The Primal State of Rage in Homer’s Iliad, Essay Example

The Iliad, Homer’s legendary chronicle of the decade-long Trojan war, between the amassed Greek forces and the kingdom of Troy, is not only a military or mythological epic, but is a psychological work, which investigates the causes of human conflict. Since the story is based on a war story, Homer is not only content on chronicling this war in a poetic form, or from the viewpoint of an objective historian. Nor is he only interested in telling tales or myth-making: rather, he understands conflict in particular terms, which are explicitly stated at the very outset of the work: “Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.” Homer here produces an interesting reversal of cause and effect relationships, one could argue. Normally, when we think of the phenomenon of rage, we first think of a cause of rage, with rage being an effect. For example, someone has been cheated by the government: they are then enraged by the government. Homer reverses this causal sequence: he begins with the rage of Achilles as something primordial and then traces the negative effects of this rage.

For this reason, since Homer’s narrative begins with rage, it can be argued that for Homer, rage is something fundamental to the human being. This, however, has a disastrous effect, as Homer also outlines in the next sentence. Perhaps this can be understood as an attempt by Homer to explain how the human being is constantly informed by a primordial negativity, a primordial rage, which leads us to inevitable destruction. What is central to Homer’s narrative, from this perspective, is not a mythological account of historical events, but instead a psychological narrative about the primal self-destructiveness of the human being.