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The Alexandrian Iliad

2011; Boston University; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2011.0001

2327-6436

James Tatum,

Classical Antiquity Studies

The Alexandrian Iliad JAMES TATUM —Bernard Knox in memoriam Caroline Alexander is an accomplished author best known for her revisionist books about adventure stories long familiar in fiction and film, The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Knopf 1998) and The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (Viking 2003). In these and other writings she demonstrates an uncommon power to choose stories that are so familiar that nothing further would seem possible to say about them, then come up with a surprising and convincing account that challenges earlier versions and makes her readers see something as familiar as the story of the 1935 AcademyAward -winning Mutiny on the Bounty of Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in a wholly new way. Already in print for nearly three years as of this writing, The War That Killed Achilles* aims to do nothing less with the foundational poem of Western literary traditions. She is particularly dedicated to showing how Achilles is not only the Best of the Achaeans—his own words, to his immortal mother Thetis, and the title of an influential book by Gregory Nagy—but also the most perceptive and incisive critic of a war against which all later wars can be compared, whether real or fictional. In Homer’s telling, the Trojan War is a paradigm of the wrong war, fought in the wrong place, for all the wrong reasons. Among many other uses to which it has been put—a prime model for Euripides and other tragic poets in their adaptation of myths to the theater, the *Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s “Iliad” and the Trojan War. New York: Viking, 2009. xix + 296 pages. $26.95. arion 19.3 winter 2012 point of departure and a major focus of argument for Herodotus and others engaged in the invention of history— the Iliad is a crucial text for anyone interested in the evolution of war stories and artistic representations of war, from classical antiquity to the present. Alexander’s prospective readers will want to know whether this book is in the same league as her best-known work. In spite of some problems of the author’s own making, much of it is. With the exception of book 22 (“The Death of Hector”), for which she supplies her own translation, Alexander gives us a running commentary on the plot and characters of the Iliad as Homer’s song unfolds, book by book, and she sets both the poem and its making firmly within the various historical contexts that classicists have been able to discover about the war that not only killed Achilles, but inspired the oral poetic tradition which culminated in Homer’s epic. Alexander herself is a classicist and writes with a classicist’s rigor about a subject close to home. In this respect, her documentation and vigorous argument are quite the equal of the earlier “true stories” mentioned above. She is good at examining historical evidence, and in many ways she’s on home ground when dealing with the cultural and political history of the Iliad. At the same time, her chapters unfold in a constant dialogue with contemporary war literature , so that writers and cultural artifacts as diverse as Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried), John Keegan (The Face of Battle), and the official motto of the United States, adopted in the Eisenhower era (“In God We Trust”), are all set in provocatively ironic contrast to the main events of Homer’s story and the many different perspectives that anthropology , archaeology, and Indo-European linguistics have brought to our reading of it. As Alexander makes clear at many points, The War That Killed Achilles is a labor of love. This one had its beginnings in what is generally regarded as among the least loveable things going, a PhD dissertation. A revised dissertation is often a scholar’s first book; it’s often where the scholar learns the alexandrian ILIAD 164 how to write a book, if ever. This was not Alexander’s path. Along with studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and founding a classics department in Malawi, she completed a doctorate in...