Priam is impatient to see Hector. But Achilles collects himself, and he urges Priam
to share a meal. The taking of food symbolizes the practical acceptance of continuing
life and the recognition that even the passion of grief must yield to necessity. Amid
the ruins of human hope and in the knowledge of imminent death, Achilles for the
first time sees life steadily and sees it whole.
In concentrating therefore upon the defeat of heroic expectation by folly and
passion and in organizing his poem around the anger in such a way that we see in the
passionate nature of the hero the cause both of his greatness and also of his great
error, Homer has made a tragedy out of the heroic myth. Indeed the Greeks came to
regard Homer as the father of tragedy and it is possible to see in the Iliad the elements
later isolated by the fourth-century philosopher and critic Aristotle in his Poetics: error
(hamartia) in Agamemnon’s folly and Achilles’ persistence, reversal (peripeteia)in the
arming of Patroclus and the consequent calamity (pathos) in his death, and finally
recognition (anagnoresis) in the conversation of Achilles first with Thetis and then with
Priam.
Unity of design
In the Iliad we can also see the embodiment of all those tendencies to concentration
and unity that are the hallmarks of Greek art. Here many cited the judgement of
Aristotle in hisPoetics:
A plot does not possess unity, as some people suppose, merely because it is about
one man. Many things, countless thing indeed, may happen to one man, and some
of them will not contribute to any kind of unity; and similarly he may carry out many
actions from which no single unified action will emerge.... Homer, exceptional in
this as in all other respects, seems, whether by art or by instinct, to have been well
aware of what was required.... although the Trojan War had a beginning and an
end, he did not attempt to put the whole of it into the poem; it would have been
too large a subject to be taken in all at once, and if he had limited its length, the
diversity of incident would have made it too complicated. As it is, he has selected
one part of the story and has introduced many incidents from other parts as
episodes, such as the Catalogue of Ships and other episodes with which he gives
variety to his poem.
(8, 23)In concentrating the main action of the Iliadupon the anger of Achilles Homer does
not waste time in telling us about unessential aspects of Achilles’ life and character
that do not have a bearing upon his anger, nor does he obscure his main theme by
telling the tale of Troy from the beginning. He begins in the middle of things in the
20 THE GREEKS