Dear John,

I started reading Homer’s great poem The Iliad a few nights ago.

I had picked up a battered bargain-bin copy of The Iliad and The Odyssey at the Book-Off in Higashi Totsuka for ¥770 but it had been gathering dust on my shelf.

Let’s be honest - it’s an intimidating fucking book. The two of them together are at least five hundred pages. But still, isn’t it fantastic that one of the foundational stories of Western civilisation could be had for less than the price of a cheap noodle lunch?

I was actually reading one of Italo Calvino’s essays in The Literature Machine where he talks about the different “levels of reality” used in the Odyssey.

Calvino asks: “How many odysseys are there in the Odyssey? At the beginning of the poem, the story of Telemachus is the story that is not there, the story that will be Odyssey.”

Having not actually read the Odyssey before myself, I could only glean from Calvino’s essay that there is a strange sense of reality and perspective used in the great poem. It starts at the end of the man’s life (Odysseus), recounted and unfolding through flashbacks and other story-telling devices as he tells the 20-year long journey from the beaches of Troy to the island of Ithaca.

The whole thing is recounted by the blind author Homer, translated by Samuel Butler in the 19th century, and now appearing to me on the printed page.

It struck me that Calvino (writing in the 1980s) expected from his readers a functional knowledge of the story and the Greek pagan gods from which a conversation could be had. He did not explain or contextualise the story, he just assumed that I knew.

Suddenly I realised that like many of my modern brethren, though I think I know a thing or two, I am in fact completely and utterly uneducated – in part because I have never read Homer.

Once upon a time every schoolchild, every pauper, knew at least a few lines of those great poems. Only an ignorant fool could go about his life without knowing Achilles and Paris and Penelope and Zeus (and Helen!).

Though I can operate a computer and manipulate data like a good boy, without knowing the story of the Son of Peleus and the Son of Atreus all my technical knowledge amounts to nothing.

I am simply a modern tool.

Let’s be clear. I knew the name of the author Homer, I was aware of who he was and (thought I knew) where he sat in context to my world today. I had read overviews and summaries and articles about Homer. But we can never know more about a criticism or analysis of a text than what the original can give us in the first place.

I had never taken the time - and our culture does not value taking the time, to work through this text myself to realise how important it is.

So what else could I do but tolle lege, and pick up and read the fucking thing for myself?

On the beaches of TroyOn the beaches of Troy

Starting with The Iliad, the poem that sets the scene for the beginning of Odysseus’ journey, I was struck almost immediately by the way it tells its story.

It is not just the theatre of Greek and Trojan warriors and some set battles like a modern fantasy novel, it is also a story of pagan gods.

To me it seems the world of Homer has these two “theatres” of action always available to it: The theatre of mortals on earth, and the theatre of the gods.

In the first book, Apollo comes down to shoot his arrows of sickness into the Greeks (Achaeans) before returning to his high place.

Again, I am sure if this is common knowledge to an educated person or not, but to me it was an entirely new revelation.

What do we have today that is even like that? Modern stories only ever seem to have a single layer of characters. Even fantasy, which is not really my thing, puts all characters on the same “realm”, interacting together even if some have supernatural powers.

But clearly there are two “worlds” interacting in The Iliad, the beaches of Troy and the summit of Mt. Olympus.

Some of the Gods move between the two to interact in human affairs, but conceptually it is two very different spaces operating with different logic.

We don’t have this mode of storytelling anymore.

Or do we?

Achilles and Agamemnon are having their petty dispute over the spoils of conquest on the beachside. Their men are dying. But it is the intervention of Achilles’ mother, a goddess herself, to go up and petition Zeus to favour the Trojans in response to the insult from the fellow Greek Agamemnon. The petty and capricious actions of Zeus and his wife to award favour to either the Greeks or the Trojans made me think of something.

The Iliad is not fantasy - it is modern politicsThe Iliad is not fantasy - it is modern politics

We can’t find this “dual mode” of storytelling in fiction anymore. But instead we find it in politics!

When I open up Reuters or Al Jazeera, or any of the countless spawn of mainstream media - I cannot help but see something like this war in the Straight of Hormuz and think of those black ships of the Greeks.

When I see Trump or the leaders of Iran or Ukraine or the EU or any of these various characters and their petty fucking struggles for glory, it is like the drunk court of Zeus and the Olympians.

There is hardly a single book or film that every person equally knows today, but if I mention Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Putin or Trump - we all know their story. Whether you are Japanese, Greek, or kiwi, we all know the details of the drama. We all know the myths.

What was once the realm of these so-called “gods” in the ancient world has become politics and politicians in the modern world!

I wonder if what we call politics, of engagement with community, of leadership, of action etc - is actually something else entirely?

No doubt the ancients had an awareness of the power of “voice” in direct community. The discussions and debates of Achilles and Agamemnon and the Greeks warriors rallying their men and leading battle is a kind of local and direct and politics driven by leaders in-person.

But the politics we think of today is of media and of distant figures. These larger-than-life leaders seems to have come to occupy that same upper celestial theatre of those ancient pagan gods.

Has the story always been the same?

Is that impenetrable fortress of Iran the same as Troy? Is the U.S Navy fifth fleet the same as the Greek black ships?

Is the petty squabbles of Trump and Netanyahu and the Saudis and the French and the British the same old story? They are all petty and fallible people. Yet through modern technology they have become all-knowing and omnipotent with their technology of war.

Like Zeus or Hera or Apollo, they get jealous, they get angry, they get drunk on power and they feast on hecatombs of sacrificed cattle and children.

We read the news on our phones and follow the story as if we are listening to every word of the blind bard Homer tell us, the passive audience, what the gods will choose to do next.

They will smite some Lebanese village or “shoot their arrows” at some Houthi base. The Trojans shoot back and land a hit on a US airstrip near a Arab city while the “gods” hold counsel and get drunk in some diplomatic dialogue.

It is as if we are waiting for Athena to come down and whisper in the ear of one of the brave generals, or for the sea nymph Thetis to appease Zeus and make some kind of deal via the Pakistani allies.

None of us are participating in “politics” as much as we are listening to an ancient song as old as time itself, a story of Pagan gods, of false gods - of the lies of war and conquest and ego.

I have only just started reading The Iliad. For now I realise that the reason that I’m considered an uneducated fuckwit is not because I don’t know the Greek gods or the difference between Hector and a hecatomb, it is because to understand the world of politics today we must understand the history of the false Pagan gods.

– Cody