ILIAD. Homer, as Horace says in the Poetica,' does not begin the tale of Troy with the egg of Leda; that is, he does not frame his tale in a complete handbook of Greek mythology, but plunges into the midst of things and hastens to the event. Similarly a modern epitomizes must proceed at once to the story of the (Iliad.' The real siege of Troy may have been a contest for the trade of the East and not an expedition to recover the beautiful Helen of Sparta, daughter of Zeus, wife of Menelaus, and sister of Castor and Pollux (consult Leaf, Walter, and But the conjectures of modern scholarship add nothing to the story as told by Homer and by the excavations on the hill of Hissarlik.
The Iliad conforms to Aristotle's prescrip tion that an epic poem should not be a chronicle or a biography (as e.g., The Life and Death of Jason)), but a unified action. The by its title is the poem of Ilium, the poem of the siege of Troy. But the first word menis, wrath, in dicates the unity of the real subject —the quar rel of Achilles with his overlord, the com mander-in-chief, Agamemnon, and its fateful consequences for the course of the war and for Achilles himself. A few words suffice for the essential plot. In the 10th year of the siege Achilles in the assembly takes the part of the soothsayer Calchas who announces that Apollo has sent a pestilence upon the Greeks because Agamemnon has re fused to return to her father, the priest Chryses, the girl Chryseis, his prize from the spoils of a captured Trojan town. After a fierce altercation, Agamemnon sullenly re nounces Chryseis but threatens in revenge that he will deprive Achilles of the girl Briseis whom Achilles deeply loved although she was the cap tive of his spear. Achilles does not overtly re sist the authority of the overlord, but when Briseis is taken from him he renounces his al legiance and remains in his tent (hut), eating his heart, aloof from the war. His mother, the sea goddess Thetis, bears his laments, rises from the sea, learns the story of his wrongs, and appeals to Zeus to punish Agamemnon by bringing defeat upon the Greeks in the absence of Achilles. Zeus, unable to resist the appeal of Thetis, who clasps his knees and reminds him of former benefits, gives the promise and confirms it by the nod of his head which in Homer's sublime description was the inspira tion of Pheidias' colossal statue of the god at Olympia. The first book closes with a descrip tion of the assembled gods on Olympus in which the jealous spouse of Zeus, Hera, taunts him with his concession to Thetis, and her son, the lame Hephaestus (Vulcan), plays the role of peacemaker and provokes unextinguishable Homeric laughter by assuming the function of Hebe, the beautiful maiden cupbearer of the gods.
The subsequent action of the poem shows how when the promise of Zeus has been ful filled, when the Greeks are driven back to their camp upon the shore, and Hector is firing their ships, Achilles so far relents as to send forth to the battle his dearest friend Patroclus at the head of his Myrmidons. Patroclus is slain by Hector, and in a frenzy of passion and grief Achilles hurls himself into the war, does terrible execution upon the Trojans, and after pursuing Hector thrice about the walls of Troy kills him in single combat. The ransom of the body of Hector by his father Priam, his burial, and the lamentations of Andromache, Hecuba and Helen for the chief defender of Troy conclude the episode and the action of the poem, which occupies about 45 days.
If rigidly restricted to this outline the poem would be a menis or song of the wrath, an Achilleis or story of Achilles. It is an Iliad, an episode of the Trojan War built up about the unity of this central action. The broader compass is made possible by the retardation of the main action, the fulfilment of Zeus' promise, and the filling up of this time with episodes that familiarize us with the leading personages on either side, display the prowess of other Greek chieftains, yet reveal their inadequacy to supply the lack of the invincible Achilles, and heighten the dramatic suspense and deepen the moral lesson of the poem by portraying Achilles' implacable and eloquent rejection of a last de spairing .appeal of the Greek chieftains. As an exercise in the abstract logic of plot con struction, it is possible to extract from the a swifter moving story of Achilles that omits some or all of these things and narrates the wrath and nothing but the wrath. It would not be nearly so good a poem as the present and there is not an atom of evidence that it ever existed. Retardation and digression in reasonable measure have always been devices of the story teller's art, and there are no great poems and few great novels in the world that attempt to obey the prescriptions of Poe's un deviating logic of the short story.