POETRY AND HEALING

The Trojan Women Lament: A Note of Grief at the End of Homer’s Iliad

by David Shaddock

This regular column for Poetry Flash looks at poetry to illuminate issues relevant to health, mental health, and coping with our lives today.

LAST NIGHT I SAW A TRAILER for a new film about the Russia-Ukraine war. Man-to-man, trench-based combat over a few hundred yards. In addition to lab experiments gone awry, melting icecaps and creeping fascism, we still have this: hard-eyed men hurling murderous projectiles at each other at close range.

I’ve spent the last few months ending my evenings by reading my eleven-year-old grandson, Ryan, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad. “Are you bored with all this?” I’d ask. “Not as long as there are more gory parts,” he’d reply. And there are plenty, so he isn’t. Much has been made of Wilson being the first female translator, but she certainly doesn’t spare us: eyeballs squirtingly pierced, organs spilling out on the dirt. To Ryan this is all Marvel Comics material, blood, heroism, a dollop of irony. But we do linger over Wilson’s delicious pentameter lines, seeing how armored Achilles “Shone like an unquenchable bright flame / Lit by Hephaestus,” savoring them on our tongue as we say them out loud. I note our squeamishness differential and plow forward. We both get the poignancy of the moment Hector realizes that it is an illusion that Athena is next to him; that he must fight Achilles alone and surely die. But even Ryan has limits—his stomach joins mine in turning when, in the penultimate book 23, Achilles heaves twelve living Trojan babies onto the top of Patroclus’s funeral pyre.

I hate the word relevant when it’s applied to literature, but I’m running right up next to my barbarity tolerance quotient now, which makes this 3,000-year-old description of human carnage seem contemporary. The god’s are no help—they love us fitfully, if at all, like an occasionally sober drunken parent. The whole story is driven by the out-of-control emotions of Achilles, acting like a pouting three-year-old as he sits out the war by his ships, then turning into a murderous psychopath when he rejoins the fray. Neurologist and poet Dawn McGuire suggests that these texts plumb our limbic-system-derived madness, beside which our rational minds crumble like movie sets.

Reading the poem with Ryan, it does seem a primer on primal emotions. Jealousy, rage, vengefulness, grief. And the slightly less primal vanity, envy, umbrage. In my psychotherapy practice I see people deadened by restricted access to emotions or buffeted by unrestricted access. Half-remembered slights from forty years ago organize a couple’s sulks and tantrums. A wife says hi to a guy at the next ATM who’s wearing a Michigan sweatshirt, and the husband’s day is ruined. Or, as in the Iliad, unspeakable carnage unleashed by a Goddess not being named the prettiest.

Is there a turn toward love, kindness, redemption at the end? Only after Achilles’s rage touches bottom. After slaying him, Achilles laces a thong though Hector’s feet and drags his body over and over around Troy on the hard ground. The gods don’t stop him, all they do is replace his skin every night so the corpse doesn’t rot. Then a startling turn toward empathy: “Poor man, you have suffered so much,” Achilles says to Hector’s father Priam, who has come to try and ransom Hector’s body. He’s snapped back into his senses, and refuses Priam’s offer of treasure.

This scene is rightly held up as a lacuna, a moment of peace and recognition, perhaps a glimpse of what, beyond endless war, our species is capable of. We note that the scene does not mark the climax of the Trojan War itself, which continues for many years and ends with the brutal sacking of Troy. But in this moment, Achilles’s use of the word “suffered” is the key. You have suffered, we have suffered. Grief as a leveler of difference, not an ignitor of rage.

The climactic scene between Priam and Achilles is not the actual end of the poem. There remains the funeral pyre, with its mixture of grief and barbarity, the funeral games, a kind of machismo restorative exercise, and, at the very end, three brief laments spoken by women: Hector’s wife Andromache, his mother Hecuba and his sister-in law Helen. Taken together they form a series of fractals, each separate in its perspective, but reflecting the whole of the profound loss that has occurred. It is to these three brief speeches that I wish to turn now.

First up Andromache, the grieving wife:

“You died young,

Husband, And left me in your house a widow.

Your boy is still a little child, a son

Born of unlucky parents—you and me—

And I do not believe he will grow up.

She grieves for her loss of comfort, and she grieves for her future, and her son’s future. She fears for her son that when the Greeks plunder Troy he will be sold into slavery, or tossed off the wall to his death. Grief and foreboding tighten into a single, unbearable knot. From which she issues a primal cry of anguish:

In death you did not reach your arms from bed

To me, or leave me with some final words

That I could have kept in mind

While crying night and day.

Though she acknowledges that, in the larger perspective, without Hector Troy will be left unprotected, to be sacked and destroyed, her loss is personal. She’s lost Hector, her comforter, her consoler.

Next the lamentation of Hecuba, who remembers, as a mother would, how Hector was favored by the gods, who preserved him, even in death. She notes that Achilles’s violence and vengeance toward her son could not raise Patroclus back to life. The mother takes no comfort in the “dewy freshness” of his god-preserved body. Her grief is not about the future. Her loss, along with the loss of her other sons, is final. There is no comfort from the gods, their restoration of Hector’s body is met with irony, not consolation:

Now you lie here in dewy freshness,

As if Apollo shot his silver bow

And with gentle arrows took your life.

She will not be fobbed off. Her grief is unrelenting.

Lastly, the sister-in-law, Helen, whose actions led to Troy’s downfall, and, indirectly, to Hector’s death. “I wish that I had died before that day” she says, remembering leaving Greece for Troy with her husband Paris twenty years earlier. But guilt is not her only topic. She remembers Hector’s unending kindness to her, even amidst others’ taunts: “No other / in spacious Troy was kind to me like you.” “So I am sick at heart with grief and mourn / for you, and for my own bad luck.” A third piece of the hero, his nobility, his kindness, reflected in yet another grieving woman. Only the woman who caused his downfall sees him clearly for who he was, uncommonly kind and noble. Collectively, the three women mark different aspects of grief: foreboding, anger, guilt. A mosaic, from which, at a certain distance, the hero’s visage emerges.

It’s a quiet ending, removed from limbic words and violent actions. The clamor of war, the hero’s code of valor, the capricious play of fate in our lives: all recede at the end of this violent epic. In therapy, we work through traumatic experience to get to grief, believing that grieving is a process, a journey toward recovery. The Iliad makes no such promise. Destruction is foretold for Troy, and the madness of war continues. We are nothing in the end but a few memories of our kindness and valor, held in the hearts of the women who loved us. But the chorus of the women’s lamentations lingers. A dollop of another heart path, to contrast the warrior’s way the long poem celebrates.

David Shaddock PhD is a poet and psychotherapist. His most recent poetry book is A Book of Splendor: New and Selected Poems on Spiritual Themes. He is also the author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field, from Routledge, and two books on relationship and couples therapy. He lectures widely on those topics, and maintains a private practice in Berkeley.

— posted SEPTEMBER 2025