There was a time when Hubby was into Terry Prachett’s Discworld series. For anyone who doesn’t recognise the name (where have you been for the last 40 years?), Discworld is a series of comedy-fantasy books set on planet Discworld. Over the years Hubby cherry-picked a few to pass to me, which is how I came to read Small Gods, the 13th book in the series.
I remember very little about Small Gods but one passage has stuck in my mind. On Discworld, a huge enemy fleet has beached in the Omnia and the Omnian army are forming battle-lines; above Discworld on Dunmanifestin, where the gods live, several dozen gods are gathered with dice, clay figures, and gaming counters, looking down and laying bets. To be truthful I hadn’t realised I remembered that, even, hadn’t given Small Gods a second thought once I’d reached THE END– and then I read The Iliad.
Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan war is thought to have been written around 800-900 BC and is one of the oldest works of Western literature. The story of Troy, though, never seems to grow old. A beautiful, faithless woman, an avenging army, a long siege, a trick that gets the enemy into the city; a great city laid waste. Examples of the story’s influence on literature are too numerous to explore in this blog but phrases such as Achilles heel, Trojan horse, Greeks bearing gifts are all rooted in the myth of Troy.
The Iliad actually begins nine years into the war and finishes before the subterfuge of the wooden horse (which is described by Virgil in The Aeneid). Its central focus is the Greek warrior, Achilles. As you might expect it’s chock-full of fighting, including some very visceral descriptions of the realities of combat (“The copious slaughter covers all the shore, / And the high ramparts drip with human gore;” and again “The Telamonian lance his belly rends; / The hollow armour burst before the stroke, / And through the wound the rushing entrails broke”.) Less expected, for me at least, was the importance of the gods to the story.
Homer’s gods are dispiritingly un-godlike. They are petty, mean-minded and querulous, intervening to help the Trojans or the Greeks according to their individual biases, even joining in the battles when it suits them. (“Such war the immortals wage; such horrors rend / The world’s vast concave, when the gods contend.”) In Homer’s epic, Troy is set to fall (as we know it will) not because Helen’s infidelity provokes a war or because Achilles is a one-man killing machine or (later) because Ulysses devises a neat trick with a wooden horse, but because Juno, Queen of the gods, bears a grudge against the Trojans. And why does she hate them so much? Because one Trojan, Paris (who ran off with Helen), judged Venus to be more beautiful than her The Trojans would have stood more of a chance if the gods had rolled dice…
…Which brings me back to Small Gods. In Pratchett’s book the gods are forced by a more powerful god to intervene to stop the fighting. “What the gods said…boiled down to:
- This is Not a Game.
- Here and Now, You are Alive.”
The world might be a much more peaceful place if we all took that on board.
Rating: ** Worth reading (ok, ok, I know it reflects badly on me that I’ve not given one of the most revered works of Western literature a ***** rating, but (whisper it) I resorted to skim-reading through a lot of the battles.
PS. Homer’s real name was Melesigenes. He lost his sight when he was a young man and acquired the name Homer because that was what the people of Cumae called blind men.
PPS. The Iliad provides the inspiration for Pat Barker’s novel The Silence of the Girls, which I reviewed in an earlier blog post.
whatcathyread 