Western Literature Starts in the Iliad with a Bloody Plague!

 Mary Beard, The New Yorker, May 2021:

“…One person’s civilization is another person’s barbarism; history teaches that civilization is always the insiders’ view of themselves. As for the pandemic, rather than “civilization,” let’s say it’s perhaps challenged the role of “arts and culture.” There’s been a bit of a blindness to those things—a sense that what was really keeping us on the road was, of course, the work of scientists, who were working on the vaccine and on better treatment. And in no way would I like to suggest that that wasn’t important. But people tend to think that music, literature, and so on is icing on the cake.

But the arts are essential. They help you understand what you are experiencing. Look at ancient history. Where does Western literature start? It starts, in the “Iliad,” with a bloody plague!…”

 

Homer, ‘The Iliad’, Book I, translation by Peter Green, 2015:

 

“…So when they had gathered and were all assembled together,

swift-footed Achilles stood up and spoke among them:

“Son of Atreus, I think we shall now be driven into retreat

and forced back home, even should we escape with our lives,60

if indeed war and plague together are to crush the Achaians!

Come, then, let us find and question some priest or diviner,

or even a reader of dreams, since a dream too is from Zeus,

who might explain to us Phoibos Apollo’s deep anger—

Is it a missed vow that riles him? Were some oxen not sacrificed?—65

Maybe, catching the savor of lambs and unblemished goats,

he’ll be willing to give us relief, call off this onslaught.”…“

Peter Jones, ‘Eureka! : Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Ancient Greeks But Were Afraid to Ask’, 2014:

“…We have no idea when Sophocles’ Oedipus Turannos was performed. But we do know that, even though Aristotle made it his ‘perfect’ example of a tragedy, it did not in fact win the first prize.

The story centres on the uncovering by Oedipus of the true nature of events occurring many years earlier. The play opens with a plague that has struck the city of Thebes, and the Delphic oracle tells Oedipus that he must find the killer of Laius, king of Thebes before Oedipus was made king (Oedipus was now married to the bereaved queen Jocasta).

Oedipus sets about the task with a will, but as the truth slowly emerges, two things become clear: not only did Oedipus kill Laius, but in doing so he had killed his own father and then married his own mother, in the process fulfilling oracles of long ago. Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself. The play ends with Oedipus being led away into the palace.

However unlikely the actual plot, it is so masterfully constructed by Sophocles that one is swept away by it – a great man, determined to reveal the guilty man behind an event happening long ago, finding that every move he makes points the finger of guilt more and more clearly at himself, with even more horrific consequences for his mother and for his surviving daughters by her, Antigone and Ismene.

It is Oedipus’ determination not to flinch from facing this increasingly dreadful truth about himself that makes him such a powerfully tragic figure.”

 

 "Plague Arriving" by Frederick Simpson Coburn, 1909