The Iliad by Homer, translated by Herbert Jordan
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

DAVID P. KUBIAK is Professor of Classics at Wabash College

It is noteworthy that when the freedman
Livius Andronicus (c. 250 B.C.) gave the
Romans their first translation of Homer it
was the Odyssey, not the Iliad he chose to
render in the old Saturnian verse: Virum
mihi Camena, insece versutum, “Tell me, O
Muse [actually an Italic water nymph]
about that ingenious man.” For all their
culture’s prowess in war, Livius must have
felt that the martial Iliad was too complicated
and mature a poem to impress the
Roman audience of his time. His perception
continues to the modern day, when
the Odyssey overshadows the Iliad in general
education courses. Its exciting narrative,
much of which takes place in the
fantastic world of folktale, its unusual preoccupation
with female characters, and not
least its happy ending combine to make the
Odyssey the classical epic most students are
apt to encounter in school. But the Iliad is
a greater poem, more constrained in physical
scope but deeper in its human vision,
the foundational monument of Western
literature, and one well-presented in
a new translation by lawyer and amateur
classicist Herbert Jordan, who recounts in
his preface how his father’s bedtime stories
of Achilles and Hector at the walls of
Troy inspired in him a life-long desire to
learn the Greek language and retell these
tales for a contemporary audience. He is
in good company. Heinrich Schliemann,
excavator of Mycenae and Troy, came to
Greek in much the same way.

In a comprehensive introduction to
this translation, E. Christian Kopff of the
University of Colorado expertly traces
the history of the Iliad‘s text. Thanks to
the groundbreaking studies of oral poetry
done by Milman Parry and Albert Lord
in the 1930s, we are now able to see how
Homer stands at the beginning of our literary
tradition but the end of his own,
heir to a process stretching back into the
high Mycenaean period itself (c. 1200
B.C.), during which oral formulas and
story patterns narrating the great deeds of
the heroes at Troy were developed generation
by generation, culminating in an
unusually full version of the Achilles and
Odysseus epics finally committed to writing
around 700 B.C., when the Phoenician
alphabet was adapted by the Greeks and
proved a much more flexible instrument
for recording their language than had their
first syllabic system, the so-called Linear B
borrowed from the Minoan civilization of
Crete, and confined, so far as we can tell,
to prosaic record keeping. Whether there
was an actual single composer of the Iliad
and the Odyssey called Homer was debated
in antiquity and can never be certainly
known, although the thematic cohesion
of the poems, especially the Iliad, makes
some version of the unitarian position
more compelling.

The verse form that evolved to narrate
Greek epic poetry is the dactylic hexam
eter: five dactyls, for which a spondee may
substitute, and a final spondee or trochee
in the last foot. It is a long line, its length
and rhythm not really sustainable in English.
The author of a poetic translation
must then first decide about his medium.
Herbert Jordan opts for blank verse and
has made each line correspond more or
less to a line in Greek. Some rearrangement
and compression become necessary,
which Jordan describes in his preface.
He has changed word order, since English
is not an inflected language, omitted
the particles, which often denote a tone
of voice and so are difficult to translate,
and removed many of the epithets, words
or phrases that describe a character and in
Greek are metrically bound to the name
itself. “Swift-footed Achilles” and “Hector
of the flashing helmet” are examples. This
last decision was, I think, unfortunate,
since the mythic fixity of Homer’s heroes
lies as much in their repetitive linguistic
identity as in the action of their lives.

Jordan’s version is at its best when the
narrative is strongly propelled forward, and
its directness is an advantage, for example
in Hector’s rallying his men in Book 11:

Trojans, Lycians, close-fighting
Dardanians! / Be men, my friends!
Summon your hard-charging valor!
/ Their leader is gone! Glory is mine,
a gift / from Cronus’ son! So drive
your strong-hoofed teams / at the
bravest Greeks! Win proud victory!

It is perhaps less successful at the ornamental
moments of the poem, the many similes
that connect the battle at Troy to the larger
natural world. Take for instance a famous
description of an insignificant warrior’s
death in Book 8. Jordan has, “As when a
garden poppy’s ripe seed-head / bows to
the sudden weight of summer rains, / so
then Gorgythion’s heavy helmet sagged.”
The ornate style available to Alexander
Pope better mirrors the several poetic
mannerisms of the original three lines: “As
full blown Poppies overcharg’d with Rain
/ Decline the head, and drooping kiss the
Plain; / So sinks the Youth: his beauteous
Head, depress’d / Beneath his Helmet,
drops upon his Breast.” I noticed the occasional
inaccuracy in Jordan’s reading of the
Greek, as in Book 24 when Achilles says
of his father Peleus, that “though a mortal,
[he] made a goddess his wife.” The gods
are responsible for this union in Homer—
a minor point, to be sure, and perhaps an
intentional departure from literal rendering.

Any translation of the Iliad must stand
or fall on the portrait it gives us of Achilles,
who is absent from the entire middle
of the poem, yet nonetheless dominates it
like a sword of Damocles hanging over the
action. The key to Achilles’ character lies
in something he says to Odysseus in Book
9, when he is rejecting the appeals made
to him to return to battle after his disastrous
quarrel with Agamemnon: “I hate
like Hades’ gates a man / who says one
thing but hides the honest truth.” Achilles
is incapable of dissimulation, and because
all of his emotions—love, hatred, rage,
remorse—exist on a hard brilliant level
derived from his goddess mother, and he
cannot help expressing them as they are,
everything he feels and does has ramifications
not only for himself, but for everyone
around him, Greek and Trojan alike. The
Trojans are so terrified when he returns to
fighting after Patroclus’s death that they
cannot even sit when they take counsel
over what their plan should be. “I have a
sickening fear of Achilles,” says Polydamas
in Book 18. Much has been written about
the excellence of Hector, whose civic dedication
and tender feeling for his wife will
always compel admiration. But in the end
there is about him, as the famous Hellenist
John Finley used to say to undergraduate
classes at Harvard, a slightly Rotarian
quality that must ultimately yield before
Achilles’ god-like splendor. There is no
more sadly frightening moment in the
poem than when Hector is forced to face
Achilles, who is compared to the newly
risen sun: “The brilliance caused Hector
to tremble and lose heart. / He left the
gates behind and started to run.” This is
not cowardice; it is sheer animal instinct
when the weaker man meets the stronger.

What separates Hector and Achilles in
battle prowess is not, however, as potent
as what binds them together, their understanding
of the human condition and the
burdens placed on honorable men who
cannot escape it. Both of them know that
they are fated to die in the Trojan War,
yet both of them continue to fight. In the
great scene of Hector and Andromache’s
farewell in Book 6, the hero, much as he
loves his wife and son, must return to battle
because he cannot bear the shame that
would come from his shrinking back in
the city. He has no illusions about the final
outcome: “Yet deep in my soul I know,
without doubt, / the day will come when
sacred Ilium falls” and when Andromache
will be taken as a slave. And yet Hector
fights on because honor demands it. Similarly
Achilles accepts the fact of his own
imminent death, prophesied to him by his
mother as occurring soon after the killing
of Hector.

The theme of universal human suffering
reaches its climax in the final book, when
Priam comes to Achilles’ hut to ransom his
son’s body. Once powerful and confident,
both men are now brought low. Achilles
tells Priam of the two jars that stand on
the threshold of Zeus, one full of good
fortune, the other of evil. The man who
receives his life’s course from both jars
should count himself happy; some have
their portion only from the jar of bad luck.
Those men “must stagger hungry over the
earth’s face, / roaming, honored by neither
gods nor men.” From this knowledge of
life comes not a transformation of personality,
which could not be imagined by the
epic tradition, but rather the recognition of
a common fate:

Achilles listened and longed for his
father. / He gently removed the
elder king’s arms, / then both men
mourned. Old Priam lamented Hector,
/ crouched at Achilles’ feet, shedding
tears. / Achilles wept awhile for
Peleus then Patroclus, and moans
echoed from both mourners.

These excerpts will suggest something
of the flavor of Jordan’s new translation. It
is particularly welcome now, for a cultural
reason not often faced directly. The Iliad
is uncompromisingly a man’s poem, while
entertainment today becomes steadily
more gynocentric. Young people have no
patterns surrounding them that take seriously
the way men think and act, their sense
of duty, loyalty, and friendship, and how
these things are nobly cultivated. Popular
culture has completely eliminated constructive
male companionship as a theme,
unless, as in the film Brokeback Mountain,
it can be made homosexual. Every television
police detective now must have a
woman partner. She will be smarter and
calmer than he is, sometimes physically his
superior, always more personally powerful.
Young men in groups are depicted as
dangerous gang members if of the lower
classes, potential fraternity rapists if of the
middle or upper. The role of trial judge
in these dramas is overwhelmingly female,
with an exception made for plots that
require malfeasance or mental derangement,
where a man may then be admitted
to the bench. Never have we been more in
need of the virtue that stands at the heart
of the Iliad, which might be described as
patriarchal love, the love of a father for his
son, a son for his father; the love of a friend
for his comrade, of a husband for his wife.
All the violence and destruction and death
in Homer’s poem is ultimately redeemed
by its affirmation of this fundamental
human value. If his translation of the Iliad
makes the experience of patriarchal love
meaningful to its readers Herbert Jordan
will have served admirably both the cause
of art and the needs of modern times.