The European canon starts here. Did Bowie come to The Iliad by way of Julian Jaynes’s theories about the bicameral mind (see p. 115) or Camille Paglia (see p. 222), who discusses it in Sexual Personae and praises Homer’s cinematic pictorialism? Maybe he just had a weakness for Greek epic poetry?
Attributed to the poet Homer, The Iliad tells of events at the close of the Trojan War and the Greek siege of the city of Troy. It’s a bloody, bellicose roll call of mythic heroes. Of particular interest to Bowie would have been the relationship, sometimes glossed as gay, between the warrior Achilles and his best friend Patroclus. Achilles is set apart from other soldiers because of his enchanted armor—bronze, speckled with stars—which symbolizes his power. When Achilles refuses to fight one day after an argument with King Agamemnon, Patroclus borrows Achilles’s armor and is therefore mistaken for Achilles by both sides. What’s more, Patroclus actually derives power from the armor to the point where he starts to assume Achilles’s fighting skills and mannerisms. Unfortunately, the god Apollo intervenes to assist the Trojans. He stuns Patroclus, removing his helmet to expose him to the Trojan hero Hector, who kills him and steals the armor for himself.
There’s a lesson here about the power of clothes, so crucial to the projection of personality, and how it not only waxes and wanes, but can be lost or transferred. The story also sheds light on Bowie’s complicated relationships with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed—artists who influenced him, were eclipsed by him, then had their lost power restored through his intercession, becoming cooler in the 1980s and ’90s as Bowie struggled to connect with the mainstream audience Let’s Dance had won him.
The Iliad and its Homeric sibling The Odyssey were recited at feasts, festivals, and ceremonies by professional singers called rhapsodes, who accompanied themselves on lyres. These illiterate rhapsodes worked by conflating and elaborating existing songs, “composing” new versions in the act of performance in a manner that would have struck Bowie as quintessentially Beat.