Homer’s Iliad is a rap battle

Homer’s Iliad is one of the foundational stories of European civilisation. The Iliad is a long poem – an epic – thought to have first been put down in writing in the eighth century BC, though the story is set several hundred years before, perhaps as early as the 12th or 13th century BC.

It explores a few crucial violent weeks within a much longer war between an alliance of Greek city-states and the city of Troy over Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. In it, we find ancient Greek gods and humans sharing a common reality. They concurrently star as the central characters of both a mythological and an earthly dramatic encounter, on which the fate of a people rests.

In his work, public philosopher Cornel West argues that there is a “gangster” inside all of us. The challenge, West teaches, is to learn to keep these “gangster elements” in check so that we can still live with decency and integrity in an often violent and unjust world. This struggle, I contend, is at the heart of both Homer’s Iliad and the art of battle rap.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

Battle rap is an art form where two or more MCs confront one another in a freestyle rap that includes boasts, insults, wordplay and disses (related to but not to be confused with rap beefs like the Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud).

The history of this kind of verbal jousting goes back at least to flyting – poetic duels usually involving rhyming insults, widespread in northern Europe in the late medieval era. (See Assassin’s Creed Valhalla for its recent reimagining.) And it also has African roots. But its latest iteration is thought to have emerged in the hip-hop scene in New York in the 1980s. The 1981 Busy Bee versus Kool Moe Dee battle at the Harlem World club in New York is an important part of hip-hop lore.

Read more: A brief history of the diss track – from the Roxanne Wars to Megan Thee Stallion

It was arguably the 2002 film 8 Mile, however, that starred real battle rap legend, Eminem, that made the art form well known beyond hardcore rap aficionados. Today it is a pop culture streaming event, with millions of followers and official leagues.

The object of a battle rap is to display flow, braggadocio and quick wit. Humour is often a plus, but lyrically dexterous, rhythmic, creative “burns” are the name of the game.

So what do the Iliad and battle rap have in common?

Both art forms encourage us, the listeners, to react, reflect and ultimately select with which speaker to side. We are thrust into the centre of the action without much of a narrator to explain things.

Both the Iliad and rap battles are part of the oral poetic tradition, since we think the Iliad was orally recited for generations before it was put down in writing. They are therefore both addressed to a live audience.

The Iliad is a story of war between Greeks and Trojans, but also of “beefs”. Menelaus versus Paris over the hand of Helen. Achilles versus Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks who wrongs him by expropriating one of his slaves. And Achilles versus Hector, the Trojan prince who kills Patroclus, Achilles’s closest friend.

The high moment of the poem is arguably the encounter between Achilles and Hector. Before they battle to the death, Hector offers Achilles a deal: whoever wins won’t disrespect the other’s body.

In response, Achilles belows: “Curse you, Hector, and don’t talk of oaths to me. Lions and men make no compacts, nor are wolves and lambs in sympathy: they are opposed, to the end. You and I are beyond friendship: nor will there be peace until one or the other dies.”

Achilles is calling out Hector’s attempt at showing nobility of character, because Hector tries to separate the duty to wage conflict from rage and disrespect of his enemy. Achilles flatly rejects the proposal. For him, the only reason to fight is to satiate his grief-induced rage and so no respect can be given even after death.

Ultimately, Achilles kills Hector and desecrates his body, but Hector was clearly the better man. Two worldviews collide. Which one should we side with?

In a battle rap, the question of how we judge which MC to be victorious is always at stake. Do we side with the MC who best “rocks the mic” by pleasing the audience, or the one who more lyrically and intelligently cuts the opponent to the bone?

Here are five more themes shared by The Iliad and battle rap.

1. The pursuit of fame

Battle rap has made gifted MCs into street rap legends. Long before record deals were the prize, MCs battled for respect and street fame.

This pursuit of legendary status also lies at the very heart of The Iliad, as Achilles is warned by his mother, the goddess Thetis, that he will die if he fights in the Trojan war, but in return his “glory never dies”.

2. Communal belonging

Battle rappers and the warriors in The Iliad act in their own name but they also represent wider groups heralding from different places. They all, in some way, carry responsibility for and aim to bring reflected fame to their respective communities.

3. Displaying skill

Most battle raps take the form of a take down of the opponent, but the real object is to demonstrate verbal prowess. Simply entertaining will not cut it. “You now have to make sense of what you say, in order for us to give you the power,” summarises hip-hop legend KRS-One.

The Iliad opens with a muse telling the audience that the epic will recount the “wrath of Achilles”, but in fact we find skilful interventions in speech that make us wonder whether the reasons for conflict can ever justify the grief it causes.

4. An honour code

What is truly worth living and dying for are central themes in The Iliad, as in battle rap. There we find talk of loyalty, honour, respect, courage, friendship and fame.

The overt answers given can be taken as embraces of a certain kind of toxic masculinity where dominance, rage, cunning and violence are celebrated, but maybe these answers subtly point to their ultimate hollowness.

Lurking behind the repeated injunction to “be the best”, battle rap and Homer’s epic invite the question of what is truly worth admiring: skill, dominance, wealth, integrity, courage, beauty, truth, justice, love or glory? They provide no singular answer.

5. Creativity and living within the ‘funk’ of life

Instead, we are left to sit within what West calls the “funk of life” – the mess of it all. From there, we can see that the stories we tell ourselves have the power to shape and define our actions and our very lives.

So the main question becomes: at a time when simplistic stories of violence and domination are presented to us as easy answers to complex social realities, can we create new and richer stories of our own?

Joshua Forstenzer's work receives funding from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture as part of its Templeton-funded Life Worth Living project (https://lifeworthliving.yale.edu/).