Q) What is Homer’s attitude towards war? Explain with suitable evidence from the text.

A story as grand as the Iliad makes any person have the ability to start relating war with the
sense of glorification. From the reader’s perspective, we read about a society greatly
glorified by the act of war. Soldiers were thought of as fearless and courageous, indulging in
the spoils from their victories. There are two opposing sides, the Greeks and the Trojans,
involved in this epic tale. Both sides are portrayed as having legitimate reasons for going to
war; however; the Trojans started the war for love and stayed to defend their home; whereas,
the Greeks fought for honour and power.

Homer is too wise to tell us whether war is good or bad; he leaves it to his readers to come to
their own conclusion. Such binaries of good and bad are not a luxury the reader has while
reading The Iliad. Having said that, Homer builds The Iliad as an anti-war poem. There is
no effort to glorify war or the hero and instead, there is a conscious attempt to depict ugly
images of war, not to disgust the reader, but to show war as it is. The Iliad doesn’t show the
death of Achilles or the burning of Troy. Of the Trojans, only Aenas will survive and of the
Greeks, Odysseus. This information plays on the reader’s mind throughout and it leads one
to wonder how a war that started because of the lustfulness of one man resulted in the end of
two civilizations.

In the second book of The Iliad, in the rare instance that Homer comments, he says about
Agamemnon: “He little knew what Zeus intended, nor all the sufferings and sorrows he had
in store for both sides in the heat of battle.” The scenes of communal cremation in book 7 are
symbolic of Homer’s humble attitude. He shows that the enemy is no different. When the
end for both the Greeks and the Trojans is the same, then there is no purpose of war. Antenor
in book 7 questions why they are fighting the battle. He says: “Enough is enough, let us give
Helen back to Agamemnon and Menelaus, along with all the property that came with her. By
fighting on as we are doing, we have cheated on the oaths. No good that I can see will ever
come out of that unless we act as I suggest.”

The unpleasant pictures of dead bodies, of the earth running red with blood and the red
turning to black contribute to the epic being an anti-war poem. Homer paints hideous images
of war with the horrific scene of the struggle over Patroclus’ body and the brutal manner in
which Achilles drags Hector’s body from the towers of Ilium back to the Greek camps. Book
14 onwards, every man who dies is given a name, an identity, and history. We can no longer
look at them as dead bodies piled up on a cart, detached from the tragedy of death. The dead
now become individuals who had families, had wives and children, who they’d never seen.
In book 17, when Hippothous dies, Homer honours him with a personal touch: “He was a
long way from fertile Larisa and could never repay his parents for their care; his life had
been too short when Ajax’s spear cut him off.”

Homer undercuts the glory of war using his heroes. When Hector meets his mother Hecebe
and his wife Andromache in book 6, he’s almost tempted to leave the battlefield. In the
beautiful moment when Hector the warrior takes off his helmet to play with his son Astyanax
for one last time, the man in Hector realizes the futility of war. He loathes Paris, his brother
because of whom Troy has been fighting for nine long years. The warrior thus hates war.
Odysseus himself didn’t want to come to battle. When Achilles returns to the battlefield, he
no longer believes in war. He doesn’t return because he believes in the cause, he only fights
to rid himself of the guilt of being responsible for Patroclus’ death. He has finally understood
that there is no glory in war. In the end, his only wish is to meet his father Peleus and to
return home.

Like the image of home and hearth Homer paints in book 6, he uses Homeric similes and
imagery from nature to build an alternate world without war. The shield of Achilles is a
symbol he uses to show that conflicts can be resolved without war and violence, without
disturbing the pastoral world and the domestic world. The shield contrasts marriage which
represents man’s ability to create and war which represents man’s ability to destroy. It
contrasts the black of the grape with the black of congealed blood and the gold of corn and
the gold of fire.

Homer concludes this build-up with a final tragedy of war; that in which parents bury their
children instead of the other way round. Thus it’s fitting that Homer’s subtle way of
condemning war is showing that it goes against the organic order of life and of nature.