Homer: Iliad Book I

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The Iliad is organized according to two complementary, mutually reinforcing artistic principles, one related to its traditional narrative and mythological content, the other to its symmetrical form and to eighth-century aesthetic norms. The narrative moves linearly toward the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy, both of which, as Homer's audiences knew, will follow shortly after the burial of Hektor with which the Iliad concludes, and both of which are anticipated with increasing frequency in the course of the poem. In the mortal world of the Iliad, the movement toward death is a one-way movement, an overriding reality that lends the poem much of its power as a representation of the human condition. Nevertheless, as Aristotle observed, unlike other epic poets who told in chronological order everything that was supposed to have happened in the course of the events they described, Homer organized the Iliad and Odyssey thematically, rather than chronologically, each around a single subject - the wrath of Achilles and its consequences and the man Odysseus and his return home - and gave them an organic unity in which, in the case of the Iliad, the death of Achilles and fall of Troy have no place. Even so, most events in the poem are told in the order in which they occur, there is nothing like the extraordinarily complex narrative form of the Odyssey, with its multiple plots, its movement back and forth in time, its numerous internal narrators and narrative perspectives, and its constant change of locale"--