Homer and Homicide

The Iliad

, which recounts a couple of weeks during the penultimate year of the Trojan War, has long been our main cultural reference point when it comes to violence in battle. The poem exists in a kind of reputational haze as the preeminent “classic.” But when actually read, especially for the first time, the story is shockingly graphic and strange.

The Iliad

The mores of the original heroic age seem to have nothing to do with contemporary ethics. Bronze age culture looks almost criminal to modern eyes—a gang-like web of might and obligation and domination and pride. Honor is measured in stolen wealth and human chattel. The heroes ignore the civilized niceties of combat with grisly abandon. The “Homeric laughter” of the gods is proverbially unfeeling, even cruel.

When I took a fresh look at the Iliad after writing about a series of murders, killings conventionally identified as hate crimes, I found disturbing similarities. Of course, it wasn’t that I saw any heroism in the actions of the modern criminals. If anything, I noticed something criminal in the heroic. A brutal chaos of the spirit—like that of a murderer—exists in the antiquated character of the hero. Perhaps heroism and criminal hatred weren’t as different as they appeared.

One thing that surprised me about contemporary killers was how often they wanted to dress murder up as warfare. As if they aspired to the heroic. Of a gang initiation killing that targeted a gay man in Oklahoma City, one murderer kept using the words “our mission.” The mission went wrong, he told me, because of exhaustion and a lack of discipline in taking care of evidence.

A California killer, basically a Christian fundamentalist terrorist, really did dream of sparking apocalyptic warfare. After he was arrested and charged with the assassination of two men (and assorted fire bombings), he filled out a credit card application from prison, writing under the Employment heading, “My brother and I were captured by occupation storm troopers while we were on a supply mission. We are now incarcerated for our work in cleansing a sick society.” It’s too easy to dismiss this as a sick joke. This killer really did imagine his crimes were a sort of police action, as “moral” as recovering Helen from the foreigners who kidnapped her. Another murderer executed his best friend for supposedly bringing dishonor on their gang and afterwards, with a grave distaste that sounds just like a soldier’s, said he’d only done what he “had to do.”

If murderers want to pretend they’re at war, Homer frequently makes warfare look like murder. In the Iliad his accredited warriors can come off as monsters. The often appealing Trojan hero Hektor has a cut-and-dried epithet—man-killer. And it’s his frenzy in battle that makes him so formidable rather than his soldierly talents, which are no match for Greek heroes like Ajax or Achilles.

The madness of battle is described again and again in the Iliad. I was unwillingly reminded of that gang member, who forlornly tried to explain in court what it had been like doing what he’d “had to do”: stabbing his friend fifty times, crushing his windpipe. He claimed it felt as if he weren’t acting himself. An Alabama man who stabbed and beat another to death with extreme violence said the same thing in an interview: “It wasn’t me. It was like it was another person. Someone else inside me.” The experience sounds Homeric, an invisible god guiding one’s weapon as so often happened on the battlefield of Troy.

Violence in the Iliad comes packaged in an epic format as conventional as a sitcom’s. There’s the arming of the hero, there’s his “aristeia,” the scene of his greatest exploits, there’s a moment of vaunting before his fallen enemy. All of these have disquieting parallels in murder.

The bronze age was poor in things, so the Iliad is full of long, loving descriptions of weaponry and armor. Though we’re now rich in things, weaponry still inspires a fetishistic love among those who ultimately use it to kill. A Brooklyn killer, a teen-ager, took pictures of himself with his collection of knives. When he later used one to murder a man, the preening pictures were found scattered all over the internet. He answered a wondering assistant DA defensively, “Yeah, I like my swords and knives.”

That Oklahoma killer, the one who described murder as a mission, also told me he’d had to be careful not to get blood on his “BDUs,” a military term that stands for Battle Dress Uniforms. Stuck in the endless boredom of prison now (life without the possibility of parole), he looks back on his criminal sprees and describes them in terms reminiscent of an aristeia—the glorious, fast-moving high point of his life. He wants and tries to sound contrite but conveys a horrible truth deeper than morality.

Achilles, as epic heroes are wont to do, mocks his victims. In a famous passage from book XXI, he taunts the defeated Lycaon who is offering ransom and begging for his life. “You too, my friend, must die. Why so sad?” Achilles tells him. One of the more chilling interviews I did was with the Alabama man who described how his victim regained consciousness before the final beating: “He said, ‘Come on, I won’t tell anybody.’ I said, ‘You won’t tell nobody you got your throat slit ear to ear? Hah. I gotta kill you. You’re gonna die.’ After that he got quiet.”

Actual homicides are mentioned a few times in the Iliad but without any modern dread. They’re treated as youthful errors, an occasion for exile. (Patroklos killed a schoolmate, for example, and was exiled and grew up as squire to Achilles.) The horror of killing is just horror. It doesn’t yet bear the lugubrious weight of moral investigation or trial or imprisonment. Indeed, history’s first murder trial (and the first insanity defense), as dramatized in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, takes place the generation after the Trojan War. Orestes is tried for killing his mother, Clytemnestra, who killed his father, the returning Greek generalissimo Agamemnon.

Comparing modern homicide to the violence in Homer may seem perverse. It’s really an exercise in respect. The grim stories of today help breathe life into the old work of art. More importantly, the ancient poem reminds us that violence—the “good” kind as well as the evil—is always the same.