News

The Iliad and Odyssey can seem slightly scary. Huge epic poems in 24 books each, these are the origins of the whole of Western literature. Composed in the eighth century BC, the Iliad tells the story of a few days of that mythical war between Greeks and Trojans. The Odyssey, composed just a few years later, tells how one Greek hero, Odysseus, eventually got home from that war to his waiting wife — triumphing over adversity, natural disasters, monsters and sexual seduction.

So why are they scary? Simply because they are so artful, clever, moving, funny and fully formed. You would expect the earliest literature in the West to be a tentative kind of production, still at the beginning and still feeling its way, slightly primitive. In fact, these two poems were born perfect. So perfect that much of Western culture over the last three millennia has been devoted to imitating them (from Virgil to the Coen brothers) or simply trying to catch up.

The truth is that we do not know who composed them. Homer is a nice invention, but probably never existed, and if he did, he was two people. Most classicists are now agreed that the same person could not have composed both poems. Nor do we know exactly when they were written down in the form we now have them (hence my pedantic use of the word "composed"). But those puzzles don't in the end matter very much. The bottom line is that each one of these poems takes — maybe even invents — a theme that will define much of the rest of Western literature.

The Iliad is about heroism, anger, forgiveness, redemption and the pity of war. It is set in the 10th year of the Trojan War, the Greeks besieging the city of Troy. The central character is the Greek hero Achilles. Furious that his commander, Agamemnon, took his favourite concubine away from him, Achilles sulks in his tent and refuses to fight. In the absence of Achilles, the Trojans get the upper hand, so Achilles's friend Patroclus puts on Achilles's distinctive armour and goes into battle — and is killed by the Trojan prince Hector. Achilles decides to retaliate, returns to combat and kills Hector.

But the Iliad does not end there. First, Achilles, in an act of monstrous revenge, comparable to any ghastly modern war crime, ties Hector's body to his chariot and drags it around his city. A horrible, mutilated mess. So in the final book of the poem, we find Hector's father, Priam, crossing enemy lines to get his son's body back for burial. Achilles, his anger sated, receives the old man kindly and hands the body over to him. Greek tragedy starts here, as do all those centuries of Western reflection (culminating in The Hague and Geneva conventions) about how to behave well in enmity.

The Odyssey is even more a favourite of mine. Predictably enough, as the Odyssey has always been taken as a more "female" text (so female that the 19th-century satirist Samuel Butler argued, unconvincingly, that it was composed by a woman). This is the story of "man goes away and comes back home," and as such, the ancestor of most novels and all road movies. But Odysseus's 10-year journey back from the war to his faithful wife Penelope raises bigger questions about what counts as civilization and culture.

A telling episode is Odysseus's conflict with the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops, just one of many adversaries who would prevent his getting home. The Cyclops is a cannibal, living on a remote island far from the civilized world; he would eat Odysseus and his companions given half a chance. But he is also very stupid, so the wily Odysseus gets him drunk and puts out his single eye with a vast stake, sizzling as it goes. (Homer's Greek is especially nasty at this point.) This is the birth of modern doubts about civilization and barbarity. The barbaric Cyclops is not to be admired, for he would eat up Odysseus. But Homer presses us to ask if we like the version of civilization Odysseus represents: Tricking the stupid barbarian, and horribly wounding him.

No surprise, perhaps, that Homer's Odysseus and the Cyclops has become an emblem of the whole postcolonial project.

Mary Beard is professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement.