Athena and Ares

There is a point in the Iliad when great Diomedes has his time of glory. He is a little different than the other characters. Hector, deeply tied to family and city, is fully human. Odysseus is glib, quick, and cool headed. Agamenmon is haughty and powerful. Achilles- the Iliad is about his rage- is a different order of man altogether.

But Diomedes...he is a strange one. He is ferocious, but not more than any of the other great warriors in the field. He fears but does not doubt. Athena grants him "strength and daring so the fighter would shine forth and tower over the Argives and win himself great glory..."

He launches into battle and kills immediately. Ares, the horrible god of war is on the field as well, wreaking havoc for the Trojans. This series of episodes is known as "Diomedes fights the gods", and clearly there is a proxy war going on: Hera and Athena seek to lay a few good ones on Ares and Aphrodite. Ares isn't terribly clever and is drawn easily from the field by Athena, who takes Ares in hand, and says, "destroyer of men...why not let these mortals fight it out for themselves..." what follows is a sequence of killings, each brutal, graphic, and curiously formal:

"Meriones ...speared him low in the right buttock- the point pounding under the pelvis, jabbed and pierced the bladder- he dropped to his knees, screaming, death swirling all around him"

and

"Meges...struck just behind his skull, just at the neck-chord, the razor spear slicing straight up through the jaws, cutting away the tongue- he sank in the dust, teeth clenching the cold bronze."

For sheer ugliness, Ares is unneeded on this battlefield. On vivid display is something essentially Greek: an unblinking eye. The anatomical detail of the killings is truly a marvel. Tongues are sliced, teeth crashed through, intestines spill out, it is a panoply of suffering and gore. A few centuries later the bard's descendant will be creating natural philosophy. Yet these are set pieces. For all the unsparing detail they seem a dance. And like in so much of Homer, phrases get reused throughout, in different contexts. There are epithets ("white armed Hera", "Menelaus, lord of the war cry" and so on). C.M. Bowra points out (Landmarks in Greek Literature 1966) that the bard's unit of composition is not the individual word, as it is in Modernism, but rather the phrase.
This is an important point- for much of the Iliad's formality and apparent rigidity of style is due to a modern close reading on the level of the word. Perhaps the oral epic required a slightly less fine grit to meet the demands of the times. We should take care to read it in this way.
Some time after the sequence of Athena-inspired killings, Diomedes spears Aphrodite's wrist while she tries to rescue her son, the Trojan, Aeneas, and also spears Ares right in the guts. Athena, with admirable scorn, helps him shove it home.

These phrases, these units of meaning (epithets, stylized violence, wounds, etc) have, up until the so-called Book V (Diomedes fights the gods), have for the most part been used to describe man on man violence, with the requisite detail. Here the wounds incurred are overcome by the sheer silliness of the gods so wounded- they will live forever, they will heal, they have caused untold suffering among men and of course their wives and children and friends...and yet:

Ares displayed the blood, the fresh immortal blood that gushed from his wound, and burst out in a flight of self-pity: "Father Zeus, aren't you incensed to see such violent brutal work? We everlasting gods...Ah what chilling blows we suffer- thanks to our own conflicting wills- when ever we show these mortal men some kindness..."


The Iliad is composed, of course, on a very large scale. And large characters march across its spaces. Massively over Hector and Agamemnon loom the gods, immortal and callous, and quite incapable of honor. These gods are not merely animated nature gods any more than they are merely animated human qualities. They are dynamic, in deep interplay, and their furious energies are directed against each other with disastrous consequences for man.