Learning Lessons From the Trojan War (Academic Journal From Ebsco Host))

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Learning Lessons fromthe Trojan War:Briseis and the Theme of Force

Casey Due

H ow is it that we still today find so muchpow er in an ancient epic poem? Itseems that every generation reads the

Iliad with fresh eyes. I have argued in a recentbook that tlie significance of the Trojan Warand the lessons taught by it have changedwith each r.ew era of history, and that todayno less than in the fifth century BCE, whenAthenian tragedy flourished, do we look tothe legendary past in an attempt to makesense of present conflict. In this essay I lookat several modern attempts to learn lessonsfrom the Trojan War, including the exampleprovided to us by the French philosopherSimone Weil's remarkable essay, "The Iliad, orthe Poem oi'Force," which she wrote in 1939during th<; war between France andGermany and just before the occupation ofFrance by tlie Nazis. Ultimately, I am goingto compare some of the arguments made inWeil's essay about the theme of force in the

Casey Dui is associate professor

of Classical Studies in the

Department of Modern and

Classical Languages at the

University of Houston. Her pub-

lications include Homeric

Variations on a Lament by

Briseis (2002) and The

Captive Woman's Lament in

Greek Tragedy (2006).

230 College Literature 34.2 [Spring 2007]

Iliad to some of the underlying assumptions of the 2004 blockbuster filmTroy, with which the essay has a remarkable af&nity. In this way I hope to showthat this movie, the most spectacular of instances to date of reading the Iliad inthe twenty-first century, ^ is only the latest example of a type of reading thatstretches back as far as the seventh century BCE, and perhaps even earlier.

Before coming to either of those works, however, it is necessary toexamine the way that the Iliad presents war, since it is the Iliad that is the ulti-mate source text for both the movie-makers and Simone Weil, This essay isdivided, therefore, into two parts. In the first, I argue that the Iliad, the firstand paradigmatic representation in literature of conflict between East andWest, has a remarkable appreciation for the consequences of war for bothsides, and especially for its victims: the warriors on tlie losing side, thewomen that get taken captive, and their children. By highlighting the mor-tality of the hero and the death of warriors at the peak of their youth andbeauty, the laments, imagery, and similes of Homeric epic mourn both sidesequally. In the second part of the essay, I trace the continuum of this equa-nimity in the literary, artistic, intellectual, and performance traditions of latercenturies that seek to learn firom Homer, In the end, I will compare the wayin which both Weil and the makers of Troy have used the character of Briseisto grapple with the conflicts of their own times, highlighting the effects ofwar on the powerless by way of her character. My conclusion speculatesabout the nature of the Iliad as a didactic text and why so many generationsof audiences have sought truth in the Iliad.

I The Victims of War

In Greek literature, appreciation for the consequences that war bringsabout for its victims has a long history, beginning with the Homeric Iliad andOdyssey.^ This is particularly true of the plight of the female victims of war.In Book 8 of the Odyssey, Odysseus is famously compared to a lamentingwoman, fallen over the body of her husband, as she is being dragged awayinto captivity.

The renowned singer sang these things. But Odysseus melted, and \vet thecheeks below his eyelids with a tear. As when a w oman laments, falling overthe body of her dear husband who fell before his city and people, attempt-ing to ward off the pitiless day for his city and children, and she, seeing himdying and gasping, falling around him wails with piercing cries, but menfrom behind beating her back and shoulders with their spears force her tobe a slave and have toil and misery, and with the most pitiful grief hercheeks waste away. So Odysseus shed a pitiful tear beneath his brows,**{Odyssey 8,521-31)

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The simile is so striking because the generic woman of the simile couldeasily be on<; of Odysseus' own victims,^ Although the woman of the similedoes not actually speak, the language of the simile has powerful associationswith the larientation of captive women elsewhere in epic, with the resultthat the listener can easily conjure her song,^

An equally striking simile is applied by AchiUes to his own situation inIliad 9:

Like a bird that brings food to her fledgHng young in her bill, whenever shefinds any, even if she herself fares poorly, so I passed many sleepless nights,and spent: many bloody days in battle, contending with men for the sake oftheir wives, {Iliad IX,323-27)

Achilles too draws on the suffering of captive women in order to articulatehis own sorrow, as he struggles against his mortality and the pleas of his com-rades that he return to battle. By using a traditional theme of women's songsof lament, that of the mother bird who has toiled to raise her young only tolose them, Achilles connects on a visceral level with the women that he him-self has widc'wed, robbed of children, and enslaved,^

The setting of the Iliad is the Trojan War, a war in which Greeks besiegeand ultimately destroy a foreign city. The poem is remarkable for the way thatits preoccupation with mortality and the human condition extends even tothe enemy. In the words of Simone Weil, who was struck by the equity ofcompassion with which the suffering of the Greeks and Trojans is narrated:"The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity thehuman race can experience—the destruction of a city. This calamity could nottear more at the heart had the poet been born in Troy, But the tone is not dif-ferent when the Achaeans are dying, far from home" (Benfey 2005, 31),

The enslavement and sexual violation of women and the death of hus-bands are realities of war that are neither condemned nor avoided in epicpoetry,^ As ^4ichael Nagler has shown, the taking ofTroy is expHcitly com-pared in the Iliad to the tearing of a woman's veil and hence characterized asa rape,^ In Iliad 11, Diomedes mocks Paris for the minor wound that he hasinfiicted on him:

I don't care—it's as if a woman or senseless child struck me. The arrow ofa worthless coward is blunt. But when I wound a man it is far otherwise.Even if I just graze his skin, the arrow is piercing, and quickly renders theman lifeless. His wife tears both her cheeks in grief and his children arefatherless, while he, reddening the earth with his blood, rots, and vultures,not women, surround him, {Iliad XI,389-96)

The horror that Diomedes describes, culminating in an unlamented corpsethat will be eaten by vultures, will in fact be the fate of countless Trojans, Butthe Iliad is not without lamentation. The laments of such figures as


Andromache and Hecuba are some of the most memorable passages in theentire poem, and yet the suffering they highlight is most often that of theTrojans, not the Greeks,

The Farewell of Hektor and AndromactiaThe first lament of the Iliad is not actually a song of lament for the dead,

but, as John Foley has shown, it actually conforms in every way to the tradi-tional patterns and structure of a Greek lament (1999,188-98), In this scene,the Trojan Hektor comes back to Troy briefiy from the battlefield and meetshis wife Andromache there, together with their infant son Astyanax. Ourimpression is that this is the last time they will ever see each other, I printAndromache's words here in three parts, refiecting the typical three-partstructure of traditional laments,

(I) Andromache stood near to him, shedding a tear,

and she reached toward him with her hand and spoke a word and addressedhim:

"What possesses you? Your own spirit will destroy you, neither do you pity

your infant son nor me, ill-fated, I who will soon be

your widow. For soon the Achaeans will kill you,

making an attack all together. It would be better for me

to plunge into the earth if I lost you. For no longer wiU there be any

comfort once you have met your fate,

but grief

(II) Nor are my father and mistress mother still alive.

For indeed brilliant Achilles killed my father,

and he utterly sacked the well-inhabited city of the CiUcians,

high-gated Thebe, And he slew Eetion,

but he did not strip him, for in this respect at least he felt reverence in hisheart,

but rather he burned his body together with his well-wrought armor,

and built a funeral mound over him. And mountain nymphs,

the daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, planted elms around him,

I had seven brothers in the palace;

all of them w ent to Hades on the same day.

For briUiant swift-footed Achilles killed all of them

among their roUing-gaited cattle and gleaming white sheep.

Casey Due 233

But my :mother, who was queen under wooded Plakos,

he led h(;re together with other possessions

and then, released her after taking countless ransom,

and Artemis who pours down arrows struck her down in the halls of herfather,

(III) Hektor, you are my father and mistress mother,

you are my brother, and you are my flourishing husband,

I beg you, pity me and stay here on the tower,

don't ms.ke your child an orphan and your wife a widow, (//larfVI,405-32)

Upon Hektor's departure, moreover, Andromache returns home and ini-tiates an antiphonal refirain of lamentation among her serving women:

So he spoke and brilliant Hektor took up his helmet of horse hair. And hisdear wi£; went home, though frequently she turned back, shedding abun-dant tears. And when she quickly reached the well-inhabited house of man-slaying Hektor, and found inside her many attendants, she initiated lamen-tation in all of them. They lamented Hektor in his own home, although hewas still alive, (//ifl(fVI,494-500)

Hektor and Andromache are the subject of one of Weil's most notable com-ments in her essay on the Iliad. She quotes the hnes in Iliad 22, which comesoon after the account of the death of Hektor:

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace

To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing

A hot bjith for Hector, returning fi-om battle.

Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths

Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm, {Iliad XXII,442-46)

Weil comments: "Far from bot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not

alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from warm baths. Nearly all human

life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths" (Benfey 2005, 4),

The Laments of Iliad 24

We hav(; just looked at the tender farewell between Hek to r and his wife

Andromache and their baby son. T h e killing of Hek to r in Iliad 22 is a vic to-

ry and a m o m e n t of extreme satisfaction for the central hero of the Iliad,

AchiUes, and yet the epic camera immediately shifts, as we witness the gut -

wrenching reactions of Hektor 's mother, father, and wife to his death.

Similarly the Iliad ends wi th the funeral, not of Achilles, the Iliad's central fig-

ure, but instead with the funeral of Hektor, Achilles' own short life and com-


ing death resonate throughout the laments that are sung for his deadliestenemy. The Iliad ends with the haunting songs of women who are soon tobe the Greeks' captive slaves—widowed, foreign, old and young, they are theantithesis of the Greek citizen ideal, the ultimate other, l" But the grief theyinitiate is a communal grief, a communal song of mourning that on the sur-face laments Hektor, but, from the perspective of the Iliad's Greek audience,is even more fundamentally Achilles's own song of sorrow, l'

First and foremost there is the lament of Andromache, Hektor's wife andchief mourner:

When they had carried the body within the house, they laid it upon a bedand seated professional mourners round it to lead the dirge, whereon thewomen joined in the sad music of their lament. Foremost among them allAndromache led their wailing as she clasped the head of mighty Hektor inher embrace. "Husband," she cried, "you have died young, and leave me inyour house a widow. And our son is still very much a child, the one whomyou and I, ill-fated, bore, nor do I think that he will reach manhood. Forsooner will this city be utterly sacked.You, its guardian, have died, you whoprotected it, you who shielded its cherished wives and helpless children,those who will soon be carried off in the hoUow ships, and I among them.And you, my child, will either follow me and perform unseemly tasks, toil-ing for a cruel master, or else one of the Achaeans wiU hurl you from atower, taking you by the hand—a miserable death—angry because Hektorkilled his brother or father or maybe even his son, since very many of theAchaeans bit the dust with their teeth at the hands of Hektor. For yourfather was not gentle in the midst of sorrow-bringing battle. Therefore thepeople grieve for him throughout the city, and you, Hektor, have broughtunspeakable lamentation and sorrow upon your parents. But for me espe-cially you have left behind grievous pain. For when you died you did notstretch out your arms to me from our marriage bed, nor did you speak tome an intimate phrase, which I could always remember when I weep foryou day and night." {Iliad XXIV.719-76)

All the things that Andromache fears come true (as we know from Proclus'ssummaries of the now lost Epic Cycle and other attested myths).Andromache's words are reproachful, as is typical of Greek laments for thedead, and tell Hektor of the suffering that she and their son will have toendure, now that Hektor has abandoned them in death. But at the same timeher lament estabhshes the memory of Hektor as the guardian and sole pro-tector ofTroy for all time. His death means the city's destruction, the deathof the men, and the enslavement of the women and children. But these samewords initiate his heroic kleos, his glory that will live on after him in song.Her grief, and the city's grief, are Hektor's glory.

Casey M 235

The laments of Andromache and the other women of the Iliad thereforehave a dual function. On the level of narrative they are laments for the dead,the warrior husbands and sons who inevitably fall in battle. They protest thecruel fate of the women left behind, and narrate the bitter consequences ofwar. The grief expressed by these women is raw and real. But for the audi-ence of ancient epic the laments for these husbands and sons are also the pro-totypical laments of heroes, who, for them, continue to be lamented andmourned on a seasonally recurring basis. ^ The poetry of epic collapses theboundaries between the two forms of song.l^

In the .Iliad, grief spreads quickly from individual to community. As eachlament comes to a close, the immediately surrounding community ofmourners antiphonally responds with their own cries and tears. It is notinsignificant then that the final lament of the Iliad and indeed the final linesof the poem, sung by Helen (who is the cause of the war), ends not with theantiphonal wailing of the women (as at IUadVl.499, 19.301, XXII.515, andXXIV.746),, but of the people: "So she spoke lamenting, and the peoplewaUed in response" (XXIV.776).

The Iliad looks at humanity without ethnic or any other distinctions thatmake peop e want to kill each other. It is not a poem that is anti-war: warwas a fundamental and even sacred part of Greek culture. But it is poem thatcan transcend ethnicity and lament the death of heroes in battle, whetherthey are Greek or Trojan, and it can even lament the death of the greatestGreek hero of them all, Achilles, by lamenting the death of his greatestenemy. It is a poem that can view Achilles through the eyes of his victims,through the sorrow that he generates, and at the same time experience andappreciate his own never-ending sorrow.

Ttietis's Lament fDr Achilles in /fed XVIII

Achilles too, of course, is lamented directly throughout the poem. Hisown upcoming death is constantly being foreshadowed, even though hedoesn't actually die in our Iliad. One of the ways that his death is foreshad-owed is through the death of his nearest and dearest companion Patroklos,who goes into battle in his place, wearing his armor, and who dies in thesame way that Achilles will die. 14 Notice the reaction to Patroklos's death:

A dark cloud of grief fell upon Achilles as he listened. He filled both handswith dust from off the ground, and poured it over his head, disfiguring hislovely face, and letting the refuse setde over his shirt so fair and new. Heflung himself down all huge and hugely at fuU length, and tore his hair withhis hands.

The women whom AchiUes and Patroklos had taken captive screamedaloud for grief, beating their breasts, and with their limbs failing them for

236 College Literature 34.2 [Spring 2007)

sorrow. Antilokhos bent over him the while, weeping and holding both hishands as he lay groaning for he feared that he might plunge a knife into hisown throat. Then AchiUes gave a loud cry and his mother heard him as shewas sitting in the depths of the sea by the old man her father, whereon shescreamed, and all the goddesses daughters of Nereus that dwelt at the bot-tom of the sea, came gathering round her . . . . The crystal cave was filledwith their multitude and they all beat their breasts while Thetis led them intheir lament.

"Listen," she cried, "sisters, daughters of Nereus, that you may hear the bur-den of my sorrows. Alas how I am wretched, alas how unluckily I was thebest child bearer, since I bore a child that was faultless and strong, out-standing of heroes. And he shot up like a sapling. After nourishing him likea plant on the hiU of an orchard I sent him forth in the hoUow ships to Ilionto fight with the Trojans. But I will not receive him again returning hometo the house of Peleus." {Iliad XVI11.22-60) 15

As soon as Patroklos is dead everyone starts lamenting—not just forPatroklos, but also for Achilles. This is because now AchiUes's own death isinevitable. He is now officially "the most unseasonal of them all," as he callshimself in XXIV.540. He is going to go back to battle to avenge the deathof Patroklos, at the cost of his own life.

Briseis, the captive concubine of Achilles, likewise laments Achilles onthe occasion of lamenting Patroklos.^^ In fact these are the only words shespeaks in the entire poem, and we must tease out almost everything we knowabout her from these few words:

Then Briseis like golden Aphrodite, when she saw Patroklos torn by thesharp bronze, falling around him she wailed with piercing cries. And withher hands she struck her breast and tender neck and beautiful face. Andthen lamenting she spoke, a woman like the goddesses: "Patroklos, mostpleasing to my wretched heart, I left you alive when I went from the hut.But now returning home I find you dead, O leader of the people. So evilbegets evil for me forever. The husband to whom my father and mistressmother gave me I saw torn by the sharp bronze before the city, and mythree brothers, whom one mother bore together with me, beloved ones, allof whom met their day of destruction. Nor did you allow me, when swiftAchilles kiUed my husband, and sacked the city of god-like Mynes, to weep,but you claimed that you would make me the wedded wife of god-likeAchilles and that you would bring me in the ships to Phthia, and give mea wêdding feast among the Myrmidons.Therefore I weep for you now thatyou are dead ceaselessly, you who were kind always." So she spoke lament-ing, and the women wailed in response, with Patroklos as their pretext, buteach woman for her own cares. {Iliad XIX.282-302)

Casey Due 237

Briseis's lament for Patroklos mourns in advance her would-be husbandAchilles—much as Andromache laments Hektor while he is still alive. As wewill see, this is an important passage for Weil, who interprets it slightly dif-ferently than I do here. Weil's interest in Briseis is as a captive woman, a slavesubjected to the force of her Greek captors. For her, the passage shows us thatslaves are not given the opportunity to weep for their own cares except whentheir masters suffer loss. I cite it here, however, as yet another example of theconflation of the deaths of Patroklos and Achilles in the Iliad.

The preparations for Patroklos's funeral too are merely a prelude toAchilles's ovm. In fact, they will be buried together. In Iliad XXIII, the soulof Patroklos comes to Achilles in a dream and accuses him of neglecting hisfuneral rites:

"One prayer more will I make you, if you will grant it; let not my bones belaid apart from yours, Achilles, but with them; even as we were brought uptogether in your own home... let our bones lie in but a single urn, the two-handled golden vase given to you by your mother." (Iliad XXIII.82-92)

This urn is a symbol of Achilles's future immortality as an immortalized hero,and Patroklcis is asking for a share in that when he asks that their bones becombined after their deaths.i'^ So when the Greeks build Patroklos's tombthey are also building it for Achilles: "AU who had been cutting wood borelogs , . . they threw them down in a line upon the seashore at the place whereAchilles would make a mighty funeral mound for Patroklos and for himself"PCXIIL123-26).

Ttie Death of Euphorbus

The theme of the hero as a plant that blossoms beautifully and diesquickly is important in Greek lament traditions, as we saw in Thetis's lamentfor Achilles. 1 It is also a metaphor that encapsulates what glory means in theIliad. One oli" the primary metaphors for epic song in the Iliad is that of aflower that v/ill never wilt:

My mottier the goddess Thetis of the shining feet tells me that there aretwo ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight around thecity ofTroy, my homecoming is lost, but my glory in song [kleos] will beunwilting;: whereas if I reach home my kleos is lost, but my Hfe will be long,and the outcome of death will not soon take me. (Iliad IX.410-16)

Here Achilles reveals not only the crux of this choice of fates around whichthe Hiad itself is built, but also the driving principle of Greek epic song. Theunwilting flower of epic poetry is contrasted with the necessarily mortalhero, whose death comes all too quickly, l^

The Iliad quotes within its narration of Achilles's kleos many songs oflamentation i;hat serve to highlight the mortality of the central hero as well


as underscore the immortality of song. The traditional imagery of these quot-ed laments, as sung primarily by Thetis, spills over into epic diction itself,with the result that similes, metaphors, and other traditional descriptions ofheroes are infused with themes drawn from the natural world.

The depiction of the death of the Trojan warrior Euphorbus in the Iliadis one such place where epic diction draws on the botanic imagery that per-vades Greek laments for heroes. Euphorbus, like Achilles, is compared to ayoung tree: Euphorbus topples like a tree that is overcome by a storm.Ô

The point went straight through his soft neck. He fell with a thud, and thearmor clattered on top of him. His hair was soaked with blood, and it waslike the Graces, as were his braids, which were tightly bound with gold andsilver. Just like a flourishing sapling of an olive tree that a man nourishes ina solitary place where water gushes up in abundance, a beautifiil saplinggrowing luxuriantly—blasts of every kind of wind shake it and it is full ofwhite blossoms, but suddenly a wind comes together with a furious stormand uproots the tree so that it is stretched out on the ground—even so didthe son of Atreus, Menelaus, strip the son of Panthoos, Euphorbus with theash spear, of his armor after he had slain him. {Iliad XVII.49-60)

The plant imagery in this passage is intensified by two references to blossoms.In the simile, the tree to which Euphorbus is compared blossoms with whiteflowers. Moreover, scholia in medieval manuscripts of the Iliad reveal that thiscomparison between Euphorbus and the tree with its blossoms is even clos-er than might appear at first glance. According to the schoha, kharites, trans-lated here as "the Graces," means in the Cypriote dialect of Greek "myrtleblossoms."2i The flecks of blood in Euphorbus's hair look like myrtle blos-soms. Since the Arcado-Cypriote dialect layer of Homeric diction containssome of the oldest elements of the oral poetic system in which the Iliad andOdyssey were composed, it is hkely that in the most ancient phases of the Iliadtradition Euphorbus's hair was understood to look like myrtle blossoms.^2Thus we find that the comparison of a dying warrior to a flower is an ancienttheme at the core of the Greek epic tradition.

I have argued that the death of glorious young men in battle and the sad-ness of that death is a central theme of the poem. This theme is somethingthat, as we will see,"Weil seizes on in her essay But one point on which I dis-agree w ith Weil is her denial that the Uiad also celebrates those deaths as themost glorious way to die.23 So I will conclude this section of my essay withone final passage from the Iliad:

TeU me now you Muses that have homes on Olympus, who was first to faceAgamemnon,whether of the Trojans themselves or of their renowned allies?It was Iphidamas son of Antenor, a man both brave and of great stature, whowas raised in fertile Thrace, the mother of sheep. Cisses brought him up in

Casey Ou6 239

his own house when he was a child—Cisses, his mother's father, the manwho begot beautiful-cheeked Theano. When he reached the fuU measure ofglorious manhood, Cisses would have kept him there, and wanted to givehim his daughter in marriage. But as soon as he had married he left thebridal chamber and went off to seek the kleos of the Achaeans with twelveships that followed him. (Iliad XI.218-28)

Unlike Hektor, Iphidamas is not lamented by his bride in our Iliad. Insteadhis compressed life history, with its account of his recent marriage, serves asthe lament for this doomed bridegroom. 24 The narrator points out some-thing very important. Iphidamas gave it all up to become part of the kleos ofanother man. It was worth it to him to become a part of the unwilting songthat is our Iliad. Hektor of course chooses likewise, and Achilles too, moti-vated as he is by the death of Patroklos. Achilles's withdrawal from battle, hisstruggle with the value he places on his own life and his articulation of thechoice that he has between a homecoming and glory in song, as well as suchmemorable passages as Hektor's farewell to Andromache, and finally thelaments that women sing for their dead warriors, are the best illustrations ofall these young men have to give up to become a part of that song. But theyaccept it as worthy compensation for their brief lives.

II The Lessons of War

On a large funerary pithos dated to around 675 BCE from the island ofMykonos, one of the very earliest surviving representations of the fall ofTroyin art, a series of panels shows the Trojan women taken captive and their chil-dren slain before their eyes.^^The creator of that pithos knew what war wasand depicted it with perfect clarity. Already in 675 the experiences of theTrojan women were iconic and emblematic of wartime suffering. Concernfor the victims of war, as exemplified by the Trojan women, is one of themany continuities that unite Archaic and Classical Greek poetic and artistictraditions. As I noted at the beginning of this essay, the significance of theTrojan War and the lessons taught by it have changed with each new era ofhistory, and yet the emotional dynamic that I have traced in Part I remainsremarkably constant.

In my recent book I explored the significance of the Trojan War forClassical Athens. There I pointed out that recent scholarship has shown thatsuch vital cultural institutions and monuments as Greek tragedy, theParthenon, and other monumental art on the acropolis did not celebrate theGreek victory at Troy, but rather explored the horrors of war, very often fromthe perspective of the defeated Trojans. The destruction ofTroy is consistent-ly represented in Athenian hterature and art as a sacrilege that rouses the ret-ribution of the gods.26 In fact, in the wake of the Persian sack of Athens in


480 BCE the Athenians seem to have identified more with the Trojans thanwith the Achaean Greeks.

Greeks of the fifth century BCE seem to have been all too aware that inthe act of sacking a city one is particularly susceptible to committing hubris-tic outrage. ' The historian Herodotus marked the Persians as exemphfyingthis kind of excessive violence when they sacked Sardis, the capital city of theLydians (Herodotus 1.89.2).The Athenians themselves were in position to actas the Persians did on many occasions over the course of the fifth centuryBCE, as they developed their own aggressive naval empire. In 475, afterbesieging and capturing the city of Eion, they sold the entire population intoslavery and established a colony there. Eion was the first of many cities to beenslaved by the Athenians in the fifth century, with some victories more bru-tal than others.Thus the sack ofTroy must have resonated with the Athenianson many levels. On the one hand it prefigures the sack of their own city andthe desecration of their temples at the hands of a foreign aggressor. Onanother level, the myth is a warning against the excesses of brutality thatoften come with victory and empire.

In the remainder of this essay I would hke to turn my attention fromancient Athenian attempts to apply the Trojan War to their own experimentwith empire, and focus instead on modern attempts to draw lessons firom theTrojan War.This war still today seems to be emblematic of all war, and specif-ically, as it was for the ancient historian Herodotus, the ultimate paradigm forunderstanding the divide between East and West. Before focusing on SimoneWeil's essay and its World War II context, however, I'd like to set this essay incontext by looking briefly at a few other examples. These examples areintrinsically connected with wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:World War I, the Vietnam War, and the current on-going hostihties in Iraq.They are offered as snapshots of history, selected episodes that I think haveimportant connections with the reading of the Hiad I have presented so far.

GallipoliA modern poem that resonates with the foregoing discussion of Achilles

is the following by Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a British officer who was killed inaction in France in 1917 during World War I. He wrote this poem on leavefrom Galhpoli, the site of some of the bloodiest batdes of the war. ThePeninsula of Gallipoli is located just across the Dardanelles from Troy °

I saw a man this morning

Who did not wish to die

I ask, and cannot answer.

If otherwise wish I.

Casey Due 241

Fair broke the day this morning

Against the Dardanelles;

The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks

Were cold as cold sea-sheUs

But other shells are waiting

Across the Aegean sea.

Shrapnel and high explosive.

Shells and hells for me.

O hell of ships and cities.

Hell of men like me.

Fatal second Helen,

Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland

And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle.

And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knowest and I know not-

So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and shout for me.29

The geographical proximity of GaUipoh to the generally accepted site ofTroyinspires Shaw-Stewart to compare his own brief respite from war to that ofAchilles in the Iliad. The poem, moreover, is packed with allusions to Greekhterature that go far beyond the Iliad. Most notable is the play on Helen'sname, a clever imitation of a similar play on the name in Greek in Aeschylus's


Agamemnon 681-90. Like Achilles, the author of this poem struggles with anunwillingness to die, coupled with an intense questioning of the purpose ofthe fighting. Both will ultimately return to battle after a brief withdrawal,Achilles to his certain death, and the author of this poem to an uncertain fate.As for Achilles, it is Shaw-Stewart's confrontation of his own mortality, in thespot where so many heroes of epic died in song, that inspires his questioningof the war.

The campaign of Gallipoli, in which the British attempted to seize con-trol of the Dardanelles, and which lasted almost eight months, had manyimportant historical consequences, including, at least in part, the weakeningof the British empire. Another consequence was the astronomical rise topower of a Turkish officer, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Attaturk, the enor-mously influential leader who is now viewed as the father of modern Turkey.Attaturk had a memorial set up at Gallipoli with the following remarkableinscription:

You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe awayyour tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. Afterhaving lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well. (AriBurnu Memorial, Gallipoli)

In an incredible recognition of the commonality of their suffering, Attaturk,speaking for Turkey as a nation, shares in the grief of the mothers of Turkey'sattackers and embraces the British war dead as though they were his ownsons. But once again, the tradition of the Trojan War looms large, and we findthat this kind of compassion was conceived of long before Attaturk.

As I have been trying to argue throughout this essay, and as we willexplore again when we come to Simone Weil, the Iliad's portrayal of war isso affective on an emotional level even today in large part because both sidesare portrayed with a compassion that does not distinguish between attackerand attacked, winner and loser, Greek and foreigner. Greek tragedy, thoughcomposed and performed in a world in which the Persian Empire dominat-ed the Anatolian peninsula and had become Athens' greatest enemy in thefirst half of the fifth century BCE, inherits and extends epic's treatment ofthe defeated Trojans. An extraordinary passage in Euripides' Hecuba goes evenfurther. The chorus of Trojan women, as their city smolders not far away,imagine and pity the suffering of the Greek women who have lost theirloved ones in war:

"Pain and compulsion, even more powerful than pain, have come full cir-cle; and from one man's thoughtlessness came a universal woe to the landof Simois, destructive disaster resulting in disaster for others. The strife wasdecided, the contest which the shepherd, a man, judged on Ida betweenthree daughters of the blessed gods, resulting in war and bloodshed and the

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ruin of my home; and on the banks of the beautifully flowing Eurotas river,some Spartan maiden too is full of tears in her home, and to her grey-hairedhead a mother whose sons are slain raises her hands and she tears hercheeks, making her nails bloody in the gashes." {Hecuba 638-56)

Here the distinction between Greek and Trojan is blurred and even subvert-ed.30 Not only that, the Athenians watching this drama are in the midst ofthe decades of hostilities with Sparta that we call the PeloponnesianWar.TheAthenians in the audience, therefore, are being asked to witness the grief ofthe Trojan women as they empathize with the grief of their attackers, theSpartans, who just so happen to be, many centuries later, the Athenians' cur-rent foe and longstanding rival in the Greek world. And we must remember,too, that it is non-professional Athenians acting in the role of this chorus ofTrojan women.î More than twenty-three centuries after Euripides's drama,Attaturk's appreciation of the grief of the British mothers is yet a furtherextension of the Iliad's ultimate humanitas.

Vietnam, Iraq

As the French scholar Nicole Loraux has meditated upon quite recent-ly, in 1965, the French existentialist novelist, philosopher, and playwrightJean-Paul Sartre produced his version of Euripides' Trojan Women (Loraux2002,1-13). He made a number of adaptations to the ancient Greek play inorder to give it meaning for his contemporary audience. The adaptations hemade added an explicit anti-war message to the play, and specifically an anti-Vietnam War message. Now, one could argue that the Trojan Women in itsoriginal fifth-century BCE form is anti-war, and specifically anti-Peloponnesian War. The play has often been understood that way, because itfocuses so directly on the effects of war on women, and presents an unfil-tered look at the lamentation and suffering of the wives and mothers of theTrojans.32 It is easy to read the play as protesting the actions of the Greeks ofthe play (that is, the victors in the Trojan War), who might easily be equatedwith the Athenians of Euripides' audience.

I and many others have argued that the play is much more subtle thanthat,33 but there have been many productions of this play that with httle tono adaptation are nonetheless anti-war in their sentiment. The RoyalShakespeare Company's 2005 production of Euripides' Hecuba, which like-wise dramatizes the grief of the Trojan women after the sack ofTroy, hadmerely to put some American-style camouflage tents in the background tosuggest the Iraq War. It did not have to go much further than that.34 Lorauxpoints out that what Sartre did by contrast was to excise the long songs oflament that comprise the bulk of the play, and replace them with speechesand dialogue dominated by exphcitly political, anti-colonialist rhetoric. In so


doing Sartre made the play much less moving, and therefore much less effec-tive as an anti-war statement.This was certainly not his intention. But hy tyingthe play too closely to contemporary events, Loraux notes, Sartre limited itsuniversality, and its emotional force, a force that transcends politics.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2005 production of the Hecuba washy no means an isolated event. Indeed, in that summer there were major pro-ductions in New York City and Washington, D.C., of Euripides's TrojanWomen and Aeschylus's Persians. 5 Each of these productions sought to con-nect with its audience hy adding an anti-Iraq War twist. Clearly, audiences ofthe twenty-first century are ahle to view Greek tragedy as relevant to cur-rent events. Arguahly it is these plays' status as "classics" that makes them seemhoth universal in their emotional impact and educational in their ultimateeffect. The producers and directors of contemporary productions of thesetragedies do not seem to question the original anti-war intent of thesetragedies, despite the fact that they are hy no means always understood thisway by scholars. ^ Many classicists do in fact argue that Athenian tragedy wasnecessarily didactic and civic in nature (while not denying the creativity andautonomy of the playwrights), hut there is Httle agreement as to what indi-vidual tragedians and particular plays sought to teach the Athenian citizensin the audience.^^ It seems clear that each play likely evoked a multiplicityof responses, and that no one message would have heen ohvious. This seemsto he the crucial difference hetween modern productions that seek to protesta specific war (whetherVietnam or Iraq) and the ancient dramas, which musthave resonated with contemporary events hut were not explicitly tied to theseevents.

There is another contemporary genre that is perhaps hetter suited to thedidactic goals of the more obviously politically motivated revivals of Greektragedy: the newspaper editorial. On the eve of the 2003 American invasionof Iraq, Nicholas Kristof published in the NewYork Times "Cassandra Speaks,"in which the Americans' strategic use of Turkey as a launch point leads him toargue that Troy and the Trojan War should he a warning to the United States:

The instruments of war have changed mightily in 3,200 years, but peoplehave not; that is why Homer's "Iliad," even when it may not be historical-ly true, exudes a profound moral truth as the greatest war story ever told.So on the eve of a new war, the remarkably preserved citadel of Troy is anintriguing spot to seek lessons. ^

By culling a variety of mythological sources firom antiquity, Kristof managesto connect episodes in the Trojan War to such central and controversial issuesas the use/misuse of intelligence, the importance of allies, and the so-called"Bush doctrine."

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Also in the NewYork Times, Edward Rothstein's "To Homer, Iraq WouldBe More of Same" (June 4, 2004), explores the Iliad and the actions of itscentral hero Achilles as a lesson in "being human" that has important mes-sages for those engaged in the current conflict. Rothstein's piece takes as itsoccasion both the sixtieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandyand the premier of Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. Much as Loraux does withSartre's take on the Trojan Women, Rothstein criticizes Petersen for the super-imposing of the Iraq War on the Homeric Troy, but then goes on to suggestthe ways in which we can legitimately learn from the Iliad. Both Kristof'sand Rothstein's editorials are remarkable in the way in which they seek toplace the Iraq war into a continuum that stretches far back into antiquity andsuggest ways in which we could use the lessons ofTroy to do things differ-ently.

World War IIIn 1939, Simone Weil embarked upon a similar exercise. Weil, who grad-

uated first in her class at the Ecole Normale Superieure in philosophy, was apacifist with an ascetic drive that impelled her to share in the sufferings ofothers. Just after France declared war on Germany (after the invasion ofPoland) and just before the occupation of France by the Nazis, Weil com-posed and published "The IUad, or the Poem of Force," a philosophical essaythat never explicitly refers to contemporary events, but which no less clear-ly than the editorials cited above seeks to understand current conflict in lightof the Trojan War. This was one of many essays inspired by the Iliad that Weilcomposed between 1939 and her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four.^^

The essay begins straightforwardly with Weil's bold thesis about the truesubject of the Iliad:

The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force. Forceemployed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's fleshshrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modi-fied by its relations with force, as swept away, bUnded, by the very force itimagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submitsto. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, wouldsoon be a thing of the past, the IUad could appear as an historical document;for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceiveforce, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is thepurest and loveliest of mirrors. (Benfey 2005, 3)

Weil builds her essay around the argument that the Iliad is not, at its heart,about the Trojan War or the anger of Achilles, but rather about a much moreabstract concept: force. Equally important for Weil is her assertion that theforce that is at the center of the Iliad is the same force driving all of humanhistory, including the events of the current day. We can see from these intro-


ductory statements therefore that Weil's essay is as much ahout contemporaryevents as it is ahout the Hiad.'^^

We can summarize Weil's principal arguments about force hriefly as fol-lows. First and foremost, it dehumanizes. Force turns humans into ohjects. Aperson who has heen made a thing through force is denied agency, and thefreedom to express his/her will, thoughts, and emotions. According to Weil,"memory itself harely lingers on" (Benfey 2005, 9). At several points in theessay Weil uses the captive concuhine of Achilles, Briseis, to illustrate herpoints. As an example of how force denies agency to the individual, Weil citesthe wailing of the captive women mentioned earlier in this paper, whorespond to Briseis's lament for Patroklos in Iliad XIX with antiphonal cries:

And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his mas-ter, his oppressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste his town andkilled his dear ones under his very eyes. This man suffers or dies; then theslave's tears come. And really why not? This is for him the only occasion onwhich tears are permitted, are, indeed, required. A slave will always crywhenever he can do so with impunity—his situation keeps tears on tap forhim. (Benfey 2005, 9)

Weil at this point goes on to examine why slaves feel love for their masters,arguing that in part hecause all other outlets for emotion are barred, and inpart hecause the master can offer the hope of becoming a person again(instead of an object), a slave like Briseis is able to forget the horrors inflict-ed upon her: "To lose more than the slave does is impossihle, for he loses hiswhole inner life. A fragment of it he may get back if he sees the possihilityof changing his fate, but this is his only hope" (10).

Secondly, force operates in a cyclical fashion, affecting hoth winner andloser equally:

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as to itsvictims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobodyreally possesses it. The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into con-quered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors andchiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not atone time or another have to bow his neck to force. (Benfey 2005, t l )

Weil cites the hero of the IUad himself, Achilles, as an example of a man suh-jected to force when Briseis is taken from him by Agamemnon. But the hal-ance of power soon shifts, and Agamemnon fmds himself begging Achilles forforgiveness. The intoxicating nature of force is such that those who have itdon't realize they will soon lose it and be subject to force in turn:

These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the conse-quences of their deeds will at length come home to them—they too willhow the neck in their turn. . . . For they do not see that the force in their

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possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations withother human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts offorce. (Benfey 2005,14-15)

Here Weil is speaking primarily in reference to those who fight the battles,but the imphcation of her arguments is that Briseis, too, will have her day.

"Moments of grace," as "Weil calls them, are scattered throughout thepoem, in which the pure love of sons for parents, parents for children, andbrothers for one another, the friendship of comrades, and even the friendshipof enemies are "celestial moments in which man possesses his soul" (Benfey2005,29-30).These moments, striking because they are few and far between,serve to impress upon us, by their very contrast, what force does to people itacts upon in war, namely that it turns a person into "stone."^! As I have indi-cated already, what I find striking about "Weil's reading is her insight into theequity of compassion with which Greeks and Trojans are portrayed, and herattempt to find the reasons for this. The theme of force and the way it affects,according to "Weil, everyone in war equally puts the victors and the van-quished over the course of time on a level plain, or at least in an alternatingcycle. In this reading, the distinction won in war is not glorified by the Iliad,because it is in fact the purpose of the Iliad to reveal that that distinction isshort lived at best, and won at the expense of the humanity of the loser.

It is not my purpose here to evaluate the merits and weaknesses ofWeil'sunique interpretation of the Iliad, an interpretation which has been longadmired even if not universally agreed with. Many Classicists have praised itas a beautiful intellectual and spiritual exercise.' 2 i would not go so far as toassert that "Weil's reading can be "correct," by which I mean only that it can-not have been Homer's intention (however Homer is conceived) to composethe Iliad in order to teach us about the concept of force. That the Iliad doesteach, however, seems to me irrefutable. So far we have explored many usesof the poem as a source of wisdom in troubled times, from the PeloponnesianWar in the fifth century BCE to conflict in Iraq in the twenty-first centuryCE. Weil reflects on what she perceives to be the continued use of forcethrough the centuries, culminating in the force that was dominating theEurope of 1939, namely the Nazi party. Though she never names it directly,we can only assume from her opening statement that the warning implicit inher arguments about the cychcal nature of force is aimed squarely at Hitler.43In the final section of my essay I propose to look at one last example of find-ing lessons in the Trojan War that perhaps offers the same warning, this timeaimed squarely at us.


III Force and the Movie Troy

Does the 2004 blockbuster Troy try to teach us anything about war? I'mnot certain that it is actually attempting to do so, but there are many aspectsof the film that connect directly with the themes of the Iliad that I have dis-cussed and with Weil's arguments about the theme of force in the Iliad.Moreover, as New York Times columnist Edward Rothstein points out, ininterviews with the press the director of Troy, Wolfgang Petersen, has fire-quently made explicit comparisons between the Trojan War and the war nowbeing waged in Iraq. I will quote Rothstein's synthesis of some of Petersen'smost telling statements here:

Last month, before the film's premiere in BerHn, its German director,"Wolfgang Petersen, said: "It's as if nothing has changed in 3,000 years." In aGerman interview, he said of the Homeric epic, "People are still using deceitto engage in wars of vengeance." And he argued: "Just as King Agamemnonwaged what was essentially a war of conquest on the ruse of trying to res-cue the beautiful Helen fi-om the hands of theTrojans, President George "W.Bush concealed his true motives for the invasion of Iraq.'"*''

I now propose to explore how Petersen's (and screenwriter David Benioff's)recreation of the characters of Agamemnon and Briseis, heavily based on theHomeric Agamemnon and Briseis but with significant changes to their story,exemphfies both the cyclical and dehumanizing nature of force described byWeil.45 As we will see, Petersen and his team, in order to tell the "true story"of the Trojan War, have made the tale one of force and its consequences.

The True History of the Trojan WarIn addition to having a political subtext that is, as we have seen, common

to so many modern revivals of the Trojan War theme, I suggest that Troy is inmany respects emblematic of a modern obsession with the historicity of theTrojan War myth, an obsession that goes hand in hand with the search for les-sons that has been the subject of this essay. The obsession with proving thehistoricity of the Trojan War began with Heinrich Schliemann, the self-edu-cated businessman turned archaeologist who in the 1880s was the first toexcavate the site that we now call Troy.^^ It is well known among scholars,even if not often admitted, that we have very Uttle evidence that would leadus to think that the Trojan War was an historical event or that Troy was a realplace, other than the fact that the later Greeks thought that it really happenedand because we admire the Iliad so much as a work of Hterature that we wantit to be history as well.'*'? At the site we call Troy, there is no inscription orarchaeological evidence of any kind labeling it as Troy, and the evidence fora destruction by siege is sketchy at best. Nevertheless, we persist in believingit was all true—well, but not all of it, right? We think going to war over

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Helen is not very believable, and of course we can't beHeve in the pagan godsand their motivations for starting the war—the judgment of Paris, and all that.

To be fair, the makers of Troy have not, to my knowledge, claimed out-right that their film narrates history, ;?er 5e. In the production notes pubhshedon the official website for the movie, the director, Wolfgang Petersen, speaksof the authenticity of characters and emotions, not historical fact.'*^ In dis-cussing the differences between Troy and the Iliad, he corrmients:

I don't think any writer in the last 3000 years has more graphically andaccurately described the horrors of war than Homer . . . But in his epicworks, the human drama was overshadowed by the brutality. A contempo-rary audience needs to come into the story through the lives and the passionsof the real people caught up in this terrifying experience, (my emphasis)

Producer Diana Rathburn makes similar assertions about the goals of themovie in these same production notes:

It is very hard sometimes to relate to classic literature as it feels distant, of adifferent time, a different world, but there's something about this story that'sso easy to connect with, it's about emotions—whether they were experi-enced thousands of years ago, or today.

Petersen and Rathburn make a claim for a reality within the history and leg-end ofTroy that consists of real people and real emotions. Neither claims toknow whether the Trojan War actually took place (this topic is discussed inthe production notes without giving a definitive answer to the questionsraised), but they nevertheless assert that there is a "reality" that can be foundin the legend.

In keeping with this quest for the reahty behind the legend, Troy leavesout the gods from the action, and instead tries to show the viewer an histor-ically plausible version of the Trojan War. Petersen notes on the film's website:

One respect in which we diverged from Homer's telling is that our storydoes not include the presence of the gods. The gods in the Iliad are direct-ly involved in the story—they fight, they help out, they manipulate. Not inour story. The religion is there, the belief is there, but the gods are onlymentioned—they are not made a part of it. It wouldn't have been in line withthe level of realism we wanted to achieve in the film, (my emphasis)

Even Achilles's divine lineage is suggested as being rumor which may or maynot be true. It is this assertion of realism that I wish to explore further now.The way the film is constructed is in fact a fine example of finding the truthbehind the legend. Helen is the pretense for going to war, but what Troy isreally about is Agamemnon's desire to amass an empire that includes Troy andits trade routes through the Dardanelles. The character, motivations, and fateof Agamemnon in particular comprise a major portion of the plot of the


film. This plot exemplifies in fascinating ways some ofWeil's central ideasabout force.

Agamemnon's EmpireOne of the first scenes in the movie Troy shows Agamemnon on the

point of conquering Thessaly with a massive army. (Thessaly was an histori-cal region of Greece, but since it is the area that AchiUes was believed to havebeen from in Greek myth, I feel compelled to point out this odd choice onthe part of the filmmakers.) The opposing king says, "You can't have thewhole world, Agamemnon." This scene sets up the driving theme of themovie, namely Agamemnon's ambition to do just that. Agamemnon is alreadya sinister and unlikable (not to mention unattractive) figure, and this portrayalonly intensifies as the film continues.

We are shown next the festivities that result when Sparta (the kingdomof Agamemnon's brother Menelaos, and of course Helen) concludes a peacetreaty with Troy. But once Helen has been stolen Agamemnon has his chanceto conquer this city too. Agamemnon says to Menelaos, consoling him afterthe departure of Helen, "Peace is for the women and the weak. .. . Empiresare forged by war." Later, alone with his personal counselor, he says "I alwaysthought my brother's wife was a foolish woman, but she's proved to be veryuseful." By now it is clear to the viewer that Agamemnon, Darth-Vader-esque in his evil intensity, does indeed want to conquer the whole world, andthat his greed is destined to bring him to a bad end.

Agamemnon's opportunity is nearly lost when the less than war-likeParis offers to settle the whole matter with a one-on-one duel after theGreeks have landed at Troy and gained the upper hand over the Trojans inthe first day of battle. Whoever wins gets Helen, and everyone else can gohome. Enraged at the prospect, this time Agamemnon states his true motiva-tions outright: "I didn't come here for your pretty wife, I came here for Troy."This proposed duel is inspired by the duel between Paris and Menelaos thattakes place in Iliad 3, though much changed.^^ In her essay, Simone Weilpoints out that in the Iliad too the Greeks cease to be content with the returnof Helen, once all ofTroy seems within their grasp.

At the end of the first day of combat described in the Uiad, the victori-ous Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e.,Helen and all of her riches. . . . In any case, that evening the Greeks are nolonger interested in her or her possessions:

"For the present, let us not accept the riches of Paris;

Nor Helen; everybody sees, even the most ignorant.

That Troy stands on the verge of ruin."

He spoke, and all the Achaeans acclaimed him.

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What they want, in fact, is everything, (Benfey 2005, 16)Helen is by no means the only woman used as a prize in this way. Just as

the phght of Achilles's captive concubine Briseis was of great interest to Weilas she sought to illustrate the operation of force on the individual, so too inthe movie Troy does Briseis become in many ways emblematic of the victimsof war. In general, the film focuses a great deal of attention on the womenof Troy, especially Briseis and Andromache, the consummate lamentingwomen of the Iliad. As I have pointed out elsewhere in connection with theIliad, Briseis is a woman of royal birth who has been widowed by Achillesand made his captive concubine, and yet in her lament of Iliad XIX she con-structs him as an erotic figure and indeed her bridegroom-to-be (Due 2002,67-81), The Iliad's plot is initiated by the taking of Briseis from Achilles byAgamemnon, Troy makes the romance of Achilles and Briseis and her seizureby Agamemnon central elements of the plot, Andromache's story parallelsthat of Briseis, but in the film her story proceeds in the reverse direction. Sheis the beloved royal bride of the Trojan champion Hektor for the moment,but we are all too aware that she is destined to share the captive fate ofBriseis,The IUad,Weil, and the filmmakers are thus united in their concernfor these characters,

I would hke to suggest that Briseis's killing of Agamemnon in the movie,an invention on the part of the filmmakers that occurs nowhere in Greek lit-erature, is a perfect illustration ofWeil's ideas about how force comes full cir-cle. Before exploring this thought further, I must point out that the charac-ter of Briseis in the movie is actually a conflation of two women in the Iliadand (very hkely) one woman of the larger epic tradition as well: she is Briseisand Chryseis and Cassandra all in one, Chryseis in the Iliad is the daughterof a priest of Apollo, a captive woman assigned as a prize to Agamemnon,The Iliad begins with the refusal of Agamemnon to accept a ransom for herfrom her father. For a modern audience at least Agamemnon comes off verycruel and selfish in his refusal: "I will not free her. She shall grow old in myhouse at Argos far fi-om her own home, busying herself with her loom andvisiting my bed" (1,29-31), When Apollo sends a plague indicating his dis-pleasure, it is Achilles who insists that Agamemnon give Chryseis back, there-by provoking Agamemnon into taking Achilles's prize, Briseis, The TrojanCassandra on the other hand is not featured in our Iliad, but in other worksof archaic Greek hterature and art she plays an important role in the eventssurrounding the fall ofTroy as a priestess of Apollo,50 She is eventuallyassigned to be the prize of Agamemnon, and he brings her home toMycenae, where they are both killed by Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra,5i

The Briseis of Troy is, like Cassandra, a priestess of Apollo; she is cap-tured by Achilles's men in the temple of Apollo when they first storm the

252 College Literature 34,2 [Spring 2007]

shore. Early in the film Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles as a way ofpulling rank on him, then treats her very cruelly, giving her to the men todo with as they wish. This act, which perhaps more than any other isemblematic of Agamemnon's merciless, rapacious, and above all power-obsessed character, comes to completion for the viewer at the very end ofthe film, when Agamemnon finds Briseis alone, praying in the sanctuary ofApollo as Troy is being sacked. Grabbing her by the hair, he hisses: "You'llbe my slave in Mycenae, A Trojan priestess scrubbing my fioors. And atnight,,,," Briseis stabs Agamemnon in the neck at this moment and he fallsdead, Agamemnon's words in this scene about scrubbing fioors in Mycenaeand his unfinished threat of what will happen at night are no doubt meantto be the equivalent of what Agamemnon says about his prize womanChryseis in Iliad I,

Petersen and screenwriter David BeniofF have taken the seeminglyminor character of Briseis in the Iliad and constructed a whole new story linefor her, in order to provide a satisfying culmination of their characterizationof Agamemnon,52 J^^^^ perhaps unintentionally they have also made themovie perfectly illustrate one of Simone Weil's central arguments about theIliad, that it is about force, about how war and its reliance on force turnpeople into objects, and about how no one escapes force's effects. Thosewho seem to have force under their command soon lose it. The slave andconcubine Briseis becomes symbohc of this principle in WolfgangPetersen's interpretation,

Agamemnon is Hitler; Agamemnon is George W, Bush,Two very differ-ent works have dealt with the compassion that the Iliad has for the Trojansby making the work a moral lesson, a lesson whose didactic reach extendsthrough millennia, Weil never removes the Iliad from the realm of literaturein her examination. For her, it was a poem that had a great deal of insightinto the human condition. But if I may go back to the essay's opening words,we can see that Weil is grappling with the Iliad from an historical perspectiveas well:

For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, wouldsoon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document;for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceiveforce, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is thepurest and loveliest of mirrors, (Benfey 2005, 3)

The creators of Troy seem just as eager to show the Trojan War as history.Their artistic and plot choices are driven by this goal, and though the empha-sis in their own production notes is on the universal truth of human emo-tion in war, a comment like, "It's as if nothing has changed in 3,000 years,"suggests that there is more to Petersen's assertions of realism. Unlike

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Athenians of the fifth century BCE, we in the twenty-first century behevethat history, not myth, teaches. For Petersen, Troy had to be at the very leastbelievable and realistic or it could not convey the unstated moral messagebehind the film. In my conclusion, I would like to explore this thought a ht-tle further.

IV Conclusion; In Search of the Trojan War

Why does the historicity or ahistoricity of the Trojan War matter to us?Note the attitude of Lord Byron, who addressed the question several timesin his published and unpublished work. ^ This poet and passionate philhel-lene who fought in the Greek war for independence, carved his name intothe temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, and swam across the Hellespont inimitation of Leander, emphasizes the continuity ofTroy through the centuries:

High barrows without marble or a name,

A vast untiUed and mountain-skirted plain.

And Ida in the distance, still the same.

And old Scamander (if tis he) remain:

The situation seems still formed for fame—

A hundred thousand men might fight again

With ease; but where I sought for Ilion's walls.

The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls. (Don Juan Canto IV, 77)

We may compare: "I've stood upon Achilles' tomb, /And heard Troy doubt-ed; time will doubt of Rome" (Don Juan Canto IV, 101). Byron's own diarygives us a great deal of insight into these verses: "We do care about 'theauthenticity of the tale ofTroy' I still venerated the grand original as thetruth o£ history (in the material Jacfi) and o( place. Otherwise it would havegiven me no delight" [written in his diary in 1821].

Byron was writing in a world in which the emerging Homeric Questionwas quickly becoming the fierce intellectual debate that it remains today. This"question" (which is, in reality, many questions) was at first concerned withauthorship. Did the Iliad and Odyssey have the same author? If so, when didhe live? If not, how did the poems come to be in the form that we now havethem? Fierce opposition arose between scholars who beheved in Homer, asingle genius and creator of the two foundational epics ofWestern civihza-tion, and those who saw the Homeric texts as the products of potentiallymany poets composing over many generations. But another branch of thequestion was concerned with the relationship between myth, epic, and his-tory. Did the Trojan War take place? If so, how closely does the Iliad reflectwhat actually happened? In 1769, Robert Wood published his Essay on the


Original Genius of Homer, in which he made deductions about changes in thetopography of the area around the Hellespont since ancient times. Anotherkey thinker early in the debate was Jean Baptiste Lechevalier, who proposedthat the site ofTroy was at the Turkish mound known as Burnabashi. Heasserted the historicity of the Trojan War, thereby sparking fierce debatethroughout Europe. Those interested in the debate scrutinized the Iliad'spoetic accounts of the topography ofTroy, including such traditional epithetsas "well-walled," "steep," and "windy" as they searched for the historical Troy.

Nearly a hundred years after the birth of Byron, a self-made wealthybusinessman, Heinrich Schliemann, astonished the world when he uncov-ered the remains of a Bronze Age citadel, presumed to be Troy, in a moundknown as Hisarhk in northwestern Turkey. Soon after, he excavated thewealthy Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae in mainland Greece, whereAgamemnon was said to have ruled. Schliemann had famously set out fromthe beginning to find the Troy of the Homeric poems, claiming that he hadbeen determined to prove Homer's veracity since he was a young boy. Hequite literally bulldozed his way towards that goal, destroying most of whatwould turn out to be Bronze Age Troy. Later, when he uncovered a corpsecovered in gold and wearing a gold mask in a Mycenaean tomb, he sent atelegram to the king of Greece, proclaiming that he had looked upon theface of Agamemnon.

The movie Troy, as have a spate of documentaries produced in the lastthirty years that claim to uncover the true history behind the Iliad, seems tome to tap into this same feeling expressed by Byron and acted upon soaggressively by Schliemann. We seem to think that if we take out the partsthat aren't believable to us, and replace them with contemporary concernsabout trade, empire, and politics, we can prove the historicity of the legend,and just as importantly, we can learn from it. If I seem critical of suchattempts, it is not my intention. Myth is by nature a dynamic entity, evolvingand constantly being reinterpreted over generations. It cannot be static, or itceases to maintain its truth value.54 The Trojan War and its historicity havebecome, in part because of films like Troy, an essential part of our own twen-ty-first-century global mythology. And so I w ill end my essay on a futuristicnote, with a quotation from StarTrek:The Next Generation.At the conclusionof an episode in which Captain Picard has found a way to communicate witha potentially hostile alien race that expresses itself solely via its own, cultur-ally bound system of metaphor, Riker, Picard's second in command, findshim reading the Homeric Hymns.^^ Picard explains that the Hymns are "oneof the root metaphors of our own culture":

Riker: "For the next time we encounter theTamarians . . ."

Casey Due 255

Picard: "More familiarity with our own mythology might help us relate totheirs."

Indeed, more familiarity with our own "mythology" concerning the factsabout Troy and the truth in the Trojan War can help us to see how the truthof the Iliad doesn't have to depend on it being "true" as historical fact. TheTrojan War may well have taken place; perhaps a king named Agamemnondid once rule at Mycenae. But in the twenty-first century and beyond thelessons that we learn fi-om the Iliad transcend the facts of any one time orplace. The poem urges us to view and seek to understand the plight of ourenemy, allowing us to appreciate the essential sameness of our experience inwar, and it does this regardless of whether or not the Trojan War really hap-pened.56

Notes

^ See Due (2006). Portions of the first section of my essay have been adaptedfrom this book.

2 Of course, we are only 6 six years into this century. I expect there will be morespectacle to come.

3 On this point see also "Death, Pathos, and Objectivity" in Griffin (1980,103-43).

^ Translations in this essay are my own unless otherwise indicated.5 On the internalized lamentation of Odysseus and the identification of the

lamenting woman see Nagy 1979 (100-01). On Odysseus as one of his own victimssee also H. Foley (1978, 7).

6 See Due (2002, 5-11) and the introduction and Chapter 1 in Due (2006),where I discuss the traditional patterns in the form and themes of Greek lament fromthe examples in ancient epic to those sung at modern day Greek funerals.

^ For this simile's associations with both women's lamentation for children andalso vengeance in the context of both epic and tragedy, see Due (2005 and 2006,Chapter 5).

8 On this point, see also Scodel (1998), who cites Iliad 11.354-55: "Let no onehasten to return home before sleeping beside a wife of the Trojans." It should benoted, however, that this is said in the context of paying theTrojans back for the theftof Helen (11.356: "and getting payment for his struggles and groans in connectionwith Helen").

^ See Nagler (1974, 44-63) and Monsacre (1984, 68-69). See also Seven AgainstThebes 321-32, which likewise equates the tearing of a woman's veil with the cap-ture of a city.

^^ Helen's lament is a special case. As I argue elsewhere, Helen (the wife/stolenconcubine of Paris) evokes the captive woman in a foreign land, longing for legiti-mate status. This is especially true when she laments Hektor. See Due (2002, 67).


11 See "Lamentation and the Hero" in Nagy (1979,94-117) and Due (2002,67-81), both of which assert that laments for heroes are at the heart of Greek epic inboth form and function.

12 On the history and archaeology of Greek hero cults, see Snodgrass (1987,159-65).Two pathfmding general works on hero cults are Brelich (1958) and Pfister,('1909-1912). Specialized works include Pache (2004) and Gallou (2005).

13 On this point see also Thomas Greene, "The Natural Tears of Epic" (Tylus,and Wofford 1999). Greene argues that lamentation in epic collapses the houndariesbetween the audience and the heroic past, producing "a hallowed communionbetween the two." He argues that in fact the goal [telos] of most of the Europeanpoetry known as epic is tears, and that through tears the communion between pastand present is most accessible (195).

14 On the death of Patroklos as a preview of Achilles's death see Whitman (1958,199-203), Nagy (1979, 33, 72, and 292-93), Sinos (1980), Lowenstam (1981), andDue (2002, 6-7 and 76).

1 Translation of this passage is based loosely on that of Samuel Butler (1898).16 On Briseis's lament for Patroklos as a lament for Achilles see Due (2002,

chapter 4).1 For more on this idea see Due (2001, 44-45) with further references to the

golden amphora and scholarship ad loc.1 On plant imagery in laments for heroes and the death of Euphorbus, see also

Due (2006, 66-67).1 See especially Nagy (1979, 174-84). Nagy shows that the root phthi- in the

Greek word aphthiton ('unwilting') is inherently connected with vegetal imagery, andmeans "wilt."

20 Comparison of the dead to a tree is one of the most common and ancientthemes in the Greek lament tradition. See Alexiou (1974,198-201), Danforth (1982,96-99), Sultan (1999, 70-71), and note 18, above. Virgil takes this traditional imagefor the fallen warrior and uses it for the death of the entire city ofTroy at Aeneid2.626-631.

21 Makedones de kai Kuprioi kharitas legousin tas sunestrammenas kai oulas mursinas,has phamen stephanitidas. See the forthcoming publication of the 2002 Sather Lecturesby Gregory Nagy.

22 For the best account of the dialectic layers that form the Homeric system seeParry (1971, 325-64). See also Householder and Nagy (1972, 58-70).

23 See also note 42, below.24 On the pathos of this and other "bridegroom" passages in the Iliad, sec Griffin

(1980,131-34).25 This pithos is more famous for the depiction on its neck of the wooden horse.

On the Mykonos pithos see Ervin (1963), Caskey (1976), Hurwit (1985, 173-36),and Anderson (1997,182-91).

26 Anderson (1997).The fall ofTroy is one of the most popular subjects in Atticvase-painting from the mid sixth century BCE to the mid fifth century BCE, withrepresentations increasing significantly after 490 (the year of the first Persian inva-

Casey Du6 257

sion, in which the Athenians defeated the Persians at Marathon). See, in addition toAnderson, Ferrari (2000, 120). O n the fall ofTroy (including the death of Astyanaxand the capture of women) as a recognizable theme already in archaic art, see alsoFriis Johansen (1967, 26-30 and 35-36).

27 C f J.Winkler (1985, 37) and Croally (1994, 47).28 The geographical significance of Gallipoli and this poem's allusions to the

Trojan War have been pointed out by Michael Wood in his documentary and accom-panying book, In Search of the Trojan War see Wood (1985/1998).

2^ For more on Patrick Shaw Stewart and this now well-known poem see thehistorical website maintained by Balliol College, Oxford: http://web.baUiol.ox.ac.uk/history/miscellany/shawstewart/index.asp.

30 The commonality between Greek and Trojan is also articulated by Odysseuselsewhere within the Hecuba: "Among us are grey-haired old women and aged menno less miserable than you, and brides bereft of excellent bridegrooms, whose bod-ies this Trojan dust has covered" {Hecuba 322-25).

^ O n the experience of the non-professional chorus, young Athenian mensinging and dancing the role of captive Trojan women, see Due (2006, 23-25).

32 See Due (2006, chapter 5) for an overview of possible interpretations of thisplay.

33 See especially CroaUy (1994, 253).34 A few other aspects of the performance, including a reference to a "coalition

force," might be justifiably interpreted as direct allusions to the American invasion ofIraq. See e.g., the review of Peter Marks in the Washington Post: " 'Hecuba':Redgrave's Blazingly Controlled Fire" (May 27, 2005).

35 O n productions of ancient tragedy in the United States see Thomas Jenkins'sforthcoming work, American Classics: Transformations of Antiquity in Postwar America.For more on the reception of Greek tragedy from the Renaissance to the present (aburgeoning academic field), see most recently Hall and Macintosh (2005), Hall,Macintosh, Michelakis, and Taplin (2006), Martindale and Thomas (2006), andMichelakis (2006).

36 See Due (2006, Chapters 2 and 5) for an overview of scholarly reactions tothese two plays.

37 O n the didactic nature of tragedy, see, e.g., GoldhiU (1986,140) and Gregory(1991, passim).

38 "Cassandra Speaks," NewYork Times, 18 March, 2003.39 O n the influence of the Iliad on Weil's writings, see Benfey 2005, x-xvi.Weil

died of heart failure brought on by a combination of tuberculosis and self-starvation.For more on Weil's life and work see retrement 1976, Panichas (1985), and Nevin(1991).

'^^ For similar arguments see Ferber (1981, 66), Summers (1981, 87), and Nevers(1991 x; cited in Holoka 2003, 13, note 15).

^^ See WeU: "those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone."(Benfey 2005, 26).

^2 For the cover of a recent critical edition of the essay (Holoka 2003), JasperGriffin has written: "The Iliad is arguably the most influential work in the whole of


Western literature. N o discussion of it is more precious than the passionate, pro-found, and penetrating essay of Simone Weil, who uses the Greek epic to illuminatethe human condition and the tragic theme of destruction and war." Cf. Macleod(1982,1):"I know of no better brief account of the Iliad than this." Macleod's com-mentary on Iliad 24 argues for an interpretation of the poem that is similar to Weil's:"The Iliad is concerned with battle and with men whose life is devoted to winningglory in battle; and it represents with wonder their strength and courage. But itsdeepest purpose is not to glorify them, and still less to glorify war itself. What warrepresents for Homer is humanity under duress and in the face of death" (Macleod1982, 8). I disagree with Weil's and Macleod's assertion that the Iliad does not glori-fy death in battle. See above, p. 238-39.

'^^ I don't mean to imply that it is as simple as that, or that the point of Weil'sessay is patriotic or nationalistic. I mean only that as the ascendant power in Europe,Hitler was on the up side of a cycle that would inevitably turn downwards.

44 "To Homer, Iraq Would Be More of Same," NewYork Times, 5 June, 2004.45 The screenplay for Troy was written by David Benioff, but it went through

many rounds of revision before and during filming. O n this point I am grateful forRobin Mitchell-Boyask's presentation on the film's script(s) at the 2005 AmericanPhilological Association annual meeting.

46 For more on the life and accomplishments of Schliemann, seeTraiU (1995).47 See further below. A vividly narrated documentary and accompanying book.

In Search of the Trojan War, by Michael Wood (1985/1998), is a good introduction tothe many controversies surrounding the possible historicity of the Trojan War and thepossible locations of the historical Troy. See also the more scholarly work of Allen1999. Latacz 2004 is a forcefully argued book that takes the opposite view of whatI have asserted here, namely that "Homer's backdrop is historical" and "There prob-ably was a war over Troy" (the quoted phrases are from the table of contents of thatwork, and are in fact the conclusions reached by the author after careful considera-tion of archeological and other evidence). I would have to write a book of my ownin order to fully explain why my view is so much more skeptical than that of Latacz.Let me just say here that it is not that I can't believe that Troy was a real place, andthat we have found it, and that there was a war there. I am far more interested, how-ever, in the way that the myth of Troy has a life of its own that is independent of anyhistorical event. Also, because I am a scholar who believes that the oral tradition inwhich the Iliad was composed had a very long history, one that extended at least asfar back as the early Bronze Age if not earlier, I have difficulty accepting that a waras late as 1200 BCE had such a definitive impact on tbe creation of our iZmJ. Theseare highly controversial matters, however, that unfortunately cannot be fuUy engagedhere.

48 For the following quotes from the production notes of Troy, see the film'sofficial website at http://troymovie.warnerbros.com/.

49 Here as elsewhere in the film a crucial change is the removal of the gods fromthe action. An even more radical departure in this particular case, however, is thedeath in the film of Menelaos at the hands of Hektor—a death that has serious con-sequences for many other works of Greek literature!

Casey Due 259

50 For more on Cassandra's role in the sack ofTroy see Due (2006, 143-45),5^ This occurs most famously in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, but Agamemnon tells

the story in the underworld in Odyssey 11 and the deaths of Cassandra andAgamemnon are also depicted on several archaic Greek vases,

52 It is interesting to note that other modern adaptations of the Iliad have alteredAgamemnon's end in a similarly radical fashion, for the same element of satisfaction.In the Helen of Troy miniseries that first aired on the USA network in 2003,Clytemnestra comes to Troy all the way from Mycenae and kills him in the bath ashe basks in his victory over the Trojans,

53 I am indebted to Michael Wood's (1985/1998) In Search of the Trojan War forthese quotations from Byron and for the title of this section,

54 For myth as a conveyor of a given society's truth values see Nagy (1992 and1996,113-45),

55 In "Darmok," StarTrek.The Next Generation, episode 102,5^ A collection of essays entitled Troy: From Homer's Iliad to Hollywood Epic v 'as

published in late 2006 (Oxford University Press, with a copyright date of 2007), afterthis essay had been prepared for publication. Some of the themes discussed here arealso addressed in that volume, including the relationship between poetry and histo-ry and the use of the Trojan War as a lens through which to understand contempo-rary conflict, and I urge the reader to consult that volume for more on these topics.

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Visual Media

"Darmok." StarTrek.The Next Generation episode 102. 1991. Directed by W. Kolbe.Written by J. Menosky and P. LaZebnik . Paramount Studios.

In Search of the Trojan War 1985. Produced and directed by B. Lyons. Written by M.Wood. British Broadcasting Company. Issued on DVD in 2004.

Helen ofTroy. 2003. Directed by J. Harrison. Written by R. Kern. USA Network.Troy. 2004. Directed by W Petersen. Screenplay by D. Benioff. Warner Bros.Troy (official website). Warner Bros.: http://troymovie.warnerbros.com/.

Documents

Learning Lessons From the Trojan War (Academic Journal From Ebsco Host))