As I mentioned last week, I’ve been reading The Iliad for my humanities class this semester. Considering that I have to read at a rate of two or three thousand lines of dense poetry a day to keep up with assignments, it only makes sense that I should skim the less important parts, like when Homer goes on and on about each individual soldier in Achilles’s battalions or lists how man one-off characters Hektor killed. But, unlike similar archaic lists of names like the endless genealogies in the book of Genesis, I can’t bring myself not to read each individual word, and to dwell on each a little bit. That’s because Homer doesn’t simply list names, he gives these throwaway footnotes stories. Small stories, stories that don’t really matter, but just enough of a story to imagine that they were a real person, that their death meant something in the enormity of the Trojan war. Strange little stories like “Medon was a bastard son of godlike Olïeus / and therefore brother of Aias, but had made his home in Phylakē / away from the land of his fathers, having killed a man, a relation / of Eriopis, his stepmother, the wife of Olïeus.” Something in that strikes me as beautiful; that someone with such a small role in the grand scheme of things still gets remembered, still gets his story printed and reprinted and read by students all across the world* (even if they only skim it).
These little stories persisting in memory seem especially important to me because this weekend is the Les Duke cross country meet here at Grinnell. Les Duke is always an important day for the team, but now more than ever because it’s also the retirement party for William and Evelyn Freeman, who have been coaching at Grinnell for forty years, leading the teams through three decades of nearly uninterrupted conference championships. Over two hundred alumni are coming, the local hotel has been booked solid for more than two months for this weekend. And all that history, all the stories that are going to be told and team lore unearthed in the next couple of days, has gotten me thinking about how memories get passed down. Because, when I read the descriptions of war and violence in The Iliad, I can’t help but use my ten years of cross country races as an example. It’s probably a little presumptuous of me to say so, after all, no one is in danger of dying when the gun goes off for a race. But there’s the same moment of terror and mad instinct, and the stressful minutes that follow it. And in all that stress and adrenaline, the excitement elevates details into stories. A muddy pit isn’t much of anything on its own, but a muddy pit a kilometer into an 8k, where the swamp claims any shoes not tied tightly enough? Where one kid got his right foot stuck in the mud, and his other foot tangled in some string marking the course, and went face down in the mud so I had to leap right over him to keep going? That’s an epic. Cross country lives on these epics, the ones you live through and the ones you just hear about, the people who win conference titles while battling anemia or binge Netflix the night before a meet and bomb it.
Part of it is the focus on competition, which is also a key element of The Iliad. Once you’re in the top five, every place counts, and sacrificing all the strength in your body for that success raises the stakes, makes everything feel important, nearly sacred. The Iliad lays out an important concept in Greek culture pretty clearly: that everyone wants immortality, but since only the gods can have it, the best that humans can hope for is to earn it through honor in warfare. When Achilles and Hektor slaughter hordes of enemies, each name and small backstory that Homer provides is a sliver of honor that the heroes seize for themselves. That sort of honor comes through in cross country too. Maybe the narratives of races are what really persist through time, but the most important narratives in our team are always of the people who won. I’ve had a habit since high school of panting out esoteric song lyrics or bits of poetry to people as I pass them. I love to think that it confuses them for a second, but sticks with them, so years later one of them sit around wondering who that Edina or Grinnell guy who whispered “So long as hope maintains a thread of green” into his ear as he got passed. And, of course, it wouldn’t carry nearly as much power if I said it as he passed me.
But that idea that honor as a zero-sum game can be harmful too, especially in a sport as individual as cross country. The same way that Zeus lets the Trojans slaughter the Greeks, only so Achilles will gain yet more honor when he enters the scene and saves the day, there’s always a certain pride in one-upping someone on your own team. Maybe even more pride than passing an opposing runner, because they’re not faceless competitors, they’re real people with real personalities and stories you know, so beating them means something. I know I’ve fallen into that trap, and I’ve seen it corrode bonds between teammates. That’s the point of The Iliad, I think, in the end. It remembers the nameless people the heroes killed not to honor the winners but to give the losers their own humanity too.
That’s why Will and Ev Freeman are the best coaches I’ve ever had, and I’m sorry to see them go. They both want to win (and they’ve done so remarkably consistently), but they don’t exclude the rest of the team at the expense of the top five, and they don’t see those top five as simply their potential to score. They see everyone on the team, their narratives and their personality, and care about everyone too. And they make the team into a place where you want something more than to gain honor for yourself, but to gain honor for your team, your friends, your coaches, and sport as a whole. In doing all that, they’ve spun their own story, one that spans four decades and could fill far more lines than The Iliad’s 30,000 or so. We’ll no doubt sit down to tell that tale when the time for reminiscing begins this weekend.
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* I should point out that Medon might not have been a historical person. The Trojan war undoubtedly happened, but Homer’s work is essentially historical fiction, and he admits that he’s guessing the names and histories of the forgotten soldiers by saying his information comes from the Muses. The point still stands, though. Medon, lowly soldier or minor character, still gets remembered somehow.
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