2002: The Odyssey continues . . . so does the Iliad

Six months and a day after Sept. 11, as air strikes continued over the caves of Eastern Afghanistan, and as closer to home — all too painfully close to home — two beams of light rose over lower Manhattan in memory of the thousands murdered, I was safe and warm in the Pyne Tower suite of the Graduate College, glass of Merlot in hand, listening to Professor Robert Fagles give a reading from his dazzling translation of Homer. As Fagles read, his mellifluous voice mesmerized all present, and the grim news we consume daily on CNN momentarily dissolved, replaced by the voices of millennia past.

What a terrible, pretentious opening to a column I've written here. How dare yet another head-in-the-clouds grad student, almost literally ensconced in an Ivory Tower, so much as mention the suffering of recent months in the same breath as his decadent intellectual enjoyments, as if the one had anything to do with the other.

Granted, Shah-i-Kot was ignored quite shamelessly throughout that wonderful evening, as a small circle of academics listened intently to Homer's hexamater, so ably rendered into English pentameter by our esteemed professor. Later, however, I was struck by how akin today's events are to those described in the first major works of the Western tradition. War and suffering have been with us since the human experience was first captured in writing, and, despite our best efforts to bring peace, will be with us as long as the human experience continues.

Homer's achievement is to capture this experience in all its richness and diversity. Take, for example, the shield of the Iliad's hero, Achilles. Within the edges of this intricately decorated armament, within 145 lines of poetry in Fagles's translation, lies the whole of existence, from the highest heaven to the deepest sea, blazoned into bronze by the god Haephastus. Our experience of peace and war is captured by the images on the shield of "two noble cities filled with mortal men." In the second of these, the city at war, there is a scene embodying irresolvable human conflict. There is bitter division, not only between, but also within the opposing forces; the attacking army is irreconcilably divided over whether to continue the siege or sue for peace. War is depicted, not as the field on which men win glory, but as the destroyer of that spirit of cooperation which allows individuals to co-exist without violence.

Curiously, however, there is also considerable conflict in the city at peace. A wedding is taking place, a classic symbol of joy and harmony, but a quarrel has broken out in the marketplace. It is a dispute over a blood price, an ancient construct from the era before formal criminal law, designed to halt the endless cycle of revenge that would otherwise result from every act of manslaughter. "The injured kinsman curbs his pride, his smoldering, vengeful spirit, once he takes the price," observes the good-hearted Ajax elsewhere in the epic. Yet even if the blood price fails to restore harmony, the well-ordered city has institutions that will settle the affair. City elders may judge when such a matter is disputed; the fairest of these is rewarded with a prize for his verdict. Though the specific practices depicted in this tableau may seem primitive to us today, the principles Homer describes are eternal. The city at peace is not a paradise in which no disagreement occurs, but a social order in which such conflicts may be satisfactorily resolved.

It is inevitable that this order will sometimes break down and that violence will sometimes prove both necessary and just. Achilles, after all, rightly enters the battle to avenge the slaughter of his brother-in-arms, Patroc-lus. But, after the fray is over, Ach-illes allows the father of his enemy to take his body home for the customary funeral rites. Violence cannot be endless, or an end in itself, but must come to a stop so that civilization may continue.

As countless pundits have pontificated, the attack of Sept. 11 was an attack on civilization itself. Targeted violence against the perpetrators and their allies is, of course, an appropriate response to this attack. Yet violating the constitutional rights of Arab-Americans, silencing dissent, or otherwise overturning the established system for legally resolving conflict within our own society are not. Peace does not consist in conformity or unanimity, after all, but in the nonviolent resolution of the inevitable differences between us. This is a truth of which Homer was aware almost three thousand years ago and which, unfortunately, John Ashcroft appears yet to have learned. It's a shame that he wasn't able to join us at Professor Fagles's reading. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.