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Lessons from Homer
By IAN BROWN Saturday, May 15, 2004 - Page F3
I was reading Homer's Iliad when the pictures from Abu
Ghraib began to appear.
It was an unusual experience. One moment I was swimming
through 15,693 lines of hexametric verse -- long stretches
of which-god-did-what-infantile-thing-to-whom, interrupted
by splurts of eye-poking gore and knockout stanzas of
shattering beauty about rage and revenge. The next I was
trying to decipher a digital snapshot of -- well, what was
that square of interlocking human flesh supposed to be? And
why did Private Lynndie England and her lover, Specialist
Charles Graner, keep grinning and doing the thumbs up in
their house of horror?
Homer can take three pages to describe someone changing his
mind, but the Abu Ghraib tale was harder to follow,
implicating someone different every day.
With each shift, new, more upsetting pictures appeared. And
not just upsetting: they were off-kilter, amateur and
intimate, cold and accidental at the same time, the way old
photographs of lynchings can be. Men in Ku Klux Klan-like
hoods made from emptied sandbags. Men attached to wires and
forced to stand on chairs -- but with their arms extended,
like Jesus, a standard posture of torture. Sometimes the
pictures (the 320th Military Police Battalion had been
swapping them by computer for weeks) seemed like amateur
pornography -- naked men bound in threes on the floor -- and
sometimes they seemed like exceptionally stupid amateur
pornography, such as the prisoner with a pair of women's
underpants over his head. ("I know West Virginia," Bert
Hall, a West Virginia-born professor at the Institute for
the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the
University of Toronto, told me one afternoon. "These kids
are not sophisticated. They haven't been to the Marquis de
Sade school of sadomasochism. It's all homemade."😉 There
were an astonishing 1,800 images in all.
As war atrocities -- next to, say, King David's habit of
collecting the foreskins of his victims, or the 500
innocents slaughtered at My Lai in 1968, or even compared
with the Chechen trick of sniping at Russians from behind a
wounded Russian prisoner strung up in a window -- the abuses
at Abu Ghraib seemed relatively mild. But to Muslims, they
meant dishonour of the worst kind. And as a final rebuttal
to the United States' claim that it was in Iraq to protect
the human rights of Iraqis, the pictures were a death blow.
All over the United States, intellectuals of once-firm
conviction, from Michael Ignatieff on the left to Andrew
Sullivan on the right, were having meltdowns.
I returned to the Iliad, where Homer was flashing his talent
for describing war through intricate details of its physical
cost -- "what metal does to flesh," someone once said.
He was never content to have an arrow hit a soldier if the
arrow could hit a soldier in the crotch. Coeranus, an
Achaean, didn't just die: Hector speared him "under the jaw
and ear, knocking teeth out, shattering roots and all and
split his tongue in half." There is nothing depersonalized
about Homeric combat: it's the 800 BC version of a
videotaped beheading. Throats slashed and gurgling, clean-
cut necks, smashed knees, sliced navels, crams of corpses,
"screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed
blood" . . . Quentin Tarantino is Walt Disney by comparison.
The plot centred on Hector, the prince of the ancient city
of Troy, and his two great enemies: Agamemnon, the big boss
of Greece, and Agamemnon's reluctant ally Achilles, Greece's
most deadly soldier. Agamemnon was attacking Troy -- now,
pay attention here -- to avenge his brother Menelaus, whose
wife Helen (the face that launched a thousand ships) had
flown the coop to Troy to be with her lover, Paris, Hector's
brother -- really, it's more complicated than an episode of
The O.C. Then Agamemnon commandeers Achilles' war loot (a
hotty named Briseis) -- and this offends Achilles so much
that he sulks off to his tent and refuses to fight, which in
turn almost scuppers Agamemnon's campaign.
Perhaps that seems farfetched. But the Bush Administration
launched an
unsanctioned "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq. Anyone not on-
side was cut
out of the oil and rebuilding contracts. This so infuriated
France and
Germany they refused to send troops -- one reason the U.S.
is in trouble
today, and why Pfc. England had to lend a hand dehumanizing
the inmates.
Change a few details, it's almost the story of the Iliad,
which has been around for nearly 3,000 years. Homer seems to
have known what he was talking about.
I went to see Troy, the new movie of the Iliad starring Brad
Pitt as Achilles. I sat next to two teenaged boys eating
fries. They wanted to see the movie "because it has all
these, like wars," one of the boys told me. "And because
it's about this unique moment in history." He had one of
those flat, unemotional teenaged boy voices designed to hide
the fact that teenaged boys are all emotion
"Apparently it's based on some book," I said.
"Yeah," he said, "Helen of Troy. No, I haven't read it."
It was a great movie. The sets were incredible, and I
developed a warm spot for Hecuba, Hector's wife. Brad Pitt
storms the beach at Troy and raids the temple of Apollo,
where he slices the head off a golden statue of the god and
then beds one of the virgin female priests.
"Bad day for Apollo," the woman beside me said. "First Brad
cuts his head off, then he screws his wife."
From what I could tell, Brad had the shortest tunic in the
picture. There were several views of Brad's backside (the
ass that launched a thousand . . . supply your own joke
here). Patroclus had a New York accent as thick as a calzone
that brought to mind Tony Curtis ("Yonduh lies de castle of
my fawduh"😉. But all in all, as I say, it was a hell of a
movie. Of course, for $175-million, it ought to be.
The action in the movie starts right away, with a snappy
battle on the plain of Thessaly. But it isn't until nearly
the end of The Iliad that Achilles finally fights Hector.
Hector, after all, has unknowingly killed Patroclus,
Achilles best friend, and Achilles, mad with grief, wants
Hector dead. Right from the get-go, you know Achilles is
going to slay Hector's butt, the same way you know a girl's
going to have a crush on Brad Pitt before she has a crush on
you: it's the injustice of the given.
But the worst is to come. Hector, dying, begs Achilles to
allow his body to be carried home. Instead, "bent on
outrage, on shaming noble Hector" (Lynndie, are you
listening?) Achilles commits an act unknown to that point
in Greek literature, an act more shocking than any picture
from Abu Ghraib -- the famous desecration of the lithe body
of Hector.
Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet,
he knotted straps of rawhide through them both,
lashed them to his chariot. . .
For 12 days, Achilles drags around Hector's corpse. "It's
the passage that makes you see how important it is to us
that our bodies stay intact," Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker
writer, told me not long ago. (He'd been reading the Iliad
too.) Homer was the first Western writer to make that
observation. But he is describing indignities performed on a
dead body, the repository of a soul that still deserves
respect. Torture, on the other hand, is inflicted on living
human beings, and isn't to be found anywhere in Homer.
"I can't think of a single incident of torture in The Iliad,
or the
Odyssey," Bernard Knox told me. He should know: At 90, he is
still a
pre-eminent classicist, and his introduction to the new
Robert Fagles
translation of The Iliad is the best guide there is to the
poem. Still,
he sounded surprised to have made his torture discovery.
"There's the
Cyclops, of course, who eats people. But he's a monster.
He's not human.
There are examples of mass butchery in Roman history. But
anything quite
That isn't to say torture doesn't work. But torture must
blunt the judgment of the torturer: How else can you explain
the presence of Lynndie England and her cohorts in their own
photographs? They claim they were ordered to pose, but the
testimony of Specialist Jeremy Sivits -- to say nothing of
the glee in their faces -- suggests otherwise. Did they not
imagine the pictures would be seen? Did they not care?
Surely the only way you could pose for such photographs is
by refusing to imagine any perspective but your own -- not
even that of your mother seeing you on the front page of the
paper back home, say, or that of Pfc. England's child, as
yet unborn, 10 years from now, seeing mom heeling a naked,
dark-skinned man on a dog leash.
Mind you, Hector's death is not the end of The Iliad. The
end comes only after Hector's father, old King Priam (hence
priapic: the man had 50 sons) begs Achilles for Hector's
body. He asks Achilles to imagine his own dead father, and
how the older man might have mourned Achilles had he been
the one to die at Hector's hand -- to imagine a point of
view other than his own, and thus to renounce his arrogance.
They share a meal, talk into the night, and Achilles hands
over Hector. In that moment Achilles becomes a human being
-- fatally so, as it turns out. Robert Fagles calls it "one
of the most beautiful things in all of literature."
I read the passage one last time, and put the The Iliad
down. Already the moral valence of the Abu Ghraib affair
was reversing itself, as the al-Qaeda beheading of an
American named Nicholas Berg darkened the Internet. The Abu
Ghraib jailers were creepy, but America's enemies were
judged creepier.
I turned on the TV. There was Donald Rumsfeld, the chagrined
but newly humanized Achilles of America, holding what looked
like a town meeting -- in Iraq, of all places. He'd stopped
reading the newspaper, he said, and was looking through a
Civil War book about Ulysses S. Grant instead. Personally, I
would have suggested The Iliad.
Ian Brown, a senior feature writer with The Globe and Mail,
writes an occasional column for Focus.
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