What Can the Iliad Tell us About Artificial Intelligence?

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

Last year I did a few posts about artificial intelligence and Homeric epic, highlighting some recent research and then sharing the results of a workshop I organized. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what Homeric epic might have to say about it on a cultural or metaphorical level. Turns out, Homer applies to everything.

When Thetis knocks on Hephaestus’ door, the narrator invites us to look inside his workshop and gives the audience a fantastic surprise:

Homer, Iliad 18.417-21

“He took the wide scepter and went limping to the door.
The handmaidens when supporting their lord,
Golden ones who look like living young women.
In each of them was a mind among thoughts, and each had
A voice and strength—indeed, they know the works from immortal gods
They were all busy around their master. But he was limping.”

… ἕλε δὲ σκῆπτρον παχύ, βῆ δὲ θύραζε
χωλεύων· ὑπὸ δ’ ἀμφίπολοι ῥώοντο ἄνακτι
χρύσειαι ζωῇσι νεήνισιν εἰοικυῖαι.
τῇς ἐν μὲν νόος ἐστὶ μετὰ φρεσίν, ἐν δὲ καὶ αὐδὴ
καὶ σθένος, ἀθανάτων δὲ θεῶν ἄπο ἔργα ἴσασιν.
αἳ μὲν ὕπαιθα ἄνακτος ἐποίπνυον· αὐτὰρ ὃ ἔρρων

It is becoming something of a trend to mention Hephaestus’ statues in the Iliad as one of the first instances of artificial intelligence. Why this is attractive is certainly understandable from this passage. The golden statues of women are certainly artificial (they are made by Hephaestus) and the narrator here takes pains to emphasize that they are intelligent: they have noos in their thoughts–which probably means that they have understanding of their perceptions and reactions–and they know how to do and make thanks to the gods themselves.

But how does this passage relate to other inanimate and made things in the Homeric tradition? I suspect that the answer to this and the information in this passage can help to outline some of the assumptions that go into our own approach to artificial intelligence.

Homer, Iliad 18.478-473

“So he spoke and he left her there and went to his forges.
He turned those towards the fire and ordered them to start working
All twenty of them began to blow into the melting bins,
Releasing every kind of well-directed breath,
They were by his side when he was rushing here, and at another time over there,
Wherever Hephaestus desired and was completing his work.”

῝Ως εἰπὼν τὴν μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ, βῆ δ’ ἐπὶ φύσας·
τὰς δ’ ἐς πῦρ ἔτρεψε κέλευσέ τε ἐργάζεσθαι.
φῦσαι δ’ ἐν χοάνοισιν ἐείκοσι πᾶσαι ἐφύσων
παντοίην εὔπρηστον ἀϋτμὴν ἐξανιεῖσαι,
ἄλλοτε μὲν σπεύδοντι παρέμμεναι, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε,
ὅππως ῞Ηφαιστός τ’ ἐθέλοι καὶ ἔργον ἄνοιτο.

In general, I think that Hephaestus’ workshop says more about the depiction of Hephaestus and the tension between able-bodied gods and the one disabled divinity more than anything else. The golden statues support him physically and their actions are described in close proximity to Hephaestus’ stilted movement. They are both a physical prosthesis for him and an extension of his own mental activity. Amy Lather has written well in describing the automata in his shop as an extension of his will. Note how their movement is related both to his physical limitations and his craft.

I have written before about how Greek epic presents bodies and have used insights from disability studies to help explain tensions between fitness of body and fitness of mind. There is a lengthy bibliography already about Hephaestus’ body, the tension between intelligence and force, and the exploration of action and outcomes through heroes of the body and the mind. Hephaestus supports and confirms a system that endows disabled bodies with compensatory gifts. He does not appear with these assistants in Greek art, but he is typically depicted as seated, with a staff, or riding on a mule when the other gods walk. I think that understanding automata in Homer as prostheses, especially in conjunction with Hephaestus, is really useful. But I don’t think it tells the entire story.

Let’s start with other automata. Hephaestus may be the only Greek divinity who engages in conventional physical labor without it being a punishment (leaving aside pastoral activities). But how he does that labor matters. The cloud garages of the gods described in the Iliad or the metal dogs created by Hephaestus for Alkinoos in the Odyssey (7.91-94). The former are like the labor assistance in Hephaestus’ forge. Divine automata function to support the lives of ease that Homer creates for the gods. Actual labor is for the most part reserved for humans. “Artificial Intelligence” serves to support a distinctly Olympian lifestyle. Alkinoos’ dogs are a kind of cybersecurity, a watchful unwavering fantasy of safety that cannot be suborned.

But this line of thinking takes me back to the golden girls described above. The dogs and tripods aren’t said to have intelligence or voice. The artificial object that is shaped like a human girl gets voice and intelligence unlike the dogs and tripods. Is it significant that the statues crafted to assist Hephaestus and endowed with thought are coded as women? Can we make a connection between that shaping and the female voice given to most AI speakers or the woman-coded bodies that are typical of our ‘androids’? The gendered nature of the fabricated laborers is part of a cultural system of subordinated and exploited labor. Outside of this forge, blacksmiths and their helpers are generally male in Greek myth. The gender choice here is marked and meaningful.

In addition, consider the nature of the intelligence. The tripods are part of what Lather calls Hephaestus’ “extended mind”. The golden girls have a mind and thoughts in them, but I wonder if we consider these qualities as necessarily connected to the works they know/have learned from the gods. These golden statuettes have only service and replicative knowledge. They are not generating knowledge or tasks, but ‘think’ and operate only in reference to their creators and their functions. Truly intelligent artificial life would have aesthetics, intentions, and knowledge of their own.

One of the things that concerns me about AI in the modern era is the lack of imagination that attends its use. First, we don’t actually have artificial intelligence; we have predictive models that anticipate the kinds of things human users expect as outputs (like the tripods and the golden girls). But, second, our AI is being used in the service of creating a life of ease for some by appropriating the products and labors of others. Generative AI in being “trained” on our writing and art and then sold back to us as services will eventually generate a massive transfer of wealth back to those who had the political and financial means to create it and ‘own’ it.

Apart from the prosthetic and aesthetic value of thinking about Hephaestus’ androids, then, there is political insight as well. Homer’s artificial intelligences function to support those whose lives are already easy and they rely and perpetuate cultural patterns of labor exploitation based on physical attributes. Homer’s robots–like generative AI–don’t create anything new but, when pressed, can tell us a lot about what already is. Our adoption of technology from the industrial age through to the information age and the artificial intelligence age is following similar patterns. Rather than being applied for the good of all humankind, AI is using public resources (energy, water) and the collected production of human minds (language, literature, and art) to benefit a small number of people.

Short bibliography on Hephaestus’ automata

Faraone, Christopher A.. “Hephaestus the magician and near Eastern parallels for Alcinous’ watchdogs.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. XXVIII, 1987, pp. 257-280.

Gerolemou, Maria. Technical automation in classical antiquity. Bloomsbury Classical Studies Monographs. London ; New York: Bloomsbury, 2023..

Lather, Amy. “ The extended mind of Hephaestus: automata and artificial intelligence in early Greek hexameter.” The Routledge handbook of classics and cognitive theory. Eds. Meineck, Peter, Short, William Michael and Devereaux, Jennifer. Routledge Handbooks. London ; New York: Routledge, 2019. 331-344.

Mayer, Adrienne. 2019. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton.

A short bibliography on Disability Studies and Homer

Brockliss, W. 2019. “Out of the Mix: (Dis)ability, Intimacy, and the Homeric Poems.” Classical World 113: 1–27.

Burkert, W. 1997. “The song of Ares and Aphrodite: on the relationship between the Odyssey and the Iliad,” in G.M. Wright and P.V. Jones, eds. and trans., Homer: German Scholarship in Translation. Oxford: 249–262.

Caldwell, R. S. 1978. “Hephaestus: A Psychological Study.” Helios 6: 43–59.

Christensen, Joel. “Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: some applications of disability studies to Homer.” Classical World, vol. 114, no. 4, 2020-2021, pp. 365-393. Doi: 10.1353/clw.2021.0020

Davis, L. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York.

Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.-P. 1978. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago.

Dolmage, J. 2006. “‘Breathe upon Us an Even Flame’: Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 25 119–140.

Dunkle, J. R. 1987; “Nestor, Odysseus and the Mêtis-Biê Antithesis: The Funeral Games, Iliad 23.” The Classical World 81: 1–17.

Garland, R. 1995. The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Greco-Roman World. Ithaca.

Grmek, M. D. 1991. Diseases in the Ancient Greek World. Baltimore.

Johnson, R. L. 2011. “Introduction: Health and Disability.” Health and History 13: 2–3.

Kelley, N. 2007. “Deformity and Disability in Greece and Rome,” in H. Avalos, S. J. Melcher, and J. Schipper, eds., This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, Atlanta: 31–46.

Laes, C., C. Goodey, and M. L. Rose. 2016. Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem. Leiden.

Laes, C. 2011. “How does one do the History of Disability in Antiquity?” One thousand years of case studies. Medicina nei secoli , N. S., 23(3), 915–946.

Linton, S. 1998. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York.

Lowry, E. R. 1991 Thersites: A Study in Comic Shame.

Marks, Jim. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus.” AJP 126:1–31.

Mitchell, D. T. and S. L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependency of Discourse. Ann Arbor.

Noel, Anne-Sophie. “« Prosthetic imagination » in Greek literature.” Prostheses in antiquity. Ed. Draycott, Jane. Medicine and the Body in Antiquity. London ; New York: Routledge, 2019. 159-179.

Penrose, Walter D. 2015. “The Discourse of Disability in Ancient Greece.” The Classical World, 108: 499–523.

Porter, J. L. ed. 1999. Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor.

Postlethwaite, N. “Thersites in the Iliad.” Greece & Rome 35: 83-95.

Rankin, H. D. 1972. “Thersites the Malcontent: A Discussion,” Symbolae Osloenses 47: 36–70.

Rose, M L. 2003. The Staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece. Ann Arbor.

Stiker, H.-J. 1999. A History of Disability. Trans. by W. Sayers. Ann Arbor (=Corps infirmes et sociétés. Paris, 1997).

Thalmann, W. G. 1988. “Thersites: comedy, scapegoats and heroic ideology in the Iliad.” TAPA 118:1-28.

Thomson, R. G.. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York.

Vernant. J.-P. 1982, “From Oidipous to Periander: Lameness, Tyranny, Incest, in Legend and History”, Arethusa 15, 1992, 19-37.

Wills, D. 1995. Prosthesis. Stanford.

Sociolinguistics and Homer

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

At the beginning of Iliad 14, Agamemnon appears in a panic. All of the leading captains are injured; Hektor has led the Trojans among the Achaean ships on the shore; and there seems to be little hope of reversing the trend. He calls to a small group of leaders and suggests that they row a ship out into the bay and await nightfall to avoid further harm. Then, they might return and lead the rest of the ships home. Agamemnon asserts with a proverbial air that “there’s no shame in fleeing evil, not even during the night” (οὐ γάρ τις νέμεσις φυγέειν κακόν, οὐδ’ ἀνὰ νύκτα, 80).

Odysseus responds with incredulity, questioning Agamemnon’s sense before telling him, essentially, to shut up:

Iliad 14.90‑94

“Quiet, lest any other of the Achaeans hear this
Speech, the kind no man would allow out of his mouth at all,
If he’s the sort who knows how to utter apt words in his thoughts,
And is a scepter-bearer, and who an army obeys,
One the size of the one you lead among the Argives.”

σίγα, μή τίς τ’ ἄλλος ᾿Αχαιῶν τοῦτον ἀκούσῃ
μῦθον, ὃν οὔ κεν ἀνήρ γε διὰ στόμα πάμπαν ἄγοιτο
ὅς τις ἐπίσταιτο ᾗσι φρεσὶν ἄρτια βάζειν
σκηπτοῦχός τ’ εἴη, καί οἱ πειθοίατο λαοὶ
τοσσοῖδ’ ὅσσοισιν σὺ μετ’ ᾿Αργείοισιν ἀνάσσεις·

The first verb here–σίγα—is an abrupt, even rude way to address the commander in chief. Without a companion imperative such as ἄγε (often combined with imperatives) or a vocative with an honorific, Odysseus expresses his frustration with the leader with a ‘bare’ imperative, both treating him the way one who can’t lead might deserve and shocking him into reconsideration.

This interpretation—that Odysseus is rude to Agamemnon—is not based in the diction (which is not essentially colloquial or harsh) but on a pattern of linguistic behavior rooted in social relationships. Such a pattern is difficult for modern readers to sense without wide reading in Homeric language. But the challenge is that our intuition of social contexts for language may be rooted in our own cultural contexts. A detail or phrase that might seem inappropriate in translation may have a perfectly reasonable (and different) valence in the context.

Sociolinguistics is a multidisciplinary field that examines how social frameworks shape language use (and, sometimes, vice versa). Frameworks within sociolinguistics help us to approach variations in language use even in ancient texts when we do not have recourse to speech communities and competent audiences.

I first started thinking about questions like this while working on my dissertation. I was primarily interested in rhetorical structures and assumptions for Homeric speeches. I spent a few months diagramming every speech in the Iliad and tracking for differences in characterization among the heroes, major devices used by Homeric speakers (e.g. similes, direct-speech, examples from myth), and noticed that there were significant variations based on speech context.

The most marked difference comes in the public speeches of the assembly (ekklêsia) vs. the more private exchanges of the small advisory council (boulê) where the ‘best of the Achaeans’ gather to strategize. Assembly speeches tend to be more structurally complex, vivid, and replete with wide array of rhetorical devices while the council speeches are shorter, more direct, and generally free of what we might consider oratorical ornament. Admittedly, this does not seem to be all that surprising, but as far as I could tell at the time, no one had made that observation before.

Language use is conditioned by speaker-experience and from social structures that govern the application of various rules (politeness/rudeness/deference) and can involve different ‘registers’ or ‘codes’ based on the identities of the speakers. Contextual differences between assembly speeches and council speeches imply that they serve distinct purposes: the rhetoric of the assembly aims for creating group unity or and adjudicating conflict, while also being a venue designed for persuasion. In contrast, the council functions to offer and vet plans. Difference in language use communicates social assumptions about what words can/should do in each circumstance

One of the first articles I read that helped me think in this way was H. Paul Brown’s “Addressing Agamemnon: A Pilot Study of Politeness and Pragmatics in the Iliad (2006). This article looks especially at vocative use and applies frameworks from politeness theory and pragmatics and argues that “the distribution of these forms [vocatives and patronymics] is constrained by the relative social standing of the speaker and the addressee.” The article is important both for the individual arguments it makes and the demonstration that an amalgam dialect like that of Homeric epic still conveys sociolinguistic difference. That is, despite the formulaic nature of Homeric composition, forms of address and imperatives are selected for sociolinguistic reasons within the conventional rhythmic form.

Michael Lloyd’s article about “off the record conversation strategies” (2004) is another one that uses linguistic concepts like conversational implicature to help recuperate implied meanings in the conversation between Achilles and Priam at the end of book 24. (See his more recent piece from 2021 for more on politeness). Subsequent studies like Kirstein 2002, Lentini 2018 have looked at a range of politeness and rudeness, overlapping at time with affect theory. Sometimes studies like this engage as well with etymology and close semantic reading. Jakob Stensgard uses these techniques when he argues that Homeric peithomai should mean assent/consent to rather than “obey” for sociolinguistic reasons (2003).

Elizabeth Minchin has been one of the most important scholars to work on sociolinguistics in Homer. Her book Homeric Voices makes some important advances in distinguishing speaking habits based on gender in Homer (among other conventions). I build on this a little in my article on “Performative Futures”, suggesting that women use a more ‘polite’ or less ‘real’ preface to introduce their own speech acts in Homer. Minchin has written a few recent pieces on sarcasm in Homer. Her piece on sarcasm and the Odyssey—which got me thinking about sociolinguistics for this post—is characteristic of her work: she surveys modern studies on sarcasm, applies the frameworks transparently to Homer, and then offers a few key interpretations to show the value of the work. In particular, she shows how sarcastic language use by the suitors, especially in dealing with beggars and people of lower classes, helps to characterize heroes (and not to the suitors’ benefit).

This approach applies the best of modern and ancient practice. For the former, it means learning from other fields, cultures, and languages, to help us escape the limits of our own linguistic and cultural rootedness, to reimagine what language can or may do. For the latter, it is essentially a reformulation of the Aristarchean principle that “one must clarify Homer through Homer”. This means that the forms, uses, and general rules of Homeric language are best judged by the patterns evident in the epics themselves. While culturally competent speakers of Homeric Greek are not available to us, we can recuperate some understanding ourselves by listening to Homer carefully. And repeatedly.

Short Bibliography

Brown, H. Paul. “Addressing Agamemnon: a pilot study of politeness and pragmatics in the « Iliad ».” TAPA, vol. 136, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-46.

Christensen, Joel P.. “First-person futures in Homer.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 131, no. 4, 2010, pp. 543-571.

Conti, Luz. “Sobre el valor pseudo inclusive de la primera persona del plural en la « Ilíada ».” Glotta, vol. 99, 2023, pp. 2-20. Doi: 10.13109/glot.2023.99.1.2

Kirstein, Robert. “Emotions and politeness in Homer’s « Odyssey ».” Emotions and narrative in ancient literature and beyond: studies in honour of Irene de Jong. Eds. De Bakker, Mathieu, Van den Berg, Baukje and Klooster, Jacqueline. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 451. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2022. 119-134. Doi: 10.1163/9789004506053_009

Lentini, Giuseppe. “(Im)politeness in the « Iliad » : the pragmatics of the Homeric expression ἀγαθός περ ἐών.” Trends in Classics, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 255-274. Doi: 10.1515/tc-2018-0020

Lloyd, Michael. “The Politeness of Achilles: off-record conversation strategies in Homer and the meaning of kertomia.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 124, 2004, pp. 75-89. Doi: 10.2307/3246151

Lloyd, Michael (Michael A.). “Positive Politeness and Mock Politeness in Homer”. Scienze dell’Antichità 27, no. 3 (2021)

Martos Fornieles, Marina. “Análisis del diálogo de Odiseo y Nausícaa (Od. 6.148-197) desde la perspectiva de la cortesía verbal.” Veleia, vol. 39, 2022, pp. 129-141. Doi: 10.1387/veleia.22760

Minchin, Elizabeth. “From gentle teasing to heavy sarcasm:

instances of rhetorical irony in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Hermes, vol. 138, no. 4, 2010, pp. 387-402.

Minchin, Elizabeth. “The expression of sarcasm in the « Odyssey ».” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 63, no. 4, 2010, pp. 533-556. Doi: 10.1163/156852510X456192

Minchin, Elizabeth. Homeric voices: discourse, memory, gender. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2007.

Stensgaard, Jakob. 2003. “Peitho in the Iliad: A Matter of Trust or Obedience?” Classicalia et Medievalia 54: 41–80.

Part 3: Rehumanized

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

I missed a week of posting, thanks to a whirlwind of work and a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to present a talk at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. To make up for the skipped week, I will present the talk here in three parts. . The First part, on Violence and Lament, is here. For the second part, A Theoretical Interlude, go here.

Priam and Achilles

In book 24, Priam’s journey to Achilles invokes a liminal space between life and death. This space is also one where the regular boundaries between nations and peoples may not apply—a zone potentially open to different ways of engaging and viewing the world. How this scene achieves its impact informs how epic works in general and can answer why Aristotle thinks the Iliad is the most tragic of epics, not in form but in function and effect. So far, I have talked about the family-rending violence anticipated in book 6, the way laments in book 19 invite us to see witnesses to suffering understanding it by making comparison to their own lives. I have offered a simple framework of blending to explain how the structure of archaic poetry supports this. I want to turn now to the epic’s end, to think about concepts from tragedy like recognition and identification, and why the Iliad emphasizes the difficulty of Achilles’ final scene.

Homer, Iliad 24.477-512

Great Priam escaped the notice of [Achilles’ companions] when he entered the room
And he stood right next to him, clasping his knees and kissing his hands
Those terrible [deinas] murderous hands that had killed so many of his sons.
As when bitter ruin overcomes someone who killed a man
In his own country and goes to the land of others
To some rich man, and wonder [thambos] over takes those who see him.
So too did Achilles feel wonder [thambêsen] when he saw godlike Priam.
The rest of the people there were shocked [thambêsan] and they all looked at one another
Then Priam was begging as he addressed him.
“Divine Achilles, remember [mnêsai] your father—
The same age as I am, on the deadly threshold of old age.
The people who live around him are wearing him out,
I imagine, and there is no one there to ward off conflict and disaster.
But when that man hears that you are alive still,
He rejoices in his heart because he will keep hoping all his days
That he will see his dear son again when he comes home from Troy.
But I am completely ruined. I had many of the best sons
In broad Troy, but I think that none of them are left.
I had fifty sons when the sons of the Achaeans arrived here.
Nineteen of them were mine from the same mother,
And other women bore the rest to me in my home.
Rushing Ares loosened the limbs of many of them,
But the one who was left alone for me, who defended the city and its people
You killed as he warded danger from his fatherland,
Hektor, for whom I have home now to the Achaeans’ ships
To ransom him from you. And I am bringing endless exchange gifts.
But feel fame before the gods, Achilles, and pity [eleêson] him
Once you have remembered [mnsêsamenos] your father. I am more pitiful [eleeinoteros] still,
I who suffer what no other mortal on this earth has ever suffered,
putting the hand of the man who murdered my son to my mouth.’
So Priam spoke and a desire for mourning his father rose within him.
He took his hand and pushed the old man gently away.
The two of them remembered [tô mnêsamenô]: one wept steadily
For man-slaying Hektor, as he bent before Achilles’ feet,
But Achilles’ was mourning his own father, and then in turn
Patroklos again—and their weeping rose throughout the home.”

τοὺς δ’ ἔλαθ’ εἰσελθὼν Πρίαμος μέγας, ἄγχι δ’ ἄρα στὰς
χερσὶν ᾿Αχιλλῆος λάβε γούνατα καὶ κύσε χεῖρας
δεινὰς ἀνδροφόνους, αἵ οἱ πολέας κτάνον υἷας.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἄνδρ’ ἄτη πυκινὴ λάβῃ, ὅς τ’ ἐνὶ πάτρῃ
φῶτα κατακτείνας ἄλλων ἐξίκετο δῆμον
ἀνδρὸς ἐς ἀφνειοῦ, θάμβος δ’ ἔχει εἰσορόωντας,
ὣς ᾿Αχιλεὺς θάμβησεν ἰδὼν Πρίαμον θεοειδέα·
θάμβησαν δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι, ἐς ἀλλήλους δὲ ἴδοντο.
τὸν καὶ λισσόμενος Πρίαμος πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπε·
μνῆσαι πατρὸς σοῖο θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ’ ᾿Αχιλλεῦ,
τηλίκου ὥς περ ἐγών, ὀλοῷ ἐπὶ γήραος οὐδῷ·
καὶ μέν που κεῖνον περιναιέται ἀμφὶς ἐόντες
τείρουσ’, οὐδέ τίς ἐστιν ἀρὴν καὶ λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι.
ἀλλ’ ἤτοι κεῖνός γε σέθεν ζώοντος ἀκούων
χαίρει τ’ ἐν θυμῷ, ἐπί τ’ ἔλπεται ἤματα πάντα
ὄψεσθαι φίλον υἱὸν ἀπὸ Τροίηθεν ἰόντα·
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ πανάποτμος, ἐπεὶ τέκον υἷας ἀρίστους
Τροίῃ ἐν εὐρείῃ, τῶν δ’ οὔ τινά φημι λελεῖφθαι.
πεντήκοντά μοι ἦσαν ὅτ’ ἤλυθον υἷες ᾿Αχαιῶν·
ἐννεακαίδεκα μέν μοι ἰῆς ἐκ νηδύος ἦσαν,
τοὺς δ’ ἄλλους μοι ἔτικτον ἐνὶ μεγάροισι γυναῖκες.
τῶν μὲν πολλῶν θοῦρος ῎Αρης ὑπὸ γούνατ’ ἔλυσεν·
ὃς δέ μοι οἶος ἔην, εἴρυτο δὲ ἄστυ καὶ αὐτούς,
τὸν σὺ πρῴην κτεῖνας ἀμυνόμενον περὶ πάτρης
῞Εκτορα· τοῦ νῦν εἵνεχ’ ἱκάνω νῆας ᾿Αχαιῶν
λυσόμενος παρὰ σεῖο, φέρω δ’ ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα.
ἀλλ’ αἰδεῖο θεοὺς ᾿Αχιλεῦ, αὐτόν τ’ ἐλέησον
μνησάμενος σοῦ πατρός· ἐγὼ δ’ ἐλεεινότερός περ,
ἔτλην δ’ οἷ’ οὔ πώ τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἄλλος,
ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι.
῝Ως φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα πατρὸς ὑφ’ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο·
ἁψάμενος δ’ ἄρα χειρὸς ἀπώσατο ἦκα γέροντα.
τὼ δὲ μνησαμένω ὃ μὲν ῞Εκτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο
κλαῖ’ ἁδινὰ προπάροιθε ποδῶν ᾿Αχιλῆος ἐλυσθείς,
αὐτὰρ ᾿Αχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ’, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε
Πάτροκλον· τῶν δὲ στοναχὴ κατὰ δώματ’ ὀρώρει.

The language of the encounter between Achilles and Priam resonates with the framing I emphasized from the laments in book 19. Many of the words also signal poetic creation/memory (words of remembering) in setting up a parallel (Priam relating his loss to Achilles’ father’s potential loss; both heroes seeing their own pain in another). Note as well the affective emphasis in the passage and the set-up, in particular on feelings of “pity” and “wonder” or ‘fear”. Wonder/surprise is operative in characterizing Achilles’ response and his ability to feel pity, which in this context seems to correlate to what happens in the narrative, which is that Priam and Achilles together engage in an act of remembering that stems from a shared performance (Priam’s speech) but extends to their individual experiences and a very real difference in the way they internally narrativize their brief common ground.

There is a repeated emphasis on pity. Prior to the supplication, Hermes provides Priam with very specific instructions (Iliad 24.354-357) And this follows an invocation Zeus sending Hermes to Priam because he pitied him (“When [Zeus] saw the old man, he pitied him and / Quickly addressed his own son Hermes…”, ἐς πεδίον προφανέντε· ἰδὼν δ’ ἐλέησε γέροντα, / αἶψα δ’ ἄρ’ ῾Ερμείαν υἱὸν φίλον ἀντίον ηὔδα, 24.354-57). Recall how the women who grieve for Patroklos turn from him to their own pains (῝Ως ἔφατο κλαίουσ’, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες / Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ’ αὐτῶν κήδε’ ἑκάστη, 19.302-303), then Achilles himself moves from topic to topic, comparing his loss in one instance to other possible losses, finally inspiring the other old men to mourn along with him, using his pain as kindling for their own fires of memory and loss.

That earlier passage helps us see as well how Achilles’ grief is metonymic for his own loss and others as well. Achilles’ grief presents a narrative others see themselves in, they project their experiences into his pain and grieve alongside him. Lament becomes a way of recuperating community through not just despite loss. The exchange between Priam and Achilles is the culmination of this narrative arc and it has individual ramifications as well as potential information for how we should understand the epic genre. Central to this movement is the sustained importance of pity. Scholars have taken different approaches to this. Dean Hammer (2002) has emphasized how Achilles’ view of his relation to other dominates his “ethical stance”, arguing for a transformation that allows him to feel pity for Priam because his experiences within the epic have changed how he views suffering. Graham Zanker makes a similar argument in The Heart of Achilles where he suggests that it is important that Achilles came to this change on his own, that the gods did not support him: His present behavior is therefore a pole apart from his cruel rejection of the supplications of men like Tros, Lykaon, and Hektor. Homeric theology allows Achilles’ present generosity, or rather magnanimity, to be based on his own volition” (Zanker 1996, 120). Jinyo Kim’s full study The Pity of Achilles traces the language of pity throughout the Iliad to demonstrate that this theme supports the epic’s unity. For Kim, “Achilles’ pity for Priam constitutes no incidental detail, but is instead the thematic catalyst of the reconciliation’ (2000, 12).

I agree with all of this. But I think there’s more to be found in the model of experiencing others’ grief as your own and its connection to how the epic conceives of our reaction to stories. I earlier used the word ‘dramatize’ and not accidentally: there’s something of tragic performance to this function. Marjolein Oele (2011) has suggested that when Priam and Achilles cry together they come to identify with each other in a way that anticipates Aristotle’s comments throughout his work—their unique moment isn’t merely pity, but instead it is a shared experience of suffering and wonder that helps them accomplish what Aristotle would call recognition. Here I want to pause to make a semantic and clinical distinction: any emotion or expression there of is rooted in social contexts.

Pity in English too often has a pejorative valence–it conveys a power structure as well as a sense of superiority, even contempt. But I think the pity signaled here in the Iliad is one of sympathetic remorse, rooted in the very nature of recognition and identification. While most scholars see some relationship between the dramatic personae of epic and tragic performances (see especially Irene J. F. De Jong’s 2016 essay, Stroud and Robertson’s essay, or Emily Allen-Hornblower’s 2015 book), I think there has been less focus on the affective impact modeled within epic poetry. Epic’s gradual but persistent emphasis on generative and combinatory acts of memory as loci for exploring one’s own experiences in a shared common frame reminds me as well of Aristotle’s famous focus on “pity and fear”. Consider again the emotions evoked during book 24: wonder, pity, fear.

Aristotle, Poetics 1449b21-27

“We’ll talk later about mimesis in hexameter poetry and comedy. For now, let’s chat about tragedy, starting by considering the definition of its character based on what we have already said. So, tragedy is the imitation (mimesis) of a serious event that also has completion and scale, presented in language well-crafted for the genre of each section, performing the story rather than telling it, and offering cleansing (catharsis) of pity and fear through the exploration of these kinds of emotions.”

Περὶ μὲν οὖν τῆς ἐν ἑξαμέτροις μιμητικῆς καὶ περὶ κωμῳδίας ὕστερον ἐροῦμεν· περὶ δὲ τραγῳδίας λέγωμεν ἀναλαβόντες αὐτῆς ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων τὸν γινόμενον ὅρον τῆς οὐσίας. ἔστιν οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾿ ἀπαγγελίας, δι᾿ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.

There are several other passages throughout his work where Aristotle adds to his conceptualization to include reversal (peripateia) and recognition (anagnorisis), but in the steady focus on memory/narrative (mimesis and memory), as well as the experience of pity and fear/wonder I have highlighted in book 24, I see a much stronger tragic/dramatic potential within Homer. And this is supported in part by one of the few scenes we have from the 4^th century that describes the work of a rhapsode, a performer of Homeric poetry. In his dialogue, the Ion, Plato has his rhapsode describe what he feels and sees when performing Homer

Plato, Ion 535d-e

Ion: Now this proof is super clear to me, Socrates! I’ll tell you without hiding anything: whenever I say something pitiable [ἐλεεινόν τι], my eyes fill with tears. Whenever I say something frightening [φοβερὸν ἢ δεινόν], my hair stands straight up in fear and my heart leaps!

Socrates: What is this then, Ion? Should we say that a person is in their right mind when they are all dressed up in decorated finery and gold crowns at the sacrifices or the banquets and then, even though they haven’t lost anything, they are afraid still even though they stand among twenty thousand friendly people and there is no one attacking him or doing him wrong?

Ion: Well, by Zeus, not at all, Socrates, TBH.

Socrates: So, you understand that you rhapsodes produce the same effects on most of your audiences?

Ion: Oh, yes I do! For I look down on them from the stage at each moment to see them crying and making terrible expressions [δεινὸν], awestruck [συνθαμβοῦντας] by what is said. I need to pay special attention to them since if I make them cry, then I get to laugh when I receive their money. But if I make them laugh, then I’ll cry over the money I’ve lost!”

Note how Ion uses language we see in the Iliad itself and the passage where Priam and Achilles meet. Where the internal evidence of epic shows its own audiences (the women, the old men, and Zeus) internalizing and responding to the narrative, Plato’s Ion features a performer expecting the same kinds of reactions from his audience (even if for less than noble reasons). When it comes to pity in particular, Emily Allen-Hornblower suggests that “The emotional charge that comes with the act of watching a loved one suffer (or die) is directly apparent in the phraseology of the Iliad…” (2015, 26) and later that Achilles’ position as a spectator during most of the epic is an important part of his development. This provides, to me, another signal of what epic audiences were expected to be doing: watching, listening, feeling, and changing in turn. Yet, there is a tension between epic as something to passively feel about and epic as a call to action. Another way to parse pity is the difference between empathy and sympathy, or, as some bioethicists have posed it, pity that enables action or pity that limits it. Empathy is feeling something like what someone else does; sympathy is sometimes described as a third person perspective, one that motivates actions based on concerns for another’s suffering. A larger question, but is the impact of mimetic art primarily aesthetic and personal, or is it ethical and communal?

I think the Iliad expects people to respond to suffering with pity that reminds them of their own suffering–empathy; second, I think the epic models this process as something that is potentially humanizing, creating a community of care where others’ experiences matter, sympathy, even if it is not necessarily so; third, I think the dramatic scope within the epic combined by some evidence for similar expectations outside the epic helps to support both a dynamic model of reading for Homer itself and also a shared performative ground for epic and ancient tragedy, helping to provide a different reason for why the Iliad is the most tragic of ancient epics.

Becoming Human

The Iliad is in part the story of ‘civilizing’ conventions of wars dismissed. What we learn from the beginning is that political institutions are not strong enough to enforce the maintenance of normative behaviors. The personal decisions of individuals–Paris before the war, Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad–run roughshod across principles of ransom in exchange for life that the assembled Greeks cheer for in book 1. Empathy seems here to fail; only to be reasserted after suffering. In a way, this is a restatement of Aristotle’s notion of the benefit of experiencing pity and fear: recognition and identification make it possible for us to see the self in the other. Perhaps, then, we could reposition catharsis as a communal recuperation of empathy.

But then, what can we say of the effect of art aimed to humanize? The very audiences who enjoyed the Iliad engaged in monumental violence like that in the reduction of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. The story of excessive violence in the Iliad is that of the rejection of conventions meant to make war in some way predictable and ‘acceptable’ to the combatants. The planned sexual violence of the Achaeans, the rejection of ransom-exchange, and the promotion of infanticide all come within the frame of the breakdown of political control over individual behavior. ‘Rage’ is the break from limitations enforced by social conventions; it unleashes the true hell of war and unveils the brutal, dehumanizing violence pulsating beneath the service of ‘civilization’. War reduces people to casualty numbers. But dehumanization comes before it: the refusal of reciprocal relationships, the call to eradicate a people, Achilles’ transformation into animal violence, met by the oppressed Hecuba’s wish to eat his liver raw.

Even the epic’s conclusion is compromised: the cessation of Achilles’ rage only comes through monstrous behavior (corpse-disfigurement and human sacrifice) and occurs at the personal level between a bereft father and a surrogate son whose potential for violence has ebbed through exhaustion and divine intervention. It thematically seals the epic’s arc: book 1 saw the breakdown in social convention thanks to the whims of an angry king; book 24 sees the conventions briefly reinforced, thanks to the needs of two kings in despair. Yet their attitude is not one of rejection violence or rehabilitation, but resignation to the continuing war that will take both of their lives.

In his work on human evolution and development, Michael Tomasello has foregrounded a definition of humanity in our communication and collaboration, our “shared mentality” rooted in imitative behavior and social learning alongside the development of what he calls a moral identity. In her recent work, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson shows that this is promise is not universally applied–the very practices of the west that create common culture can also define people out of humanity, by reducing them to objects, by racializing, genderizing, or otherwise categorizing other beings as outside the purview of the moral identity that defines us.

This too is a part of the Iliad’s story and its dramatic impact. The culture, practices, and relationships that define the Achaeans from the epic’s beginning also make it possible for one exceptional figure to instrumentalize, objectify, and reduce others. The poem’s thematic lesson is that once loose in the world, such a reduction in status knows no end: Achilles does not mean for Patroklos to die, but it is a direct result of his own excess and reduction of others to satisfy his story of loss. The poem’s mimetic lesson shows how it takes repeated suffering to comprehend a human world beyond oneself. The premise, I suggest, is that humanization is a process that must always be ongoing. Poetry, performance and art–the humanities–offer this promise, but require patience, observation, identification and community and for its fulfillment.

Selected Bibliography

Allen-Hornblower, Emily. 2015. From agent to spectator : witnessing the aftermath in ancient Greek epic and tragedy, De Gruyter, 2015.

Anderson, Michael J. 1997 The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art Oxford.

Anderson, Warren D. 1956 “Achilles and the Dark Night of the Soul.” The Classical Journal 51, no. 6: 265–68.

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

Burgess, Jonathan. 1997. “Beyond Neo-Analysis: Problems with the Vengeance Theory.” The American Journal of Philology 118, no. 1: 1–19.

Christensen, Joel P. 2025. Storylife, On Epic, Language, and Living things. Yale.

Christensen, Joel P. 2020. The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic. Cornell.

Cook, Erwin. 2014. “Structure as Interpretation in the Homeric Odyssey.” In Defining Greek Narrative, edited by Douglas Cairns and Ruth Scodel, 75–102. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

De Jong, Irene. J. F. 2016. ‘Homer : the first tragedian’, Greece and Rome, Ser. 2, 63.2:149-162.

Douglas, Mary. 2007. Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dué, Casey. Homeric variations on a lament by Briseis. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

Ebbinghaus, Susanne. 2005. “Protector of the City, or the Art of Storage in Early Greece.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 125: 51–72.

Ervin, M. 1963. “A relief pithos from Mykonos”, Archaiologikon Deltion 18 (1963), pp. 37-75.

Gaca, Kathy L. 2014. “MARTIAL RAPE, PULSATING FEAR, AND THE SEXUAL MALTREATMENT OF GIRLS (Παῖδες), VIRGINS (Παρθένοι), AND WOMEN (Γνναῖκες) IN ANTIQUITY.” The American Journal of Philology 135, no. 3 (2014): 303–57.

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

Heiden, Bruce. 1998 “The simile of the fugitive homicide, Iliad 24.480-84: analogy, foiling, and allusion.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 119, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1-10.

Jackson, Zakkiyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. NYU.

Kim, Jinyo. 2000. The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity of the Iliad. Rowman & Littlefield.

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

Lowenstam, Steven. “Patroclus’ death in the Iliad and the inheritance of an Indo-European myth.” Archaeological News, vol. VI, 1977, pp. 72-76.

Lowenstam, Steven. 1981. The Death of Patroclus: A Study in Typology.

Most, Glenn W. “Anger and pity in Homer’s « Iliad »’, Yale Classical Studies, 32. (2003) 50-75.

Rinon, Yoav. Homer and the dual model of the tragic. Ann Arbor (Mich.): University of Michigan Pr., 2008.

Rutherford, Richard. “Tragic form and feeling in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. CII, 1982, pp. 145-160.

Marjolein Oele, ‘Suffering, pity and friendship: an Aristotelian reading of Book 24 of Homer’s « Iliad »’, Electronic Antiquity, 14.1 (2010-2011) 15.

Sparkes, B. A. “The Trojan Horse in Classical Art.” Greece & Rome 18, no. 1 (1971): 54–70.

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

Tomasello, Michael. 2019. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard.

Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Warwick, C. (2019). “The Maternal Warrior: Gender and Kleos in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology 140(1), 1-28.

Warwick, C. (2019). “We Two Alone: Conjugal Bonds and Homoerotic Subtext in the Iliad. “Helios 46(2), 115-139.

Zanker, Graham. 1996. The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad. University of Michigan.

Part 2: Theoretical Interlude

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

I missed a week of posting, thanks to a whirlwind of work and a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to present a talk at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. To make up for the skipped week, I will present the talk here in three parts. The First part, on Violence and Lament, is here.

Some of the thoughts and words from this section are from Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things.

Narrative Blends

The way I take about how audiences engage with Homer draws on work I have done on cognitive psychology and the Homeric Odyssey and on the structure and generation of Homeric poetry in my recent Storylife, On Epic, Language, and living things, which applies a series of biological analogies to Homeric poetry and early Greek myth as a test case for exploring how narratives are more like living organisms than they are not. When I talk about the structure of ancient Greek poetry, I emphasize that there is a reciprocal relationship between the shape of the story and its cognitive function.

One of the most significant structures in early Greek poetry is ring composition. The structure, however, also has semantic functions. Just as a formula answers the needs of both structure and meaning, so too do the larger structures beyond the line. A ring frames, providing opportunities for both structure and interpretation. Such mirroring repetition helps to refocus or emphasize the beginning idea and invites audiences to reconsider the elements in between in light of such parenthetical reminders. As Erwin Cook argues, further, ring composition is essential to how the narrative helps guide reception. Rings have parenthetical function—they set the material they contain off from what surrounds them. But they are more permeable than our punctuation: they invite us to consider how the part set apart by the repetition relates to itself and material outside the ring: ringed structures make propositions about what goes together and how things should be understood.

Other epic structures have similar effects: Lines of speech introduction and conclusion, for example, help us transition into direct speech and out of it from narrative while also providing some information on how the speech is intended and/or received (or is to be received). Similarly, similes are bounded by “just as” and “just so” statements that separate narrative or speech from comparison, directing audiences to follow through the comparison both at its beginning and end. These comparisons are rarely 1:1 and perfectly clear, they often shift and move from one element inside the simile (a vehicle) to a different corresponding element outside the simile (the tenor).

In the shifts and interpretive demands put on audiences by narrative structures, speeches, and similes alike I see an echo, if not a confirmation, of a model of reading explored by Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind. As Turner describes, when we hear (or read) a story, we do not actually experience the narrative created by the teller of the tale. Instead, the story unfolds in a cognitive blend in a space between the world of the narrative and the reader’s mind. From this perspective, when we hear a story, we fill in details that are not expressed but we are also guided in understanding the plot and its themes by our own experiences. When we hear narratives together in group settings, we each construct our own notional blend, one we adapt and shift as we reflect on it together. So, not only is the ‘same’ story not actually the same for different people, but the ‘same’ story is different for the ‘same’ person over time.

The parenthetical framing strategies I have discussed all similarly mark the movement from a more concrete space into a blended one, to an invitation to make connections in the blended space between self and story. This happens within epic with mimetic speeches and challenging similes, but we can see characters engage in reading meaning into the world when discussing omens or experimenting with telling stories themselves. If we follow the part-for-whole structure of epic itself, then the interpretive invitation of a speech or a simile is in part a model for the relationship between the audience and the whole poem. Characters in the poem model anticipating responses to speeches, encountering misinterpretations, and trying to use narrative to understand their world; similes invite us as readers outside the poem to compare the action of the narrative to different worlds and imagery. The process of witnessing the former and then engaging in the latter, I believe, helps to train audiences in the iterative and ambiguous task of applying epic narratives to the worlds around us.

Similes and Similarities

Similes are an important device to help us understand the structure and interpretation of Homeric poetry. They replicate pars pro toto the blending and movement that happens when audiences hear and begin to interpret the stories. Two things I would like to emphasize in the similes I have selected are the slippage or blending of detail between the domains of tenor and vehicle and the movement within the simile from the initial comparison to include a greater part of a world than one might expect.

The first example has Paris finally dressed to go to war in Iliad. The verbal repetitions link the tenor and vehicle for us, and the effect of comparing Paris to a show-horse is comedic and pointed. But note as well the bleedover of human-traits to the horse in the simile: the horse’s extravagant hair evokes as much a dandy princeling tossing his hair as that of a stallion. The bathing, the swift feet, the jaunting off for mares, all speak to a horse compared to Paris as much as a prince compared to a horse. The bleedover is a species of the very kind of cognitive blending that happens when we absorb any narrative and try to process it through the language and experiences that are familiar to us.

Simpler, but still telling is the simile from book 7: When Hektor and Paris leave the gates, the relationship between tenor and vehicle is unstable: we start out, perhaps wrongly, thinking that they are the sailors but find out as we move through the simile that their return to battle is witnessed by the Trojans, who are the at first unexpressed tenor to the simile’s sailors. Hektor and Paris are the favorable wind sent to relieve them. This shifting, re-blending of space through the unfolding of the narrative aims our mental gaze first at the princes returning to war, then to an imagined vessel, then to the Trojans altogether, moving us through the narrative and to a new place in the tale. The details left unexplored may strike different audience members: the inversion of Trojans as sailors, the emphasis on the toil of their work, the implication of divine agency, so crucial throughout Hektor’s characterization from this moment until Achilles’ return. The simile refracts and bends, leaving listeners to recompose its meaning.

To be clear, I am arguing that epic poetry provides models for its own interpretation within it—not as a clever puzzle for audiences to discover, but as an outgrowth of its development over time. This structure, moreover, is not home to epic poetry alone. Indeed, I think we find it as a central compositional principle of early Greek poetry, even when it is not explicit. Let’s consider a famous example from lyric poetry, Sappho’s fragment 16 (c. 6^th Century BCE; Lesbos)

This poem starts out with a narrative conceit of an imagined debate, at some level communicating the ancient equivalent of “different strokes for different folks”. The first stanza has at times been characterized as being about poetic topics and genres: talking about love, the argument goes, is the function of lyric, while horsemen and cavalry are about war. Then, the speaker moves from the debate about the relative nature of beauty and passion to a point of comparison from myth: Helen chose her love for Paris over all else. The narrator closes the comparison after two stanzas to turn back to her narrative world, comparing Anaktoria both to Helen and to the “loveliest things” on the dark earth.

This striking poem offers a couple of important points about parenthetical thinking and the cognitive blend. Note how a structural ring that starts in the narrator’s projected ‘real world’ circles around the world of myth. But as we move from the outside in, then to the outside again, the narrator accumulates detail: the world of myth ‘contaminates’ the external world: Sappho (the narrator) is Helen, but Anaktoria is Helen too, standing amidst the Lydian chariots and infantrymen. The move from the myth back to the framing device is made through the self-conscious “this reminds me of….” The resulting concatenation of myth-detail with the narrative frame performs for the audience the kind of cognitive blending that Mark Turner describes. Sappho’s narrator is at once a singer opining on the relativity of beauty and also a besotted lover who sees in the world of myth the longing and force of her own experiences. As audience members witnessing this process, we recombine the details, starting at first in the debate about beauty, then trying to unpack and understand the jump to talking about Helen before moving all too quickly to follow the narrator’s logic and blending in the closing stanza.

The Iliad betrays a consciousness of this process. Consider the long story that Phoinix tells Achilles in book 9 of the Iliad. When Phoinix arrives, he is trying to persuade Achilles to return to battle through a long story from the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt. But he frames this story with reference to Achilles: he says that it is right to listen to the pleas of those who are dear to you, “just as we have learned previously from the famous stories (klea andrōn) of heroic men / whenever intense anger overtakes someone” In doing so, Phoenix echoes the narrative’s presentation of Achilles earlier , where it depicts him as singing through the klea andrōn to himself as the embassy approaches and it engages with the thematic situation at hand.

The story that Phoinix tells, however, presents a rather targeted version of the Calydonian boar hunt. The hunt can be a tale of heroes banding together to kill a massive boar, devolving into a conflict over the spoils when Meleager, the young prince of the city, tries to give the boar’s hide to the heroine Atalanta. In rage, Meleager’s mother, Althaia, destroys a log that is tied to Meleager’s life force, resulting in his death. In Phoinix’s story, Meleager sits out of the conflict until even his wife, Kleopatra—a clear inversion of Patroklos’ name—asks him to join the battle. According to Phoinix, Meleager ignored the promises of gifts, had to fight anyway, and ended up laboring without recompense. Phoenix ends by telling Achilles to “think about this,” warning him that he too will end up fighting without honor. Achilles tells him he does not care about the gifts and threatens to leave for home in the morning.

Phoinix frames his narrative with explicit invitations to make comparisons between the experiences of his addressee and that of the central character in his story. He offers a specific interpretation that Achilles rejects because Achilles is likely taking a different lesson from the narrative (to stay out of battle because he does not want the goods or the social obligations they imply). This exchange, then, features both how storytellers adapt stories to the experiences of the audiences and also how audiences misread or reread the stories through their own perspectives.

Part 1: Violence and Lament

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

I missed a week of posting, thanks to a whirlwind of work and a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to present a talk at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. To make up for the skipped week, I will present the talk here in three parts.

Violence

Homer, Iliad 6.53-62

“And then [Menelaos] was intending to give Adrastus
To an attendant to take back to the Achaeans’ swift ships
But Agamemnon came rushing in front of him and spoke commandingly
“Oh my fool Menelaos, why do you care so much about people?
Did your house suffer the best treatment by the Trojans?
Let none of them flee dread death at our hands,
Not even a mother who carries in her womb
a child that will be a boy, let not one flee, but instead
Let everyone at Troy perish, unwept and unseen.”

The hero spoke like this and changed his brother’s mind,

καὶ δή μιν τάχ᾽ ἔμελλε θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν
δώσειν ᾧ θεράποντι καταξέμεν: ἀλλ᾽ Ἀγαμέμνων
ἀντίος ἦλθε θέων, καὶ ὁμοκλήσας ἔπος ηὔδα:
‘ὦ πέπον ὦ Μενέλαε, τί ἢ δὲ σὺ κήδεαι οὕτως
ἀνδρῶν; ἦ σοὶ ἄριστα πεποίηται κατὰ οἶκον
πρὸς Τρώων; τῶν μή τις ὑπεκφύγοι αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον
χεῖράς θ᾽ ἡμετέρας, μηδ᾽ ὅν τινα γαστέρι μήτηρ
κοῦρον ἐόντα φέροι, μηδ᾽ ὃς φύγοι, ἀλλ᾽ ἅμα πάντες
Ἰλίου ἐξαπολοίατ᾽ ἀκήδεστοι καὶ ἄφαντοι.

ὣς εἰπὼν ἔτρεψεν ἀδελφειοῦ φρένας ἥρως

At the beginning of Iliad 6, Menelaos has captured the Trojan Adrastus alive and is about to send him to the ships to be ransomed later. But his brother, Agamemnon intervenes and tells him to “Let everyone at Troy perish,” even the babies in their mothers’ wombs and stabs the man before Menelaos can act. I have struggled with how to understand this scene. Perhaps it is characteristic of Agamemnon whose refusal to honor the convention of supplication in book 1 set the epic’s conflicts into action. Or, we could imagine the privations of a long conflict undermining even basic conventions. Achilles also refuses a suppliant in book 22 (Lykaon) and proceeds to capture 12 Trojan youths alive in order to sacrifice them at Patroklos’ pyre. Indeed, one of the main thematic arcs of the Iliad is the reaffirmation of social conventions of exchange (ransom/xenia) and the rites of the dead, resolved powerfully in book 24.

We could also pose this as an exploration of the impact of violence beyond voluntary combatants. The invocation of infanticide sets the audience up for seeing Astyanax at the end of the book. Hektor’s young son, conceived and born during the siege and likely confined to the city for his entire existence, is later killed by either Neoptolemus or Odysseus, dashed to the ground or hurled from the city walls. From this perspective, the structure of Iliad 6 progressively reframes Agamemnon’s words for the audience: Astyanax is a metonym for all the children who die at the fall of Troy.

But what does it do to an audience member who bears witness to these events? The way we tend to read and talk about Homeric epic can sanitize its contents in favor of abstract talk of honor and glory. An analogy I have been contemplating is the tension between the nearly comical top image of the Mykonos vase and the panels below.

For most of my teaching career, I have shown this early image of the Trojan horse to myth classes, entirely ignoring narrative that plays out in the lower sequence. The terrible violence on the lower part of the vase below seems a consequence of the actions of the warriors inside the horse. Michael Anderson (1997, 183-191) identifies the images as part of the sack of troy: the panels follow the action of a single warrior and woman with a male child in different poses, indicating a narrative. He compares the panels to Priam imagining the future death of his sons and enslavement of daughters in book 22 (62-65) and adds “… the warriors on the pithos are determined to eradicate the entire race of Trojans, and all the male children must die, even the sons still in the womb, as Agamemnon coldly threatens in Iliad 6” (187). And for ancient audiences, as Kathy Gaca has argued, the act of killing those who know how to fight and enslaving/taking those who do not (women and children) was a practice observed in many different ways in Ancient Greece. Agamemnon’s words and the Mykonos vase must surely reflect these practices. But how can we reconstruct what such reflections meant to their ancient audiences?

I want to linger on what the Iliad has to say about how we react to suffering, loss, and violence. I am going to offer close readings of lament in Iliad 19 and the meeting of Priam and Achilles in book 24 with some insights from cognitive approaches to literature and a sprinkling of ideas from tragedy to argue that the Iliad provides models for empathy in response to suffering within its own narrative. In this provision, it also outlines an approach to the function of mimetic art and anticipates just how hard it is to become and stay human by acknowledging the reality of others beyond the self.

Lament

The Iliad offers one continuous day of violence from book 11-18. One third of the epic is a sprawling killing field punctuated by the death of Patroklos and the redirection of Achilles’ rage. But following the political reconciliation, Iliad 19 shifts back to the personal, exploring further the impact of Patroklos’ death on others. Here, we see a refraction of some of the themes from Hektor’s visit to Troy. Briseis, in something of a surprise appearance, weeps for Patroklos, recalling how she witnessed the death of her husband and brothers and somehow he persuaded her not to mourn, to imagine a different future with the very man who slaughtered her family.

Homer Iliad 19. 281-302

“Then when Briseis, like golden Aphrodite herself,
Saw Patroklos run through with sharp bronze,
Poured herself over him while she wailed and ripped
At her chest, tender neck, and pretty face with her hands.
And while mourning the woman spoke like one of the goddesses:

“Patroklos, you were the dearest to wretched me and
I left you alive when I went from your dwelling.
And now I find you here dead, leader of the armies,
When I return. Troubles are always wresting me from troubles.
The husband my father and mother gave me to
I watched run through with sharp bronze in front of the city,
And then the three brothers my mother bore,
Dear siblings, all met their fate on that day.
But you would not ever let me weep when swift Achilles
Was killing my husband and when he sacked the city of divine Munêtos—
No, you used to promise to make me the wedded wife
Of divine Achilles, someone he would lead home in his ships to Phthia,
where you would light the marriage torches among the Myrmidons.
So now I weep for you, dead and gentle forever.”
So she spoke, while weeping….

Βρισηῒς δ’ ἄρ’ ἔπειτ’ ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ ᾿Αφροδίτῃ
ὡς ἴδε Πάτροκλον δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ,
ἀμφ’ αὐτῷ χυμένη λίγ’ ἐκώκυε, χερσὶ δ’ ἄμυσσε
στήθεά τ’ ἠδ’ ἁπαλὴν δειρὴν ἰδὲ καλὰ πρόσωπα.
εἶπε δ’ ἄρα κλαίουσα γυνὴ ἐϊκυῖα θεῇσι·
Πάτροκλέ μοι δειλῇ πλεῖστον κεχαρισμένε θυμῷ
ζωὸν μέν σε ἔλειπον ἐγὼ κλισίηθεν ἰοῦσα,
νῦν δέ σε τεθνηῶτα κιχάνομαι ὄρχαμε λαῶν
ἂψ ἀνιοῦσ’· ὥς μοι δέχεται κακὸν ἐκ κακοῦ αἰεί.
ἄνδρα μὲν ᾧ ἔδοσάν με πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ
εἶδον πρὸ πτόλιος δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ,
τρεῖς τε κασιγνήτους, τούς μοι μία γείνατο μήτηρ,
κηδείους, οἳ πάντες ὀλέθριον ἦμαρ ἐπέσπον.
οὐδὲ μὲν οὐδέ μ’ ἔασκες, ὅτ’ ἄνδρ’ ἐμὸν ὠκὺς ᾿Αχιλλεὺς
ἔκτεινεν, πέρσεν δὲ πόλιν θείοιο Μύνητος,
κλαίειν, ἀλλά μ’ ἔφασκες ᾿Αχιλλῆος θείοιο
κουριδίην ἄλοχον θήσειν, ἄξειν τ’ ἐνὶ νηυσὶν
ἐς Φθίην, δαίσειν δὲ γάμον μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσι.
τώ σ’ ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί.
῝Ως ἔφατο κλαίουσ’…

The postponed weeping, evoked in part by the enjambment and postponement of the infinitive klaien comes at last as Patroklos stands as a fulcrum over which her past losses and future hopes collapse. She has been a witness to death and we are witnesses to her mourning.

But we aren’t permitted to contemplate too long. Achilles takes his turn and moves through a range of motifs that echo Briseis’ invocation of her lost relatives and the re-location of her hopes for continued life in Achilles (as promised by Patroklos).

Homer, Iliad 19. 309-340:

“He said this and dispersed the rest of the kings,
But the two sons of Atreus remained along with shining Odysseus,
Nestor, Idomeneus, and the old horse-master Phoinix
All trying to bring him some distraction. But he took no pleasure
In his heart before he entered the jaws of bloody war.
He sighed constantly as he remembered and spoke:
‘My unlucky dearest of friends it was you who before
Used to offer me a sweet meal in our shelter
Quickly and carefully whenever the Achaeans were rushing
To bring much-lamented Ares against the horse-taming Achaeans.
But now you are lying there run-through and my fate
Is to go without drink and food even though there inside
Because I long for you. I couldn’t suffer anything more wretched than this
Not even if I learned that my father had died,
Who I imagine is crying tender tears right now in Pththia
Bereft of a son like this—but I am in a foreign land,
Fighting against the Trojans for the sake of horrible Helen.
Not even if I lost my dear son who is being cared for in Skyros,
If godlike Neoptolemos is at least still alive—
Before the heart in my chest always expected that
I alone would die far away from horse-nourishing Argos
Here in Troy, but that you would return home to Phthia
I hoped you would take my child in the swift dark ship
From Skyros and that you would show to him there
My possessions, the slaves, and the high-roofed home.
I expect that Peleus has already died or
If he is still alive for a little longer he is aggrieved
By hateful old age and as he constantly awaits
Some painful message, when he learns that I have died.”
So he spoke while weeping, and the old men mourned along with him
As each of them remembered what they left behind at home.
And Zeus [really] felt pity when he saw them mourning.”

῝Ως εἰπὼν ἄλλους μὲν ἀπεσκέδασεν βασιλῆας,
δοιὼ δ’ ᾿Ατρεΐδα μενέτην καὶ δῖος ᾿Οδυσσεὺς
Νέστωρ ᾿Ιδομενεύς τε γέρων θ’ ἱππηλάτα Φοῖνιξ
τέρποντες πυκινῶς ἀκαχήμενον· οὐδέ τι θυμῷ
τέρπετο, πρὶν πολέμου στόμα δύμεναι αἱματόεντος.
μνησάμενος δ’ ἁδινῶς ἀνενείκατο φώνησέν τε·
ἦ ῥά νύ μοί ποτε καὶ σὺ δυσάμμορε φίλταθ’ ἑταίρων
αὐτὸς ἐνὶ κλισίῃ λαρὸν παρὰ δεῖπνον ἔθηκας
αἶψα καὶ ὀτραλέως, ὁπότε σπερχοίατ’ ᾿Αχαιοὶ
Τρωσὶν ἐφ’ ἱπποδάμοισι φέρειν πολύδακρυν ῎Αρηα.
νῦν δὲ σὺ μὲν κεῖσαι δεδαϊγμένος, αὐτὰρ ἐμὸν κῆρ
ἄκμηνον πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἔνδον ἐόντων
σῇ ποθῇ· οὐ μὲν γάρ τι κακώτερον ἄλλο πάθοιμι,
οὐδ’ εἴ κεν τοῦ πατρὸς ἀποφθιμένοιο πυθοίμην,
ὅς που νῦν Φθίηφι τέρεν κατὰ δάκρυον εἴβει
χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ’ υἷος· ὃ δ’ ἀλλοδαπῷ ἐνὶ δήμῳ
εἵνεκα ῥιγεδανῆς ῾Ελένης Τρωσὶν πολεμίζω·
ἠὲ τὸν ὃς Σκύρῳ μοι ἔνι τρέφεται φίλος υἱός,
εἴ που ἔτι ζώει γε Νεοπτόλεμος θεοειδής.
πρὶν μὲν γάρ μοι θυμὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἐώλπει
οἶον ἐμὲ φθίσεσθαι ἀπ’ ῎Αργεος ἱπποβότοιο
αὐτοῦ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ, σὲ δέ τε Φθίην δὲ νέεσθαι,
ὡς ἄν μοι τὸν παῖδα θοῇ ἐνὶ νηῒ μελαίνῃ
Σκυρόθεν ἐξαγάγοις καί οἱ δείξειας ἕκαστα
κτῆσιν ἐμὴν δμῶάς τε καὶ ὑψερεφὲς μέγα δῶμα.
ἤδη γὰρ Πηλῆά γ’ ὀΐομαι ἢ κατὰ πάμπαν
τεθνάμεν, ἤ που τυτθὸν ἔτι ζώοντ’ ἀκάχησθαι
γήραΐ τε στυγερῷ καὶ ἐμὴν ποτιδέγμενον αἰεὶ
λυγρὴν ἀγγελίην, ὅτ’ ἀποφθιμένοιο πύθηται.
῝Ως ἔφατο κλαίων, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γέροντες,
μνησάμενοι τὰ ἕκαστος ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἔλειπον·
μυρομένους δ’ ἄρα τούς γε ἰδὼν ἐλέησε Κρονίων…

As Casey Dué observes, these themes recall Andromache’s comments in book 6, marking some connection between the impact of violence on non-combatants and the laments in book 19. There is a significant difference in Achilles’ rumination, however: where Andromache and Briseis invest a single person with the lost hopes of larger families, Achilles projects the loss of a single person on his living father and son. Andromache and Briseis try to find some comfort in life for the loss of many in the hopes of one; Achilles allows the loss of one to articulate his separation from everyone else.

In doing so, Achilles articulates a collapse between himself and Patroklos. His speech is remarkable because he does not mourn his own loss of life (as is clear from his speech in Iliad 18) but instead shows that his hope for life after death was based in Patroklos out-living him. And the way he talks about this frames them as replacements for each other, inverting what actually happens in the Iliad. In book 16, Patroklos literally takes Achilles’ place in battle, wearing his armor as one might a lover’s clothes and facing death in his stead. In book 19, Achilles shows that he expected Patroklos to replace him in life, to take his place as a surrogate father to Neoptolemos, returning him to the home he has never seen to meet the grandfather he has never known.

Language facilitates Achilles’ elision of identities. Ambiguities may leave the audience briefly lost, but they also point to the overlap in Achilles’ mind: consider line 314/5 where Achilles says of Peleus that he is “bereft of a son like this, but he [I] am fighting in a foreign land….” (χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ’ υἷος· ὃ δ’ ἀλλοδαπῷ ἐνὶ δήμῳ / εἵνεκα ῥιγεδανῆς ῾Ελένης Τρωσὶν πολεμίζω). It is very difficult to convey in English the postponement of meaning in these lines. The qualitative demonstrative τοιοῦδ’ (“of this kind of…”) modifies the word “son” (υἷος), yet, given the context it is unclear whether Achilles is referring to himself as the kind of person Peleus mourns over or Patroklos.

The following words make it clear to me that he likely means Patroklos, at first. After using the demonstrative, Achilles shifts to the nominative singular article ὃ followed by what Egbert Bakker has called the discourse shifting particle δ’. The combination of a stated article with the particle (ὃ δ’) frequently indicates a subject change. In this case, it strengthens the case that we are supposed to imagine Achilles as in some way contrasting the referent of the demonstrative “someone like this” with pronoun.

But it is even more dizzying, because it is not clear from that ὃ δ’ that Achilles is talking about himself and not another person until the end of the following line when we get to the first-person verb πολεμίζω. The closest English approximation would be something like “bereft of a son just like this, while this guy in a foreign land, for the sake of horrible Helen, I, am fighting the Trojans”. And if it is somewhat unconvincing that the movement from the demonstrative to the pronoun, the sequence χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ’ υἷος· ὃ δ’ indicates a shift from thinking about Patroklos to Achilles. Some lines later Achilles moves back to Patroklos clearly in contrasting them when he imagines that he was going to die “here in Troy, but you [Patroklos] would return home…” The adverbial αὐτοῦ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ breaks at the same metrical position in the line as χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ’ and is followed with σὲ δέ just as the earlier was followed by ὃ δ’. The impact is not unclear: Achilles struggles in that first part of the speech to distinguish between his grief and its object, but when he articulates his lost hopes he admits that he expected Patroklos would live in his place.

The unfolding associations of replacement and surrogacy should make us, as an audience, reconsider what happens earlier in Iliad 16. In an unpublished talk, Lenny Muellner builds from his late friend Steven Lowenstam’s dissertation The Death of Patroclus: A Study in Typology to make observations on the relationship of Achilles and Patroklos. Lowenstam’s dissertation in part explores how the Homeric function of the therapon (attendant, ‘henchman’, assistant) may be related to an ancient Hittite practice of a figure who takes a king’s place and dies in his place in battle. Lenny explains the origin of the term alter ego:

“The origin, in fact, of the modern psychological term alter ego is Patroklos himself. It is actually a Latin translation of a Greek proverb that defines the Greek word philos, the word that we translate ‘friend,’: ti esti philos? the proverb goes, ‘what is a friend?’; the answer is allos ego, ‘another I,’ an alter ego. And the epic tells us that Patroklos is Achilles’s philtatos hetairos, ‘most philoscompanion.’ The German Classicist Erwin Rohde applied this designation to Patroklos in his masterpiece, Psyche; from there it apparently entered the vocabulary of Freud and Jung, perhaps via Nietzsche.”

Lenny goes on to explore via the work of the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott the tension between Achilles treating Patroklos as a metaphor for himself (when he goes in his place in book 16) and as a metonym, when Achilles sees Patroklos’ death as in fact his own and not a representation of it. This follow up speech in book 19 shows Achilles roiling with pain at the violent resolution of this tension: when he articulates his hope that Patroklos would have been his therapon in life. As Lenny writes, the pain Achilles expresses is related in part to the core meaning of philos, “friend, near and dear” to indicate something so close and important as to be a part of oneself.

Achilles’ ragged emotional response belies an as yet unarticulated understanding. Notably missing from Achilles at this moment is the realization that in his imagined future, Patroklos would have been as broken and fragmented without Achilles as Achilles is without him. And the ability to understand this, to see another’s realness through one’s own grief, is the space Achilles has still to travel before he meets Priam in book 24.

This potential for narrative to bridge that space between oneself and others that I think this scene has more yet to teach us. Achilles’ speech also has internal and external framing that provides important reflections for how Homeric poetry works. For the first, consider how Achilles refuses to share a meal with the Achaeans and refrains from food. Scholars often argue that once Patroklos has died, Achilles symbolically enters the realm of the dead—he refuses to eat or engage with the living. I don’t think this is at all wrong, but the Homeric narrative also offers a more immediate cause: Achilles says he does not want to eat because Patroklos is the one who used to feed him. A scholion is particularly insightful here in sensing the associative leaps in Achilles’ grief.

Schol. bT ad Hom. Il.19.316a ex

“you offered me a sweet meal”: the lament [responds]to what has just happened. For they were begging him to eat, and he was reminded of the table on which his friend used to serve him often. It is customary to talk to the dead as if to the living. And what he means is that what is sweet is a meal offered to him by the hands of someone he loves.”

ex. λαρὸν παρὰ δεῖπνον ἔθηκας: ἀπὸ τῶν γινομένων ὁ θρῆνος· ἐπεὶ γὰρ ᾔτουν αὐτὸν φαγεῖν, ὑπομιμνῄσκεται τραπέζης, ἣν ὁ φίλος αὐτῷ παρετίθει πολλάκις. ἠθικὸν δὲ τὸ ὡς ζῶντι διαλέγεσθαι τῷ νεκρῷ. καὶ λαρὸν δεῖπνον φησὶ τὸ ὑπὸ τῶν τοῦ φιλουμένου χειρῶν παρατεθειμένον.

As anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows, the magnitude of death is inconceivable. We absorb the basic fact of it, but the shape of someone’s absence in a life built around them is impossible to grasp at once: we lose them again in countless different ways as lives unfold without them. Achilles does not care about the food, he is undone by the reminder of living with Patroklos and the future meals he will never share with him.

Grief is associative and unpredictable, it moves like water, filling the space open to it, dripping, pooling, and relentless. Note how the speech’s introduction positions Achilles as mourning constantly “as he recalled” (μνησάμενος δ’ ἁδινῶς…). But this is not the only thing the narrative tells us. The end of the speech reminds us that other people are listening to Achilles as well and are changed and moved in turn by his mourning. The Greek elders mourn in addition (ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γέροντες) and not because of Patroklos, but as they recall what they have left behind (μνησάμενοι τὰ ἕκαστος ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἔλειπον).

Achilles’ grief–in both the words of his lament and their performance–presents a narrative they can see themselves in; they project their experiences into his pain and grieve alongside him, anticipating to a great part that powerful moment in book 24 when Achilles and Priam find in each other a reminder to weep for what they have individually lost. I will shortly talk about Mark Turner’s approach to narrative in The Literary Mind. He suggests that what happens when we experience stories is that we don’t recreate the world the story comes from but instead generate a blend between the world of stories and our own experiences. Another step I usually emphasize is that while each blending of narratives and the world is idiopathic, connected to our own unique and embodied experiences, we can bring our narrative worlds closer together by sharing them with other people, by measuring our responses to theirs: the iterative, collective responses to Achilles’ lament are poised on that shift from the realization of the other in the individual and the (re)creation of a shared understanding in collectivized reactions.

This moment foregrounds a Homeric expectation that what people witness should (and does) prompt reflection on their own lives (as well as the situation in general). The sequence also anticipates other audiences as well. A simple but extremely useful distinction from narratology (the way narratives are structured and work) is between internal and external audiences. Internal audiences are characters within a narrative who observe and (sometimes) respond to what is going on. External audiences are those outside the narrative (mostly those in the ‘real’ world). A theoretical suggestion from this is that the responses of internal audiences can guide or often complicate the way external audiences receive the narrative.

Homer, Iliad 19.301-308

“So she spoke in mourning, and the woman joined them in grieving
Over Patroklos as a beginning [prophasis], but each of them [then] their own pains.
Then the elders of the Achaeans gathered around him
As they were begging him to eat, but he was denying them as he mourned:
‘I am begging you, if anyone of my dear companions is listening to me,
Not to tell me to fill my dear heart with either food or drink
When this terrible grief [akhos] has come over me.
I will wait and I will hold out steadfastly until the sun goes down.”

῝Ως ἔφατο κλαίουσ’, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες
Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ’ αὐτῶν κήδε’ ἑκάστη.
αὐτὸν δ’ ἀμφὶ γέροντες ᾿Αχαιῶν ἠγερέθοντο
λισσόμενοι δειπνῆσαι· ὃ δ’ ἠρνεῖτο στεναχίζων·
λίσσομαι, εἴ τις ἔμοιγε φίλων ἐπιπείθεθ’ ἑταίρων,
μή με πρὶν σίτοιο κελεύετε μηδὲ ποτῆτος
ἄσασθαι φίλον ἦτορ, ἐπεί μ’ ἄχος αἰνὸν ἱκάνει·
δύντα δ’ ἐς ἠέλιον μενέω καὶ τλήσομαι ἔμπης.

Achilles’ lament for Patroklos has more than one internal audience. First, as we have just seen, the elders of the Achaeans join Achilles’ mourning and move to reflecting on their own lives. Such a move is anticipated right before Achilles’ speech when the women around Briseis join her in mourning. Briseis’ mourning is something of a gateway for the women who mourn alongside her. And the language itself is somewhat uncommon for Homer: the only other time the word prophasis appears in Homer is under 100 lines previously when Agamemnon swears he never had sex with Briseis (οὔτ’ εὐνῆς πρόφασιν κεχρημένος οὔτέ τευ ἄλλου, 262). Here, we might translate prophasis as a ‘pretext’ or ‘excuse’. But in the narrative of the women mourning, these translations seem too dismissive or pejorative. Perhaps ‘prelude’ is more appropriate, but even this seems insufficient to convey the sense of beginning and transition, that slippage from looking outward to inward, that movement from someone else’s story to your own.

And these women are far from the scene’s final audience. Another internal audience appears when we learn that Zeus too is watching the scene and he feels pity: together the women, the elders, and Zeus present a range of potential reactions for external audiences: the mortals reflect on their own lives and the losses they suffer or those to come. Zeus watches it all and feels pity and tries to do something to help, sending Athena to provide Achilles with the sustenance he will not take on his own. Here, we might even imagine the narrative offering an ethical imperative to respond to other’s stories. It is not enough to think about yourself or to be moved to pity by seeing the reality that others may feel as deeply and painfully as you. Zeus suggests that if you are in power and can do something to intervene, even something minor, when you notice another’s suffering, then you should do what you can.

Sound and Sense in Homer

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

When Odysseus tests his restrung bow, the process is compared to someone stringing a lyre. The metapoetic content of this scene has not been missed: at a moment when Odysseus turns from using stories (=songs) to effect his homecoming, when he transforms from ‘singer’ back into warrior, the simile briefly collapses identities, reflecting the singer in the warrior’s pose. There’s more to the scene too: after the stringing, Odysseus plucks the string and the narrator tells us that it sings “like a swallow”. The verb for singing is often marked in Homeric poetry as the act of a bard like Phemios, Demodokos, or even Achilles, and it also introduces epic itself, famously in the first line of the Iliad “sing [aeide], Goddess, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”.

Homer, Odyssey 21.407-412

“Just as a man who knows both lyre and song
easily stretches a string on a new peg
as he attaches the twisted sheep-gut to both sides
just so, without haste, Odysseus strung the great bow.
He took the string and tested it with his right hand.
And it sang beautifully with a voice like a swallow.
Then, a great grief overcame the suitors, and everyone skins’ turned.”

ὡς ὅτ’ ἀνὴρ φόρμιγγος ἐπιστάμενος καὶ ἀοιδῆς
ῥηϊδίως ἐτάνυσσε νέῳ περὶ κόλλοπι χορδήν,
ἅψας ἀμφοτέρωθεν ἐϋστρεφὲς ἔντερον οἰός,
ὣς ἄρ’ ἄτερ σπουδῆς τάνυσεν μέγα τόξον ᾿Οδυσσεύς.
δεξιτερῇ δ’ ἄρα χειρὶ λαβὼν πειρήσατο νευρῆς·
ἡ δ’ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄεισε, χελιδόνι εἰκέλη αὐδήν.
μνηστῆρσιν δ’ ἄρ’ ἄχος γένετο μέγα, πᾶσι δ’ ἄρα χρὼς

The sound does not stop there: the poem’s internal audience responds to the sound. It inspires grief among the suitors as their skin grows pale. This moment confirms, to an extent, that Homeric poetry anticipates an emotional response to sound and offers, perhaps, a synaesthetic aspect as well as we move through senses from sound, to emotions, to the sight of skin turning under the influence of anxiety and fear.

One of the ironies of Homeric studies since the advent of oral-formulaic theory is how little prepared most of us who write from this perspective are to talk about Homeric poetry as part of a sound scape, from an aural perspective. This is, of course, not universally true. Ancient authors like Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Eusthathius often remarked on the sound quality of Homeric poetry. Dio Chrysostom insists that Homer had ample control over the sounds of words to shape their impact and meaning (12.69). Prior to oral-formulaic theory, the debate largely attended the tension between traditional word shapes and sounds and the possibility of ‘Homer’ intending a specific effect (see Shewan 1925 on alliteration and assonance). There is some interest in such questions following the work of Parry and Lord too.

David Packard argued, for instance, that Homeric poetry manipulates the “harshness” of consonants for different contexts and meaning, against the claims of Walter Leaf and W.B. Stanford that many of the sound effects in Greek poetry are incidental or accidental. (Of course, these approaches focus overmuch on what performers may have been trying to do rather than the impact of the sounds on audiences.) I would insist that the sounds of Homeric poetry were no more accidental or incidental than word choice and poetic structures: but rather than being a specific feature of a performer’s intention, they had to have been part of the reciprocal development of performance in a song culture. W.B. Stanford, who is dismissive of what modern readers can hear in Homeric verse, nevertheless asserts that “Until the fifth century B.C., all Greek poets made their poems for hearing, not for seeing, for the ear and not for the eye. Poetry was social rather than private being usually sung, recited, or performed at religious ceremonies, festivals, feasts, or entertainments” (1981, 127).

Sound is certainly not incidental to meaning! Homeric poetry is invested in different kinds of wordplay that makes associative and non-linear connections (see the overview in Louden 1995 and Ahl 2002). Amy Lather (2017) supports the compositional importance of sound in exploring the depiction of music in early Greek hexameter–meaning arises from patterns and contrasts that are available to us from careful reading (and speaking aloud) but would have been implicit for audiences trained in hearing the music of Homeric poetry. We have little we can say about the performance itself: beyond the shape of words and the impact of consonants and vowels, I can also imagine the sonic repertoire available to any musician as part of bardic practice: changes in volume, speed, pitch, and rhythm stir the emotions and animate the space between the singer and their audience.

Tanvi Solanki writes persuasively of the importance of aural philology in her article about Johann Gottfried Herder’s experience of reading Greek aloud. Tanvi cites Herder: Herder goes on to write that ‘every one of Homer’s pictures is musical: the tone reverberates in our ears for a little while; if it should begin to fade, the same string is struck and the tone rings out once more, this time with greater force; and all the different tones combine to create the harmony of the picture’. Solanki argues that listening may help collapse cultural differences: “The practice makes explicit the insight that the act of listening was enculturated; the degree to which acoustic nuances could or could not be perceived varied among distinct peoples, which differentiated it too from the haptic and the optical. These variations among ‘ears’ served as the basis to unite, divide, and hierarchize communities. ”

I started thinking about sound in Homer again while reading Bill Beck’s recent “Homer’s Verbal Mimesis in the Iliad’s Exegetical Scholia” (GRBS, 2023). Beck provides a really interesting survey of comments on Homeric use of sound in the scholia. Beck divides this summary into three parts: scholia that look at the potential impact of tmesis (when compound words are split up, with other elements interposed), the correspondence between the sounds of words and what they describe (onomatopoeia), and the potential effects of rhythm in the Homeric line.

Beck shows how ancient scholars see disorder or constraint in grammar/diction as indicating disordered actions or disrupted psychology or compressed/constrained actions respectively. Ancient commentators, according to Beck, also saw correspondence between harsh sounds and harsh actions, sonorous sounds and the sea, and liquid (l/r) with the water. Beck observes that ancient critics were less interested in rhythm than modern readers are (implying, I might imagine, less attention to exactitude of prosody that we see in some modern scholarship, and more tolerance for variation). Still, there are some trends—largely dactylic lines implying faster movement or continuing action while spondaic lines (those with fewer dactyls or ending with all long syllables).

My favorite example here comes from a scholiastic comment on the meter of Iliad 12.208 (Τρῶες δ᾽ ἐρρίγη-σαν ὅπως ἴδον αἰόλον ὄφιν), which is ‘defective’ (ending in a trochaic rhythm). The T scholion suggests that rather than being a mistake, this line is intentionally affective, aimed at prompting a different response in the audience:

In other words, by making the line metrically defective, so that its final foot not only defies expectations but also demands explanation, Homer inspires in his audience a feeling analogous to the perplexity felt by the Trojans when presented with an anomalous and portentous phenomenon. What the metrical shape of ὄφιν elicits in readers is precisely what its referent provokes in the Trojans. (2023, 101).

Regardless of whether we accept this argument and don’t dismiss it as creative misreading, the moment asks that we take the sounds of Homeric poetry more seriously.

Short bibliography on Homeric Sounds

AHL, FREDERICK. “WORDPLAY AND APPARENT FICTION IN THE ‘ODYSSEY.’” Arethusa 35, no. 1 (2002): 117–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578452.

Barea Torres, Cristóbal. “« Tanto como alcanza un grito » : voces y ruidos en la épica homérica.” Faventia, vol. 43, 2021, pp. 7-20.

Calero, Luis. “El paisaje sonoro en la « Odisea ».” Graeco-Latina Brunensia, vol. 25, no. 2, 2020, pp. 33-45. Doi: 10.5817/GLB2020-2-3

Cullhed, Eric. “Movement and sound on the shield of Achilles in ancient exegesis.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, 2014, pp. 192-219.

Kondylaki, Vasiliki. “Les paysages sonores des funérailles d’Achille : à propos des Néréides et des Muses dans l’« Odyssée » et dans les « Posthomériques » de Quintus de Smyrne.” Gaia, vol. 22-23, 2020, pp. non paginé.

Lather, Amy. “The sound of music : the semantics of noise in early Greek hexameter.” Greek and Roman Musical Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 127-146. Doi: 10.1163/22129758-12341296.

Louden, Bruce. “Categories of Homeric Wordplay.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 125 (1995): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/284344.

Packard, D. W.. “Sound-patterns in Homer.” TAPA, vol. CIV, 1974, pp. 239-260.

Russo, J. A.. “Is oral or aural composition the cause of Homer’s formulaic style?.” Oral literature and the formula. Eds. Stolz, B. A. and Shannon, R. S.. Center for the Coordination of Ancient & Modern Stud.. Ann Arbor (Mich.): University of Michigan, 1976. 31-71.

Sansom, Stephen A.. “ Divine Resonance in Early Greek Epic, knowledge, affect.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 142, no. 4, 2021, pp. 535-569. Doi: 10.1353/ajp.2021.0019

Shewan, A. “Alliteration and Assonance in Homer.” Classical Philology 20, no. 3 (1925): 193–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/263057.

Stanford, W. B. “Varieties of Sound-Effects in the Homeric Poems.” College Literature 3, no. 3 (1976): 219–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111142.

Stanford, W. B. “Sound, Sense, and Music in Greek Poetry.” Greece & Rome 28, no. 2 (1981): 127–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/642860.

Tanvi Solanki, ‘ Herder hears Homer singing’, Classical Receptions Journal, 12..4 (2020) 401-424. Doi: 10.1093/crj/claa007

Tsagalis, Christos. “ Style and construction, sound and rhythm: Thetis’ supplication to Zeus (Iliad 1.493-516).” Arethusa, vol. 34, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-30.

Tsagalis, Christos C.. “The dynamic hypertext: lists and catalogues in the Homeric epics.” Trends in Classics, vol. 2, no. 2, 2010, pp. 323-347.

Epic: The Musical

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

A few years ago, people started asking me if I had heard about Epic: The Musical. Among my many annoying tendencies is to be dismissive when someone tells me I am going to like something. There are some good reasons for this (anyone who works on the past and had to live through the initial popularity of The Davinci Code knows what is is like to have someone recommend you total trash with the best intentions). There are some bad reasons for this too–I retain a bit too much of the GenX pose that nothing popular can be cool. (I rejected Greenday straight out when Dookie was released because “punk is dead” and, well, I guess I am in my fourth decade of being very wrong about things.)

So, when students started telling me I should listen to a musical in progress based on the Odyssey I was skeptical. But I also figured, let them do their thing and enjoy it. I tend to be something of a curmudgeon with adaptations of the Odyssey anyway. But, then, last year, my oldest child, Aalia, discovered it and asked me and I could no longer use professional indifference as an excuse to hide.

Here’s the thing: Epic: The Musical is pretty good. People should check it out. Seriously.

A few weeks ago, I joined Christine Vogler and Joe Goodkin on a (friendly) takeover of Liv Albert’s Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! Podcast to talk about Epic: The Musical.

I think we cover a lot of what is really engaging about Epic: The Musical in the podcast (although I don’t think we ever resolve whether or not it could actually be performed), but I do want to share a little here about why I think it is worth taking some time to listen to. (And how it may be more insightful than a lot of scholarly engagement with the epic…). But, first, let’s talk about what it is.

Epic: The Musical is a series of short albums (called “sagas”) based on the Odyssey and started in 2019 by Jorge Rivera-Herrans while he was an undergraduate. The songs became something of a TikTok phenomenon. The last Saga was released in December 2024. What makes it difficult to define is its status as a social media performance piece. Not only are the songs released on streaming platforms, but videos of the performers were released on TikTok with commentary from Rivera-Herrans. There’s a Wiki that includes information about the music, the performers, and the lyrics, but the official website emphasizes that this is also a community piece:

The EPIC community is comprised of over 410,000 people on TikTok, 15,000 people on Discord, and more across other platforms. This positive and supportive community comes together every day to make fan art, perform song covers, create animatics, and spread the word about the development of EPIC.

The YouTube page includes official songs, videos of the cast listening to the songs, and versions of the songs in development and conversations about the process. Fans have created art, animation, music videos. Read some of the comments and you will get a sense of how engaged the audience is.

There are nine sagas in total adding up to 40 songs. (I don’t believe it has ever been performed live and in person.) The story is not strictly the Odyssey. It starts with the “Troy Saga” then moves through the Cyclops scene and towards the hero’s homecoming. It is more of a linear telling of the story that basically works like this: Troy Saga (Sack of Troy to the arrival on Cyclops’ island); Cyclops Saga (book 9); Ocean Saga (Book 10); Circe Saga (Book 10); Underworld Saga (Book 11); Thunder Saga (Book 12?): Wisdom Saga (Books 1-5); Vengeance Saga (Book 11 again); Ithaca Saga (Books 21-23).

This summary shows the Epic: The Musical spends the most time on Odysseus’ own version of his story (what is often can called the apologos or apologoi) in Homeric scholarship. Most engagements with the Odyssey privilege the legendary events of books 9-12. I have always found this intriguing because ancient artwork indicates that most of these events were already well-known before the Odyssey we have was written down. (Some of our earliest Greek art shows Odysseus with the Cyclops.). But our Odyssey’s version of these famous tales is less than heroic. As Jonathan Shay argues–and as I have also explored myself–Odysseus comes out pretty badly if you read the events of the apologoi closely.

The Odysseus in Epic: The Musical shares some kinship with The Return’s Odysseus. Both seem to be traumatized by their experiences. A primary difference with Epic’s Odysseus is that he struggles with moral decisions (killing the infant Astyanax in The Troy Saga) and the cause of his suffering at sea is his opposition to Athena: Athena chastises him for blinding but not killing Polyphemos in “My Goodbye” (from the Cyclops Saga). This Odysseus is tortured by the actions he has taken and turns out to be haunted by the loss of his companions.

I listened to each saga with my children while driving them to school over a few weeks. My oldest brought Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel of the Odyssey in the car to match the songs to the events and we each developed our own favorite songs and details. My favorite thing about the songs are how they interpret the Odyssey and their hero in different ways. Each song is, in a way, an intervention in our collective text of the Odyssey. They are scholarly in the traditional sense of not being in the service of daily labor, but instead in reflection of human experience and creations.

(Also, I am viscerally vulnerable to music theater. My children have seen me cry watching The Greatest Showman and Disney’s Zombies)

I’ll give one example of what struck me as both insightful and creative. The song “Love in Paradise” is mostly a conversation between Odysseus and Calypso. It begins with a montage of previous songs from his travails and then transitions to a lighter musical number roughly based on book 5.

The conceit seems to be that Odysseus is at the moment of the song trying to understand how he has been their seven years and sifting through his memories. Odysseus ends up on a ledge, thinking about his mistakes and experiences. The production integrates fragments from other songs and provides the spirit, if not the content, of Odysseus’ final conversations with Calypso.

Time can take a heavy toll

[CALYPSO, spoken]
Odysseus?

[ODYSSEUS]
All I hear are screams

[CALYPSO, spoken]
Ody, get away from the ledge!

[ODYSSEUS]
You don’t know what I’ve gone through
You don’t know what I’ve sacrificed
Every comrade I long knew
Every friend, I saw them die
And all I hear are screams

[CALYPSO]
It will be fine, dear
Come back inside, dear
Love of my life, come back to paradise

What I really appreciate about this song–and which extends in general to the whole Musical–is the way Rivera-Herrans reads into the seams of the epic and between the lines to flesh out the inner workings of the characters. By my interpretation, this entire song reads into a famously opaque set of lines from the Odyssey. When we first see Odysseus’ in the Odyssey, he is not heroic by any means

Homer, Odyssey (5.151–159)

Kalypso found [Odysseus] sitting on the water’s edge. His eyes were never dry
of tears and his sweet life was draining away as he mourned
over his homecoming, since the goddess was no longer pleasing to him.
But it was true that he stretched out beside her at night by necessity
In her hollow caves, unwilling when she was willing.
By day, however, he sat on the rocks and sands
wracking his heart with tears, groans and grief,
Shedding tears as he gazed upon the barren sea.

τὸν δ’ ἄρ’ ἐπ’ ἀκτῆς εὗρε καθήμενον· οὐδέ ποτ’ ὄσσε
δακρυόφιν τέρσοντο, κατείβετο δὲ γλυκὺς αἰὼν
νόστον ὀδυρομένῳ, ἐπεὶ οὐκέτι ἥνδανε νύμφη.
ἀλλ’ ἦ τοι νύκτας μὲν ἰαύεσκεν καὶ ἀνάγκῃ
ἐν σπέεσι γλαφυροῖσι παρ’ οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσῃ·
ἤματα δ’ ἂμ πέτρῃσι καὶ ἠϊόνεσσι καθίζων
[δάκρυσι καὶ στοναχῇσι καὶ ἄλγεσι θυμὸν ἐρέχθων]
πόντον ἐπ’ ἀτρύγετον δερκέσκετο δάκρυα λείβων.

There is no indication in the epic itself about the source of Odysseus’ sorrow. One might imagine from the context that he is upset about his endlessly prolonged nostos, his homecoming. Yet, there’s a strange disjunction between that and his behavior, what I have called his anhedonia. Instead of making this all about his longing for home, spouse, and child, Rivera-Herrans has interpreted this moment as one shaped by the trauma of losing his men, of all his suffering at war and sea, and his struggle to understand his place in the world. It is a creative and insightful reading that made me reconsider the events of book 5.

This is chiefly what I find important about creative receptions like Epic: The Musical. They both update ancient narratives for modern audiences and provide reinterpretations. In the latter capacity, Epic does as well–if not better–than a lot of scholarship. You could do a lot worse with 2 hours and 20 minutes than listening to these sagas.

While looking around, I found that there are other Odyssey based musicals. Somehow I missed that Prince produced a series of songs for Glam, Slam, Ulysses

Here’s the song for the Cyclops scene, “interactive”

Possessions and Identity in the Iliad

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

There’s a proverb attributed to the Spartan Aristodemus–but also to the poet Alcaeus– “a man is [his] money and no one poor is noble or honored” (χρήματ᾿ ἄνηρ, πένι-/ χρος δ᾿ οὐδ᾿ εἴς πέλετ᾿ ἔσλος οὐδὲ τίμιος; Alcaeus, fragment 360, 3). The line deserves some glossing for those who don’t know a lot of Greek. The ancient word for money here is khrêmata, the plural of the word for “thing”. If we could imagine that this might not mean money the way we imagine it, we could translate this more as “a man is his stuff”, or, more broadly, “you are what you own”.

We don’t actually get this line directly from Alcaeus or Aristodemus, however. It shows up in the epinician poet Pindar and is recording in the scholia to that poet as being proverbial

Pindar, Isthmian 2.1-15

“Thrasyboulos: people in the past
Used to climb onto the chariot
Of the gold-crowned Muses
Armed with a fame-bringing lyre.
Then they would quickly aim their sweet-voiced hymns
At the boys–whoever was cute and
in that sweetest summer season
Of well-throned Aphrodite.

That’s because the Muse wasn’t yet
Too fond of profit nor yet
A working girl.
And sweet songs
From honey-voiced Terpsichore
Weren’t yet sold as pricey tricks.

So now she invites us to remember
The word of the Argive that’s closest
To the truth: “Money,
A man is his money”–
As someone claims when he’s lost
His possessions along with his friends.”

Οἱ μὲν πάλαι, ὦ Θρασύβουλε,
φῶτες, οἳ χρυσαμπύκων
ἐς δίφρον Μοσᾶν ἔβαι-
νον κλυτᾷ φόρμιγγι συναντόμενοι,
ῥίμφα παιδείους ἐτόξευον μελιγάρυας ὕμνους,
ὅστις ἐὼν καλὸς εἶχεν Ἀφροδίτας
εὐθρόνου μνάστειραν ἁδίσταν ὀπώραν.
ἁ Μοῖσα γὰρ οὐ φιλοκερδής
πω τότ᾿ ἦν οὐδ᾿ ἐργάτις·
οὐδ᾿ ἐπέρναντο γλυκεῖ-
αι μελιφθόγγου ποτὶ Τερψιχόρας
ἀργυρωθεῖσαι πρόσωπα μαλθακόφωνοι ἀοιδαί.

νῦν δ᾿ ἐφίητι <τὸ> τὠργείου φυλάξαι
ῥῆμ᾿ ἀλαθείας <⏑–> ἄγχιστα βαῖνον,
“χρήματα χρήματ᾿ ἀνήρ”
ὃς φᾶ κτεάνων θ᾿ ἅμα λειφθεὶς καὶ φίλων.

Here’s the scholion to this poem that explains the repetition χρήματα χρήματ᾿ ἀνήρ.

Schol. Pind. Isthm. 2. 17 (iii 215–16 Drachmann)

“Money, money is the man.” This is counted among proverbs by some, but it is a saying of Aristodemus as Chrysippus reports in his work On Proverbs. Pindar does not name this Aristodemus, but instead makes it clear when he says where he is from, he says only his country, that he is Argive. But Alcaeus names both the man and his country, not Argos but Sparta. For he says that Aristodemos said it smartly in Sparta when he explained, “money is the man, no one poor is noble nor honored”

χρήματα, χρήματ’ ἀνήρ: τοῦτο ἀναγράφεται μὲν εἰς τὰς παροιμίας ὑπ’ ἐνίων, ἀπόφθεγμα δέ ἐστιν ᾿Αριστοδήμου, καθάπερ φησὶ Χρύσιππος ἐν τῷ περὶ παροιμιῶν. τοῦτον δὲ τὸν ᾿Αριστόδημον Πίνδαρος μὲν οὐ τίθησιν ἐξ ὀνόματος, ὡς προδήλου ὄντος ὅς ἐστιν ὁ τοῦτο εἰπών, μόνον δὲ ἐσημειώσατο τὴν πατρίδα, ὅτι ᾿Αργεῖος· ᾿Αλκαῖος δὲ (fr. 49) καὶ τὸ ὄνομα καὶ τὴν πατρίδα τίθησιν, οὐκ ῎Αργος, ἀλλὰ Σπάρτην· ὣς γὰρ δή ποτέ φασιν ᾿Αριστόδημον ἐν Σπάρτᾳ λόγον οὐκ ἀπάλαμνον εἰπεῖν· χρήματ’ ἀνήρ· πενιχρὸς δὲ οὐδεὶς πέλετ’ ἐσλὸς οὐδὲ τίμιος

There’s a great blog post about this that lays it all out here.

Many-moneyed Men

I want to linger for a minute on the fragment while thinking about Homer. The words χρήματ’ ἀνήρ· πενιχρὸς δὲ οὐδεὶς πέλετ’ ἐσλὸς οὐδὲ / τίμιος provide a way for thinking about the elision of character and attributes in the epic’s first book and, by doing so, for reconsidering how the Iliad invites audiences to think about material wealth, identity, and the obligations between individuals and their communities

Let’s start with the first two words, a nominal sentence χρήματ’ ἀνήρ. Today, we translate it as “money is the man,” or” man is money” when it could also mean something like “a man is his things–so no one poor is noble nor honored”. As a Homerist, I cannot help but hear these lines and think of Iliad 1 where the value statements of esthlos (“noble, good”) and timios (“honored”) are asserted and reinterpreted during conversations Agamemnon complains that Calchas’ speech is never “good” (esthlon, 1.08) and the gods worry about the feast being disrupted by strife, depriving them of “noble pleasure” (1.576). Achilles accuses Agamemnon of expecting the Achaeans to “gather up honor [timê]” for him and Menelaos (1.159), while Agamemnon points out that others will honor him (timêsousi, 1.175) and Nestor later asserts that the two men are not of the same honor (timês, 1.278) and Achilles asks Thetis to ensure that Zeus will provide honor for him (timên, 1.353) to make up for his lost esteem.

Focusing on just the terms translated here as “noble” and “honor” leaves out an essential metaphorical step in the fragment. The slight to Achilles’ timê is concrete–he, the narrator, and others point to the removal of his prize possession (geras), the captured woman Briseis, as an alteration of his esteem. A way to rephrase the situation in book 1 might be: a man is his things [geras]: and no one poor is noble or honored. So, by depriving Achilles of a thing, Agamemnon has undermined his social standing as well as his esteem.

The social standing part probably needs a little more attention. To gloss this with one more step, the word for poor, penikhros, is derived from a verbal root that has to do with toil and work. The semantic range is likely that people who have to labor are not already worth the goods that would qualify them for a specific class and a level of honor. (Or, more generously, if you don’t have wealth, you need to work; there’s also the additional resonance of ponos as suffering to consider.)

But wait, there’s more: it isn’t just that a person is their money, it is a gendered man who is defined by his possessions and in the world of the Iliad, possessions include other people, especially women. It would, then, not be an unfair reading of the Iliad’s view of the Trojan War that, just as Achilles loses honor by being deprived of Briseis, so too Menelaos lost honor when Helen departed.

Origins, Thoughts

So, what happens in Iliad 1 is, to my taste, crystallized in the fragment attributed to Alcaeus. I can phrase what I think is important in this in two ways: first, I posed this as an elision between a metaphorical esteem (timê) and its concrete representation (geras), both of which are additional symbolic indications of a person’s value and class (i.e., whether or not they need to work). The second way to put it is that there is a collapse of signifier and signified and then a subsequent replacement of the thing itself by its symbolic representation.

In these moves, the money/things cease to be a symbol of a person’s value or worth and end up becoming first a representation of the person and then the persons in fact.. The shifting is not insignificant for the plot of the Iliad: one way to read Achilles’ speeches in book 9 is as a probing of that very collapse between esteem (fame, reputation, social position) and the things that are supposed to represent it. His rejection of the gifts promised by the embassy is in part a rejection of the proposition that, regardless of what you do in the world, your worth is defined by the possessions other people permit you to have.

This interpretive thread interests me for two reasons: first, it provides, as I start to indicate above, a slightly different way of reading Achilles’ alienation and the Iliad’s reflection on heroism, politics, and human communities. The second reason resides in the history of ideas, or, perhaps better, a notional genealogy of the values explored in Homer and how they are selected and received in subsequent generations.

I have been inspired by scholars who have recently explored the origins of certain aspects of modern culture in epic. Edith Hall has argued that the Iliad’s extractive and consumptive relationship with the environment foreshadows and informs modernity’s destruction of the environment. Similarly, Jackie Murray and Patrice Rankine have traced modern approaches to race and enslavement back to ancient epic, in its casualization of class violence, proto-racialization with races of heroes and demigods, and the implicit cultural structure that facilitates the domination of one person over another based on gender, class, and race.

When I look at the extreme inequality of late-stage capitalism, its subverting of participatory systems of governance, and the casual violence it perpetuates both domestically and internationally, I can’t help but follow the model of these scholars and look for the history of the values that enable and encourage our current march toward self-destruction. There is a symbolic harmony as well between a system of human value that equates persons with things and downgrades actual human labor and the extractive and exploitative systems of oppression and environmental devastation. One could argue that the Iliad contains the structures and ideas that have led to the rampant inequality and extractive expansion characteristic of modern, state-abetted capitalism.

The Structures of Poems and (mis)Reading

The final sentence of the last paragraph, however, is not the whole story. It would be simplistic to say that epic is the root of modern capitalism. It would be better, but still insufficiently nuanced, to say that epic reflects the roots of our modern world. Instead, I would return to what I have written before that Homeric epic is both a product and producer of culture. It reflects and embeds a system of values in its own narrative, but not without pressing on them, questioning them, and asking audiences to do the same.

In an article in the Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (2018), I argue that early Greek epic both embeds a thematic pattern in its narratives and is shaped by the basic aesthetics of that pattern. Homer and Hesiod both provide themes of strife (eris, neikos) issuing from conflicts over the division or distribution of goods (dasmos), and requiring a judgment or resolution (krisis) that also expects audiences to make additional determinations through the act of interpretation. The conflict of Hesiod’s Theogony is in part resolved by the stabilization and concretization of divine timai and gerai when Zeus assigns rights and spheres of influence to the gods.

The problem is that stability is not possible for human communities because we are constantly in a process of change. There is death-cult aspect to what is on offer in the Iliad that relates to this problem. Achilles, as he famously articulates it, is offered the choice of a long life in ignominy or a short one with kleos aphthiton. The vegetal aspect of the adjective “imperishable” here is important: this kind of kleos cannot wither and die like the mortal substance it is linked too. The transformation from a moneyed-man who can lose the tokens of esteem that become that esteem itself into an eternal tale strives in part to face the challenge of the continual redistribution of human life. Yet, as I have suggested elsewhere (most recently, Storylife, chapter 4), Achilles doesn’t make that choice and no one in the Iliad seems to support such a vision for kleos, with the exception of figures who have no other option (like Hektor).

The discussion of kleos, however, is something of an aside. What early Greek poetry shows is that the distribution of things creates conflict that leads to the need for human beings to make judgment about the world, both in terms of the division of goods and the meaning of human life relative to that distribution. If we follow the thematic arcs of both epics, they challenge a simplistic approach to wealth–that man is indeed his possessions–but they do not fundamentally question whether or not a human being can and should be a possession contributing to someone else’s honor; or whether it is right to commit violence and end human lives for excess wealth (although the Iliad shows that’s pretty stupid).

Each epic does ask us to think about the tension between how someone is valued in a community for their wealth and power and what they actually do in the world. This doesn’t undercut the notion that a person is what they possess; instead, it acknowledges the structure of a world where many accept that definition and asks audiences to see the fundamental limitations of attaching a person’s worth to the things they own.

A few thins to read

Brown, Adam. “Homeric talents and the ethics of exchange.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 118, 1998, pp. 165-172. Doi: 10.2307/632237

Christensen, Joel P. “Eris and Epos: Composition, Competition and the ‘Domestication’ of Strife.” YAGE 2: 1–39.

De Cristofaro, Luigi. “Reading the raids : the sacred value of the spoils : some considerations on Il., 2, 686-694, Il., 9, 128-140 and Il., 19, 252-266.” Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale, vol. 61, no. 1, 2019, pp. 11-41. Doi: 10.19272/201906501001

Murray, Jackie. 2021 “Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey” in Denise McCoskey, ed., Bloomsbury Cultural History of Race. Volume 1: Antiquity. 137-156

Mark Peacock, Introducing Money. Economics as social theory 33. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. xii, 212. ISBN 9780415539883. $45.00 (pb).

Rankine, Patrice. “Odysseus as Slave: The Ritual of Domination and Social Death in Homeric Society,” in Reading Ancient Slavery, eds. Richard Alston, Edith Hall, and Laura Proffitt. New York: Bristol, 2011: 34-50.

Ready, Jonathan L. (2007). “Toil and Trouble: the acquisition of spoils in the « Iliad ». TAPA, 137(1), 3-43.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 382pp, $28.99 (spbk), ISBN 0521539927.

Wealth/Economy in Homer

Adamo, Sara. “ un posto per Omero ?.” Incidenza dell’Antico, vol. 20, 2022, pp. 221-233.

Brown, Adam. “Homeric talents and the ethics of exchange.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 118, 1998, pp. 165-172. Doi: 10.2307/632237

Christensen, Joel P.. “Eris and Epos: composition, competition, and the domestication of strife.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 2, 2018, pp. 1-39. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00201001

Fox, Rachel Sarah. Feasting practices and changes in Greek society from the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age. BAR. International Series; 2345. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012.

Haubold, Johannes (2000). Homer’s people: epic poetry and social formation. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr.

Jones, Donald W.. “The archaeology and economy of Homeric gift exchange.” Opuscula Atheniensia, vol. 24, 1999, pp. 11-24.

Karanika, Andromache. Voices at work: women, performance, and labor in ancient Greece. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 2014.

Kelly, Adrian. “ Iliad 9.381-4.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 3, 2006, pp. 321-333. Doi: 10.1163/156852506778132400

Kolb, Frank. “ a trading center and commercial city ?.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 108, no. 4, 2004, pp. 577-613.

Korfmann, Manfred. “ archaeological evidence for the period of Troia VI/VII.” Classical World, vol. 91, no. 5, 1997-1998, pp. 369-385.

Koutrouba, Konstantina and Apostolopoulos, Konstantinos. “Home economics in the Homeric epics.” Πλάτων, vol. 52, 2001-2002, pp. 191-208.

Lewis, David M.. “The Homeric roots of helotage.” From Homer to Solon : continuity and change in archaic Greece. Eds. Bernhardt, Johannes C. and Canevaro, Mirko. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 454. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2022. 64-92. Doi: 10.1163/9789004513631_005

Lyons, Deborah J.. “ ideologies of marriage and exchange in ancient Greece.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 22, no. 1, 2003, pp. 93-134. Doi: 10.1525/ca.2003.22.1.93

Murray, Sarah C.. The collapse of the Mycenaean economy: imports, trade, and institutions, 1300-700 BCE. New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2017.

Olsen, Barbara A.. “The worlds of Penelope : women in the Mycenaean and Homeric economies.” Arethusa, vol. 48, no. 2, 2015, pp. 107-138.

Piquero Rodríguez, Juan. “« Blood-money » : la compensación por homicidio en la Grecia micénica.” Δῶρα τά οἱ δίδομεν φιλέοντες : homenaje al profesor Emilio Crespo. Eds. Conti Jiménez, Luz, Fornieles Sánchez, Raquel and Jiménez López, María Dolores. Madrid: Ed. de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2020. 221-229.

Rose, P. W.. Class in archaic Greece. Cambridge Books Online. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2012.

Scodel, Ruth. “Odysseus’ dog and the productive household.” Hermes, vol. 133, no. 4, 2005, pp. 401-408.

Seaford, Richard A. S.. Money and the early Greek mind: Homer, philosophy, tragedy. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2004.

Tandy, David W.. Warriors into traders: the power of the market in early Greece. Classics and contemporary thought; 5. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California Pr., 1997.

Thomas, Carol G.. “Penelope’s worth ; looming large in early Greece.” Hermes, vol. CXVI, 1988, pp. 257-264.

Van Wees, Hans (1992). Status warriors : war, violence and society in Homer and history. Amsterdam: Gieben.