“It is not possible to find medicine to bring life to the dead.” οὐκ ἔστιν ἀποφθιμένοις ζωᾶς ἔτι φάρμακον εὑρεῖν -Ibycos
“Only Zeus has medicine for everything” Ζεὺς πάντων αὐτὸς φάρμακα μοῦνος ἔχει -Anonymous Elegy
After Zeus wakes up from his post-coital nap at the beginning of 15, he sees right away that his plans have been subverted and focuses in particular on Hektor. The narrator notes that he saw “Hektor lying there and his companions were /seated around him, as he struggled with a ragged breath / losing his mind a bit while he puked up blood” (15.9-12). Hektor’s health and survival is directly connected to the survival of the city and Zeus’ plans, So his wounding during book 14 and his declining situation is a clear reason for concern.
Yet, Hektor’s revival is not narrated in the same way as other. In other divine interventions (Paris rescued by Aphrodite or Aeneas rescued), the audience witnesses how a god’s agency changes the natural course of events. Even when Sarpedon nearly dies in book 5, the language of the scene is marked in such a way as to show it is remarkable. Yet, in this scene, we hear Zeus talking repeatedly about Hektor needed to be healed, only to have the action in some way skipped over.
When we next see Hektor in the middle of the book, it is alongside Apollo who “found Hektor, the glorious son of god-fearing Priam / seated–he was no longer stretched out, but he was regaining his spirit again / he recognized the companions around him, and his gasping and sweating / was relenting, since the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus was awakening him” (15.239-242).
The phrase “the mind [noos] of Zeus” does not occur frequently in Homer, but it seems to indicate either a part of Zeus’ general plan or his intention in the moment. Consider 16.103 where the narrative says that Ajax did not remain because “the mind of Zeus and the proud Trojans hurling [weapons] overcame him” (16.103) or later in book 16 when the narrator laments Patroklos ignoring Achilles’ warnings and provides the proverbial sounding judgment “the mind of Zeus is always stronger than men” (688), a phrase repeated by Hektor when speaking to Glaukos in book 17 (176). Indeed, it appears that these references do seem to correlate to moments where the overall plan of Zeus is being enforced.
One of the most important parts of book 15 comes after Zeus awakens and summons Hera. As he upbraids her, he outlines the plot for the rest of the epic.
Homer, Iliad 15. 63-68
“[The Greeks] will fall among the many-benched ships of Peleian Achilles, after they flee there. He will send out his friend Patroklos. Shining Hektor will kill him with a spear In ground of Troy after he has killed many other strong men Among them will be my own son, glorious Sarpedon. In a rage over him, glorious Achilles will kill Hektor.”
Some Alexandrian editors marked this passage as questionable (athetizing up to 20 lines of this speech). “because [the poet] needlessly repeats about the events that will immediately proceed and the verses inside are simplistic in their composition” (Schol. A ad 15.56a). Within the scholia as well, however, is the proposal that this device is “foreshadowing” (προανακεφαλαίωσις) as when “Odysseus outlines to Telemachus the murder of the suitors”.
The primary point here is that there is an overlap between Zeus’ function as a divine figure and his control over narrative devices. In the Iliad his plan is one of the most important ‘maps’ for the epic’s plot. One way to think of his speech in book 15 is as a corrective measure, pulling things back into line and pointing them back on course. From a similar perspective, if we return to the idea of the Iliad being performed in three parts, this speech is prolepsis (foreshadowing) of the type that we might see at the end of a weekly television drama: NEXT TIME, ON the Iliad….
But we also can’t lose sight of the numinous impact of his speech. Zeus’ noos–his thought about the plot–is so potent that merely be articulating the future, he sets it into action. Hektor does not need healing because as soon as Zeus has articulated what will happen next, Hektor becomes what he needs to be to serve Zeus’ plan. It is almost as if the world itself at this moment of the Iliad is a story unfolding in Zeus’ mind, a dream corrected or altered upon waking.
A short Bibliography on Zeus and Hektor in book 15
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Barker, Elton. (2022). Die Another Day: Sarpedon, Aristodemos, and Homeric Intertextuality in Herodotus.
Hunter, Richard. “39 Some Problems in the ‘Deception of Zeus’”. The Layers of the Text: Collected Papers on Classical Literature 2008–2021, edited by Antonios Rengakos and Evangelos Karakasis, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 787-808. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110747577-039
De Jong, Irene. 2004. Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad.
Book 15 revisits themes of theomachy (“divine war”) without actually showing the gods at war. The two primary conflicts are between Zeus and Hera and then Zeus and Poseidon. In a way, the first pairing echoes conflicts between gendered gods in the Theogony while the latter resonates with intergenerational strife or, perhaps, different models for authority among the gods. I outline some of how this engages with the themes of politics in the Iliad in the first post on book 15, but there are more connections here with other narrative traditions as well. In this post I will focus on Zeus’ responses to Hera and Poseidon.
Zeus and Hera
Hera’s rage and behavior, as Joan O’Brien (1990) argues, anticipates the disorder and chaos of the following books of the Iliad. (And accordingly, the forced resolution of her rage in book 24 is an echo of the force ending of Achilles’ rage.) O’Brien emphasizes how Hera becomes a “tutelary god” for Achilles and notes that they both have associations in this poem with kholos, anger that is socially motivated. (See Walsh’s 2005 book for more on anger words in the Homeric poems.)
The transferal of irrational violence from an elemental male god in the Theogony to the Queen of the Olympians in the Iliad may be another reflex of the resolution of tensions in Hesiod’s poem: Zeus balances out and overrules Hera in a manner that relies on the threat of force but not its activation and it is in Zeus’ role as an arbiter that Hera’s rage against the Trojans is put to rest. (Or, at least forestalled: Any reader of the Aeneid knows that wrathful Juno will be there after the city falls.)
One of the important features of Hera’s anger and her conflicts with Zeus is that they help to bring a clarification to his ‘plan’ for the poem. The moments in books 4, 8, and 14/15 when Hera opposes Zeus result in clearer articulations of his plan. At the beginning of 15, after he awakens and threatens Hera, Zeus offers a clear foreshadowing of events to come including the deaths of Sarpedon, Patroklos, and Hektor (15.63-71). And as James Morrison shows (1997), this is also connected to the larger arc of the Trojan War. Zeus, in his response to Hera and the conflict of the war, outlines where the events of the Iliad fit in the larger picture: the death of Hektor will be followed by the Greeks surging from the Greek ships until they capture the city.
Zeus’ speech to Hera is interesting for its forcefulness and the details it claims:
Homer, Iliad 15.11-35
When he saw Hektor, the father of men and gods pitied him; then, glaring terribly, he spoke his speech to Hera: ‘Impossible Hera, your trick really was so wily— it kept shining Hektor from battle and routed his troops. I truly do not know whether you will take part in this harsh defiance again and I will flog you with blows. Do you really not remember when I hung you from on high and attached two anvils from your feet and bound around your hands a golden chain, unbreakable? Then you hung in the sky and the clouds and the gods raged over great Olympos at your side but they could not free you—whomever I caught afterwards I would seize and throw from the threshold so he would fall to the earth powerless. So, then the ceaseless grief over godlike Herakles did not leave my heart, the one you, by persuading the breezes, sent with the wind Boreas over the barren sea as you devised evils for him, then you even sent him to well-inhabited Kos. I saved him from there and led him back again to horse-nourishing Argos even though he had suffered so many things. I will remind you again so that you will stop your deceiving, so you know whether sex and the bed will be of any use to you, the sex you had when you departed from the gods and deceived me.’ So he spoke, and ox-eyed queen Hera shivered.
This is not the only time in the Iliad that Zeus claims the physical power to counter all the other gods together, but the scene he describes here is so specific that it seems bizarre. The D Scholia to the Iliad suggest that Zeus’ description of his punishment of Hera is some kind of a coded philosophical message about the relationship between the air, the aether, and the earth and that the anvils are water and land that depend on the sky and the golden bonds are the ethereal fire that sky (here, really Zeus) uses to bind the elements together.
I don’t know much about that! But the specificity of the image seems conducive to some kind of an allusion to another tradition. The second important comment here is the echo of conflict over Herakles. For Zeus, who is helping Achilles, the whole dynamic is a replay of the trials of Herakles and in this instance he is intervening to keep Hera at bay. Note that Hera does not respond in any significant way. She retreats and is more or less compliant for the rest of the epic.
As part of the dynamic of their marital relationship, Zeus’ repeated threats to Hera (here, in book 1 and book 4) are somewhat unsettling. As Katerina Synidinou shows, however, these threats are not actualized in the epic and they don’t seem to move Hera completely, since she ignores him right up through the seduction in book 14 which prompts his strongest language. Some authors have seen the back-and-forth between Zeus and Hera as a representation of a conflict between diverging religious systems (a patriarchal sky father winning over an ancient earth-mother) but this simplistic model has been successfully challenged. Hera definitely appears to lose status in the Iliad, as Walter Burkert observes, but this movement may also convey echoes of sacred marriage rituals (the so-called hieros gamos), emphasizing the power of seduction and in many cases the importance of fertility.
Black figure vase from National Museum of Denmark: Dionysus with Zeus and Poseidon, c. 540 BCE
Zeus and Poseidon
In the first post for book 15, I mentioned the divine theme of the division of honors and the stability of the divine universe. Divine anger over threats to such stability is an important theme of early Greek poetry–the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is in part a rumination on how to maintain cosmic balance. (For some of these echoes see Erwin Cook’s essays below). The language of division, conflict, and judgment emerge clear in Poseidon’s response to Iris.
The ancient story that Poseidon alludes to fills in some of the details from the Theogony. We know from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter that the story of Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus splitting control of the cosmos is not peculiar to the Iliad. There is of course some awkwardness in Zeus’ relationship to his brother. As G. M. Calhoun (and others) argues, Zeus is positioned as both father and king in the Iliad. The problem is that he is technically younger than Poseidon and Hades but qualifies as older on the technicality that Kronos ate Poseidon and Hades when they were born and Zeus later forced them to be vomited up in a kind of twisted second birth. The father role is complicated: Benveniste (1969, 210-1) argues that the IE term *pəter does not carry with it the notion of reproductive paternity but contains a semantic notion of rulership and cosmic order connected to the supreme IE god. It is combined with an interesting position for Zeus in the Iliad: he is never called a king, even though gets that title in Hesiod’s Theogony (886).
One of the chief features of the exchange in book 15 is that Zeus does not deign to engage with Poseidon directly. Instead he sends Iris to tell him to stop messing around.
Homer, Iliad 15.162-6
‘And if he will not obey my words, but disregards them, let him consider, indeed, in his heart and mind that he does not dare to face me coming on even though he is strong; since I say well that I am far better in strength and older by birth; and his dear heart does not shirk from saying he is equal to me whom even the other gods fear.’
Zeus characterizes his power as residing in his superior strength and his greater age. Implicit in this combination is the ability to punish Poseidon along with the right to do so. When Poseidon responds to Iris’ message, he addresses force first:
Homer, Iliad 15.185-99
‘Alas, even though he is noble he has spoken presumptuously, if he will restrain me, unwilling, with force, when I have equal timê. For there are three of us, brothers, whom Rhea bore to Kronos, Zeus and I, and the third, Hades, rules over the underworld. But everything was divided in three parts, each was allotted his timê. I drew my lot to inhabit the gray sea always, when we drew lots Hades drew the misty gloom and Zeus took the wide sky in the heaven and the clouds. But the earth is still common to all and so is great Olympos. So I will in no way walk in step with Zeus’ thoughts, let him, even though he’s stronger, remain in his allotment at peace. Let him not at all try to abuse me shamefully with his hands, for it is better for him to chastise his daughters and sons with terrible words, those children he fathered himself, they will listen to him urging them on and by compulsion too.’
Poseidon’s dismissal indicates that he conceives of Zeus’ authority in two independent systems. First, as he states, Zeus drew lots in the division of the world with his brothers and maintains control over one realm of three (four if you count the “neutral” zone of earth). Second, as patêr, Zeus is the head of his family, the children he fathered (and his wife). From Poseidon’s point of view, he is subordinate to Zeus in neither system. He rejects the notion that Zeus can and should abuse him and attempts to reduce his authority to his own household.
The story of the three-fold division of the world among a group of gods may be one that is consciously (or less so) shared with Ancient Near Eastern myth, as Bruce Louden, Walter Burkert, and Andre Lardinois have argued (among others). Here, I think, Poseidon is allowed to voice this world-view even as the perspective is subordinated to a single-god in authority model.
The resolution of this conflict points to the very impossibility of anything but a patriarchal order on Olympos: Poseidon attempts to lay claim to some sort of oligarchic power structure, a claim that he bases on a denial of Zeus’ paternity. Iris seems to respond to this by emphasizing both Zeus’ imminent threat and his age. She also appeals to his sensibility, his desire to keep things from falling into a greater state of disorder.
‘Dark-haired earth-shaker, should I really report in this way
this harsh and forceful language to Zeus,
or will you change your mind a bit? The thoughts of the noble are flexible.
You know that the Furies always follow the elders.’
Iris, by emphasizing Zeus’ age, reasserts paternity within the frame of the threat of Poseidon’s rebellion which, in essence, pales in comparison with the threat of Zeus’ force. Like Milton’s Satan, Poseidon attempts to claim a share in the control of the universe. Unlike Lucifer, Poseidon relents because he knows he will fail. Nevertheless, his threatened future rebellion bears an intriguing resemblance to Satan’s: it is a coalition aimed at obliterating the supreme god’s powers. Poseidon’s response confirms that what is really going on here are hurt feelings:
Poseidon’s Response 15.209-17
‘Iris, goddess, you especially speak this word according to fate; good also comes whenever a messenger knows proper things. But this grief overcomes my heart and chest whenever he wishes to taunt me with wrathful words, since I am of equal lot and assigned to the same fate. But now surely, even though I am angry, I will yield. However, I will tell you another thing, and I threaten this in my heart: if without me and Athena the forager, and without Hera, and Hermes, and lord Hephaistos, he spares lofty Troy, if he does not wish to sack it and give great strength to the Argives, then let him know this, that our anger will be incurable.’
Poseidon occupies a strange place in early Greek poetry: we know that he is a god of some importance, but his significance seems to be waning in comparison to gods like Zeus, Apollo, and Athena. Some of the meaning of this exchange is tied up in the earlier conversation between Zeus and Poseidon in book 7 where the latter expresses his anxiety about the destruction of the walls of Troy and the eradication of his fame. Poseidon is, at some basic level, a deity worried about his place in the pantheon. In book 7 he looks to Zeus to confirm his importance, his place of honor. We could imagine that he turns against Zeus, even if briefly, because he has lost faith. At the same time, it is not beyond the imagination to speculate that the Iliad is also trying to figure out how a god like Poseidon fits into the world of its audience.
Poseidon speaks to confirm a certain status quo. His retreat here anticipates Achilles’ reconciliation with Agamemnon for the sake of a larger goal. His language throughout echoes the conflict between the two Greeks but models a capitulation to a shared goal, namely the destruction of Troy. The audience knows that this has always been Zeus’ plan and the impact of this should not be understated. Regardless of how overwhelming Zeus’ power is, the events of the Iliad have demonstrated that he can be overcome through certain means. But the poem has also shown that his reign does not rely only on his authority through age and his overwhelming force. Zeus’ ability to plan, to manipulate the plot, and see further than the other gods is an attribute of his intelligence and, in a way, a confirmation of the resolution of the conflict in the Theogony.
A short Bibliography on Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Adkins, A. W. H. “Threatening, Abusing and Feeling Angry in the Homeric Poems.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 89 (1969): 7–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/627461.
Burkert, W. 2004. Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bermejo Barrera, José Carlos. “Zeus, Hera y el matrimonio sagrado.” Quaderni di Storia, vol. XV, no. 30, 1989, pp. 133-156.
Calhoun, G. M.. “Zeus the Father in Homer.” TAPA, 1935, pp. 1-17.
Clark, Isabelle. “The « gamos » of Hera: myth and ritual.” The sacred and the feminine in ancient Greece. Eds. Blundell, Sue and Williamson, Margaret. London: Routledge, 1998. 13-26.
Cook, Erwin F.. “Structure as interpretation in the Homeric « Odyssey ».” Defining Greek narrative. Eds. Cairns, Douglas L. and Scodel, Ruth. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2014. 75-100.
Cook, Erwin F.. “Epiphany in the « Homeric Hymn to Demeter » and the « Odyssey ».” Papers of the Langford Latin Seminar: Fifteenth volume 2012. Eds. Cairns, Francis, Cairns, Sandra and Williams, Frederick. ARCA; 51. Prenton: Cairns, 2012. 53-111.
Lardinois, André. “Eastern myths for western lies : allusions to Near Eastern mythology in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 71, no. 6, 2018, pp. 895-919. Doi: 10.1163/1568525X-12342384
López-Ruiz, C. 2010. When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Louden, Bruce. “Iapetus and Japheth: Hesiod’s Theogony, Iliad 15.187-93, and Genesis 9-10.” Illinois Classical Studies, no. 38 (2013): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.5406/illiclasstud.38.0001.
Maitland, Judith. “Poseidon, Walls, and Narrative Complexity in the Homeric Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1999): 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/639485.
MORRISON, J. V. “‘KEROSTASIA’, THE DICTATES OF FATE, AND THE WILL OF ZEUS IN THE ‘ILIAD.’” Arethusa 30, no. 2 (1997): 273–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578099.
SYNODINOU, KATERINA. “The Threats of Physical Abuse of Hera by Zeus in the Iliad.” Wiener Studien 100 (1987): 13–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24747703.
Walsh, Thomas. Feuding Words, Fighting Words: Anger in the Homeric Poems. Washington, D. C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. 2005
Book 15 is one of those books that makes it hard to imagine the Iliad being constructed entirely out of shorter, more-or-less self-contained songs, insofar as it relies so much on the action of book 14. And yet, one could also imagine the action following the seduction of Zeus following in many different directions. Book 15 offers an opportunity for Zeus to reestablish his authority over the gods and get his ‘plan’ back on track.
The action of the book is split into two basic movements: Zeus’ conversations with the gods to threaten or cajole them and the resulting actions taken to rally the Achaeans. Accordingly, the plot of this book engages critically with the major themes I have noted to follow in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions, but the central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 13 are Politics, Gods and Humans and Narrative Traditions.
Statue of the head of Zeus in the Greek National Archaeological Museum.
Divine Politics
As I have discussed in earlier posts, Zeus exercises control over the plot and the pacing of the epic. But scenes on the divine plane also have significant impact on the Iliad’s investigation of politics. One of my hobby-horses in the Iliad since I wrote my dissertation, has been what I call the three-stages for the investigation of how language and politics help communities face threats to their safety. While many have written about the political situation among the Achaeans, fewer have written on the Trojans and even fewer have seen the gods as a locus for political concerns.
I think how the gods negotiate their decisions and power struggles helps us to understand the Trojans and Greeks better. In short, the gods have a family-based autocracy that functions in perpetuity because Zeus’ power cannot be contested in any reasonable sense. While there are stories of Zeus’ authority undermined through apostasy or war, all of those stories are projected into the Iliad’s past. What is significant is that Zeus does not actually use his physical power in the Iliad: he makes threats (see books 4, 5, 8 and 16) but he mainly relies upon the idea of his power. Book 15 is a great demonstration of this because rather than harming Hera or engage with Poseidon directly, Zeus sends a messenger to converse with Poseidon and delegates resetting the battlefield to Apollo. In practice, Zeus’ leadership of the gods contrasts most directly with the Trojans who have a similar political structure but lack both the actual immutable power to maintain it and the linguistic dexterity that would channel it.
I do not mean to blame the Trojans entirely, however. Instead, I think the Iliad points out that the way the gods govern themselves is an impossible model for human beings for two reasons: first, human power is never unassailable; second, humans are impermanent and mortal, along with all agreements and situations they create.
To understand this contrast with the gods, it is useful to turn to Hesiod’s Theogony to figure out why the gods no longer have succession issues. Hesiod’s Theogony, as Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold describe it, works in partnership with the Homeric poems to describe to ancient audiences how their world came to be. One of the questions that these poems explain together is how the Olympian pantheon became established and why the worlds of gods and men are separate. Indeed, the Theogony states before it moves into its primary narrative that one of its goals is to recite “how the gods divided their wealth and doled our their honors” (112).
The story of the Theogony moves through three generations of conflict that pit various elemental forces against each other–gender, age and youth, strength and intelligence etc–and most of these tensions are resolved, or at least suspended, in the body of Zeus who eats his first wife Metis and gives birth to Athena, thus appropriating female powers, some portion of intelligence and more. But Zeus also gains power by acting trans-generationally. In Hesiod’s version of the Titanomachy, Zeus allies with the Hundred-Handers and the Kyklopes to overthrow the Titans and solidifies his ‘heroic’ stature by defeating the monster Typhoon.
But the key moment in the poems political establishment comes before Zeus eats Metis (after line 885). Once the battle with Typhoon is completed, the narrator tells us that the gods got down to the real business:
Hesiod, Theogony 881-885
Once the gods had finished their toil and they had resolved the issues of honors with force, then in fact at the advice of Gaia they were urging broad-browed, Olympian Zeus to be king and rule the immortals and then he made a good distribution of their honors.
The image of Zeus projected here is one of a king and an anax (cf. the Mycenaean word wanax) whose power resides not just in his ability to distribute honors, but in his power to maintain them and ensure them over time. Much of this is anticipated prior to the series of battles that occupy a good portion of the Theogony
Hesiod, Theogony 391-396
“[Zeus] called the immortal gods to great Olympos And said that whoever fought with him against the Titans Would not be deprived of rights (geraîon) but that each Would possess the honor (timê) they had before among the immortals. And he added that whoever was dishonored (atimos) and disenfranchised (agerastos) Under Kronos, would received honor (timê) and rights (geraîon), as is correct [lawful].”
The Theogony imagines a Zeus who may be an autocrat but is successful as one because he enjoins his subordinates and guarantees them a place in his realm. For the gods their timai and gerai are the esteem they receive from humans and the place they have in the universe: the sacrifices they receive and the separate spheres of influence they dominate.
This is no minor a guarantee in the world of the Iliad either: the words timê and geras are significant to the beginning conflict of the poem where both Agamemnon and Achilles see the prizes they were awarded as a geras, a physical representation of their timê, the honor that represents their place in the community. In a way, Zeus’ Olympos is a post-revolutionary world where the basic problems of wealth distribution have been solved by freezing everything in place. As I discuss in a different article, the cycle of dasmos (division), eris (conflict), and krisis (judgment) is central to the composition of early Greek epic. (And Elton Barker and I write about it as well, here.)
Book 15 is pretty much the penultimate political scene for the gods. The final one, the beginning of book 24, allows Zeus to take something of a more distant role as judge over the conflict between Hera and Poseidon. But this book shows Zeus resolving the conflict through proxies and threats, avoiding any outward violence and preserving the distribution announced in the Theogony. When reading book 15, pay special attention to his language and to the way the other gods talk about him.
Reading Questions for Book 15
How does Zeus’ language and response to the potential rebellion reflect on Olympian politics?
How do the actions of the gods in book 15 potentially reflect mythological themes of theomachy (“war of the gods”)?
How do the actions from book 15 set the audience up for the resumption of the ‘main’ plot in book 15?
A short Bibliography on Politics in the Iliad
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Barker E. T. E. 2004. “Achilles’ Last Stand: Institutionalising Dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society: 92–120.
———. 2009. Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford.
Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Chaston, C. 2002. “Three Models of Authority in the Odyssey.” The Classical World 96: 3–19.
Christensen, Joel P. 2015. “Trojan Politics and the Assemblies of Iliad 7.”
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 55:25–51.
Christensen, Joel P. . 2018a. “Eris and Epos: Composition, Competition and the ‘Domestication’ of Strife.” YAGE.
Clay, J. S. 1989. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns. Princeton.
Cook, Erwin. 1999. “ ‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Heroics in the Odyssey.” Classical World 93:149–67.
Donlan, W. 1979. “The Structure of Authority in the Iliad.” Arethusa 12:51–70.
———. 2002. “Achilles the Ally.” Arethusa 35:155–172.
Elmer, D. 2013. The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision-Making and the Iliad. Baltimore.
Hammer, D. 1997. “‘Who Shall Readily Obey?’ Authority and Politics in the Iliad.” Phoenix 51:1–24.
———. 2002. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman.
Haubold, J. 2000. Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation. Cambridge.
Mackie, H. 1996. Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad. Lanham.
Postlethwaite, N. 1998. “Thersites in the Iliad.” In Homer: Greek and Roman Studies, ed. I. McAuslan and P. Walcot, 83–95. Oxford.
Roisman, H. 2005. “Nestor the Good Counsellor.” The Classical Quarterly 55: 17–38.
Rose, P.W. 1997. “Ideology in the Iliad: Polis, Basileus, Theoi.” Arethusa 30:151–199.
Thalmann, W. G. 1988. “Thersites: Comedy, Scapegoats and Heroic Ideology in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 118:1–28.
———. 2004. “The Most Divinely Approved and Political Discord.” Classical Antiquity 23:359–399.
Wilson, D. F. 2002a. Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge.
Book 14 splits almost easily into three parts. Poseidon’s actions echo the events of book 14 and Hera’s seduction of Zeus, which involves Poseidon to the extent that he will be rallying the Greeks during Zeus’ distraction, seems almost as if it could be an entirely independent episode. There are some interwoven themes, however: the foolishness of Agamemnon at the beginning of the book could be seen to anticipate Zeus’ own failures as a leader during the seduction scene, while the coalition of wounded Greek leaders joining together at the book’s beginning is balanced by the efforts of the second rank of Trojan leaders (especially Sarpedon and Polydamas) to defend Hektor and lead the Trojans after Hektor falls).
Structure of Iliad 14
1-133 Nestor and the Council of Kings
134-360 Seduction of Zeus
361-522 Rallying of Greeks, wounding of Hektor
The first portion of this book echoes two earlier scenes that help to characterize the Achaean political organization. In both books 2 and 9, Agamemnon expresses a desire to depart and this triggers a response that reaffirms a larger will to stay. In book 2, he ‘tests’ the army and they run to the ships, only to be restrained and rallied by Odysseus and Nestor. In book 9, he again suggests fleeing, only to be opposed by Diomedes and then redirected by Nestor. At the beginning of book 14, all of the best of the Achaeans are sidelined from battle. Here, Nestor is drawn into action by the sound of battle and when he asks Agamemnon for a plan, that glorious son of Atreus, proposes that the wounded leaders withdraw into a ship and row out into the bay and await nightfall.
Elton Barker and I wrote an article comparing Agamemnon’s claim that “there’s no criticism for running away, not even in the night” (οὐ γάρ τις νέμεσις φυγέειν κακόν, οὐδ’ ἀνὰ νύκτα, 14.80) with the new Archilochus fragment where the speaker runs away from Telephos along with Archilochus’ shield poem. We argue that the common strains are evidence of something of a poetic tradition of debating bravery and self-preservation, emphasizing that Homer and Archilochus are engaged with rhetorical repositioning in response to each other.
Masque funéraire, connu sous le nom de « masque d’Agamemnon ». Or massif, trouvé dans la Tombe V du site de Mycènes par Heirich Schliemann en 1876.
(As Melissa Mueller effectively argues in her recent book on Sappho and Homer, there’s great interpretive advantage to putting Lyric/Elegiac poets in a non-hierarchical relationship with each other. In our work, Elton and I have tried to emphasize that because of the nature of composition in performance and the many versions of any tale that were told previous to textualization, it is just as likely that our version of Homer is responding to ideas extant in Archilochus and Sappho as it would be that Sappho and Archilochus are responded to the Homeric text we have.)
Agamemnon presents an unheroic plan unbecoming to the leader of the army. He attempts to use proverbial sounding language justifying retreat in the face of considerable danger in a context in which his retreat would doom the army. Rather than presenting a Tyrtaeus/Callinus shaming speech, declaring that only cowards run and they’re likely to die anyway, Odysseus focuses on the larger picture:
Iliad 14.83-102
‘Son of Atreus, what kind of word has escaped the bulwark of your teeth? You’re a disaster, I wish that you would order some other unfit army, that you didn’t rule us, those for whom Zeus has assigned work over harsh wars from youth right up to old age, until each of us perishes. Do you really desire to abandon in this way the wide-wayed city of the Trojans, for which we have suffered many evils? Be quiet! Lest any one else of the Achaeans hear this plan which no man, at least, would ever release from his mouth, a man who knows how to utter fit things in his thoughts, a scepter-bearing man and one to whom the host assents, the size of the host you rule over among the Achaeans. Now I question your thoughts altogether, what sort of thing you have spoken, you who call us, when the war and strife have been joined, to drag the well-benched ships to the sea, so that more still to boast over might occur for the Trojans who have already overpowered us, and harsh ruin might fall over us. For the Achaeans will not withstand the war while the ships are dragged to the sea, but they will look back at us and forget their battle-lust. There, then, leader of the host, your plan will destroy us.’
Agamemnon seated on a rock and holding his sceptre, identified from an inscription. Fragment of the lid of an Attic red-figure lekanis by the circle of the Meidias Painter, 410–400 BC. From the contrada Santa Lucia in Taranto. Stored in the Museo Nazionale Archeologico in Taranto (Italy).
Odysseus warns Agamemnon that this is the kind of man that will lead to the very outcome he has lamented on more than one occasion (that he will destroy his own Army). His language is aggressive and also transgressive: he uses bare imperatives, repetitions, insults, and rhetorical questions to reprimand Agamemnon. This scene is, in a way, an inversion of book 2: Nestor starts the questions, Agamemnon says something foolish, and Odysseus puts him in his place. Odysseus can be harsher here because this is the equivalent of a small council (a boulê) where the leaders speak more frankly and directly to each other than if the entire army were listening. Agamemnon backs down quickly in the face of Odysseus’ onslaught:
Iliad 14. 103-108
“Then, Agamemnon the Lord of Men answered him. “Odysseus, you’re laying into me with reproach so hard! For my part I won’t order the unwilling sons of the Achaeans To drag their well-benched ships back into the sea. But I wish there were someone here who could lay out a plan Better than this one. Someone young or old. This would be welcome to me.”
Earlier in the epic speakers have been valued for their age—as Nestor himself makes clear when he responds to Diomedes in book 9 and tells him that he “has not reached the end of speech” since he is so young. Here, in a moment of desperation, Agamemnon basically says he needs a good idea and he doesn’t care where it comes from. The hero who stands up with a better idea is none other than Diomedes. And he’s has a little bit to say first.
Iliad, 14.109-133
Then among them spoke Diomedes, good at the war-cry: ‘The man is near, let us not waste any more time; if you wish to consent, then may none of you entertain anger because I am indeed the youngest by birth among you. I also claim to be the offspring of a noble father, Tydeus, whom the heaped-up earth covers in Thebes. For, three blameless children were born to Portheus and in Pleurôn and steep Kalydon lived Agrios and Melas, and the third child was the horseman Oineus the father of my father—and he was conspicuous among them for virtue. Although he remained there, my father lived in Argos, driven there, for this, I guess, is how Zeus and the other gods wished it. He married one of Adrêstos’ daughters, and inhabited a house rich for living—he had sufficient grain-bearing ploughlands and around these there where many orchards full of fruit, and he possessed many flocks. He surpassed all the Achaeans with the spear—you all must have heard these things, if they’re true. Hence, do not, by claiming that my birth, at least, is low and cowardly, disregard the speech that is offered, the one I will speak. Let us go again to the war, even though we are wounded by necessity. But, when there, let us keep ourselves out of the strife of the missiles, lest anyone somehow receive a wound on top of a wound. Let us rally the others and send them into battle, even those who before gave into their impulse to hang back and not fight.’
Where Diomedes starts his response to Agamemnon in book 9 by complaining about how the king has impugned his bravery and fighting effort before, here he also talks about his genealogy. Diomedes may be responding in part to Agamemnon’s earlier use of Tydeus as an example to shame him to fight harder. But he is also setting his story alongside the famous tales of these famous heroes’ families. Genealogical bona fides occupy the vast majority of these speech even after Agamemnon has so directly said he just needs a better plan.
I would go so far as to suggest that Diomedes is working within the confines of the previous speeches: he has been qualified as a warrior not up to his father’s measure in book 4, and yet in book 9 he was criticized for being too young. Here he seems to imply again that his father’s excellence is a necessary but insufficient quality for his own authority to speak. What he specifies about his father’s place is his acceptance into another city and people (Argos, closer to Agamemnon in the Peloponnese) and his high position in that new kingdom. For me, the key to this somewhat unclear logic is the superlative “youngest”—perhaps, Diomedes is saying that just as his father proved himself a useful stranger among the Argives, so too Diomedes’ difference in youth marks him out among the Achaean leaders.
Busts of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Hector in Conference (from Scenes from The Story of The Trojan War), South Netherlandish, probably produced through Pasquier Grenier of Tournai (MET, 55.39)
As I write in my dissertation, this scene is one of several that shows the difference in Greek politics in the Iliad is that there are multiple leaders endowed with the authority to speak and advise (in contrast to the Trojans). In revisiting this exchange, moreover, I think it shows much more internal echoing with the earlier political scenes and Diomedes’ exchange with Agamemnon in book 4. Following Odysseus’ abuse, I would dare argue that Agamemnon says “either young or old” because he wants to hear from someone else and might be apologetically opening the door to Diomedes.
A Short bibliography on Diomedes
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Andersen, Öivind. 1978. Die Diomedesgestalt in der Ilias. Oslo.
Barker, Elton T. E. “Achilles’ Last Stand: Institutionalising Dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” PCPS 50 (2004) 92-120.
—,—. Entering the Agôn: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford, 2009.
Burgess, Jonathan. 2001. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore.
—,—. 2009. The Death and Afterlife of Achilles. Baltimore.
Christensen, Joel P. 2009. “The End of Speeches and a Speech’s End: Nestor, Diomedes, and the telos muthôn.” in Kostas Myrsiades (ed.). Reading Homer: Film and Text. Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 136-62.
Christensen, Joel P. and Barker, Elton T. E.. “On not remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the contest for Thebes.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici, no. 66, 2011, pp. 9-44.
Christensen, Joel P. 2015. “Diomedes’ Foot-wound and the Homeric Reception of Myth.” In Diachrony, Jose Gonzalez (ed.). De Gruyter series, MythosEikonPoesis. 2015, 17–41.
Gantz, Timothy. 1993. Early Greek Myth. Baltimore.
Griffin, Jasper. 1980. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—,—.2001. “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer.” in Cairns 2001: 363-84.
Hammer, Dean.“‘Who Shall Readily Obey?” Authority and Politics in the Iliad.” Phoenix 51 (1997) 1-24.
—,—. “The Politics of the Iliad.” CJ (1998) 1-30.
—,—. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Irene J. F. de Jong. “Convention versus Realism in the Homeric Epics.” Mnemosyne 58, no. 1 (2005): 1–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4433613.
Kakridis, Johannes Th. 1949. Homeric Researches. Lund.
Kakridis, Phanis, J. 1961. “Achilles’ Rüstung.” Hermes 89: 288-97.
Lohmann, Dieter. 1970. Dieter Lohmann. Die Komposition der Reden in der Ilias. Berlin.
Mühll, Peter von der. 1952. Kritisches Hypomena zur Ilias. Basel.
Nagy, Gregory. 1979. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore.
Nickel, Roberto. 2002. “Euphorbus and the Death of Achilles.” Phoenix 56: 215-33.
Pache, Corinne. 2009. “The Hero Beyond Himself: Heroic Death in Ancient Greek Poetry and Art.” in Sabine Albersmeir (ed.). Heroes: Mortals and Myths in ancient Greece. Baltimore (Walters Art Museum): 89-107.
Redfield, James. 1994. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hektor. Chicago.
—,—. 2001. “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse.” in Cairns 2001: 311-41.
Rose, P. W. “Thersites and the Plural Voices of Homer.” Arethusa 21 (1988) 5-25.
—,—. “Ideology in the Iliad: Polis, Basileus, Theoi.” Arethusa 30 (1997) 151-99.
One of the most memorable scenes of the Iliad that does not involve murder, mayhem, or lamentation is Hera’s seduction of Zeus, the so-called Dios apatē, in book 14. It is a fascinating episode for reasons that involve not just the themes and plot of the Iliad, but also possible issues of performance, attitudes towards the divine cosmos inside the epics, and engagement with other narrative traditions.
The length and tone of this episode often prompts readers to recall the song of Demodocus in book 8 of the Odyssey. There, a bard sings a somewhat bawdy tale of when Hephaestus caught Aphrodite and Ares in flagrante. Interpreters have demonstrated how the content of that inset song reflects the singer responding to the action around him (crafting a tale that praises the mysterious guest Odysseus) while also reflecting primary themes of the Odyssey itself. The length and content of the tale, moreover, have led some to see it as, at the very least, a Homeric representation of what epic (or epic-like) singers would do. Like the tale of the tryst of Aphrodite and Ares, the Dios apatē effects a comic tone, providing distraction from ongoing tensions, and exploring the difference between mortal and immortal worlds by showing how frivolous and foolish the gods can appear. We can imagine the Dios apatē as a kind of set piece, a reflection on Zeus’ limitations as a masculine god.
In such a resonance, the scene also engages with the history of the divine cosmos and threats of succession or theomachy. The story of Hesiod’s Theogony is in part about how strong male gods are undone by desire, overcome eventually by a goddess’ guile. These patterns are refracted into the Dios apatē, by which I mean they are represented within it, but not in a one-to-one correspondence. Zeus’ power in the Iliad resides in part in his overwhelming force, but it is made manifest as well in his ability to advance his plan, the Dios boulē. Hera subverts this plan and temporality upends divine political structures by tricking him. She makes it possible for a rival to contest Zeus’ will on the battlefield–as a result, a significant part of the story in book 15 is about Zeus reasserting control and getting his plan back on schedule.
As Lenny Muellner explores in The Anger of Achilles and Laura Slatkin establishes in The Power of Thetis, the cosmic structures and struggles from the Theogony (and similar narrative traditions) shape and inform the structure and reception of the Homeric epics. Zeus’ fallibility, his vulnerability to desire, is a theme from other traditions that is important for the Iliad as well: in just 4 books, Agamemnon will ‘apologize’ to Achilles by claiming that he was blinded (using the word atē, echoed in Dios apatē) just as Zeus was when he bragged about the birth of Herakles. Such a framework makes Agamemnon guilty for disrupting the political stability of the Achaeans because of the debate over Briseis. In a way, Agamemnon’s fight with Achilles over a girl is an echo of the cause of the whole war, Paris’ conflict with Menelaos, initiated by kidnapping Helen. There may be intratextual commentary supporting this as well. As Ann Bergren suggests, there are also strong echoes between Zeus’ attempt to get Hera to sleep with him and Paris’ entreaties to Helen in book 3 (their closing lines are identical: ὡς σέο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ. ).
The danger of desire and the fallibility of male figures thanks to it connects the Dios apatē with the overall plot of the Iliad and the larger narrative arc of the Trojan War. Through each case, such longing threatens disorder by upending Zeus’ plans. So, while the Dios apatē is amusing and provides what some might see as a welcome respite from the battle books, it is thoroughly serious in probing the causes of conflict and the consequences of masculine weakness.
“’Cause I see some ladies tonight that should be havin’ my baby (uh), baby (uh)” from “Big Poppa”, The Notorious B.I.G.
One ‘cause’ of the Trojan War is Zeus’ anxiety about being overthrown by a son. As the story goes, this is the secret knowledge shared with Prometheus: the identity of a sea nymph who would bear a son greater than his father. Zeus’ sex-capades, then, represent a threat to the order of the entire universe and the entire set up for the Trojan War, starting with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis to preserve Zeus or one of his brothers from fathering an unstoppable son. The Iliad is rather tight-lipped about all of this but, again as Laura Slatkin has shown, the themes and implications of such a succession permeate the epic.
Another significant text for understanding this passage is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Let’s review the basic plot of the Dios apatê first
Hera comes up with the plan (160) to distract Zeus with sex
She lies to Aphrodite about it and says she is going to use her charms to get Kronos and Rhea to love each other again, Aphrodite consents, but with the somewhat odd “it would be neither possible nor proper for me to deny your request, since you lay in the embrace of Zeus, the best one”(οὐκ ἔστ’ οὐδὲ ἔοικε τεὸν ἔπος ἀρνήσασθαι· / Ζηνὸς γὰρ τοῦ ἀρίστου ἐν ἀγκοίνῃσιν ἰαύει, 212-213) [The scholia inform us that Aristophanes and Aristonicus athetized this line)
Then she goes and bargains with Sleep who recalls another time he made Zeus unconscious and was punished. She ends up offering one of the Graces as a bride
She appears before Zeus, telling him the same lie she told Aprodite
Zeus falls for it and they have sex beneath cloud cover on the mountain.
When I teach the Hymn, I joke that it provides an etiology for why men fall asleep after sex; but I can’t imagine that the Iliadic passage doesn’t have a similar impact. Zeus’ speech in the midst of all of these offers somewhat of an odd example for seducing one’s spouse. But the catalogue is worth considering in the larger cosmic context.
Homer Iliad 14.323-328
“Cloud-gathering Zeus answered her Hera, you can go there at some later time. For now, let the two of us go to bed and turn to sex. For never has lust for a goddess or woman Ever overcome the force in my chest as it does now. Not when I was lusting after the wife of Ixion Who bore Peirithoos, a thinker equal to the gods, Nor when I lusted after fine-ankled Danae Akrisios’ daughter, Who gave birth to Perseus, the most outstanding of all men, Nor when I went after the far-famed Phoenician girl, Who gave me Minos and divine Rhadamanthys Nor even when I was with Semele or Alkmene in Thebes. The second one gave birth to my strong-willed son Herakles And the first gave us Dionysus, that charm for mortals. Not even when I lusted after the fine-haired lady Demeter Nor again glorious Leto, or even you yourself! Never have I longed the way I long for you now, as sweet desire overtakes me.”
This list provides something of a retrospective timeline: Zeus starts with his more mortal children and goes back until he is talking about the birth of divine figures like Apollo and Artemis. The list is a bit of a classic example of the rhetorical practice of saving the best for last, but it pointedly closes off the possibility of new children or at least of children who may threaten the divine order. In part, this list exists in a concretized Pantheon, one where, for whatever pain it causes, Zeus’ dalliances do not disrupt the stability of the universe. And, for this case, it is certainly true: Zeus’ desire only disrupts the plan of the Iliad–a sex act with his own wife/sister cannot produce an heir to challenge him.
Aphrodite and Adonis. Attic red-figure squat lekythos, ca. 410 BC.
In this framework, the Dios Apate seems to also engage with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Even though the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite exists prior to the Trojan War in our conceptual timeline, its narrative and concerns co-exist with the Homeric poems we know. (See Barbara Graziosi’s and Johannes Haubold’s Homer: The Resonance of Epic for a great overview of the relationship between Homer and Hesiod, including the Homeric Hymns.) Foremost among the concerns of that Hymn is the power Aphrodite has to overwhelm Zeus and other gods, to destabilize the Universe by creating new offspring. Rather than being a hymn that increases or explains Aphrodite’s influence (as in the Hymns to Demeter and Hermes), this Hymn curtails it by showing Zeus turning the tables on her and humiliating her by forcing her to lust after a Trojan mortal (Anchises) on the side of Mount Ida (on the reproach and humiliation of this scene, see Bergren 1989).
Here are some motifs shared by the Hymn and the epic scene:
A goddess readies for a Romantic tryst near Mt. Ida
The preparations are elaborate given the context
The goddess demures, offering a plan different from the covert one
The man begs/cajoles/convinces
The male figure falls to sleep
The seduced figure wakes up unhappy/angry/afraid
A speaker puts their situation in a mythic framework by telling a story of other examples
Peter Walcot (1991) notes that while both Anchises and Zeus are being seduced, they end up playing the role of seducer themselves, convincing their future lovers to have sex now rather than later. A significant difference, however, is that Aphrodite is disappointed and upset after having sex with Anchises; Hera runs off to fight as soon as Zeus falls asleep.
How we should understand the relationship between these scenes is a tough question to answer. A simple reading might see one narrative as building on or responding to the other, creating fixed allusions or intertexts. But given the other scenes at play (from the Odyssey, the Theogony, and even earlier in the Iliad) I think it is more likely that these kinds of stories were common and audiences had to interpret each one at the time of performance with reference to performances they had experienced before.
Does this sequence make an effort to undermine or otherwise mock the power of desire? It appropriates the form of genealogical catalogues known elsewhere to illustrate the power of this desire. This partly advances other Homeric strategies, making the Homeric story the biggest and the best, but it also undermines Zeus’ authority at a critical time in the text (perhaps leading up to its re-assertion in book 15, offering a potentially favorable comparison for the Achaeans and human behavior in general).
Questions about the relationship between the Iliad and other narrative traditions ultimately cannot be answered because we don’t know what ancient audiences knew and what they would bring to a performance of Homer. What we can surmise, I think, is that humorous examples of divine sex were part of various song traditions and that they were used to different effects. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite can help us confirm that comic sex scenes can be deadly serious when seen from a cosmic perspective. In a way, the Dios apatê performs and confirms this, refracting, again, desire as a significant theme of the Trojan War narrative that impacts gods as well as men.
A starter bibliography on the deception of Zeus
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Bergren, Ann L. T. “‘The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite’: Tradition and Rhetoric, Praise and Blame.” Classical Antiquity 8, no. 1 (1989): 1–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010894.
Brillet‐Dubois, Pascale, ‘An Erotic Aristeia: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and its Relation to the Iliadic Tradition’, in Andrew Faulkner (ed.), The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays (Oxford, 2011
Cyrino, Monica Silveira. “‘Shame, Danger and Desire’: Aphrodite’s Power in the Fifth Homeric Hymn.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 47, no. 4 (1993): 219–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1348308.
Andrew Faulkner, The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xv, 342. ISBN 9780199238040
Graziosi, B., and J. Haubold, 2005. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London.
S. Douglas Olson, The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Related Texts: Text, Translation and Commentary. Texte und Kommentare 39. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012
Parry, Hugh. “The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: Erotic ‘Ananke.’” Phoenix 40, no. 3 (1986): 253–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1088842.
Podbielski, Le structure de l’hymne homeriqu a la lumiere de la tradition litteraire Wroclaw 1971
Segal, Charles. “The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: A Structuralist Approach.” The Classical World 67, no. 4 (1974): 205–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/4348003.
Slatkin, Laura. 2011. The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays. Hellenic Studies Series 16. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
C. A. Sowa, Traditional T Homeric Hymns (Chicago 1984)
Walcot, Peter. “The Homeric ‘Hymn’ to Aphrodite’: A Literary Appraisal.” Greece & Rome 38, no. 2 (1991): 137–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/642954.
As I mention in the first post about Iliad 14, the book provides a structure that is built around three basic movements: the crisis of leadership among the Achaeans, resolved by Diomedes; a rallying of the Greeks on the field, led by Poseidon; the Dios apate, or deduction of Zeus, including Hera’s preparations and their Idaean assignation.
These scenes are connected both in terms of plot and theme around resistance to Zeus’ plan: the Greek captains rally and correct Agamemnon to maintain some unity; Poseidon intervenes to help the Greeks resist (and even wound) Hektor; and Hera, in coordination with Poseidon, distracts Zeus in order to support their resistance. Altogether, these three movements take us from the very serious human challenges of the opening panic, through a somewhat surreal but still ‘epic’ battle scene mixed with the gods, until it terminates in a comic, other-worldly Romantic tryst. There’s a unity and a wholeness to the book that reminds me of the three-movements in book 6.
Such neatness, if it can be called such, invites questions about design and the relationship between the parts of the Iliad and the whole. Anyone who picks up a translation of either epic today finds them neatly divided into 24 books each (even though the Iliad is 3000 lines longer than the Odyssey. What makes this a little suspicious is that in ancient Greek, the books are named after the 24 available letters of the alphabet. It is highly unlikely, moreover, that the division of books was established in the Archaic and classical period since once the Greeks adopted the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, local dialects often had more than 24 letters (including variations like qoppa, digamma) and would assign received symbols (those we know for psi, ksi, and khi) to different sounds. Indeed, the standard Ionic alphabet was not adopted in Athens until after the Peloponnesian War (c. 403 BCE).
Pseudo-Plutarch, De Homero 2.4
“Homer has two poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of them is divided into the number of letters in the alphabet, not by the Poet himself, but by the scholars in Aristarchus’ school.”
So just how and where the book divisions of the Homeric epics came from has been something of a hot topic from time to time. The major arguments are:
The book divisions were there from the beginning, because the alphabet was adopted to write Homer down
The book divisions are features of smaller performance units
The book divisions were a product of Hellenistic editing, following the adoption of a regular alphabet and the impetus to present standard, synoptic versions of epic
The book divisions were a result of the process of dictating the poems: each one represents a day’s dictation, or something like that.
Part of an eleventh-century manuscript, “the Townley Homer”. The writings on the top and right side are scholia.
What people call the ‘books’ of the Iliad often reveal some of their assumptions about their nature. Note, the passage above does not use the word biblion (although it is implied, I think). Other titles such as scrolls or rhapsodies see the performance units as possibly relating to scripts or readily performable episodes. I also worry about to what extent some of these models are divorced from the material reality of (1) the cost of transcription and copying and (2) a reading public accustomed to performance of epic.
There are challenges with each approach: we have no evidence of Alphabetic book distinctions before the Hellenistic period (when earlier authors talk about Homeric passages, they focus on episodes); we don’t have any evidence for book divisions as performance units, since many of the episodes referred to as potential performance pieces occupy parts of books rather than their whole; we have only anecdotal evidence supporting the creation of book divisions by Hellenistic editors, and that evidence is 3-5 centuries after the fact; and we have no direct evidence for the dictation and recording of the poems. Another early testimony about the book-divisions, discussed by Rene Nunlist, shows that early scholars emphasized the unity of the whole poems and saw the book divisions as sometimes artificial interventions.
The details of the arguments are interesting too. But here’s a summary of the issues from Steve Reece (2003):
2) All at once about ten years ago a great amount of attention began to be paid to the book divisions in the Homeric epics; more specifically, to how the twenty-four book divisions in our inherited texts of the Iliad and Odyssey are related to the historical performance units of these songs. The debate remains unresolved. On one end are those who regard the book divisions as reflections of breaks in the historic performance of an eighth- or seventh-century BCE bard. On the other end are those who regard them as Alexandrian—a result of serendipity (the fact that there are 24 letters in the Ionian alphabet) and, to a lesser degree, of the physical features of text-making during the Hellenistic period (the typical length of a papyrus roll). Somewhere in between are those who trace the book divisions to the first writing down of the epics in connection with their performance at one of the Greater Panathenaic Festivals in Athens in the late sixth century. Whenever, and for whatever reason, they occurred, most of the book divisions seem to have been chosen judiciously, coinciding with breaks in the narrative. Yet some clash with scene divisions, cutting right through a narrative segment or even a type-scene (e.g., Il. 5-6, 6-7, 18-19, 20-21; Od. 2-3, 3-4, 6-7, 8-9, 12-13, 13-14, 20-21). Hence there has developed some consensus among Homeric scholars that in performance a division into three or four major “movements” is to be preferred to the twenty-four book units. As a practical matter, I encourage my students to read through the book divisions of Homer, just as I encourage them, in their reading of other oral narratives, to disregard the artificial divisions imposed by textualization (verse, section, chapter, book divisions)—in the New Testament Gospels, for example. Not only does this practice better replicate the original performance units, but it also allows the modern reader to detect patterns and themes in the epic that are obfuscated by overadherence to book divisions. A recent and excellent summary of the debate on book divisions, with full appreciation of its implications for oral poetics, is Jensen 1999.
Scholars like Bruce Heiden (following others) argue with some efficacy for the structure of each book. Heiden argues (1998, 69)
“ The analysis will first consider the placement of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’. It will show that all the scenes that immediately precede a ‘book division’ manifest a common feature, namely that they scarcely affect forthcoming events in the story. All the scenes that follow a book division’ likewise display a common characteristic: these scenes have consequences that are immediately felt and continue to be felt at least 400 lines further into the story. Therefore, all of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’ occur at junctures of low-consequence and high consequence scenes. Moreover, every such juncture in the epic is the site of a ‘book division’.
The second stage of the analysis will examine the textual segments that lie between ‘book divisions’, i.e., the ‘books’ of the Iliad. It will show that in each ‘book’ the last event narrated is caused by the first, as are most of the events narrated in between. But the last event seldom completes a program implied by the first. Thus the ‘books’ of the Iliad display internal coherence, but only up to a point. They do not furnish a strong sense of closure. Instead their outline is marked by a sense of diversion in the narrative at the beginning of each.”
I think that close readings of many of the books bears out some of Heiden’s argumentation here, but the problem is what the cause of this is, by which I mean is this a feature of our efforts as interpreters and the impact that the Iliad’s contents have had on the history of literature in its wake shaping our expectations or is this a matter of intentional design.
Steve Reece, in a later piece, emphasizes that approaches like this in general double down on ignoring the performance origins of the poems (2011, 300-301):
“We may acknowledge the orality of Homeric epic, we may refer to it as performance, we may pay obeisance to the study of comparative oral traditions, but we remain addicted to our printed texts, our book divisions and line numbers, our apparatus critici, our concordances and lexica. We rarely try to reconstruct or even imagine a production of an epic performance.”
A combination of the work of Minna Skafte Jensen, Jonathan Ready, and Reece’s own fine essay ventures to imagine the performance context, but the first two tie it to the formation of the texts we have as well. (It is Jensen in her seminal debate from 1999 who suggests the book units are the product of a day’s transcription.)
Simonides, fr. 6.3
“Simonides said that Hesiod is a gardener while Homer is a garland-weaver—the first planted the legends of the heroes and gods and then the second braided them together into the garland of the Iliad and the Odyssey.”
My take on the major issues presented here is that the final three approaches are reconcilable from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary model for the creation of the Homeric epics (on which, see Nagy 2004 and Dué 2018), posits a movement from greater flexibility to greater fixity over time. If we imagine Homeric epic already existing notionally between episodic performances and monumental events involving multiple singers, we can see these episodes more or less coalescing around smaller performance units that could be stitched together in grander performance contexts. Any process of textualization would necessarily include stages of dictation and transcription providing performance units that were largely coherent as a whole and which would present different levels of internal coherency based in the individual performance. As the whole cultural phenomenon was transferred from performance contexts around the Greek speaking world to the libraries of the Hellenistic cities, they would achieve a textual fixity and polish that would harden, where possible, the joins between books.
Just as in my metaphor for the cultivation of crops or trees, Homeric poetry would have been adapted and shaped over time by the performance context, the intervention of transcription and textualization, and the actions of editors imposing regularity and uniformity typical of literary traditions.
Other explanations require a textual culture for the poems at a much earlier period. This model, as well, helps to explain the unified, yet still organic and largely asymmetric shape of a book like Iliad 14.
A starter bibliography on Homeric Book Divisions
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Bachvarova, Mary R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bruce Heiden. “The Placement of ‘Book Divisions’ in the Iliad.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 118:68-81.
Minna Skafte Jensen. “Dividing Homer: When and How Were the Iliad and the Odyssey Divided into Songs?” Symbolae Osloenses, 74:5-91.
Nagy, Gregory. 2004. Homer’s Text and Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Nünlist, René. “A Neglected Testimonium on the Homeric Book-Division.” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 157 (2006): 47–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20191105.
Barry B. Powell. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss
Ready, Jonathan. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. 2019.
Book 14 is right in the middle of the longest day in the Iliadthat stretches from the renewal of hostilities at the onset of book 11 and lasts through the struggle over Patroklos’ body in book 17. Compared to the jam-packed action of books 11-13, book 14 offers a bit of a respite from the slaughter, but no break from Homeric intrigue. The book begins with a despairing Agamemnon proposing a thoroughly disastrous plan to take the wounded captains out to sea until things calm down at night and culminates in the so-called Dios Apate, or the afternoon delight of Hera and Zeus.
While these two events may seem to be radically different in their nature, both feature kings at less than their best and provide an opportunity to reflect on the weaknesses of an autocratic model. At the same time, they pair human and divine folly in a short space, allowing audiences to compare the stakes and consequences of their choices. The big difference is that the Achaeans end up having multiple leaders to make up for their king’s folly while the gods need to wait for Zeus to flex his strength and make more threats to put their world back in order.
Achilles and Agamemnon, scene from Book I of the Iliad, Roman mosaic, Naples Archaeological Museum
Of course, this is not all about failed leaders! The deception/seduction of Zeus is legitimately fascinating and funny to modern readers, interweaving what we see as comic elements with potential ritual and religious allusions. At the same time, the fight keeps flaring up and mortals struggle as the gods engage in some less than clandestine carnal relations. Accordingly, the plot of this book engages critically with the major themes I have noted to follow in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions, but the central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 13 are Politics, Gods and Humans and Narrative Traditions.
Book 14 continues with the Achaean crisis that became clear in book 11: all of the major leaders were injured resulting in a book 12 that saw Idomeneus and Ajax rallying the troops and a book 13 that centered around the leadership of the Cretan captains Ajax and Meriones. At the beginning of book 14, Agamemnon looks at the unfolding events in despair and suggests that running away might be the best option. His plan is for the captains to pull out to sea in a ship and wait out the danger there until nightfall (14.65-81). Odysseus’ response is, well, memorable.
Iliad 14.82-102
‘Son of Atreus, what kind of plan has escaped the bulwark of your teeth? Ruinous one, I wish that you would order some other unfit army, that you didn’t rule us, those for whom Zeus has assigned work over harsh wars from youth right up to old age, until each of us perishes. Do you really desire to abandon in this way the wide-wayed city of the Trojans, for which we have suffered many evils? Silence! Lest any one else of the Achaians hear this idea which no man, at least, would ever lead through his mouth, a man who knows how to utter fit things in his thoughts, a scepter-bearing man and one to whom the host assents, the size of the host you rule over among the Achaians. Now I question your thoughts altogether, what sort of thing you have spoken, you who call us, when the war and strife have been joined, to drag the well-benched ships to the sea, so that more still to boast over might occur for the Trojans who have already overpowered us, and harsh ruin might fall over us. For the Achaians will not withstand the war while the ships are dragged to the sea, but they will look back at us and forget their battle-lust. There, then, leader of the host, your plan will destroy us.’
Odysseus, famous bestower of abuse, hits Agamemnon about as hard as Atreus’ son gets struck in the epic. This speech is all the more impactful because it echoes and puts a cap on a pattern we have seen since book 2: Agamemnon expresses–or feigns–defeat and despair, his seconds/captains intervene to come up with a better idea and to rally the troops. In this case, however, Agamemnon is speaking to the council of elders and not the full assembly of the Achaeans as he does in book 2 and book 9. Where book 2 was clearly marked as a ‘test’ and book 9 seemed a bit melodramatic even as it still functioned as an opportunity to recreate Achaean unity despite Achilles’ dissent, book 14 seems more earnest and potentially disastrous.
Odysseus’ words directly address this: he expresses clear frustration with Agamemnon, going so far as to wish he didn’t rule them, and reprimands him for the foolishness of his plans. His closing statement–your plan will destroy us–thematically echoes the repeated concern of Homeric poetry that leaders ruin their people through recklessness.
Red figure vase of the Embassy to Achilles, c. 480 BCE
And yet, Agamemnon does not respond with ire or condemnation. Instead, he allows that Odysseus’ words sting, but that he wasn’t planning on forcing anyone to retreat. In what seems to be a moment of desperation, Agamemnon says he’s ready for anyone to give them a good plan, no matter how old they are. With that cue, Diomedes prepares to speak.
Iliad 14.109-34
Then among them spoke Diomedes, good at the war-cry: ‘The man is near, let us not waste any more time; if you wish to consent, then may each of you do not entertain anger because I am indeed the youngest by birth among you. I also claim to be the offspring of a noble father, Tydeus, whom the heaped-up earth covers in Thebes. For, three blameless children were born to Portheus and in Pleurôn and steep Kalydon lived Agrios and Melas, and the third child was the horseman Oineus the father of my father—and he was conspicuous among them for virtue. Although he remained there, my father lived in Argos, driven there, for this, I guess, is how Zeus and the other gods wished it. He married one of Adrêstos’ daughters, and inhabited a house rich for living—he had sufficient grain-bearing ploughlands and around these there where many orchards full of fruit, and he possessed many flocks. He surpassed all the Achaians with the spear—you all must have heard these things, if they’re true. Hence, do not, by claiming that my birth, at least, is low and cowardly, disregard the speech that is shown forth, the one I will speak. Let us go again to the war, even though we are wounded by necessity. But, when there, let us keep ourselves out of the strife of the missiles, lest anyone somehow receive a wound on top of a wound. Let us rally the others and send them into battle, even those who before gave into their impulse to hang back and not fight.’ So he spoke and they especially heard him and consented; They got up to go and Agamemnon, lord of men, led them.
I have written on several occasions (see below) about Diomedes as the replacement Achilles in books 2-15. This speech marks his last significant action in the epic, but it brings to culmination a plot arc that others like David Elmer and Elton Barker have seen as the exploration of the limits of dissent and popular consensus. In a few publications (listed below), I have suggested that Diomedes is a stand-in for someone learning how to engage in a political group like the Achaeans following these primary steps:
Diomedes’ Story of Speech (from Christensen 2008 below)
(1) Diomedes (implicitly) witnesses the actions and speeches of Iliad 1-3
(2) Diomedes shows he knows the appropriate parameters for political and martial speech (Il. 4).
(3) Diomedes practices public speech and is acclaimed by all the Achaians in his refusal of Paris’ offer to return the gifts but not Helen (7.400-2). Acclamation (7.403-4).
(4) Diomedes practices public speech in criticizing Agamemnon and is acclaimed by all (9.50-1) but is criticized by Nestor for not reaching the télos múthôn (9.53-62). Acclamation (9.50-1)
(5) Diomedes practices public speech in reaction to Achilles’ rejection of the assembly (9.697-709) and is acclaimed by all the kings. Acclamation (9.710-11).
(6) Diomedes volunteers to go on a nocturnal spying mission during the council of kings and is encouraged by Agamemnon to choose any companion he wants regardless of nobility (10.219-39)
(7) Diomedes executes public speech at a critical moment and offers a plan (14.110-32). He is obeyed by all the kings and departs from the epic as a speaker. Acclamation (14.133).
Book 14 is a moment of crisis that follows upon 13 books of crisis, each one of which could have meant the end of the Achaean coalition against Troy. The Iliad portrays the Greeks succeeding without Achilles–even despite his wish that they perish for not honoring him–because they have a structure that allows multiple people to speak with authority and give good advice. This contrasts with the Trojans but it also shows a different possibility from the world of the gods, the comic absurdity of which is visited at the end of book 14 with the seduction of Zeus.
Book 14
How does Agamemnon’s response to the battle (and his plan) interact with similar themes in books 2 and 9?
What does the plan to seduce Zeus (the so-called Dios apatē) contribute to the plot and our impressions of the gods?
How does Zeus’ use of stories from the past during the Dios apatē shape the way we understand the use of mythological examples in the past?
Bibliography on Politics and Iliad 14
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Barker, Elton T. E. 2004. “Achilles’ Last Stand: Institutionalising Dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” PCPS 50: 92–120.
—,—. 2009. Entering the Agôn: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford.
Burrage, Dwight G. “Education in the Homeric Age.” CJ: 147–152.
Christensen, Joel P. 2008. “The End of Speeches and a Speech’s End: Nestor, Diomedes, and the telos muthôn.” in Reading Homer: Film and Text. Kostas Myrsiades (ed.). Farleigh Dickinson University Press. 136–162.
—,—. 2015a. “Trojan Politics and the Assemblies of Iliad 7.” GRBS 55: 25–51.
—,—. 2015b “Reconsidering ‘Good’ Speakers: Speech-Act Theory, Agamemnon and the Diapeira of Iliad 2.” Gaia, 18: 67–81.
—,—. 2018. “Speech Training and the Mastery of Context: Thoas the Aitolian and the Practice of Múthoi” for Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators and Characters, Christos Tsagalis and Jonathan Ready (eds.). University of Texas Press, 2018: 255–277.
Dickson, Keith. 1995. Nestor: Poetic Memory in Greek Epic. New York: Garland.
Donlan, Walter.. 2002. “Achilles the Ally.” Arethusa 35: 155–172.
Elmer, David. 2013. The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad. Baltimore.
Frazer, Richard McIlwaine. “The crisis of leadership among the Greeks and Poseidon’s intervention in Iliad 14.” Hermes, vol. CXIII, 1985, pp. 1-9.
Gottesman, Alex. 2008. “The Pragmatics of Homeric Kertomia,” CQ 58: 1–12.
Haft, Adele J.. “Odysseus’ wrath and grief in the Iliad. Agamemnon, the Ithacan king, and the sack of Troy in Books 2, 4, and 14.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXV, 1989-1990, pp. 97-114.
Hammer, Dean. 1997. 2002. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman.
Haubold, Johannes. 2000. Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation. Cambridge.
Knudsen, Rachel Ahern. 2014. Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric. Baltimore.
Martin, Richard P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.
Nagy, Gregory. 1979. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore.
Roisman, Hannah. 2005. “Nestor the Good Counsellor.” CQ 55: 17–38.
Roochnik, David. 1990. “Homeric Speech Acts: Word and Deed in the Epics.” CJ 85: 289–299.
Rose, P. W. 1988. “Thersites and the Plural Voices of Homer.” Arethusa 21: 5–25.
Sale, William M. 1994. “The Government of Troy: Politics in the Iliad. GRBS 35: 5–102.
Stensgaard, Jakob. 2003. “Peitho in the Iliad: A Matter of Trust or Obedience?” Classicalia et Medievalia 54: 41–80.
van Wees, Hans. 1996. “Growing up in Early Greece: Heroic and Aristocratic Educations.” In Alan H. Sommerstein and Catherine Atherton (eds.). Education in Greek Fiction. Nottingham: 1–20.
Wilson, Donna F. 2002. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge.
At the beginning of book 13, soon after the Trojans have broken through the Greek fortifications around their ships, Poseidon intervenes in the action and rallies the Greeks to defend themselves. The intervention, however, has a few interesting features that may reflect on how we understand the gods’ functions in epic.
The Homeric gods are simultaneously representations of divine forces/entities who may (or may not) have reflected audiences beliefs and also actors in and upon the plot of epic. By intersecting between these two domains, they can also offer metaphysical and epistemological reflections, by which I mean, the limits of what humans can do and know and what the nature of the world between mortal and god may be. This reflection is, to be fair, more an issue of refraction (to borrow Donna Wilson’s term from her 2002 book).
When it comes to divine intervention, as I have mentioned before, I think part of what we are supposed to be inspired to consider as audience members is the interplay between human agency and determinism. The feature of double determination, where actions are given divine and human causes, for example, allows us to see both how events look from the divine perspective and how they might look from a mortal one. The reason I use the word ‘refraction’ here is that Homer does not have a single or simple way the human and divine worlds engage: it shifts throughout the epic, now here and there, inviting audiences to consider different ways of framing causality, fate, and human action.
The intervention in this book introduces metanarrative features of divine presence as well. Readers have long observed that divine viewing shapes the way the audience may see the action: gods comment on mortal events, meddle in them, and train the audience’s gaze from one place to another. This scene is especially interesting because Poseidon’s action is the result of his viewing of the action alongside his rooting interest in the outcome of the game. But in addition to that, Poseidon also intervenes indirectly: he takes on the guise of a mortal and even seems to play the part by imitating what the mortal might be likely to say. As such, this seen may have mimetic implications, by which I mean it may provide insights into how Homeric poetry thinks both about the characterization of individual heroes and how it imagines audience members reading the epic’s action.
Iliad 13.39-45
“The Trojans were churning like whirlwinds or a gale As the followed Priam’s son Hektor insatiably Shouting, screaming—they imagined they would take The Achaeans ships and kill all the best men among them. But the earthshaker Poseidon who grips the land Rose from the deep sea to urge the Argives on, Putting on the appearance and tireless voice of Kalkhas”
A scholion explains Poseidon’s choice as “since he was about to speak against Agamemnon on Achilles’ behalf, he is disguised as Kalkhas to make it more believable” ἐπεὶ ὑπὲρ ᾿Αχιλλέως κατὰ ᾿Αγαμέμνονος μέλλει λέγειν (sc. Ν 107—14), πρὸς τὸ πιστωθῆναι Κάλχαντι εἴκασται, schol. bT ad Il 13.45 ex. B). The scholion’s explanation here is more than a little disappointing. It reads into Poseidon’s choice the content of his subsequent speech—and not even the immediate one in which he addresses the two Ajaxes. Soon after that, he finds Teucer, and Lêitos, Pêneleon, Thoas, Dêipuros, Mêrionês, and Antilochos. With the exception of Thoas, these are not the leading lights of the Achaeans—but they are those who are left, thanks to the spate of injuries suffered in book 11. As a scholiast notes, Poseidon calls them “young men” and they are the ones who are left. The tone and content of his speech is fascinating
Iliad 13.107-114
But now [the Trojans] are fighting far from the city among the hollow shops Thanks to the wickedness of our leader and the negligence of the army. They are not willing to defend the shift ships because they have been struggling With him—yet still, they are being killed alongside them. But even if it is totally true that the cause of this Is the hero son of Atreus, wide-ruling Agamemnon Because he dishonored swift-footed Peleus’ son, There is no way for us to hang back from war. Let’s repair this quickly—the minds of good men are surely reparable.”
What a speech! A scholion notes significant ambiguity in this final line because the verb ἀκεώμεθα does not have an object. A T scholion suggests it could be “the anger of Achilles, or the negligence for which he was reproaching them” (τὴν ἔριν ἢ τὴν μῆνιν ᾿Αχιλλέως, ἢ τὴν ἀμέλειαν, ἣν αὐτοῖς ὀνειδίζει, schol. T ad Hom. Il. 13.115c). The proverbial claim—that noble men have minds that are pliable—doesn’t make the matter any clearer, because it could refer to Achilles and Agamemnon, the Greeks who are holding back, or everyone. While I tend to prefer readings that preserve ambiguity, I think that the closest referent is ἡμέας (“us”), which puts the onus on the addressees without foreclosing other possibilities (e.g., the arguing jerks who started it all).
The language from the beginning of this passage is critical of the Greeks and their leadership and aims to claim common ground with the addressees while filling them with a sense of shame that it has gone this far. Poseidon is acting the part of an audience member who is fed up with action that has taken a different course than he expected. His intervention strains against “Zeus’ plan” and tries to realign the inverted action of this poem with the larger “superstory” (to use Rachel Lesser’s term) of the Trojan War. In this, we can imagine Poseidon in that role of divine voyeur, frustrated at the story he watches.
Amphora, MET: Poseidon and Victory, c 470 BCE
At the same time, he provides an interpretation of the events for the mortals. As a god, Poseidon has heard about Zeus’ plans—he just doesn’t care about them. Note that he does not mention divine will in this passage; instead, he focuses on the Achaean political drama. He claims that Agamemnon is to blame, which is strong language in the epic tradition, yet by lumping Achaean cowardice into the conversation, he makes the very reasonable—and persuasive—argument that the Achaean army is a lot more than one (or two) men. As an interpreter of the action of the poem, then, Poseidon passes judgment on all of the Achaeans and instrumentalizes his judgment as an act of persuasion.
Disguised as Kalkhas, Poseidon also picks a line of argumentation that will resonate with these youngest of heroes who have seen the actual best of the Achaeans sidelined by pettiness, rage, and actual martial injuries. In my reading now, Poseidon is an actor who has donned a persona to move mortals to action; at the same time, he is a performer who has taken on a role that may also speak to Homeric poetics. Can we imagine Poseidon here as echoing the choices for speeches made by Homeric singers and from this can we make deductions on how they shape and shift the content of each speech to persuade or otherwise shape audience reaction?
My intuition on this is yes. There may be a homology to explore between this scene and Thucydides famous description of how his speeches correspond to what needed to be said (or what was appropriate to the situation). One would also need to look at all of the disguised speeches in the Iliad with careful attention to the audiences targeted to explore this idea further. But Poseidon gave us a start. As a figure in a mask, interpreting the scene for us, Poseidon is an actor, a divine hypocrite (keeping in line with the original meaning of the Greek word). But the tension between the story he tells as Kalkhas and the story we see as the audience helps us understand the epic even more.
Other posts on Iliad 13
The Iliad‘s Longest Day:Starting to Make Sense of Book 13: Time and the Iliad; Temporal Structure; Chronology
One of the remarkable things about Homeric poetry is the potential for any detail to open up a new world of story. The Iliad doesn’t endow every named character with a backstory or fuller narrative, but it does meander at times and provide sketches of stories that give context and content to a larger world.
This feature of Homeric poetry is one of the primary characteristics discussed in literary theory outside of Homer, thanks in part to Erich Auerbach’s use of Odysseus’ scar in the Odyssey in his influential book Mimesis. For Auerbach, Homer’s paratactic style lends itself to the extreme digression of focusing on the story of how Odysseus got his scar at the moment Eurykleia sees it and demonstrates a commitment to the part to the detriment of the whole. This perspective imagines a poetic narrative not in control of itself, growing in whatever direction works at the time, like twisted branches searching for light. (see Egbert Bakker’s discussion and adjustment of this here.)
How or why Homer does this has been debated for some time. Prior to rather general acceptance of theories of oral composition and performance, the so-called ‘digressions’ in Homer were sometimes seen as a fault. Modern authors rarely make this claim any more. Instead, there are questions of what the digressions and narrative explorations indicate about the authorship of the poems (and probably too little concern about what they mean for audiences!).
For instance, Maureen Alden has argued that the intricacy and interconnectedness of the “paranarratives” indicate a highly sophisticated author, interweaving stories over a process of many years. This argument has been attractive to those who want to struggle against Auerbach’s implicit criticism of Homeric poetry as in some way uncontrolled, unfinished, or imperfect. From this perspective, the problem is on the part of interpreters who are too ill-informed to understand Homeric genius.
Bakker, cited above, and others, provide a different way out: for Bakker, Homeric poetry is more like speech than something directly visualized, and the process of unfolding an experience. Norman Austin suggests that digressions come at moments where “the dramatic and psychological concentration is the most intense” (312). They amplify the emotion or the themes. Elizabeth Minchin sees many of these narratives as causal: they shouldn’t be seen as digressive (especially in the case of the scar) and, while others are indeed thematic, they also reflect what we now know about how human memory works. For Minchin, and others, there is a cognitive aspect to Homeric narrative: its tendency to explore the part is not to the detriment of the whole but instead serves to support our understanding of the whole. Not only is this kind of paratactic and telescoping narrative more apt for the way human brains work, but it also helps audiences understand the forest through the exploration of the trees.
For me, Auerbach’s description fails to represent Homeric poetry accurately on a very fundamental level: the description of the scar is momentous, thematically critical, dramatic, and engaged with the plot and movement of the Odyssey. But approaches that assume that such complexity is due to the long term effort of a master storyteller also pay short shrift to the complexity available from a poem that develops in performance and in response to human audiences.
There are a few interesting digressions in book 13. One of them occurs during Idomeneus’ aristeia.
Iliad 13.361–369
“There, though his hair was partly grey, Idomeneus called Out to the Danaans and drove the Trojans to retreat as he leapt. For he killed Othryoneus who was there from Kabesos— He had just arrived in search of the fame of war. He asked for the most beautiful of Priam’s daughter’s Kassandra, without a marriage-price, and he promised a great deed, That he would drive the sons of the Achaians from Troy unwilling. Old Priam promised this to him and nodded his head That he would do this. Confident in these promises, he rushed forth.
This passage is more than a little enigmatic. The narrative that unfolds tells the story of a hopeful suitor for Kassandra who is killed by Idomeneus. The details seem rather straightforward. Othryoneus has come to fight for the promise of marrying Kassandra. What separates this brief obituary from others are the details. Othryoneus is marked out for his recent arrival, his pursuit of glory, his promise of a “big deed” and his desire to wed Kassandra without a bride gift.
A scholion pays some attention to this last detail.
Schol. bT ad Il. 13 365-6 ex
“He was asking to marry the most beautiful of Priam’s daughters without a bridegift”
This is also foreign. For we can find no place in Greece where they go to war for pay and posit before that they will not be allies without a contract. Also, consider the payment. For he came, asking for the girl, not because she was royal, but because she was the most beautiful. Certainly the most intemperate suitors among the Greeks “strive because of [her] excellence” [Od 2.366] But “without bridegifts” [Il.13.366] is cheap: even the most unjust suitors offer bridegifts to Penelope.”
So the Scholiast marks Othryoneus’ proposal as odd, if not improper. If we could imagine some notional summary of Othryoneus’ character, he would be something like a Dolon, asking for far more than is proper. But, taken altogether, the brief narrative is not wholly different from the heroic setup in general. Did not all the Achaeans come to Troy in search of kleos and a girl?
In addition to this somewhat strained thematic resonance, the quick resolution of his story (by which, I mean his death) coupled with whose hands deliver it (Idomeneus, the third string QB trying to rally the Achaeans when everyone else is sidelined (Achilles) or wounded (Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaos…) renders Othryoneus’ death even more pathetic. At the same time, it amplifies Idomeneus. Note the strange detail about Idomeneus grey hair, implying advanced age. He seems to re-enter the field, late in the day at a time of great need, a Joe Flacco to the Achaean Browns.
(For those who don’t follow the NFL, Joe Flacco is a quarterback who had an unlikely resurgence)
Joe Flacco on the Jets, with the definitive “I am getting too old for this” face.
The cumulative effect in the middle of a book that rages back and forth with death and confusion is to further relativize war and the promise of glory. It seems foolish if not futile to fight at all.
For me, such resonance and connected meaning develops because of my familiarity with Homer and in response to a style of composition and performance that prioritizes repetitions and meaningful sequences. My interpretation is possible because of the Iliad tendency to layer scenes (the paratactic structure again) and return to motifs (thematic rings), but it is not guaranteed. One can hear the Iliad without getting that Othryoneus was important at all (adding to the pathos) or linger as I have and come to a greater understanding of the whole. But this greater understanding relies on an audience receptive to the methods of meaning-making.
To return to the question of digression: Homeric poetry builds itself out of repetitive structures that are formed in part through performance and audience reception/response. Such intricate meanings are unlikely the result of a master plan and more likely a collaboration in a dynamic context where composer and audience unfold the story together. This method reflects and capitalizes upon human memory and cognition.
Bonus: Stories Tapped by this telling
As I explore in an article about Kassandra in the Odyssey, some narrative details in a story like Othryoneus’ do seem to draw on other narrative traditions. There are traces of a larger story tradition that positions Kassandra as an attractive yet ultimately unattainable bride, an inverse Helen of sorts.
The travel author Pausanias has someone else coming to Troy to seek Kassandra’s hand.
Pausanias 10.27.1-2 (see Benarbe Il. Parvae 15)
“Koroibos came to seek a marriage with Kassandra, but he died. According to a greater tale, she was taken by Neoptolemus; but Lesches gave her to Diomedes.”
Alcidamas, an orator, provides us with an imagined speech performed by Odysseus prosecuting Palamedes. In myth, it was Palamedes who revealed that Odysseus was just pretending to be crazy to avoid going to war. Odysseus held a grudge and framed Palamedes as a traitor when they arrived in Troy by planting gold and a letter in his dwelling.
Alcimadas, Rhetor fr. 16.72-7 (4th Century BCE)
“After calling Sthenelos and Diomedes to witness, I was showing them the contents. The letter clearly said these things:
“Alexandros [writes] to Palamedes. You will have all the things promised to Telephos and my father will give you Kasandra as a wife, just as you asked. But do those things you offered quickly.”
These were the things which were written, and when you approached me and witnessed it you took the bow.”
The Trojan War tradition has Kassandra awarded to Agamemnon after the sack of Troy and killed by Klytemnestra when they return home.
A short bibliography for this post.
Alden, Maureen 2000. Homer Beside Himself: Para-Narratives in the Iliad (Oxford 2000).
Austin, Norman. 1966. “The Function of Digressions in the Iliad”. Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 7:295-312.
Bakker, Egbert J. 2005. Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics. Hellenic Studies Series 12. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Minchin, Elizabeth. “Voice and Voices: Homer and the Stewardship of Memory.” in Niall W. Slater, Voice and Voices in Antiquity. Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, 11; Mnemosyne supplements. Monographs on Greek and Latin language and literature, 396. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017.
One of the things I emphasized in my first post aboutIliad 13 is how it features what we might thing of as the second or third string of Homeric heroes, an Idomeneus and a Meriones who echo other heroic pairs like Achilles and Patroklos, Diomedes and Sthenelos, or Sarpedon and Glaukos. These pairs may echo narrative structures that harken back to Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Gilgamesh poems and persist to characters like Nisus and Euryalus in Vergil’s Aeneid.
The thematic pairing seems important for these heroes to have the therapon, a ritual assistant who can also be seen as a sacrificial replacement. There’s certainly a hero and sidekick phenomenon going on that’s interesting, but there are interesting psychological possibilities as well. Lenny Muellner has argued, following others, that Achilles and Patrolkos are a mirrored pair, substitutes if not doubles for each other to the extent that the represent the same person.
In addition to the symbolic exploration of identity, these pairs also allow audiences the opportunity to see heroes in friendships. I often wonder if there is some kind of a commentary on figures who don’t have these relationships or for whom they are problematic. In this, I am thinking primarily of Hektor whose relationships with his brother Paris and his countryman Polydamas are fraught at best. Rather than seeing this as an indictment of Hektor, we may see his lack of a double as a feature of his social and political deprivation. Perhaps we are meant to see Hektor as someone who, despite family and city, is essentially alone.
So, part of what I think is happening again in book 13 is an emphasis on the greater possibilities of the Achaean polity: the Greeks can withstand the Trojan onslaught because they have multiple leaders who can stand up and fight when others fall. This contrast with the Trojans is pointed in book 13 where we see Idomeneus and Meriones rally the Greeks against Hektor until he listens to Polydamas’ advice.
But wait, there’s MORE.
Le retour d’Idomédée, oeuvre de Gamelin, Musée des Augustins Palais Niel, Toulouse
I suspect that the rise of Idomeneus in this passage is also about integrating Cretan mythic traditions into the Homeric narrative. Now, to explain this, a little foot work: As Elton Barker and I explore in Homer’s Thebes, the Homeric epics we possess demonstrate some kind of an appropriative relationship with other poetic traditions. Scholars are pretty sure that there were countless heroic traditions rolling around the Greek world prior to the classical age. Part of the success of the Iliad and the Odyssey is the integration of local traditions–also called epichoric–and other narrative patterns into their narratives. The Iliad does this most clearly in the Catalogue of Ships where i realizes a pretty nifty narrative trick: by creating a coalition narrative that brings heroes together from all over the world of Greek audiences to go against a common enemy in the east, the Iliad creates the perfect opportunity to bring those story traditions together and make them work for its narrative. In a slightly different way, the Odyssey does something similar in the stories Odysseus tells in the underworld in book 11: he subordinates other heroic traditions and genealogical traditions to his own story.
This is all part of the Homeric strategy to replace other traditions. As Christos Tsagalis writes in the Oral Palimpsest: “ ‘Homer’ then reflects the concerted effort to create a Pan-Hellenic canon of epic song. His unprecedented success is due…not to his making previous epichoric traditions vanish but to his erasing them from the surface of his narrative while ipso tempore employing them in the shaping of his epics” (2008, xiii). This process separates the local myths from their original context and transforms them into a different vehicle for Panhellenic identities. According to Gregory Nagy (1990:66) “myths that are epichoric…are still bound to the rituals of their native locales, whereas the myths of Panhellenic discourse, in the process of excluding local variations, can become divorced from ritual.”
Crete was an important place within the larger discourse: ancient myth positions Crete as a place of power, due to King Minos; and Greeks of later years had mostly lost the memory of the great Minoan cities on Crete, but not the shape of those memories. The Iliad and the Odyssey, however, seem to present Crete in somewhat different ways. Crete may have been a setting for different versions of the Odyssey.
There’s a minor debate about how many cities there were in Crete!
Schol. A. ad Il. 2.649
“Others have instead “those who occupy hundred-citied Crete” in response to those Separatists because they say that it is “hundred-citied Crete” here but “ninety-citied” in the Odyssey. Certainly we have “hundred-citied” instead of many cities, or he has a similar and close count now, but in the Odyssey lists it more precisely as is clear in Sophocles. Some claim that the Lakedaimonian founded ten cities.”
“Because the poet sometimes calls Krete “hundred-citied” but at others, “ninety-cited”, Ephorus says that ten cities were founded after the battles at Troy by the Dorians who were following Althaimenes the Argive. But he also says that Odysseus names it “ninety-cities” This argument is persuasive. But others say that ten cities were destroyed by Idomeneus’ enemies. But the poet does not claim that Krete is “hundred-citied” during the Trojan War but in his time—for he speaks in his own language even if it is the speech of those who existed then, just as in the Odyssey when he calls Crete “ninety-citied”, it would be fine to understand it in this way. But if we were to accept that, the argument would not be saved. For it is not likely that the cities were destroyed by Idomeneus’ enemies when he was at war or came home from there, since the poet says that “Idomeneus led to Crete all his companions who survived the war and the sea killed none of them.
He would have mentioned that disaster. For Odysseus certainly would not have known of the destruction of the cities because he had not encountered any of the Greeks either during his wandering or after. And one who accompanied Idomeneus against Troy and returned with him would not have known what happened at home either during the expedition or the return from there. If Idomeneus was preserved with all his companions, he would have come back strong enough they his enemies were not going to be able to deprive him of ten cities. That’s my overview of the land of the Kretans.”
Most readers of early Greek poetry might remember that both Odysseus, in the Odyssey and Demeter, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, use Cretan origins as ways to explain why they can speak Greek but are unknown to mainlanders. Crete is just Greek enough to be “Greek”, but foreign enough to mark a Cretan as ‘other’.
From the Suda
“To speak Cretan to Cretans: Since they liars and deceivers”
“To be a Cretan: People use this phrase to mean lying and cheating. And they say it developed as a proverb from Idomeneus the Cretan. For, as the story goes, when there was a disagreement developed about the greater [share] among the Greeks at troy and everyone was eager to acquire the heaped up bronze for themselves, they made Idomeneus the judge. Once he took open pledges from them that they would adhere to the judgments he would make, he put himself in from of all the rest! For this reason, it is called Krêtening.”
There’s a fascinating myth that brings together these traditions of lying with Idomeneus and Achilles’ mother:
Medeia’s Beauty Contest: Fr. Gr. Hist (=Müller 4.10.1) Athenodorus of Eretria
“In the eighth book of his Notes, Athenodorus says that Thetis and Medeia competed over beauty in Thessaly and made Idomeneus the judge—he gave the victory to Thetis. Medeia, enraged, said that Kretans are always liars and she cursed him, that he would never speak the truth just as he had [failed to] in the judgment. And this is the reason that people say they believe that Kretans are liars. Athenodorus adds that Antiokhos records this in the second book of his Urban Legends.”
Of course, in the Odyssey Idomeneus shows up in Odysseus’ lies
Od. 13.256-273
“I heard of Ithaca even in broad Krete Far over the sea. And now I myself have come With these possessions. I left as much still with my children When I fled, because I killed the dear son of Idomeneus, Swift-footed Orsilokhos who surpassed all the grain-fed men In broad Krete with his swift feet Because he wanted to deprive me of all the booty From Troy, over which I had suffered much grief in my heart, Testing myself against warlike men and the grievous waves. All because I was not showing his father favor as an attendant In the land of the Trojans, but I was leading different companions. I struck him with a bronze-pointed spear as he returned From the field, after I set an ambush near the road with a companion. Dark night covered the sky and no human beings Took note of us, I got away with depriving him of life. But after I killed him with the sharp bronze, I went to a ship of the haughty Phoenicians And I begged them and gave them heart-melting payment.”
This is the first ‘lie’ Odysseus tells upon his arrival on Ithaca. He does not know that he is speaking to Athena and a scholiast explains his choices as if he were speaking to a suitor or one who would inform them.
Scholia V ad. Od. 13.267
“He explains that he killed Idomeneus’ son so that the suitors will accept him as an enemy of dear Odysseus. He says that he has sons in Crete because he will have someone who will avenge him. He says that the death of Orsilochus was for booty, because he is showing that he would not yield to this guy bloodlessly. He says that he trusted Phoenicians so that he may not do him wrong, once he has reckoned that they are the most greedy for profit and they spared him.”
One of my favorite recent articles about book 13, by Grace Erny, looks closely at the role Idomeneus and Meriones play in this book. She argues that the depiction of the heroes in this book integrates “competing depictions of the Islands: one where Crete is well integrated into the Panhellenic world of the Achaeans and one where it stands out as a distinct region” (198). In doing so, I think the epic performs or even creates the Cretan dualism I mentioned above. Idomeneus and Meriones are just Greek enough to be part of the Achaean coalition but not so much as to escape the implication of difference and the echo of something perhaps more salacious.
Enry’s article lays out some of the material realities behind these traditions and also trace out the continuity of Crete’s depiction outside of the Iliad. In the latter part of the article, she looks at the relationship between the heroes and the ambiguity about their relative positions. Such ambiguity partners with their descriptions and actions to make it impossible to forget that they are Cretan, both advancing and confirming the Homeric strategy vis a vis Crete.
A starting bibliography on Book 13
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Cramer, David. “The wrath of Aeneas: Iliad 13.455-67 and 20.75-352.” Syllecta classica, vol. 11, 2000, pp. 16-33.
Fenno, Jonathan Brian. “The wrath and vengeance of swift-footed Aeneas in Iliad 13.” Phoenix, vol. 62, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 145-161.
Friedman, Rachel Debra. “Divine dissension and the narrative of the « Iliad ».” Helios, vol. 28, no. 2, 2001, pp. 99-118.
Kotsonas, Antonis. “Homer, the archaeology of Crete and the « Tomb of Meriones » at Knossos.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 138, 2018, pp. 1-35. Doi: 10.1017/S0075426918000010
McClellan, Andrew M.. “The death and mutilation of Imbrius in Iliad 13.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 159-174. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00101007
Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: the Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore.
Saunders, Kenneth B.. “The wounds in Iliad 13-16.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 49, no. 2, 1999, pp. 345-363. Doi: 10.1093/cq/49.2.345
Tsagalis, Christos. 2008. The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 29. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
