The Iliad for Children
Unraveling this classic text with Christian students
I did not read Homer’s Iliad until I was a freshman in college, and lo and behold, it was thanks to that book and others of classical antiquity that I decided to major in Classics (a discipline that I had not heard of until college—educated as I was in the humble public school system of New Mexico). Unfortunately, I felt that I could not meditate on these classic texts with a view to the “bigger picture,” if you will. At my secular college, we dwelt on themes that were strictly within the lane of the academic classics discipline. Which meant that you could ask such irrelevant and inane questions as, were Achilles and Patroclus lovers before the Trojan war or only during the war (because of course lovers they were—to believe otherwise was to be hopelessly unacademic).
But now that I have freed myself from the oppressive shackles of academia, I am able to ask such forbidden questions as, what is the significance of this text? And, what does this reveal about the human condition?
I meditate on these deeper questions here on Substack so that you, dear reader, can think about them too as you read these classic works of literature and philosophy with your children.
I happen to follow the Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling which emphasizes the role of the mother being “cultured.” We moms must do more than wash and fold (and cook dinner and clean and educate and drive to soccer and form in the faith—no small task indeed!). We must keep up our own intellectual lives. And doing so will have a wonderful trickle down effect on our children, who see our ardent desire to learn alongside them.
To that end, I intend to post reflections on classic texts that will be for the intellectual and cultural benefit of mother-educators (which, to be sure, is all mothers).
Right now, we are reading about the Trojan war in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy: the Story of The Iliad and Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece. The latter is on the menu of the Charlotte Mason Education Center’s feast for this year for my second grader (Form 1, for all you Charlotte Mason folks). And what a literary feast it is. My 5-year-old and 7-year-old boys love this story. I pull from both Sutcliff and Lang. Sutcliff’s book has wonderful, vivid illustrations (the boys squint to try to make out dead bodies) that help to keep my kindergarten student engaged. The language of Lang is a bit more advanced than that of Sutcliff, but both stories do a good job translating the Iliad for children.
The beauty of these books is that they make the plot and spirit of the original accessible to the youngest readers using language that is both appropriate and yet also challenging. They do not shy away from the violence or the hard lessons (as if that would even be possible with The Iliad). And while the young ones are reading the “children’s” versions, they will soon enough read the classic itself and, knowing the plot already, they will be able to consider deeper themes and to more fully engage the text.
I try my hardest not to philosophize on my children after reading. I trust in Charlotte Mason’s advice to let the text lie with the children and to speak for itself. Still, having considered thoughtfully the meaning, themes, scope and coherence of a text, it is nice to be able to meditate on the text more thoughtfully and to open the floor to some of the deeper themes and ideas running through these texts.
And because I get to read high quality literature (“living books” in Charlotte Mason parlance) with my children, I always have something interesting to mull over. Because, you know, who has time for Hegel or Heidegger when laundry must be folded and dinner must be made? Not I.
There is so much going on in The Iliad (I’ll simply refer to the stories of the Iliad rather than Blacks Ships Before Troy or Tales of Troy and Greece, for simplicity—but it is to all three, really, that I am referring here), and much that can be pondered and discussed. But one theme that could be highlighted is the idea of honor. This seems like a good one to explore because it helps to make sense of all of the violence—especially to children—in the story of the sack of Troy.
Honor (and dishonor) is a prevalent theme in Christian literature for children. It features prominently in the many knight tales that boys love. Honor is also a major theme in the literature of classical antiquity. But Christians will notice that the ancients had a very different understanding of honor.
In the Homeric age, honor was at the center of civilized life, both in war and peace. In the story of the Iliad, we see how honor motives the actions of the soldiers. Achilles’s perceived slight by Agamemnon (having his girl, Briseis, taken away—that was an interesting part of the plot to gloss over with my 5- and 7-year-old boys) ultimately causes a chain of events that ends in Achilles’s own death.
It begins with the plague being brought upon the Greeks because Agamemnon refuses to do the honorable thing of returning the girl he holds as his slave, Chriseis, to her father when he offers ransom for her. After the plague decimates the Greek troops, Agamemnon finally agrees to return the girl, but he decides to take Achilles’s girl, Briseis, in order to restore his own sense of lost honor at having lost some of the booty that he felt that he rightfully deserved as king.
Achilles then felt that his honor had been slighted at having lost his girl to Agamemnon. Achilles then refuses to fight until Agamemnon makes public restitution so as to restore his honor.
Honor is one of the driving forces behind the events of the war. And in all of this, honor is very public. It must be on display for everyone to see or it doesn’t count.
In the Christian worldview, on the other hand, honor is something held interiorly. Christ showed us this change of meaning when he patiently bore the crown of thorns placed upon his head and the reed placed in his hand. Christ showed us that humility trumps public honor—and to act with humility is, Christ showed us, what is truly honorable.
We catch a glimpse of the beauty and civilizing force of humility in the episode in which Priam tries to recover his son Hector’s body.
“The old king went in and knelt down at the prince’s feet, and took and kissed his hands according to the custom. Hands that seemed to him crimson and terrible with the death of so many of his sons beside the beloved Hector.
‘Have pity on me and listen to the word of the gods and give me back my dead son,’ he begged. ‘Think of your own father, who is old and grieving . . . Have pity on me; for my son’s sake I have done what I did not think possible and kissed the hands that slew him and his brothers.’”
It is a very moving image within a story rife with violence. The killing has stopped and all is still. Priam is a witness to humility for the sake of another, and his actions are a balm on the wounds that the violence has inflicted on both the Trojan and the Greek communities. His actions heal Achilles’s own madness over the death of Patroclus and bring home the body of a son, husband, and father.
“He raised the old king from his knees and spoke kindly to him, and they wept, both of them together; Priam for his son, and Achilles for his father and for Patroclus his friend.”
Priam illustrates a different kind of honor—the kind that Christ will baptize with his redemptive sacrifice—one that is interior rather than exterior. This other kind of honor is intertwined with humility and strives after honor not for one’s own sake but for that of another—ultimately Christ. Priam humbles himself before Achilles so that he can fulfill the transcendent imperative to give proper burial to his son. Without his humility, this would not have been possible. Priam is a witness to the extraordinary power of humility.
In humbling himself, Priam has restored public honor to his son Hector and has redeemed Achilles, who had been driven mad by the death of his friend, to the point of dishonoring himself by dragging Hector’s body, day after day, around the Greek camp.
Christ showed us that such action as Priam displayed should not be the exception but rather the standard to which we should all hold ourselves. If we all behaved in such a way, the world would be a much more civilized place, as indeed it became after Christianity swept the Western world. (To those who say otherwise, go and visit an avowed atheist state, such as North Korea, or ask a survivor of Soviet communism what Russia or Yugoslavia was like in the twentieth century. Read about the Roman empire in decline or the Jacobin terror of the French Revolution. Or read The Iliad—all products of life without Christianity.)
One of the reasons that honor was so important to the Greeks and Trojans was because honor helped to bring immortality to the person on which it fell. Since only one’s reputation could become immortal, it was of supreme importance to soldiers to die honorably.
Christianity, as we know, bestowed on humanity the real and lasting immortality of the soul dwelling in Heaven with God.
Public honor motivated the men who desired the (semi-)permanence of public reputation. Privately held honor before the eyes of God orients the men who desire everlasting life in the Heavenly Kingdom.
When discussing the role of violence in Black Ships and other stories about Greece and Troy, we can help sort this out by elucidating the Homeric notion of honor that, paradoxically, brought about so much violence.
It was Achilles’s tragic recognition (the Greek anagnorisis) that he was responsible for the death of his dear friend. He indeed got exactly what he had asked the gods for—a Trojan victory over the Greeks. But it came at an intolerable cost. And Achilles still fought in the war and still had to face his own mortality.
In a moment of clarity, Achilles reasons:
In the end, everybody comes out the same.
Coward and hero get the same reward:
You die whether you slack off or work.
And what do I have for all my suffering,
Constantly putting my life on the line?
Achilles is deprived, he believes, even of his share of the war booty, and by a man who hasn’t even the courage to go out and fight. Yet Achilles’s real insight is that war booty is not enough of a reason to fight.
But in the end, Achilles does return to fight in the war because he knows that it would be dishonorable not to. He chooses to fight even though his mother, the goddess Thetis, has prophesied that to fight will mean Achilles’s certain death, whereas to abandon the Greek cause, “my glory is lost,” Achilles says, “but my life will be long.”
On the one hand Achilles recognizes the emptiness of an immortality that is but human glory. On the other hand, Achilles is still a Greek and still a product of his time and place. He is bound within a culture that has no other conception of immortality.
It is interesting to consider these ideas as a Christian because we can see the shortcomings of the ideas of honor and immortality that preexist Christ. Achilles’s paradoxical existence, caught between morality and immortality (recall that his mother is a goddess but his father is a mortal), personifies the collective experience of the Greeks who at once long for immortality, but at some level recognize that such a longing cannot be fully satisfied through mere human glory. Achilles brings this to light for all of the Greeks to see, but even he sees through the glass darkly.
Christ’s glory and triumph over death is the very real and also philosophical bridge between morality and immorality that the Greeks longed to cross but could not. For me, this idea was significant because I recall as an undergraduate a professor (whom I very much respected) commenting that there were many virgin birth stories involving the parentage of a deity. I was alarmed by the insinuation that the Christian story of Christ and His virgin birth is nothing extraordinary, just another myth among many.
It took me many years of contemplating this idea—the juxtaposition between the many myths of virgin births and the true story of Christ’s birth—to begin to see the incredible philosophical depth of the Christian story. There is a longing in the ancient mind for the truth and hope that Christianity gives the world.
The Iliad gives us a tale of a hero culture that, in the end, must content itself with the worldly pleasures, partly as a distraction from the existential realization that “in the end, everybody comes out the same.” The Iliad closes with a feast, of Achilles and Priam forgetting for a moment their mutual sorrow and sating themselves on a roasted sheep. The last image we have of Achilles is him going to sleep beside Briseis.
Interesting!!
Glory to the Father forever and ever, Amen.