Everything comes across loud and clear, especially those stark shifts of focus that characterise the poem: in the tender farmyard metaphors we see the battlefield as if from a great height, and with godlike detachment but at other times we are shoved in close, right into the flapping mouth with its glittering bronze hook. Penguin Classics has used Robert Fagles' splendid and energetic 1990 translation. As Bernard Knox writes in his excellent introductory booklet, this creates: 'an exquisite balance between the celebration of war's tragic, heroic values and those creative poles of civilised life that war destroys'. Corpses are crushed like barley under the hooves of oxen warriors swarm over a dead Trojan hero like flies over the brimming milk buckets in spring Ajax is pushed backwards like a stubborn donkey driven by boys with sticks. Who knows how many motorists, after listening to all six tapes, will feel like skewering the slowcoach hesitating at the lights or dawdling on a roundabout? As usual, Homer concots a weird intimacy with violence by comparing it to a familiar scene. This is not exactly Chucky, but it is not far off. The only values they recognise are to do with glory and honour and death, and the gods pursue their fatuous tiffs with an Olympian indifference to the suffering they cause in the mortal sphere.

There isn't anything we can recognise as a moral reflex: as David Denby pointed out in a recent New Yorker essay, the Iliad is one long punch-up between men who like reciting their family trees. Even Homer is included in the list of those who somehow uphold our, er, totally bogus and irrelevant value system, with its hypocritical morality and parochial terror of 'the other'.īut even the most cursory experience of the Iliad - and what could be more cursory than listening to Derek Jacobi while negotiating the traffic cones on our motorways? - is enough to show that nothing could be more 'other' than this strange and savage epic about gods and men locked in vicious combat. We are living in a time when the so-called canon is often held up for ridicule: all those great books of the past are assumed to be merely a capitalist trick, a way of perpetuating a sexist-racist- bourgeois-fascist ideology.

But this is only the first of many salutary shocks awaiting those who decide to listen to the new Penguin Classics tape of Homer's amazing poem. AN AWFUL lot of bullocks get burnt in the Iliad.

The iliad robert fagles