Is the Iliad campy?

After I saw Skyfall last weekend, the spouse and I discussed the inherent campiness of action movies. Action movies are supposed to have become more thoughtful on the heels of the Bourne Identity series, but they are still full of heroes who think nothing of chasing a villain over rooftops on a motorbike, then getting shot, then fighting said villain on top of a moving train.

Is there an inherent campiness to such unrealistic deeds? And does Greek lit get to do an end-run around this by making heroes the sons of gods and goddesses? I understand campiness to be an amusing lack of realism. In a Greek context, of course, amusing and realism may have looked very different than they do to us.

It's accepted that certain parts of Homer's poem are meant to be funny, mostly passages involving gods behaving badly. In fact the gods are probably acknowledged to be the campiest part of the Iliad. But are the human characters, particularly Achilles, ever campy? As this NY Times blogpost recently argued, we find sincerity without irony amusing; did the Greeks? 

"I hate that man like the gates of hell who hides one thing in his heart and says another" (Il. 9.312-313)

As far as unrealistic deeds of arms, such as the slaying half the Trojan army in the Scamander river, followed by a very credible effort to conquer the river itself, the Greeks do have an advantage in their tradition of hemitheoi, half-divine heroes. We can't say, "but a person couldn't do that …" because in an important sense Achilles is not a person, or not just a person. As far as I can tell, Achilles' seriousness is taken seriously throughout the Iliad, when he withdraws from battle, when he mourns Patroclus, and even in the Odyssey when he rails against death (the hero who chose an early, glorious death with full knowledge).

Still, there is a reason Odysseus and his poem are more popular today, as a subject of scholarship and as a cultural touchstone. Whatever the original audience's stance towards Achilles may have been, the possibility of ironic distance helps us deal with his implacable, uncomfortable forthrightness in our more 'nuanced' age. As the NYT piece pointed out, we modern ironists mock what we secretly long for:

But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.

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