The Cost of War
εὖ γὰρ ἐγὼ τόδε οἶδα κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν·
ἔσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτʼ ἄν ποτʼ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋμμελίω Πριάμοιο.
ἀλλʼ οὔ μοι Τρώων τόσσον μέλει ἄλγος ὀπίσσω,
οὔτʼ αὐτῆς Ἑκάβης οὔτε Πριάμοιο ἄνακτος
οὔτε κασιγνήτων, οἵ κεν πολέες τε καὶ ἐσθλοὶ
ἐν κονίῃσι πέσοιεν ὑπʼ ἀνδράσι δυσμενέεσσιν,
ὅσσον σεῦ, ὅτε κέν τις Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων
δακρυόεσσαν ἄγηται ἐλεύθερον ἦμαρ ἀπούρας·
Deep in my heart I know too well
There will come a day when holy Ilion will perish,
And Priam and the people under Priam’s ash spear.
But the pain I will feel for the Trojans then,
For Hecuba herself and for Priam king,
For my many fine brothers who will have by then
Fallen in the dust behind enemy lines—
All that pain is nothing to what I will feel
For you, when some bronze-armored Greek
Leads you away in tears, on your first day of slavery.
— Iliad 6.447-6.455 (S. Lombardo,trans.)
Germany attacked Greece on April 6, 1941, in an operation they called Unternehmen Marita. General Konstantinos Bakopoulos waged a defense on the Bulgarian border valiantly, but to no avail, and Thessaloniki was captured on April 9. The rest of Greece followed.
From 1941 to 1945 the occupying German forces took revenge for any Greek resistance with violent reprisals, massacres of civilians such as that of Kommeno, the Massacre of Distomo, or the Massacre of Kalavryta.
Every community in Greece, it seems, was affected, from Epirus to Crete, from Achaea to Thessaly. The whole village of Millies, on the east coast, in Magnesia, was set on fire and 33 civilians were killed in April of 1943.
The little town of Gavalou has a beautiful, powerful monument, originally erected to commemorate six children killed by the Germans during the occupation, but then supplemented with the names of all other civilians from Gavalou killed during the occupation.
When I read the Iliad, the exprerience of war, and the stakes, are literary abstractions for me.
There are Greeks alive today who had first-hand experience of what Hector and Andromache fear will be their fate.
