Did Homer get war writing all wrong?

And is my book simply about comparing the Iliad to my own experiences, or is it really a discussion of how the Iliad glorifies something that actually is terrible?

The idea for my book, tentatively titled A Veteran’s Iliad, came to me several years ago. I found myself dwelling on how Homer’s Iliad compared to my own experience of war, and the seeds of little essays began to form in my mind. I had spent a life thinking about Homer, from childhood fascination to professional academic research. I had also spent five years in the Marine Corps, participating in the invasion of Iraq and returning again in 2004-2005. The intensity of these two perspectives is in inverse proportion to their length. Reading the Iliad and thinking about its history, how it was written, what it says - that is a way to spend a peaceful and thoughtful lifetime, as numerous Classics professors like me have done before. My time in the Marine Corps, with its year in Iraq, certainly had many thoughtful moments, but was, as literally as is possible, far from peaceful.

I grew to be fascinated by this contrast and, as the essays continued to emerge in my mind, I began to write them down. Initially they were very short, sometimes only half a page. The first one was a discussion of how Alexander the Great loved the Iliad and carried a copy of it (stored in a trunk as it was 24 scrolls of papyrus) as he conquered the world he knew and others beyond it. What I thought made the essay interesting was when I pointed out that the warfare depicted in the Iliad is not at all similar to what I had experienced, nor to what Alexander the Great would have seen. In fact, I argued, my experience and Alexander’s, as separated as they are by time and technology, were much more similar to each other than to anything Homer wrote about.

It took a long time, but this theme, that Homer kind of got it wrong, permeated my thinking and my writing. When I prepared a book proposal and sent it to Blue Ear Books, the theme was a ghost that inhabited my words, but that I didn’t yet see as the purpose of the book. The process of expanding my short essays into chapters and coming up with new ones brought this ghost to light more and more, until I had to look directly at it. Was this book simply about comparing the Iliad to my own experiences, or was it really a discussion of how the Iliad glorifies something that actually is terrible? As brilliant and lasting a storyteller as Homer was, did he know what he was talking about?

It was as I began shaping my writing around this more focused theme that Ethan Casey, whose encouragement, support, and wisdom were crucial in moving me along in the writing process, added another layer. He pointed out that, yes, this theme and comparisons and contrasts were interesting, but there was not enough of me in the writing. My experiences were articulated and stood up against similar or dissimilar stories from the Iliad, but in rather matter-of-fact ways. The actual lived experience, the emotions, the pieces that made it true to me, were under-developed. “The reader wants to know what makes you tick,” Ethan explained to me.

I have a full draft now, and I am very proud of it, but I am still working through Ethan’s suggestion. I am in the process of revisiting those parts of the manuscript that are about me, what I saw, what I was experiencing, and developing them into something like what you would find in a memoir. I have, in fact, read a handful or memoirs to help me think through this process. Ultimately, I do not see my book as itself a memoir, but as something that straddles the line between memoir and scholarly discussion of the first book of Western Civilization.

Because all my published writing before now has been purely academic, I find this last effort to be difficult. Sure, I know myself and what I did and what I saw, but getting that out of my brain and onto the page, in a way that makes sense to people who are not me, takes effort. It is pushing me more into the artistic and almost psychological side of writing. I both embrace this challenge and am intimidated by it. The audience I’m used to writing to wants facts, analysis, the synthesizing of ideas that leads to the discovery of new ones. Now I’m writing to an audience that needs my personal introspection, the parts of me that I’ve never talked about, to guide them to what I’m trying to say, to make them think that both I and my story are interesting and worth the read.

As intimidating and challenging as this is, I love it. I don’t necessarily love it all the time, but when I’m in the right mindset, sitting in my comfortable chair, laptop in front of me, cigar in my mouth, and words flowing from my fingertips, I’m in a really good place.