The Iliad -- Book Two

BOOK TWO

The repetition of the dream message, from Zeus to Dream, from Dream to Agamemnon, and from Agamemnon to his counselors emphasizes the oral tradition that forms the basis of this work. The repetition and rhythm is compelling when spoken out loud, even in a translation.

Regarding the mustering of the Achaians, Agamemnon states:

Yet first, since it is the right way, I will make trial of them
by words, and tell them even to flee in their benched vessels.

And Rumour walked blazing among them.

Agamemnon’s symbol of power is the scepter wrought by Hepahistos for Zeus. It’s lineage is thus: from Zeus to Hermes the courier, and then to Pelops the driver of horses, and then to Atreus, ruler of men, and, on his death bed, to Thyestes (of the rich flocks), and then to Agamemnon, ruler over all Argos.

After Agamemnon has convinced the Argives to sail back to Argos (apparently as a test of will) the poet says that Hera sends Athena down to stop the men from fleeing. She does this by imploring Odysseus to convince the men to stay. While on his way to the fleeing men,

He came face to face with Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
and took from him the scepter of his fathers, immortal forever.
With this he went beside the ships of the bronze-armoured Achaians.

This taking of the scepter is an amazingly dramatic event which is disposed of in one sentence. I want to know what happened. What did Odysseus say to Agamemnon? Was there fear or guile in Agamemnon’s eyes? Was there a struggle, or did Agamemnon give it up without a fight? I want to know what he said as Odysseus left.

I imagine Odysseus saying to Agamemnon, "Your fear betrays us all." I think that Agamemnon eyes shown first with fear and then with guile. I believe that Odysseus snatched the scepter right out of Agamemnon’s hand with a violent, righteous sweep that Agamemnon did not even try to stop. I believe that as Odysseus went forth to marshal the Achaians, Agamemnon whispered to his back, "Go forth and do my work."

"For the anger of god-supported kings is a big matter." – Odysseus speaking Agamemnon.

Thersites is a colorful character. He is the ugliest person to come to Troy. He is bandy-legged, club footed, stoop shouldered, slope-chested, and pointy headed. To boot, he is known as Thersites of the endless speech, and would apparently castigate both Achilleus and Odysseus to no end. Needless to say, there was no love lost between them. Odysseus even goes so far as to threaten to strip him and beat him back to the ships if he doesn’t quit abusing (this time) Agamemnon.

Nestor is the paragon of a grizzled, wizened, battle-tested field general. He brings to mind a character from the Shogun novel by James Clavel, Toda Hiromatsu, general Toranaga’s principle advisor.

Once the Achaians are mustered, and Agamemnon’s preeminence established, the poem takes on a much different voice. The poet writes,

Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympos.
For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things,
and we have heard only the rumour of it and know nothing.
Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaans?
I could not tell over the multitude of them nor name them,
not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had
a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me,
not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters
of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who came beneath Ilion.
I will tell the lords of the ships, and the ships’ numbers.

This, to my recollection, is the first instance that the poet uses a first person narrative. The poet then lists the individual leaders, the number of their ships and troops, and even their battle positions (I am sure some military buff has created a diagram based upon these descriptions). These passages are reminiscent of the "begats" found in the Old Testament. I will list a few of the more interesting Greek leaders.

The poet goes to great lengths to praise the leader of the Athenian troops, Menestheus, son of Peteos. "Never on earth before had there been a man born like him for the arrangement of horses and shielded fighters." Sounds like a little home-town hero worship to me.

Diomedes "of the great war cry" was the leader of the troops from Argos and Tiryns.

Menelaos, brother of Agamemnon (and cuckold of Helen), led the troops from Sparta.

Nestor is the leader of the troops from Pylos and its environs. This portion contains an interesting anecdotal digression about Thamyris the Thracian, whose singing was so beautiful and powerful, he boasted that it would even surpass the Muses. Needless to say, he really pissed off the Muses. They "struck him maimed, and the voice of wonder they took away, and made him a singer without memory." Yet thousands of years later, here I sit at my keyboard clicking away and wondering what Thamyris was thinking when he threw down on the Muses like that. My guess is that somewhere in this untold tale lies the hand of a woman. Perhaps more fodder for cheap poetry; "The Ballad of Thamyris the Thracian." The alliterative possibility alone are intriguing.

Nireus was the most beautiful man (after Achilleus) who went to Troy, but he was a weakling.

Protesilaos was the leader of the men from Pteleos, but he was the first Achaian leader killed in battle when he leapt from his ship in Dardania. His brother took over command.

Once the poet finishes his litany of leaders, he beseeches the Muse to tell him . . . who were the best and bravest men and . . . HORSES (I kid you not). The best were the mares of Eumelos Pheres’ son. They were "swift-moving like birds" and had "backs drawn level like a plumb-line." They must have been two amazing horses for me to be reading about them thousands of years later. Of the men, since Achilleus was still pissed off and pouting, the poet claims that the best one was Telemonian Asia.

The poet recounts how Achilleus’ men are goofing off around camp while the rest of the Achaians prepare for battle. ". . . his men amused themselves with discs and with light spears for throwing and bows. . . ."

The Trojans muster on "The Hill of the Thicket" which was the last resting place of "dancing Myrina." Now I wonder who was dancing Myrina? She was the queen of the Amazons who defeated the people of Atlantis. She is also believed to have been the wife of King Dardanus, one of Priam’s ancestors.

Upon the marshaling of the Trojan troops, the poet begins the begats of the Trojan leaders. Again, I’ll list a few of the more interesting ones.

Hektor "of the shining helm" was by far the best and the bravest.

"Pylaimenes the wild heart was leader of the Paphlagones,
from the land of the Entetoi where the wild mules are engendered."

"Nastes came like a girl to the fighting in golden rainment,
poor fool, nor did this avail to keep dismal death back;
but he went down under the hadns of swift running Aiakides
in the river, and fiery Achilleus stripped the gold from him."

Now that the field has been laid out, the fighting commences.

Homer ("Doh!") - The Iliad

Homer, “Doh!” The first great intellectual work of Western civilization. I have started this many times and could never make it all the way through. I have probably read almost all of this work, but only in fragments. I will take it at an easy pace, and try and see what I can garner this time around.

Book One


“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.”

Thus it begins.


“He came as night comes down. . .”

Describing Apollo moments before he visits his rage upon the Danaans (led by Achilleus) after Agamemnon dishonored Apollo’s priest by refusing to return his daughter and to go forth against Priam’s city.

What is a “hecatomb”? A public sacrifice of 100 oxen to the gods.

Kalchas, son of Thestor, the bird interpreter (Bk 1, v. 69). I am fascinated by the idea of a bird seer. I recall the movie “The Man Who Would be King” (Sean Connery and Michael Caine acting out the Rudyard Kipling short story) in which the ancient Kafiristan priests were divining by reading the innards of birds. As an aside, I must record my favorite line from that movie: “. . .Danny never let go of Peachy’s hand and Peachy never let go of Danny’s head.” Kalchas is smart to make Achilles promise to protect him before divining.

Apparently the terms "augur" and "auspices" both derive from the ancient art of bird divination. Thus the phrases "this does not auger well" and "he came under good auspices" have ancient roots.

“Seer of evil: never yet have you told me a good thing.” – Agamemnon to Kalchas (v. 106).

But isn’t this the way of ALL prophesy. I can’t recall a single prophesy in scripture or history that portends a pleasant or positive happening. Furthermore, isn’t most prophesy in some aspect a form of supplication. The prophesy is not . . . This will happen. It is usually . . . This will happen, UNLESS. It is this “unless” that which empowers a prophesy more than the foreknowledge of the event itself. You must ask, when considering a prophesy, just what exactly is it that the prophet (or his divine source) wishes to accomplish? The first word that comes to my mind is “obedience.”


Agamemnon threatens to take Achilleus’ prize, “the fair cheeked Briseis,” in replace of having to return Chyseis, the daughter of Apollo’s priest, in order to appease Apollo. Achilleus is about to kill Agamemnon when Hera sends Athene to intervene. Athene advises Achilleus that he cannot slay Agamemnon, but that he can verbally abuse him as much as he desires. I love the following insult (v. 225):

“You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart . . . .” Achilleus to Agamemnon.


What drives this fearful jealous desire of mankind to be recognized (i.e. Andy Warhol’s proverbial fifteen minutes)? Agamemnon is afraid of giving up his prize (Chyseis) for fear of appearing less than those generals who kept theirs. Thus he goes after Achilleus’ prize (Briseis). But for Athena’s warning, Achilleus would have killed him in order to protect his prize. Yet later, driven to tears of rage, he begs his mother, Thetis, to petition Zeus to help the Trojans beat his own countrymen so that they may be punished for failing to properly honor him and allowing Agamemnon to take his slave girl.

This is all nuts!!! Agamemnon is a bad leader, and Achilleus is a petulant leader. I wonder what that lowly Achaian grunt thinks about all of this, the one who is going to be the spear bearer in the very first line of infantry, the one who’s only prize is a dry spot of sand where he can beat off in the night before the morning comes and he is ordered to clear Agamemnon’s path with his spilt guts.



It strikes me that the anecdote of Odysseus delivering Chryseis back to her father (v. 430 - 488) feels as if it was written in a different voice than the rest of the poem up to that point. It has almost a proselyte feel to it, particularly in the details of the feast of Apollo. It is striking how the depiction of the sharing of the wine at Apollo’s feast is so reminiscent (or should I say prescient?) of the Marriage at Canna or the Last Supper.



I find Hera’s son Hephaistos intriguing. He urges his mother to stop resisting Zeus and his plans for the Achaians, and recounts an episode when he stood against Zeus on her behalf. He says that Zeus grabbed him by the foot and threw him from the “magic threshold” and that “all day long I dropped” and that he then landed in Lemnos at sunset and that his injuries were tended by the Sintian men.

What is all this then? What is the magic threshold? Where is Lemnos? Who are the Sintian men who took care of him? What did Hera do in the first place to get this all started?


Hephaistos was a smitty to the gods, and he apparently crafted all of their homes up on Mount Olympus, even Zeus' home. Yet as he was pouring drinks for all of the other gods, “uncontrollable laughter went up as they saw Hephaistos bustling about the palace.” Why would Hephaistos cause such laughter? Was it his limp? Was he an object of their ridicule?

Here is more on Hephaistos. I think he would be an interesting subject for a short story or poem.