Canter Bridge

What happens upon earth when the gods make war in heaven? Many cultures have a treasured and conventional answer to this, even those deeply secularized societies that describe celestial violence in scientific language. Homer’s Iliad is one such tale-epic in its scope-that has deeply marked Western civilization down to its roots.

If you listen to just one audiobook this year, it should be George Guidall’s narration of Homer’s The Iliad.

It used to be possible to say without embarrassment that literature ennobles its reader. Guidall’s resplendent performance of Homer’s Iliad resuscitates that traditional notion beyond all doubt. The man’s voice is a symphony. Only a master narrator like Guidall could make nearly seventeen hours of reading as gripping at the end-or even more so-than at the beginning.

Homer’s epic tale of ‘blood on bronze’ sounds as up-to-date in the first decade of the 21st century as it must have to listeners of the Homeric bards who told this tale centuries before the time of Christ. Guidall finesses Homer’s famous similes with passionate exactitude. Fitzgerald’s translation is earthy, his lexicon powerfully ample and necessarily inventive, though without ever sounding effete.

The Iliad has given us a number of modern English phrases: ‘to unleash the dogs of war’, ‘you’re a dead man’, ‘to bite the dust’.

The combination of Homer, Fitzgerald, and Guidall is a match made in, well, in Olympia, ‘where Zeus views the whole wide world.’

The humanity and heroism of Homer’s mortals as the war between beached Hellenic warships and the wall of Troy is sumptuously spelled out. Achilles’ rage, Hector’s nobility, Priam’s dignity, the voluble humor of the two Ajaxes are qualities one feels in the bones.

The gods come off considerably less well. These distracted denizens of Olympia, the earth, and the sea are quarrelsome, arbitrary, petty, inconstant, and unreasonable. The fortunes of good men and bad are slave to their whimsied narcissism. Though the main drama of Homeric poetry is profoundly human, the gods are never far off. Indeed, the bards provide the occasional glimpse of war in heaven where human drama, for a moment, takes a subservient role.

Human experience of life’s ephemeral fortunes was no doubt projected onto these protagonists of the great myth. What, one wonders, do life and death feel like, under the supposed governance of such undeserving powers? It’s enough to make you a monotheist.