Afterword: Locating Emotions, Locating Wars

Abstract

Rage opens The Iliad. Here is Robert Fagles’ English translation: ‘Rage — Goddess, sing of the rage of Pelus’s son, Achilles’.¹ Western culture’s epic story of war begins with the emotion of an individual mortal and ends 24 books later with the burial of Achilles’ Trojan rival, Hector. ‘The rage of Achilles’, writes Bernard Knox, ‘— its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences — is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of its plot’.² That one word, rage, looms then balloons into something much larger than Achilles himself. The presence of rage spawns a full world of emotions — fear, panic, despair, love, hatred, grief, pity, fascination, lust, resentment, awe, respect, pride — radiating from Achilles to his fellow Achaeans and enemy Trojans, even to the gods themselves. The poem offers a map of common emotions grown monumental, each a definite location on that map, a node in the larger drama. For Homer, mapping the world of emotion means mapping a world at war. Rage invites us into the all-encompassing world of epic warfare — its causes, its course, and its disastrous consequences. Like war, and inextricably bound to it, the emotion of rage in The Iliad both composes and shreds the map of the world.