So, tragically, when I at last sat down to read The Iliad, it turned out to be a crap translation by E.V. Rieu, and it was nigh on unreadable. Honestly, I don’t know why I persevered. I suppose it was because I really want to be familiar with the Iliad, and not just from Classic Comics.
So, what did I learn? First of all, the Greek Gods were a bunch of jerks. I mean, I knew that, but they are really a bunch of jerks. Second, everybody in the whole thing is big, hunky, brave (even the ones who run away, and even while running away), strong and dimwitted. All their armor is well-made, strong, polished, well-fitted and totally ineffective. All their spears are long, strong, hard, straight, immense and cast long shadows. Even the rocks on the ground, when picked up to throw, are immense. Everything is peculiarly well-made or outsized or perfect in some way. The men are all strong, the women are all good looking and the children are all above average. Oh, and their fathers were all particularly impressive youths, back in the day, when they killed sixteen giants with one blow, and seduced the Statue of Liberty before bedtime.
I’d be surprised if nobody has done a spoof where somebody, at least one guy in these immense armies, is a sniveling little weakling.
. Next to the mighty ships, the Ill-formed Pansius, then, took up his lightweight spear, and made as if to fling it. Like a broken-winged sparrow plummets to the earth after a shepherd, bored with his responsibilities at the end of a long day, flings a pebble at it and lands a lucky shot, so did the spear of Pansius flutter to the ground. This was the son of Afraedes, who in battle would shy from the tiniest noise, like a rabbit who does not wait to see if the twig has been broken by a hungry lion or by a mild deer but cowers in his burrow until the beast has passed. Such was Afraedes, the father of Pansius. Now Maukus of the horse-taming Trojans singled out Pansius. He cast a long-shadowed spear, thirsting for blood, but Pansius saw it coming and shrank behind his shield. This shield, tiny and ill-made, had only two layers, of cracked and discolored leather, badly bound together. Pansius had found it, discarded by the mighty Argives after they had sacked his village. Creeping out from his hiding place after dark, he retrieved the trampled shield that the well-formed warriors had disdained, and this shield now he held up to try, however vainly, to deflect the bloodthirsty spear of Maukus. But aegis-bearing Zeus did not intend for Pansius to die that day, and pushed aside the spear as if it had been a leaf in a breeze.And on for pages and pages.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
So why not try a different translation? There are several excellent ones out there — Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and Fagles all have their advocates and their strong points, or if you want some really fine English poetry that’s a little looser with the original Greek, there’s Chapman and Pope.
A catalogue of ships is still a catalogue of ships, of course, but there’s a reason why the Iliad is one of the major sources of inspiration for Western Literature . . .
The spoof is highly entertaining, btw.
It’s funny, I read the Odessey and subsequently the Iliad (both in the Fitzgerald translation, which are quite readable) primarily because Dan Simmons had written some SF loosely patterned after them, and I wanted to know what he was talking about. After reading the source materials, have I gone back and read the Simmons books?
No.
And the spoof is highly entertaining, btw.
peace
Matt
Dang it! I always spell odyssey wrong on the first try! I know that, but did I spell-check my post?
No.
And the spoof is highly entertaining, btw.
peace
Matt
First of all, the Greek Gods were a bunch of jerks.
Quite so.
Let’s be honest: the Greeks could have imagined their gods any way they wanted. So why imagine them like this? How could anyone seriously regard these gods as guarantors of justice (as Hesiod does)? What does it mean to worship gods like this — or are these not really the gods of cult? Discuss.
A) I read the translation that was in the house. I bought it for twenty-five cents at a church fair (out of the same dollar as the Claudius books), and having discovered it was a crap translation had the choice, essentially, of reading the crap translation or not reading the crap translation, which would put The Iliad back in the category of must get ahold of that sometime. I read it. If I get the urge to read the Odyssey (dang, that is hard to type), I will make sure to get somebody else’s translation.
2) I think there’s a fundamental problem with translating the word god, as there is with the word priest (as we’ve discussed in other contexts). I don’t think that Zeus and Athena are gods in the sense that Adonai is, or that Jesus is. Well, and I think that the Adonai of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Sarah, Rebecah, Rachel and Leah) is to a limited extent like Zeus (although less of a jerk), and the Adonai of Moses and the Exodus is quite a bit like Zeus, up until the Red Sea, but not so much the Adonai of the judges and kings and prophets, and definitely not the Adonai of the siddur.
What I mean is, there is a sense in which Zeus and his buddies are unseen, incredibly powerful people who like the smell of burning animal flesh, but who are essentially people. They are not answers to questions about ourselves and our inner characters, they are not fundamentally concerned with justice and certainly not salvation (vaddevah dat means). The Divine of the siddur and the Divine of Christian prayer is concerned (as I understand it) with making their worshipers better, more righteous people. All of that connotes to the word god, even if you don’t capitalize it, and I don’t think should connote to the Greek and Roman gods.
If you can even use connote to. But you know what I mean.
Thanks,
-V.
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean “not really the gods of cult?”
Some discussion points:
So there’s that.
peace
Matt
V-
That’s a very good point about the difference between anthropomorphic deities and the more gnostic divine. However, I don’t know that it’s universally true of Christians that “the Divine of Christian prayer is concerned (as I understand it) with making their worshipers better, more righteous people,” as opposed to the notion that the Christian God is a burly, grandfatherly dude in shimmering white robes who will ultimately gather his flock with the shepherd’s crook of his love. I think there are a lot of people who think of themselves as Christian who think of their God in a more gnostic way, and a lot of people who call themselves Christian who think of their God in a Zeus-like idiom. I identify more closely with the former lot, but even they are a little peculiar. The latter bunch perplex me as much as the Aztecs.
peace
Matt
I had a crazy friend in Pasadena who read the whole thing in the original Greek with the help of a dictionary.
I don’t think that Zeus and Athena are gods in the sense that Adonai is, or that Jesus is.
Well, they’re certainly not like Adonai or Jesus, either in the sense of being transcendent and fundamentally unlike humans, or in the sense of caring about personal morality (although even in Homer, and even more in Hesiod, they do care about justice, which seems to mean something like “playing by the rules”). But they are gods in the sense of being recipients of cult.
When I ask if the gods of myth were the same as the gods of cult, I’m wondering about how the classical Greeks imagined the gods to whom they sacrificed: were they like Homer’s Zeus? (Answer: sort of.)
(These were the questions I asked my Greek Religion students on the second day of class this semester; they saw things much as you all do, but not quite as well informed. V’s point that the Greek gods are fundamentally like us, whereas the Jewish and Christian Gods aren’t, was the crux of Day 3.)
Irilyth: Aw, the Iliad isn’t so hard, once you get going, although there is rather a lot of it.
ho ho! a groupful of american people wondering how justice can be achieved when everyone is adversarial and argumentative. ho ho ho.
I typed some stuff that was adversarial and argumentative, but then I realized that wasn’t just. I long to be just.
So do you teach a history of Greek Religion, Kendra, from proto-Olympianism to Greek Orthodoxy, or do you specialize in Classical Greek Religion?
Aristophanes seems to imagine the gods as being essentially Athenian gentry. Of course, he uses them as mouthpieces for some political position or personality type, usually one that he’s making fun of. If Aristophanes was any judge, the Greeks didn’t have much respect for their gods (where respect is a variable containing the value “abject slavering devotion,” such as Christians seem to be encouraged to have to their deity).
Or possibly they had a great deal of respect for their gods, in that they felt like their gods could take a little ribbing from mere mortals and were probably sitting around on Olympus having a good chuckle along with the audience.
Also, what’s up with Greek women and beastiality? Helen’s mom, Leda, boinked Zeus in the guise of a swan, and wasn’t Zeus the minotaur’s dad, again, as a bull?
A pretty hot bull, sure.
(Actually, I think those stories are again hold-overs from the indigenous, displaced culture that were warped by the Illyrians displacing the Achaeans, who were both subsequently displaced by the Dorians – and probably they all displaced the Minoans on and around the southern coast of Greece, who may or may not have been the same as the Achaeans. My understanding is that the minotaur story, for instance, was a Hellenic mythological interpretation of the Minoan bull-fighting/riding/jumping game warped by Hellenic conquerors after the culture that participated in the sport was diminished by the volcanic explosion of their island nation. But of course, that, like all history, is just speculation. And I have no idea where the swan thing came from.)
peace
Matt
I’m a specialist in ancient history and religion; my class concentrates on the religion(s) of the ancient Greek world, including interactions between Greek polytheists, Jews, and Christians, but not extending as far as Greek Orthodoxy.
Historicizing readings that explicate Greek myth by mapping it onto Balkan pre-history used to be very popular (at least, I absorbed a lot of them as a young student). Among historians, those migrations/invasions have fallen out of fashion somewhat (both as explanations for change, and as distinct historical realities); I’m not enough of a mythology specialist to know what role they play these days in the interpretation of myth.
I find the theriomorphic love stories baffling, too.