The Iliad

“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses

hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,

feasts for the dogs and birds,

and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon, lord of men and brilliant Achilles.” 

The Iliad’s opening stanza operates as a compressed narrative of the whole poem, identifying the central conflict that moves the plot, Achilles’s all-consuming rage at Agamemnon and the destruction it wreaks. The ancient Greeks had numerous words to express anger-like feelings. The one used in the Greek text, which Fagles translates here as “rage,” is menin (μηνιν), a type of long-lasting anger associated with gods. This divine-level rage may be inappropriate for a mortal, as Achilles is owing to his mortal father, but it is tied to Zeus, who is identified from the outset as the driver of the poem’s tragic events.

“And the whole assembly surged like big waves at sea,

the Icarian Sea when East and South Winds drive it on,

blasting down in force from the clouds of Father Zeus,

or when the West Wind shakes the deep standing grain

with hurricane gusts that flatten down the stalks—

so the massed assembly of troops was shaken now.” 

The Iliad has paradoxically been called both an antiwar poem and a poem that glorifies war. The poet’s simile comparing the surging troops to a surging wave suggest an alternative perspective that the poem neither glorifies nor decries war but accepts it as a force of nature whose tragic scope inspires awe and wonder. In the Homeric imagination, forces of nature are personified as gods and goddesses, as with, in these similes, the East, South, and West Winds, and Zeus. The poet frequently layers similes, as in this instance, perhaps attempting to overwhelm listeners/readers’ senses in the way that nature’s uncontrollable elements often do.