This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 24. 

How does one bring the Iliad to a close? How does one begin to write about this epic’s end? Do we start with the image of Priam kissing the hands of the man who killed his son? Do we try to make sense of the story Achilles tells of a Niobe who stopped to eat while she was weeping en route to her transformation to stone? Do we interweave all of the ends that are tied up alongside those left dangling in the completion of this overwhelming tapestry?

One of the finest scholarly responses is C.W. MacLeod’s commentary on the book. I tend to think that there is so much going on that a line by line response is the only way to make sense of what the book achieves: it addresses the major tensions lingering since book 1 without resolving them altogether by providing an understated coda to the political plot, offering transitional movement from the world of the living to the dead and back again, arranging for the themes of reciprocity and ransom to be revisited in the meeting of Priam and Achilles, providing an ambiguous yet moving testimony to Achilles’ change in character, and revisits the generative power of mourning with the women’s lament for Hektor and his funeral.

Of course, much of the action of the Iliad’s final book is forgotten because of the power of its most famous scene, the meeting of Achilles and Priam for the ransoming of Hektor’s body. The iconography of this scene is widespread enough in early Greece for me to believe that it was an episode independent of our Iliad—so how it is integrated into our particular epic is of great moment here. The book starts with Achilles’ unrelenting abuse of Hektor’s corpse, followed by a divine assembly to decide what to do over his behavior. Hera and Apollo argue against each other and Zeus intercedes on Hektor’s behalf. Hermes guides Priam at some length (and in secret) to Achilles’ dwelling where the famous meeting takes place. Priam returns with a guarantee for an armistice to arrange a funeral; Andromache, Hekuba, and Helen provide funerary laments for Hektor and the epic ends with his burial

Each the book adds something to the themes I have outlined in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions. Among these, however, I think for book 24 to do its job, it needs to resonate with all five of these themes. And, I think I will likely do more than three posts to bring this epic to a close.

The ‘Trial’ of Achilles

To start, let’s take a closer look at the opening deliberative scene in book 24. It addresses the relationship between Gods and Humans and also adjusts our expectations for heroic life (and death). [N.B. I have repurposed some unpublished material from my dissertation for what follows.] But most importantly, it signals a different approach to politics. As I have discussed before, the Iliad examines politics on three separate stages, one each for the Achaeans and Trojans, and the third is among the gods. Divine power operates differently because Zeus’ authority (allegedly) guarantees every god’s place in a fixed universe.

The message of the Iliad’s political interest is in part that human institutions cannot mirror divine ones because humans collectively change and individuals are subject to our torrent of self-interest and emotions. In addition to the thematic echoes/resonances, there are also some important structural returns. We find out at the beginning of Iliad  24 that there has been a nine-day neîkos among the gods, mirroring the nine-day plague at the beginning of the epic. And this creates something of an epic long chiastic [AB B’ A’] structure. Ransom [denied]: 9 days of divine wrath [culminating in Achilles’ rage] :: 9 days of divine strife : Ransom [accepted, final resolution of Achilles’ rage] (Whitman and Reinhardt are really good on these structural correspondences.)

The epic’s final book, however, has to answer general issues remaining with the gods, while also responding to the structure of the first: foremost, how their own self-interest has perpetuated violence in the form of the Trojan War and the Iliad itself and, second, whether Homer’s gods can hope to stand for justice the way the divinities of the external audiences are expected to in later years. These questions are addressed in part by the final divine assembly where they guarantee the right of burial to all mortals, regardless of their lineage.

The divine conflict over the corpse has been about just how transgressive Achilles’ behavior has been and whether or not the gods should intervene to preserve Hektor for burial. Since he died in book 22, Hektor’s body has been preserved by the gods, but the emotional impact of his mutilation has not been limited. The internal human audience does not know that Hektor’s flesh has been preserved. With the exception of Hera, Poseidon, and Athena, the gods long for Hermes to steal him away. Apollo stands to address them all (24.33-54):

‘Gods, you are cruel, baneful. Didn’t Hektor always
burn the thigh pieces of bulls and full-grown goats for you?
Now you do not dare to save him, even as a corpse,
for his wife and mother and child to see,
and his father Priam and the host, who soon would
cremate him in fire and offer him a burial.
But you gods decide to help ruinous Achilles,
who has neither fateful thoughts nor flexible intention
in his heart, but he’s like a wild lion
who, after he gives in to his great force and proud heart,
goes after the flocks of mortals to take his feast,
so Achilles obliterates pity and has no shame
that thing that does so much in helping men.
Someone else would lose one so dear, I suppose,
either a brother of the same womb or a son,
but surely, after mourning and crying, he sets this aside;
for the Moirai gave men an enduring heart.
But this man, at least, after he has tied his horses
to shining Hektor, whose dear heart he extinguished,
he drags him around the grave marker of his dear companion—
that surely will not be better or finer for him.
Let us not be chastised by him even though he his noble;
For, indeed, he disfigures the fallow earth in his rage.’

Apollo speaks to show both that there is a clear majority for rescuing Hektor and that the majority is right with a poetic tour de force. As Richardson (1993, 280) notes in his commentary on the Iliad, this version of Apollo differs from the vengeful god of plague we meet in book 1 and closer to the god of prophecy and law who is more prominent in later years. First, he assails all the gods and appropriates Zeus’ language from book 4 in asking, rhetorically, whether or not Hektor was pious in his sacrifices. The implication is that, if Hektor was pious when alive, then he deserves the rites of burial. Apollo poetically expands this statement as he enumerates each member of Hektor’s funeral party (wife, mother, son, father, people). Then, he insists that, instead of helping Hektor, the gods help Achilles, a destructive man whose thoughts are not fitting and whose inhuman behavior he evokes with a surprising simile. By comparing Achilles to a lion who knows “wild” things, Apollo points to the politically destabilizing force he has had on the Achaeans and the uncivilized manner in which he is behaving. Not only does Apollo appropriate a theme from Zeus’ speech in book 4 (cf. 4.7) but instead of naming just those who have helped the Achaeans, he implicates all of the gods and insults them by their connection with ruinous acts against fate. Apollo, in the application of poetic devices, the appropriation of motifs from Zeus, and the manipulation of verbal persons, exploits a performance context where his ‘success’ depends conceptually on a majority approval, but realistically only on persuading Zeus.

The scene appears to proceed in the fashion of litigation. This is Apollo Lykaios, Apollo the barrister-god who appears in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, arguing against the Furies. The sought-after compromise between this particular, younger god, and an older figure of the earth and the matriarchy, Hera, would offer obvious parallels to ancient audiences. In her rebuttal, Hera defends inaction and attempts to manipulate the same performance dynamics (24.56-63):

‘This would only be your word, silver-bow,
if, indeed, you would set the same timê for Achilles and Hektor.
Hektor is mortal and nursed from a mortal woman and breast;
but Achilles is the offspring of a goddess whom I myself
raised and reared and I gave her as a wife to a man,
Peleus, who is dear to the heart of immortals.
You all attended the wedding; and you feasted among them,
holding your lyre, companion of evils, always untrustworthy.’

Hera claims, in a strange conditional, that if Apollo’s word were accepted, Hektor and Achilles would garner the same timê.  Hera changes addressees during the speech, but her alteration is sudden (during the conditional), which may heighten the angry (if not irrational) tone of her speech. Hera aims the political language of valuation at the sensitivities of her audience. She attempts to depict a settlement as ridiculous through antithesis: Hektor is a mortal and was nursed by one, Achilles is not the same. Then, she accuses all the gods of being disingenuous since they all attended the wedding of Achilles’ parents. In closing, she calls Apollo a liar and implies that he is a hypocrite, because he performed at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Hera’s argument is posterior-focused—it emphasizes the relationships of the past, of a world that mixed gods and men. Apollo’s is anterior—he looks to a world in which the gods can authorize and champion some very basic values for mortals.

In his summary judgment, Zeus succinctly offers a verdict on the contest before him and occupies a more distant position from his engagement earlier in the epic, as if he never responded to Achilles’ plea at all. He briefly reflects the threat of neîkos inherent to Hera’s speech and then sets things in order quickly. Hera has little to say because Apollo has already won over Zeus, as his response makes clear (24.65-71):

‘Hera, really, don’t be completely angry with the gods.
Their timê [honor], at least, will not be the same. But Hektor
is also dearest to the gods of the mortals who live in Troy,
so he is to me, since he never missed dear gifts.
For my altar never lacked a fine feast,
both smoke and libation; for that is the share we have obtained.
But, certainly, we will not allow you to steal bold Hektor away
from Achilles in secret, there is no way. For his mother
always watches over him night and day the same.
But let someone of the gods call Thetis near me,
so I may speak some wise word, that Achilles
will accept gifts from Priam and ransom Hektor.’

Zeus starts with a negative imperative ἀποσκύδμαινε, a hapax legomenon (a word that occurs only once), to characterize the anger of Hera’s speech. The verb resonates well with the themes of irrational anger and political strife. Lexically, it appears to be related to éris. After depicting Hera as a politically dangerous and irrational speaker by using this verb, Zeus quickly dismisses her complaint about Achilles and Hektor earning the same timê and confirms that Apollo delivered the suggestion closest to his own perspective (Hektor is due funeral rites) by repeating his words from book 4 (4.48-9 = 24.69-70). Zeus’ response, however, is not a complete valorization of Apollo’s speech. Instead of relenting and having Hektor’s body stolen away, Zeus offers something of a compromise. At the same time, he retains his control over the narrative, his support of a world in which human sacrifices are observed, and the place of the basic right to burial.

The opening scene of Iliad 24 further justifies the separation between mortals and gods while also carving out a different kind of role for Zeus outside of this particular narrative. The importance of this scene is easier to appreciate if we consider the unfolding of events in this particular epic where leaders have repeatedly failed to resolve conflict. This movement repositions the gods to serve as examples for human beings and centralizes Zeus as the deity of justice more familiar from the Zeus presides over this scene as the king from Hesiod’s Theogony and Greek tragedy.

Hesiod Theogony, 80-93:

[Kalliope] is the Muse who attends to kings and singers.
Whomever of the god-raised Kings the daughters of great Zeus
Honor and look upon when he is born,
On his tongue they pour sweet dew
And gentle words flow out of his mouth. Then the people
All look upon him as he judges the laws
With straight decisions. He speaks confidently
And quickly resolves a conflict with skill.
For this reason, kings are intelligent, so that they
May effect retributive actions in the assembly when men are harmed,
And with ease as they persuade everyone with gentle words.
When he walks into the contest ground people propitiate him
Like a god with gentle reverence, and he stands out among the assembled.
Such is the gift of the muses for men.

ἡ γὰρ καὶ βασιλεῦσιν ἅμ’ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ.
ὅντινα τιμήσουσι Διὸς κοῦραι μεγάλοιο
γεινόμενόν τε ἴδωσι διοτρεφέων βασιλήων,
τῷ μὲν ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ γλυκερὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην,
τοῦ δ’ ἔπε’ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα· οἱ δέ νυ λαοὶ
πάντες ἐς αὐτὸν ὁρῶσι διακρίνοντα θέμιστας
ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσιν· ὁ δ’ ἀσφαλέως ἀγορεύων
αἶψά τι καὶ μέγα νεῖκος ἐπισταμένως κατέπαυσε·
τούνεκα γὰρ βασιλῆες ἐχέφρονες, οὕνεκα λαοῖς
βλαπτομένοις ἀγορῆφι μετάτροπα ἔργα τελεῦσι
ῥηιδίως, μαλακοῖσι παραιφάμενοι ἐπέεσσιν·
ἐρχόμενον δ’ ἀν’ ἀγῶνα θεὸν ὣς ἱλάσκονται
αἰδοῖ μειλιχίῃ, μετὰ δὲ πρέπει ἀγρομένοισι.
τοίη Μουσάων ἱερὴ δόσις ἀνθρώποισιν.

In the public space, subordinates offer competing visions and engage in verbal strife as evinced by Hera’s insults. Zeus listens to their speeches and then offers his own; his language presents a solution previously unavailable to prevent actual strife from developing. These parallels, however, quickly begin to collapse—the exchange loses its luster when compared to earlier conflicts in the Iliad. First of all, since the dispute is over men, the course of divine conflict in the Iliad has already determined that the stakes of such a contest are diminished. Second, the conflict is not with Zeus, but between factions of gods who spar with one another and expect him to orchestrate a resolution. Finally, the decision itself is a simple one. Although Zeus’ speech amounts to something of a compromise, he explains that there is a co-dependence between honors from men and honoring men. The import of this scene is undermined and left under-determined. And this is because there is still more work to be done. It is one thing to know that Achilles will return Hektor’s body; it is another to see it happen.

Short bibliography on the Book 24

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Bowie, Angus. “Narrative and emotion in the « Iliad »: Andromache and Helen.” Emotions and narrative in ancient literature and beyond: studies in honour of Irene de Jong. Eds. De Bakker, Mathieu, Van den Berg, Baukje and Klooster, Jacqueline. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 451. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2022. 48-61. Doi: 10.1163/9789004506053_004

Carvounis, Katerina. “Helen and Iliad 24. 763-764.” Hyperboreus, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 5-10.

Currie, Bruno. “The « Iliad », the « Odyssey », and narratological intertextuality.” Symbolae Osloenses, vol. 93, 2019, pp. 157-188. Doi: 10.1080/00397679.2019.1648002

Burgess, Jonathan Seth. “Untrustworthy Apollo and the destiny of Achilles: Iliad 24.55-63.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 102, 2004, pp. 21-40.

Danek, Georg. “Achilles hybristēs ? : tisis and nemesis in Iliad 24.” Έγκλημα και τιμωρία στην ομηρική και αρχαϊκή ποίηση : από τα πρακτικά του ΙΒ’ διεθνούς συνεδρίου για την Οδύσσεια, Ιθάκη, 3-7 Σεπτεμβρίου 2013. Eds. Christopoulos, Menelaos and Païzi-Apostolopoulou, Machi. Ithaki: Kentro Odysseiakon Spoudon, 2014. 137-152.

Ebbott, Mary. “The wrath of Helen: self-blame and nemesis in the « Iliad ».” Plato’s « Laws » and its historical significance: selected papers of the I International Congress on Ancient Thought, Salamanca, 1998. Ed. Lisi, Francisco Leonardo. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2001. 3-20.

Felson, Nancy. “« Threptra » and invisible hands: the father-son relationship in Iliad 24.” Arethusa, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 35-50.

Franko, George Fredric. “The Trojan horse at the close of the « Iliad ».” The Classical Journal, vol. 101, no. 2, 2005-2006, pp. 121-123.

Hammer, Dean C.. “The « Iliad » as ethical thinking: politics, pity, and the operation of esteem.” Arethusa, vol. 35, no. 2, 2002, pp. 203-235.

Heath, Malcolm. “Menecrates on the end of the Iliad.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, vol. 141, no. 2, 1998, pp. 204-206.

Herrero de Jáuregui, Miguel. “Priam’s catabasis: traces of the epic journey to Hades in Iliad 24.” TAPA, vol. 141, no. 1, 2011, pp. 37-68. Doi: 10.1353/apa.2011.0005

Kiss, Dániel. “Iliad 22.60 and 24.487: Priam on the threshold of old age.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, vol. 153, no. 3-4, 2010, pp. 401-404.

Knox, Ronald A.. “Iliad 24. 547-549: blameless Achilles.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, vol. 141, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1-9.

Kyriakou, Poulheria. “Reciprocity and gifts in the encounters of Diomedes with Glaucus and Achilles with Priam in the « Iliad ».” Hermes, vol. 150, no. 2, 2022, pp. 131-149. Doi: 10.25162/hermes-2022-0009

Mackie, Chris J.. “Iliad 24 and the judgement of Paris.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 63, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1-16. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838812000754

MacLeod, C. W., editor. Iliad, Book XXIV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 1982.

Most, Glenn W.. “Anger and pity in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Yale Classical Studies, vol. 32, 2003, pp. 50-75[JC1] .

Murnaghan, Sheila. “Equal honor and future glory: the plan of Zeus in the « Iliad ».” Classical closure: reading the end in Greek and Latin literature. Eds. Roberts, Deborah H., Dunn, Francis M. and Fowler, Don P.. Princeton (N. J.): Princeton University Pr., 1997. 23-42.

Pantelia, Maria C.. “Helen and the last song for Hector.” TAPA, vol. 132, 2002, pp. 21-27.

Perkell, Christine G.. “Reading the laments of Iliad 24.” Lament: studies in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. Ed. Suter, Ann. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2008. 93-117.

Karl Reinhardt. Die Ilias und ihr Dichter. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1961.

Rabel, Robert J.. “Apollo as a model for Achilles in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology, vol. CXI, 1990, pp. 429-440.

Race, William H.. “Achilles’ κῦδος in Iliad 24.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 67, no. 5, 2014, pp. 707-724. Doi: 10.1163/1568525X-12341406

Nicholas Richardson. The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Strauss Clay, Jenny. “Iliad 24.649 and the semantics of κερτομέω.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 49, no. 2, 1999, pp. 618-621. Doi: 10.1093/cq/49.2.618

Taplin, Oliver. “A word of consolation in Iliad 24, 614.” Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica, 3a ser., vol. 20, no. 1-2, 2002, pp. 24-27.

Thalmann, William G.. “« Anger sweeter than dripping honey »: violence as a problem in the « Iliad ».” Ramus, vol. 44, no. 1-2, 2015, pp. 95-114. Doi: 10.1017/rmu.2015.5[JC2] 

Cedric Hubbell Whitman. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Xian, Ruobing. “The dramatization of emotions in Iliad 24.552-658.” Philologus, vol. 164, no. 2, 2020, pp. 181-196. Doi: 10.1515/phil-2020-0105[JC3] 

Zanker, Graham. “Beyond reciprocity: the Akhilleus-Priam scene in Iliad 24.” Reciprocity in ancient Greece. Eds. Gill, Christopher, Postlethwaite, Norman and Seaford, Richard A. S.. Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1998. 73-92.

This post is one of a few on Iliad 23.

Every time the Olympics come around, I find myself talking about ancient Greek athletics, even though the topic is a bit far outside my expertise. As a Homerist, these contests stick out in my mind because they are (1) part of the apparatus of Panhellenic culture with Homer that emerges before the classical period; (2) like Homer, they reflect a growing fantasy of a heroic age that appealed to elite culture in the Classical period; and (3) their spirit of competition and glory resonates with the questions that are posed—if never answers—by the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Both epics have athletic contests as scenes where internal (and external) audiences are invited to consider heroic ‘worth’ based on participation in games. In Odyssey 8, the young Phaeacian princes invite Odysseus to show what kind of a man he is by engaging in after-dinner competition. (He eventually bests them with a discus, after criticizing them for putting too much emphasis on appearances.) That epic’s centering of cleverness and de-centering of the conventional heroic physique is tied to the identity of its hero and the skills he needs to return home (as I try to tease out a bit in an essay on disability studies in Homer).

For the Iliad, the funeral games of Patroklos occupy nearly an entire book. In writing my posts for each of the Iliad’s books, I think I gave short shrift to the funeral games. This is a little ironic, since the final chapter of my dissertation focused almost entirely on the games and the job talk I developed from it certainly helped me get my first academic position! The games are central to the epic’s plot in allowing it to return to the themes of the conflict in book 1. Oliver Taplin has argued that “one of the main poetic functions of the funeral games [is] to show Achilles soothing and resolving public strife, instead of provoking and furthering it” (1992, 253) and other authors who write on politics in Homer have seen these connections explicitly, including, but not limited to, Donna Wilson, Dean Hammer, Deborah Beck, Walter Donlan, David Elmer, Elton Barker, and more!

Games are never just about play and fun! They are opportunities for individuals to compete, but when communities are involved, they are also a form of deferred or transformed strife, nearly always loci of political posturing and the exploration of inter-social hierarchies. One just needs to check out ESPN’s Medal Tracker from the last Olympics to note, even if superficially, that individual performance in the games is translated into some sign of collective worth or esteem. Further, we narrativize our own experiences and values through what happens on the screen: games are a place where we negotiate our differences and litigate what they mean. Consider recent controversies about gender, ongoing nationalistic feuds over clothing (though, mostly only what women are allowed to wear), and historical manipulation of the games.

The funeral games in Iliad 23 are an opportunity where Achilles experiments with new ideas about authority and the distribution of goods, resolving in part the conflict between him and Agamemnon lingering from book 1, but creating, I think a dissonance for external audiences about to what extent the solutions offered are available outside of epic.

I am not just reminded of the games because of the ongoing Olympics! In Charles Stocking’s Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, which I have been reading and thinking about, the third chapter, “Force and Discourse in the Funeral Games of Patroclus”, presents an in depth reading of the games that adds to essential reading on the topic (work I have mentioned above, plus articles by Grethlein, Kelly and Kitchell cited below”.

Stocking opens the chapter looking at the “problem of force” in the famous advice Nestor gives Antilochus before the chariot race. The race is the central part of the games and takes the longest amount of story time. It initiates a series of disputes and a pattern. The disputes are about the outcome of the contest where the presumed “best” competitors failed to meet expectations because of adverse luck (or questionable tactics). Achilles intervenes in several arguments and proposes solutions that provide new prizes from his personal store to restore/maintain the positions and honor of the competitors.

This would be the equivalent of an official from the IOC adding new medals to the competition. Imagine if the US Men’s basketball team loses a gold-medal game and a shocked world clamors for them to receive the top prize because everyone knows they have the best players! So, the IOC introduces a platinum medal for the team with the most talent and hype. This is a simplified form of what happens in book 23.

But there are many turns. Stocking’s full-chapter treatment is one of the most extensive and detailed analyses of the conflicts and prizes in the games that I know of. he goes through each of the major conflicts with a careful reading of the context and the language that makes it possible. He also introduces some alter work by Michel Foucault in which he discusses the games as a crucial point in “western” history’s exploration of “the will to truth”. Working with and through Foucault’s frameworks, Stocking provides a fine reading of Antilochus’ dispute with Menelaos as a complex negotiation of the fact that “the final distribution of prizes does not match up with the expectations outlined by the original sequence” (138).

During the chapter, Stocking focuses less on “force” directly than in the hierarchy of status implicit in the notion of who is best and the implications of the tension between assumed ability or excellence and outcomes due to accident or fate. In his words, the games become something of a “non-contest” because Achilles intervenes regularly abandoning “the logic of competition a a means for determining or representing social order” (166). Achilles, Stocking argues following others, replaces the contest by creating or recreating the order through his own “verbal performance”.

In this last detail, Stocking may miss an opportunity to set this Achilles as equivalent to the Odyssey’s Odysseus. Both heroes bend the perception of the cosmos for their audiences to their own liking, but both end up creating additional fantasies that may not have equivalents in the external worlds. Part of the disjuncture is the world of plenty heroes have to deal with: Achilles breaks with Agamemnon in book 1 over a slight to his honor when a distribution of goods is recalled in the king’s favor, yet repeatedly redistributes prizes in book 23, drawing from a store of goods that has no end. Odysseus comes home to punish the suitors for consuming his wealth, but there seems to be no end of meat and wine for feasting on Ithaka either. The worlds of Homer’s heroes approach no material limit.

The absence of this limit has a strange relationship with competition: for a feat to have value, it needs a context—we communicate ours by historicizing records of accomplishments and commemorating with symbolic prizes. In the Iliad’s games, the heroic world seems to always be spilling over its ends. As Edith Hall argues in her forthcoming Achilles in Green, the world of Homer’s heroes is extractive and consumptive to the extreme, perhaps anticipating our own modern fiction of endless expansion, profits without end. Without a limit or canon for the heroic games, they become performances of identities reified by Achilles’ addition of prizes whenever the expected worth doesn’t play out as it is expected.

The tension here—I suspect—is that the goal of epic itself is compromised. While Achilles’ never clearly chooses kleos aphthiton in exchange for his war-shortened life, the Iliad leaves us to assume that he nevertheless receives it. But kleos without end is as problematic as human honors that do not change regardless of what actually happens in the games. As Glaukos says, the lives of men are like the leaves that grow and fall. They—and anything related to them—cannot truly be aphthiton, “unwithered, imperishable” because they are made of perishable stuff.

Perhaps the tension in the games relies in this: it is both about replaying the politics of book 1 and trying to approach the deep disappointment of being an example of human greatness, as yet subject to the failures of human life. Achilles’ management of the games is a navigation through personal as well as political value. It is a prelude to the contemplation of mortality in book 24, rather than an exultation in the variety and wonder of human achievement.

my old overview of the funeral games

Short Bibliography

n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.

Deborah Beck. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005.

Christensen, J. (2021). Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer. Classical World 114(4), 365-393. https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2021.0020.

Dunkle, Roger. “Nestor, Odysseus, and the μῆτις-βίη antithesis. The funeral games, Iliad 23.” Classical World, vol. LXXXI, 1987, pp. 1-17.

Ellsworth, J. D.. “Ἀγων νεῶν. An unrecognized metaphor in the Iliad.” Classical Philology, vol. LXIX, 1974, pp. 258-264.

Elmer, D.F. (2013). The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., https://doi.org/10.1353/book.21075.

Grethlein, Jonas. “Epic narrative and ritual: the case of the funeral games in Iliad 23.” Literatur und Religion: Wege zu einer mythisch-rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen. Eds. Bierl, Anton, Lämmle, Rebecca and Wesselmann, Katharina. MythosEikonPoiesis; 1.1-2. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 151-177.

Kelly, Adrian. “Achilles in control ? : managing oneself and others in the Funeral Games.” Conflict and consensus in early Greek hexameter poetry. Eds. Bassino, Paola, Canevaro, Lilah Grace and Graziosi, Barbara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2017. 87-108. Doi: 10.1017/9781316800034.005

Kenneth F. Kitchell. “‘But the mare I will not give up’: The Games in Iliad 23.” The Classical Bulletin 74 (1998) 159-71.

Mouratidis, Ioannis. “Anachronism in the Homeric games and sports.” Nikephoros, vol. III, 1990, pp. 11-22.

Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.

Rengakos, Antonios. “Aethiopis.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 306-317.

Roller, Lynn E. “Funeral Games in Greek Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 85, no. 2 (1981): 107–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/505030.

Scott, William C.. “The etiquette of games in Iliad 23.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 213-227.

Stocking, Charles. Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, Oxford, 2024.

Oliver Taplin. Homeric Soundings: The Shape of the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Christoph Ulf. “Iliad 23: die Bestattung des Patroklos und das Sportfest der “Patroklos-Spiele”: zwei Teile einer mirror-story.” in Herbert Heftner and Hurt Tomaschitz (eds.). Ad Fontes! Festschrift für Gerhard Dobesch zum 65 Geburtstag am 15. September 2004. Wien: Phoibos, 2004, 73-86.

Malcolm M. Willcock, ‘The funeral games of Patroclus’, Proceedings of the Classical Association, LXX. (1973) 36.

Donna F. Wilson. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 23. 

In the first post on Iliad 23, I provide a good deal of framing for understanding the funeral games from Patroklos from a thematic/political perspective. At some point, I think I planned to write a second post on that topic, detailing the exchanges during the chariot race as a recapitulation of the events in Iliad 1 and 2. I think that this work has largely been done and would refer to the bibliography there for further reading.

I remain interested—if not stuck—in how to understand the run-up to the games, which includes a lengthy burial ritual. This process is crucial for understanding Achilles’ character, but I think it can also help us think more about how epic poetry, about how much it tells and how much we assume it tells. The most prominent part of this, for me, is the human sacrifice that was promised in book 21. As I mention in that post, the seemingly casual presentation of the human sacrifice always reminds me of the murder of the suitors and the mutilation of the enslaved people in the Odyssey. Just as in that case, however, I think part of my/our sense that the acts are downplayed is connected to our cultural distance from ancient audiences.

As modern readers, we often find ourselves at a loss when it comes to evaluating epic actions without seeming terribly anachronistic or facing criticism for projecting our values on the past. The solution to this challenge is not maintaining neutrality, but allowing our responses to surface, interrogating them alongside the narrative, and using both ancient evidence and modern theoretical frameworks to ‘triangulate’ values. The point is not to cede evaluative ground, but to proceed with care, using transparency and owning our own perspectives to engage in a dialogue with the past rather than issuing a summary judgment.

My basic argument for both is that the non-combat murders that occur at the end of the Iliad and the Odyssey are certainly framed as excessive, if not transgressive, by each epic. These scenes contribute to an exploration of the dangers of the heroic figure who suffers and causes suffering. In the Odyssey, the slaughter functions, I think, to indicate the extremity of Odysseus’ vengeance and the stark violence endemic to autocracy. In the Iliad, we find the sacrifices as part of a narrative arc that takes Achilles far away from the realm of ‘civilized’ people and returns him again, if only briefly, to practices of reciprocity in book 24.

Arguments like this often encounter doubt, if not derision. This is why I think it is important to look at what the text does. In the case of the sacrifice of the twelve Trojan youths, the epic narrator marks it as “wicked” twice, once when the young men are captured in book 21 and again at the moment of their sacrifice in book 23. In between, Achilles calls them  “glorious children of the Trojans, I am ready to sacrifice because I am angry over your death” (23.22-23). When we get to the act nearly two hundred lines later, the narrator is subtle, but to my mind clear.

Homer, Il. 23.161-191

Once Agamemnon, the lord of men, heard [Achilles]
He immediately dispersed the army to their fine ships,
While those who were close to Patroklos stayed by and piled the wood.
They made a pyre one-hundred strides wide to all sides,
And placed the body on the top of it, as they grieved in their hearts.
They flayed and butchered many sheep and in addition
Many ambling cattle in front of the pyre. Then great-hearted
Achilles took the fat from all of them and covered the corpse.
He heaped it over the body from head to toe.
Then he added to the rest large jars of honey and oil,
Leaving them next to the platform. He toppled four, high-necked horses
On the pyre quickly while he groaned outloud.
There were nine dogs who waited at the table for the lord,
And Achilles added two of them to the pyre, after cutting their throats.
He slaughtered the twelve sons of the great-hearted Trojans
With bronze. He was contriving wicked things in his thoughts.
And he kindled the iron-strong power of the fire, so he could spread it around.
Then, indeed, he mourned out loud and called his friend by name.
“Hello, my Patroklos, mine even in Hades’ home.
I am finishing everything that I promised to you before.
The fire is consuming all of these men for you—the twelve
Fine sons of the great-hearted Trojans. I will not give Hektor
Up to Priam to put in the fire. I’ll give him to the dogs.”

So he threatened. But the dogs did not descend on Hektor.
No, Zeus’ daughter Aphrodite protected him from the dogs
All day and all night, keeping him anointed with rosy-olive oil,
Ambrosial stuff, so that he would not rip while being dragged.
And Phoebus Apollo cast over him a dark cloud
From the sky to the ground, and covered the whole land
Where the corpse stretched out, to stop the sun’s intensity
From drying out the skin still set on his muscles and limbs.

Αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ τό γ’ ἄκουσεν ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν ᾿Αγαμέμνων,
αὐτίκα λαὸν μὲν σκέδασεν κατὰ νῆας ἐΐσας,
κηδεμόνες δὲ παρ’ αὖθι μένον καὶ νήεον ὕλην,
ποίησαν δὲ πυρὴν ἑκατόμπεδον ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα,
ἐν δὲ πυρῇ ὑπάτῃ νεκρὸν θέσαν ἀχνύμενοι κῆρ.
πολλὰ δὲ ἴφια μῆλα καὶ εἰλίποδας ἕλικας βοῦς
πρόσθε πυρῆς ἔδερόν τε καὶ ἄμφεπον· ἐκ δ’ ἄρα πάντων
δημὸν ἑλὼν ἐκάλυψε νέκυν μεγάθυμος ᾿Αχιλλεὺς
ἐς πόδας ἐκ κεφαλῆς, περὶ δὲ δρατὰ σώματα νήει.
ἐν δ’ ἐτίθει μέλιτος καὶ ἀλείφατος ἀμφιφορῆας
πρὸς λέχεα κλίνων· πίσυρας δ’ ἐριαύχενας ἵππους
ἐσσυμένως ἐνέβαλλε πυρῇ μεγάλα στεναχίζων.
ἐννέα τῷ γε ἄνακτι τραπεζῆες κύνες ἦσαν,
καὶ μὲν τῶν ἐνέβαλλε πυρῇ δύο δειροτομήσας,
δώδεκα δὲ Τρώων μεγαθύμων υἱέας ἐσθλοὺς
χαλκῷ δηϊόων· κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα·
ἐν δὲ πυρὸς μένος ἧκε σιδήρεον ὄφρα νέμοιτο.
ᾤμωξέν τ’ ἄρ’ ἔπειτα, φίλον δ’ ὀνόμηνεν ἑταῖρον·
χαῖρέ μοι ὦ Πάτροκλε καὶ εἰν ᾿Αΐδαο δόμοισι·
πάντα γὰρ ἤδη τοι τελέω τὰ πάροιθεν ὑπέστην,
δώδεκα μὲν Τρώων μεγαθύμων υἱέας ἐσθλοὺς
τοὺς ἅμα σοὶ πάντας πῦρ ἐσθίει· ῞Εκτορα δ’ οὔ τι
δώσω Πριαμίδην πυρὶ δαπτέμεν, ἀλλὰ κύνεσσιν.
῝Ως φάτ’ ἀπειλήσας· τὸν δ’ οὐ κύνες ἀμφεπένοντο,
ἀλλὰ κύνας μὲν ἄλαλκε Διὸς θυγάτηρ ᾿Αφροδίτη
ἤματα καὶ νύκτας, ῥοδόεντι δὲ χρῖεν ἐλαίῳ
ἀμβροσίῳ, ἵνα μή μιν ἀποδρύφοι ἑλκυστάζων.
τῷ δ’ ἐπὶ κυάνεον νέφος ἤγαγε Φοῖβος ᾿Απόλλων
οὐρανόθεν πεδίον δέ, κάλυψε δὲ χῶρον ἅπαντα
ὅσσον ἐπεῖχε νέκυς, μὴ πρὶν μένος ἠελίοιο
σκήλει’ ἀμφὶ περὶ χρόα ἴνεσιν ἠδὲ μέλεσσιν.

We should start by noting how much this passage is doing. Consider the multiple mentions of grief and lamentation, making it clear that Achilles is in an extreme state of mind. The focus on the process of sacrifice may in part be a reflection on the importance of the ritual for processing grief. As anyone who has lost a loved one has learned, the concrete steps funerary rituals give us in the immediate days after our loss provides us with a feeling of control, of agency at a moment when we have been reminded that we ultimately have anything but that (over death). Rituals provide an outlet for grief, but they also importantly provide us with something to do. From a neurobiological perspective, sudden loss and extreme grief triggers a survival impulse: Achilles’ lashing out and slaughter is probably too ordered to simply be this, but his adaptation of ritual and his slowness to proceed may be a reflex of traumatic shock.

But to focus on the possibility of narrative judgment: the poem itself increases the importance of the human sacrifice by placing it in an ascending scale with the other victims. We start with the normal sheep and cattle, followed by the surprise dogs, ending with the twelve Trojan youths who are called “fine sons” of the great-hearted Trojans here, when they were referred as boys in book 21 and mere children before. The relevance of that choice increases for me: the label of sons enters them into families, into relationships that are torn by Achilles’ acts and the use of the adjective recalls the heroic language of nobility in the exchange with Lykaon in book 21 as well. Achilles repeats this line when he mourns later on, and a scholion reports that the adjective esthlous may have been replaced in some texts with a simple demonstrative toutous “these sons”).

Regardless of the repetition (or lack thereof), the narrative’s description is followed by the clearest line of judgment in the epic, the statement that Achilles is “devising wicked deeds” (κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα·). If there is any doubt that there is something off about this sequence, following the speech, Achilles has trouble lighting the pyre and must appeal to the gods for help.

The cumulative effect of the rhetorical treatment (placing the slaughter at the end of a list, in the longest description), the familial and qualitative description of the youths, in contrast with earlier lines, the narrative judgment on the deeds, and the appearance of divine dissatisfaction, is to mark the sacrifice as extreme and as a feature of Achilles’ particular excess in his grief.

The view from outside

My reading of this scene requires a little more work to support. The cultural meaning of human sacrifice may be different for ancient audiences, and it is important to measure our response against what we can reconstruct from theirs. As Dennis Hughes writes in his introduction to Patroklos’ funeral (1991, 49), ancient authors were perplexed, if not horrified by this scene: “This incident so distressed Plato that he simply denied that Achilles had committed the deed, and the reactions of many modern Homeric scholars have been similar: shock and distaste (reactions sometimes projected back onto the psyche of Homer himself), a quick dismissal, or, more often than not, complete silence”.

The specter of human sacrifice overshadows the Iliad. The Trojan War narrative centers the sacrifice of Iphigenia to start the war, but other traditions also have the Trojan Polyxena sacrificed for/to Achilles as well. War itself demands a kind of sacrifice from soldiers, but the Iliad in particular sets up the Achaeans to be ‘sacrificial victims’ to Achilles’ honor while the surrogacy of Patroklos has something of a ritual substitution sacrifice to it. (Margo Kitts’ work is particular good at summarizing issues regarding sacrifice in the Iliad)

There have been questions for some time about to what extent Achilles’ sacrifice echoes historical practices. In addition to myths of human sacrifice in Athens, as well as in Sparta and Syracuse, and more broadly in myth among the family of Lykaon, or the self-sacrifice of the Lokrian Maidens, there is some archaeological evidence of human sacrifice in ancient Greece and theoretical speculation that ‘scapegoat’ narratives may have been related to ancient sacrificial practices. Herodotus mentions it too, but as an extreme. There is some caution here though: As Albert Henrichs suggests, the evidence for human sacrifice outside of Greece is far better than inside it, during the bronze age.

As Dennis Hughes argues, our interpretations have tended to imagine that this sacrifice was like other animal sacrifices or performed to provide Patroklos attendants in the Underworld and that the Iliad’s composers had lost knowledge about the practice. The other possibility—that Achilles’ act is meant as extreme, as an extension of his rage, is reconcilable with human sacrifice as an actual or forgotten practice. As Hughes notes, it seems difficult to argue that Homer is “downplaying” the incident when he mentions it three times, goes to great length to describe it, and then leaves the human portion of the sacrifice in the rhetorically marked, final position. It is perfectly possible that Achilles’ sacrifice is both an extreme outlet for his rage and a recognizable ‘ritual killing’ with real world antecedents.

This last point is important: As Henrichs argues, from the perspective of Greek myth and tradition, human sacrifice can happen but it is extreme and ritual killing “is something which uncivilized men inflict upon one another but which no Greek in his right mind with contemplate” (2019, 63). Achilles is steadily depicted throughout the Iliad as someone who has withdrawn from the communion of human beings, flirting with the excesses of the god of war when he is not descending to the animal realm. Tamara Neal demonstrates that Achilles has a particular blood-lust, marked even for the Iliad, shared with Ares and predatory animals in similes. His rage pushes him to animalistic and supernatural extreme, but at this moment in the epic, the sense seems more of irresolvable grief.

The excess of the sacrifice functions in part to characterize the agent of the act. As Sarah Hitch argues, sacrifices in the Iliad are subject to a system of reciprocity that emphasizes the status of the doer. The sacrifice in Iliad 23 is an evocation not just of the magnitude of Achilles’ grief, but the otherworldliness of his character. To my mind, it is part of a larger motif exploring the threat that figures like Achilles represent to their communities. Achilles’ life (and death) is one of cosmic proportion and significance. This sacrifice shows that his loss is too.

A short Bibliography on the sacrifice

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Bremmer, J. (1978) “Heroes, Rituals and the Trojan War,” Studi storico-religiosi 2, 5–38.

Burkert, W. (1966a) “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies7, 87–121.

Clement, P. (1934) “New Evidence for the Origin of the Iphigeneia Legend,” L’Antiquité classique 3, 393–409.

Compton, Todd M. 2006. Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History. Hellenic Studies Series 11. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. 

Graf, F. (1978) “Die lokrischen Mädchen,” Studi storico-religiosi 2, 61–79

Henrichs, Albert. “3. Human sacrifice in Greek religion: Three case studies”. II Greek Myth and Religion, edited by Harvey Yunis, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 37-68. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110449242-003

Hitch, Sarah. 2009. King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 25. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.

Hughes, Dennis. 1991. Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge.

Kitts, Margo. “KILLING, HEALING, AND THE HIDDEN MOTIF OF OATH-SACRIFICE IN ILIAD 21.” Journal of Ritual Studies 13, no. 2 (1999): 42–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44368561.

Kitts, Margo. “SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE IN THE ILIAD.” Journal of Ritual Studies 16, no. 1 (2002): 19–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44368624.

Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad: The Force That Moves the Epic and Its Audience. Oxford.

Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.

Neal, Tamara. “Blood and Hunger in the Iliad.” Classical Philology 101, no. 1 (2006): 15–33. https://doi.org/10.1086/505669.

Redfield, James R. The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Italy. Princeton, 2004.

Seaford, Richard. “Homeric and Tragic Sacrifice.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 119 (1989), 87-95

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 22. 

Once Achilles kills Hektor and starts to mistreat his body, the narrative provides the clearest judgment on his acts as possible by marking the treatment as shameful (ἀεικέα μήδετο ἔργα.) and then moving from his excess to the responses of the epic’s internal audience. Almost too late do we as the external viewers of the horror realize that Hektor’s death has been witnessed by his people and members of his family. In an echo of the first part of the book, we hear from Priam and then Hecuba as they begin their laments. The structure is in a way an expansion of the rhetorical rising tricolon: Priam and Hecuba are followed by a much longer segment that moves us toward Andromache.

Andromache, as some audience members might recall, was last seen in book 6 when she was sent by Hektor back to her weaving. We find her near the end of book 22 weaving still. When the narrative takes us to her, she is calling for a bath to be drawn for her husband. But when she hears the sounds from without, she freezes, dropping the weaving from her hands. In a scene Charles Segal has described as an anagnorisis (the word Aristotle uses for recognition or realization in tragedy), Andromache is overcome, she faints, and needs the help of her attendants to go outside. She removes her veil, and is compared to a maenad “in a state of ecstatic frenzy” (as Christos Tsagalis puts it).

The prolonged setup accompanied by the description of grief’s impact on her body introduces one of the most remarkable speeches in Homer. Once so complex and moving, that if the epic’s political and reciprocal themes were not still left to be resolved, this might be the poem’s true end.

Iliad 22.482-507

“And now you go under the hidden places of the earth to Hades’ home,
But you leave me in hateful grief, a widow in our home—
And your child too, still an infant, the one we bore
You and I, ill-fated, Hektor, you will not be of any use to him
Since you have died, and he won’t be to you.

For even if he should escape the Achaeans’ war of many tears,
Still there would be toil and griefs for this child afterward.
For others will deprive him of his lands.

The day that makes a child an orphan separates him from his peers.
He looks down all the time; his cheeks are covered in tears;
And the child goes in need to his father’s friends,
Asking one for a cloak and another for a tunic.
He holds out his little cup while they pity him—
He can moisten his lips but never fill his hunger.

A luckier child chases him from the feast,
Striking him with his hands and laying into him with words:
“Go away—your father doesn’t dine with us.”

And the cheerful child will return to his widowed mother,
Astyanax, who used to eat only marrow and the rich fat
Of sheep as he sat on his father’s needs.
Then when sleep would come over him, he would stop playing
And rest on a bed in the arms of a nurse, his heart full
Of everything good on that soft bed.

But now, he would suffer much once he has lost this dear father,
Astyanax, as the Trojans call him as a nickname,
For you alone defended their bulwarks and great walls.”

νῦν δὲ σὺ μὲν ᾿Αΐδαο δόμους ὑπὸ κεύθεσι γαίης
ἔρχεαι, αὐτὰρ ἐμὲ στυγερῷ ἐνὶ πένθεϊ λείπεις
χήρην ἐν μεγάροισι· πάϊς δ’ ἔτι νήπιος αὔτως,
ὃν τέκομεν σύ τ’ ἐγώ τε δυσάμμοροι· οὔτε σὺ τούτῳ
ἔσσεαι ῞Εκτορ ὄνειαρ ἐπεὶ θάνες, οὔτε σοὶ οὗτος.
ἤν περ γὰρ πόλεμόν γε φύγῃ πολύδακρυν ᾿Αχαιῶν,
αἰεί τοι τούτῳ γε πόνος καὶ κήδε’ ὀπίσσω
ἔσσοντ’· ἄλλοι γάρ οἱ ἀπουρίσσουσιν ἀρούρας.
ἦμαρ δ’ ὀρφανικὸν παναφήλικα παῖδα τίθησι·
πάντα δ’ ὑπεμνήμυκε, δεδάκρυνται δὲ παρειαί,
δευόμενος δέ τ’ ἄνεισι πάϊς ἐς πατρὸς ἑταίρους,
ἄλλον μὲν χλαίνης ἐρύων, ἄλλον δὲ χιτῶνος·
τῶν δ’ ἐλεησάντων κοτύλην τις τυτθὸν ἐπέσχε·
χείλεα μέν τ’ ἐδίην’, ὑπερῴην δ’ οὐκ ἐδίηνε.
τὸν δὲ καὶ ἀμφιθαλὴς ἐκ δαιτύος ἐστυφέλιξε
χερσὶν πεπλήγων καὶ ὀνειδείοισιν ἐνίσσων·
ἔρρ’ οὕτως· οὐ σός γε πατὴρ μεταδαίνυται ἡμῖν.
δακρυόεις δέ τ’ ἄνεισι πάϊς ἐς μητέρα χήρην
᾿Αστυάναξ, ὃς πρὶν μὲν ἑοῦ ἐπὶ γούνασι πατρὸς
μυελὸν οἶον ἔδεσκε καὶ οἰῶν πίονα δημόν·
αὐτὰρ ὅθ’ ὕπνος ἕλοι, παύσαιτό τε νηπιαχεύων,
εὕδεσκ’ ἐν λέκτροισιν ἐν ἀγκαλίδεσσι τιθήνης
εὐνῇ ἔνι μαλακῇ θαλέων ἐμπλησάμενος κῆρ·
νῦν δ’ ἂν πολλὰ πάθῃσι φίλου ἀπὸ πατρὸς ἁμαρτὼν
᾿Αστυάναξ, ὃν Τρῶες ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν·
οἶος γάρ σφιν ἔρυσο πύλας καὶ τείχεα μακρά.

In describing this speech from a narratological perspective, Rebecca Muich notes that even in her grief, Andromache seems to recede into her narrative, imagining someone else’s pain, creating a scene where “her own experiences do not figure into [the] story” (14). Her focus on Hektor’s place in book 6 and his absence in this first speech “seeks to stress the father’s role in grounding a child within a community” (14) and indicates, in part, that Andromache cannot see past the personal loss to her family unit and see the impact on the whole city (contrasting with Hektor’s earlier emphasis on his responsibility to the people).

I was profoundly moved by this speech for its vividness and terrible irony long before I was a parent myself. The first time I read this passage in Greek as I prepared for my PhD exams, I wept while completing it. As a parent now, I struggle even to think about reading it. The terrible irony of course is that Astyanax is actually killed by the victors before he can suffer the deprivations his mother predicts, although she does fear this fate:

Iliad 24.732–738

“You, child, will also either follow me
Where you will toil completing the wretched works
Of a cruel master or some Achaean will grab you
And throw you from the wall to your evil destruction
Because he still feels anger at Hektor killing his brother
Or father or son, since many a man of the Achaeans dined
On the endless earth under Hektor’s hands.”

… σὺ δ’ αὖ τέκος ἢ ἐμοὶ αὐτῇ
ἕψεαι, ἔνθά κεν ἔργα ἀεικέα ἐργάζοιο
ἀθλεύων πρὸ ἄνακτος ἀμειλίχου, ἤ τις ᾿Αχαιῶν
ῥίψει χειρὸς ἑλὼν ἀπὸ πύργου λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον
χωόμενος, ᾧ δή που ἀδελφεὸν ἔκτανεν ῞Εκτωρ
ἢ πατέρ’ ἠὲ καὶ υἱόν, ἐπεὶ μάλα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν
῞Εκτορος ἐν παλάμῃσιν ὀδὰξ ἕλον ἄσπετον οὖδας.

In the popular tradition the one who carries out the killing of Astyanax is Odysseus, that ‘hero’ of that other epic who gets to go home to his own son and father. If the way we talk about and treat our enemies dehumanizes them—and us—what does it mean when we murder, torture, or harm children? This is not an ‘academic’ question in the Iliad. As I discuss in a post on book 6, transgressive violence– ‘war crimes’–is central to the epic’s exploration of what rage and revenge does to people. When Agamemnon tells his brother they will kill even children in the wombs, it anticipates Astyanax’s future death and increases the pain we feel for Andromache in book 6.

In the future Andromache imagines, Astyanax is marginalized even among his own people by the loss of his father–he loses his status, his friends, and his former happiness. But in a foreign land, he loses all hope of happiness–he is a slave to another if he is lucky to be alive. The reality is, of course, worse–given that nearly every account of what happens in the sack of Troy (or after) has Astyanax dying terribly.

And the future is not much better for Andromache. Her pairing with Hektor as Achilles’ opposite is matched with her possession by Achilles’ son, Neoptolemos, who is awarded her in his father’s stead. Andromache bears children to the son of her husband’s killer (and her story is explored in different ways in Euripides’ Andromache and Trojan Women.

In a moving article, Franco Maiullari suggests that taking three of Andromache’s speeches together helps us see here as a character suffering from trauma: first, the loss of her family (brothers, father, mother), described in dialogue in book 6; second, this speech from book 22, when she is described as in some kind of a trance before her speech. Maiullari focuses on Andromache’s collapse and the narrative’s description of her as nearly deed. And then, in the speech herself, her emphasis on her son instead of herself shows her fixating, looking away from the grief, but perhaps projecting her own experience as an orphan to her child’s future. The third speech is her final lament for Hektor, where she revisits many of the same themes, in a tighter, charged fashion. Maiullari suggests that Astyanax becomes a stand-in for both parents and, perhaps, for the lost future of the city: “Astyanax is the symbol of a childhood that will always remain in its potential state: a tragic repeated destiny for the mother and an unfulfilled promise for the father” (2016, 26).

Andromache’s imagined future hurts even more than it should because even this vision of suffering is less grievous than Astyanax’s actual death and Andromache’s passage into slavery and the sexual violence it implies. The image of the lonely child, separated from his peers is an echo of Andromache at that moment, bereft of her only family, looking forward to a future of begging and shame.

But it will be one without this precious son. And in the end, I think this is what we should take away from the Iliad–how violence destroys cities, how it takes away all that is good, and how the promises of goods and glory are empty and hollow in the face of irreparable loss.  While we know all too well that the ability is about heroes and their futile rage, recent books by Emily Austin and Rachel Lesser remind us that epic is also about loss and desire for what can never be returned.

Children dying in war, murdered when they should be playing and dreaming, should be an unforgivable sin. They represent so many futures foreclosed, so much hope and potential undone for reasons that have nothing to do with them. But what is violence apart from unreasonable, unforgivable loss? The Iliad shows us this through the deaths of Patroklos, Hektor, and the future death of this child, the “lord of the city” through whose singular future we grieve the collapse of an entire people.

A short bibliography

Biondi, Francesca. “Il velo di Andromaca in Il. 22, 468-472 : analisi della tradizione esegetica antica.” Giornale Italiano di Filologia, vol. 69, 2017, pp. 11-25. Doi: 10.1484/J.GIF.5.114572

Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Dimock, Wai Chee. “After Troy: Homer, Euripides, total war.” Rethinking tragedy. Ed. Felski, Rita. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 2008. 66-81

Casey Dué. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. 

Easterling, Patricia E.. “The tragic Homer.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London, vol. XXXI, 1984, pp. 1-8. Doi: 10.1111/j.2041-5370.1984.tb00524.x

Karanika, Andromache. “Women’s tangible time: perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer.” Narratives of time and gender in antiquity. Eds. Eidinow, Esther and Maurizio, Lisa. London ; New York: Routledge, 2020. 13-27.

LEFKOWITZ, MARY R. “The Heroic Women of Greek Epic.” The American Scholar 56, no. 4 (1987): 503–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41211464.

Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad: The Force That Moves the Epic and Its Audience. Oxford.

Lohmann, Dieter. Die Andromache-Szenen der Ilias. Ansätze und Methoden der Homer-Interpretation. Spudasmata; XLII. Hildesheim: Olms, 1988.

Maiullari, Franco. “Andromache, a post-traumatic character in Homer.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, N. S., no. 113, 2016, pp. 11-27.

Muich, Rebecca. “Focalization and Embedded Speech in Andromache’s Iliadic Laments.” Illinois Classical Studies, no. 35–36 (2011): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.5406/illiclasstud.35-36.0001.

Segal, Charles. “Andromache’s anagnorisis. Formulaic artistry in Iliad 22.437-476.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. LXXV, 1971, pp. 33-57.

Tsagalis, Christos. 2008. The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 29. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.