One of the most alienating features of the Homeric hero is his need to degrade the corpses of fallen enemies. The most famous example is Achilles’ treatment of the body of the Trojan prince Hector, but Hector himself is no better: he felt the same urge to demean the lifeless body of Patroclus and planned to cut off Patroclus’ head and give his body as food to the Trojans’ dogs (Iliad 17.127). To the modern reader, these actions might feel unheroic and unthinkable — until we examine how the bodies of our fallen enemy combatants are displayed and degraded on social media.

Achilles’ desire to kill Hector stems from his desire for revenge following the murder of Patroclus (18.18–21). Promising the dead Patroclus to avenge him, Achilles swears that he will not give Patroclus funeral honors until the armor and head of Hector are his (18.335). As Hector breathes his last breath, Achilles does not hesitate to tell him what will happen to his body: “on you the dogs and the vultures/shall feed and foully rip you” (22.335–336). Although Hector begs Achilles to accept the gold and gifts that his parents would give in exchange for his body, Achilles mercilessly responds with insults and threats (22.345–354, trans. Lattimore):

No more entreating of me, you dog, by knees or parents.
I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me to hack your meat away and eat it raw for the things that you have done to me. (…)
not even so shall the lady your mother
who herself bore you lay on the death-bed and mourn you:
no, but the dogs and the birds will have you all for their feasting.

Whenever I read these lines — so highly descriptive — from the Iliad, I am reminded of images and videos posted on social media of Western soldiers posing next to or even defiling an enemy’s body. Perhaps the most memorable are the images of prisoners tortured by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, either because of the brutality of the pictures or their being the first to surface (or both). On this occasion, the photography itself was part of the torture: many of the abuses carried out consisted of forcing prisoners to perform humiliating acts while they were filmed or photographed.

How is it possible that human reactions towards the Other-as-enemy have not changed in over 3,000 years?

Despite the horror and widespread social criticism that resulted from the case of the Abu Ghraib pictures, images like these have not stopped appearing on social media. For example, an Israeli soldier posted on his social networking account a picture of a child in the sights of his rifle. More recently, last summer, another Israeli soldier posted photos posing with guns and boasting of having killed 13 Palestinian children. An Australian terrorist posted on a social media showing his son grabbing the decapitated head of a Syrian soldier. In the caption, the proud father: “This is my son!” A British soldier also posed by the lifeless body of a Taliban fighter with a thumbs-up.

These public manifestations of physical and psychological abuse of the enemy raise questions for us, as classical scholars and as human beings. What reading can be given to these images, and what do they convey about the psychological aspects of warfare? And what is the meaning of the similarity between these pictures and the descriptions depicted in the Iliad?

Achilles’ final words to Hector show his anger and harshness toward his fallen foe: he even alludes to his desire to eat raw the body of the enemy. This image works to demonstrate the unleashed wrath of the hero, estranging Achilles further from his humanity and bringing him closer to the world of the monstrous and radical instead.

By denying Hector a burial, Achilles ensures that Hector’s fame will die with his body. In the world depicted by Homer, the burial mound symbolized the exploits of the hero; it was a remembrance for the collective memory. Denial of burial also means denying the purification of fire and therefore revoking the entrance to Hades, condemning Hector’s soul to wander: he would neither be with the living nor could he be with the dead. Furthermore, with the theft of Hector’s corpse, Achilles makes it impossible for Hector’s family to weep for the deceased.

Through Achilles’ actions, the life of the “Other” (on this occasion represented by the enemy) is not a worthy-of-being-mourned life, using the terminology of Judith Butler, who distinguished between lives worthy-of-being-mourned, those who belong to the “We,” and not worthy of this, namely the lives of the “Others,” which become hated lives worthy-of-being-destroyed.

The mutilation of the corpse also is an attempt to deny Hector his individuality by rendering him unrecognizable. Everything about him will be forgotten, from his exploits down to his physical appearance. Immediately following Hector’s death, Achilles rushes to carry out the mutilation of his enemy’s lifeless body (22.396–398, trans. Lattimore):

In both of his feet at the back he made holes by the tendons
in the space between ankle and heel, and drew thongs of ox-hide through them
and fastened them to the chariot so as to let the head drag.

By dragging Hector’s body face-down along the ground, Achilles reveals his desire to erase Hector. The face is the part of the body that individualizes the person; spoiling the face of the opponent, letting it become unrecognizable, makes him dissimilar to anything that reminds us of an “I” or “We.”

Achilles then continues to maltreat Hector’s corpse: he ties it to the chariot again, dragging it while he rides three laps around the pyre of Patroclus. As a final insult, Achilles leaves the lifeless body lying face-down on the ground: the Greeks always placed dead bodies face-up, in supine position (like the corpse of Patroclus).

The modern photos posted on social media, like Achilles’ degradation of Hector in the Iliad, can be read in terms of dehumanization of the Other. A photograph, usually used to memorialize an individual, takes on the opposite meaning, turning the fallen enemy into nothing more than a dead body. It becomes dissimilar to everything that reminds us of a “We.” The abuse and humiliation of the enemy’s body dehumanizes and objectifies him by denying the features that characterize him as a human being, bringing him closer to the world of objects instead — objects that can be broken, littered, defaced, and, of course, destroyed. The lives of the Others, as objects, are considered inferior and, therefore, not deserving of the same rights or privileges of a “We.”

Following this reasoning, the “I” comes to be seen as having legitimacy for performing such actions. In turn, this legitimization of violence is what allows it to be displayed openly. In the social media pictures, as in the Iliad, the protagonists have no qualms about showing their atrocities towards the Other-as-enemy to the world. If anything, the opposite is true: they are proud of their actions, using the destruction of the Other to confirm the value of the self.

When Achilles first returns to the battle after finding out about the death of his companion, he claims that he used to be benevolent toward the enemy, saying, “many I took alive and disposed of them” (21.102). But after the death of Patroclus, his attitude changes, and he says he will kill every Trojan whom he sees in the battle (21.103–104), starting with Lykaon. Achilles kills Lykaon unarmed and in a supplicant stance: “He (Lykaon) let go of the spear and sat back, spreading/wide both hands” (21.115–116). He then throws Lykaon’s corpse out to the river and says to his lifeless body “nor will your mother/lay you on the death-bed and mourn over you” (21.123–124). The Achaean expresses a gruesome wish for the fishes mutilate the Trojan corpse: “And a fish will break a ripple shuddering dark on the water/as he rises to feed upon the shinning fat of Lykaon” (21.126–127).

Achilles also says that he intends to kill as many enemies as possible — just as the proud father of the picture does not hesitate to show the whole world the position of him son (and by extension, his self) towards the enemy. In J. P. Vernant’s reading, the Homeric person seeks and finds himself in the Others. He needs the acknowledgment of the Other: it is the only way of knowing himself. On this occasion, the Other is another member of the group who works as if he were a mirror in which each person recognizes himself. It seems that the Homeric individual is not the only one who needs this recognition: it is a compulsion that has followed human beings throughout our history.

For a Homeric hero, the act of stripping the armor of the enemy dead to turn it into a trophy — an external sign of the value of the warrior (geras) — seems to be the same need fulfilled by the pictures in social media. In both cases, the person needs to outsource the result of his actions; he needs to share with other members of the group the great feat that he has just committed. These episodes shown the importance of glory and the acknowledgment of the members of the group, as well as the urge to not being forgotten, namely, that one’s name be remembered. It is, precisely, this lack of recognition by the members of the group (especially Agamemnon) that makes Achilles, the best of the Achaean heroes, leave the battle in Book I of the Iliad.

The acknowledgment of the members of the group is a necessity in the lives of soldiers — both Homeric and contemporaneous — to keep their fame. In Book 9 of the Odyssey, the hero does not hesitate to affirm his identity to Polyphemus — even though his companions insist that he should not rouse the cyclops’s fury — but Odysseus does precisely this in order to be remembered his great feat: “Cyclops, if any human being asks of you how your eye was so hideously put out, say that Odysseus, despoiler of cities, did it; even the son of Laertes whose home is in Ithaca” (Odyssey 9.502–505). If he had not identified himself, his achievement would have been without authorship. It would have been forgotten. And for a Homeric hero, to be forgotten is even worse than death.

Fear of the unknown has accompanied human beings throughout Western history — fear that often turns into hatred. Due to this fear, the Western individual has opted, most of the time, for the domination of what caused it: the domination of the Different, the Other.

The connection between Iliadic war scenes and 21st century pictures in social media shows that, in spite of the temporal distance between the two, little has changed with regard to human feelings and relationships towards the Other. Homeric poems remain fascinating for many reasons, among them for the great poet’s ability to depict characters whose psychology and relationships with each other are perfectly recognized by us. They expose a social structure that is certainly cruel — but for that very reason also plausible and familiar, similar to that of many places in the world today.

Bárbara Álvarez Rodríguez is a “Clarín-COFUND” postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, Classics Department. Her research interests involve epic poetry and oral tradition, Greek philosophy, gender studies, intercultural dialogue, immigration issues and the relationships with marginal groups around the Western history. Currently, she is working on her postdoctoral project called “Exclusion and marginalization in the Greek epic: A study on the relations with the otherness in the Iliad”.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.