That first unpleasant and magnificent poem.(The Iliad)

THE ILIAD is an unpleasant poem. For much of its length one intent countenance hacks and jabs at another. Skulls, with a name and provenance casually attached, are split open like so many rockmelons. Spear and sword probe downward past collarbones to find hearts set beating by mothers whose lamentations are already shrugged into the scheme of things. The warrior attributes plume around the heads of the heroes, but where is there a man or god to do or say a surprising thing, an intellect to look at a phenomenon and find it curious?

Occasionally a shaft of pathos illumines a personal condition, as when the doting Thetis commissions Hephaestos to create for her son a new shield and recalls for the lame god how she had "endured a mortal warrior's bed / many a time, without desire" (Book 18).

Indeed, if we watch this mother--son relationship in the light of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book One, that breach can suggest the psychological depth and necessity of the confrontation between two natures, one hetero- and one homosexual. There is chieftain dignity at stake of course, but also, before that masculine assembly, the sub-text of Agamemnon's confiscation from Achilles of the slave-concubine, Briseis, insinuates how we all know a comely girl is wasted on this fellow. In the manners here, and later in the extravagance of Achilles' grieving for Patroclus, the text allows, but does not quite direct, such a reading.

For all that the portrayal will not clinch the evidence I favour this delineation of Achilles' sexuality because his anger, so decisive to the movement of the poem, gains a psychological necessity and subtlety from such tensions. Furthermore, by giving his anger towards Agamemnon that extra edge, it creates a natural transfer of enmity towards Hector. In Book Twenty-Two does Achilles chase Hector ("forever unforgiven") around the walls of Troy, or Agamemnon? Is the defiling and displaying of the Trojan champion's body designed to humiliate his countrymen, or chill the Mycenean king?

ANGER, WE CAN SEE, impels the poem. But the war has been waged for nine years at the poem's outset, and the initiating offence that sparked Greek anger--Helen's abduction--makes the emotional charge of this original wrath stale. Indeed the staleness and edginess in the Greek camp in Book One give credible immediate context to the quarrel over Briseis. And yet Agamemnon's goading petulance and Achilles' corresponding sulks seem out of scale with the fact of the slaughter that dominates the four days of The Iliad's action, or the longer politics motivating it.

Like the murderous fights which overtake chimp colonies in the Cameroon forest, the Greek-Trojan combats seem more momentary than motivated, more habitual than directed. There is a tonic in, indeed a cultivation of, the high adrenalin afforded by the puncturing of stomachs and the slashing of hamstrings.

Is Hector's slaughter-lust credible? Certainly it stems from the fact that his homeland has been invaded by foreigners. A Chechen, or an East Timorese, is incipient in his cause, though not especially in his nature. Implacable Hector is, though he is more a duellist than a liberationist maybe, where one remarks in the manner of the modern freedom fighter the patience that accompanies the unremitting purpose, the watchful good cheer that is studied to outlast superpower rage. Hector lacks this tension between studied detachment and unappeasable purpose. Is it fair to ask from a millennially ancient poem some crisper life-drawing in one of its chief protagonists to enliven the more formulaic observances? Probably not, though the capacity for life-drawing (that fastidiousness to get distinct attitudes just-so rather than stylised) has taken residence in the human mind by this date, as the exquisite and far older figure depictions on the cave-walls of Lascaux and Altamira show.