Wrath without Reason in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid

Epic poetry serves at least in part to help articulate the values of the society from which it has come. These themes are often made explicit in the invocation of the muse, at the very beginning of the poem. It is vividly clear in all three poems that an important theme is the effects and legitimacy of wrath or anger. Indeed, the very first line of the Iliad asks the muse to sing about rage. To contemporary audiences, anger is not considered to be a force that is disconnected from reasons for anger. It is expected that if one is angry wrongly than the behavior that results is wrong. In these three epics of antiquity, however, rage seems to be a force disconnected from its reasons, not articulated as unreasonable or irrational. Indeed, rage seems to be understood as separate from agency at all; in a sense, one does not seem to decide to become angry. Wrath happens to the actor and makes their resulting behavior, irrational as it may seem, inevitable. This paper will argue that in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, rage is a divine force separate from human agency that, despite its ability to radically change human events, is not under human control.

The entire plot of the Iliad hinges on wrath. Achilles shows his humanness, angry that Briseis has been taken from him, not only refuses to further engage in the fighting but also asks his mother Thetis to make life difficult for the Achaeans engaged in the siege of Troy. The poem begins by asking the muse to sing of “Achilles' rage,” treating it as a noun that is separate from him (Homer, Iliad 1.1-2). The text immediately cites the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon, but does not ask for the reason of the fight; instead, the poet wants to know “Which of the immortals set these two / At each other’s throats?” (Homer, Iliad 1.9-10). This further depersonalizes the rage, making it as an entity separate and beyond human ken. The gods, who are above and unmanipulatable by human action, are the source of the rage. Indeed, the plot initiates with the rage of Apollo, who is angry due to the capture of the daughter of one of his priests. There is reason to the anger, in the sense that there is a precipitating event, but not in the sense of the anger being justifiable. The question is never so much why Apollo is angry except insofar as understanding what it would take to appease him and stop the plague. The soothsayer who tells the Achaeans that they have to return the daughter of the priest prompts an intense rage of Agamemnon, which is a descriptive passage. Agamemnon is “furious, anger like twin black thunderheads seething/ in his lungs, and his eyes flickered with fire” (Homer, Iliad 1.109-110). Anger is something natural, like a storm, but it is living in his lungs and causing reflections in his eyes. The rage not described as something he feels, instead, it is something that overtakes him. Indeed, much later in the poem, when Achilles waits to kill Hector, he waits “like a snake waits,” no longer human at all, “venom in its fangs/ and poison in its heart” (Homer, Iliad 12.107-108). He is described as several animals in this book, including a falcon and a hound, so overcome with rage that he isn’t a person at all. Indeed, Achilles tells Hector that his rage is so great that there will never be the possibility of negotiation, asking rhetorically “do lions make peace treaties with men?/ Do wolves and lambs agree to get along?” (Homer, Iliad 12.288-289). Indeed, it is this unhuman rage that makes Achilles dishonor the body of Hector after his death. This desecration is evidence that Achilles “has lost all pity and has no shame left” (Homer, Iliad 24.48). He is not a human being anymore, as evidenced by Hera saying that this did not matter, because Hector was mortal and Achilles is born of a goddess. The agent of rage in the poem is divine and animal, but never human; his rage has changed him from a person to a force of nature that makes the rest of the characters in the play tremble.

In the Odyssey, the important agent of rage is not human, but instead divine. Odysseus is traveling home from the Trojan War but ends up enraging Poseidon such that he dooms him to travel and to get lost in his journey home. The gods pity him, all except for Poseidon, is “stiff and cold with anger” (Homer, Odyssey 1.74). Odysseus blinded his son in self-defense and for this, he is so enraged that he keeps Odysseus on the sea, refusing to let him return home. Even though the actual plan by which Odysseus blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus is an act of cunning, the only reason why it becomes a problem for Odysseus is that out of anger, he taunts the Cyclops and tells him his identity (Homer, Odyssey 10.500-503). His men tried to stop him, but his anger makes him not listen. Like in the Iliad, reason is incompatible with anger. Anger can have ramifications and an origin as to why an actor is possessed by it, but once they are under anger’s sway, it is impossible to treat them like a full person anymore. Even Odysseus, cunning and sly usually, makes the biggest mistake of the poem when he is angry.

The Aeneid, despite being written hundreds of years later and in Latin, instead of Greek, shares a similarly irrational conception of anger. Like the Iliad, the poem begins with rage, though not of a mortal, and like the Odyssey, it is a divine rage that prevents Aeneas and his men from easily reaching Latinum (Virgil, Aeneid 1.5). Juno, like Poseidon and Apollo before her, loathes Aeneas and hates him, leading the poet to ask, “what could wound the Queen of the Gods with all her power?/… /Can such rage inflame the immortal's hearts?” (Virgil, Aeneid 1.11-14). Like the previous books, a divine figure is angry, but the way the Aeneid approaches the rage of Juno is different. She is afraid out of fear for her beloved Carthage, punishing the Trojans before they have even founded the city that would eventually be the ruin of Carthage. This is still a rage that overtakes her, but it is far more psychological in understanding than the poems of Homer. This god is angry because she is afraid; it is not a question of vengeance like Apollo, Poseidon, and Achilles from the other poems. At the same time, mortals are still overcome by a rage beyond their ability to understand. At the very end of the poem, Aeneas acts utterly without reason to kill Turnus and to end the war in Latinum. Turnus has yielded and is pleading for mercy, and Aeneas looks like that he is about to be persuaded, his words beginning to sway him, when he spots the sword-belt of his friend Pallas, on Turnus’s body. Turnus had killed Aeneas’s friend and now wears his trophy, causing Aeneas to flare up in fury. Despite the fact that moments before Aeneas was going to let Turnus go and the fact that he was unarmed, surrendering, Aeneas is overtaking with fury and kills Turnus with one thrust of his sword. The wrath is shown to be able to overtaken reason, mercy, and the customs of war; when faced with the death of his friend, wrath prevents Aeneas from being rational, and the poem ends.

All three poems provide reasons, in a sense, for anger. There are events that the characters are responding to with rage. At the same time, anger is without reason in the sense of rationality, once the characters have been overcome, they cannot be argued down without grave difficulty. The anger is described as something external to the characters, coming into the heart of the mortal. Indeed, anger is divine, something that dehumanizes those who have rage and makes them like immortals and animals, unreasoning but powerful.

Work Cited

The Norton Anthology of World Literature (Shorter Third Edition). Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.