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The Iliad is about power and force. Those who inhabit its space abide by the warrior’s code. Its heroes are vain, brave, and consumed by the heady elixir of violence and the bitterness of bereavement. The story is primarily that of one man, Achilles, who returns to the battlefield at Troy to attain kleos, the ever- lasting fame that will be denied to him without heroic death. The

Iliad could have been written about Bosnia, with its competing warlords and its commanders willing to sacrifice men and vil- lages to their egos and ambition.

The Odyssey is different. It is also built around one character, Odysseus. In The Odyssey the hubris and inflexibility of the war- rior fail to ward off the capriciousness of fate, the indifference of nature. Odysseus has trouble coping with the conventions of civilized life. When he takes umbrage at more powerful forces and cannot resist revealing his name to the Cyclops, he con- demns his men to death and himself to prolonged suffering. As the sailors beat the sea to white froth with their oars, Odysseus calls out to Cyclops: “With my men / hanging all over me and begging me not to,” but they “didn’t persuade my hero’s heart.”2

It is his hero’s heart that Odysseus must learn to curb before he can return to the domestic life he left twenty years earlier. The very qualities that served him in battle defeat him in peace. These dual codes have existed, perhaps, since human societies were formed, and every recruit headed into war would be well- advised to read The Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading The Odyssey. No two works have come closer to chronicling the rage and consumption of war and the struggle to recover. The name Odysseus is tied to the Greek verb odussomai, which means “to suffer pain.”

War exposes a side of human nature that is usually masked by the unacknowledged coercion and social constraints that

12 Introduction

Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, PublicAffairs, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1634813. Created from fdu-ebooks on 2023-10-19 22:11:46.

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