sarah cole
the war rubric, from its cause to itsleadingcharacters to its culminating events, is
understood in terms of human rage.
No less important and complex in theIliadis grief, and here, too, the spectrum is
wide, with such passionate spectacles as Achilles’ histrionic mourning for Patroclus
(which comprises several days, the immolation of twelve Trojan prisoners, and a
lavish funeral befitting Achilles perhaps more than his beloved friend) sharing the
stage with quiet moments of mourning such as the meeting between Achilles and
Priam, after Hector’s death:
So [Priam] spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving
for his own father. He took the old man’s hand and pushed him
gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled
at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor
and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again
for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
(24. 507–12)Justly famous for its portrayal of a grief that, in its spirit of gentleness and pity,
momentarily dismantles fundamental organizing structures of war (friend and
enemy, victor and victim, battlefield and home, the present and the past), the
passage suggests not only that grief is one of war’s inescapable attributes, but,
more radically, that it is one of war’s greatest accomplishments. Such transcendent
moments of human intimacy, amidst a ravaged world, in a sense bespeak a whole
panoply of civilian values to which theIliadcan only gesture, often via its similes.
Yet the scene between Priam and Achilles resonates precisely because it isolates a
magnificent moment of human suffering and communitywithinwar—one that
could, in a sense, only be a productofwar.
This moment is not alone; theIliadoffers a sustained reflection on the particular
forms of peacefulness that attend war. Often books will end at nightfall, as quiet
and rest descend—‘and each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds’, as Owen would
put it 2,000 years later.^15 The rhythms of war in theIliadinclude formal structures
of slowdown and recuperation, not only at night, but also during the various
truces that occur periodically, and these pauses have their poetic correlatives.^16 For
example, at the close of book 8, a representatively bloody book, the tone shifts to
one of tense, yet wondrous, rest:
So with hearts made high these sat night-long by the outworks
of battle, and their watchfires blazed numerous about them.
As when in the sky the stars about the moon’s shining
are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness,(^15) Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, inCollected Poems and Fragments, 99.
(^16) Despite the general tendency to end fighting with the end of daylight, this pattern is not absolute
in theIliad; most memorably, the night raid in book 10, in which Odysseus and Diomedes slay a
number of sleeping Trojans, represents a powerful counter-example.