COLLOQUIUM: Tom Palaima, The University of Texas at Austin, "The troubles with Achilles: problems with using the Iliad as a testament to war trauma and an instrument in its treatment"

As the ancient Greeks knew and General Douglass MacArthur thought that Plato wrote—and many other, including the Royal War Museum in London, have since believed because of MacArthur's error: "Only the dead have seen an end to war."

Even before Jonathan Shay's groundbreaking study, Achilles in Vietnam (1994), the Iliad served as both a guide to what war means for human beings and an instrument to help human beings get through what pathei mathein means when war is on.

The Iliad made Rupert Brook en route to Gallipoli joyous at the prospect of fighting gloriously on the very plains where Hector and Achilles met face to face—leaving out that Hector ran like hell trying to escape Achilles become a killing machine. At the outbreak of WW II, Simone Weill offered her radical interpretation of 'force' as the true hero of the Iliad. Classicist Kevin Herbert took the Iliad with him to Saipan where it served him well while he served, by his own choice, as a tail gunner in the bombing of Japan. Joseph Heller, besmitten with the Iliad since childhood, used it and Achilles as templates for Catch-22 and its central character Yossarian. And Anthony Swofford in Jarhead talks about reading the Iliad, but doesn't seem to draw any lessons from it applicable to his experiences in Operation Desert Storm.

Here we will look at ways in which the Iliad is used and misused, and some true problems key passages still pose to interpretation, by bonafide classical scholars (some labeled Homerists) and by others who would use the Iliad in translation as a tool for understanding what war is and does, for training soldiers and officers to fight, and for trying to heal the trauma war causes in human societies.