The Iliad(1) as Bible critique by Dennis M. Hammes So, what is this Iliad? We may begin with what it is not: It is not the story of the Trojan War (that brought by the Achaians against the Troad on the Hellespont ca. 1200 B.C., in response to the latter's chronic and general plundering that culminated in the kidnap of Menelaus' wife Helen by Priam's son Paris), though that is its setting, for the Iliad tells primarily of only three events in some three weeks early in the tenth year of that war, long after the rest of the Troad has been captured or laid waste, and all that remain are besieged into Troy herself. It neither begins at the beginning, recapitulates any history of the war save by reference to the deeds of an accidentally-met individual, nor ends at the war's end. Though it ends with Hektor's funeral, it is not the story of Hektor, for we first come upon him after the middle of things and toward the end of himself, and of his deeds none are given before the Trojans -- namely, he -- decide to take advantage of Achilleus' sudden and obvious absence from the fighting to press to the ships. It is not the story of Patroklus, for he appears as himself even only well after Hektor, and disappears before him, showing us no real reason that Achilleus found him so dear, though we are told often that he is. (The delicious and popular notion that they were homosexual companions is highly doubtful, as the Achaians generally and Achilleus specifically are equipped with camp-followers and personal women, and indeed it is the loss of the principal of these personal women to Agamemnon, Briseis, and she to be his wife, that puts him in his famous strategic sulk. It was the Spartans centuries later who used each other to rid themselves of the camp-followers that slowed all other armies by a factor of four.) It is not even the story of Achilleus, for his history is given vaguely and only through reference and address by others, he disappears from the action and the reference in a few chapters, to reappear as almost a stock figure a few chapters from the end. It is not the story of the Atreidae for whom the forces were gathered and the war fought, especially not of Menelaus whose wife was stolen by his honored houseguest (Alexandros, called "Paris"), but not even of Agamemnon, whose evident vacillation has so prolonged the war (not that Homer, a poet, dwells upon this failure of military character and strategy), for he very nearly disappears from the story after crucially alienating Achilleus, he on whom the Achaeans' fortunes so obviously depended. It is not the story of Priam or his sons, for, except for Hektor in the latter part, they appear only incidentally as they kill or are killed by name, and everybody who is mentioned at all is mentioned for that. For that matter, Hektor himself falls into this category, having more words to his story largely he kills more people than most others. It is not the story of Troy, for that city stands in its whole glory at the beginning of the tale, and stands unchanged at its end, albeit with fewer inhabitants. It is not the story of Helen and Alexandros ("Paris"), for they appear only here and there throughout the story, to have scorn and blame told upon them for a verse or two no matter who speaks, thereafter to disappear until somebody feels like cussing them again. Helen appears now and then to bemoan her part (none, in the law and custom of the day) in causing the war, but, though, Alexandros appears now and then to cockily assure everybody that he will not give up Helen because stealing her was the only "clever" thing he had ever managed in his life, nobody takes him up on this boast and feeds him to the dogs, for he is a son of the King even if only one of fifty and not a favorite. Indeed, there is only one sort of event told more consistently in more detail than the thoroughly-routine and gory combat slayings and the two high funerals, and that is the various appearances and machinations of an inbred, juvenile, and psychotic family of "gods." Indeed, the single most interesting thing about these is that the participants know so little about them, despite being there, while Homer, who never lied about anything, knows everything about them, including every disguise that fooled anyone they "spoke to" or "helped." From the first page to the last, the story is rife with them in all their shifting and shifty personae, purposes, lies (their standard speech, apparently), and "loyalties." But if the gods played such havoc with these three weeks in the war, why not with the nine years preceding them, the few months to follow, and the defense of Achaia against the invading Dorians? Well, Virginia, it was because these "gods" came to the Greeks primarily through the Dorians, who were invading Greece while the Greeks were at Troy. The Achaians at Troy knew almost nothing about them. They are Eastern European demonic constructs that not only rule the Orthodox Church there today (under different names, as usual), but in one massive migration (the first known of two) of the "Caucasian" peoples, a migration whose cause is indeterminate but whose periods and effects are well known, not only made it south into Greece but north to Scandinavia and east into northern India, where they got really mean. And Homer, a Dorian wandering in Ionia (nee Ilion), wrote at least 400 years after the fall of Troy and "explained" things in the light of his own language and "knowledge." As I do now. For Homer's deific "explanations" are totally at odds with the martial psychology and values expressed by the very characters against whom he asserts these "activities." The insult perhaps given by Agamemnon, but definitely taken by Achilleus, the single event that is the reason for the whole three weeks' action and losses on both sides, is not possible to be taken by one whose world is ruled over and upset by the fiddlings of psychologically variable divinities: whatever happens to him is their fault, and he can neither gain nor lose face from it. Such an insult can be taken only by one who is utterly used to ruling his own destiny, who gains or loses credit solely by reason of his own acts and responsibility for them. In the much-later and very Dorian Agamemnon, Klytemestra murders her husband on his return from Troy for that he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis; the act is not possible to one who was raised to believe in the power and authority of a Zeus all her life, but is possible to one who is habituated to praise or blame only Agamemnon himself. Throughout the Iliad, Achilleus is concerned almost solely, and certainly before everything else, with his gain or loss of face, both among the Achaians and among the Trojans: "...and would not let them... for fear the thrower might win the glory, and himself come second (Il. 21:206-7). Who gets the job done is more important than getting the job done, and this means that those involved do not believe that it is the "gods" who get the job done. Even the brutish Hektor is not immune: "I feel shame before the Trojans... that someone who is less of a man than I will say of me..." It is their fellows' opinion, and the collecting of bronze from the victims, that affects their moral stature, not the opinion of Zeus and his boys and girls. The same is understood by all the participants, and practiced by most of those worth any mention. In fine, no participant in the Trojan War grew up with these excusatory "gods" fiddling in his life; only Homer did. It is standard practice in any investigation that when known events go out of routine, one is to look for the unknown cause that has set them adrift. It is the standard practice of a shyster to assert that only he can imagine the cause. But it takes the impeccable laziness of the truly and deliberately ignorant to assert for 2800 years that the shyster was right. I suggest there is a telling event at work here, not to be found in the story because it was not known to its players or to their chronicler. Poetry is, before it is anything else, an art form whose artist is, even today, totally dependent on the religious and political stipends of his time, and it does not matter whether he is reciting for kings and priests, or for their willing victims. Thus, the players and their generations reported, as in all primitive poetry, only events as they saw them or got them from their parents, while the subsequent "artist" furnished the "explanations." It is known from Schliemann's work on Troy II (there are remains of nine cities on the site), from several investigators of the Cretan and Theran civilisations, and from numerous Biblical archaeologists, that these several weeks of the Trojan War, the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and the explosion that blew away three-quarters of the Mediterranean island of Thera (along with many Mediterranean island civilisations), were coincident. The contemporary loss of Mediterranean civilisation to the tectonic activity that set off Thera about 1200 BC is well-documented (the exact date is not; not even the Mayans had an accurate calendar at the time). Biblical archaeologists, if not Biblical "divines," who assert, like Homer, "higher means of knowledge," routinely lay the "twelve plagues" of Exodus to Theran vulcanism. And here, page after page of the Iliad, from the first book to the last, literally reek (commonly of sulfur) of descriptions of immediate tectonic and farther-reaching volcanic atmospheric effects, these in both stories being attributed by their chroniclers to be the work of the gods, or God, depending on contemporary nationality. It is available to casual inspection, that the Dardanelles, forming the Hellespont and Troy's north shore, the south coast of Anatolia (on which is Troy), and the Jordan River Valley, which extends to and becomes the Red Sea, are all tectonic plate boundaries. Indeed, the volcano that is still Thera arises on the Mediterranean Fault, that extends eastward as the south coast of Anatolia and into the megalithic writhings of the Hindu Kush, and Westward so far as the Puerto Rican Trench, whose toe is the writhing Isthmus of Panama. Indeed, "the gods" wrenched the very foundations of the earth among four civilisations, one of them so severely that none lived to carry the tale: Crete was buried under twelve feet of ash in a matter of hours, not unlike the much-smaller Mt. St. Helen's' burying three States under several inches of ash more recently. At Troy, "the gods" rendered the sun itself variously absent, sickly, red, "blemished," etc., while in 1980 AD one may have observed the sun -- red and blemished with sunspots -- and by naked eye -- after the St. Helen's eruption, provided only that one was generally east of the local weather, as Troy is generally about as far east of Thera, with Homer faithfully reporting the wind as being from that quarter. In this case, the atmosphere is so full of fine ash as to provide a filter that, when it does not merely obliterate it, makes possible viewing the sun directly and comfortably for minutes, when one cannot otherwise view it directly for a full second, even at sunset, without some pain and the possibility of permanent damage. The essence of a good explanation is that it apply in advance of a case (natural law applies in advance of any case, even if the explanation should happen to follow it, but this explanation applied at least in advance of the Mt. St. Helen's eruption if not fully in advance of Krakatoa, which did all of the same to Indonesia that Thera did to the Mediterranean), and that it apply to more than one case. In the eruption of Thera is a single event, discovered and dated by geology and archaeology, that explains the disappearance of the Island (Cretan) Civilisation, and the godlike instabilities of two pieces of literature, each to have been a history and each polluted by amateur theology. I confess to having expected to have found more psychological analysis of the players of the Iliad. But Achilleus asserts the argument that sustains him through the next weeks, and in the face of all his fellows' misery, in a few sentences in the first pages of the first book, while Agamemnon repeats himself throughout the story the imperious juvenile that he exhibits himself to be, a child who inherited his wealth and position, with little thought to the personal or strategic consequences of his edicts, in a few other sentences on the same pages. And nobody in the Iliad save Achilles, the victim, particularly objects to his behaviour because, by the time of Homer, this inheritance of authority, worthy or not, was the done thing. However, we may note by reference to this one and that one throughout the Iliad itself that it was not all that common among the Achaians, wealth and power coming far more normally by conquest, even within the family (as Atreus itself in the mere generation before Agamemnon), rather than inheritance. It is the Trojans who have lineage; most Achaians have only fathers. Some few are singled out, in rather longer passages, for their bravery, but all, and especially the principals Achilleus and Hektor, when they finally get going, are no more than relatively overstrong (the phrase, "no three men today can do it," while not regular, is routine), fairly-skilled, semi-intelligent, utterly uneducated, and bronze-armed animals. The lion in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber" is far more emotionally and morally human than any character, including the gods, in the Iliad; the great lamentations are those of children whose favorite toy has been broken by a bully. So they lie on the beach, bawling about it and tearing their hair. What remains after the very dismissible actions and motives of the human players is the chronic attempt, throughout every chapter of the action, to assert and to explain not only the interferences of the Theric eruption but especially the strengths and shortcomings of the players, as interferences of the gods in an-otherwise-utterly-ordinary Bronze-Age siege. Homer is not so much explaining the outcomes of the Trojan War as they were handed to him, as he is mouthing the platitudes by which his own Dorians routinely excused themselves: except for some 50 years of fantastic architecture and sculpture, most of it in pursuit of the same religious excuses, they were never outstanding. The siege of Troy, by contrast, is ill-understood today to be almost the last in some 5000 years of internecine warfare between the same two peoples, the Caucasian Achaians of the Northern Mediterranean, and the once-Atlantic Trojans of the East, who had invaded the area in strength when the tectonic events of The Flood made the Mediterranean a single body of water (it had been totally divided when Italy continued the Libyan Peninsula) and had subsidised themselves thereafter -- and today -- largely by piracy upon a then-physically-smaller peoples. And the High Priest of Sais reports elsewhere to Plato that these same Achaians succeded in defending the entire Mediterranean from these same pirates for over 5000 years. However, by the time of the Trojan War, neither did the Atlantics remain uniformly large nor the Caucasians uniformly small: the two phenotypes had been interbreeding the entire time. The Bible reports that "in those days, giants roamed the earth," and the Iliad records the awesome feats both of Hektor and several among the "Achaians" (few of whom were from Achaia, see the Order of Battle) and indeed they did: Goliath of Gath was one of the last of the area's relatively-pureblooded Atlantics, and so was Odysseus' Polyphemus (who was not born with one eye in the middle of his forehead, but had lost one of the normal two in combat, common enough among pirates, the cutlass being rather less lethal than the "ashen spear," unuseable on shipboard; the word "kyklopes" or "cyclops" means "round-eyed," an Atlantic characteristic to be observed today). But even in those days the types were not completely distinct, for Atlantics "had known the daughters of men" in the Bible quite as well as Zeus seems to have got around before the Iliad and associated writings. What is well-known to archaeologists is that Atlantic (Cro-Magnon) Man (the Cyclops, Goliath) stood an average of 6'4" in his socks, while the poor Caucasian averaged 5' and the Aurignac of whom he was the Atlantic hybrid stood 4'6" in his clogs. A large man even in the Middle Ages, as given both from accounts and from much surviving armor, an expense lavished only on big people, stood 5'4" on a good day for dying. Much more interesting is that the bulk of the sorties in the Iliad devolved to the throwing of handy rocks ("that no two men could lift, but he threw it easily") by those who were neither rich (noble) nor noble (rich) enough to afford arms and armor of bronze. Still more interesting is that "pig iron," i.e., gray cast iron, was known, owned and given away by Achilleus himself, as utterly useless for the sword or anything else that must give or receive a blow, and was instead reserved for plowshares and other nonimpacting tools -- axes were bronze. Thus, the bulk of the Iliad's physical action is not the fight, usually over in a single stroke, but the stripping of arms from the loser and handing it off to be hauled to the rear -- while the victor was still under attack from the next man in line. Bronze was so dear as to be fought over and died for (Achilleus' armor is given as the ultimate reason for Hektor's seeking out and slaying Patroklus), while gold was given away by the half-talent and talent (60 lb. ingot) to winners of impromptu games and in ransom of one's many sons and daughters, alive or dead. And this despite that a bronze spear had about equal chances of "penetrating shield and corselet, and spilling the inside guts," or "bending back upon itself," or "bouncing well back from the throw." As variable in quality as it was, bronze was the best utility material known to the age: you cannot fight with stone, for it shatters at the first stroke -- and so does pig iron. The relatively- invincible "bronze of Hephaistos" is known today to contain exactly one part of tin to three of copper (something the Bronze Age did not know at all), giving a detailed atomic arrangement that is rather more than a mere alloy and amounting to another metal entirely, one having few of the feeble properties of copper or tin (by comparison, solder behaves merely as tin diluted with the cheaper metal, lead). Further, both must be chemically pure, and the poor Bronze-Age smith had access to the pure metals only by some "godly" accident, if at all, and no way to know purity if he had it: while inclusions and alloys make steel stronger (mostly) than iron, they weaken bronze. It was not the "gods" that made combat results so variable: it was the variability of the bronze itself from case to case, with no way to tell the quality except by seeing what happened in the fight, with the victorious arms like Achilleus' being passed on (as described) for generations. The Iliad, then, is not a whole lot of things that one ordinarily expects in a people's principal war story (cf. the tactical and personal details of the Beowulf), but it certainly is a claim to substantiate and explain the gods that held the later Greeks in such absolute thrall that they "voted" death or exile to 26 general officers, most engaged against the Persians, in 412 BC, for the "capital crime" of "impiety" (Plato, Apologia, et al). Not incidentally, the result of this "vote" was that barbarians sacked and burned Athens to the ground not eight years later. Indeed, this literature shares with all primitive catastrophic literature that it doesn't bother to record what any subsequent generation could still see for itself. Rather, it asserts to record events so out- of-ordinary that they violate what little is known of natural law, events, in short, "caused by gods" because they "could only have been caused by gods." (Actual meaning: "me not know.") We may note the fact that, before the "divine" interventions of these three weeks, the gods of the Greeks were little more than a background reference that did so much nothing it took the best army in the world nine years to clear an area smaller than Maine: the "Zeus" that demanded the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, supposedly before the Greeks could even sail for Troy, is an assertion made several centuries after Homer, while the principal religions activities current to the event are augury (flight diviniation, mentioned and attended to throughout the Iliad), chaumaturgy (reading of entrails), and the sulfide-induced gobbledygook of the Pythoness ("writher") at Delphi. No Olympic Pantheon here at all. Indeed, worship of that Pantheon does not seriously begin until the Dorians, demon- worshipping Celts from the Balkans, sacked all of Achaia but Menelaos' Laconia (his Laconic Greek is spoken there today) and Odysseus' Ithaca (because he returned and put them to sword and bow), while the Achaians were busy sacking Troy. The Iliad, whatever it started as, becomes the mouthings of a barbarian people who took over while their betters were away, and accomplished very little subsequently. A similar fate, and by virtue of the same geological events, overtakes the then-mainly-metaphysical "Jehovah," who had otherwise been famous solely for "His" covenant with Abraham (smart guy), that "He" no longer required families to kill and burn their firstborn to propitiate the Assyrian demonology they had just left behind (see any non-Biblical history of the wanderings of "Abraham," who was probably more than one person). It is unwisely assumed by the faithful that the Hebrew Bible begins with Genesis, when it does not: the Old Testament begins shortly after Exodus, and was carefully backwritten after 1200 BC (as the Iliad was backwritten 400 years after Troy), specifically to create a new religion for what were to be a new people. Moses and Aaron assert with their new "knowledge" of the "power of God" to put new explanations onto events that, until then, few had known -- or cared -- much about. As an explanation of the Exodus -- or Genesis -- it is quite as reliable as the special effects of Cecil B. DeMille, who had also felt the very earth "lose all its law" and heave beneath his feet as a matter of Californian routine. It is a rewriting of knowledge by catastrophically-induced demonic fantasy unmatched until one Joshua ben Jusef of Nazareth, Decapolis, overheard some of what was left of the martial disciplines and metaphysics of the Achaeans who stayed behind after the war and were uninfluenced by the Dorians, from the Ionians they became. His catastrophe, did he know it, which he did not, was the assassination of Julius Caesar and the taking of the Seleucid Empire (including Nazareth) by the political leftovers not three generations before he moved in. The Iliad and the Bible have something else in common to the literature of demonic catastrophe (the Politically-Correct term is "miracle"): they remain popular among savages, whether born to savage, barbarian, or civilised parents. I mean that all children are born savages, and most collect demonic "literature" to excuse them of having to take responsiblity for themselves. See: it asserts, in all its "divine Authority," that the "gods" will render the child's efforts superfluous, whether by taking care of him for having a feeling, or by wrecking his careful efforts in his own behalf. It is, after all, so easy to let Mommy do it, even if Daddy comes along and spanks. __________ 1. Homer. Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, tr. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 1951. Dennis M. Hammes, "The Iliad As Bible," Moorhead MN: ScrawlMark Press (1995). Mr. Hammes is Robert Larson Professor of Poetry and James K. Larson Professor of Philosophy at FISHHOOK Academy of Natural Philosophy.