Iliad - Homer - 750 B.c.
The cover of a recent translation of the Iliad (published by Hackett in 1997) features a black-and-white photograph of the 1944 D-Day landing at Normandy, as seen from the point of view of a soldier about to jump from the open door of the troop transport into the freezing surf. This image draws a parallel between the allies of World War II and the Greek armies of the Iliad. The relevance of Homer's ancient war epic to the world wars of the twentieth century was not lost on those participants who had read it. In 1915, the young British soldier Patrick Shaw-Stewart, during a three-day leave from the Battle of Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, not far from ancient Troy, wrote the following lines in an untitled poem:
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knewest and I know not—
So much the happier I.
Shaw-Stewart, contemplating his own role as soldier, identified with the warrior-hero Achilles' struggles to subordinate his personal anger to the larger demands of his role as a warrior. Shaw-Stewart was not fated to survive the war, but unlike Achilles, he did not possess foreknowledge of his fate. Achilles is more than merely human: he is the son of a mortal, Peleus, and Thetis, a sea nymph.
