I’ve just read the finale of book 12: Hector takes up a huge boulder, smashes the gates of the Greek wall and the Trojans rush into the breach. Strong stuff with a high cinematic quality to it. In fact it’s all too easy to imagine how this would translate into a movie scene. Which made me wonder why oh why no decent movie exists with the Iliad as its subject. Or none that I’m aware of anyway. Okay, there’s Troy with Brad Pitt as Achilles (ha!) but the less said about that abomination the better. Shouldn’t there be some Italian master piece (by Passolini e.g.) of this timeless story or a dark German drama or, why not, a well crafted Hollywood blogbuster or a multi season series on HBO? The script is way better than that of Game of Thrones and it’s just as gory.
Oh, well, maybe one day…
I’m not sure that it’s possible to transfer the violence of the Iliad to the big screen. They could get Tarantino and Scorcese and Ford Coppola together on the set and the result would still pale in comparison.
But I’d go see it.
I’ve often thought how cinematographic the Iliad is. Except for the speeches, without which the Iliad is not the Iliad.
What I loved about Troy—because it was so mythologically innovative, and I didn’t see it coming—was how the Paris-Menelaus duel was ended. Just kill him off! and to hell with the Odyssey.
I myself would prefer opera. 
There’s bound to be some baroque opera on this subject. Händel maybe?
I do not see a major problem with the speeches, it can’t be too difficult to incoporate them in a film/ tv series. The biggest hurdle to me seems how to depict the gods. Do you give them a role at all (if not, it’s not really the Iliad I think) and if so, how to represent them visually without falling into cheap special effects.
You’re right, it’s the gods more than the speeches. Just cut them out. They make little or no difference to the action (one of the remarkable things about the Iliad). Troy did this, if I remember, except for that incredibly awkward Thetis-Achilles scene before falling into routine Hollywood romantic schlock. Homer without gods? No longer Homer, to be sure, but it wouldn’t be Homer in any case.
I agree, cut them out.
Yes, that’s a fine observation. Martin Mueller devotes a chapter to this in his book on the Iliad (chapter 5, The Gods: human and divine motivation). He puts it like this:
'Everything of note in the Iliad is the work of a god. One may give a coherent account of the poem’s action without any reference to the gods at all. Both these statements are true, and the lack of contradiction between them captures an essential element of the Homeric gods. ’
Btw, just read these verses, that would not be out of place in a Hollywood movie script
Iliad 13, 203-205
‘κεφαλὴν δʼ ἁπαλῆς ἀπὸ δειρῆς
κόψεν Ὀϊλιάδης κεχολωμένος Ἀμφιμάχοιο,
ἧκε δέ μιν σφαιρηδὸν ἑλιξάμενος διʼ ὁμίλου·
Ἕκτορι δὲ προπάροιθε ποδῶν πέσεν ἐν κονίῃσι.’
I did part of the katalogos with some school children once and they were quite good at pointing out how cinematic it felt in places. Two recommendations come to me vis a vis this thread:
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“An Iliad” It’s called something like that. A version of the Iliad with the gods taken out. Though I think the removal of the divine from Homer (and elsewhere when it comes to the Classics) is part of a wider and more pernicious bit of cultural appropriation, even if its somewhat subconscious.
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N. Lowe (2001) Classical Plot (Cambridge). It’s not the full title, it’s a mix of narratology/neuroscientific approaches to narrative and looks at over-arching structures as we (note, WE, I dislike it when we foist our narrative strategies onto the others, ancients or not, without evidence) see them. IIRC it plays with modern literature and movies too here and there. I think it’s a damn good read for anybody interested in any form of entertainment nowadays, literary…cinematographic…whatever.
Alternatively, then, cut out the mortals, and leave the gods. Either way you get Homer dimidiated, which results in less than half the whole. If you keep the two planes, you have a set-up more like the Hunger Games or the Roman Colosseum. Commercial success and spectatorial depravity.
The passage you quote, a couple of things to note: the exceptionality of the mutilation (he’s already dead), marking the extreme intensity of the situation; and ἁπαλῆς, striking the saving Homeric note of pathos and complementing the poor man’s backstory and simile-killing recounted a few lines before. A Hollywood movie would be less likely to dissociate Ajax’s action from its own point of view. (Cf. e.g. American Sniper.)
P-S(cribo): “the removal of the divine from Homer” But that is so 70’s, the anthropological turn. We need that, of course, but haven’t the gods made a strong come-back?
I’m not completely sure what you mean here. In what context is ‘cultural appropriation’ pernicious? Apart from the fact that it’s impossible to completely set oneself apart from one’s cultural background (no one has ‘a view from nowhere’ to speak with Thomas Nagel), why should it be a bad thing at all?
Numerous examples come to mind; from my part of the world for instance , look at the late medieval and early Renaissance Flemish and Dutch painters; their main source of inspiration was undeniably the classical world. They more or less transpose biblical and mythological themes to their own time, depicting Mary and Joseph or a falling Icarus in contemporary clothing and against a background they knew well (a Flemish town for instance). Surely they are engaging with the past, looking for and finding meaning in it and making great art in the process. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I’ld say.
Would you call that a form of cultural appropriation or did I misunderstand you?
I must confess I liked Troy a bit, at least when the characters were fighting and not talking. The rhythm of the film was nice, there was nice action and also they knew when to pause the fighting. I think the way the gods were eliminated was nice (and personnally I didn’t find Thetis/Achilles’ mother so disturbing). I think it was the Clash of the Titans that tried a totally different, more Homeric approach to depicting the gods… which was semi-ok, but the film was a total disaster in so many other respects that let’s just forget about it.
Re: cultural appropriation. I think every generation appropriates old material to address new issues. That’s equally true in our own time as it was in Homer’s. I don’t find the way Greek gods are treated in films so disturbing. What disturbs me more is what I’d call the “anthropology”, in lack of a better word. The way these sword-and-sandal films address issues such as, say, gender, slavery or democracy is totally alien to anything any ancient would have ever said (although they did have Aristophanes and Ecclesiazousae…). A modern film could never make Chryseis the nonentity she is in the Iliad, so Wolfgang Petersen made her almost like a feminist hero. But wouldn’t it be so much more instructive (instructive of them, and even instructive of ourselves) and much more captivating if we had the Ancients speak in their own voice in these matters, even if we don’t always like what they have to say?
Another thing that disturbed me (but much less) are the exaggerated splendors of the material culture. The walls of Troy are just too high! If we paid more attention to Homer, we should have a lot more dung all over the place instead… Here’s one film that got that bit right (jump to the end if you don’t care to watch it all!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs.