What’s a mob to a King, what’s a King to a God, what’s a God to a Non-Believer?

Alice Oswald’s original title of Memorial ended with the subtitle of “An Excavation of the Iliad.” Frankly, that is probably the most accurate title of any work. She digs into the Homeric epic and rediscovers the deaths of almost every soldier that was told in the Iliad. And the characteristic that follows every death is that the readers are not told who dealt the killing blow, but rather the gruesome death of these soldiers.

But really the best thing about this is that every name is just a name. No one has an actual backstory unless their death was accompanied by one in the Iliad. But this makes it so much more humanizing than the Iliad itself because of the fact that there is no hierarchy that exists within these pages. There is no explicit mention of rank or nobility. Priam, king of Troy, was only mentioned as a father to several of the dead young soldiers. Oswald effectively de-emphasized the role of heroes and kings in her work as a way to focus more on those that pile at the feet of kings. Though not really a commentary on class warfare, but maybe more to focus on the people whose names are looked or skimmed over, this provides a much more evocative way of looking at them. A memorial is to stand for remembering all the dead, no matter who they were, because ranks mean nothing when the soul is gone and the body is rotten.