I finally finished The Iliad

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing! (Book I. 1-2, Alexander Pope's translation)

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles... (Book I.1, Robert Fagles' translation)

Just today I finally, finally! finished Homer's Iliad. I read the translation of Pope in part, and in full the translation of Robert Fagles, late Princeton professor of comp lit. Both translations are absolutely sublime: the former bearing Miltonic grandeur, the latter fluid and vivid. (Fagles' Odyssey was my first full reading of that poem, and it was just as good.) Fagles' rendering of The Iliad gives you a feeling of moving scenes, as if you were watching a grossly extended war film with 20-something intermissions, and at the end of it all your being lies battered. Fagles translates with visceral vigor and, when retelling the battles, unflinchingly conveys the horrific violence — throats are speared through, intestines spill out, brains splatter, 300 is put to shame, Pope is made to look like a prude. (By the way, Bernard Knox, in his introduction to Fagles' Iliad, says that Pope's translation is the finest ever. Fagles was totally cool with that, I'm sure.)

Homer begins with a prayer to the Muse that she sing the rage of Achilles, and the Muse willingly obliges — but not for another four, five hundred pages. Homer twiddles his thumbs a bit, taps his fingers on his tablet. ("How on earth can a man rage on forever?" Achilles asks. You tell me, Achilles. You've been sulking in your ship fifteen books now.) Finally Homer gives up waiting and goes ahead and sings something else: the puerile contempt of Agamemnon toward Achilles, the exhilarating exploits of Diomedes, "lord of the war cry", the ignominious pusillanimity of Paris, the camaraderie of the two Ajaxes, the heroics of Aeneas and of the "man-killing" Hector. Homer has very much enjoyed himself composing thousands of war-poem dactylic hexameter lines, waiting for Achilles to finally get out of his funk, when somewhere near the twentieth book, Patroclus, Achilles' best friend, overextends and gets killed near the walls of Troy, being speared by a rookie Trojan soldier and then finished off by Hector, and whatdoyouknow, after Achilles mourns Patroclus with abandon, the Muse finally gets around to singing about Achilles' fiery onset; and what brutality the son of Peleus is capable of! 

On his way to find and fight Hector, Achilles kills an enemy with the heartless words: "There — / lie there! Make your bed with the fishes now, they'll dress your wound and lick it clean of blood — / so much for your last rites! Nor will your mother / lay your corpse on a bier and mourn her darling son...." No one stands a chance against him, dead set on avenging the death of Patroclus. Hector is unwilling to face the Greek champion, but knows that it is his "to do and die" (Tennyson, not Homer), and goes despite the pleas of his father Priam ("Pity me... / ... a harrowed, broken man") and his mother Hecuba ("If he kills you now, / how can I ever mourn you on your deathbed?") Once Hector finally one-on-ones Achilles, the latter refuses Hector's request that the body of whoever dies be returned to his comrades to be buried properly. They promptly duel. Achilles stabs Hector "clean through the tender neck" and promises that "dogs and birds will rend [Hector] — blood and bone!" The other Greeks come over and have fun stabbing Hector's corpse. Achilles does further insult by attaching Hector's heels to his chariot and driving in front of Troy's walls, dragging the Trojan prince's corpse.

In the twenty-third book Achilles takes a break to hold funeral games in honor of Patroclus, and the festive air of chariot races and wrestling matches is probably the lightest that The Iliad gets. The book after, which is the final book, relates how the aged King Priam of Troy picks himself up from his mourning in filth (paralleling Achilles' mourning of Patroclus) and goes alone, without arms, to Achilles' tent to redeem Hector's corpse. This poignant scene elicits a terrible pathos from the reader. Priam implores: "[R]emember your own father! I deserve more pity ... / I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before — / I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son." (Fagles)

Or, as Pope much better renders:

"Think of thy father, and this face behold!
See him in me, as helpless and as old!
Though not so wretched: there he yields to me,
The first of men in sovereign misery!
Thus forced to kneel, thus grovelling to embrace
The scourge and ruin of my realm and race;
Suppliant my children's murderer to implore,
And kiss those hands yet reeking with their gore!" 

Priam's plea ignites the first spark of pity for a Trojan in Achilles, who is is "touch'd with the dear remembrance of his sire" (Pope) who Achilles knows will never see him alive again. Achilles and Priam both pour forth tears of mourning for their loved ones:

Now each by turns indulged the gush of woe;
And now the mingled tides together flow: ...
But great Achilles different passions rend,
And now his sire he mourns, and now his friend.
The infectious softness through the heroes ran;
One universal solemn shower began;
They bore as heroes, but they felt as man. (Pope)

Achilles, uncharacteristically magnanimous, promises to refrain from attacking during the burial process of Hector. Priam returns to Troy, to the wails of the Trojan women. Anromache, Hector's widow, leads "their songs of sorrow, / cradling the head of Hector, man-killing Hector / gently in her arms: 'O my husband ... / ... You leave me a widow, / ... and the boy only a baby, / the son we bore together, you and I so doomed.'" Cradling the head of man-killing Hector gently in her arms. Wow.

The poem that begins "sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles" ends: "And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses" (Fagles). ("Such honors Ilion to her hero paid, / And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade." [Pope])

My favorite character by far is Hector. I quite frankly think he is really the de facto protagonist of The Iliad. He carries with him a dignity and humanity alien to Achilles, and is a more interesting character in general; but that's just my poor and biased judgment. 

Many scenes involving Hector are shot through with pathos. The first scene of The Iliad to move me nearly to tears was Hector's final conversation with Andromache. Hector has just returned for a short while to the city in order to tell the Trojans to make sacrifices to Athena in hope that she will be more favorable to them (I believe; I may be recalling wrongly) . In response to Helen's invitation to rest from the fighting he refuses, explaining:

"For I must go home to see my people first,to visit my own dear wife and my baby son.Who knows if I will ever come back to them again?"

Andromache has rushed beforehand to the city walls, where her battle-weary husband meets her. She, "pressing close behind him and weeping freely now, / clung to his hand urge[s] him, call[s] him:

'Reckless one,
my Hector  — your own fiery courage will destroy you!Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,and the destiny that weighs me down, your widow,now so soon? ...... What ... warmth, what comfort's left for me,once you have met your doom? Nothing but torment!'"

She pleads:

"Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,
before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow."

Hector answers that he wouldn't be able to bear the shame of shying away from battle (as his brother Paris does for quite some time); and he speaks in a tone very tender yet very forceful of a time in a future that would be made possible if he didn't rejoin the war:

"And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears,
'There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter
they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans,
long ago when the men fought for Troy.' So he will say
and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more,
widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough
to fight off your day of slavery.
   No, no,
let the earth come piling over my my dead body
before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!"

Hector removes, in a surprising, fatherly gesture, his frightful bronze helmet (the piece of armor he is most famous for) that terrifies his son, takes him, and kisses him, and prays to the gods:

"... Grant this boy, my son,
may be like me, first in glory among the Trojans,
strong and brave like me, and rule all Troy in power
and one day let them say, 'He is a better man than his father!'"

It is painful for the reader, who knows that this hope will never come to fruition.

Nestor, the aged Greek tactician, is another noteworthy character for me. He only rides in his chariot in the field, kept relatively safe from combat, but what he lacks in strength to participate in combat he makes up for in his smarts. Nevertheless, he dearly wishes to have youthful vigor again, and often recounts his deeds done in the past. In a dialogue with Agamemnon he says, with a shake of his "hoary locks":

"Well might I wish, could mortal wish renew
That strength which once in boiling youth I knew; ...
But heaven its gifts not all at once bestows,These years with wisdom crowns, with action those...." (Pope, italics mine)

I was taken aback by the staggering amount of pathos in The Iliad, which is a war poem par excellence. But perhaps that is what makes the war poem great: it infuses it with humanness.