The Iliad is about power and force. Those who inhabit its
space abide by the warrior’s code. Its heroes are vain, brave, and
consumed by the heady elixir of violence and the bitterness of
bereavement. The story is primarily that of one man, Achilles,
who returns to the battlefield at Troy to attain kleos, the ever-
lasting fame that will be denied to him without heroic death. The
Iliad could have been written about Bosnia, with its competing
warlords and its commanders willing to sacrifice men and vil-
lages to their egos and ambition.
The Odyssey is different. It is also built around one character,
Odysseus. In The Odyssey the hubris and inflexibility of the war-
rior fail to ward off the capriciousness of fate, the indifference
of nature. Odysseus has trouble coping with the conventions of
civilized life. When he takes umbrage at more powerful forces
and cannot resist revealing his name to the Cyclops, he con-
demns his men to death and himself to prolonged suffering. As
the sailors beat the sea to white froth with their oars, Odysseus
calls out to Cyclops: “With my men / hanging all over me and
begging me not to,” but they “didn’t persuade my hero’s heart.”2
It is his hero’s heart that Odysseus must learn to curb before
he can return to the domestic life he left twenty years earlier.
The very qualities that served him in battle defeat him in peace.
These dual codes have existed, perhaps, since human societies
were formed, and every recruit headed into war would be well-
advised to read The Iliad, just as every soldier returning home
would be served by reading The Odyssey. No two works have
come closer to chronicling the rage and consumption of war
and the struggle to recover. The name Odysseus is tied to the
Greek verb odussomai, which means “to suffer pain.”
War exposes a side of human nature that is usually masked
by the unacknowledged coercion and social constraints that
12 Introduction
Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, PublicAffairs, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1634813.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2023-10-19 22:11:46.
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