“But when each of them were lined up with their leaders,
The Trojans went forward screeching and cries just like birds,
With the sound like the call of cranes near the sky.
Those birds that flee the winter and its endless rain
And fly with a cry over the ocean’s streams
Bringing death and murder to the Pygmies.
The Achaeans went forward exhaling rage in silence,
Eager in their heart to stand in defense of one another.”
This opening simile offers a somewhat surprising transition from the catalogs that end book 2 on the way to the action of book three. As I discuss in earlier posts about book 3, it is a fascinating book that continues some of the themes and concerns that emerge in book 2: a (re)introduction of the Trojans (starting with their catalog) and a (re)starting of the Trojan War. In my reading of the way the Iliad works as a coherent narrative that engages with and communicates the larger interest of both the Trojan War and the tradition of epic performance, book 3 presents episodes that evoke the character of the war’s beginning while still working within the narrative arc of the story of the rage of Achilles
1-111 Beginning, Proposal of a Dual [request for Priam to be fetched]
112-263 Teikhoskopia (“viewing from the walls”): Helen describes the Greeks
264-376 Duel
377-461 Aphrodite and the Reunion of Helen and Paris
The sequence of events laid as laid out here takes the audience almost in reverse from the war to the meeting of Helen and Paris. One could imagine the debate between Helen and Aphrodite and Helen’s begrudging acceptance of Paris as the Iliad’s take on blaming Helen, Paris’ character, and the shared conspiracy of divine will and human frailty. In this, the book offers one narrative arc that begins with Hektor upbraiding and shaming his brother and ends with Paris’ rather pathetic “aw shucks” return to the scene of their ‘crime’ (i.e., the bedroom). At the same time, if we think about the wide angle lens approach, this arc also allows us an early meeting between Menelaos and Priam and a view of the Greeks from the Trojans’ perspective. Book 3 situates the audience in space between Troy and the Greeks (anticipating book 6 in a way) and while also integrating potentially ‘famous’ episodes from the fuller war into its narrative.
National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Fresco from Pompeii
Given these primary functions of book 3, what sense can we make of the opening simile? It compares the sound of the assembled Trojan armies (and their allies) to the cry of migratory cranes who bring “death and doom to the Pygmies” during the winter. A simple reading of the simile might see the Trojans as moving away from their home and bringing death to the Greeks. For moving us into the action, this interpretation suffices, but I don’t think it is enough.
Fortunately, two of my favorite pieces of Homeric scholarship address this passage and in very different ways. Hilary Mackie, in her Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad [substack.com] (1996), opens with this simile to suggest that unlike the Achaeans, the Trojan use of language “suggest[s] a lack of social order” (14). She contrasts the depiction of the Greeks following the simile as one of cohesion (16) and recalls the similes from book two that marks the Achaeans in mutiny or chaos as resolving into an eventual reimposition of order through the scapegoating of Thersites (17). Mackie relates this passage to the assertion from book 2 that the Trojans and their allies have many different languages (2.802-806) and for that reason must rely on captains to command only their own troops (19). She concludes that this passage extends a process of “underselling the Trojan army” (21) and suggests “when the Trojans march out at the beginning of Book 3, they are still dominated by undifferentiated clamor (klaggê). With their mixed languages, the Trojans cannot function as an articulate group.
I have always appreciated this argument insofar as it helps modern audiences understand differences between Trojan and Achaean politics (something Mackie also goes on to discuss). But I do worry if this interpretation against a linguistic pluralism may lean too much into the Iliad’s own attempt to downplay the strength of the Trojans (who have managed to hold the mighty Achaeans off for ten years!). I fear, in addition, that some might misinterpret such an argument as implying that the Iliad is essentially against heterogeneity. (And I don’t think this is Mackie’s argument at all. See Shawn Ross’ paper on language and Panhellenism in the Iliad for a perspective from contemporary audiences.)
A Pygmy fights a crane, Attic red-figure chous 430–420 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Spain
The other example of Homeric scholarship that engages with this opening is Leonard Muellner’s “The Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies”. I am deeply fond of this article because my first Greek teacher and many decade mentor and friend, Lenny, wrote it; but beyond that, it is one of the finest works on Homeric similes from the 20th century. Lenny uses this article to argue both that similes are not less traditional than other parts of Homeric epic (contra someone like Shipp or others who claim similes are ‘later’ than other parts of the Iliad or Odyssey) and also to show how a ‘device’ like this “continually enhances and preserves the epic’s expressive and evocative power” (61).
Lenny delves into the grammar of this simile by walking his reader through how other bird similes operate in the Iliad, emphasizing in part the group nature of this comparison and their place high in the sky, where predators usually roam , marking these birds as “deadly” and their “shriek [is a] war cry” (75). There is something of an inversion in this role, as Lenny notes, because cranes are not typically predatory birds in similes and this is the only extant example of massed birds compared to an attacking army. The second half of the essay examines this peculiarity.
National Archaeological Museum of Florence, Froicoise Vase
One argument Lenny provides is based on the context of book 3 and the character of the Trojan(s) who fight in the book. He notes that soon after this passage, Paris is criticized by his brother for not being a fighter, for being a dancer/lover instead, a theme that pervades the book and is emphasized again at the end when Paris is returned to his bedroom. Cranes, in the language of Greek poetry and myth, are birds who dance. In this light, the cranes reflect the unaccustomed place of the Trojans themselves in the Iliad: “in an unaccustomed role, in an unaccustomed locale: shrieking high above the river-plains, they descend like predators upon the Pygmies” (90).
The information about the Pygmies is less clear: Lenny notes a tradition from Egypt where a tribe of people called pygmies where known for “the god’s dances” (100). There was a tradition of the war of cranes and pygmies in art outside of Homer [substack.com] that may or may not be related to this. I suspect that the inversion of the cranes (as Trojans) going across the ocean to battle a non-bellicose foe may be significant to the resonance of the image here. At its most extreme/absurd, we can imagine something of a dance battle, a conflict resolved in a different dimension and a world far away.
Works Mentioned
Mackie, Hilary Susan. Talking Trojan: speech and community in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.
Karis Nemik, Andor, episode 12
If you spend a little time learning about Greek myth and ancient epic, you’ll encounter the Epic Cycle, a term for a group of poems around that told the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?) to the very end (Odysseus’ return home and its aftermath). Recent years have seen dozens of articles and books on the topic. As a Homerist, I have had to engage with this scholarship a great deal.
And my central problem is this: I think the Epic Cycle, as we talk about it, is a scholarly fiction.
I watched the Disney+ series Andor and found myself agreeing deeply with a general opinion of its excellence–the plot is exciting, the characters are moving, and the themes of the rebellion both advance those of the original movie and complicate them. The rebels here are conflicted–some are aggrieved, some are true believers, and some are more venal. Together, they dramatize the cost of resistance and the seductive dangers of that complacency that makes us all complicit in oppression.
But watching Andor and enjoying it–after also cheering for The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, and the Book of Boba–has made me think repeatedly about the relationship between canon and fixity and what it means to be an audience to an expanding universe. As a Homerist who comes from the end of Gen X (I was born in 1978), watching the explosion of the Star Wars universe has made me think a lot about the epic cycle and secondary narratives.
The making of a canon
It is impossible for my children to imagine what Star Wars meant when I was their age. One of my first memories is seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a drive-in theater with my parents and being terrified by Darth Vader. Anyone who can remember prior to 1999 knew of Star Wars as an unfinished but finished trilogy: there were always rumors that George Lucas would return to a galaxy far away and long ago, seeded especially by the numbering of the first movie as IV, but for a decade or so it seemed like it would never happen.
To be a fan of Star Wars prior to the return of the movies was to rewatch VHS cassettes and read authorized novels and wait for random viewings of the super strange Ewok adventures, The Battle for Endor and Caravan for Courage. Part of what made Star Wars moving was its boundedness and the promise of more. As a child, I would weep at the end of Return of the Jedi because I didn’t want it to end. As an adult, I have written about our uncomfortable relationship with narrative closure, how we want it to come but we also dread it because it is the end of a world and is, in some way, an echo of our own deaths.
Episodes and Universes
There are two ways of thinking about entries or episodes in a narrative universe. For Star Wars what became canon were the movies–but the more episodes added to the list, the less stable the canon became. There’s a danger of surplus narrative and how we refer to the whole changes two. I think people mean two different things when they talk about the epic cycle. One is general, expansive: the cycle refers to the full range of narratives associated with the Trojan War. The other is an imagined canon of episodes.
So, the classic Trojan Cycle described by Proclus include the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (also called, according to some, The Return of the Atreids [ἡ τῶν Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος], and the Telegony. We have only a handful of fragments for most of these poems Some scholars have also suggested different ‘cycles’ which would focus around heroes (a cycle of epics about Herakles, for example, the Calydonian Boar Hunt or the Argo) or centering around cities other than Troy (where a Theban cycle might include the Oidipodeia, Thebais, Epigonoi, and perhaps even the Alkmeonis). This is the one I don’t think is real.
The larger a canon is, the less effective it is in exerting authority. I think that the original Star Wars trilogy exerted a centripetal force on its audiences, pulling them together to a narrative center. As the universe expands–or as the canon multiples–its force is more centrifugal, moving audiences into clusters. This is one way I think comparing a modern entertainment ‘universe’ to Trojan War narratives is useful: the Iliad and the Odyssey were panhellenic texts that persisted in applying aesthetic pressures on other traditions and their audiences. But the narrative world of the Trojan War included countless other stories and spanned many different kinds of genres.
Often when we talk about the authority of the Homeric poems, we are talking about the cultural position they occupied in Archaic and Classical Greece as performance narratives connected to political power. This authority transformed as they moved into fixed texts and aesthetic objects for Hellenistic readers and later. Over time, they became quasi-sacred. But other stories set in the Trojan War world existed prior to our epics and kept on spinning out from a notional but fictive center: local, epichoric traditions preceded the Iliad and Odyssey and persisted well into the Christian era. The discrete episodes filled out the Universe and allowed audiences to live within them: the static nature of the canonized object is mitigated by the fluidity of ongoing traditions.
This comes clear often in accounts of ritual and local practices, like those observed by Pausanias who puts Penelope’s grave in the Peloponnese, not far from that of Aeneas’ father Anchises. What’s different, I think, about ancient Trojan War narratives is that these local or epichoric narratives developed prior to the canonized epics and continued long after. As Irad Malkin has shown in The Returns of Odysseus, as Greeks spread across the Mediterranean, they took their stories with them, adapting their myths of people like Odysseus to accommodate their new realities.
When I first watched the Mandalorian, I was simultaneously charmed and critical: prior to the new movies, you could not imagine two characters with more commercial potential than a Boba Fett analog and a baby Yoda. People my age loved Boba Fett because his action figure looked so cool. (I used to sleep with Boba as a toddler, I confess.) These characters are also tangential to the canonized storyline, they allow the space to create a new story while also still drawing on the nostalgia and cache of the center. This is part of the thrill and peril of expanding narrative traditions: the cameo of a main character in a peripheral story can be fun, but when the canon limits overmuch, the story becomes campy and over allusive (which explains, in part I think, why Rogue One works well but Solo does not).
The cultural forces of capitalism that produced the Mandalorian are, of course, different from those that perpetuated Trojan War narratives in Archaic and Classical Greece, but they remain somewhat analogous cultural forces. Both rely on audience interest and respond to changing cultural trends.
Audiences and Change
When we talk about the market forces that influence the expansion of the Star Wars universe, we are talking in part about audiences. Discussions of the epic cycle–and Homer in general–too often forget that ancient performers responded to their audiences as well. Audiences exist through time and time creates different kinds of audiences. When we talk about interpreting or making sense of cultural objects, we emphasize the intention of creators because it is so difficult to talk about the multiplicity of audiences. But I have been thinking about audiences as palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been cleaned and repurposed for a new text, and yet the old text can often be seen underneath it. Christos Tsagalis has used it productively as a metaphor for how oral traditions work. Yet this model is still about the object and not the people who view it. We change as individuals over time and our relationship to a text or cultural object changes from one generation to another.
I took dates to the rerelease of the original three movies in high school. When The Phantom Menace was released, I was there on the first weekend with roommates and my future wife (who purchased Star Wars legos while waiting to see the movie and assembled them during the film). And despite the exhilaration of the opening chyron and the music, I left disappointed. The second trilogy is cluttered, confused and confusing, and tries too hard to fill in the blanks of the later/earlier films. The second trilogy is both shaped and trapped by nostalgia.
Part of the problem is the difference between a backstory that is unexplained and a forced explanation. The “clone wars” as referenced in Star Wars are nebulous and strange: we know they were in the past and bad. When we get to them in the later trilogy, they lose the menace and strangeness. What was a detail in service of another narrative fails in certain ways when it is fleshed out because it does not and cannot exist on its own terms.
The later Star Wars films have a secondariness in that they both serve to fill out a preexisting story and they also attempt to establish intertexts and references to the earlier films that prevent them from truly being their own. This is part of the challenge of judging narratives that develop in the shadow of a canon: we love them because they continue the larger story, but also begrudge them for not being the originals they imitate. Indeed, when authors like Jasper Griffin critique the poems of the epic cycle–without actually having access to them–for their fantastic content or their derivative nature, they are judging them by aesthetic standards, by rules, that they can never actually attain.
But changing some of the boundaries creates new space: consider the effectiveness of different kinds of Trojan War narratives on the tragic stage. Similarly, the later film Rogue One and the television series inhabit a familiar and attractive world but have their own stories to tell. They are compelling because they do not rely on their audiences fully knowing the original trilogy, but merely being familiar with the general ‘rules’ and characteristics of the Star Wars universe. They are free to respond to contemporary concerns and to establish new narratives. Further, with the television shows especially, they benefit from different generic boundaries: the pacing of episodic television lends itself to different kinds of stories from a 120 minutes space opera.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the process of canonization limits narratives that try to do the same thing as the canonized object but provides space for those that forge into new genres or plots. In addition, the further from the canon that narratives go, the more space they have to respond to changing audiences. Once Lucas released Star Wars into the world as a billion dollar intellectual property, others were able to escape the canonicity, to use the familiar world to tell new stories.
Mykonos vase (Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, Inv. 2240). Decorated pithos found at Mykonos, Greece depicting one of the earliest known renditions of the Trojan Horse[/caption]
Homer and Trojan War Narratives
The relationship between the later narratives of the Star Wars universe and the original trilogy has made me think a lot about the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and Trojan War narratives. This analogy fails at a certain point because the Homeric epics likely had many different versions of their own narratives and were engaged with and responding to epic performance of all kinds (and not just Trojan War and heroic poems). But the main point I take with me is the willingness of audiences to engage in the expansion of narrative worlds and how narratives in the expanded Trojan War universe change based on new genres and new audiences.
One of the things I regularly emphasize about the limits of our own ability to understand ancient epic because we know so little about what ancient audiences knew or how they experienced epic. Think here of the difference between someone like me for whom Star Wars was canonical and my children who love Grogu and have always known who Luke Skywalker’s father was. They don’t labor under the same aesthetic weight either: they do not judge Phantom Menace by the standard of Star Wars because they don’t remember a time before when these films did not co-exist. The difference between the expanded Star Wars universe material and the second trilogy is that between inhabiting/exploring a world and concretizing/freezing it.
When it comes to the cultural position of the Homeric epics, we make the mistake of assuming the Iliad and the Odyssey always had the same monumental status as they gained by the end of the 5th century BCE. I have had exchanges recently with the Assyriologist Seth Sanders who has been somewhat perplexed by Classicists’ tendency to see “cycles” in ancient near eastern literature. He has remarked on how the development of fixed–or ‘charismatic texts’–occludes the varied and continuing nature of oral traditions and living narrative mythscapes. As a comparison, he points out the possibility that some texts from the Hebrew bible were transmitted as “monuments”. In calling it this, he notes he is adapting the art historian Alous Reigl’s notion of monumentality as a dialogic dynamic between a cultural artifact and an audience for whom that object defines something of their community’s past or authoritative identity.
The impulse to tell the whole story is a feature of post-canonization. Audiences yearned for more Star Wars and eventually got them. But the narrative satiety that resulted was disappointing until the limits set by the canon could be exceeded. As the Iliad and the Odyssey became canon, the Trojan War mythscape moved to another genre with different boundaries (tragedy) and different narrative traditions. There was no cycle telling the later tale until scholars of a post-canonized period felt the need for it.
The Fictive Epic Cycle
Imagine a future scholar of narrative, say in 3023, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe. The collapse of time might very well lead them to believe that the nine movies of three trilogies were always part of an authoritative cycle. But the content and contemporary responses to the later movies would likely perplex them. The collection of stories about the Trojan War are from a much longer period in time than the mere forty years that spans the release of the Star Wars movies. We know less about the alleged poems origins than we do about their contents, but they are not centered in the same cultural space and time.
But to step back for a moment: what is the epic cycle? The ‘Epic Cycle’ most often refers to the Trojan War poems recorded by Proclus (2nd or 4th Century ce) in his Chrestomathia (appended to the Venetus A manuscript; 10th Century ce, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822) and summarized by the later Photius (9th Century ce, Patriarch). The limited fragments of these poems are conventionally dated to the 7th through 6th centuries bce. The phrase Epic Cycle refers both to the mythical events spanning from creation to the end of the race of heroes and in the same way as Proclus, in isolating a specific group of poems that tell the story of the Trojan War. There are many similarities between Proclus’ summary and the work of the mythographer Apollodorus; but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the Trojan War myths and the poems of the cycle.
Rudolf Pfeiffer suggested that kuklos meant everything that was composed by Homer, everything that was attributed to a heroic world set in the story of the Trojan War. Gregory Nagy suggests that there’s some relationship between the etymology of the name Homeros as “one who fits things together” and that the kuklos points to the whole. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis expand on this idea in their introduction to their 2015 handbook by suggesting that the term is “historically ambiguous” referring to the entirety of the sky, a ring composition, or anything that repeats and returns.
The dual notion of totality and repetition, I think, makes the or a kuklos an attractive concept but an impossibility in actuality. It is both a metonym and a metaphor. This reading works well if we consider kuklos as indicating potential entirety or completion rather than an actual one. In the world of performance, the terms kuklos and Homeros may rightly become signals of authority: to be Homeros is to be a singer who has the skills to bring the potential of the kuklos into reality; to assert that a story or song is part of the kuklos is to authorize it ex post facto as part of the tradition. It is both a nodding to a canon and an alteration of it.
I am only partly convinced that kuklos functioned in this way in performance traditions in Greece; I am certain, however, that it became something completely different in the hands of literate and literary scholars. There is a wider discussion of kuklika poems and kuklikoi poets among Hellenistic scholars (starting with Aristarchus of Samothrace, 3rd-2nd Centuries bce). But evidence for both the term kuklos and the practice of separating the kuklikoi poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey is often traced back to Aristotle who makes a few enigmatic references to Kuklos poetry (Elench. 171a10 7-11) and who also distinguishes Homeric epics from other poems by other poets based on assessments of quality (Poetics 1459a37). The poems (and poets) who appear in these scholarly traditions, however, do not align with Proclus’ summary. Scholars have explained this away by saying there were other cycles, e.g., those around Thebes, Herakles, or other topics.
Here is my summary of the principles to keep in mind.
There is no evidence of a series of epic poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from the same performance tradition and period of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
All of our evidence comes from Aristotle and later. The evidence is from literary scholars treating the Iliad and the Odyssey as texts.
There is evidence of long narrative poems about other traditions (e.g. Thebais)
Our emphasis on the Epic Cycle is skewed by the gravity of Homer: We have more extensive fragments from Panyassis and Aristeas than we have for anything from the epic cycle
There is significant evidence of Trojan War narratives in other genres: lyric, elegiac, iconographic contemporaneous to or even prior to the epics we possess
The Epic Cycle is an initial creation of Hellenistic scholars trying to provide narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the Iliad and the Odyssey. This initial creation has been concretized by subsequent Classical scholarship, a process intensified by some of the scholarship of the past decade.
The positivistic assumption of the epic cycle as a stable set of texts and plots reasserts textual and literary aesthetics on a system that was much more fluid and dynamic (leading to a range of interpretive problems)
And, from this, a secondary list of things we can say about the epic cycle:
Everything we know about the epic cycle is subordinate to the Iliad and the Odyssey as canonized, monumentalized epics.
This subordination occurred either as part of trying to tell the whole story of The Trojan War or as evidence of the aesthetic superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The fragments and their summaries were selected to facilitate point #2 and are likely secondary or tertiary selections rather than excerpts taken from whole poems at the hands of Hellenistic editors.
The privileging of Trojan War narratives as part of these efforts has suppressed the extent and importance of non-Trojan War epics: e.g. Thebais, Oedipodea, Heraklea
There are many moments while watching a show like Andor that invite audiences to think about its relationship to various narrative authorities–to the shape of the empire in the original trilogy to the future events of Rogue One. But it succeeds in part because its narrative is different enough. Successful expansions of narrative universes allow traditional narratives to respond to contemporary concerns, the way that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos turns an ancient myth to an opportunity to reflect on plague and politics in contemporary Athens. Authoritative narratives exert a special gravity on their audiences; but audiences push back too: they make these stories into vehicles for their own lives. When the stories become too inflexible, they adapt them or make new ones.
The expanding Star wars universe allows this now too, and sometimes with discomfort. One of the subplots of Mandalorian Season 3 troubled me: the presentation of the New Republic’s amnesty program and the betrayal of Dr. Pershing by Elia Kane suggests that while the attempts of the New Republic to be progressive and inclusive are more just than the fascism of the Empire (and its descendants), they remain coercive and subject to the baser impulses of human nature.
This ‘both-sides’ approach to the struggle against fascism in an imaginary universe is a reflex of our own contemporary experiences and conversations. Such a thematic reflection would likely be lost on future audiences as they treat the Star Wars narratives as part of a canonized cycle of tales. In much the same way, Trojan War stories developed in particular times and places, in responses to their audience’s experiences and needs. Subsequent scholars imposed an order and created a systemized series of tales that never truly existed, to respond to their own needs for stability and closure.
Some things cited and some things to read
Alwine, A. T., ‘‘The Non-Homeric Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey’’, GRBS 49 (2009) 323-333.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Barker, E.T.E. 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.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus
Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”
Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.
Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.
Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11.
Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.
L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.
Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.
Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.
Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”
Malkin, I., The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley 1998.
Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.
Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.
Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.
Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.
Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.
Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.
Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.
Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.
Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.
Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.
Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).
Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hephaistos Polishing Achilles’ Shield – THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. Caskey-Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings (MFA), no. 082.[/caption]
Helen ‘appears’ for the first time in the Iliad in book 3. What does she look like?
A few years ago, there was a bit of a to-do about the ethnicity of Homeric heroes. While some sketchy applications of DNA testing are eager to establish continuity between the people of antiquity and modern populations, others rightly argue that so many of our ideas about race, color, and identity have little to do with the ancient world and everything to do with our own. (See also the discussion on Pharos.)
But questions about DNA and color concepts are separate issues from myth and epic. Sure, the images and values of the ‘real’ world shape fantasy, but there is no direct accord cross-culturally between what people look like and how they imagine their heroes. Consider, e.g., the over-representation of blonde characters in American media in comparison to actual culture or the difference in skin tones in Bollywood from the general population. Racism and colorism shape representation, rendering the reality of genetics and appearance less important than the grammar of idealized bodies.
How did the Greeks imagine their heroes? This is nearly unsolvable because who the Greeks are and what their heroes do for them changes by time and location. We can start, though by looking at some of the language. Greek poetry describes Helen as xanthê and kuanopis. An insensitive and simplistic reading of these facts might claim that she was “blonde” with “blue eyes”. Not only is the situation far more interesting and complicated than this, but I am pretty sure that even if we accept these two words as applying to Helen they would not be equivalent to the appearance these two terms denote in modern English.
Let’s start with the barest fact. What Helen actually looks like is never stated in Homer. When the Trojans look at her, they say she has the “terrible appearance of goddesses” (αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν). This, of course, is not terribly specific.
Elsewhere, she is “argive Helen, for whom many Achaeans [struggled]” (᾿Αργείην ῾Ελένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν, Il. 2.161) she has “smooth” or “pale/white” arms (῏Ιρις δ’ αὖθ’ ῾Ελένῃ λευκωλένῳ ἄγγελος ἦλθεν, 3.121), but this likely has to do with a typical depiction of women in Archaic Greece (they are lighter in tone than men because they don’t work outside) or because of women’s clothing (arms may have been visible). Beyond that? In the Odyssey, she has “beautiful hair” (῾Ελένης πάρα καλλικόμοιο, 15.58) and a long robe (τανύπεπλος, 4.305).
Black-figure Belly Amphora with the Reclamation of Helen and Herakles and Kerberos. c 540 BCE; Walters Art Museum
If anyone is looking for a hint of the ideal of beauty from the legend who launched a thousand ships, they will be sorely disappointed. Why? I think the answer to this partly has to do with the nature of Homeric poetry and with good art in general. Homeric poetry developed over a long duration of time and appealed to many different peoples. To over-determine Helen’s beauty by describing it would necessarily adhere to some standards of beauty while alienating others.
In addition, why describe her beauty at all when the audience members themselves can craft an ideal in their mind? As a student of mine said while I mused over this, Helen “cannot have descriptors because she is a floating signifier”. She is a blank symbol for desire upon which all audience members (ancient and modern, male and female) project their own (often ambiguous) notions of beauty. To stay with the ancient world, think of that seminal first stanza in Sappho fr. 16:
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest thing on the dark earth, but I say it is [whatever] you love
As long as beauty is relative and in the eye of the beholder, any time we disambiguate it by saying that it is one thing and not another we depart from an abstract timeless idea and create something more bounded and less open to audience engagement. I think that part of what makes Homeric poetry work so well is that it combines a maximum amount of specificity within a maximized amount of ambiguity.
Outside of Homer, Helen is described with a little more detail, but in each case the significance of the signifier is less than it appears. In Hesiod, she has nice hair again (῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο, Works and Days 165; this is repeated a lot in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue). In fr. 9 of the Cypria she is merely a “Wonder for mortals” (θαῦμα βροτοῖσι·). Much later she has “spiraling eyebrows/lashes” (῾Ελένης ἑλικοβλεφάροιο, Quintus Smyrnaeus, 13.470). (N.b. there is a scholion glossing heliko- as “dark-eyed” when it is used in the Iliad).
If we want to learn more about Helen, she has additional features outside of epic poetry in lyric. I would be bold enough to claim that the more personal and erotic character of the genre is a better explanation for this specificity than anything else.
In lyric (e.g. Mesomedes, κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας,) Helen is “cyan-eyed”, but if we look at the semantic range of this nominal root—which describes dark stones and eyes of water divinities—I think we can argue fairly that this indicates a dark and shiny, even watery texture (like lapis lazuli). I suspect this is about the sheen of eyes rather than their hue.
Eustathius remarks that the epithet κυανώπιδα is common (κατὰ κοινὸν ἐπίθετον) and is often used for dark sea creatures, describing as well his hair (Ποσειδῶνα κυανοχαίτην, Ad Hom. Il 1.555.23). Indeed, nymphs in general are “dark-eyed” in lyric (καὶ Νύμφαι κυανώπιδες, Anacr. fr. 12.2) and water deities remain so in Homer (κῦμα μέγα ῥοχθεῖ κυανώπιδος ᾿Αμφιτρίτης, Il. 12.60). Outside of Homer marriageable women also receive this epithet, including Helen’s sister Klytemnestra (Hes. Fr. 23a κού[ρην Τυνδαρέοιο Κλυταιμήσ]τρην κυανῶπ[ιν· cf. fr. 23.27 and for Althaia, 25.14, Elektra (169).
From Robert Beekes. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill, 2010
So, in lyric, Helen has dark pools for eyes. But what about her hair? At Sappho fr. 23 Helen is described as “xanthai” ([ ] ξάνθαι δ’ ᾿Ελέναι σ’ ἐίσ[κ]ην; cf. Stesichorus Fr. S103: [ξ]α̣νθὰ δ’ ῾Ελένα̣ π̣ρ[ ; Ibycus, fr. 1a.5: ξα]νθᾶς ῾Ελένας περὶ εἴδει ). But it is important to note that in this context there is a first-person narrator speaking (“I liken you to fair Helen…”). Note as well that there is something formulaic in these lyric lines: the epithet seems to begin the phrase each time.
When it comes to Hair color, xanthus is used in Homer to describe heroes, but not Helen (Menelaos is Xanthus, for example). A byzantine etymological dictionary suggests that the core meaning of this root has something to do with fire (Ξανθὴν, πυῤῥοειδῆ) and argues that the hair “symbolizes the heat and irascibility of the hero” (αἰνίττεται, τὸ θερμὸν καὶ ὀργίλον τοῦ ἥρωος, Etym. Gud, s.v.). But outside the Iliad and Odyssey the adjective is applied to goddesses: both Demeter (H. Dem. 302) and Aphrodite (Soph. fr. 255) are called Xanthê. Modern etymology sees this as anywhere from yellow to brown. But this is altogether relative again. “Light hair” in a group of people who are blond is almost white; among black/brown haired people, light hair can merely be a different shade of brown.
Again, from Beekes 2010:
In the second book of Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem Trilogy” The Dark Forest, one of the main characters Luo Ji creates an ideal woman to love in his mind and goes so far as to converse with her, to leave his actual girlfriend for her, and then to go on a trip with her. When he consults a psychologist about this, his doctor tells him his is lucky because everyone is in love with an idea–where the rest of the world will inevitably be disillusioned when they realize this, Luo Ji will never suffer this loss.
Trying to make Helen look like an actual person is not only impossible, but it is something which Homeric epic avoids for good reason.
Many of us read the Odyssey for the first time because it is part of a certain kind of cultural inheritance in the literary canon. But we remain engaged with it, I think, because the character’s flexibility and adaptability. He is closer to us than some heroes, thanks to his physical vulnerability and his characteristic intelligence (instead of superhuman strength; and he goes through things. His journeys make for easy metaphors for our own; and his ability to persevere has made him an attractive model for philosophers and eventually theologians as well. He is a villain on the tragic stage; a rival in early rhetoric; and a sage by the Roman Empire. The Homeric Odyssey cannot contain everything the hero represents, but it does draw us in, asking the audience to wonder more about what could have happened if this hero’s life had been different in one small way…
Laura Jenkinson-Brown’s You are Odysseus finds new space for telling Odysseus’ story between the static audience engagement of reading and the immersive wandering of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. She sets out with a remarkable twist on how we engage with his story: what if we can intervene in some of his decisions? What if we can be author of a part of his tale? This may sound like a great leap from an ancient cliff, but it responds to the spirit of the Odyssey well. At the beginning of the poem, Zeus complains that “Mortals are always blaming us gods for their suffering / when they have suffering beyond their fate because of their recklessness” (1.30-32). His introduction offers a thematic framework that encourages audiences to ask how people make their own lives worse and how, in turn, it might be possible to make them better. You Are Odysseus takes the experience one step further.
I wasn’t surprised to find this book engaging and fun. L. Jenkinson-Brown has been the genius behind GreekMythComix for years, blending a heavy dose of facts with sharp and striking illustrations. As an educator, Jenkinson-Brown has a good sense of how to tell a story herself and makes great use of short, direct statements in often jarring collocations. Consider the effective coverage of the following graphic, which contains at a glance what it might take me a full lecture to convey:
One of the most interesting things about the way Jenkinson-Brown sets this up us that you can choose which character to read as, identifying as someone other than Odysseus. For the majority of us, the story traces the hero’s journey home, starting around the first event of Odysseus’ own story, the conflict between his men and the Cicones (told in Odyssey 9). Each episode is read addressed to the reader, numbered for their sequence in the overarching range of possibilities Jenkinson-Brown has sketched out.
What does choice in the Odyssey look like? Giving too much away would ruin any future experience, but let me give you a few samples. After Odysseus’ raft fails, the narrator gives the reader two choices
It is all too much. You resign yourself to the waves – and obscurity. Go to 143.
You’re not done yet – Zeus has decreed that you will return home! Go to 244.
The exhausted among us who are tempted to give into the sea’s embrace are treated to a few more paragraphs of regrets about Telemachus and Penelope before we’re invited to the epilogue (which contains an invitation to try again). If we choose to swim, we end up on the shore, talking to a sea bird, who may or may not be a god. Part of the fun of enjoying the Odyssey this way is that I know what kind of story to expect, and I find it in different pieces, refracted to me here, and reinvented for me there. But in the background is the Siren call of the story I already know as I search for it.
Another interesting aspect of this way of engaging with the tale is how the narrator can talk about the character’s gaze, thereby directing ours. After Odysseus has made the blood sacrifice to attract the souls of the dead, the reader is told that we start to feel “weak with panic” as our companions turn pale. The panic is punctuated by possible options:
I won’t spoil any surprises here. But if you know the Odyssey, you can guess some of what will happen next. I think it is that act of eliciting guesses though that commends this method of storytelling to me too. We know that ancient audiences were familiar with different details and variations of the big stories from ancient Greece. Some of the excitement from viewing this year’s version of a tragedy or listening to the most recent rhapsodic performance comes from discovering how the regular story would be told; but a certain degree of pleasure comes from suspense over which details of the story this accounting will tell.
Jenkinson-Brown is not shy about integrating other stories from myth, like the tale of the counterfeit Helen that comes as part of the episode involving Proteus, the old man of the sea. Such inclusions are far from disquieting, instead they remind of the way that others stories are always threatening to intrude on myth in Homer (and ancient Greece altogether). Jenkinson-Brown finds within this possibility the ability to tell of Odyssean counter-lives, not just the hero who gives up and never makes it home, but one who does make it home, but lingers in a hut like a hermit, waiting for something to happen, rather than striving to make it so.
Version 1.0.0
Don’t worry if it seems like this approach may go too easy on Odysseus—the Muse speaks to him directly and catalogues exactly how many of his people died and whose fault it was (just before the final members of his crew disappear). Jenkinson-Brown takes creative turns—as in the section entitled “The Tragedy of Odysseus”, which, in centering the enslaved women as the chorus reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad before Odysseus sings outside his house about his desire to be “Odysseus again”. Just as in tragedy, there’s a recognition scene (here, Eumaeus misrecognizing Odysseus). The confusion ends up with multiple main characters deceased thanks to a certain scar not convincing anyone. Athena, that classic dea ex machina, appears to declare “he was not what he was / his choices all were wrong, / and now his story ends – / before an Epic tale, / a tragedy instead”. The epilogue is one of the collection’s finer points from the serious side of things. Jenkinson-Brown closes by making the point that Odysseus’ decisions are not simple, interwoven as they are with the tensions between mere survival and attempt to be some kind of a moral agent. The difference for us, however, is that thanks to Jenkinson-Brown’s work we can experiment with doing the whole thing again.
The combination of irreverence and seriousness keeps readers moving through the choices, uncertain. I don’t think there is a wrong way to read this book: each episode has some insights on its own; even where there are departures from Homer, they are instructive and intriguing. One could quibble about not being able to be one of the suitors or that certain of our favorite tales are left out. But the pleasure of reading through a fast-paced journey that manages to be knowledgeable and funny at the same time is undeniable.
This is easiest read on actual paper! But the prose is clear and direct, and the leaping from scene to scene makes has the effect of creating excitement and some confusion. There’s a knowing wit to the retelling as well, as when Odysseus is with Circe and we read “As your men drift off to find a comfortable place to sleep for the night – not the roof, you remind them – Circe slips her hand into yours and draws you aside.” The dark humor of the reminder, recalling Elpenor for those who know, stands strangely next to the nearly saccharine hand-holding. But there’s something about it that rings true in just that Odyssean ways of rendering lies that sound like the truth. The narrator frequently characterizes emotions, effectively emphasizing an interior experience, flipping the normal, distanced engagement with Homer on its head.
There are many ways I can imagine using this book in the classroom or with readers coming to Homer from different backgrounds. I think this approach could pair really well with Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel of the Odyssey for readers who don’t have the time or the practice to get through a translation for the first time. Then, again, it also provides enough information to support learning about the Odyssey on its own. I read through this one with my daughter (15) who has read Hinds’ graphic novel and has been listening to me drone on about Odysseus for years. She thinks Jenkinson-Brown’s approach is better than mine, and she has some experience! If she and I both like this book, there’s a good chance there’s something in it for you too.
“The rest of them were sitting, and they had taken their seats. Only Thersites, a man of measureless speech, was still declaring– A man who knew many disordered things in his thoughts and who Strived pointlessly with kings out of order, –whatever he thought would be amusing to the Argives. And he was the most shameful man who came to Troy. He was cross-eyed and crippled in one foot. His shoulders Were curved, dragged in toward his chest. And on top His head was misshaped, and the hair on his head was sparse. He was most hateful to both Achilles and Odysseus For he was always reproaching them. Then he was shrilly cawing At lordly Agamemnon again, as he spoke reproaches. The Achaeans Were terribly angry at him and were finding fault in their heart. As he shouting greatly, he was reproaching Agamemnon.”
Thersites’ description also uses some language of disability in the ancient world: here, aiskhos (for “ugly” or “deformed”) and khlôlos (for “crippled” or lame”). The correlation between the disorderliness of his body and thoughts (ὃς ἔπεα φρεσὶν ᾗσιν ἄκοσμά) may not be causative, but it helps to establish a meaningful relationship between Thersites’ body, his behavior, and the hate his presence elicits.
Schol T. ad Il. 2.216a
“most shameful: this is also said of an ape.”
ex. αἴσχιστος: τοῦτο καὶ ἐπὶ πιθήκου.
Schol. BT [Aristonicus] ad Il. 2.217a
“pholkos: this is spoken once. Homeric pholkos means when the eyes are narrowed together, which means turned.”
Homer presents a overlap between ‘beautiful body’ and ‘beautiful mind’ (a topic I explore in this article.) This physiognomic category error pervades a great deal of classical Greek culture. In the Iliad, Thersites transgresses physical boundaries through his unheroic body and ethical boundaries by using the genre of rebuke upward in the social hierarchy. He is hateful to both Achilles and Odysseus because they exemplify in a complementary fashion the ‘center’ or ideal of the heroic person—Achilles is the beautiful body, Odysseus is a beautiful mind. But both of them stay within the boundaries of ‘normal’ in their own deviance (Achilles’ political straying, Odysseus’ aging, imperfect body).
Thersites, labelled by many as a comic scapegoat, functions as an inferior in order to define the center as non-transgressive. This is, in particular, why he is hateful to Achilles and Odysseus: without him, their persons might be monstrous or disabled. And this also helps explain why Odysseus must physically beat Thersites in public.
But there is a tradition to Thersites outside of the way he is used in Homer. Ancient scholars etymologize his name and report, ironically, that he became disabled because of punishment for cowardice (making his body a marker of the consequences of his character).
Schol. T ad Hom. Il. 212a1 ex
“Thersites: the name is made from the Aiolic [version of tharsos] audacity, thersos. ex. Θερσίτης δ’ ἔτι: ὠνοματοποίησε τὸ ὄνομα παρὰ τὸ θέρσος Αἰολικόν
Schol. D ad Hom. Il. 2.212 [= Euphorion fr. 82]
“Because the goddess was enraged at Oineus’ lack of concern for sacrifices to Artemis, she sent a wild boar against the city. A band of the best of Greece when against it when it was ruining the country, as the poet says in the ninth book. Among them was also Thersites who, because he was coward, abandoned his assigned guard post and went instead hunting safety in some high position. He was being reproached and pursued by Meleager and fell from a cliff; [this is how] he became the sort of man Homer describes him as. Euphorion tells this story.”
“Pherecydes says that [Thersites] was one of those who gathered to hunt the Kalydonian boar but that he was avoiding the fight with the boar and was thrown from a cliff by Meleager. This is how his body was deformed. People say he is a child of Agrios and the daughter of Porthaon. But if he is Diomedes’ relative, there is no way Odysseus would beat him. For he would only hit common soldiers. Hence, [the poet] has deployed him not [because of] his father or his country but only because of his manner and form, the things which the current situation needs.”
In the broader tradition, Thersites’ boldness leads to his death at Achilles’ hands.
Proclus, Chrestomathia 178–184
“Then Achilles killed Thersites because he was mocked by him when he reproached him, claiming he loved Penthesileia. A conflict arose among the Achaeans over the murder of Thersites. After that Achilles went sailing to Lesbos where, after he made a sacrifice to Apollo, Artemis and Leto, he was cleansed of the murder by Odysseus.”
“A bit farther along among the final souls, he saw that of the ridiculous Thersites taking on the form of a monkey. By chance, he came upon the soul of Odysseus last of all as it made its choice still remembering its previous sufferings and, having decided to rest from the pursuit of honor, was spending an excessive among of time seeking the life of an untroubled private citizen. He found it barely situated somewhere and ignored by the rest of the souls. When he saw it, he said that he would have made the same choice even had he drawn the first lot and was happen to make this choice.”
“Accordingly, then, they differ from one another in magnitude of more or less, just as the whiteness in show compares to the whiteness of milk: it is white for each it is not different in this, but it contrasts in being more or less white. In the same manner, if you will allow me to say, the health of Achilles does not differ from that of Thersites: inasmuch as it is health, it is the same, but it differs in another thing.”
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.
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.
At the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon refusers to honor the ransom request of Chryses for his daughter Chryseis and this prompts the “rage of Apollo” and the plague that initiates the epic’s conflict. When Achilles calls an assembly after nine days of suffering, the poem introduces the seer Calchas:
Homer, Iliad 1.69-72
"Kalkhas the son of Thestor, the best of the bird-men readers
who knew what is, what will be, and what was before,
and lead the ships of the Achaeans to Troy
through the power of prophecy Phoibos Apollo granted him.
Κάλχας Θεστορίδης οἰωνοπόλων ὄχ' ἄριστος,
ὃς ᾔδη τά τ' ἐόντα τά τ' ἐσσόμενα πρό τ' ἐόντα,
καὶ νήεσσ' ἡγήσατ' ᾿Αχαιῶν ῎Ιλιον εἴσω
ἣν διὰ μαντοσύνην, τήν οἱ πόρε Φοῖβος ᾿Απόλλων·
The scholia to this passage suggest that Calchas led them to Troy and prophesied that it would take 10 years (a story told by Odysseus in Iliad 2). After Calchas speaks, however, Agamemnon’s aggressive response has prompted many questions:
Iliad 1.106-9
"Prophet of evils, you've never said anything good for me!
It's always dear to your thoughts to prophesy wicked things--
you never utter or complete any kind of noble word!"
μάντι κακῶν οὐ πώ ποτέ μοι τὸ κρήγυον εἶπας·
αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ' ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι,
ἐσθλὸν δ' οὔτέ τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ' ἐτέλεσσας·
Schol. T. ad Hom. Il. 1.106b
“The poet does not know the name Iphigenia. Since it is not known, then this is not an issue of a falsification, but [Agamemnon] is speaking his slander because of the delay of the victory.”
The D Scholia (to lines 108=109b) insist that the “younger poets” (neoteroi i.e., later accounts) tell the story of Calchas’ prophecy at Aulis. Whether or not ‘Homer’ ‘knew’ the tale is immaterial, I think, because later audiences certainly knew it and could have attributed the tension in book 1 to that event. The Homeric Iliad is perfectly capable of suppressing details that serve its own ends; and ancient scholars are equally capable of taking Homeric poetry at its face value. The question for me is how does it change our reading of the Iliad to imagine that we could be thinking about Iphigenia.
At one level, this might be too much: there’s already a sufficient thematic pattern in a leader (here, a king) at odds with an expert with unwanted knowledge (here, a prophet). Consider, for example, the similar beginning to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. However, it seems to me highly unlikely that audiences of the fifth century did not think of Iphigenia at the beginning of the poem. Homer “not knowing” the name Iphigenia could mean simply that; or, it could be one of many examples of Homeric poetry downplaying details that are not convenient to its plot. A clear allusion to a sacrificed daughter might change the way we think of Agamemnon when he refuses to return a daughter at the beginning of the poem.
The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a pivotal moment in the tale of the House of Atreus—it motivates Agamemnon’s murder and in turn the matricide of Orestes—and the Trojan War, functioning as it does as a strange sacrifice of a virgin daughter of Klytemnestra in exchange for passage for a fleet to regain the adulteress Helen, Iphigeneia’s aunt by both her father and mother. The account is famous in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and the plays Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides. Its earliest accounts, however, provide some interesting variations:
Hes. Fr. 23.13-30
“Agamemnon, lord of men, because of her beauty,
Married the dark-eyed daughter of Tyndareus, Klytemnestra. She gave birth to fair-ankled Iphimede in her home And Elektra who rivaled the goddesses in beauty. But the well-greaved Achaeans butchered Iphimede on the altar of thundering, golden-arrowed Artemis on that day when they sailed with ships to Ilium in order to exact payment for fair-ankled Argive woman— they butchered a ghost. But the deer-shooting arrow-mistress easily rescued her and anointed her head with lovely ambrosia so that her flesh would be enduring— She made her immortal and ageless for all days. Now the races of men upon the earth call her Artemis of the roads, the servant of the famous arrow-mistress. Last in her home, dark-eyed Klytemnestra gave birth after being impregnated by Agamemnon to Orestes, who, once he reached maturity, paid back the murderer of his father and killed his mother as well with pitiless bronze.”
This fragment presents what is possibly the earliest account of the tale of Iphigenia and contains the major elements: the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter is tied to vengeance against Helen; the daughter is rescued by Artemis, made immortal and made her servant. [In some traditions she is either made immortal or made into a priestess of Artemis at Tauris]. Orestes kills the murderer of his father and his mother.
Note that several details are not spelled out, but assumed: namely, Agamemnon’s agency in the death of his daughter (either in angering the goddess or in arranging her sacrifice) and the murder of Agamemnon. Note as well, the name is different: here we have Iphimedê instead of Iphigeneia. Of course, the situation gets stranger: according to Pausanias (1.43.1) Artemis turned Iphigeneia into Hekate. According to Proclus (in his Chrestomathia, “useful knowledge”; 135-143), the story was told in the Kypria as follows:
“When the fleet gathered a second time at Aulis, Agamemnon struck a deer while hunting and claimed he had surpassed Artemis. The goddess, enraged, kept them from sailing by sending storms. When Kalkhas explained the origin of the goddess’s anger and called for Iphigeneia to be sacrificed to Artemis, they attempted to complete the sacrifice by sending for her with the pretext of a marriage to Achilles. But Artemis snatched her away and settled her among the Taurians and made her immortal; she put a deer in place of the girl on the altar.”
In the fifth century, the story becomes a little more consistent: Aeschylus’ account is probably the best known (Agamemnon, 229-249) but Pindar discusses it too (Pyth. 11.22-28)
“Was it the fact that Iphigeneia
was butchered far from her homeland at Euripos that incited [Klytemnestra’s] heavy-handed rage? Or did nocturnal sex, breaking her to another’s bed, lead her astray? That is most hateful and intractable in young wives—but it is impossible to hide because of other people’s tongues: Townsfolk are gossip-mongers.”
Sophokles, who also wrote an Iphigeneia (lost), has Elektra defend her father’s decision by portraying him as accidentally killing the deer and having no choice in the killing of his daughter (Elektra, 563-576).
The situation with the naming of the daughters of Agamemnon is a bit knotty. In the Iliad he declares: “I have three daughters in my well-made home / Khrysothemis, Laodikê, and Iphianassa” (τρεῖς δέ μοί εἰσι θύγατρες ἐνὶ μεγάρῳ εὐπήκτῳ / Χρυσόθεμις καὶ Λαοδίκη καὶ ᾿Ιφιάνασσα, 9.144-145) whereas the Hesiodic fragment cited above lists only two (Elektra and Iphimedê). Some scholars have assumed that Homer suppresses the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (although the events of the epic’s first book seem to rely on that tension). According to Aelian the name Elektra was a pejorative nickname for Laodikê (Varia Historia, 4.26):
“Xanthus the lyric poet—the one who was older than Stesikhoros—says that the daughter of Agamemnon Elektra did not have that name at first, but instead was Laodikê. After Agamemnon was killed and Aigisthos married Klytemnestra and was king, because she was “unbedded” (a-lektron) and was growing old as a virgin, the Argives called her Elektra because she didn’t have a husband and had no experience of a marriage bed.”
Aeschylus in his Libation-Bearers gives Agamemnon only Elektra. Sophokles and Euripides preserve Khrysothemis. Strangely, according to one scholion, the lost Kypria named both Iphigeneia and Iphianassa as Agamemnon’s daughters. West (2013, 110) concludes that in this tradition (following Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon once had four daughters).
Fourth Style fresco depicting the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, Naples National Archaeological Museum
Sources: Timothy Gantz. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore, 1993. Bryan Hainsworth. The Iliad: A Commentary. III: books 9-12. Cambridge, 1993. R. Merkelbach and M. L. West. Hesiodea Fragmenta. Oxford, 1967. Glenn Most. Hesiod: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments. Cambridge, 2003. M. L. West. The Epic Cycle. Oxford, 2013.
In the first book of the Iliad, Nestor attempts to intervene in the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. He eventually tells both men to simmer down—Achilles should act insubordinately and Agamemnon shouldn’t take Briseis. Neither of them listen to him. The reason—beyond the fact that neither of them are in a compromising state of mind—may in part be because of the story Nestor tells.
Il. 1.259–273
“But listen to me: both of you are younger than me; for long before have I accompanied men better than even you and they never disregarded me. For I never have seen those sort of men since, nor do I expect to see them; men like Perithoos and Dryas, the shepherd of the host, and Kaineus and Exadios and godly Polyphemos and Aigeus’ son Theseus, who was equal to the gods; indeed these were the strongest of mortal men who lived—they were the strongest and they fought with the strongest, mountain-inhabiting beasts, and they destroyed them violently. And I accompanied them when I left Pylos far off from a distant land when they summoned me themselves; and I fought on my own. No one could fight with them, none of those mortals who now are on the earth. Even they listened to my counsel and heeded my speech.”
Ancient commentators praise Nestor elsewhere for his ability to apply appropriate examples in his persuasive speeches:
Schol. Ad Il. 23.630b ex. 1-6: “[Nestor] always uses appropriate examples. For, whenever he wants to encourage someone to enter one-on-one combat, he speaks of the story of Ereuthaliôn (7.136-56); when he wanted to rouse Achilles to battle, he told the story of the Elean war (11.671¬–761). And here in the games for Patroklos, he reminds them of an ancient funeral contest.”
The scholia also assert that such use of stories from the past is typical of and appropriate to elders:
Schol. ad Il. 9.447b ex. 1-2 : “The elderly are storytellers and they persuade with examples from the past. In other cases, the tale assuages the anger…”
Not just elders of course! Singers and teachers are positioned as authorities who should (and do) use narrative examples to form the characters of the young (the first comment comes in response to Achilles’ playing of the lyre; the second comment is prompted by Phoinix’s tale of Meleager presented to Achilles in the 9th book of the Iliad:
Schol. A ad. Il. 9.189b ex. 1-2: “Klea andrôn: [this is because] it is right to be ever-mindful of good men. For singers make their audiences wise through ancient narratives.”
Schol. ad Il. 9.447b ex. 1-2 : “The elderly are storytellers and they persuade with examples from the past. In other cases, the tale assuages the anger…”
For Nestor’s speech, the ancient critics do concede that there is some rhetorical grace in the elder’s choice of detail:
Schol. bT ad Il. 1.271c ex. 3-5: “[Nestor] does not mention that Peleus [Achilles’ father] was Agamemnon’s friend so that he doesn’t appear to be rebuking Achilles if his father obeyed him some, but he does not.”
But in explaining the details of Nestor’s speech—that he is alluding to the mythical battle of the Lapiths vs. the Centaurs—the scholiast may hit upon part of the problem of Nestor’s example:
Schol. bT ad Il. 1.266 ex 1-2: “These were the strongest men: but they were the strongest in competing against the remaining beasts”.
Unlike Nestor’s other tales, this one does not fit the context. He uses it in an attempt to establish his own heroic bona fides. But what his audience(s) hear is some rambling tale about fighting beasts they are not fighting. The conflict is between men who are supposed to be on the same side.
As an aside, Xenophanes would prefer we avoid talking about Centaurs altogether:
Xenophanes, fr. B1 13-24
“First, it is right for merry men to praise the god
with righteous tales and cleansing words after they have poured libations and prayed to be able to do what is right: in fact, these things are easier to do, instead of sacrilege. It is right as well to drink as much as you can and still go home without help, unless you are very old. It is right to praise a man who shares noble ideas when drinking so that we remember and work towards excellence. It is not right to narrate the wars of Titans or Giants nor again of Centaurs, the fantasies of our forebears, Nor of destructive strife. There is nothing useful in these tales. It is right always to keep in mind good thoughts of the gods.”
In a later post, I will talk more about what I see as some of the most important themes to emphasize when working with students on the Iliad. One of them is the way Homeric poetry positions itself in relation to other narrative traditions.
A commonly recognized feature in the speeches of Homer’s heroes is the offering of an example from another mythical tradition, called a paradeigma. In particular, paradeigmata provide an opportunity to think about how Homeric characters relate to stories from their own past and make sense of their present. At the same time, they also provide opportunities for audiences to think about how the Iliad might be used as a paradigm for their lives.
My personal take is that the Iliad is particularly interested in where examples from other narratives create dissonance with the contexts to which they are compared. This example from book one in the Iliad is a clear one; but the epic ends with such an example as well when Achilles provides the paradigm of Niobe to Priam in order to convince him to eat. The epic is, in my opinion, engaged from beginning to end in getting audiences to think about just how effective extant narratives are as models for the challenges they face in the world outside the story. And, I think, it anticipates its own use as a problematic model for others, clearly when Achilles says (19.64–65): “This was better for the Hektor and the Trojans: I think that the Achaeans will remember our strife for a long time.” (῞Εκτορι μὲν καὶ Τρωσὶ τὸ κέρδιον· αὐτὰρ ᾿Αχαιοὺς / δηρὸν ἐμῆς καὶ σῆς ἔριδος μνήσεσθαι ὀΐω).
Major Iliadic Paradeigmata
1.259–274 Nestor’s tale of the Lapiths and Centaurs
1.393–407 Thetis’ rescue of Zeus
4.370–400 Agamemnon’s Tale of Tydeus
5.382–404 Dionê’s list of gods harmed by mortals
6.130-140 Diomedes on Lykourgos and Dionysus to Glaukos
7.124–160 Nestor’s one-on-one combat);
9.524–605 Phoinix’s Meleager Tale
11.669–762 Nestor’s story to Patroklos
14.315–328 Zeus’ Erotic Catalogue
15.18–30 Zeus’ Warning to Hera
18.394–405 Thetis’ rescue of Hephaestus;
19. 90–144 Agamemnon’s tale of Atê, Zeus and the birth of Herakles
[23.629–643 Nestor’s Reminiscence]
24.596–620 Achilles’ tale of Niobê
Andersen (1987) on paradeigmata: primary, secondary, and tertiary functions
1. Persuasion of one character by another
2. Reflection of the main story
3. Modeling of reading the epic as a whole; cf. Nagy 2009, 54: “[Homeric] poetry actually demonstrates how myth is activated”
Some things to read on paradeigmata
Andersen, Øivind. 1987. “Myth Paradigm and Spatial Form in the Iliad.” In Homer Beyond Oral Poetry: Recent Trends in Homeric Interpretation, edited by Jan Bermer and Irene J. F. De Jong. John Benjamins.’
Barker, Elton T. E. and Christensen, Joel P. 2011. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” MD: 9–44.
Brenk, F. 1984 “Dear Child: the Speech of Phoinix and the Tragedy of Achilles in the Ninth Book of the Iliad.” Eranos, 86: 77–86.
Braswell, B. K. 1971. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” CQ, 21: 16-26.
Combellack, F.M. 1976. “Homer the Innovator.” CP 71: 44-55.
Edmunds, L. 1997. Myth in Homer, in A New Companion to Homer, edited by I. Morris and B. Powell, 415–441. Leiden.
Held, G. 1987. “Phoinix, Agamemnon and Achilles. Problems and Paradeigmata.” CQ 36: 141-54.
Martin, Richard. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.
Minchin, Elizabeth. 1991. “Speaker and Listener, Text and Context: Some Notes on the Encounter of Nestor and Patroklos in Iliad 11.” CW 84: 273-285.
Nagy, Gregory. 1996. Homeric Questions, Austin.
—,—. 2009. “Homer and Greek Myth.” Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, 52–82.
Pedrick, V. 1983. “The Paradigmatic Nature of Nestor’s Speech in Iliad 11.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 113:55-68.
When you hear the words “ancient Greek tragedy,” what comes to mind? Suicide, maybe. Some parricide every once in a while. If you’re feeling particularly despairing, maybe even all three: suicide, parricide, and gouging out one’s eyes. Skim through the pages of The Bacchae, Medea, Hippolytus, and others, and you will find that Greek tragedies do not involve a lot of positive emotion.
However, one tragedy defies the tradition of soul-crushing endings to soul-crushing plays: Euripides’ Alcestis. Yes, the play’s characters suffer—the titular protagonist Alcestis even dies. Nonetheless, the characters of Alcestis enjoy a traditionally happy ending.
Or do they?
First, we have to examine how we got to this point. Alcestis is not as popular a tragedy as, say, Oedipus Tyrannus, so it calls for some exposition. Here is a bare-bones summary: King Admetus of Pherae, due to his friendship with Apollo, is saved from an early death. However, someone must die in his place. Admetus’ parents refuse, but his wife Alcestis agrees to die for him. As she slowly withers, Admetus swears to never remarry. He insults his father Pheres for not choosing to die instead, and Pheres calls him a coward before storming off. Amongst this chaos, an oblivious Heracles stops by Pherae. Wanting to be hospitable, Admetus houses Heracles despite his wife’s death. Heracles initially drinks and celebrates, but once he learns of Alcestis’ death, he sets off to retrieve her from Thanatos. He later returns to Admetus with a veiled woman, whom he claims he won in a competition. Admetus initially refuses to take the woman in, but, pressured by Heracles, he agrees. Admetus lifts the veil to find Alcestis beneath it, and he rejoices. She cannot speak for three days, but Admetus, overcome by joy, declares a feast. With Admetus’ mistake reversed and everyone ostensibly alive and well, the play ends.
King Admetus of Thessaly Mourning the Death of Alcestis by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder
If you know this play’s designation and know what the word tragedy means, one thing immediately stands out: what’s up with that ending? In a sea of grim, unsalvageable conclusions, Alcestis’ fairytale resolution sticks out like a rainbow-hued thumb.
But something more specific also stands out: what’s up with Alcestis?
If you take this play at face value, Alcestis has been rendered temporarily mute by death and will soon regain her voice. In Diane Arnson Svarlien’s translation of Alcestis, Heracles says, “[Alcestis is] consecrated to the gods below / and will not be released until the third / day’s light has come” (Euripides, lines 1207-1209). The reader can assume that Alcestis’ condition is temporary and all will be well in three days. Her muteness is only a small bump on the road to her and Admetus’ happily ever after. However, this face-value interpretation leaves quite a few questions unanswered. For example, why doesn’t Alcestis react to her revival? Why doesn’t she reach for Admetus? Why doesn’t she at least smile? She is mute, not immobile. Being rescued from death and reunited with one’s husband should provoke a reaction. As Admetus asks, “Why is she just standing there in silence?” (Euripides, line 1205).
Which brings this essay to its point: Alcestis didn’t want to be revived. Her lack of reaction says it all. She resents that Heracles has dragged her back to life, she resents that she will have to spend more time with Admetus, and she resents that her seemingly perfect escape plan was foiled. Alcestis’ choice to die for her husband was not motivated by love; it was motivated by desperation for freedom.
It is important to note that Alcestis didn’t die happily. However, the timing of her sadness reveals that she took issue with the circumstances surrounding her death, not death itself. Alcestis’ chorus initially says, “When she realized / the day had come, she bathed her pale skin / with water from the river. Then she took / her clothing and her lovely jewelry / from cedar chambers, and she dressed herself / as the occasion called for” (Euripides, lines 153-158). Here, Alcestis displays surprising diligence for someone about to go to her death. Instead of refusing to surrender herself or breaking down, she prepares for her day. This sense of acceptance continues as she prays to Hestia and walks through her house. The chorus continues, “[Alcestis’] eyes were dry; she did not moan. Her beautiful complexion / was unchanged by the imminent disaster” (Euripides, lines 171-173). These sentences add a layer of determination to Alcestis’ actions. She behaves as if she is completing an important task. She may not like it, but she knows it must be done. Alcestis’ outward stoicism only falters when she comes across her marriage bed and children. She says to the bed, “It’s you / alone who have destroyed me” (Euripides, lines 179-180), and embraces her children “like a woman who is dying” (line 193). Alcestis’ reluctance to die stems from her resentment at having been put in this situation and from having to leave her children behind; however, she doesn’t seem to resent death itself. She is upset that her husband would let her die in such a way and upset for her children, but she keeps her composure regarding the action of dying.
King Admetus Recognizes Alcestis, Who Is Being Led from the Underworld by Heracles by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder
There are two reasons why Alcestis would be so okay with death: she either loves Admetus that much, or she quietly despises him and views death as an escape. Given her comments toward Admetus, evidence points toward the latter. As Alcestis dies, she says, “I am dying, / although I didn’t have to, for your sake. / I could have married well in Thessaly, / had any man I wanted, lived in wealth” (Euripides, lines 301-304). In her final moments, Alcestis expresses resentment toward her marriage. She seems bitter that she married Admetus and implies that she didn’t want to. Given that this play takes place in ancient Greece, one has to wonder if Alcestis even chose to marry Admetus. Alcestis mentions her youth quite a few times, so she is obviously young. The existence of her children indicates that she married Admetus when she was even younger. In contrast, Admetus is a well-established king with very old parents, which indicates that he is probably middle-aged. A young girl without much agency being married off to an older man? Said young girl growing resentful of her husband due to her lack of agency? Considering this play’s setting, that is par for the course (Beneker and Tsouvala).
And Alcestis’ grievances regarding her marriage don’t stop there. One of her last requests to Admetus is to never remarry. She says to him, “It’s not possible / to pay me back what I deserve (for nothing / is worth more than a life), but what I will ask / is fair, as you’ll agree… Don’t remarry” (Euripides, lines 318-324). However, just a few lines after this request, she implies to her children that Admetus will remarry anyway. She says, “But you, my daughter, how will you / grow up to womanhood? What kind of wife / will your father marry after me? Let’s hope / she doesn’t, in the blossom of your youth, / cast some disgraceful slander on your name / and ruin utterly your hopes of marriage” (Euripides, lines 332-334). Alcestis evidently does not have much faith in her husband. She believes him to be the kind of person who would disregard his wife’s dying wish, the kind of person who would force a malicious stepmother upon his children. And, unfortunately, Alcestis might be onto something.
Throughout this play, Admetus is selfish, cowardly, and ungrateful. After Alcestis dies, Admetus’ father Pheres calls him out on this behavior. He says, “So, you put up a fight, / got out of dying, shamelessly stayed alive, / avoided your due fate by killing [Alcestis]. / You’re calling me a coward? You’re the worst! […] You’ve found a smart alternative to death: / just persuade your current wife to die / on your behalf! And then you blame your loved ones / if they won’t do it, coward that you are!” (Euripides, lines 735-744). Per his own father, Admetus is a spineless duty-shirker. Step into Alcestis’ shoes again, and you will see why she might resent her marriage. She probably lacked a say in marrying Admetus, and his lack of character only made things worse. To add to her unfortunate situation, she had no way out of her marriage, and her freedom was extremely limited. Alcestis, bound to a man she quietly resented, must have felt exceedingly trapped. So when an escape route presented itself in the form of death, she took it. It was a perfect plan: Alcestis would escape her marriage, die as a revered figure, and indirectly inflict some pain upon her husband. It was freedom on a silver platter. Alcestis didn’t die for Admetus; she died for herself.
Evidently, though, Alcestis doesn’t stay dead. Heracles fights Thanatos to retrieve her, then he brings her back to Admetus. However, something is very wrong with this revived Alcestis. Along with not being able to speak, she is stiff and devoid of emotion. As far as the reader can tell, she does not react at all to the fantastical events occurring around her. She simply stands in silence. Think back to Alcestis’ possible reasons to die, and it becomes increasingly clear that her lack of reaction is not just due to her death. She is frustrated, despairing, demoralized, and more resentful than ever. By reviving her, Heracles has negated all that has occurred. After a brief moment of freedom in death, Alcestis is shackled once more.
For all of Alcestis’ life, men tell her what to do. A man tells her to marry Admetus, a man tells her to be a homemaker, a man tells her to die, and now, a man tells her—forces her, really—to return to Admetus. She tries to break free, but she is dragged right back to where she started. By the man, no less: Heracles, with his heroic deeds and bulging muscles, was considered the ideal man by many ancient Greeks, and many modern men still view him as such (Blanshard and Stafford). Alcestis’ reunion with Admetus is almost symbolic: veiled and finely dressed, she is guided to her husband by a guardian. Once she reaches her husband, he takes her hand and her freedom. She quite literally has no say in any of this. Her relationship with Admetus started with a marriage she did not want, and said relationship is revived with a reenactment of this forced marriage. Alcestis does not depict a noble act of self-sacrifice; it depicts a desperate suicide attempt by a trapped young woman. Admetus may receive a happy ending, but Alcestis does not. Her revival is the real tragedy of this play.
Bio
Lana Miao is a high school junior from Great Neck, New York. She discovered the world of Classics through the Percy Jackson series in second grade, and her sixth grade Latin class solidified her passion for the field. She hopes to major in the Classics with a concentration in the Latin language. She enjoys parsing Latin text, reading too deeply into the syntax of Latin poetry, and interrogating the depiction of female figures in Greco-Roman literature. In her free time, she produces music, sings, and clumsily translates English paragraphs into Latin. Her favorite authors are Catullus and Euripides!
Works Cited
Beneker, Jeffrey, and Georgia Tsouvala. The Discourse of Marriage in the Greco-Roman World. U of Wisconsin P, 2020. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv136c5bq. Accessed 25 May 2025.
Blanshard, Alastair J.L., and Emma Stafford, editors. The Modern Hercules. Brill, 2020. Vol. 21 of Metaforms.
Immediately following the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Elon Musk addressed crowds at the parade congregated in the Capital One Arena. After thanking the crowd for showing up to re-elect the 45th president, he overshadowed the whole day by twice making a gesture that many have interpreted as the Nazi salute or “Sieg Heil” used first by Fascists in Italy in the 1920s and then adopted by members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s.
The response to this moment was immediate, with many on the left decrying this as “abhorrent” and something that “must worry every democrat,” while others denied he was making a fascist salute. The Anti-Defamation League, which has been very vocal in the past 15 months in calling out the antisemitism of Palestinian protests and anti-Israel sentiment, said in a tweet that he made “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm” and Dr. Aaron Astor, a historian at Maryville College, TN wrote that it was “a socially awkward autistic man’s wave to the crowd where he says ‘my heart goes out to you,’” gaslighting people with a healthy dose of ableism. The far-right and various domestic terrorist groups in fact celebrated Musk’s actions, identifying it precisely as a Nazi salute, with infamous extremist figures such as Nick Fuentes, Evan Kilgore, and Keith Woods all praising Musk and his actions. And for a figure who has voiced his support for far-right movements in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, all of whom have ties to fascist groups or histories, should we really be surprised that he would behave in such a way?
While the debate will continue to rage, it is also the Roman connection to this action that interests me. Mainstream media and people on the right have been referring to his salute as a Roman salute. This term has a long history, but it turns out not even close to long enough to include the actual Romans. George Mason University Classicist Martin Winkler has done a deep dive into the history of the so-called Roman salute, and has conclusively proven that the Roman salute was invented in the theatrical productions of the nineteenth century for use during “toga plays” inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii.
Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David, Louvre Museum
It subsequently made its way into the general mindset through the invention of cinema. While Roman art depicts salutes and greetings that are similar, none reflect the specific salute performed by Elon Musk at the inauguration parade. It was instead this media proliferation of the Roman salute, featuring a thump of the chest and then the full extension of the right arm at around 135° with palm down, that led to its use by extremist political groups in the twentieth century. Although it had existed for decades in fictional displays of ancient Roman power, it was not given its explicitly fascist ideological meaning until 1919 when Italian Gabriele D’Annunzio used it at a ritual in Fiume, inspiring Mussolini to adopt it.
That a symbol of Romanitas, albeit a fictional one, should be taken up by the fascist parties of the early-to-mid twentieth century is not surprising, given Mussolini’s explicit propagandistic program of framing his Italy as the new Roman Empire and Hitler’s fascination with Germany’s alleged connection to ancient Greece. Fascist political parties and their supporters throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day have connected themselves to the ancient world through the use of ancient symbols in an attempt to legitimize their white supremacist goals and activities. Images from the ancient world and phrases such as Molon Labe (Come and take them – a phrase attributed to Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans stood against the Persian army and adopted by proponents of the second Amendment and the NRA) were seen in abundance during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection attempt at the Capitol. Nick Fuentes, celebrating Musk’s salute in an unhinged video, starts to call it the Roman salute but then ends up referring to it as “a straight-up, like, Sieg Heil.” So why is the mainstream media referring to it as a Roman salute?
I am willing to give some benefit of the doubt to the mainstream media, which, like so much of the population, has received the messaging that such a salute originated in the Roman world through cinema and imagery. For example, an Al-Jazeera article discussing the salute the following day stated that the “gesture dates back to a salute that is said to have been used in ancient Rome.” Many people do indeed say this, albeit erroneously, because that claim has been baked into the social consciousness. However, more cynically, and, unfortunately, I believe more accurately, is that it is in the best interest of our mainstream media, controlled by the billionaire elite who have pledged their support for the new president, to act as apologists for the new regime and aid the transition to authoritarianism.
That the mainstream media has a white supremacist agenda and provides national and local affiliate stations with acceptable talking points is a widely known ‘secret,’ and this very gesture helps to illustrate exactly this point. While the rest of the world openly acknowledged that Musk was performing a Sieg Heil salute, with Germany’s Deutsches Museum of Science and Technology going so far as to remove a portrait of him from their astronautics gallery, US news has generally ‘both sides’ed that moment. While some may argue that it is just balanced journalism, I would like to draw attention to an article from Fox 5 DC written by Jillian Smith on January 21st, in which the author directly quotes from Winkler’s previously mentioned academic work. She states that “the saluto Romano was previously used as a sign of respect in ancient Roman culture.”
The whole thesis of Winkler’s work The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology is that the claim that the Nazi salute is Roman is false. Smith quotes “This salute was based on an ancient Roman custom, just as the term Fascism itself is associated with the Roman fasces – the bundle of rods with an axe in their middle that were a symbol of the power of office held by higher Roman magistracies and some priests.” However, the sentence she quotes starts with the phrase “According to the Fascist ideology of the 1920s and in common perceptions still current…” and the sentence is followed by the statement, “As will be seen, however, the term “Roman salute” is a misnomer.” That she saw the text of his work and omitted these phrases suggests a conscious downplaying of the gesture and an attempt to obfuscate the ties to Nazism by associating it with Rome, an imperial power used historically and today by colonizing countries and enterprises to legitimize the atrocities capitalist white supremacy needs to enact to succeed. The links between the discipline of Classics and white supremacy are many and constitute a much larger discussion. Still, as a good rule of thumb, wherever you see references to ancient Greece and Rome in so-called Western culture, it is always good to ask yourself why they are being used, whom the references benefit, and whom they exclude.
Dr. Ian Lockey is a teacher at Friends Select School in Philadelphia
