Editor’s note: Elton and I will be hosting an Odyssey-anticipation open house from 10-11 EDT (2 PM GMT) Next Monday, July 13th. Email for details
Disclaimer: I’ve deliberately avoided all trailers, as well as anything else written about the film. This isn’t a film review: it’s a reflection on what we might have to look forward to, given the source material and Nolan’s previous film output.
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is not released for another 10 days and it’s already created quite the stir. A lot of angry people have got angry about the casting; newspaper columns are full with ideas about how the Odysseyspeaks to contemporary concerns; classicists around the world have been pitching in with their thoughts, including no lesser figures than Mary Beard and this blog’s host. Still, I’ve been disappointed before (Troy: the movie, anyone?). And yet I can’t help feeling excited for this movie.
So, why am I excited? It seems to me that Homer’s Odyssey raises three particular issues with which the director has been grappling over the course of his career.
First, the Odyssey is an epic. That may seem an obvious thing to say, but I think it’s worth dwelling on. In the literal sense, Homer’s Odyssey is composed in a genre known as early Greek heroic epic — epic deriving from the Greek “epos”, which means a “word” or “utterance”, especially one that is authoritative. A major function of epic as a genre is to be grand in scale and in ambition, as, for example, in the epic Theogony, where Hesiod tells the story of the cosmos. Similarly, Homer’s poems the Iliad and Odyssey take on the entire Troy story, the former the ten-year conflict for the city, the latter one hero’s long-delayed return home.
Jean-Baptiste Mallet ( 1759 -1835), Homer reciting the Odyssey, oil on canvas, 25 cm x 32 cm. Aucitoned at Hôtel Drouot,
Epic as a genre is also an origins tale: where Hesiod narrates the beginnings of the cosmos through to the establishment of Zeus’s rule, Homer’s poems narrate the foundations of civic society and the values to which later Greeks adhered. They became, for the ancient Greeks, foundational narratives: not only great tales of conflict and companionship, glory and endurance, but also stories that explain the human condition. And with the Renaissance interest in all things ancient Greek and Roman, epic as the master narrative became a critical means by which European nations made competing claims for their own cultural authority (think Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Paradise Lost, following the precedent established by Virgil’s Aeneid). There is a direct line from Homeric poetry to the cinematic tradition in which Nolan is working.
Not that the Odyssey has been served well by film or TV. When I was in grad school in 1997, I remember also being excited for the miniseries directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, starring Armand Assante as Odysseus and Greta Scacchi as Penelope — and finding it, well, funny. (Odysseus railing against a mouth superimposed onto a raging sea, which was meant to symbolise Poseidon, sticks in my mind.) It wasn’t epic. It was all a bit trivial. Small.
That’s the challenge for Nolan, to make the Odysseyepic. The reason why I’m excited is because he has a great track record of making his films big, even at a technical level (where he has been an innovator in IMAX technology). One could point to science fiction films like Inception (2010) or Interstellar (2014) for the depiction of worlds at an epic scale, but you could even take his latest blockbuster, Oppenheimer (2023). Ostensibly a biography, Nolan transforms the genre precisely by exploiting the technology to project Cillian Murphy’s face onto a massive screen so that it is seen at the same scale as a landscape or a star system. Appropriately so for the man who saw himself as having become “death, the destroyer of worlds”. Nolan does epic.
Second, identity. The very first word of the Odyssey is “andra“, which means “man”. This could refer to “the man”, Odysseus, who remains conspicuously unnamed in the poem’s trailer. Instead, we get teased by ways of describing this man, such as by the adjective “polytropos” (literally: “much-turning”). Part of what the poem sets out to do is to explore who Odysseus is. Just taking this epithet, for example: what does “polytropos” mean? Should we take it literally, to mean the man who has been tossed here and there by the sea? Or is it more metaphorical, referring to a mind that is always “turning this way and that”? And does that express Odysseus’s cunning or deceitfulness? What kind of man is he (going to be)? After all, Odysseus is also the absent husband — andra again in the Greek — returning to reclaim his wife and household. But andra can also simply mean “man”: what kind of example is Odysseus for us? Certainly, he is less the demi-god kind of hero that Achilles is portrayed as in the Iliad. Odysseus is someone more like us, who has to live by his wits, who suffers and makes others suffer, who endures.
Nolan’s interest in identity runs through all his films. A classic example is his early Memento (2000), where Guy Pierce’s character, who suffers from anterograde amnesia and is unable to store recent memories, has to try to piece together who he is and how he should act through the polaroid photographs that he takes. Or take the Prestige (2006), where the big “reveal” is the presence of another brother of whom we weren’t aware: a pair of identical twins sharing one identity. But for me the best example is his Batman trilogy. Like Homeric epic, Nolan creates an origins story for a superhero, who, before his Batman Begins (2005), had been more a camp, than dark, crusader, and by doing so revolutionises what you can do with comic-book depictions in film. The issue of identify is writ large in the follow-up The Dark Knight (2008), where the Joker not only constantly challenges “the Batman” to unmask himself and reveal his true identity, but also suggests that his true identity is more like his, that they are in fact two sides of the same coin, that Batman “completes” him. At the end of the film, we see Batman explicitly renounce “hero” status (assigning that to the dead Harvey Dent) and accept his role as the Dark Knight.
Third, time and narrative. I initially thought that I was going to treat these two issues separately, but I quickly realised that I couldn’t. For Nolan’s interest in time is an interest in narrative, in how to tell the story. Memento wears this self-consciousness on its sleeve, as we are put in the position of the main character, trying to piece together the story that the film is telling, as the protagonist tries to piece together his memory. Nolan even plays with the biographical genre to interweave three different time periods that both explore Oppenheimer’s life and put his work into context. Dunkirk (2017) similarly disrupts the conventional war narrative by taking three different ways of telling time — by the week, day and hour — to tell the story of the three different experiences of the armed forces at Dunkirk (the army, navy and airforce respectively). Or think about Inception (2010), with its tripartite deep dive into a single person’s consciousness, where storytelling meets world building (quite literally).
The Odyssey doesn’t just start in media res as so many other works do (like its epic rival, the Iliad, for example). For the first fifth of its running time, it doesn’t even feature its hero but rather shows us what’s happening back at home, which helps us see both what makes home so important to Odysseus and why he needs to get back home now. (It’s also about identity, as we learn along with his son, Telemachus, how to survive in this post Iliadic world.) Most notably, however, the Odyssey disrupts the telling of the story by messing with the chronology. All those bits that we may have heard about — Odysseus’s misadventures with Circe, for example, his visit to the underworld, his confrontation with Cyclops — all these are told in flashback, by Odysseus himself. Yes, Odysseus is the first post-modern text, where the protagonist takes over the telling of the tale in the manner of a Tristam Shandy. Again, incidentally, this narrative device deepens the issue of identity, as we learn first-hand what kind of enduring, and tricky, figure he is, as he tells the story of how he managed to lose all his men and why he is now alone, begging to be sped back home.
No spoilers about what happens when he gets back home, only to say that the vengeance he meets out is more complicated and troubling than we might think or have anticipated. A flawed hero of the kind Nolan has been exploring throughout his films.
After the gods have decided to force Achilles to return Hektor’s body, Thetis is dispatched to talk to her son and Iris tells Priam to go with a ransom to Achilles. Priam meets resistance from his family, but eventually he begins his journey across the plains of war.
Homer, Iliad 24. 322-333
“The old man climbed quickly into his chariot And drove through the foregate and the resonating passage, The miles drove the four-wheeled cart And wise Idaios guided them in turn. Then the horses Were coming from behind. The old man was striking them with a goad Moving them quickly through the city. All of his loved ones Were following him. Mourning as if he were going to his death. Then they descended down from the city and came to the meadow. But they family members turn back again and arrived in the city, The sons and sons-in-law, and the two of them [Idaios and Priam] Did not escape the notice of wide-browed Zeus as they entered the plain. He saw them and felt pity. Quickly he turned to his dear son Hermes And addressed him:
This speech is filled with the language of burial and death. One could almost imagine that when Priam’s sons and sons-in-law accompany him out of the city, they are engaging in a funerary procession, taking Priam himself to his final resting place. Even more, the language evokes heroic journeys: when the narrative says “they went down from the city”, it uses the word kateban (κατέβαν), about as close as possible to katabasis, a term for a trip “down-country”, or to the underworld.
The middle section of book 24 is the movement from the city to the sea, from the confines of besieged Troy to the marginalized outpost of Achilles’ dwelling where Hektor’s mistreated body lies preserved by divine intervention. The length of this episode has multiple motivations with structural, dramatic, and symbolic forces. Structurally, the passage corresponds to the embassy to Chryses in book 1, building on that in a kind of doublet that expands to place greater emphasis on the subsequent scene.
As a feature of narrative structure, the movement through the space creates a kind of ‘real time’ delay, postponing the highly anticipated confrontation with suspense but also putting the audience through something of a transformative passage. Priam’s movement from the city to Achilles in the dead of night is dangerous: the atmosphere of the scene brings the audience along on that trip, narrowing in nearly on each step that it takes to bring these two together. The role-playing of Hermes as one of Achilles’ ‘henchmen’ provides another moment to think about divine and mortal double motivation: from one perspective we could tell the story without a god at all, imagining the scene from Priam’s point of view as an odd intersection between luck and desperation.
From the opposite perspective, this changes the way gods engage with men: Hermes and Apollo are brothers with complementary aspects (negotiated humorously in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes). They appear together in the Odyssey during Demodokos’ song of Ares and Aphrodite, audience members laughing at their humiliation. In this epic, Hermes has been mostly absent, but I suspect there are ritual/religious echoes in the change from book 1 where Apollo begins as a righteous god of rage, punishing the Greeks, to book 24 where he argues for the right of all humans to a burial and then is followed by Hermes’ intervention to help ensure that one particular human is buried. (Indeed, Malcolm Davies has seen a transformation in Hermes during the epic, see Davies 2020)
This is where we get into the symbolic too. It is significant in many ways that Hermes is the god selected to lead Priam to Achilles. Hermes is a god of the threshold, a divinity who represents the movement between different realms. He is in nearly every aspect a liminal god, one who has influence over the passage between different states and who can occupy the space between them. In this capacity, Hermes can ‘trigger’ some critical associations. As the psychopompos, “the marshal of the dead”, Hermes is the deity who leads souls from the realm of the living to Hades. In book 24 then, his appearance reinforces that Achilles is still in the realm of the dead: when he leads Priam from the city to the sea, he is taking him to a liminal place between worlds. Achilles is between the land and the sea, between the living and the dead, and between mortals and gods. It is almost as if the two ‘opposites’—the old and the young, the aggressor and the defender, the father and the son—can only meet in a place between worlds. And this betweenness is transitional. Through their pairing they move from an opposing to a binary pair, two men united in the certainty of their coming deaths and the pain of their losses.
Hermes’ intervention confirms that Priam and Achilles can only meet in an otherworldly place and confirms, on many different levels, the exceptional nature of the epic’s penultimate scene. Ancient audiences would have sensed much of this, but there is a good chance we modern audiences miss even more. As a friend of mine, Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui shows, this scene engages with a tradition of “katabasis”, the mythological motif of entering the underworld to complete some heroic tasks. Earlier authors (e.g. Robert 1950) imagined some version of the story where Priam goes to save his son from death. This line of thinking brings Homer together with stories of Orpheus.
Gold orphic tablet and case found in Petelia, southern Italy (British Museum)[35]
Orphism in the ancient world denotes a likely loosely associated set of practices and beliefs about death and rebirth, named for the mythical singer Orpheus. We have many fragments and texts from orphic practices in antiquity, but they have traditionally not been paired with so-called literary texts like epic, as if ancient audiences possessed some kind of cognitive ‘firewall’ between the stories of heroes and gods and the stories of….heroes and gods? But it is pretty clear that there is significant resonance between the language and traditions of orphism and key scenes in Homeric epic.
As Miguel notes, book 24 is replete with the language and motifs of a journey to the world of the dead, shared not just with Greek religion and myth, but with Near Eastern motifs as well. (Think of aspects of the tales of Odysseus in Odyssey 11, Heracles in his labors, or the journey of Gilgamesh after the death of Enkidu.) Priam enters the world of the dead at 24.349-353 and exits it again later (692-95). Miguel even argues that Achilles’ home is “clearly constructed on the model of the house of hades” (46):
“This helps explain why Achilles’ tent or hut (448:) in a soldier s camp is nevertheless described as a large dwelling-place, with roof, courtyard, and bolted gates (448-56). These gates, we are told, only Achilles can open by himself (456), which recalls the description of Hades as “fastener of the gate”;, precisely in the context of Heracles’ catabasis: 8.367).28 This transformation of a warrior s hut into a megaron complex is best explained by the association with the House of the King of the Underworld.”
The Iliad’s Achilles is something of a god of death—he deals it out from the beginning of the poem and like Hades himself has distributed pain without prejudice, ending the lives of his near and dear as much as those of his enemies. He ends up “figuratively playing Hades’ role at the end” of the epic (Herrero de Jáuregui 2011, 48) creating a potentially ironic intertext with the Achilles of the Odyssey who wishes to be a farmhand rather than prince of the dead. As king of the dead, though, Achilles receives a ransom that echoes rites in myth and reflected in the Orphic tablets, the supplication of Hades and Persephone for the soul of the dead. The process of the laying out of Hektor’s corpse followed by his transport back to his home may echo burial practices of the prosthesis (“laying out”) and the funerary procession (“ekphora”) as well.
Miguel also notes the overlap between narratives of katabasis and rituals connected with death. The domains are interconnected and co-influencing, but not in a fixed way. Even as Iliad 24 draws on narrative and ritual traditions concerning the transition from the world of the living to the dead, it also changes these traditions and becomes yet another cultural intertext for thinking about them. In a way, this recreation of a traditional story through Priam is a follow-up to Apollo’s declaration of Hektor’s rite to burial and even Hera’s insistence in book 16 (when speaking of Sarpedon) that funeral rites are the geras (prize of honor) of the dead.
The whole framework of book 24 is to ensure that Hektor receives this prize, which closes the theme of honors opened in book 1 when Achilles was deprived of his own prize. The performance of time and the echoes of an underworld journey serve in part to create a geras equal to Hektor’s status and Priam’s emotional loss. By making Achilles the agent who delivers on this obligation, the social-cosmic rupture of book 1 is closed. It is not enough for Achilles to repair his own honor, he must be in a position to guarantee that someone else’s geras is returned, even in death.
Priam at the feet of Achilles by Eugène Carrière (1876)
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.
Bernabe, A. and Jimenez, A. 2008. Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets. Trans, by M. Chase. Leiden: Brill
Malcolm Davies, ‘From night to night: Apollo, Artemis and Hermes in Homer’, in Ο επάνω και ο κάτω κόσμος στο ομηρικό και αρχαϊκό έπος: από τα πρακτικά του ΙΓ’ Διεθνούς Συνεδρίου για την « Οδύσσεια » : Ιθάκη, 25-29 Αυγούστου 2017, ed. by Menelaos Christopoulos and Machi Païzi-Apostolopoulou (Ithaki: Kentro Odysseiakon Spoudon, 2020), pp. 383-392.
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
De Jong, Irene J. F.. “Homerische verteltechniek : de ontmoeting tussen Hermes en Priamus in Ilias 24.” Lampas, vol. XXIII, 1990, pp. 370-383.
Hooker, J. T. 1988 “The Cults of Achilles.” RhM 131:
Mayhew, Robert. “Aristotle on Hermes’ sandals in Schol. T Iliad 24.340: a neglected « fragment » ?.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 66, no. 2, 2016, pp. 777-780. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838816000628\
Most, G. W. 1992. “II poeta nell’Ade: catabasi epica e teoria dell’epos tra Omero e Virgilio.” SIFC 10: 1014-26.
Nagy, G. 1979. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Poulheria Kyriakou, ‘Reciprocity and gifts in the encounters of Diomedes with Glaucus and Achilles with Priam in the « Iliad »’, Hermes, 150.2 (2022) 131-149. Doi: 10.25162/hermes-2022-0009
Robert, E 1950. Homere. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France
Segal, C. 1971. The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad. Leiden:
Shiffman, Gary Adam. “« Going alone » at Iliad 24. 198-205.” Classical Quarterly, vol. XLII, 1992, pp. 269-270. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838800042750
Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 1981. “To Die and to Enter the House of Hades: Homer, Before and After.” In Whaley, J. ed. Mirrors of Mortality. London: Europa
Wathelet, P. 1988. “Priam aux Enfers ou le retour du corps d’Hector.” LEC
West, Stephanie. “Priam’s cup: a note on Iliad 24.429-36.” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 40, no. 1-4, 2000, pp. 489-494. Doi: 10.1556/AAnt.40.2000.1-4.45
This post is a basic introduction to readingIliad 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.
A detail of the Toledo amphora, showing the ransom of Hector. c 515 BCE
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.
Apollo and Artemis. Tondo of an Attic red-figure cup.. Louvre. c 470 BCE
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.
Priam begs Achilles to release the body of Hector. Silver cup made in Capua, south Italy, in the early 1st century AD. Found in 1920 in the grave of a ca. 30-year-old man in Hoby, Lolland, Denmark.
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.
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.
Jérôme-Martin Langlois, Priam at the feet of Achilles 1809
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.
A few years ago I posted a bit from Plato’s Ion, discussing the proposition that there is something about laughter that is alien to the expectations of Homeric performance. In doing so, I perhaps was not specific enough in focusing just on Homer. There was an entire tradition of epic parody that was predicated on people knowing epic forms and norms. Athenaeus, in his Deipnosophists, has one of his speakers trace the founding of parody to the iambic poet Hipponax:
Polemon, in the twelfth book of his To Timaios, writes about his studies on the authors of parody “I would call Boeiotos and Euboios word-smiths since they play deftly with multiple meanings and they surpass the poets who preceded them in earlier generations. But it must be admitted that the founder of this genre was Hipponax, the iambic poet. For he writes as follows in hexameter:
“Muse, tell me the tale the sea-swallowing Stomach-slicing, son of Eurymedon, who eats without order, How he died a terrible death thanks to a vile vote in the public council along the strand of the barren sea.”
Parody is also accredited to Epicharmus of Syracuse in some of his plays, Cratinus the Old Comic poetry in his play The Sons of Eunêos, and also to Hegemon of Thasos, whom they used to call “Lentil Soup”, as he says himself.”
There were many forms of epic parody between the performance of Homeric epics and when Athenaeus composed his work: Animal epic, like that of the Batrakhomuomahkia, gastronomic parody, like that of Matro of Pitane, or the work of Hegemon the parodist. We have evidence for the performance of parody at competitions in the 4th century BCE.
There’s a sense of secondariness to parody that leads most reasonable thinkers to insist that parody follows the original. How can something be mocked if it does not already exist? But this common sense believe doesn’t accord either with the way epic developed in performance or with human behavior. Thanks to fragments from Panyasis or Aristeas we know that archaic epic could be ‘unheroic’ and more fantastic. We also know from early Greek art that there was little off limits: consider the Oedipus parody vases that show absurd figures and masturbating monsters.
But could it be funny? Howard Clarke sums it up thus: “the Odyssey has more laughs than the Iliad, 23 to 11. But the Iliad has more smiles, 14 ” (1969, 246). There’s laughter in Homer, but there’s general agreement that there’s a cruel streak to it. Joseph William Hewitt puts things a bit more starkly (1928, 437):
Neither Iliad nor Odyssey contain much of what we might call healthy, happy laughter. The sinister elements predominate heavily. One of these is scorn, aroused by a prophet’s warning or by what is thought to be a beggar’s braggadocio ” or bluff. The giggling of the maidens in the palace of Odysseus was inspired by scorn of the helpless beggar.6 There is also cruel scorn of an opponent’s weakness, a laugh of exultation over a fallen foe.’ Such laughter has a basis that is perfectly intelligible and, to a considerable degree, justifiable. Laughter often comes with the relief from tension.
One might wonder what a definition of happy and healthy laughter could be in a time of war, but that’s a different question altogether. Anyone who has been a teenager (or has watched Goodfellas) knows that laughter can be sinister, harmful. Humor, like most human reactions, is rife with opportunities for misunderstanding
When Hewitt identifies the relief from tension, I think he is probably thinking of that striking passage in Iliad 2 where there Achaeans laugh at Odysseus’ abuse of Thersities, “even though their aggrieved” (οἳ δὲ καὶ ἀχνύμενοί περ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ ἡδὺ γέλασσαν, 2.170). That concessive phrase gives Homerists interpretive fits because we don’t know at what they are aggrieved. The passage gets stranger too because the generic Achaean conversation insists that while Odysseus has done numberless good things (ὢ πόποι ἦ δὴ μυρί’ ᾿Οδυσσεὺς ἐσθλὰ ἔοργε, 272) this is the best thing he has done by far (νῦν δὲ τόδε μέγ’ ἄριστον ἐν ᾿Αργείοισιν ἔρεξεν, 274).
There’s certainly an edge to Homeric laughter. The two passages that always stick out for me are near the beginning and end of the Iliad. In the first, the gods laugh at Hephaestus as he limps around the Olympian party (1.595-600). It seems a cruel response to someone with a disability, but the laughter may have multiple purposes. It is certainly a relief from tension—Hera and Zeus were arguing dangerously prior to Hephaestus’ comic play—and it may rely as much on the role Hephaestus adopts as a cup-bearer as on his physical abilities. Even a physically able blacksmith god delivering drinks during a feast could seem inapposite when that role is usually reserved for a younger, more attractive servant/lover (as in Ganymede).
Humor often functions as a type of social control, laughing-at enforces cultural norms as a replacement for or prelude to violence. But sometimes bad luck is funny too. The second example is from the end of the funeral games when Ajax son of Oileus:
“Ajax then slipped while running, for Athena sabotaged him, In that place where the manure from the loud bulls who had been killed When swift-footed Achilles sacrificed them for Patroklos. His mouth and nose filled with bull shit when he fell. Much-enduing Odysseus took the bowl because he was first And shining Ajax was awarded the bull Because he came second. And he stood with his hands On its horns and addressed the Achaeans while spitting out manure: ‘Fools, the goddess sabotaged me, that one who before Always stood like a mother on Odysseus’ side, helping him.” So he spoke, and everyone laughed sweetly at him.
There are several funny things here: first, the physical and visual humor of a man slipping in dung and getting it all over his face. Second, I can’t help but find the fact that his prize for coming in second is another bull. Perhaps a promise of eternal bullshit. Third, there are metapoetic/traditional resonances at play. Athena is antagonistic against Ajax in the stories of the homecomings because he rapes Kassandra. The Odyssey makes it very clear: Ajax dies because of sacrilege; but Odysseus, favored by Athena, makes it home. I also suspect that there’s meaning in calling Achilles swift-footed here, when he is overseeing the race and witnessing a man who professes to be slow in the Odyssey defeating a younger hero in madcap fashion.
Boeotian black-figure skyphos, decorated with a scene of Odysseus being given a drugged potion by Circe, from the workshop of the Mystae Painter, from Thebes, Boeotia, late 5th century [reproduction]
There is, then, something judgmental about the humor. We might even imagine an ethical consideration. What we laugh at tells us something about what we value and who we are. How we use humor also helps us understand harsher, meaner emotions. These scenes strike me as well as being about watching and judging things. Each scene capitalizes upon the metatheatrical effect of being external audiences witnessing internal audiences having unpredictable responses. The Olympian laughter papers over an irreconcilable difference; Thersites’ beating is a reassertion of a political order—the laughter seals his place as a scapegoat. And Ajax’s ill-luck foreshadows some of the concerns that pace the Odyssey: that tenuous relationship between who we are, what we do, and the fate that takes us.
I started thinking about this again, in part, after reading through Oliver Thomas’ “The Mocking Homer of the Exegetical Scholia to the Iliad” (2022). While some of the framing of the question—e.g. what “kind of person” made the Iliad—differs from how I would put it, there’s real value in looking at how earlier interpreters understood the tone of the Homeric narrator. Thomas traces specific words in the scholia, starting with a case study of διασύρει. The first discussion, of whether Homer or Hektor are really mocking Paris (according to Plutarch and Eustathius) is a good introduction to the problem of narrative frames. The scholia seem much clearer on the ethical import of mocking Thersites, however. Surprising in the article is the degree to which some ancient scholars saw the depiction of Hektor as one of biting mockery.
Most valuable in the piece, for thinking about how ancient scholarship may have reshaped the Homeric poems, is the penultimate section where Thomas discusses the evidence for ancient critics like Aristonicus and Zoilos objecting to lines on the grounds that there were too silly or comedic, following earlier scholars like Aristotle who try to separate between the comic and the tragic. Thomas ends by rightly noting the tension between what these critics assert and what a majority of other comments show. Homeric poetry may not be farce, but it is engaged with a wide array of human experiences and emotions. Tears, violence, and range without laughter lack that ring of truth that makes art so moving.
Three men robbing a miser in his house, in a scene from a phlyax play painted by Asteas; c. 350–340 BC
Short Bibliography
n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.
Benson, R. D. (2021). Homeric Epithets that Seem to Be Humorously Ironic. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 29(1), 35–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.29.1.0035
Brown, Christopher G.. “Ares, Aphrodite, and the laughter of the gods.” Phoenix, vol. XLIII, 1989, pp. 283-293.
Caleb M. X. Dance, ‘Laughing with the gods : the tale of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer, Ovid, and Lucian’, Classical World, 113.4 (2019-2020) 405-434. Doi: 10.1353/clw.2020.0037
Clarke, Howard W.. “The humor of Homer.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXIV, 1969, pp. 246-252.
Colakis, Marianthe. “The Laughter of the Suitors in ‘Odyssey.’” The Classical World 79, no. 3 (1986): 137–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/4349839.
Guidorizzi, Giulio. “The laughter of the suitors: a case of collective madness in the Odyssey / transl. by Lowell Edmunds.” Poet, public, and performance in ancient Greece. Eds. Edmunds, Lowell, Wallace, Robert W. and Bettini, Maurizio. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 1997. 1-7.
Halliwell, F. Stephen (2008). Greek laughter: a study in cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr.
Halliwell, Stephen. “Imagining divine laughter in Homer and Lucian.” Greek laughter and tears : antiquity and after. Eds. Alexiou, Margaret and Cairns, Douglas. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 8. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2017. 36-53.
Hoffer, Stanley E.. “Telemachus’ « laugh » (Odyssey 21.105): deceit, authority, and communication in the bow contest.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 116, no. 4, 1995, pp. 515-531.
Hunt, W. Irving. “Homeric Wit and Humor.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1869-1896) 21 (1890): 48–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/2935808.
Konstan, David. “Laughing at ourselves: gendered humor in ancient Greece.” Laughter, humor, and the (un)making of gender: historical and cultural perspectives. Eds. Foka, Anna and Liliequist, Jonas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 13-29.
Donald E. Lavigne, ‘Bad Kharma: a « fragment » of the « Iliad » and iambic laughter’, Aevum Antiquum, N. S., 8. (2008) 115-138. Doi: 10.1400/210042
Levine, Daniel B.. Γέλῳ ἔκθανον. Laughter and the demise of the suitors. Univ. of Cincinnati, 1980.
Levine, Daniel B. “Homeric Laughter and the Unsmiling Suitors.” The Classical Journal 78, no. 2 (1982): 97–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297058.
Levine, Daniel B. “Penelope’s Laugh: Odyssey 18.163.” The American Journal of Philology 104, no. 2 (1983): 172–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/294290.
Minchin, Elizabeth. “From gentle teasing to heavy sarcasm: instances of rhetorical irony in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Hermes, vol. 138, no. 4, 2010, pp. 387-402.
Miralles, Carles. “Laughter in the Odyssey.” Laughter down the centuries. 1. Eds. Jäkel, Siegfried and Timonen, Asko. Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 208 – Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 208. Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994; 1994. 15-22.
Siegfried Jäkel, ‘The phenomenon of laughter in the Iliad’, in Laughter down the centuries. 1, ed. by Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora, 208 – Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora, 208 (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994; 1994), pp. 23-27.
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!
Detail of red-figure ceramic vessel. ca.470 BCE. Athens.
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 World114(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.
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.
At the end of the chariot race inIliad 23, Achilles attempts to intervene when the man he thinks is best in the contest—Eumelos—comes in last (“The best man is driving his single-hooved horses last!” λοῖσθος ἀνὴρ ὤριστος ἐλαύνει μώνυχας ἵππους. 23.536) thanks to an accident during the contest. A scholion suggests that Achilles {or the poet} is “teaching us to pity those who suffer misfortune unaligned with their worth and not to allow chance to overpower excellence” (διδάσκει τοὺς παρὰ τὴν ἀξίαν ἀτυχοῦντας ἐλεεῖν καὶ μὴ τῆς ἀρετῆς ἐᾶν ὑπερτερεῖν τὴν τύχην, Schol. bT ad Hom. Il. 23.536-7). Achilles’ pity triggers a series of mini-conflicts with Antilochus and then Antilochus and Menelaos wherein Achilles tries to balance the expected outcome of the race based on the excellence of the horses and their driver and the actual results.
The responses to Achilles and the arguments among different characters echo the language of Iliad 1 where Achilles and Agamemnon fall out in disagreement over the distribution of goods. In that conflict, Agamemnon describes his loss of his prize (geras, here, Chryseis) as a slight to his honor (timê) that needs to be rectified by the addition of a future prize. In this system—which echoes the divine cosmos where honors and rights are stable—the amount of goods that signify one’s public position is limited by the availability of new goods to a zero-sum game. Achilles’ makes this point when he tells Agamemnon that all the prizes have been distributed, but there will be new wealth to be shared once the city is sacked. But Agamemnon is angered enough by Achilles’ insubordination and the insult to his position, that he eventually settles on taking Achilles’ prize to supplement his loss, thereby reducing Achilles’ symbolic position.
Leaving aside the dangerous logic of continuous and endless expansion—which is, in a way, the assumption of late-stage capitalism that thrives on the promise of ever more profit—the conflict of book 1 points to a signal difference between divine realms and mortal realms. Mortal affairs are limited in terms of time and substance; the divine realm does not change. When there is a shift in cosmic balance among the gods, it threatens the stability of the universe. But shifts among mortals are by necessity: people live and die. We change. The whole ideal of stable honor and expanding wealth is fundamentally against the laws of physics (nihil ex nihilo, entropy, etc.)
Prizes and events in the Funeral Games (from a handout I made nearly 20 years ago)
I have written before about the thematic structure of early Greek poetry, how eris or neikos (strife) develops from a conflict over the distribution of goods (dasmos) and continues until there is some redistribution or judgement (krisis). As I describe in the article “Eris and Epos…” this sequence is so fundamental to Greek epic that it shapes its form as well as its content. The Iliad is not complete thematically until it resolves the problems of distribution in book 1. This is partly done in the ‘reconciliation’ of book 19 where the scales are more-or-less balanced between Agamemnon and Achilles, but general questions remained unanswered: can you express a person’s value in symbolic wealth? What happens when events disrupt the distribution? Is there a place for community intervention to ensure that someone’s access to wealth is equal to their perceived worth?
Achilles’ intervention in the chariot race, characterized by the scholion as an act of pity to ensure that Eumelos’ virtue is supported symbolically, is met with the same kind of objection that he voices himself in book 1: by taking from others to support Eumelos, he is perpetuating a loss in the zero-sum game: honoring Eumelos means dishonoring someone else.
Instead, Achilles comes up with a different response:
Iliad 23.558-565
“Antilochus, if you’re asking me to give something from my own store To Eumelos, I will do that as well, I think. I will give him a breastplate which I took from Asteropaios A bronze one, which is decorated around the edge with shining tin. It will be worth a lot to him.”
So he spoke, and he told his dear companion Automedon To get it from his dwelling. He went and brought it back And placed it in Eumelos’ hands. The man accepted it gladly.”
Here, as someone outside the system, Achilles introduces new material wealth to resolve the conflict before it becomes too serious: he attempts to short-circuit the traditional theme of dasmos leading to eris. In a kind of heroic welfare, Achilles creates a positive-sum game by offering new material. Or, we could see it as a modification of the zero-sum game because he is willing to give up some of his own wealth to keep a community conflict free. In either case, we as an audience are left with two difficult models for addressing the traditional conflict: the addition of new wealth to a closed system (through expansion) or the largesse from someone who has so much wealth that it doesn’t make a difference. Neither option forces heroes to make hard decisions in ranking the material needs of a community.
The world of epic heroes overflows with material fantasy. As Adam Brown suggests in his 1998 article, the Homeric economy is symbolic and ‘literary’ rather than historical: Heroes never eat vegetables and rarely touch fish; instead they subsist on a diet of meat that is fundamentally impossible for the world of their audiences. Gold, silver, and bronze adorns their armor. But where did the wealth come from? This material fantasy is an echo of our entertainment today where characters in movies and televisions (generally) work very little and enjoy material wealth far greater than the average audience member. I think this partly explains Homeric wealth: no one wants to worry about semi-divine heroes not having enough to eat or, really, dealing with the indignities of bodies riven by scarcity.
photo of a chariot race scene on the shoulder of an Attic Black-figure hydria attributed to the Priam Painter. ca. 510 BC MET Accession: L.1999.10.12
And, yet, the Iliad is deeply invested in the problem of scarcity from its first few dozen lines. The conflict that drives the poem is embedded in the very difference between the fantasy world of myth and the gods and the basic problem of being human: there’s not enough time and for heroes, honor and possessions function as symbolic stand-ins for the fundamental limits of mortal lives. Certain images function throughout the epic to emphasize the impossibility of heroic abundance: consider the hecatomb sent to Apollo in book 1: 100 bulls (supplied from where) loaded onto a ship rowed by 20 men (1.309-311): Were they stacked on top of one another?
So, for me, the funeral games potentially introduce a paradox. On the one hand, they perpetuate the fantasy of endless wealth feeding the expansion of heroic esteem; on the other hand, they show Achilles trying to balance this with the kind of excellence and competition that he valued in book 1. One answer to the paradox is that, as with book 1, the dissonance is productive: the audience is supposed to think about the impossibility of what Achilles does in book 23 and rethink the questions and moves prior to it.
Another answer, which I am leaning towards, is that Achilles does not care about stuff or honor any more because of the horrible loss he suffered with Patroklos’ death. Achilles’ has set himself outside the system and gives from his own material wealth to keep other people whole. This act of understanding others’ needs prefaces his return of Hektor’s body and his weeping with Priam in book 24. And that act, renders the heroic material concerns meaningless. The fantasy of heroic abundance functions to set into relief the irremeable scarcity of human life.
Adamo, Sara. “ un posto per Omero ?.” Incidenza dell’Antico, vol. 20, 2022, pp. 221-233.
Brown, Adam. “Homeric talents and the ethics of exchange.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 118, 1998, pp. 165-172. Doi: 10.2307/632237
Christensen, Joel P.. “Eris and Epos: composition, competition, and the domestication of strife.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 2, 2018, pp. 1-39. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00201001
Fox, Rachel Sarah. Feasting practices and changes in Greek society from the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age. BAR. International Series; 2345. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012.
Haubold, Johannes (2000). Homer’s people: epic poetry and social formation. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr.
Jones, Donald W.. “The archaeology and economy of Homeric gift exchange.” Opuscula Atheniensia, vol. 24, 1999, pp. 11-24.
Karanika, Andromache. Voices at work: women, performance, and labor in ancient Greece. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 2014.
Kolb, Frank. “ a trading center and commercial city ?.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 108, no. 4, 2004, pp. 577-613.
Korfmann, Manfred. “ archaeological evidence for the period of Troia VI/VII.” Classical World, vol. 91, no. 5, 1997-1998, pp. 369-385.
Koutrouba, Konstantina and Apostolopoulos, Konstantinos. “Home economics in the Homeric epics.” Πλάτων, vol. 52, 2001-2002, pp. 191-208.
Lewis, David M.. “The Homeric roots of helotage.” From Homer to Solon : continuity and change in archaic Greece. Eds. Bernhardt, Johannes C. and Canevaro, Mirko. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 454. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2022. 64-92. Doi: 10.1163/9789004513631_005
Lyons, Deborah J.. “ ideologies of marriage and exchange in ancient Greece.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 22, no. 1, 2003, pp. 93-134. Doi: 10.1525/ca.2003.22.1.93
Murray, Sarah C.. The collapse of the Mycenaean economy: imports, trade, and institutions, 1300-700 BCE. New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2017.
Olsen, Barbara A.. “The worlds of Penelope : women in the Mycenaean and Homeric economies.” Arethusa, vol. 48, no. 2, 2015, pp. 107-138.
Piquero Rodríguez, Juan. “« Blood-money » : la compensación por homicidio en la Grecia micénica.” Δῶρα τά οἱ δίδομεν φιλέοντες : homenaje al profesor Emilio Crespo. Eds. Conti Jiménez, Luz, Fornieles Sánchez, Raquel and Jiménez López, María Dolores. Madrid: Ed. de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2020. 221-229.
Rose, P. W.. Class in archaic Greece. Cambridge Books Online. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2012.
Scodel, Ruth. “Odysseus’ dog and the productive household.” Hermes, vol. 133, no. 4, 2005, pp. 401-408.
Seaford, Richard A. S.. Money and the early Greek mind: Homer, philosophy, tragedy. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2004.
Tandy, David W.. Warriors into traders: the power of the market in early Greece. Classics and contemporary thought; 5. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California Pr., 1997.
Thomas, Carol G.. “Penelope’s worth ; looming large in early Greece.” Hermes, vol. CXVI, 1988, pp. 257-264.
Van Wees, Hans (1992). Status warriors : war, violence and society in Homer and history. Amsterdam: Gieben.
Short bibliography on the Funeral games
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Deborah Beck. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005.
Strauss Clay, Jenny. “Art, nature, and the gods in the chariot race of Iliad Ψ.” Άθλα και έπαθλα στα Ομηρικά Έπη: από τα πρακτικά του Ἰ Συνεδρίου για την « Οδύσσεια » (15-19 Σεπτεμβρίου 2004). Eds. Païzi-Apostolopoulou, Machi, Regkakos, Antonios and Tsagalis, Christos K.. Ithaki: Kentro Odysseiakon Spoudon, 2007. 69-76.
Walter Donlan. “The Structure of Authority in the Iliad.” Arethusa 12 (1979) 51-70.
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.
Evjen, Harold D.. “Competitive athletics in ancient Greece. The search for origins and influences.” Opuscula Atheniensia, vol. XVI, 1986, pp. 51-56.
Forte, Alexander S. W.. “The disappearing turn of Iliad 23.373.” Classical Philology, vol. 114, no. 1, 2019, pp. 120-125. Doi: 10.1086/700618
Garland, R.S.J. “‘GERAS THANONTON’: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CLAIMS OF THE HOMERIC DEAD.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, no. 29 (1982): 69–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43646122.
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.
Dean Hammer.“ ‘Who Shall Readily Obey?” Authority and Politics in the Iliad.” Phoenix 51 (1997) 1-24.
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.
Nicholas Richardson. The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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.
H. A. Shapiro, Mario Iozzo, Adrienne Lezzi-Hafter, The François Vase: New Perspectives (2 vols.). Akanthus proceedings 3. Kilchberg, Zurich: Akanthus, 2013. 192; 7, 47 p. of plates.
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.
Cedric Hubbell Whitman. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
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.
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.
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.
Detail from 1884 Engraving of Achilles sacrificing a Trojan youth on Patroclus’ funeral pyre – as narrated by Homer in the Iliad 23.181-2. Greek Apulian Red-figure Volute Krater, attributed to the Painter of Darius, ca. 330 BCE. Naples Arch Museum
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 Greeceand 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.
Book 23, as I discuss in the first post to this book, revisits political and heroic themes from books 1 and 2 and offers an opportunity for the epic’s participants and audience alike to reconsider issues of honor, distribution, and institutional order through Achilles’ chairmanship of the funeral games for Patroklos. Often these games are seen as “filler” or a digression following the violence and deaths of books 20-23; but as many others have noted, the whole book is a matter of ritual performance with deep ties both to the material experiences of ancient audiences and to myth in general.
One of the harder things for modern audiences to sense is the extent to which Patroklos’ death in the Iliad is anticipation of or in surrogacy for Achilles’ outside of the Iliad (usually located in the lost cyclic poem the Aethiopis). As I have written about before, I get a little nervous about some of the approaches that fall under the scholarly rubric of “neoanalysis”—the general approach that explores how the Iliad relates to ‘prior’ or, in better cases, ‘other’ narrative traditions. It makes me anxious because, while in its best form it can provide us with an idea of how the Iliad absorbs and responds to other motifs and stories, it too often provides the impression of hierarchical relationships between tales and that certain episodes were fixed in specific ‘poems’ to which ancient audiences had access.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in such assumptions about the relationship among various narratives and what audiences knew. When it comes to the funeral games in particular, this approach surfaces because they are often seen as an echo/doubling/recapitulation of/model for the funeral games for Achilles. As a general rule, I am not opposed to the idea that there is a significant relationship between the episodes, I just think it more likely that an epic grammar of funeral games developed around retelling of tales that centered the death of a great hero and, further, that the depictions of the burial honors for Patroklos and Achilles were so interdependent in their development over time that any ancient audience member would be hard-pressed to articulate clearly where one began and another ended.
This presupposes the timelessness of performance, the space that is created outside a hierarchy of what story was told when by the ever pressing now of the story being told. I think part of the power of the Iliad’s funeral games resides in how much we understand them as anticipating Achilles’ own death and burial. But given how much Achilles is central in the games and how thorough the political theme is, it is really hard to imagine how to evaluate this power. We would need to know what audiences knew, and that is at some level impossible.
Before we get to the games, however, we have the issue of the burial itself. One of the surprising things about book 23 is its setup: most people remember the elaborate games; I think far fewer remember clearly the continued mutilation of Hektor’s body at the book’s beginning, the slaughter of the 12 Trojan youths, or Patroklos appearing as a ghost to chide Achilles for not burying him already.
Homer, Iliad 23.59-92
Peleus’ son was lying there on the strip of the much-resounding sea, Groaning deeply among the many Myrmidons, In a cleared space where the waves were lapping at the sand. There sleep found him, softening the concerns in his heart, Once it fell around him, sweet. His powerful limbs were exhausted From chasing Hektor toward windy Troy. Then the soul of pitiful Patroklos arrived Alike to himself in every way, in size and his beautiful eyes- His voice too, and he had similar clothes enveloping him. He stood above Achilles’ head and addressed him. “You are sleeping? Then you have forgotten me, Achilles. You were never careless when I was alive, but now I am dead. Bury me as quickly as possible so I can enter Hades’ gates. The souls, those little ghosts of worn out men, are holding me far off— They will not allow me to join them beyond the river at all, But I am wandering like this through the home of wide-gated Hades. Give me your hand too. I am in sorrow, since I will never again Return from Hades, once you have granted me fire. We will never again sit alive, apart from our dear companions, Making our own plans together. Now a hateful fate has Swallowed me whole, the allotment given as I was born. This is your fate too, Achilles, even though you are like the gods, To die in front of the walls of the wealthy Trojans. But I am going to tell you something, I’ll ask you, if you’ll listen. Don’t keep my bones apart from yours, Achilles, But just as we were raised together in your home, When I was just a young child and Menoitios send me From Opoeis to your home because of a painful murder, On that day when I killed the son of Aphidamas, the fool I was, I did it unwillingly, sent into a rage over a game of dice. Then the horseman Peleus welcomed me into your home And raised me in a kind way and named me your attendant. So have one vessel safeguard our bones together, A golden chamber with two handles, the one your mother gave you.”
Achilles and the Shade of Patroclus, 1793. John Flaxman. MET
The sequence of events that leads up to this speech is remarkable enough that a scholiast felt the need to comment on the sudden change. At one moment, we are witnessing Achilles mourning on the sea, and then he is asleep and a dream is looming over him.
Schol. bT ad Hom. Il. 23.65a
“The sudden change is credible: for, after Achilles’ lamentations, the poet has devised something rather new, and he has provided words for someone who died through a dream.”
The language the scholiast uses here—peripateia—is reminiscent of the terminology Aristotle uses for tragedy. In Greek drama, from an Aristotelian perspective, the peripateia is a reversal, a sudden inversion of fate or outcomes that (sometimes) drives audience and/or character towards a recognition (anagnorisis). The sudden turnabout here is nearly akin to a divine intervention. Patroklos appears, but as George Gazis notes, he is not an envoy of the dead in the same way that is represented in book 11 of the Odyssey. Instead, he appears as a dream. The immediacy of it and the rapid transition leaves us little time to think about the other dream in the Iliad, the false dream sent by Zeus in book 2 to persuade Agamemnon to lead his people to war that day (in part to honor Achilles’ request and advance the ‘plan’ of the Iliad).
I bring up that first dream for thematic and structural reasons. Thematically, dreams elsewhere are sent by the gods. Here, we have no agent, no spoken reason. Unbidden, a supernatural force appears to Achilles and confirms his course of action, providing additional information to the audience. It is tempting to read this, as some do, as an exploration of Achilles’ guilt rather than a literal ghost in a dream; but the vividness and detail leads me to believe that ancient audiences would have taken this as a literal dream. Again, thematically, this makes sense for where we are in the epic.
Dreams and sleep are often paired in early Greek myth as moving between the realms of the seen (the world of the living/day) and the unseen (the underworld/night). Achilles, moreover, has been depicted directly and indirectly as separated from the realm of the living, so much so that when Priam travels to meet him in Iliad 24, he is guided by Hermes, whose role as the psychopompos (the “marshal of souls”) is to guide the dead to Hades’ realm. Perhaps we can imagine Achilles in a space where the fabric between the realms is thinning, frayed, and Patroklos can reach him thanks to their indelible bond, stretching across life’s final boundary.
(Although, to be fair, this sounds a bit too much like a tagline for the movie Ghost.)
Whether we see Patroklos as an actual ghost or an outlet for Achilles’ conscience, the speech provides some background for their relationship and an implicit critique of Achilles. The story Patroklos tells about how they came to know one another is explained in another scholion.
Schol. D ad Il. 12.1 [see Apollodorus 3.13.8]
“Menoitios’ son Patroklos grew up in Opos in Locris but was exiled for an involuntary mistake. For he killed a child his age, the son of the memorable Amphidamas Kleisonumos, or, as some say, Aianes, because he was angry over dice. He went to Phthia in exile for this crime and got to know Achilles there because of his kinship with Peleus. They cemented a deep friendship with one another before they went on the expedition against Troy. This story is from Hellanicus.”
The detail I think is really interesting here and in the speech is that Achilles and Patroklos were brought together by a rage-induced mistake that shattered one community only to create a new one. Patroklos starts out by telling Achilles that he is still suffering, that he cannot rest because Achilles has not cared for his body. Achilles’ rage, then, has been entirely for himself. It had no hope of raising the dead and only has increased the amount of bodies to be buried.
Patroklos reminds Achilles of his own story only after he asks him to make sure that their bones are interred together in one vessel. When he reminds Achilles of how they came to be together, he uses a thematic word for anger (kholôtheis) that should remind audiences of all the damage anger has done in the Iliad’s world. I suspect that Patroklos’ story redounds on Achilles as well, inviting him (and us) to think about the other actions undertaking “unwillingly” and their outcomes, the way Achilles’ anger led him to pray for his people to suffer, the way his people suffering meant Patroklos’ death too.
The point, I think, is an analogical one: the union in death following rage and its ruin is a remaking of life, but in a final fashion. Just as Patroklos’ childhood error led to an adolescent life with Achilles, so too will Achilles’ adult mistake still lead to a kind of eternal life with Patroklos. It is a small solace and no replacement for a life together, but it is something. And it is something Achilles, now, has to create on his own. If there is a peripateia in this moment, it is to be found both in the plot (a move from lament to action) and in the character who drives the plot.
The blending of the Achilles and Patroklos in death—both through the metaphorical overlapping of tales and the literal blending of bones—should remind us of the powerful themes of surrogacy that bind Achilles and Patroklos further together. In this near-final articulation, however, I wonder how much we need to consider Achilles response and the subtle narrative revelation that Achilles reached out to him, but could not grab him, because his spirit “like smoke”. Achilles’ request for an embrace is unfulfilled, yet he turns almost immediately to start the process of burial.
One of the things I emphasize when talking about Achilles’ amazing second lament for Patroklos is that he still seems to be expressing his own sense of loss primarily. This is, of course, a realistic representation of grieving and I may be mistaken in believing that it is only a step toward a broader sense of loss in the world. When my father died suddenly at 61, I don’t know that I started to grieve for what he lost until years later and it was prompted mostly by feelings of joy, tempered by his absence. In times of loss I have come to think more about what the missing miss out on: for my father and his mother, getting to see my children born and grow, taking joy at their joy in the world, and comfort with a world born anew through them.
In my reading of the multiple audiences to Achilles’ speech about his disappointed expectation that Patroklos would be the one to live on and take his place in the world, I think the Iliad is anticipating the epic’s end, when Achilles ever so briefly sees Priam as real through their intersecting yet separate pain. Part of the point of dramatic narrative, I think, is to give us an access to a world outside ourselves, to help us fill our bodies and minds with others’ light and love, both so we can be more unto ourselves and we can make a better world alongside others because we know they are real.
But even this approach, as magnanimous as it might sounds, runs the risk of instrumentalizing others’ pain for the sake of individual gain. Just as easily as someone can mourn what a loved one misses out on, we could take the opposite corollary, to celebrate all they will not suffer. Such a pessimistic view is not far off from the so-called “wisdom of Silenus,” that the best fortune is not to live long or die in glory, but never to have been at all.
And yet, for all it’s apparent logic, this seems too bleak. An epic so invested in showing us the power of loss, can’t possibly be telling us that a superior alternative is never feeling love at all.
Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825). Achille saisit l’ombre de Patrocle, vers 1810 Mine de plomb, craie et aquarelle – 34 x 60 cm Zurich, Kunsthaus
A short Bibliography on the Ghost of Patroklos
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Anderson, Warren D. “Achilles and the Dark Night of the Soul.” The Classical Journal 51, no. 6 (1956): 265–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3292885.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Jonathan Burgess. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love. Oxford.
Devereux, George. “Achilles’ «suicide » in the Iliad.” Helios, vol. VI, no. 2, 1978-1979, pp. 3-15.
G
azis, George Alexander, ‘The Dream of Achilles’, Homer and the Poetics of Hades (Oxford, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 May 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198787266.003.0003, accessed 19 Mar. 2024.
Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad: The Force That Moves the Epic and Its Audience.Oxford.
Lowenstam, Steven. “Patroclus’ death in the Iliad and the inheritance of an Indo-European myth.” Archaeological News, vol. VI, 1977, pp. 72-76.
Mouratidis, Ioannis. “Anachronism in the Homeric games and sports.” Nikephoros, vol. III, 1990, pp. 11-22.
MUELLNER, L. Metonymy, Metaphor, Patroklos, Achilles. Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos, [s. l.], v. 32, n. 2, p. 139–155, 2019. DOI 10.24277/classica.v32i2.884
Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.
Paschalis, Sergios. “The Epic Hero as Sacrificial Victim: Patroclus and Palinurus.” Hermathena, no. 199 (2015): 135–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26921696.
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.
Russo, Joseph. “The Ghost of Patroclus and the Language of Achilles”. Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Philosophy, History, and Literature, edited by Peter Burian, Jenny Strauss Clay and Gregson Davis, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 209-222. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605938-012
This post is a basic introduction to readingIliad 23.
Book 23 of the Iliad provides a break in the relentless action following Achilles’ return. It is entirely dedicated to the honoring of Patroklos, both through his burial and the funeral games in his honor. But I suspect that many audiences miss out on the sustained rituals for Patroklos because the games become such an engrossing distraction. The book starts with a reminder that Patroklos remains unburied (through a conversation with a ghost!), then moves through the preparations for his cremation and burial, and then proceeds through a long series of athletic contests in his honor. Along the way, we have some human sacrifice when Achilles kills the twelve Trojan youths he selected in book 21 to slaughter over Patroklos’ pyre.
Iliad 23 is actually anything but fun and games, even if it appears to be a bit of a diversion (or what some have dismissed as a “mere interlude”). The burial is an important part of heroic honors for the dead, yet is marked by a strange sacrifice and the ongoing mutilation of Hektor’s corpse; the games echo the political questions of Iliad 1, 2, 9, and 19; and the funeral games themselves may also be engaging with traditions both of the death of Patroklos outside the Iliad and of the games that were held following Achilles’ death. As such, each of part 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 book 21 speaks most directly to politics, heroism, and narrative traditions.
Contextualizing the Funeral Games
Funeral games are an important context in Greek narrative from myths around the foundation of the four major Panhellenic contests (Olympian, Nemean, Pythian, and Isthmian games) to providing settings and inflection points for myths in general.. Funeral games feature in narrative traditions around Thebes (especially Oedipus and Laius) and Pelias (which leads to the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts) and extend to less well-known traditions like those of Erginos of Orchomenos. Of course, by the classical age, games had become a significant ritualized part of aristocratic culture in Greece.
It is that groundedness of athletic contests in elite/aristocratic culture that can provide some perspective for modern audiences to understand how ancient audiences saw games in the Homeric epics. In the Archaic and Classical periods, Panhellenic games developed as the context for aristocrats from individual city states to compete against each other outside of war, to assert/establish their worth vis a vis their peers (for themselves and for people back in their cities), and to explore a shared elite culture across city-boundaries. Athletic competitions are the kinds of things that ‘heroes’ do when they aren’t in war or some civil conflict.
There’s some disagreement about how much of what is represented would have been at home in the world of Homeric audiences. Ioannis Mouratidis suggests that the Iliad includes material from the oral tradition going all the way back to the Mycenaean age but including elements through the Archaic age as well, reflecting the movement from an autocratic model to the city-state that shaped the perspectives of most ancient audiences. Jonas Grethlein adds to this the recognition that the burial and the games are ritual acts too—as such, they are doubly removed from political ‘reality’ but serve even more as a metanarrative device, another mirror to allow internal and external audiences to work through interpretations of the epic.
Antimenes Painter, C. 510 Metropolitan Museum of Arts
As such, games in ancient Greek culture and in Homeric epic are never just play—they are opportunities to create and establish individual identities in a competitive yet not destructive context. Within Homer, then, the games provide a familiar, albeit likely still fantastic, context for ancient audiences while also offering a context for participants in epic to revisit the political rancor of book 1. As William Scott (1997) notes, the games create a cooperative atmosphere where Achilles is in charge to enforce a particular order of games and of valuing other people. In its structures and discussions, however, it corresponds both to the break of Iliad 1and the reunification of the Achaean assembly in book 2 (As Richardson points out [1993, 164-6]. Cf. Whitman 1958, 261-4). As several scholars have point out, there is a close connection between the institutional structure of the assembly throughout the Iliad and context of the Funeral Games. See, for example, Wilson 2002, 57 and Hammer 2002, 134ff. Deborah Beck (2005, 233-41) makes explicit the connection between the Achaean assembly and the funeral games.
The games function both as a space for re-imagining politics and for putting Achilles in a position to lead. For the former, Hammer offers five reasons for this (Hammer 1997, 14-16; cf. Ulf 2004.): (1) The burial rites are performed by the Achaeans as a community; (2) The subsequent games performed at the gravesite of a dead hero evokes cult-hero practices; (3) Public challenges regarding prize distribution are offered and answered; (4) Formal procedures for adjudicating disputes appear; and (5) Zeus is invoked as a guarantor of distribution in a different way. Good analyses of the games (see below) look at the way the disputes between characters are played out, the language they use, and what happens when someone intervenes or mediates.
While some see Iliad 23 as a collective effort to reimagine Greek political activity (see, e.g. Donlan 1979), many others have seen the games as being particular to Achilles’ efforts to rethink and rework the events that dominated the epic’s beginning. Kenneth Kitchell (1998) argues that Achilles’ settlement of the disputes in the games as well as his treatment of the wrestling match and spear-contest illustrate his profound character change while Oliver Taplin has suggested 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). Recently, Adrian Kelly has emphasized that the funeral games are the last opportunity for Achilles to demonstrate excellence in speaking and action, straining for that heroic ideal of surpassing everyone. And the results, according to Kelly, are mixed: “It is entirely fitting, then, that Achilles’ arbitrations in the Funeral Games show his shortcomings, and his exceptionalism, all too clearly, both in terms of what he does and what others achieve without him” (108).
As I will discuss in one of the subsequent posts about this book, the funeral games for Patroklos are a fantasy of political redistribution that help audiences think through just how difficult it is to resolve the tensions left over from book 1. If they demonstrate anything, it is that maintaining a status quo without coercive violence is hard work, but perhaps a more possible goal than a world where everyone is valued as they think they should be.
Reading Questions for book 23
How does the conversation with Patroklos’ ghost shape our understanding of his relationship with Achilles?
How does Achilles run the funerary games?
How do the debates in the games reflect/refract the conflicts of book 1
Short bibliography on the Funeral games
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Deborah Beck. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005.
Walter Donlan. “The Structure of Authority in the Iliad.” Arethusa 12 (1979) 51-70.
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.
Garland, R.S.J. “‘GERAS THANONTON’: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CLAIMS OF THE HOMERIC DEAD.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, no. 29 (1982): 69–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43646122.
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.
Dean Hammer.“ ‘Who Shall Readily Obey?” Authority and Politics in the Iliad.” Phoenix 51 (1997) 1-24.
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.
Nicholas Richardson. The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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.
H. A. Shapiro, Mario Iozzo, Adrienne Lezzi-Hafter, The François Vase: New Perspectives (2 vols.). Akanthus proceedings 3. Kilchberg, Zurich: Akanthus, 2013. 192; 7, 47 p. of plates.
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.
Cedric Hubbell Whitman. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
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.
Soon after Hektor decides to face Achilles, he loses his nerve and runs. The epic lingers on the moment.
Homer, Iliad 22.157-170
“They both ran around that point: One chasing, one fleeing. In front, there was a good man trying to get away, but a much better man was pursuing. Quickly. They weren’t struggling over a sacred prize or an oxhide, The kinds of things that are prizes for men on their feet, But instead they were running for the soul of Hektor, tamer of horses. Just as when prize winning horses turn their feet Quickly around the bend and a great prize lies in wait— Either a tripod or a woman when some man has died, So too did these two men run around Priam’s city On their swift feet as all the gods were watching. The father of gods and men started a conversation among them: “Oh my fools, am I really watched a dear man pursued Around the walls with my eyes? My heart feels grief for Hektor….”
There are several reasons this passage draws my attention: first, the grammar elegantly advances some of the blending of the characters I mention in my post about Hektor imagining sweet-talking Achilles. The two are combined in duel verbs (the form that is just for two grammatical subjects like eyes, hands, and pairs) to frame the episode (παραδραμέτην δινηθήτην) but then this potential equality is undermined by the concession that one is good, but the other is much better. This serves in part to echo some of the interdependence of the pair, but also to illustrate their ultimate difference (echoed sweetly in the language of competition.
Berlin Painter – period / date: late archaic, ca. 490 BC –
Second, the comparison to men racing for a prize—as will happen in the following book—emphasizes the stakes of Hektor’s flight and, in a way, relativizes the competitions to come. The simile brings into question fundamental Iliadic themes of honor and reward, hearkening back to book 1, but leaving in direct contrast all that has transpired since: these heroes are not merely competing for a geras (prize) or time (honor), they are struggling over life itself (and, note, for the time being, kleos has been left aside. I have probably written too much on similes, but this one is especially powerful in the way it includes within in it images that connect the details of this particular moment to the broader epic themes.
Third, the position of the divine audience reminds us that the human audience is outside the poem. Zeus here—as he does throughout the epic—acts as an internal audience to guide the external gaze. His response of frustration and sorrow frames the scene and informs the audience (to an extent) how they should feel about this scene: it is sad, but the outcome is inevitable. No matter how good Hektor has been, he still must die. Both the simile and the divine reflection extend the narrative space of Hektor’s final moments.
What is also interesting about this passage is the specification of how many times they run around the walls. In an epic tradition where Achilles is famed for the swiftness of his feet, it seems somewhat suspect that it takes him three times around a wall (and then a divine trick) to catch up with a hero known for man-slaying and horse-taming (especially when the narrator tells the audience that Achilles is a lot better than his quarry.) A conventional answer offered in commentaries is that specific numbers like this (nine years of war, nine years of plague) represents the penultimate moment before a final turn. By that logic, mentioning three times anticipates a fourth and final turn around the wall that will be decisive. The delay here, then, creates additional suspense based on audience experience of the structure earlier in the poem (cf. 5.436-39).
ca. 490 BC – material: pottery (clay) – height: 34 cm – findspot: Vulci – museum / inventory number: München, Staatliche Antikensammlungen 2406 –
This type of repeated structure that facilitates both composition and audience understanding is typically called a “type scene” in the study of Homeric and oral poetry. In my book Storylife, I position type scenes as structures that help create far more complex compositions, building on formulas and other repetitions:
Type-scenes are repeated patterns in what we might think of as conventional or repeated scenes: moments of dining, arming, onset and conclusion to speaking, and other kinds of near-ritualized performances, especially in sacrifices. Many modern scholars have seen type scenes as evidence of what Albert Lord describes as “composition by theme.” These scenes can vary in length, but tend to present recurring actions. That is, they have a stock set of elements that can be altered to fit the needs of their narrative environment. As Katherine Hitch argues (following Egbert Bakker, 1997), type scenes are like formulae: conventional material used innovatively through different combinations and variation within a specific pattern is the expected way to create meaning in an oral poetic context. Type scenes are made up of motifs and formulae the way multicellular lifeforms are composed of individual cells: and in each case the overall form can have a very different function from those of its constituent parts and separate iterations of the ‘same’ form will have different characteristics and functions based on their local environments.
A general concern of Homerists—and literary theorists in general—from the 20th century was to figure out how to balance innovation in language against traditional forms. One of the more rigid and dull approaches to this is to imagine that oral poets function in a “poetry by number” environment that limited their creativity to chunking together pre-established units. My contention is that all language is to some extent limiting and that this facilitates understanding across different consciousnesses. It does not mean, however, that poets and audiences can’t press on prior structures to bend them or use them to create extrinsic meaning. In other posts I have introduced the term “productive dissonance” to describe how conventional forms can be used “incorrectly” or against expectation to produce new kinds of meanings (this is, essentially, my argument for the duals of Iliad 9).
But dissonance is not always the way: sometimes a lack of resolution or delayed resolution based on an expected pattern is useful as well. In her article “Emotional and thematic Meanings in a Repeating Homeric Motif”, Deborah Beck looks at this passage specifically. She sees the duals here as making “this chase into one deed and Achilles and Hector into a single actor….which “will eventually result in the death not only of Hector but also of Achilles, but not yet…” (2018, 162). The opening verses anticipate the repeated nature of the chase, but it is not until the close of the simile that the thrice+1 pattern is introduced. This structure, Beck suggests, creates a ring around the mention of the prize here, which is Hektor’s life. The shared grammar and the repeated pattern bring Achilles and Hektor closer together as characters while also heightening the emotional response of the audience. Beck summarizes the whole effect well:
The narrative of Achilles chasing Hector around and around the city of Troy before killing him might come across as repetitive, or even as pointless delay. Instead, the various elaborations that extend this τρὶς μέν … τρὶς δέ scene depict the two most important fighters in the Iliad as fundamentally the same, and the fates of both – but especially Hector – as a matter of the warmest interest to the gods both individually and collectively. The ‘length confers emphasis’ aesthetics of Homeric epic are particularly effective for depicting a pivotal event that the characters themselves experience as taking a long time. Moreover, the individual expansions that appear in this scene foster the audience’s emotional engagement with the characters and the story. These include: several similes, which depict Achilles and Hector both as predator and prey and also as essentially identical competitors (162–65, 189–93, 199–201); a conversation between the gods watching from Olympus, where we would expect a single speech by one of the τρίς characters (168–85);36 a counterfactual condition within a rhetorical question, which brings the audience vividly into the poem in a manner nearly unparalleled in Homeric epic (202–04); and, finally, the τέταρτον turn of events (208–13), which features a character who, about to fail in his τρὶς μέν attempt, chooses to renounce his endeavour rather than simply be overpowered by a hostile god. These techniques work together even – or especially – as Hector’s death approaches to depict him as a brave and admirable warrior fully deserving of sympathy from both the internal audience of gods and the external audience of the Iliad.
I think all of these effects are worth highlighting, but it is worth noting as well how much familiarity with Homeric language is needed to respond fully to these cues and to understand them. Homeric poetry has a grammar of meaning that rises above the level of the individual word and relies on composite structures and audience familiarity with both. While we as modern audiences can sense the impact from close reading and from the confluence of so many poetic indicators in this scene, one would be fair to wonder how much of the substance of Homeric poetry we continue to miss out on because of all the performances that were never recorded and all those that we’ve lost.
As modern readers, we need to work overtime to restore the nuance that is lost to us and to slough off modern ideas about how and what epic poetry makes meaning. In a way, this is similar to restoring the pigment and decoration to plain white marble statues, understanding that they were more dynamic in the past and that modern aesthetics have been (mis)shaped by misunderstanding. But the level of challenge is greater, I suggest: epic is a living, breathing statue that moved in response to audiences. Modern aesthetics and translation often presents a fossil or desiccated form, in need of color, breath, and movement.
From The New Yorker: “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture.”
Beck, Deborah. 2005. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Bonfante, Larissa. “The judgment of Paris, the toilette of Malavisch, and a mirror in the Indiana University Art Museum.” Studi Etruschi, vol. XLV, 1977, pp. 149-167.
Collins, Leslie. “The wrath of Paris. Ethical vocabulary and ethical type in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology, vol. CVIII, 1987, pp. 220-232.
Edwards, Mark W.. “The conventions of a Homeric funeral.” Studies in honour of T. B. L. Webster, I. Eds. Betts, John H., Hooker, James T. and Green, John Richard. Bristol, Eng.: Bristol Classical Pr., 1986. 84-92.
Edwards, Mark W.. “Type scenes and Homeric hospitality.” TAPA, vol. CV, 1975, pp. 51-72.
Faraone, Christopher A.. “Circe’s instructions to Odysseus (Od. 10.507-40) as an early Sibylline Oracle.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 139, 2019, pp. 49-66. Doi: 10.1017/S0075426919000028
Fenik, Bernard. 1968. Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner.
Gainsford, Peter. “Formal analysis of recognition scenes in the « Odyssey ».” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 123, 2003, pp. 41-59. Doi: 10.2307/3246259
Grethlein, Jonas. “The poetics of the bath in the « Iliad ».” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 103, 2007, pp. 25-49.
Hitch, Sarah. 2009. King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Jurriaans-Helle, Geralda. Composition in Athenian black-figure vase-painting: the « Chariot in profile » type scene. Leuven ; Paris: Peeters, 2021.
Reece, Steve. 1993. The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rood, Naomi Jennifer. “Craft similes and the construction of heroes in the « Iliad ».” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 104, 2008, pp. 19-43.
Vouzis, Panagiotis. Οι ομηρικές τυπικές σκηνές του ταξιδιού στη θάλασσα: η τυπολογία του πλου στον Όμηρο. Vivliothiki Sofias N. Saripolou; 137. Athina: Ethniko kai Kapodistriako Panepistimio Athinon, Filosofiki Scholi, 2020.
