This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.

One of the many questions about Homeric poetry that interests me is its engagement with other genres. There are some basic assumptions about how epic works in relation to other kinds of poetry that can restrict how we talk about epic, think about how audiences engaged with the poetry in performance, and how it influenced (and was influenced by) other kinds of song.

Before discussing some of these assumptions, it may be helpful to give some examples of what I mean. First, repeated language (words, formulae, even longer phrases) may not count as intergeneric engagement, since the genres of early Greek poetry really hail from a song culture that shared a special language. While some forms of Greek song are marked by dialectical differences (see Sappho or Corinna, e.g.), Greek poetry leaned on traditional forms and shared language as part of performance culture.

What I mean by intergeneric engagement is when we can see longer lines, motifs, or ideas at play within and across our evidence from Greek performance culture. Here are two examples from Homer and Mimnermus (a poet traditionally placed in the 6th century BCE). Homer, in describing the spirits of deaths has:

Homer, Iliad 12.326-8

“But now, since the spirits of death stand fast around us
By the thousands, and there is no way any mortal can escape them,
Let us go and offer a reason to boast to someone else, or take it for ourselves”

νῦν δ’ ἔμπης γὰρ κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο
μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βροτὸν οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι,
ἴομεν ἠέ τῳ εὖχος ὀρέξομεν ἠέ τις ἡμῖν.

Mimnermus has language that is similar, using the same noun and verb in a combination that an Indo-Europeanist like Calvert Watkins would be “formulaic” in a way that would inform both composition and reception. That is, the noun-verb combination implies a sharing of an image/idea that attends a particular domain. Note, the traditionality of the image in Homer is expanded with more vivid personified language in Mimnermus.

Mimnermus, 2 [=Stobaeus 4.34.12]5-8

“The dark spirits of death are standing beside us.
One holds eventual old age, in pain,
The other has death. The fruit of youth is brief,
As long as the sun’s light stretches across the earth.”

…Κῆρες δὲ παρεστήκασι μέλαιναι,
ἡ μὲν ἔχουσα τέλος γήραος ἀργαλέου,
ἡ δ᾿ ἑτέρη θανάτοιο· μίνυνθα δὲ γίνεται ἥβης
καρπός, ὅσον τ᾿ ἐπὶ γῆν κίδναται ἠέλιος.

Another, more famous example, comes from Glaukos’ speech to Diomedes in Iliad 6 where he parries Diomedes’ question about lineage.

Homer, Iliad 6.146-149

The generations of men are just like leaves on a tree:
The wind blows some to the ground and then the forest
Grows lush with others when spring comes again.
In this way, the race of men grows and then dies in turn.

οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη·
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.

The comparison of the generation of human lives to the growth and shedding of leaves appears as well in Mimnermus.

Mimnermus, fr. 2

“BUT we are like the leaves that spring of many flowers
Produces, when they grow quickly thanks to the sun’s rays”

ἡμεῖς δ᾿, οἷά τε φύλλα φύει πολυάνθεμος ὥρη
ἔαρος, ὅτ᾿ αἶψ᾿ αὐγῇς αὔξεται ἠελίου,

In this instance, the comparison is shared, but the language itself doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a formulaic comparison, unless we look at the core comparative word (οἵη/οἷά) + noun (φύλλων/φύλλα) + verb (φύει) sequence as indicative of a common articulation or a generative metaphor that is part of a traditional repertoire of ideas. This takes us right up to those assumptions I mentioned earlier. I’ll separate these into two categories I’ll call “priority trap” and the “generic fallacy”. Both of these categories are rooted in objections I have against supply side poetics–the tendency to privilege authorial intent/practice over what audiences do with poems (songs, etc.).

Let’s start with the priority trap. In my brief comments about Homer and Mimnermus I have operated on the assumption that Homer and Mimnermus draw on a shared corpus of language and image. This is what I would call a networked and non-hierarchical model of reading Greek poetry. It functions in contrast to hierarchical models that imagine Mimnermus “quoting”, “alluding to” or otherwise responding to an extant Homeric text.

Elton Barker and I started to think about these problems two decades ago in our article on the New Archilochus Fragment and Homer. In it, we emphasize that both Homer and Archilochus are likely drawing on shared traditions, using common language to produce different ‘takes’ on shared inheritance. While we believe that Homer was performed/composed prior to Archilochus, we don’t know for sure that the ideas presented within Homer and/or Archilochus were presented in the texts we have for the first time. Indeed, considering the iterative nature of performance culture, it is possible that the texts we have represent ideas that were explored many different times in many different forms. We have no way of actually knowing how the songs engaged with each other over time and how this influenced the final forms we have. This means that it is methodologically as important to ask if Homer is ‘responding’ to Archilochus as it is to invert the question or to consider if they are both responding to something else.

This takes me to another challenge: the generic fallacy. There’s an old and stubborn notion that the poetic genres of ancient Greece had firewalls between them and that there were restrictive rules about the contents and form. All of the imagined rules are eventually undermined: the New Simonides poems showed that elegy could in fact be historical; the new Archilochus demonstrated that elegy could contain narrative myth. (Prior to these publications, very respectable scholars insisted that these poems would not happen).

I have always found restrictions about interpretive flow between and across genres or restrictive use of genres to be suspect. Think of the way people use music today: I have often found myself listening to dance music while doing dishes, exercising, or driving the car. I think this is far from atypical. Song culture in ancient Greece was persistent and permeating, but the boundaries between kinds of songs and their occasions were not fixed and hard. Instead, they moved and were squishy, accommodating audience use and changing cultures over time.

I started thinking about again a few years ago because I have been reading Stephen A. Sansom’s article “Achilles and The Resources of Genre: Epitaph, Hymnos, and Paean in Iliad 22.386-94”. In it, Sansom builds on an earlier article by Christopher Faraone, proposing that Homeric singers integrated other hexametric genres into their creations. Faraone suggests that singers do this in order “to enhance a dramatic or narrative situation by fulfilling or upsetting the audience’s generic expectations.” Faraone uses literary theory (Bakhtin) to talk about embedded genres (similarly Melissa Mueller uses Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading to talk about Sappho and Homer). I am a big fan of theoretical approaches, especially when they undergird a pragmatic reality. In this case, I am not sure we need literary theory to make a very basic proposition: Greek singers used the full range of language, music, and ideas at their disposal in order to engage with their audiences. It is my belief that as a ‘master genre’ of Greek song, Homeric epic regularly absorbed and integrated features from other genres.

I first started thinking about this when working on my dissertation and reading A. P. Lardinois’ work on the integration of proverbs into Greek epic. If we can ignore questions of priority and disregard the restrictive definition of genre that posits that elegy and epic and lyric are different poetic universes, it is easier to imagine a performance context where an epic rhapsode would adapt or otherwise integrate words, sounds, and ideas from other forms that audiences would know.

There is an interpretive payoff for this at micro-and macro levels. Sansom shows that Achilles uses language akin to hymnic epitaphs in thinking about Patroklos, indicating a characterization of Achilles that shows a consciousness of other genres and a humanizing move: the hero reflects on death the way ancient audiences did with their funerary epitaphs. This has a reinforcing as well as reflective impact on the shared culture of audience and song. There are structural aspects to this as well indicating group and individual songs, the beginning and end of ritual, and the overall shape and arc of the poem. Here’s what Sansom says

Achilles’ call for the paean in Book 22 repeats most of line 1.473 (ἀείδοντες παιήονα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν, the only other instance in the epic corpus) and seeks to inspire a similar or perhaps the same group of Achaians to sing (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, 22.369; κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν, 22.391). Considering the generic qualities of Achilles’ recollection of Patroklos, hymnos also precedes and works in conjunction with both paeans. From a wider view, then, we can observe that the Iliad thus begins and initiates its ending with embedded hymns: the first, a hymn from local cult; the second, a hymnic epitaph that prototypes the hero-cult of Patroklos. In doing so, it makes use of two of the formal functions associated with hymns: that of preface or prooimion in the epichoric hymn of Book 1, and as a transitional device between songs, themes, or locales in Achilles’ hymn of Book 22.’

There’s a lot more detail to support his argument–the whole piece is certainly worth reading. This joins a growing body of work that acknowledges that Homeric poetry is in a way trans-generic, or, perhaps less clunkily, that the genre of epic poetry is actively engaged with other song genres. Of course, there is a less positive way to think about it as well. As Elton and I have argued in Homer’s Thebes, there is a leveling, almost imperial character to Homeric poetry as it exerts its force on other genres. Like the Star Trek’s Borg, Homeric epic seeks to integrate themes and ideas from other traditions into its song, which it means to make the final one. And, resistance can indeed be futile: Homeric poetry makes its meaning as much by silencing ideas as sampling them.

A Short Bibliography on Homer and Other Genres

Alexandrou, Margarita. “Mythological narratives in Hipponax.” Iambus and elegy : new approaches. Eds. Swift, Laura and Carey, Chris. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2016. 210-228.

Baratz, Amit. “The roots of divination in archaic poetry.” Classical Philology, vol. 117, no. 4, 2022, pp. 581-602. Doi: 10.1086/721576

Barker, Elton and Christensen, Joel. “ the new Archilochus fragment and its resonance with Homeric epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici, no. 57, 2006, pp. 9-41.

Blondell, Ruby. “Refractions of Homer’s Helen in archaic lyric.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 131, no. 3, 2010, pp. 349-391.

Currie, Bruno. Homer’s allusive art. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2016.

Dalby, Andrew. “ lyric and epic in the seventh century.” Archaic Greece: new approaches and new evidence. Eds. Fisher, Nick and Van Wees, Hans. London: Duckworth, 1998. 195-211.

Evans, Stephen. Hymn and epic: a study of their interplay in Homer and the « Homeric Hymns ». Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 244. Turku: Turun yliopisto, 2001.

Faraone, Christopher A.. “On the eve of epic : did the Chryses episode in Iliad 1 begin its life as a separate Homeric « Hymn » ?.” Persistent forms : explorations in historical poetics. Eds. Kliger, Ilya and Maslov, Boris. Verbal Arts : Studies in Poetics. New York: Fordham University Pr., 2016. 397-419. Doi: 10.5422/fordham/9780823264858.003.0015

Griffith, Mark. “Man and the leaves, a study of Mimnermos fr. 2.” California Studies in Classical Antiquity, vol. VIII, 1975, pp. 73-88. Doi: 10.2307/25010683

Harden, Sarah J. and Kelly, Adrian. “Proemic convention and character construction in early Greek epic.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 107, 2013, pp. 1-34.

Hendricks, Amy N.. Approaching chorality : literary representations of the chorus in archaic Greek poetry. [S. l.]: [s. n.], 2020.

Janko, Richard (2016). the archetype of the Orphic gold leaves. Classical Quarterly, N. S., 66(1), 100-127. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838816000380

Kousoulini, Vasiliki. “Alcmanic Hexameter: Alcman’s poetry in its oral context.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, 2013, pp. 420-440.

Lardinois, André Pierre M. H.. “ the orality of Greek proverbial expressions.” Speaking volumes: orality and literacy in the Greek and Roman world. Ed. Watson, Janet. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 218. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2001. 93-107.

Lardinois, André Pierre M. H.. “Characterization through gnomai in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Mnemosyne, vol. 53, no. 6, 2000 Ser. 4, pp. 641-661.

Lavigne, Donald. “Archilochus and Homer in the rhapsodic context.” Iambus and elegy : new approaches. Eds. Swift, Laura and Carey, Chris. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2016. 74-98.

Larson, Stephanie. “ τεθνάκην δ᾽ἀδόλως θέλω: reading Sappho’s « confession » (fr. 94) through Penelope.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, pp. 175-202. Doi: 10.1163/156852510X456129

Levaniouk, Olga Arkadievna. “« Αἴθων », Aithon, and Odysseus.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 100, 2000, pp. 25-51.

Lulli, Laura. “Elegy and epic : a complex relationship.” Iambus and elegy : new approaches. Eds. Swift, Laura and Carey, Chris. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2016. 193-209.

Martin, Richard P.. “ enigmas of the lyric voice.” Making silence speak: women’s voices in Greek literature and society. Eds. Lardinois, André Pierre M. H. and McClure, Laura K.. Princeton (N. J.): Princeton University Pr., 2001. 55-74.

Maslov, Boris. “The genealogy of the Muses: an internal reconstruction of archaic Greek metapoetics.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 137, no. 3, 2016, pp. 411-446.

Mueller, Melissa. “ Re-centering epic « nostos »: gender and genre in Sappho’s Brothers poem.” Arethusa, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 25-46.

Mueller, Melissa. Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading. Cambridge. 2023.

Nobili, Cecilia. “ il nuovo Archiloco.” Maia, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 229-249.

Nobili, Cecilia. “Female lyric voices in the « Odyssey ».” Philologia Antiqua, vol. 16, 2023, pp. 65-81. Doi: 10.19272/202304601006

Purves, Alex. “Who, Sappho ?.” Defining Greek narrative. Eds. Cairns, Douglas L. and Scodel, Ruth. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2014. 175-196.

Sbardella, Livio. “The Trojan War Myth: rhapsodic canon and lyric alternatives.” Submerged literature in ancient Greek culture: an introduction. Eds. Colesanti, Giulio and Giordano, Manuela. Berlin ; Boston (Mass.): De Gruyter, 2014. 61-75.

Strauss Clay, Jenny. “The new Simonides and Homer’s ἡμίθεοι.” The new Simonides: contexts of praise and desire. Eds. Boedeker, Deborah and Sider, David. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2001. 182-184.

Swift, Laura. “Negotiating seduction : Archilochus’ Cologne epode and the transformation of epic.” Philologus, vol. 159, no. 1, 2015, pp. 2-28.

Toohey, Peter. “Archilochus’ general (fr. 114 W). Where did he come from?.” Eranos, vol. LXXXVI, 1988, pp. 1-14.

Walsh, Thomas R.. “Some refractions of Homeric anger in Athenian drama.” A Californian hymn to Homer. Ed. Pepper, Timothy. Hellenic Studies; 41. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Pr., 2010. 105-129.

Watkins, Calvert. “Let us now praise famous grains.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. CXXII, 1978, pp. 9-17.

Watkins, Calvert. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. 1995.

Węcowski, Marek. “Homer and the origins of the symposion.” Omero tremila anni dopo: atti del Congresso di Genova : 6-8 luglio 2000. Eds. Montanari, Franco and Ascheri, Paola. Storia e Letteratura; 210. Roma: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. 625-637.

Part 3: Analysis, Neoanalysis, and the Set List

This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.

This post is part three of three looking more closely at the proposition that our Iliad is made up of a series of songs or ‘episodes’ put together in a monumental performance. The first part looks at some of the internal evidence for performance and provides some historical context. The second part explores how much support there is for this model in the classical period. The third part offers some remarks on how this approach may or may not be different from neoanalysis and begins to sketch out how our Iliad may be broken up into songs or episodes.

In earlier posts, I have surveyed some internal evidence for episodic composition of the Homeric epics and later literary and iconographic support as well. The basic idea is that the epics themselves show smaller songs with recognizable titles or themes at home in the larger arc of the Trojan War potentially combined into narratives of longer duration (as in Odysseus’ tale of his own experiences to the Phaeacians in the Odyssey). Later authors like Aristotle and Aelian start (or continue?) a tradition of talking about the epics as composed of smaller episodes to support this.

I find the model attractive because it can help us understand how multiple performers of Homer could come together for a major event (like the Panathenaia in Athens) and sing longer epics that are like the poems we have from antiquity. Of course, this model does not explain how such performances would lead to our text. In addition, I want to be very clear that I don’t think this process was necessarily one of a majority of fixed songs. Nor do I think it would have occurred once or yielded the epics we have so easily.

Analysis vs. Neoanalysis

I preface this post with those initial caveats because the episodic thought experiment has led to some navel gazing. A question that I struggle to resolve for myself is how the approach I am taking may be differentiated from earlier scholarly frameworks like analysis or neoanalysis. At some level, many of the ideas will seem similar, but there are some contrasting foundational assumptions. Let me try to walk through what I think the differences are and see if they make sense.

Analysis was an approach to Homer that dominated near the end of the 19^th century and for the first quarter of the 20^th. The Analysts were primarily opposed to Unitarians. The latter group argued for the artistic unity of the Homeric epics against the growing consensus of scholarship in general that the Iliad and the Odyssey as we have them were not the products of a single author (or authors for each poem). Due to stylistic inconsistency, textual variations, and other aesthetic judgments based on the features of more modern literary authors, scholars had established that the epics we have couldn’t possibly be the product of individual minds.

As a response to this, Analysts sought to show how editorial intervention had changed the poems or how various songs had been edited together to create the epics that survived antiquity. Often Analysts were in search of the most “original” or ancient core of either epic and as a result endeavored in part to identify where parts of the epics we have came from. The poems of the so-called epic cycle were often seen as likely sources for sections that were otherwise added or adapted to the core stories of “The Rage of Achilles” and “The Homecoming of Odysseus”. Unitarians labored to show the “artistic unity” of the poems we have against this onslaught. The sheer volume of discrepancies and the lack of ‘scientific rigor’ in the Unitarian approaches rendered their arguments mostly romantic and easily undermined in the face of the ‘evidence’ provided by the Analysts.

The advent of oral-formulaic theory through the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord and many others shifted the debate radically. In a simplistic summary, oral-formulaic theory countermanded questions about consistency, style, and the difficulty of composition offered by the Analysts in an evidence-based way that appealed to the scientific bent of scholarship coming out of the 19^th century. A great deal of Homeric scholarship from the 1930s into the 1970s was engaged either with fleshing out the details of oral-formulaic theory or with coming to terms of how it shifted our notions of authorship, textualization, and transmission.

Neoanalysis eventually emerged as scholars returned to questions of the relationship between our epics and other narrative traditions. Neoanalysis does not generally claim that the epics we have were made up by editing together other narratives, but instead explores how the parts of the Iliad and Odyssey that we have may have drawn on other poems (or poetic traditions) such as the Aithiopis or the Kypria. This approach has been pretty fruitful in showing how our epics draw on motifs, plots, and scenes that we believe were in other lost poems. But often, neoanalytic claims betray older analytic motivations. Erwin Cook summarizes some of these tensions well in his work on Iliad 8:

“Analytic scholars such as Wilamowitz used the episode to support their argument that Book 8 was “late” because it echoes accounts based on the Aithiopis in which Nestor again suffers a chariot wreck, and his son, Antilokhos, rescues him at the cost of his own life.9 An assumption underlying this argument is that one account is “imitating” the other. The derivative account is inherently “inferior” to its model, and betrays its dependency in part by its aesthetic shortcomings, including its imperfect integration into the narrative. For example, the Neoanalyst Wolfgang Kullmann accepts Analytic claims about the relative priority of the two episodes, though he avoids the Analytic conclusion that the Iliadic passage is interpolated by arguing that the Aithiopis is earlier than the Iliad.”

My reservations about Neoanalysis have generally been (1) that the approach too often assumes that the Iliad or Odyssey are drawing on poems that were prior to them (therefore in some way more original and authentic) and (2) that a great deal of the evidence we have for the contents or even existence of these poems comes from scholarship that developed to explicate the Iliad and the Odyssey. There’s an essential circularity to claiming that the Homeric epics are based on material that only ended up being preserved in reference to the Iliad or the Odyssey. If we imagine epic performance as lasting hundreds of years in many different contexts, it seems tenuous to me to make significant compositional claims based on secondary evidence when many thousands of other performances may have helped shape their character. In addition to this concern for circularity, I think the hierarchical models favored by such approaches tend to create stemmata and trees that look like manuscript traditions and not the flowing and circulating of motifs, ideas, and structures that could make it very likely for a song we imagine as late to have actually influenced something we conceive as earlier while they were both in the process of developing into their final forms. (And to add more apprehension to this: the very notion of a final form is ill-fit to composition in performance.)

Episodicism (?)

Overall, it should be clear that I am not fundamentally opposed to the notion that the epics we have integrate material that existed prior to their final performances and textualization. My basic contention is that we cannot really know anything other than the poems we have and it is more fruitful to imagine that even if we have an Iliad that was influenced by an Aethiopis, each of the story traditions that these poems represent went through innumerable iterations that influenced each other. As a result, pointing to a scene in our Iliad and claiming it was based on a specific scene in a specific poem thoroughly misconstrues the nature of oral-derived poetry. (Many Neoanalysts are certainly proponents for the orality of the Homeric epics, of course.)

Given these distinctions, then, how is imagining our epic poem coming together through the performance of discrete episodes related to Neoanalysis? Some of the assumptions are certainly the same, namely that there were more or less fixed story traditions within the Trojan War narrative myth and that these traditions were recognizable to audiences.

I believe that this approach is different in two basic ways. First, I am exploring how the Iliad is made up of smaller parts to explain its compositional unity and not assuming the priority of any given part over another. Second, I am not proposing that the individual episodes are fixed and portable objects, but rather different song traditions with recognizable features that could be performed independently of the whole if needed. Unlike the Analysts, I am not proposing that there is a core and original Iliad that this process will be able to identify. Unlike some Neoanalysts, I am not trying to reconstruct how the Iliad was based on or made up of earlier poems. Instead, I am trying to imagine what it might look like over time to have a more or less regular list of episodes that could be performed as part of a larger performance. Karol Zieliński (2023, 664) presents a somewhat stronger articulation:

If, as we have already demonstrated, the songs of the cycle showed a given episode in the context of the whole Trojan War, then it follows that they must have retained a certain degree of independence. The presentation of these episodes in sequence must have taken place on special occasions, e.g. during great festivals like the Panathenaia. But the independence of a song depicting a given episode from the perspective of the whole war could have been possible only because the thematic range of the cycle had already been established and familiar, so it seems that the principle of sequential presentation is deeply rooted in Greek tradition.

(I must also confess to worrying that the distinction I am attempting to draw is too fine to be a difference that makes a difference. There are many different shades of Neoanalysis. This approach certainly contrasts with that of Martin West in The Making of the Iliad where he sees the integration of different narrative traditions as a very writerly pursuit. But there would be far less tension with the work of scholars like Christos Tsagalis whose approach is more flexible and in tune with oral traditional theory).

Here again, I think the Apologoi—books 9-12 of the Odyssey—can provide an instructive example. Imagine Odysseus’ audience in Skheria: they have no notion of Odysseus’ tale as a series of discrete episodes that may have had an independent existence in different story traditions. Instead, they experience a coherent narrative with many turns, all functioning in the service of explaining how Odysseus ended up on their island. The parts have different length and importance: the Cyclops episode and the Nekyia are longer and much more detailed than the tale of Aeolus or the Lotus-eaters. Circe’s island presents a beginning, middle, and end that is much more well-developed than the brief tales of the Laistrygonians or the Kikones. But they are connected through the narrative conceit of sea-faring in a way that renders them separate even as part of a whole. At the same time, they are thematically connected to the epic as a whole: the scenes end with the deaths of Odysseus’ men after they eat the cattle of the sun (anticipated by the proem in Odyssey 1) and Odysseus swept up on Calypso’s island, where the external audience finds him in Odyssey 5.

Now imagine the 10 scenes of the Apologoi as a set list in a live performance. It would take very little effort for a seasoned group of performers to musically “sample” or anticipate parts of the 9^th and 10^th songs at the beginning of the set. The songs could be blended together smoothly or abruptly as the performance required, giving the sense of functioning as a single composition even when the individual songs may have come from different places. In the context of one performance, moreover, the musicians might adapt the songs to fit one another in a way they might not if they were performed in a different order or individually.

The Iliadic Set List

I have spent a good deal of time talking about the idea. Now it is time to make it a little more concrete and see what comes of it. I have reached out to a few friends to help explore methods for testing this, both quantitative (using statistical language modeling) and qualitative (thinking about thematic and artistic aspects). I am also trying to figure out how to use analogical methods too: to really think about how modern professional musicians “stitch” their performances together.

For now, here’s a list of the books of the Iliad and the episodes we have some reason to believe would have been identifiable in antiquity, based on evidence in ancient literature, art, and scholarship.

Book || “episode/Song”

1 Overarching: Rage of Achilles + Ransoming of Briseis + Strife of Agamemnon and Achilles

2 False Dream +Thersites +Catalog of Ships

3 Teichoskopia + Duel of Menelaos and Paris + Helen and Paris in the Bedroom

4 Oath Breaking (Pandaros) +Epipolesis

5 +Diomedea / Aristeia of Diomedes +Wounding of Aphrodite + Theomachy

6 Hektor’s Visit to the city + [Glaukos and Diomedes as an independent episode]

7 Duel between Hektor and Ajax

8 Echoes of the Aethiopis

9 Embassy to Achilles

10 Doloneia

11 Aristeia of Agamemnon + Wounding of Diomedes

12 Teikhomakhia

13 Fighting by the Ships/Battle of the ships

14 Dios Apate

15 Echoes of Succession Myths

16 Patrokleia

17 Fight over the body: Menelaos v. Hektor over Euphorbus

18 Arms of Achilles / Shield of Achilles

19 Reconciliation (?); Achilles talks to his horses

20 Aeneas vs. Achilles

21 Theomachy

22 Achilles Kills Hektor + Achilles mutilates the body

23 Achilles kills captives + Contest for Patroklos

24 Ransoming of Hektor + Laments of Hecuba and Andromache

I have italicized a few episodes I want to identify but can’t find good support for.

For me, what is surprising in this list is not so much that there is some support for an episode in nearly every book, but that there is so little support for books 8 and 15, which have been identified by scholars like Bruce Heiden as really important to the structure and themes of our particular Iliad. In addition, even a cursory review of the material shows much that is not accounted for. The greater portion of the episodes identified in antiquity accord with the epic’s first third (where it seems to engage the most with the traditions that precede the war). There’s a compositional echoing of the Odyssey here as well: both epics seem to be more fluid and strange in their second halves than their first. Scenes like Agamemnon’s intervention in the sparing of Adrastus in book 6 may be special to this version of the Iliad and therefore more significant for its interpretation. Political scenes like those in books 1, 2, 9, 19, and the beginning of 24 that people like Elton Barker have shown are crucial for understanding the Iliad’s politics also seem underrepresented in the episodic tradition.

None of this vitiates the thought experiment–instead, I think it provides a really unique chance to reconsider again that dynamic relationship between the Iliad we have and the performance traditions that produced it. Thinking about the relationship between the synchronic moment of that performance and how singers came together to respond to their audiences and their times is one of the things that not only keeps the Iliad alive for me, but keeps its study vital.

Next steps include mapping out the line numbers for the episodes and interstitial parts, doing more research to see if other song traditions have been overlooked, and then taking turns with others working on this process, and pushing through the various frameworks for thinking about this reimagined performance. If you’re reading this and have thoughts, please share them. Like the epics in their composition, their interpretation is something that happens best with many people taking turns.

Bibliography: As Always, not exhaustive. Also, shared bibliography for all three posts.

Beck, Bill. “Lost in the middle : story time and discourse time in the « Iliad ».” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 46-64. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00101003

Rinon, Yoav. “« Mise en abyme » and tragic signification in the « Odyssey »: the three songs of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 208-225. Doi: 10.1163/156852506777069673

Beck, Deborah. “The presentation of song in Homer’s « Odyssey ».” Orality, literacy and performance in the ancient world, edited by Elizabeth Minchin, Mnemosyne. Supplements; 335. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2012, pp. 25-53.

Benardete, Seth. “Some Misquotations of Homer in Plato.” Phronesis 8, no. 2 (1963): 173–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4181724.

Broeniman, Clifford. “Demodocus, Odysseus, and the Trojan War in Odyssey 8.” Classical World, vol. 90, no. 1, 1996-1997, pp. 3-14.

Christensen, Joel P. 2020. The Many-Minded Man. Ithaca.

Christensen, Joel P. (2018). The clinical « Odyssey »: Odysseus’s apologoi and narrative therapy. Arethusa, 51(1), 1-31. Doi: 10.1353/are.2018.0000

Collins, Derek Burton. “Improvisation in rhapsodic performance.” Helios, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 11-27.

Collins, Derek. 2004. Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry. Hellenic Studies Series 7. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_CollinsD.Master_of_the_Game.2004.

Combellack, Frederick M. “Homer the Innovator.” Classical Philology 71, no. 1 (1976): 44–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/268517.

Cook, Erwin F. 1995. The Odyssey in Athens. Ithaca.

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

Davies, Malcolm. The « Aethiopis »: neo-neoanalysis reanalyzed. Hellenic Studies; 71., Washington (D. C.): Center for Hellenic Studies, 2016.

Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 81. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Due.Achilles_Unbound.2018.

Dué, Casey, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton. “Panathenaia.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corinne Ondine Pache, 187–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Edmunds, Lowell. “Three short essays on Demodocus’s song of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey 8.266-369).” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 4, 2020, pp. 55-71. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00401003

Edwards, Mark W.. “Neoanalysis and beyond.” Classical Antiquity, vol. IX, 1990, pp. 311-325. Doi: 10.2307/25010933

Haft, Adele J.. “Odysseus’ wrath and grief in the Iliad. Agamemnon, the Ithacan king, and the sack of Troy in Books 2, 4, and 14.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXV, 1989-1990, pp. 97-114.

Finkelberg, Margalit. “The first song of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, vol. XL, 1987, pp. 128-132. Doi: 10.1163/156852587X00111

Finkelberg, Margalit. “The sources of Iliad 7.” Colby Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2002, pp. 151-161.

Gaisser, Julia Haig. “Adaptation of traditional material in the Glaucus-Diomedes episode.” TAPA, vol. C, 1969, pp. 165-176.

González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Hellenic Studies Series 47. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GonzalezJ.The_Epic_Rhapsode_and_his_Craft.2013.

Heiden, Bruce. “The placement of « book divisions » in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 118, 1998, pp. 68-81. Doi: 10.2307/632231

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

Howes, George Edwin. “Homeric Quotations in Plato and Aristotle.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 6 (1895): 153–237. https://doi.org/10.2307/310358.

Hunter, Richard L.. “The songs of Demodocus: compression and extension in Greek narrative poetry.” Brill’s companion to Greek and Latin epyllion and its reception, edited by Manuel Baumbach and Silvio Bär, Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2012, pp. 83-109.

Kakridis, Johannes Theophanes. “Auch Homer ist in die Lehre gegangen.” Gymnasium, vol. XCIX, 1992, pp. 97-100.

Karanika, Andromache. “Wedding and performance in Homer: a view in the « Teichoskopia ».” Trends in Classics, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, pp. 208-233.

Kelly, Adrian. “Performance and rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod.” Performance, iconography, reception: studies in honour of Oliver Taplin, edited by Martin Revermann and Peter J. Wilson, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2008, pp. 177-203.

Kullmann, Wolfgang. “Ἡ σύλληψη τῆς Ὀδύσσειας και ἡ μυθικη παράδοση.” Ἐπιστημονικὴ Ἐπετηρὶς τῆς Φιλοσοφικῆς Σχολῆς τοῦ Πανεπιστημίου Ἀθηνῶν, vol. XXV, 1974-1977, pp. 9-29.

Marks, Jim. “Resisting Aristotle : episodes in the Epic cycle.” Tecendo narrativas : unidade e episódio na literatura grega antiga, edited by Christian Werner, Antonio Dourado-Lopes and Erika Werner, São Paulo: Humanitas, FFLCH/USP, 2015, pp. 55-71.

Most, Glenn W. “The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 119 (1989): 15–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/284257.

Murray, P.. “Homer and the bard.” Aspects of the epic, edited by Tom Winnifrith, P. Murray and Karl Watts Gransden, New York: St. Martin’s Pr., 1983, pp. 1-15.

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans. 1999. Johns Hopkins. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Best_of_the_Achaeans.1999.

Nagy, Gregory. 2002. Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Hellenic Studies Series 1. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Platos_Rhapsody_and_Homers_Music.2002.

Nagy, Gregory and Olga M. Davidson. “On the problem of envisioning Homeric composition: some comparative observations.” Philologia Antiqua, vol. 16, 2023, pp. 15-25. Doi: 10.19272/202304601002

Nelson, Thomas J.. “Iphigenia in the « Iliad » and the architecture of Homeric allusion.” TAPA, vol. 152, no. 1, 2022, pp. 55-101. Doi: 10.1353/apa.2022.0007

Nishimura, Yoshiko T.. “The Circe-episodes in the « Odyssey ».” Journal of Classical Studies, vol. 45, 1997, pp. 40-49.

Postlethwaite, Norman. “The duel of Paris and Menelaos and the Teichoskopia in Iliad 3.” Antichthon, vol. XIX, 1985, pp. 1-6.

Rengakos, Antonios (2002). Zur narrativen Funktion der Telemachie. In André Hurst & Françoise Létoublon (Eds.), La mythologie et l’« Odyssée »: hommage à Gabriel Germain : actes du colloque international de Grenoble, 20-22 mai 1999 (pp. 87-98). Droz.

Rinon, Yoav. “« Mise en abyme » and tragic signification in the « Odyssey »: the three songs of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 208-225. Doi: 10.1163/156852506777069673

Roisman, Hanna M.. “« Rhesus »’ allusions to the Homeric Hector.” Hermes, vol. 143, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-23.

Segal, Charles (1994). Singers, heroes, and gods in the Odyssey. Cornell University Pr.

Sels, Nadia. “The untold death of Laertes: reevaluating Odysseus’s meeting with his father.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 66, no. 2, 2013, pp. 181-205. Doi: 10.1163/156852511X584991

Thomas, Oliver. “Phemius Suite.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 134, 2014, pp. 89-102. Doi: 10.1017/S007542691400007X

Tsagalis, Christos. 2008. The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 29. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_TsagalisC.The_Oral_Palimpsest.2008.

Tsagalis, Christos. “Towards an Oral, Intertextual Neoanalysis” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 209-244. https://doi.org/10.1515/tcs.2011.011

Wyatt, William F.. “Homeric transitions.” Ἀρχαιογνωσία, vol. 6, 1989-1990, pp. 11-24.

YAMAGATA, NAOKO. “USE OF HOMERIC REFERENCES IN PLATO AND XENOPHON.” The Classical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2012): 130–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41820000.

Zieliński, Karol. 2023. The Iliad and the Oral Epic Tradition. Hellenic Studies Series 99. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ZielinskiK.The_Iliad_and_the_Oral_Epic_Tradition.2023.

This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.

Why read Homer? Why read Homer when any reasonable person might think that our “bronze age is collapsing”? A simple answer: it brings me peace. I have returned to the Iliad and the Odyssey throughout my life both as a touchstone for world events and as a type of therapy.

I started grad school in NYC right before 9/11 and turned away from all my schoolwork just to work on Homer. There’s no accident that my dissertation ended up being on Rhetoric and Politics in the Iliad–I was only dimly aware of responding to world events through my work. Similarly, following my father’s sudden death at 61, I immersed myself in the Odyssey. When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, I teamed up with Lanah Koelle and Paul O’Mahony to start Reading Greek Tragedy Online, which culminated in a 24 hour, round the world reading of the Odyssey.

I used to think of these responses as escapist, at best providing some indirect ways of working through the challenge of ‘real’ life. But a conversation with one of the founders of the Sportula, Stefani Echeverria-Fenn, helped me understand that there is more going on than that. As Stefani wrote at the time, the slow reading of Greek or Latin can help rearrange reality, providing a therapeutic method of reasserting agency on the world. The slow reading of philology, of communing with the dead through their languages, can help produce what psychologists call a “flow state”.

There are important neurobiological aspects to such a state: when we are fully engaged on a task that takes us outside of ourselves, it can have positive effects on mental and physical health. It can slow down the heart-rate and calm a racing mind. There are studies that show similarities with the neurophysiology of prayer or other meditative practices. The deliberative practice of reading intensely creates space outside of time and the daily self. The space and the process can be therapeutic.

Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied poetry with the translator and poet Olga Broumas. I distinctly remember a meeting when I told her I was an atheist and she calmly responded that I was not. How, I asked, could she say that? She told me I just hadn’t learned the words to talk about the universe in a way that made sense yet and that I was too spiritual to be an atheist. I can’t say that this much has changed in a quarter century, but I can say that when the world gets dark, I somehow find light in Homer. And that’s a pretty good start.

New Book Alert!

Homer’s not just useful for mental health! Greek epic also provides a way to think about how humanity got where it is and what we need to do to survive. In addition to the resurgence of fascism, the stupidity of modern technology and its claims to intelligence, the horrors of ongoing conflicts, and rising income inequality, we may be facing an extinction level event from climate change over the next century. Not to be an alarmist–there is hope! But the hope diminishes with each passing year of inaction.

Ecocriticism is a cross–disciplinary theoretical approach to literature. While the term was first coined in the 1970s, the approach has seen slow adoption in past-focused disciplines like Classics. Ecocriticism can characterize a lot of work that looks at the interaction between human beings and the environment, and it can also apply to individual works like Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory that speaks directly to ecological concerns and humankind’s relationship with nature.

When it comes to classical studies and Homer, ecocritical approaches can have an important historicizing contribution. Just as post-colonial studies of Homer can help us understand the systems of values that have shaped Homeric reception and help us to understand epic’s fundamental relationship to enslavement, misogyny, political power, etc, and how these values have influenced later cultures and Homer’s appeal, so too can ecocritical studies help us understand how our modern relationship to the natural world draws on ancient beliefs.

The last decade has seen increasing interest in the depiction of the environment Homer. William Brockliss’ book on Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment is a great resource for thinking through the presentation of the environment in Homer. Wayne Mark Rimmer has suggested that Homeric warriors function as an index of humanity’s ‘precarious place in a delicate natural world”. Julio Vega Payne does a great job in his dissertation of developing the way that Homer uses the natural world as a character to explore human-environmental dynamics. In her blog post “Bring Timber Into The City”: Reading The Iliad Against The Grain” Lindsay Davies concludes

“A human ecological reading of the Iliad requires us to recognize that in the world of the poem, humans, in their mobility of mind and body—remember swift-footed Achilles—are greater than trees and beasts. They transcend the earth through their imagination and ingenuity, if not in their bodies. Their eyes are cast upwards to the sky for meaning, not downwards to the earth. In this context, as Robert Pogue Harrison argues in his great study of the meaning of forests in culture, it becomes imperative to clear the trees, for “Where divinity has been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with cosmic infinity, or with ‘heaven,’ the forests become monstrous, for they hide the prospect of god” (6, italics in original). This association of the sky with transcendence also explains the significance of Homer’s poor pigeon whose death causes warriors to wonder. For the bird struck down while striving to fly skyward potently symbolizes the quest for heroic glory, that which appeared to turn a man into a god yet simultaneously guaranteed that he would bite the dust.”

A little earlier, Jason Bell argued for a reading of the Odyssey that centered environmental ethics (see Elizabeth Schulz’s article on the Odyssey and ecocriticism too); and Sam Cooper’s article on “Speculative Fiction, Ecocriticism, and the Wanderings of Odysseus” shows how “Ecocritical readings of the Odyssey that wander purposefully between that epic and its receptions (let it be clear that the one I offer is by no means exhaustive) may help us to stay with its ecological troubles, and with those of later periods, and with our own.”

I think there is definitely more work to be done on the Odyssey’s relationship with the natural world, especially if we position the Odyssey in cosmic history as a text moving from a world of fantastic abundance (consider the endless feasting of the Iliad or the meals in the early part of the epic itself) to one of comparative scarcity (the suitors’ unchecked eating is a major concern). Given current interest in abundance and inequity, epic’s arc from the zero-sum game of Achaean honor in Iliad 1 to the premise that “wealth and peace should be enough” to avoid conflicts in book 24 of the Iliad is worth tracing. But I have been thinking about ecocriticism and Homer since I first Edith Hall’s  Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World.

I am going to say very little about this book right now, except that I think it should be one of the most important books written about Greek poetry of the year, if not the decade. I hosted Edith for a talk at Brandeis last year where she presented some of the research for this book and I immediately recognized its importance. It forces us to reconsider the natural world presented in Homer and to think as well about how the heroic world and its values contain the seeds of our own destructive relationship with the planet.

The book unfolds in part by looking at the poetics and the contents of the Iliad, following chapters about interpreting the poem, historical contexts, and ecocritical approaches. Hall traces the work of Loggers, Farmers, and Smiths, through chapters that blend history, archaeology, and philology to ask readers to confront the consumptive deforestation that Homeric epic presupposes as a necessity for heroic (if not Human) life. In the Epilogue, she notes that “central to the ideology of the Iliad is the idiom of infinitude, an assumption that the physical Earth, its contents, and the resources needed by humans, somehow limitless” (202). Homeric culture, as it were, is founded upon a need to continually expand to add new resources to fuel the machine of human war and politics. As Hall continues, “The Iliad shows that the seeds of environmental capacity were already sown by warfare at the dawn of human civilizations less than ten thousand years ago” (203). The military industrial complex is the largest driver of climate change today; and this has always been the case.

And, yet, Hall does not with total despair. She reads the Iliad as a record and a lament. It is “not only the poem of the Anthropocene; it has the potential to become the epic of the Earth–the poem for the Anthropocene” (205). By bearing witness, the Iliad advocates for all that has been lost to the blades of war; by learning from this witness, modern audiences have a chance to contemplate the nature of things in truth.

The world burning is not inevitable. It is a product of the way human beings choose to live. According to Hall, epic can help us choose to live a bit longer.

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 24. 

The Iliad begins:

“Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”

Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω ᾿Αχιλῆος

And then it ends:

“And so they were completing the burial of Hektor, tamer of horses”

῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο 

Imagine if all we had of the poem was a scholarly record conveying these two lines. What would we make of the journey that we would have to take to get from line 1 to line 2? How would we relate the opening request with the final fact and then connect these in turn to a larger tradition of myth? One might naturally assume that the former leads to the latter in a causal fashion, but there’s no necessary reason to posit that.

There’s an openness, though, to both lines. The initial invocation asks for a story to be told; the final one offers a scene in process: the imperfect tense of the verb ἀμφίεπον shows an action that is ongoing but not yet complete, it leaves the audience with the sense that more is still to come, that the final word has not actually been spoken. This certainly functions to mark the epic as part of a larger story cycle, just as the imperfect in line 1.7 (Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή) indicates that the Iliad is part of a larger process, a cosmic narrative arc.

Yet, without external evidence, each name is merely an empty sign waiting to be filled, a story needing to be told. But we have the whole poem. We can follow from line 1.1 to 24.804. And we still likely ask why the Iliad ends with the burial of Hektor, tamer of horses. Ancient scholars had a range of less than satisfactory answers. The scholia record that a scholar named Menekrates believed that Homer was silent about the events after Hektor because “he sensed his own weakness and inability to tell the events in the same way” (Schol. bT ad. Hom. Il. 21.804). Another claims that some modified the final line:

Schol. T ad. Hom. Il. 21.804a

“Some people write “and so they were completing the burial of Hektor. Then the Amazon came / the daughter of Ares, the great-hearted man-killer”

τινὲς γράφουσιν „ὣς οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος· ἦλθε δ’ ᾿Αμαζών, / ῎Αρηος θυγάτηρ μεγαλήτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο” (804. 804a).

In this version, we find the possibility of an ever-expanding tale, moving from the Iliad to the events of the Aithiopis without much of a break at all. While I have no doubt that ancient performances offered such opportunities for stitching and re-stitching narratives together, I think we still need to contend with the beginning, middle, and end of our Iliad. Even if a performer would segue from an Iliad to an Aithiopis, we still face the fact that each was felt to be a unitary and individualizable narrative. So, here are some other reasons why the Iliad ends as it does.

1.‘Epic’ time is different from normal narrative time: it is more like a time loop in modern science fiction. All the main events always happen and have already always happened, but there’s room for variation in the journey between them. This occupies a place between what we might clumsily call “ritual time” and a causal narrative chain. For the former, I have in mind the narrative cycle of a liturgical calendar where congregants/audiences are treated to the same stories at the same part of the year. The stories never change because they have happened and must happen the same, but our experiences of them change as we move from one repetition to another. For the latter, the logic of causation is imposed through the repetition of the same basic events, but by finding space in the interstices to tell different stories, audiences explore the dynamic interaction between determinism and agency, between accepting what one cannot change and being empowered to alter what one can.

2.The city has already been destroyed in the imaginations of the characters and the audience. Following on the immutable layering of epic time, Iliadic narrative refers to canonical events of the Trojan War but mostly moves around them: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the marshaling of the armies, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the sack of the city, and other events all exist on the periphery, at times marginalized to such an extent that scholars can doubt whether or not the Homeric epics appeal to them. At the same time, the Iliad appropriates and reperforms moments from the larger tale that should not be part if its tale, engaging in a creative anachronism that manages to place the catalogue of ships, the teikhoskopia, the duel over Helen, and the building of Achaean fortifications between Achilles’ falling out with Agamemnon and the embassy to try to resolve the spat.

The Iliad reshuffles the deck of mythical time both to assert the supremacy of its story and to show that no series of events, no causal chain, can alter the outcome of the overall narrative. This is theological in the cosmic sense: notions like Zeus’ plan and the double determination (when the narrative shows the gods ‘causing’ an action but also features mortals choosing to act without knowledge of divine will) underscores the complexity of causation and the inscrutability of single efficient causes. At the same time, such shuffling is evocative of human cognition, the way we understand and retain basic concepts of beginning and ending but can lose track of intermediary steps.

3.Achilles has already died. In a way, this is no different than the previous point, but it is important enough to emphasize again. The Iliad does not merely deal out the deck of myth in a different order, it redraws the images on the most important cards to achieve similar ends. Achilles dies through Patroklos—his physical death is disassembled and re-used in book 11 and then book 16, anticipated in books 18, 19, 22, 23, and 24, but never performed because it has already been achieved. Just as the city is destroyed in the words of Hektor, Andromache, Priam, and Hecuba, so too is Achilles’ death portrayed through Patroklos’ surrogacy and the divine and mortal speeches that anticipate it.

4.Hektor’s death may be more important than Achilles’.  As I have mentioned before, the Iliad takes part in an etiological (that is, explanatory) arc that moves from the dios boulê, Zeus’ plan to rid the world of the race of heroes, to an era when the realms of gods and men are more thoroughly distinct. While the Odyssey more-or-less completes this journey toward Hesiod’s Works and Days, where human beings toil distant from tangible divine favor or aid, the Iliad moves audiences from the twin rages of Achilles and Apollo in book 1 (where they are both upset at Agamemnon) to Apollo’s anger at Achilles for his treatment of Hektor in book 24. Apollo—much to Hera’s surprise—takes the side of a non-divine mortal for the rite of burial against one closer to his own kin.

Along the way, we see the widening distance between divine knowledge and human knowledge—the whole motif of double determination, whereby we as audience members see the gods and mortals as understanding different levels of causation for a given action. The repeated toggling between divine intervention paired with human decisions shows us separate worlds, even separate realities or dimensions whose entanglement does little more than increase damage and pain to one another. It is almost as if the Iliad attests to a time when the fabric between two different realities was thin enough to be permeable and that it shows us how perilous it is when beings from one realm meddle with events in another. The world of the gods was overturned by the silly decision of one man (Paris!); the mortal plain roils with each outsized, overwrought divine act. The steady movement towards emphasizing the honor of mortals in death and the separation of gods and humans both justifies and supports the way the world is for mortals and suggests rather strongly that it is better this way.

5.Hektor’s burial is the end of an era. And also a beginning. Hektor is different from Achilles as a full-mortal and as a ‘family’ man. By ending with his burial rather than the fall of the city or the funeral games for Achilles, the Iliad elevates his importance and closes out the race of heroes by encapsulating a different series of values in this one fallible man. Hektor is far from perfect throughout the epic: he struggles to understand his role in leading the city, he blusters and glowers when things don’t go his way, and he is shown to be in the framework of Achilles and Diomedes somewhat un-heroic in his final moments. But the laments that follow his death in books 22 and 24—cast against the obscenity of Achilles’ treatment of his body—double down on the importance of his unheroic character as a son, father, and a man whose kindness towards the most hated woman in the world and the cause of all his troubles is so incredible that scholars have speculated he was under the spell of her charisma. Hektor’s inconsistencies and internal contradictions form a counterpoint to Achilles’. In a universe where even the gods are churlish and quick-to-rage, what kinds of excess should we be grateful for in a man?

6.Hektor’s burial may also be self-reflective for epic poetry. As I mentioned above, the tense/aspect of the verb performing Hektor’s burial is incomplete, and ongoing (῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο). The Iliad doesn’t so much end as fade away, to black as in the end of the final episode of the Sopranos. The process of burying Hektor remains ongoing as the poem ends, as we all continue to engage in its continuation through sharing in his memory. But I think the process, the imperfectivity goes farther than this.

The process of the burial is the beginning of enshrining Hektor’s memory and creating his kleos. But this may also be an example of an unnoticed ekphrasis. While the tomb itself is not the creation of a work of art like Achilles’ shield, it is still the execution of a physical craft described within an oral/written artform. As such it may contain an implicit comparison between the practice of burial and the art of epic poetry.

Homer, Il. 24.797–800

“They quickly placed the bones in an empty trench and then
They covered it with great, well-fitted stones.
They rushed to heap up a marker, around which they set guards
In case the well-greaved Achaeans should attack too soon.”

αἶψα δ’ ἄρ’ ἐς κοίλην κάπετον θέσαν, αὐτὰρ ὕπερθε
πυκνοῖσιν λάεσσι κατεστόρεσαν μεγάλοισι·
ῥίμφα δὲ σῆμ’ ἔχεαν, περὶ δὲ σκοποὶ ἥατο πάντῃ,
μὴ πρὶν ἐφορμηθεῖεν ἐϋκνήμιδες ᾿Αχαιοί.

In Iliad seven, Hector challenges the ‘best of the Achaeans’ to a duel. There he imagines that, once he had won the contest, the dead hero’s tomb would be a monument to, and sign of, his everlasting glory. Ironically, the dead hero’s tomb turns out to be his, once the Trojans construct it at the epic’s end

But what kind of sign is it? Homer describes how the Trojans’ burial mound for Hector leaves ‘a mark’—the word here is sêma (from which we get the words ‘semantics’ or ‘semaphore’), and also means a sign or symbol. In the end, then, the epic leaves us with a symbol of some kind that I think points back to this epic itself. Ostensibly, of course, that is Hector’s burial mound, a physical marker of his fame—and as a metonym it stands for the fame of all the heroes who fought at Troy. Yet, its immediate referent, the physical thing it describes, is a ‘hollow grave’ (koilên kapeton).

An English speaker might wonder whether or not the hollowness of the grave marks some sort of empty meaning and thus offers some judgment on the vanity and meaninglessness of the conflict, perhaps evoking ambivalence. But part of the trick in translating metaphors from one culture to another is understanding that a cognitive valence can be very different. In English, ‘hollow’ and ‘empty’ tend to refer to the absence of substance within something else. (Hence, our use for it to describe depression or anhedonia.)

But in ancient Greek, the word koilê is used to describe the shape made by a thing that allows it to hold something else. It can sometimes then come to shift to point to the absence of that something else, but it is, more often, a marker for the vessel which can carry something, even when it is carrying it. In conjunction with Hektor’s grave, consider the following lyric mentions of the ‘hollow ships’ of the Trojan War:

Consider:

Ibycus fr. 1a 16-19

Nor yet the overreaching virtue
of heroes whom the hollow,
many-benched ships brought
as the destruction of Troy.

ἡρ]ώων ἀρετὰν
ὑπ]εράφανον οὕς τε κοίλα[ι
νᾶες] πολυγόμφοι ἐλεύσα[ν
Τροί]αι κακόν, ἥρωας ἐσ̣θ̣[λούς·

Pindar, Ol. 6.1

Unrisked virtue becomes honored
Neither among men nor in the empty ships.
But many a man is remembered
When something noble has been tried.

… ἀκίνδυνοι δ’ ἀρεταί
οὔτε παρ’ ἀνδράσιν οὔτ’ ἐν ναυσὶ κοίλαις
τίμιαι· πολλοὶ δὲ μέμναν-
ται, καλὸν εἴ τι ποναθῇ.

In both these passages, the ships are marked out for their potential to carry something and their ability to do so. It is also arguable that the ships carry ethical content of the heroes they convey to Troy as well. Of course, in the Iliad the ships are often invoked as empty in their capacity to carry things as well as people—but these moments are also seen as critical in telling the story, as when the Trojan herald Idaios refers to the beginning of the conflict:

Homer, Il. 7.399-400

“However many possessions Alexandros led in his hollow ships
To troy. Oh, how I wish he had died first!”

κτήματα μὲν ὅσ’ ᾿Αλέξανδρος κοίλῃς ἐνὶ νηυσὶν
ἠγάγετο Τροίηνδ’· ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλ’ ἀπολέσθαι·

So, when the word used to describe that ‘hollow trench’ (koilein kápeton) is the same used for the ships that brought the Achaeans to Troy and will take their stories away, the grave is being marked out as a vessel for Hector’s fame. The message of Hektor’s “empty grave” is not like the elegiac regret of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, but instead it represents the potential of an empty vessel to be filled by the audience in its reception of the poem. It is a signal, I think, of the assumption that meaning continues to be made outside the world of the poem and that when we stare into the sign we create the meaning based on what we ‘read’ there and knew before. Each time we engage in this process, we create anew. This outward looking burial mound that is simultaneously Hektor’s grave and the Iliad itself is a continuation of the narrative’s strategy of showing us characters responding to other’s narratives by reflecting on their own lives and then engaging in storytelling themselves, as we see in Achilles’ final story to Priam in book 24. We are the people to come, walking or sailing by on the Hellespont or traveling through the tale as it is sung or read. We recreate the story of Achilles, bound up in the grave of the man he killed, just as Hektor imagined his story would be told through his own enemy’s tomb.

So, in addition to Hector’s grave, this vessel, this sêma, refers to the Iliad itself. The epic is a vessel of fame, of Hector’s, Achilles’, and Agamemnon’s, but it is also a marker for the death of a world, for the end of a bygone time. On the one hand, it marks the transition from the heroic age to the present day. On the other, it acts as a grave marker of an entire tradition of epic poetry which would have sung about the wars at Troy and Thebes. We as audience members recreate the tale, but in the raiment of our time, transforming it, but reviving it too.

The hollowness of this thing is not about being empty, but about having the power to carry something, to produce something else, even something new. As the Tao Te Ching states, “We shape clay into a pot / but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space / that makes it livable” (Chapter 11; Stephen Mitchell, 1988). Thus, Hector’s grave carries with it everything he was or could be; and the Iliad, far from empty and devoid of meaning, is that vessel that carries so much unknown across the oceans of time.

Tao Te Ching: Chapter 11
translated by Stephen Mitchell (1988)

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being
but non-being is what we use.

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 24. 

In the last post on book 24, I wrote about how pity and wonder drive the actions of the epic’s close, furnishing both a resolution to many of the poem’s conflicts while also providing models for interpretation and ‘reading’, if not a foundation for ethical humanism. I focused in part on the mirroring and blending that happens in our relationship with narratives and proposed as well that the core function of pity in facilitating identification between Achilles and Priam through their recognition of each other’s suffering may also help to explain the ‘tragic’ core of the Iliad. By this I don’t mean simply that the Iliad follows a tragic arc, but that it also produces tragic effects in Aristotelian terms. Homeric epic, by modeling people seeing their own experiences and sufferings in other peoples’ lives and then articulating narratives with new understanding, clarifies the potential for narrative art to help us see more than ourselves in the world while also framing ourselves as part of a human and cosmic continuum.

This post follows on earlier posts positioning the meeting between Achilles and Priam as in a liminal space between life and death and on the importance of Thetis to the Iliad, especially when she gives advice to her son about taking the remaining time he has to enjoy what pleasure life has to offer. I bring these topics up because I think they are linked to the story Achilles tells Priam about Niobe and how we should interpret it.

Once Achilles and Priam have had their (temporary) fill of weeping, Achilles tries to encourage Priam to stay and share a meal with him. This meal-sharing is critical for Achilles on a symbolic level as a step in his return to acting like a human being instead of some kind of a wild animal or a god of war.  Priam is reluctant because he wants to get Hektor’s body home for burial and he is rightly wary of being around Achilles too long. Achilles uses an interesting narrative of myth to ‘persuade’ Priam to join him.

Iliad 24.596-620

“And then shining Achilles went back into his dwelling
And sat on the finely decorated bench from where he had risen
near the facing wall. Then he began his speech [muthon] to Priam:

‘Old man, your son has been ransomed as you were pleading—he
Lies now on the bedding. You will see him at dawn yourself
When you lead him away. But now, we should remember our meal.
For fair-tressed Niobê, too, remembered to eat,
Even though her twelve children perished at home.
Six daughters and six sons.
Apollo killed them with his silver bow
Because he was angry at Niobê, and Artemis helped too,
Because their mother had considered herself equal to fair-cheeked Leto.
She claimed that Leto birthed two children while she had many.
And so those mere two ended the lives of many.
They lingered in their gore for nine days and no one went
To bury them—Kronos’ son turned the people into stone.
On the tenth day, the Olympian gods buried them.
And she remembered to eat, after she wore herself out shedding tears.
And now somewhere in the isolated crags on the mountains
Of Sipylus where men say one finds the beds of goddesses,
Of the nymphs who wander along the Akhelôis,
She turns over the god-sent sufferings, even though she remains a stone.
So, come, now, shining old man, let’s the two of us remember
Our meal. You can mourn your dear son again
After you take him to Troy—he will certainly be much-wept.”

῏Η ῥα, καὶ ἐς κλισίην πάλιν ἤϊε δῖος ᾿Αχιλλεύς,
ἕζετο δ’ ἐν κλισμῷ πολυδαιδάλῳ ἔνθεν ἀνέστη
τοίχου τοῦ ἑτέρου, ποτὶ δὲ Πρίαμον φάτο μῦθον·
υἱὸς μὲν δή τοι λέλυται γέρον ὡς ἐκέλευες,
κεῖται δ’ ἐν λεχέεσσ’· ἅμα δ’ ἠοῖ φαινομένηφιν
ὄψεαι αὐτὸς ἄγων· νῦν δὲ μνησώμεθα δόρπου.
καὶ γάρ τ’ ἠΰκομος Νιόβη ἐμνήσατο σίτου,
τῇ περ δώδεκα παῖδες ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ὄλοντο
ἓξ μὲν θυγατέρες, ἓξ δ’ υἱέες ἡβώοντες.
τοὺς μὲν ᾿Απόλλων πέφνεν ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο
χωόμενος Νιόβῃ, τὰς δ’ ῎Αρτεμις ἰοχέαιρα,
οὕνεκ’ ἄρα Λητοῖ ἰσάσκετο καλλιπαρῄῳ·
φῆ δοιὼ τεκέειν, ἣ δ’ αὐτὴ γείνατο πολλούς·
τὼ δ’ ἄρα καὶ δοιώ περ ἐόντ’ ἀπὸ πάντας ὄλεσσαν.
οἳ μὲν ἄρ’ ἐννῆμαρ κέατ’ ἐν φόνῳ, οὐδέ τις ἦεν
κατθάψαι, λαοὺς δὲ λίθους ποίησε Κρονίων·
τοὺς δ’ ἄρα τῇ δεκάτῃ θάψαν θεοὶ Οὐρανίωνες.
ἣ δ’ ἄρα σίτου μνήσατ’, ἐπεὶ κάμε δάκρυ χέουσα.
νῦν δέ που ἐν πέτρῃσιν ἐν οὔρεσιν οἰοπόλοισιν
ἐν Σιπύλῳ, ὅθι φασὶ θεάων ἔμμεναι εὐνὰς
νυμφάων, αἵ τ’ ἀμφ’ ᾿Αχελώϊον ἐρρώσαντο,
ἔνθα λίθος περ ἐοῦσα θεῶν ἐκ κήδεα πέσσει.
ἀλλ’ ἄγε δὴ καὶ νῶϊ μεδώμεθα δῖε γεραιὲ
σίτου· ἔπειτά κεν αὖτε φίλον παῖδα κλαίοισθα
῎Ιλιον εἰσαγαγών· πολυδάκρυτος δέ τοι ἔσται.

One scholiast notes that the comparison is aimed at persuasion and that the adduction of similar suffering “lightens Priam’s” (ἐπικουφίζεται γὰρ τὰ πάθη, bT ad Il. 24.601 ex. 2) while another focuses on the logical way in which Achilles unfolds the tale. Yet the overwhelming ancient response is incredulity:

Schol. A ad. Il. 24.614-617a ex

“These four lines have been athetized [marked as spurious] because it does not make sense for her to “remember to eat” “after she wore herself out shedding tears.” For, if she had been turned into a stone, how could she take food?

Thus, the attempt at persuasion is absurd—“eat, since Niobê also ate and she was petrified, literally!” This is Hesiodic in character, moreover: “they wander about Akhelôion. And the word en occurs three times. How can Niobê continue pursuing her sorrow if she is made out of stone? Aristophanes also athetized these lines.”

Ariston. | Did. νῦν δέ που ἐν πέτρῃσιν<—πέσσει>: ἀθετοῦνται στίχοι τέσσαρες, ὅτι οὐκ ἀκόλουθοι τῷ „ἡ δ’ ἄρα σίτου μνήσατ’, <ἐπεὶ κάμε δάκρυ χέουσα>” (Ω 613)· εἰ γὰρ ἀπελιθώθη, πῶς σιτία προ<σ>ηνέγκατο; καὶ ἡ παραμυθία γελοία· φάγε, ἐπεὶ καὶ ἡ Νιόβη ἔφαγε καὶ ἀπελιθώθη. ἔστι δὲ καὶ ῾Ησιόδεια τῷ χαρακτῆρι, καὶ μᾶλλόν γε τὸ ἀμφ’ ᾿Αχελώϊον ἐρρώσαντο (616). καὶ τρὶς κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς τὸ ἔν (614. 615). πῶς δὲ καὶ λίθος γενομένη θεῶν ἐκ κήδεα πέσσει (617); | προηθετοῦντο δὲ καὶ παρ’ ᾿Αριστοφάνει.

Schol. bT ad Il. 24. 614-617

“these four lines are athetized. For how could a stone taste food? Also, why does the poet place a river from Aetolia on Sipylos?”

ex. νῦν δέ που ἐν πέτρῃσιν<—πέσσει>: ἀθετοῦνται τέσσαρες· b(BCE3)T πῶς γὰρ ἡ λίθος τροφῆς ἐγεύσατο (cf. Ω 602. 613); b(BCE3E4)T τί δὲ ὁ Αἰτωλῶν ποταμὸς ἐνΣιπύλῳ ποιεῖ (cf. 616); T πῶς τε λίθος οὖσα κήδεα πέσσει (617)

The scholia note that the lines were athetized because it makes no sense for Niobê to stop eating during her destructive mourning; or, it is impossible to eat for one who has been turned to stone. And worse—one cannot mourn post petrifaction! In Achilles’ defense, he has selected an example from myth of a parent mourning the loss of a child; the loss has come at the hands of the gods who have sought to punish human transgression. In Achilles’ application of the tale, Niobê stops to eat—is this altogether absurd?

The effect of the scholiastic comments and the dissonance between what Achilles says here and what he has attributed to Niobê has led many scholars to argue that the lines about Niobê turning to stone are later “interpolations” by editors trying to explain the whole story. Authors like Johannes Kakridis (1930) and Thomas Pearce (2008) have made strong thematic arguments about why these lines shouldn’t be there. I think that some of what they say is reconcilable with multiform approaches to Homer like that explored by Casey Dué in Achilles Unbound, that these lines are legitimately part of telling the story of the Iliad, but perhaps were not present for all audiences. To my taste, these lines are necessary if people don’t know the story of Niobê because her turning into a stone is critical to the impact of the comparison. This is a very different perspective than others have offered, so I want to take a moment to explain.

Schol. bT ad. Hom. Il. 24.602a ex

“Some say that this Niobê is the daughter of Pelops; others say she is the daughter of Tantalos. Others claim that she is the wife of Amphion or of Zethus. Still more claim that she is the wife of Alalkomeneus. Among the Lydians she is called Elumê. And this event occurred, as some claimed, in Lydia; or, as some claim, in Thebes.

Sophokles writes that the children perished in Thebes and that she returned to Lydia afterwards. And she perished, as some claim, after she swore a false oath about the dog of Pandareus because [….] or later when she had been ambushed by the Spartoi in Kithaira. There were two Niobes, one of Pelops and one of Tantalus. He explains the whole tale because the story is Theban and unknown to Priam.”

ex. | ex. <καὶ γάρ τ’ ἠΰκομος Νιόβη:> τὴν Νιόβην οἱ μὲν Πέλοπος, οἱ δὲ Ταντάλου· γυναῖκα δὲ οἱ μὲν ᾿Αμφίονος, οἱ δὲ Ζήθου, [οἱ δὲ] ᾿Αλαλκομένεω. ἐκαλεῖτο δὲ παρὰ Λυδοῖς ᾿Ελύμην. ἡ δὲ συμφορὰ αὐτῆς, ὡς μέν τινες, ἐν Λυδίᾳ, ὡς δὲ ἔνιοι, ἐν Θήβαις. Σοφοκλῆς (cf. T.G.F. p. 228 N.2; II p. 95 P.) δὲ τοὺς μὲν παῖδας ἐν Θήβαις ἀπολέσθαι, νοστῆσαι <δὲ> αὐτὴν εἰς Λυδίαν. ἀπώλετο [δέ], ὥς τινες, συνεπιορκήσασα Πανδάρ[εῳ] περὶ τοῦ κυνός, ὡς δὲ [..], ἐνεδρευθεῖσα ὑπὸ τῶν Σπαρτῶν ἐν Κιθαιρῶ[νι]. οἱ δὲ δύο Νιόβας, Πέλοπος καὶ Ταντάλου. T | ὡς Θηβαῖον ὄντα τὸν μῦθον καὶ ἀγνοούμενον Πριάμῳ ἐπεξεργάζεται.

Yoshinori Sano (1993) has argued that the full account of Niobê helps to explore the isolation and loneliness of both Priam and Achilles. I think this is a really good argument and what I would like to add is that this isolation is in a crucial way synonymous with death. Homeric narrative provides multiple meanings—its polysemy is connected to a dynamic model of reading that I have tried to emphasize throughout the process of posting on the Iliad.

As I have discussed in earlier posts, paradeigmata like this—examples from myth offered to persuade an audience member—respond well to interpretations that use notions of cognitive blending like those presented by Mark Turner. Rather than assume a logical comparison between the worlds of the speaker, the audience, and the story, we have to see them as creative separate narrative blends

It certainly does not make logical sense for Niobê to eat—but there are other details in the narrative that can produce through projection from the target space a latticework within the creative blend. For instance, the pairing of a sequence of nine followed by resolution on the tenth recalls for the audience locally the recent delay of the gods in their argument over the burial of Hektor (24.108–109) and generally the nine and ten days of the plague at the epic’s inception (1.53–54) as well as the nine and ten years of the Trojan war itself. The looming finality of the tenth unit of time is emphasized through the petrifaction of the people in Achilles’ tale—an image that easily coalesces with Iliadic language about grave markers standing in place for a man after his death.

The clear input source from Achilles is that Niobê and Priam are similar—they have both lost children thanks to divine anger over human action. Achilles does not specify any wrongdoing on Priam’s fault (that occurs in Priam’s notional blend and in the audience’s imagination). In the repeated first-person plural injunction to eat (νῦν δὲ μνησώμεθα δόρπου… μεδώμεθα…/ σίτου, 601/618), moreover, there is an invitation to Priam (and to us) to allow Achilles himself into the creative blend—especially since he has so strongly refused to eat earlier in the poem (in book 19).

When we admit Achilles into the blend alongside Priam we as audience members may sense his (1) acknowledgment of impending death; (2) acceptance of some responsibility for his loss. If Niobê’s absurd break from mourning to eat creates an image-schematic clash, it may be an effective one: Priam lost more children over a longer period of time and will lose more still. Achilles is acknowledging the magnitude of their combined losses and that their story is not yet at its end. In now encouraging another to eat, Achilles offers another lesson about the necessity of living on despite the pain until life reaches its final closure.

It is this last step where I think we can really understand how Achilles has learned, in this book alone. Recall the advice his mother gives him just 500 lines earlier: she tells him that it is good to take time to eat, to have sex, to enjoy life before its over. She offers this when everyone knows that Achilles’ life is foreshortened following the death of Hektor. But when Achilles applies similar wisdom to Priam through the story of Niobê, the jarring contrast is intentional: it uses a very extreme case to make a more general point.

Achilles has adapted his mother’s lesson to his understanding of an an earlier tale. Audiences knowing the story of Niobê turning to stone increases the force of the passage. Yes, she stopped mourning to eat. We all continue living amid scars, losses, and grief. Life goes on during war. Children are born during sieges and famines. People fall in love as their worlds fall apart. Life continues right up to the moment of death and whether the end is 5 minutes from now or five decades it is uncertain. We should take the time we can to eat and enjoy the pleasures life offers, where and when they appear.

Achilles forgot this after Patroklos died—in fact, we might even argue that he never learned this or else wouldn’t have lost his mind at a slight to his honor in book 1. To be fair, we all forget these truths in the repetitive busyness of life. Whether we have one day left or most of a lifetime, what matters is making it matter. But this doesn’t have to mean dying in glory for eternal renown. It can mean sharing a meal with another, stopping to feel the earth turn.

Achilles’ wisdom is hard won and brief and all the more precious for it. Book 24 shows him adapting a narrative to try to share a moment of life with his bitter enemy’s father despite every force trying to keep him from doing so. He can do this because he has learned to see himself in Priam’s world. And the lesson of the Iliad for us is twofold: we too should take what life gives us while we can—but we need to see ourselves in others to truly do so.

A short bibliography

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

Ahern, Charles F.. “Two images of « womanly grief » in Homer.” Essays in honor of Gordon Williams: twenty-five years at Yale. Eds. Tylawsky, Elizabeth Ivory and Weiss, Charles Gray. New Haven (Conn.): Henry R. Schwab Publ., 2001. 11-24.

Andersen, Øivind. 1987. “Myth Paradigm and Spatial Form in the Iliad.” In Homer Beyond Oral Poetry: Recent Trends in Homeric Interpretation, edited by Jan Bremer and Irene J. F. De Jong. John Benjamins

Braswell, B. K. 1971. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” CQ, 21: 16-26.

Combellack, F.M. 1976. “Homer the Innovator.” CP 71: 44-55.

Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 81. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.

Edmunds, L. 1997. Myth in Homer, in A New Companion to Homer, edited by I. Morris and B. Powell, 415–441. Leiden.

Friedrich, Paul and Redfield, James. 1978. “Speech as a Personality Symbol: The Case of Achilles.” Language 54: 263–288.

Held, G. 1987. “Phoinix, Agamemnon and Achilles. Problems and Paradeigmata.” CQ 36: 141-54.

Johannes Theophanes Kakridis, ‘Die Niobesage bei Homer. Zur Geschichte des griechischen Παράδειγμα’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie (1930) 113-122[JC1] .

Knudsen, Rachel Ahern. 2014. Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric. Baltimore.

Martin, Richard. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.

Nagy, Gregory. 1996. Homeric Questions, Austin.

—,—. 2009. “Homer and Greek Myth.” Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, 52–82.

Thomas E. V. Pearce, ‘Homer, Iliad 24,614-17’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 151.1 (2008) 13-25[JC2] .

Pedrick, V. 1983. “The Paradigmatic Nature of Nestor’s Speech in Iliad 11.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 113:55-68.

Walter Pötscher, ‘Homer, Ilias 24,601 ff. und die Niobe-Gestalt’, Grazer Beiträge , XII-XIII. (1985-1986) 21-35.

Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford.

Willcock, M.M. 1967. “Mythological Paradeigmata in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly, 14:141-151.

____,____. 1977, Ad hoc invention in the Iliad, HSCP 81:41–53.

Yoshinori Sano, ‘An interpretation of the Niobe-paradeigma: Iliad XXIV 602-620’, Journal of Classical Studies, 41. (1993) 14-23[JC3] .

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