The Australian takes on Troy.

It's going to be a bad movie. Quite possibly Waterworld bad, but without gills for the hero. As far as I know. But that's no excuse for piling on Homer.

The author of the article, a Mr. Slattery, claims that the Iliad no longer resonates with us, at least "large tranches" of it. He points to one of Achilleus' minor tantrums, the killing of Lycaon. "We hold war crime tribunals for this sort of thing," he says. Of course we do: because it still happens. Achilleus has just lost his closest friend, Patroklos. Moreover, Achilleus himself bears some of the guilt for that death, in his refusal to battle the Trojans. Patroklos is fighting alone at the suggestion of Achilleus, who remains, sulking, in his tent. The rage he must feel is overwhelming. And perfectly understandable; "it's easy if you try," as Mr. Lennon put it.

"Detailed rendering of extreme violence" is a charge no one can honestly refute about the Iliad, as is "glorif[ying] the victor"; but to ascribe "demean[ing] his victim" to Homer is to misread the text. The other warriors may well demean their victims. Hector's body is dragged 'round and 'round the city behind Achilleus' chariot, and only the gods keep it from ripping apart. But Homer gives almost every victim of the war a name, and often an origin, a family, something which makes them more than a faceless corpse.

There's a metaphor I love:

Yet they, like pliant-bodied wasps or bees,
That build their cells beside the rocky way,
And quit not their abode, but, waiting there
The hunter, combat for their young -- so these,
Although but two, withdraw not from the gates,
Nor will, till they be slain or seized alive.”

It's repeated later, once again comparing the Greeks to wasps. One might originally think that this metaphor de-humanizes them, in comparing them to swarming insects far beneath the stature of a man. But Homer's metaphors are seldom as simple as they appear at first. They imply something by its opposite, or with an ironic twist:

As when some Maionian woman or Karian with purple
colours ivory, to make it a cheek piece for horses;
it lies away in an inner room, and many a rider
longs to have it, but it is laid up to be a king's treasure,
two things, to be the beauty of the horse, the pride of the horseman:
so, Menelaos, your shapely thighs were stained with the colour
of blood, and your legs also, and the ankles beneath them.

The metaphor finds its greatest strength in first comparing two things, then contrasting them. Just so the warriors are compared to wasps in their ferocity and determination to defend, but, unlike wasps, are all men, with names, roles, and families to mourn them.

Mr. Slattery is quite right that only at the end does Achilleus regain his humanity, when he and Priam weep together. This is, ultimately, the point of tragedy: to remind us what we share with other men, even if those qualities are often grim, and to bring us back into their company. To claim that the Iliad, the greatest of tragic works, is only at its close comprehensible to us it to be ignorant of what lies within us, and to ignore the difficulties of true communion. It is to assume that the savagery of our ancestors has been completely sublimated, a position demonstrably false.

Mr. Slattery may never have an anti-social feeling, a desire to promote one's own good at the cost of others. Perhaps that is why he cannot enjoy the Iliad. For those of use whose imperfections make for constant struggle, the Iliad reminds us of the price we must pay.

Link to the Australian article found on Arts and Letters Daily.

UPDATE: A review. Of the movie.