When, around six-hundred B. C., the Iliad took its hold on western civilization, everyone mistook it for what it seems at first glance - a serious epic poem, to laud heroes and sing of battle. Achilles, Ajax, Hector, and Odysseus became every boy�s ideal. �Who is the happy warrior? Who is he / that every man in arms should wish to be?�(1) For the Greeks, and later the Romans, Homer had the answer. As an example of how prevalent this use of the Iliad became, Alexander the Great had to memorize it as a boy.
The Iliad is still regularly taught as one of the first Epic Poems; it studied and admired wherever it is read. How many people understand its true meaning, though? Too few. Behind the mist of legend - over the mountain of �heroism� - past the noble illusion, the Iliad is ridiculing everything it pretends to honor. It is a timeless satiric device: the Ironic Viewpoint. Under the pretense of upholding it, this book undermines everything it speaks of.
Take Achilles. His great honor (i.e. Pride) takes a blow, when Agamemnon �steals� his rightful plunder - a girl. Because of this, he prefers to sulk with his Myrmidons and watch his sword-brothers die, than help the big bully that stole his concubine. �What a worthless, burnt-out coward I�d be called / If I would submit to you and all your orders, / whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others / don�t give me commands!�(2) When the death of his friend, Patroclus, spurs him to do his duty, he enters the battle with such misguided fury that he dishonors the dead body of a noble enemy. In my mind, this soils the last shred of a reputation he had.
Then there is Helen - the only reason there is a war at all. Because she left her husband, a king of the Achaeans, for a spineless Trojan prince, all of Greece feels the need to go fall on each other�s swords to avenge the wrong. Later, when giving herself up would have cut the war shorter by several years, threats that perhaps, someday, she�d pay for her wrongs sends her cowering to watch men die. Of all the Trojans, only Helen is spared in the end. She goes back in honor to her former husband�s home.
Even the gods of Greece themselves fail to escape Homer�s whip. Between them, pulling and pushing, they manage to drag out the war to excessive length, and create as much slaughter as they prevent.
Obviously, Homer�s point is much deeper than mere Bard Song - Beware that �honor� doesn�t become pride, �heroism� mere blood-lust, and beauty an excuse for contention.
(1) Wordsworth �The Character of The Happy Warrior�
(2) Homer, �The Iliad,� Book 1