killing, the bonds forged in extremity, the intoxication of glory — while steadfastly refusing to endorse them. When a man dies in the Iliad, he is almost always given a brief biographical sketch: he had a father, a wife, a home, a life that contained things he loved. The Trojan warrior Simoeisios, killed by Ajax early in the poem, is described as a young man whose parents named him for the river Simoeis, near which his mother gave birth while following the flocks. He repaid his parents’ care not at all, Homer says, his life cut short by the spear of great-hearted Ajax. These are not minor characters given perfunctory obituaries. They are human beings, most of them utterly unknown outside this brief moment of their death, granted their moment of personhood precisely so that their loss will register.
This quality of attention — the refusal to treat the dead as mere numbers, as the collateral of narrative — is one of the things that makes the Iliad moral without being moralistic. The poem does not tell you that war is bad. It makes you feel the specific weight of each death. It trusts the accumulation of individual grief to do what no editorial commentary could.
At the centre of this is Achilles — arguably the most psychologically complex figure in ancient literature, which is remarkable given that he is effectively absent from most of the poem. After his quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles withdraws from battle and sits by the ships, and the Greeks begin to lose, badly, and still he will not fight. His rage is, by any reasonable measure, excessive. Men die because of it. And yet Homer gives that rage a dignity, even a logic. Achilles is angry not simply because his honour has been slighted but because he has seen through the social contract of heroic culture: he will be given the same honour in death whether he fights bravely or stays home, so what is the point? Life is short and then it ends. The kleos — the glory, the undying fame that justifies a warrior’s sacrifice — suddenly seems like a very poor exchange.
This is the crisis at the heart of the Iliad, and it is not resolved so much as transfigured. When Patroclus dies, Achilles returns to battle not for glory but for grief. The motive shifts from the social to the personal, from the public economy of honour to something rawer and more absolute. His revenge killing of Hector is magnificent and terrible, and Homer does not flinch from either quality. But what follows — the desecration of Hector’s body, the twelve days of dragging the corpse around Patroclus’s tomb — is presented not as heroism but as a kind of madness, an excess of grief that has crossed into something inhuman.
And then Priam comes, and everything changes. The scene in the tent is the poem’s answer to the question it has been asking since its first word. Rage is overcome — not defeated, not resolved, not forgiven — but briefly transcended through the recognition of shared mortality. Achilles will die soon. Priam will watch his city burn. Their grief is not commensurate, but it is human, and in that humanity they find a moment of peace that the poem itself describes as extraordinary.
It is worth pausing on the fact that this moment of grace is made possible not by divine intervention but by an act of imagination — Priam’s deliberate and dangerous decision to see the killer of his son as a man with a father, and Achilles’ willingness to receive that vision. Homer’s gods intervene constantly in the Iliad, but they do not create this. The gods in Homer are powerful and petty, splendid and unreliable, beautiful and indifferent in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar. They take sides in human conflicts for reasons of personal preference. They mourn their favourites with genuine anguish and then forget them with shocking speed. They embody, with a clarity that is almost satirical, the way that power without accountability behaves.
What the gods cannot give the humans of the Iliad is what the humans in their best moments give each other: the recognition of a shared fate. Mortality — the thing that distinguishes humans from gods, the wound that cannot be healed — turns out to be the ground of all genuine connection.
The Odyssey is, at first glance, a different kind of poem. Where the Iliad is concentrated, monumental, relentless — ten years of war compressed into fifty-one days — the Odyssey is sprawling, episodic, formally inventive. It moves between Ithaca and the Mediterranean world and the underworld and the land of the Phaeacians with an ease that reflects the different intellectual problem it is exploring. The Iliad asks: what does it mean to live and die with honour in a world where death is certain and the gods are arbitrary? The Odyssey asks: what does it mean to go home?
This sounds like a simpler question. It is not. Odysseus has been away for twenty years. His wife Penelope has been besieged by suitors who have eaten through his estate and are pressing her to accept that her husband is dead and choose among them. His son Telemachus has grown up in the absence of a father. Ithaca has changed. And Odysseus himself has changed — has spent years with the goddess Calypso, has been to the land of the dead, has heard the Sirens, has made choices that a different man might not have made.
The question of identity is the deepest question the Odyssey poses. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, he is testing not just the suitors but the people who loved him — testing whether they can see through the disguise to the man underneath, and perhaps testing himself, checking whether the self he carried through twenty years of war and wandering is still there. The recognition scenes — with his old nurse Eurycleia, who identifies him by a scar; with his dog Argos, who dies of joy at seeing him after nineteen years; most devastatingly with Penelope herself — are among the most formally sophisticated moments in the poem, and they are all asking the same question: what persists? What part of a person survives time, suffering, transformation?
Penelope is one of Homer’s greatest achievements, which is to say one of the great characters in world literature, and she tends to be underestimated because she is still and patient where Odysseus is mobile and cunning. Her patience is not passivity. Her famous ruse — weaving and unravelling Laertes’ shroud to delay the suitors — is an act of sustained intelligence, a long con played against men who underestimate her because they assume cleverness is the province of action. She matches Odysseus not by imitating his mode of heroism but by inventing her own.
Their reunion — the famous scene in which Penelope tests Odysseus by asking for their bed to be moved, knowing that the bed cannot be moved because Odysseus built it around a living olive tree rooted in the earth — is a scene of extraordinary complexity. It is a recognition achieved not through sentiment but through shared knowledge, a private fact that only they could know. The rooted bed is a kind of metaphor that the poem allows itself without strain: it is their marriage, the thing that could not be moved or uprooted, the living tree at the centre of the house. And the fact that it takes a test — that Penelope will not simply weep and embrace but insists on proof — is not a coldness but a wisdom born of twenty years of deception and disappointment. She has been lied to before. She will not be taken in again, even by the man she loves.
What the Odyssey ultimately argues — or rather, what it dramatises, since Homer does not argue so much as show — is that homecoming is not a return to what was but a reconstruction of what could still be. You cannot step back into the past. The house is full of strangers. The dog is dead. The son is a man. The wife has built a life without you. Home, in the Odyssey, is not a place you recover but a relationship you have to re-establish, patiently, through the hard work of recognition.
There is a passage in the Odyssey that is less often quoted than it should be. In the eleventh book, Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets the shade of Achilles — his old companion from the Iliad, the great hero of the Trojan War, now dead. Odysseus tries to console him: surely it is better to be the king of the dead than an ordinary mortal? And Achilles’ reply is devastating. He would rather, he says, be the poorest farm labourer alive, a man working for hire on someone else’s land, than king of all the dead. The underworld is nothing. Life — any life, even the smallest, least heroic life — is better than this.
This exchange is the hinge between the two poems. Achilles chose in the Iliad to live briefly and gloriously, to accept death in exchange for eternal fame. And here, in the underworld, he tells us what that choice cost. The Iliad‘s vision of heroic sacrifice is not repudiated — Achilles does not recant — but it is placed in a context that qualifies it absolutely. The kleos that made the bargain worth making turns out to feel differently from the other side.
What Homer is doing here — or what the tradition that produced these poems is doing — is holding two truths simultaneously without forcing a resolution. Life is short and glorious action is worth its price. Life is precious and no glory is worth its loss. Both of these things are true. The poems do not choose between them. They insist on the simultaneity, the permanent irresolvability, of the contradiction. This is, arguably, the deepest thing that literature can do: not answer the hard questions but refuse to pretend that they can be answered, while continuing to take them seriously.
Homer’s world is one in which the gods exist and are real and are, on balance, a problem. They intervene and withdraw. They favour and abandon. They make promises they keep and promises they don’t. Athena guides Odysseus home through twenty years of obstruction, and Poseidon, whose son the Cyclops the hero blinded, harries him without mercy across the sea. The divine sphere in Homer is not a moral order. It is a power structure, with all that implies about caprice and favouritism and the suffering of those caught between rival claims.
This is often read as primitive theology, a naïve anthropomorphism that the Greeks would eventually leave behind on the road to philosophical monotheism. But there is something more sophisticated going on. The gods in Homer function as a representation of forces that humans experience as external but that actually originate within the human situation itself — war, desire, craft, storm, the hunger for homecoming. When Ares inflames the warrior, or Aphrodite drives Helen across the sea to Troy, the poem is not claiming that a supernatural being took possession of a human being. It is claiming that the forces at work in human life are larger than individual choice, that people act under compulsions they cannot fully explain or control, that the boundary between what we choose and what happens to us is less clear than we imagine.
The Greek philosopher Plato famously wanted to ban Homer from his ideal republic on the grounds that the poems gave immoral models of behaviour — lying, weeping, gods behaving badly. He was, as a philosophical critic, not entirely wrong. The poems do not provide moral instruction in any simple sense. They do not tell you how to behave. What they do is harder and more valuable: they show you the range of what human beings are capable of, the full spectrum from Priam’s courage to Agamemnon’s pettiness, from Penelope’s intelligence to the suitors’ contemptuous greed, and they trust you — the listener, the reader — to make your own judgements.
This trust is itself a moral position. Homer does not condescend. He does not simplify. He does not give you heroes without flaws or villains without humanity. Even the suitors, those parasitic young men who have eaten Odysseus’s estate and threatened his family, are given moments of individuality: Amphinomus, who repeatedly warns the others against violence and is described as a good man trapped among bad decisions, killed by Telemachus not because he is evil but because he is in the wrong place. The poem mourns him briefly before moving on. It always moves on. But it always pauses first.
It is worth asking what kind of comfort, if any, Homer offers. The Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral — not with Greek victory, not with Achilles’ death, but with the burial of the enemy. The Odyssey ends with a fragile, hard-won peace: Odysseus reunited with his wife and father, the families of the slaughtered suitors mollified by divine intervention, the killing stopped. Neither ending is a triumph. Both are, in their different ways, an acknowledgement that the world continues — that grief must be accommodated, that the dead must be honoured, that life goes on even when it has cost everything.
This is the Homeric vision of the human condition: we are mortal, we love other mortals, and we will lose them and be lost. The cosmos is indifferent and the gods are unreliable and the best we can do is the thing that Achilles and Priam do in that tent — acknowledge each other, weep together, share a meal, and manage to sleep. It is not consolation. It is something harder and more durable: the recognition that suffering is universal, that the enemy is a man with a father, that the man who killed your son was, somewhere in his grief, reaching toward the same thing you were.
The poems have survived because they are true — not factually true, not historically true (though Troy almost certainly existed, and the bronze-age world they describe has left archaeological traces), but true in the way that only the greatest art is true: true to the texture of experience, to the shape of grief, to the way that human beings look at each other across the distances that separate them and find, sometimes, something they recognise.
Homer does not promise that this recognition will save you. He does not promise that the world will be just, or that the good will be rewarded, or that courage will be sufficient, or that the gods will take your side. He promises something more modest and more honest: that you are not alone in your condition. That the man in the tent weeping for his dead companion, the woman at the loom unravelling her work in the dark, the old king crossing enemy lines in the night carrying nothing but his grief and his dignity — these are not figures from a remote and alien past. They are, in whatever sense the phrase still carries meaning, us.
The Iliad ends with darkness and burial fire. The Odyssey ends with an uneasy truce. Between them, they have covered more of the human experience than almost anything written since: war and homecoming, rage and patience, the hunger for glory and the hunger for ordinary life, the love of companions and the love of family, the terrible speed with which everything is lost and the slow, improbable work of putting something back together.
That is the human condition according to Homer. It is not a comfortable inheritance. But it is an honest one.
Sources and Further Reading
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1990.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1996.
Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Edited by Adam Parry. Oxford University Press, 1971.
Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Graziosi, Barbara. Homer. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Weil, Simone. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Translated by Mary McCarthy. Politics, November 1945.
Schein, Seth L. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad. University of California Press, 1984.
Clay, Jenny Strauss. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. Princeton University Press, 1983.
Finley, M. I. The World of Odysseus. New York Review Books Classics, 2002.
Wood, Michael. In Search of the Trojan War. University of California Press, 1998.
My World of Interiors 