The Iliad

As a project in his retirement Richard is determined to read the Iliad all the way through in the ancient Greek.  So far he has completed the first four books; he is so organized, relentless, determined.  For twenty years I have toyed with a similar project, reading  Ovid's Latin masterpiece Metamorphoses in the Latin; so far I have got a copy of the text and set it out on a table near my desk.  I am following Richard's progress with mixed feelings of nostalgia for the memory of my first engagement with Homer and guilt for my obvious disinclination to make the effort to take on Ovid, whose work I must admit, I, the Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus, have never ever even looked at.  For forty years or so I read the Iliad annually, all or in part, in Greek or in English, as preparation for tackling it in one or more of the courses I was scheduled to offer.  Thus I can participate in Richard's progress almost telepathically. It is providing me with a delicious recall. The poem was the major spiritual experience of my late teenage years arriving shortly after my defection from the Christian faith of the Episcopal Church where my time as pious altar boy came to a cruel end in our minister's rough reaction to my revelation as a sexually active youth with a proclivity for the other boys.  Homer had things to say that seemed immediately true to my nineteen year old mind.  When Achilles says to Priam in the twenty fourth book of the Iliad  something like"There are two jars outside the door of the house of Zeus, one filled with good, one with evil; sometimes he takes a little from one and a little from the other to put down on mankind, and sometimes he takes just from the evil, and then a man is certainly doomed," the poet is making a final statement it seems to me about the nature of the universe, and that is the meaningless, indifferent, and basically cruel fate that appears for humans.  I was equally moved by the famous dialogue in the sixth book between Andromache and her husband Hektor, the major Trojan prince, and ill-fated defender of the city, whose response to his wife's plea for him to stay within the city walls as the fighting grows desperate is to forecast calmly enough the destruction of the city, his death, and her fate as captive and slave to one of the victorious Achaians, together with his determination to fight the good fight, as what my Edwardian mother would have called a "gentleman," or would have in an era when such figures still existed, an Ashley Wilkes, for instance, or Christopher Tietjens.  And Hektor, when he finishes that speech by picking up his infant son and praying that he will someday distinguish himself as a manslayer in the battle lines,  to my mind resembles no one so much as the father of Michael Corleone who dooms his son to lifetime of servitude to the Mafia code.  Somehow that desperate view of things, that famous "Greek tragic sense of life," has always given me the impetus to find joy and meaning and fulfillment in ever day that comes to me, although Richard who lives in close proximity insists that gloom is the fundamental of my world view.