By Ronald E. Osborn
(From the winter 2002 issue of Spectrum magazine)

Homer understood the logic of violence. In the Iliad, his epic retelling of the fall of Troy, every emotional, physical, and psychological dynamic of force is carefully and critically weighed. Every aspect of the human personality is submitted to the harsh rigors of close combat. Every ethical reserve is tested in the pitch of battle. Here, amid the crush of flesh and iron, ideals and abstractions are shattered in an ultimate realism. Lofty sentiments are unraveled by the elemental impulse for self-preservation. Moral pretensions and pieties are stripped bare by death feeding at the altar of war.

The final vision of the poem, however, is not a celebration of this stark arena, or, as some have believed, of the soul of the warrior. It is, rather, an understanding that all who engage in violence are mutilated by it; that one cannot wield might without becoming its slave; that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.

We discover that this greatest of all war epics is in fact an antiwar epic not through any systematic exposition or declaration, but through a striking accumulation of detail. First, there is the fact that the entire conflict is waged for the sake of a symbol, Helen, rather than any objective purpose or moral necessity. Capricious gods--acting through their ciphers, the ruling elites--stir the masses of ordinary people into a positive desire to kill and be killed. The gods must continually prime these men for battle through high-sounding rhetoric, through oracles and omens and promises of glory and success.

Yet the impulse to wage war defies any logic or reason external to the war itself. When left to their own intuitions, the common soldiers declare that their only desire is to abandon the campaign and set sail for home. At the gates of Troy we thus find ourselves in an ethical void in which violence serves as its own justifier. "You must fight on," the gods command, "for if you make peace you will offend the dead." It is slaughter, in other words, that necessitates more slaughter.

Against the desire of the gods to maximize destruction is the suffering of the innocent, as when the aging King Priam gives the following grim account of what war can only mean for the vast majority of human beings:

I have looked upon evils
and seen my sons destroyed and my daughters dragged away captive
and the chambers of marriage wrecked and the innocent children taken
and dashed on the ground in the hatefulness of war, and the wives
of my sons dragged off by the accursed hands of the Achaians
and myself last of all, my dogs in front of my doorway
will rip me raw1

The victims of war, Priam bears witness, are not the soldiers, whose deaths will be celebrated with songs and wreaths, but women, children, and the elderly. This, of course, comes as no new fact to anyone. But Priam’s words are particularly penetrating and revelatory, for Priam is a Trojan, a foe of Homer’s people. The foundational text in the Greek self-understanding subversively invites us to contemplate how violence bears on the weakest members of society and even on the enemy. It is as though the Hebrew Bible included descriptions of how YHWH’s holy wars might have felt for a Philistine child.

Most subversive of all, however, is the way in which the Iliad plays havoc with the underlying assumption of what would later be known as the "Just War" tradition, namely, the assumption of reason. All Just War theories rest upon the idea that violence can somehow be contained within established rules of prudence and proportionality. But if violence serves as its own justifier, and if the suffering of the innocent is not enough to deter an initial act of aggression, there is no possible limit that can be placed on any war waged for "a just cause."

In Homer, this truth emerges through the unraveling of a treaty offering a modicum of ethical constraint within the conflict. Early in the poem the Greeks and Trojans make a pact allowing both sides to collect and burn their dead without hindrance or threat of attack. The agreement, while not affecting the actual prosecution of the war, seeks to place the struggle within the framework of social and religious convention. It aims to humanize and dignify the bloodshed through shared values of reason and restraint.

Unfortunately, maintaining one’s reason while drenched in human blood is a tenuous affair. As the war intensifies, the combatants kill with increasing savagery until at last they are seen gleefully mutilating dead corpses. "Tell haughty Ilioneus’ father and mother, from me, that they can weep for him in their halls," cries Peneleos to the Trojans while holding up the fallen soldier’s eyeball on the point of his spear.

When the Greek hero Patrokolos is slain at the end of book sixteen the unstoppable drift toward total war, in which no rules or conventions apply, is finally realized. The two sides engage in a battle of unprecedented fury and destruction for the entirely irrational purpose of seizing Patrokolos’s dead body--the Trojans to further mutilate it and then feed it to wild dogs, the Greeks to prevent this humiliation at whatever cost. The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself.

Notes and References

1. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), book 22.61-67.