The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The epic as we now have it opens with a description of the physical strength and beauty, and the political power, of King Gilgamesh, but then quickly shifts perspective to tell how the people of Uruk feared and resented his arrogance and arbi- trary exercise of power. To teach Gilgamesh humility, the gods created Enkidu, a hairy, wild man of the desert, to be Gilgamesh^ rival and alter-ego. Gilgamesh sends a temple girl, Shamhat, into the wilderness to seduce Enkidu and so tame him. She does so, and brings him back to Uruk. When he arrives, he and Gilgamesh wrestle each other fiercely but soon realize that neither can overcome the other. Thereafter they become sworn brothers, and decide to embark on an adven- ture: to find and slay the terrible monster Humbaba. After they do so, the jealous goddess Inanna sends down the Buli of Heaven to destroy Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu succeed in killing the buli also, but at the cost of Enkidus life. Gilgamesh, disconsolate, goes on a journey to visit the keeper of the Underworld, Utnapishtim; the latter tells him the story of the great world-engulfing Flood, teaches him to accept the lesson of mortality, and allows him to return to Uruk.

It will be obvious to anyone raised in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam that the Epic of Gilgamesh con- tains many parallels with the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible: The urbane, handsome Gilgamesh and the wild, hairy Enkidu recall Jacob and Esau, as Enkidu and Shamhat resem- ble Sampson and Delilah; the havoc wrought by the Buli of Heaven brings to mind the discord created by the casting of the Golden Calf during the years in the Wilderness (and Moses destroys the calf just as Gilgamesh kills the buli). The flood described by Utnapishtim sounds just like the flood of Noah. And so on. One might think at first that these themes in Gilgamesh are echoes of the Bible, but in fact the situation is just the reverse: one of the things that is most fascinating about the Epic of Gilgamesh is that it is a precursor of the Bible (though with no hint of Biblical monotheism). However one feels about the divine inspiration of the Bible itself, it is appar- ent from Gilgamesh that several key themes of the Hebrew Bible were couched in terms of symbols that had already been current in Mesopotamia for over a thousand years before the Bible began to be written.

Such weighty considerations aside, the Epic of Gilgamesh is well worth reading as a story of love and friendship, of adven- ture and danger and grief, and of a proud man^ humbling encounter with mortality. The epic is now available in several fine English versions; I particularly like the verse translations by Danny P. Jackson and by David Ferry.

J.S.M.

2

HOMER

ca. 800 B.c.E. The Iliad

The Iliad and the Odyssey are two long, ancient Greek narra- tive poems called epics. They are the first as well as the great- est epics of our civilization. Every time we refer to a siren or Achilles^ heel or compare a lovely woman to Helen of Troy we are borrowing from these poems that are perhaps three thou­sand years old.

I say perhaps. We do not know when Homer lived—maybe between 800 and 700 b.c.e., maybe earlier. As a matter of fact we do not even know whether he lived. We do not know whether the stories were written by one man named Homer; or, as the old joke has it, by another fellow of the same name; or by a syndicate; or even, as Samuel Butler thought in the case of the Odyssey, by a woman. These questions are for scholars. The poems are for us.

Originally, it is supposed, they were listened to rather than read. Homer, whomever he or she was or they were, recited them.

The Iliad tells the story of some fifty days of the last of the ten years' siege of Troy (or Ilium) by a number of tribes we loosely call Greeks. This siege resulted in the capture and firing of Troy's "topless towers," which we know to have actually existed. To find out how Troy was taken, see VirgiPs Aeneid [20].

The Iliad is probably the most magnificent story ever told about man's prime idiocy: war. The human center is Achilles. The main line of the narrative traces his anger, his sulkiness, his savagery, and the final assertion of his better nature. He is the first hero in Western literature; and ever since, when we talk of heroic qualities, Achilles is somewhere in the back of our minds, even though we may think we have never heard of him.

You can look at the Iliad through a diminishing glass. Then it becomes the story of a trivial scuffle, marked by small jeal- ousies and treacheries, fought by long-dead semibarbarians who had hardly advanced beyond the sticks-and-stones era. The wars of The Iliad, compared with our splendid planetary slaughters, are petty stuff