The Iliad, Homer, 18 October 1991.



I know the date as it’s stamped into the front of my book. I was 10 years old, just, and in my first term at a small, kindly boarding school, itself in a Norman manor house, which nestled in the Arun valley in between the two castles of Arundel and Amberley.

Every week there was a bookshop. A prefect would open up a cupboard in the corner of the library and lay books out for us to browse. I remember, perhaps the second or third time, staring at a Penguin Classic, on the cover of which a chariot was in the process of tipping over. Men bearing shields stood around it, in various poses of fright. The book was called simply, The Iliad; the author, Homer; the price, astonishing now, £2.99.



I bought it, along with The Odyssey, much to the chagrin of one of the classically minded prefects who’d had them in his sights. I took them back to my dormitory, and that night, during the half hour of “silent reading” we had before bed, began to read.

Philip Womack. Photograph: Tatiana von Preussen

Of course, most of it went over my head. Even to, as I was, a precocious 10-year-old who delighted in Latin tables and JRR Tolkien, the language of EV Rieu’s translation seemed archaic and difficult. But it didn’t deter me. There was something about it that cast a glamour – a spell that I’ve never really been released from. Even now, walking down the streets of London, thousands of years after a war that, if it happened at all, was probably only a skirmish about some cattle, I find myself seeing Achilles, best warrior of the Greeks, dragging the Trojan Hector round Trafalgar Square, while Helen, the gorgeous cause of it all, looks down from the arch above.

Since then, I’ve read The Iliad in its original Greek, and have consumed new translations, even reviewing one for a national newspaper. And yet it’s still that first book I return to. Battered, bent, the front cover almost torn, the back cover ripped off, it sits on my shelf, next to the Hammond translation I had as a teenager. I used it for years, to read, re-read, and later to teach from.

What was it that appealed so to me, in my grey corduroy shorts, long grey socks, and grey jumper, in a cool Sussex autumn? The Iliad tells the story of a few weeks in the last year of the Trojan war - a war that lasted 10 years, as the Greek armies besieged Troy to retrieve Helen, their captured princess. At first, I think, it was the alien quality of it. Here were people, long ago, doing things that seemed impossibly strange. They quarrelled about things I didn’t really understand – but they also talked to gods. Athena herself came down to stay Achilles’ hand in the very first pages. Theirs was a world where the supernatural was simply accepted as part of the normal course of affairs. Gods stalked the battlefields; fretted and cooed over their favourites; Zeus sent black rain to mourn the loss of his son Sarpedon. These Achaean warriors on the shores of Troy fought with rivers; Achilles had immortal horses that wept at the knowledge of his approaching death.

In this way, the Iliadic knights seemed to me brothers of the Arthurian knights that I was also obsessed with. They rode through forests, chancing on white harts and magicians. Was our reality so? Could the trees talk, the rivers sing?

That was my Eureka moment. I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly, but it was a growing sense that people had been telling stories - fantastical, beautiful stories - for as long as there had been people, and that we were still reacting to and talking about them. There was a universe of difference between the warriors of my imagination – blood-stained, grim, but with their own cast-iron code of honour - and the paperback in my hand, as I sat absorbed by it among the comforting rituals of school and play.



But that paperback was, and is, a time-machine, transporting the reader right into the thick of that battle. In those pages I found Homer’s poetry among the 1950s prose; violence, tenderness, love and magic; and most importantly, what it was like to be a human, right at the edge of time.

Philip Womack’s fifth novel, The Double Axe, will be published by Alma in 2016. His sixth novel, The King’s Revenge, the final part in the Darkening Path trilogy, will appear later in that year.