A residual problem in Iliad 24

Extract

The late Colin Macleod's commentary on Iliad 24 (Cambridge, 1982) has rightly received praise for its sensitivity to the nuances of Homeric language and its appreciation of the entire poem as a carefully constructed work of art. Although reluctant to accept the more radical solutions proposed by the ‘oral’ school, Macleod showed himself fully aware of the contribution made by the oral theory towards elucidating the history of the epic. Nevertheless, his commentary is concerned principally with the Iliad as we have it: a poem which is at one level a masterly re-telling of saga but at another a sublime tragedy, commiserating the sorrows inseparable from human existence and holding up for our admiration the heroes who nobly confront pain and death. I believe that much, and probably most, of the Iliad can and should be viewed in this light. The last book of all, as Macleod himself has shown, offers especially rich rewards to an interpreter who keeps in the front of his mind the overriding aims of the great poet. Yet Macleod's method, like any other single method, will never yield a fully satisfactory answer on all occasions. However the ‘definitive’ or ‘monumental’ composition of the Iliad was brought about, it formed only one stage (though from our point of view incomparably the most important stage) in the development of the Greek epic. Our Iliad cannot have been the first or the only treatment, on a large scale, of the matter of Troy.