Rewriting the Plot: What The Structure of the Iliad’s First Third Accomplishes

Many of the structural and plot questions of the Iliad’s first third can be categorized as anxiety about anachronism, specifically the events that occur within books 2-8 that more ‘logically’ occur prior to the beginning of the Iliad. These include the listing of all the combatants (the catalogue of ships), the teikhoskopia (the viewing from the walls), the duel between Paris and Menelaos, and the building of fortifications around the Greek ships. Amid these actions are the repeated divine councils in books 1, 4, and 8 that clarify the coming action of the epic, and sundry other scenes that don’t really relate to the theme of the rage of Achilles.

When we talk about the postponement of the theme of Achilles’ rage and his presence in the epic, we often compare it to the absence of Odysseus at the beginning of the Odyssey. It is a delaying mechanism that creates magnitude and inspires suspense. But in reviewing the poem again, I think there may be more going on here. Part of books 2-8 is the Iliad answering the challenge of telling the whole of the Trojan War narrative through only a few days. It does this by evoking famous episodes, but I think it also structurally echoes it as well.

A ring structure, the order of events, and the refinement of Zeus’ plan supports this. First, Agamemnon’s speech, longing to go home, is repeated in great part at the beginning of book 9. This speech in its first iteration initiates the series of events that reunify the Achaeans and return them to battle. A great deal of the catalogue of ships sounds like a flashback, taking us to the beginning of the Trojan War. Yet, once the sides are assembled, the plot moves through echoes of the first 9 years of the War before returning to the scene of the rage, in book 9 Agamemnon’s speech is a repetition with a difference, collapsing the action between 1, 2, and 9, and taking us through the years back to the ninth.

Zeus’ plan, referred to in the proem as ongoing, is refined several times during these books: first in 1, where he promises to honor Achilles by having the Trojans win for a while, then in book 4, and again in book 8 where he announces that Hektor will win until he gets to the ships. There has been some debate over what Zeus’ “plan” is at the beginning of the poem, whether it is the plan to rid the earth of the race of heroes, as mentioned at the beginning of the fragmentary Kypria, the plan to repair Achilles’ wounded honor, or the plot of the Iliad itself. The process of refinement we witness in books 1-8 fully integrates all three plans into one. It is a rewriting of the first nine years of the Trojan War to center Achilles’ rage as the pivotal point. This kind of rewriting is daring, from one perspective: it reorders the series of events and causal relationships through a retelling of the past nine years to make this story the most important one.

Here’s a chart I am working on. Note the thematic impact of considering the Iliad‘s structure this way as we move from a fresh start to the war to exhausted and frightened Achaeans by the end.

I am trying to make very little of the fact that nine books are standing in for nine years of the war (Greek poetry tends to count inclusively), but in laying the structure of the first third out like this, it seems clear to me that the structure enables an analepsis (flashback function) in order to revise the war, rewrite Zeus’ plan, and amplify the importance of book 9. Functionally, it covers all the necessary plot points, introduces all the characters and themes of the poem, and enacts the famous inversion of besieger and besieged that makes the rest of the Iliad so powerful

In addition to this, there are several performance models of the Iliad that see the break between 8 and 9 as a possible natural breaking point for the “monumental” performance of the Iliad

Some bibliography on Zeus’ Plan:

Allan, W. 2006. “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 126:1–35.

Barker, Elton. ———. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.

Clay, J. S. ———. 1999. “The Whip and the Will of Zeus.” In Literary Imagination, 1.1:40–60.

Lynn-George, M. 1988. Epos: Word, Narrative, and the Iliad. Atlantic Highlands.

Mayer, K. 1996. “Helen and the ΔΙΟΣ ΒΟΥΛΗ.” The American Journal of Philology 117:1–15.

Marks, J. R. 2002. “The Junction between the Cypria and the Iliad.” Phoenix 56:1–24.

Murnaghan, Sheila. ———. 1997. “Equal Honor and Future Glory: The Plan of Zeus in the Iliad.” In Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. F. M. Dunn, D. P. Fowler, and D. H. Roberts, 23–42. Princeton.

Wilson, D. F. 2002a. Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge.

On the performance of the Iliad and book 8

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. Follow-up posts will address book 8 and other traditions

Cook, Erwin F. “On the ‘Importance’ of Iliad Book 8.” Classical Philology, vol. 104, no. 2, 2009, pp. 133–61. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/605340

Fenno, Jonathan. “‘A Great Wave against the Stream’: Water Imagery in Iliadic Battle Scenes.” The American Journal of Philology 126, no. 4 (2005): 475–504. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804872.

Foley, J. M. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington.

———. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia.

González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.

Heiden, B. (1996). The three movements of the iliad. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 37(1), 5-22. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/three-movements-iliad/docview/229178418/se-2

Bruce Heiden. “The Placement of ‘Book Divisions’ in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998): 68–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/632231.

Heiden, B. 2008. Homer’s Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad. Oxford.

Lord, Albert. 2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

MORRISON, J. V. “‘KEROSTASIA’, THE DICTATES OF FATE, AND THE WILL OF ZEUS IN THE ‘ILIAD.’” Arethusa 30, no. 2 (1997): 273–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578099.

Scodel, Ruth. 2002. Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Stroud, T. A., and Elizabeth Robertson. “Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and the Plot of the ‘Iliad.’” The Classical World 89, no. 3 (1996): 179–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/4351783.

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