What Emily Wilson’s <em>Iliad</em> Misses
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Early in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, perhaps the greatest novel about an American bureaucracy, the narrator describes a most unbureaucratic figure, a Maine fisherman named Snowman Dyer who died in 1870 in his sister’s home. Dyer once “bartered five lobsters for a small Greek tome that belonged to a classics scholar at Harvard.” The English translation, which was printed between the lines of Greek, so intrigued Dyer that he decided to read the original. Having no teacher other than the dead page before him, he assigned the letters sounds at random. “As he grew older, he grew bolder, and used to recite aloud from this unique tongue while wandering over the rocks,” Mailer writes. “They say that to spend a night in the dead sister’s house will bring Snowman Dyer’s version of Greek to your ear, and the sounds are no more barbaric than the claps and groans of our weather.”
As knowledge of Greek has become more exotic—the mark of pedants, nerds, and graduates of expensive schools—capturing the barbarism of ancient Greek, and of the ancient Greeks themselves, has become harder. The ghost of Snowman Dyer would be a helpful tutor. Classical Greece is often thought to be a pillar that holds up modern civilization, and that impression is not wrong. Take away the tradition that begins with Greece, and everything political from Cicero to Machiavelli to Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama tumbles down, and along with it a literary inheritance extending through Virgil to Wole Soyinka.
Learned men and women carried Greek civilization into the present. Where did the barbarism go? In , Homer refers to the Carians, allies of the Trojans, as “barbarophones,” or speakers of, whence came the English , is imitative of foreign speech, like our meaningless .) Homer contrasts the barbarians with the civilized Greeks. But any modern account of the ancient Greeks—particularly the marathon of homicide in the Trojan War—has to capture both the heights of poetry and civilization, and the total, savage negation of what we recognize today as civilized. They are in the same people; they are in the same poem.
