“They took Melanthios out through the hall and into the courtyard.
They cut off his nose and ears with pitiless bronze.
Then they cut off his balls and fed them raw to the dogs;
And they cut off his hands and feet with an enraged heart.”
“If this one defeats you and proves stronger,
I will send you to the shore, throw you in a black ship,
And ship you off to king Ekhetos, the most wicked man of all.
He will cut off your nose and ears with pitiless bronze
And after severing your balls, he will feed them raw to his dogs.”
“Ekhetos was the son of Boukhetos, after whom there is also a city named in Sicily. He is said to have been tyrant of the Sicilians. The story is that he did every kind of mischief to the inhabitants of his land and killed foreigners by mutilating them. He exhibited so much wickedness that even those who lived far off would send people to him to kill when they wanted to punish someone. He developed all kinds of unseemly methods. This is why the people would not endure so bitter a tyranny, and they killed him by stoning.”
A lingering interpretive problem for the Odyssey is why the epic introduces this torture and attributes it to a very bad person, only to have Odysseus commit the very same act later in the epic. A pressing question for modern readers of Homer is why so few of us have bothered to worry about this at all.
Combined with the hanging of the enslaved women, this should be an indictment of Odysseus and support for the rebellion against him in book 24.
From the Suda:
“Tyrannos: The poets before the Trojan War used to name kings (basileis) tyrants, but later during the time of Archilochus, this word was transferred to the Greeks in general, just as the sophist Hippias records. Homer, at least, calls the most lawless man of all, Ekhetos, a king, not a tyrant. Tyrant is a a name that derives from the Tyrrenians because these men were quite severe pirates.* None of the other poets uses the name tyrant in any of their works. But Aristotle in the Constitution of the Cumaeans says that tyrants were once called aisumnêtai, because this name is a bit of a euphemism.”
Immediately following the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Elon Musk addressed crowds at the parade congregated in the Capital One Arena. After thanking the crowd for showing up to re-elect the 45th president, he overshadowed the whole day by twice making a gesture that many have interpreted as the Nazi salute or “Sieg Heil” used first by Fascists in Italy in the 1920s and then adopted by members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s.
The response to this moment was immediate, with many on the left decrying this as “abhorrent” and something that “must worry every democrat,” while others denied he was making a fascist salute. The Anti-Defamation League, which has been very vocal in the past 15 months in calling out the antisemitism of Palestinian protests and anti-Israel sentiment, said in a tweet that he made “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm” and Dr. Aaron Astor, a historian at Maryville College, TN wrote that it was “a socially awkward autistic man’s wave to the crowd where he says ‘my heart goes out to you,’” gaslighting people with a healthy dose of ableism. The far-right and various domestic terrorist groups in fact celebrated Musk’s actions, identifying it precisely as a Nazi salute, with infamous extremist figures such as Nick Fuentes, Evan Kilgore, and Keith Woods all praising Musk and his actions. And for a figure who has voiced his support for far-right movements in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, all of whom have ties to fascist groups or histories, should we really be surprised that he would behave in such a way?
While the debate will continue to rage, it is also the Roman connection to this action that interests me. Mainstream media and people on the right have been referring to his salute as a Roman salute. This term has a long history, but it turns out not even close to long enough to include the actual Romans. George Mason University Classicist Martin Winkler has done a deep dive into the history of the so-called Roman salute, and has conclusively proven that the Roman salute was invented in the theatrical productions of the nineteenth century for use during “toga plays” inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii.
Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David, Louvre Museum
It subsequently made its way into the general mindset through the invention of cinema. While Roman art depicts salutes and greetings that are similar, none reflect the specific salute performed by Elon Musk at the inauguration parade. It was instead this media proliferation of the Roman salute, featuring a thump of the chest and then the full extension of the right arm at around 135° with palm down, that led to its use by extremist political groups in the twentieth century. Although it had existed for decades in fictional displays of ancient Roman power, it was not given its explicitly fascist ideological meaning until 1919 when Italian Gabriele D’Annunzio used it at a ritual in Fiume, inspiring Mussolini to adopt it.
That a symbol of Romanitas, albeit a fictional one, should be taken up by the fascist parties of the early-to-mid twentieth century is not surprising, given Mussolini’s explicit propagandistic program of framing his Italy as the new Roman Empire and Hitler’s fascination with Germany’s alleged connection to ancient Greece. Fascist political parties and their supporters throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day have connected themselves to the ancient world through the use of ancient symbols in an attempt to legitimize their white supremacist goals and activities. Images from the ancient world and phrases such as Molon Labe (Come and take them – a phrase attributed to Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans stood against the Persian army and adopted by proponents of the second Amendment and the NRA) were seen in abundance during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection attempt at the Capitol. Nick Fuentes, celebrating Musk’s salute in an unhinged video, starts to call it the Roman salute but then ends up referring to it as “a straight-up, like, Sieg Heil.” So why is the mainstream media referring to it as a Roman salute?
I am willing to give some benefit of the doubt to the mainstream media, which, like so much of the population, has received the messaging that such a salute originated in the Roman world through cinema and imagery. For example, an Al-Jazeera article discussing the salute the following day stated that the “gesture dates back to a salute that is said to have been used in ancient Rome.” Many people do indeed say this, albeit erroneously, because that claim has been baked into the social consciousness. However, more cynically, and, unfortunately, I believe more accurately, is that it is in the best interest of our mainstream media, controlled by the billionaire elite who have pledged their support for the new president, to act as apologists for the new regime and aid the transition to authoritarianism.
That the mainstream media has a white supremacist agenda and provides national and local affiliate stations with acceptable talking points is a widely known ‘secret,’ and this very gesture helps to illustrate exactly this point. While the rest of the world openly acknowledged that Musk was performing a Sieg Heil salute, with Germany’s Deutsches Museum of Science and Technology going so far as to remove a portrait of him from their astronautics gallery, US news has generally ‘both sides’ed that moment. While some may argue that it is just balanced journalism, I would like to draw attention to an article from Fox 5 DC written by Jillian Smith on January 21st, in which the author directly quotes from Winkler’s previously mentioned academic work. She states that “the saluto Romano was previously used as a sign of respect in ancient Roman culture.”
The whole thesis of Winkler’s work The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology is that the claim that the Nazi salute is Roman is false. Smith quotes “This salute was based on an ancient Roman custom, just as the term Fascism itself is associated with the Roman fasces – the bundle of rods with an axe in their middle that were a symbol of the power of office held by higher Roman magistracies and some priests.” However, the sentence she quotes starts with the phrase “According to the Fascist ideology of the 1920s and in common perceptions still current…” and the sentence is followed by the statement, “As will be seen, however, the term “Roman salute” is a misnomer.” That she saw the text of his work and omitted these phrases suggests a conscious downplaying of the gesture and an attempt to obfuscate the ties to Nazism by associating it with Rome, an imperial power used historically and today by colonizing countries and enterprises to legitimize the atrocities capitalist white supremacy needs to enact to succeed. The links between the discipline of Classics and white supremacy are many and constitute a much larger discussion. Still, as a good rule of thumb, wherever you see references to ancient Greece and Rome in so-called Western culture, it is always good to ask yourself why they are being used, whom the references benefit, and whom they exclude.
Dr. Ian Lockey is a teacher at Friends Select School in Philadelphia
“[in this case] the soul and the body would experience things together, but they would not have the same reactions as one another. But, now, it is entirely clear that one follows another. This is especially obvious from the following. For madness seems to be a matter of the mind; doctors, however, respond to it by cleansing the body with medicines and also by telling them to pursue certain habits in life which may relieve the mind of madness.
So, the form of the body is relieved by treatments to the body at the very same time that the soul is freed from madness. Since they are both relieved together, it is clear that their reactions are in synchrony. It is also clear from this that the forms special to the body are similar to the capabilities of the mind, with the result that all similarities in living things are clear signs of some kind of sameness.”
“While I live, I love to sing these songs and when I die
Put a pipe above my head and a lyre near my feet.
Play a song for me.
Who could find a limit to wealth or cure for poverty?
Or who among the human race knows an end to gold?
Now one who has money wants more money still
And even though he’s rich, he’s tortured like the poor!
Play a song for me.
Whenever you see a corpse or pass by quiet tombs
You’re glancing at a shared mirror: the dead expected this.
Time is on loan and the lender is mean.
When he asks for payment in full, you render it with pain.
Play a song for me.”
Achilles does not receive the news of Patroklos’ passing until the beginning of book 18 thanks to the prolonged struggle over the bodies in book 17. Antilokhos (Antilochus, Nestor’s son), who, according to other traditions, plays a role similar to Patroklos in the lost Aithiopis when Memnon kills him and incites Achilles’ rage anew, comes running to Achilles to tell him the “painful message”. When he finds Achilles, the scene is somewhat guided through his eyes (what narratologists might call ‘focalized’, see de Jong below), but the information is a strange variation on the kind a narrator usually provides.
Homer, Iliad 18.2-17
“Swift-footed Antilokhos came as a messenger to Achilles. He found him in front of the straight-prowed ships, Considering through his heart what things could have happened. He was deeply troubled then and spoke to his own great heart:
“Oh, my heart, why are the long-haired Achaeans again Clustering around the ships, horrified from the plain? I hope the gods haven’t brought the evil pains to bear on my heart As my mother once warned me and told me that The best of the Myrmidons would be torn from the light of the sun by Trojan hands while I was still alive. Is it really that the bold son of Menoitios has died, The fool. I really was telling him just to push the fire From the ships and come back, and not to battle in force with Hektor.” While he was going over those things in his thoughts and heart, Then the son of glorious Nestor was coming near, Shedding warm tears when he spoke his painful message.”
This passage is remarkable to me for a few reasons. First, we have the application of Achilles’ epithets (“swift-footed”) to Antilochus, but in such a close proximity that any reasonable listener might feel the tension between Antilochus’ urgent message and Achilles’ lack of motion. This contrast is in part proleptic, since Achilles is about to burst back into action and become the kind of hero of force more appropriate to the conventional epithet. As Elton Barker and I have explored (Homer’s Thebes; See Roger Dunkle’s work as well and Storylife for another take) the depiction of Achilles in the Iliad plays on the tension between his traditional heroic identity, marked by swiftness, and his actions in the Iliad, where he is swift to anger but stalled in action for two-thirds of the epic. His swiftness in the Iliad is related both to the dynamic force of his anger and the swiftness (or brevity) of his life. Achilles, ironically or not, is described as swift-footed right before he permits him to lead out the Myrmidons in his stead (16.48) and he regains the epithet in his grief when he speaks to his mother soon after Antilochus arrival (18.78).
Second, there’s also an interesting angle in thinking about the Iliad and narrative time. One might imagine this scene as representing Achilles’ concern throughout Patroklos’ absence rather than just at the moment of this conflict. The join in the action is this: Hektor and Aeneas have routed the Danaans and they are fleeing across the ditch constructed to defend the ships. The book begins acknowledging, almost generically, “so they were struggling like a burning fire” and then Antilochus arrives. For me, the structure of the line recalls the beginning of the embassy in book 9 when “they find him delighting his thoughts in the clear-voiced lyre” (τὸν δ’ εὗρον φρένα τερπόμενον φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ, 9.186): here, the idea is spread into two lines, first noting where he is (in front of the ships) and what he is doing (i.e., thinking about what has happened). In each case, the action ascribed in a participle (“delighting” “wondering”) to Achilles is likely the interpretation from the internal audience (the embassy, then Antilochus) framed by the narrator.
Fresco from Francois Tomb, in the Etruscan city of Vulci, Italy
Yet, there is a potential tension between the ongoing nature of the participle (here, present and probably progressive) and the tense of the speech introduction which tends to imply a one-time action. In fact, the speech introduction and conclusion used for this speech is elsewhere used to show contemplation and deliberation over a course of action before a choice is made. As I explore elsewhere, this combination is used four times in a row in book 5 of the Odyssey with the expletive ὤ μοι ἐγώ (essentially, FML), to show Odysseus struggling with options and forced to make a choice. Indeed, throughout Homer, this speech introduction seems to mark a deliberation on options or a contemplation of the situation. With Achilles, however, there may be a pattern of reflection rather than choice. In book 20, this marks Achilles reacting to Aeneas escaping him (20.243 ff.) and in book 21, it prefaces his killing of Lykaon (cf. 21.54) but in each of those cases, the first utterance is a kind of expletive about other people’s foolishness or bad luck (ὢ πόποι) rather than his own.
In this scene, Achilles considers two options over which he has no control: whether or not Patroklos has been injured or killed is something of a coin flip, a Schrödinger’s hero kind of situation from one perspective. But the combination of Antilochus’ vision of the hero trying to figure out what happened and a speech and speech introduction sequence that usually signals choice produces what I have been thinking of as “productive dissonance” (a kind of poetic resonance built on contrast instead of echoing). A clear example of “productive dissonance” to my mind is the use of the duals in Iliad 9: a traditional form (the duals of two messengers going to an enemy or outsider) is applied to an unconventional situation (a friend/ally acting like an enemy or outsider) to emphasize its extraordinary nature.
At the beginning of book 18, we have a pattern used to mark one situation applied to something that doesn’t quite fit. What I think this means here is that the juxtaposition of a form typically used for Homeric figures deciding between two possible options (even if one is clearly not realistic) with the audience and Antilochus’ knowledge of what has occurred raises the stakes and further characterizes his denial about what he already suspects. Achilles is ruminating, he is pre-lamenting, and he is in the denial phase of grief as he calls his loved one a “fool”. In a way, this tension between his suspicion and the actual events may reflect, at times, a similar tension between audience desire for the outcomes of the action and the plot as it unfolds.
Ceiling Mural depicting Achilles mourning Patroclus as Thetis brings him the new weapons forged by Hephaistos ca 1802-1805 by Francesco and Gian Battista Ballanti Graziani In the Galleria d’Achille Palazzo Milzetti, Faenza, Italy
Confirming much of this is the revelation of another prophecy from Thetis that is nowhere else reported. The productive dissonance combines with the echoes of the embassy and Achilles own claim in book 9 that he has two fates (to live a long, ignoble life, or die with ternal glory, 9.410-416). No audience outside the poem believes that this is actually a choice. The dissonance produced here reflects not just the complexity of Achilles’ anticipatory grief, and the protective human response of denial, but it also may signal in part an understanding of how audiences engage with this story (and others).
The ancient scholarship on this passage speaks to some of these issues. First, one scholiast notes that it is understandable that Achilles would be in denial here.
Schol. A ad Hom. Il. 18.4
“People who are struggling for their loved ones fall into desperation among dangers. Their minds fall into misfortune in advance.”
There’s also some concern about what it means for Achilles to talk about the future death of the Best of the Myrmidons while Achilles is still alive. Some ancient scholars insisted that Achilles could be correct in being surprised at Patroklos’ death, since Automedon is actually the best of the Myrmidons.
Schol. A ad Hom. Il. 18.10-11a ex
“According to Rhianos [fr. 1M] the issue isn’t that there are two [who are the best of the Myrmidons] but that Patroklos is not one of the Myrmidons, since he is a Lokrian from Opos. So, Aristarchus claims that that one should know from this that he is the best of the Myrmidons after him. According to some of those who follow Homer, Aktôr the father of Menoitios allegedly took Aigina and Menoitios was born from her and lived in Opos. So, Patroklos is a Myrmidon by origin. Patroklos can be said to be a Myrmidon for other reasons as well, thanks to the fact that he leads the Myrmidons after Achilles.
But how is it, some ask, that after Achilles learned this fact from his mother he still sent Patroklos to war? One might ay that it is because she didn’t speak the name or the time clearly, that there was some forgetting of these kinds of things at the right time. But once it happened, they recall it.”
Barker, E.T.E. and Christensen, Joel P. 2019. Homer’s Thebes. Hellenic Studies 84. Washington, DC.
Christensen, Joel P. The many-minded man: the « Odyssey », psychology, and the therapy of epic. Myth and Poetics; 2. Ithaca (N. Y.): Cornell University Pr., 2020.
Homer, Iliad 18.2-17 [for more on this passage, go here]
“Swift-footed Antilokhos came as a messenger to Achilles.
He found him in front of the straight-prowed ships,
Considering through his heart what things could have happened.
He was deeply troubled then and spoke to his own great heart:
“Oh, my heart, why are the long-haired Achaeans again
Clustering around the ships, horrified from the plain?
I hope the gods haven’t brought the evil pains to bear on my heart
As my mother once warned me and told me that
The best of the Myrmidons would be torn from the light of the sun
by Trojan hands while I was still alive.
Is it really that the bold son of Menoitios has died,
The fool. I really was telling him just to push the fire
From the ships and come back, and not to battle in force with Hektor.”
While he was going over those things in his thoughts and heart,
Then the son of glorious Nestor was coming near,
Shedding warm tears when he spoke his painful message.”
“According to Rhianos [fr. 1M] the issue isn’t that there are two [who are the best of the Myrmidons] but that Patroklos is not one of the Myrmidons, since he is a Lokrian from Opos. So, Aristarchus claims that that one should know from this that he is the best of the Myrmidons after him. According to some of those who follow Homer, Aktôr the father of Menoitios allegedly took Aigina and Menoitios was born from her and lived in Opos. So, Patroklos is a Myrmidon by origin. Patroklos can be said to be a Myrmidon for other reasons as well, thanks to the fact that he leads the Myrmidons after Achilles.
But how is it, some ask, that after Achilles learned this fact from his mother he still sent Patroklos to war? One might ay that it is because she didn’t speak the name or the time clearly, that there was some forgetting of these kinds of things at the right time. But once it happened, they recall it.”
“We are all hearing the reports that everywhere is filled with corpses—the fields, the roads, the hills, crests, caves, peaks, groves, and trenches—and that some of the corpses are feasts for birds and beasts while the rivers carry others to the sea.
I am sometimes surprised by this news but at other times I blame those who suffer it and I say that they have suffered what is right, that they have earned this for going into exile. You might even say that they invited upon themselves the swords of their murderers.
They would not have suffered these things if they stayed at home. They have met these events because they are wandering and are offering themselves as a feast to these men who have been criminals for a long time. Think of it like this: they have made others into bandits by making the inducement greater! Who could pity people who ruin themselves willingly?”
Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, from the Ahmed I Falnama; attributed to Nakkaş Hasan Pasha; Turkey, Ottoman Period, 1614-16; Opaque watercolor and gold on paper; 49 x 36.4 cm; Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, H. 1703, f. 7v
“When some musician or scholar has died, then their music or writing dies with them; but their basic contributions persist and, in some way, live as long as the universe does. Those who are scholars and musicians now or who will be in the future will continue to develop thanks to these previous works in an undying procession.
In the same way, whatever is prudent, wise, brave, just, or just simply wise in an individual may perish, but it nevertheless remains as immortal thought and all excellence is safeguarded against decay in the immortal nature of the whole [universe]. Through this advantage people today and those of tomorrow will also become civilized—unless we believe that the death of one individual person in turn visits ruin upon humankind.”
“Whoever destroys a soul [of Israel], it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life of Israel, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
This composite image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the ROSAT telescope (purple), infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (orange), and optical data from the SuperCosmos Sky Survey (blue) made by the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.
At the end of Iliad 16, Patroklos dies. As Patroklos himself puts it in his final speech, Hektor was merely the third responsible for his death, after Apollo, and Euphorbos (16.850). Euphorbos, who is introduced in book 16 for the first time in the epic as “the son of Panthoos who excelled his age group in the spear, horsemanship, and swift feet” (16.808-9). There’s little information about Euphorbos—a scholion reports that his brother is Polydamas (which makes this pairing with Hektor weird). He is also described in book 16 as a “Dardanian man” (Δάρδανος ἀνὴρ, 16.807), which seems to have caused some consternation to ancient scholars who assert that “In Homer, Troy is one thing and Dardania is another” καθ’ ῞Ομηρον γοῦν ἄλλη ἐστὶν ἡ Τροία καὶ ἄλλη ἡ Δαρδανία, schol. T ad Hom. IL. 15.449-551b) and elsewhere that Panthoos is a foreign ally. Euphorbos echoes Paris’ role in Achilles’ death. In some traditions, the philosopher Pythagoras claimed that he was Euphorbos in an earlier life.
Those details aside: Eurphorbos does not linger for long in the Iliad. In book 16, he faces Menelaos and follows Paris into the gloom. What interests me about this passage is the simile that follows the death and an explanation of it.
Homer, Iliad 17.61-69
“That’s the way the well-limbed son of Panthos, Euphorbos, was When Atreus’ son Menelaos killed him and took his weapons” “As when a mountain lion bred in the mountains and trusting in its own strength Seizes a cow from a grazing herd, whichever one is best. It takes her and breaks her neck with his strong teeth, first And then gulps down all her blood and organs as he rages. Around him the dogs and men, the shepherds wail aloud but standing from afar because they do not wish to stand in his way—once pale fear overcomes them. In that way, the heart in no man dared to stand and face glorious Agamemnon.”
Menelaos and Hector fighting over the body of Euphorbos. Middle Wild Goat style. 600 BCE
Lion similes abound in Homer. The image of a single lion surrounded by humans or domesticated animal is common, and it can mark extreme danger to an isolated hero (surrounded by hunters) or, conversely, a moment of surpassing glory as a hero is described as a lion having its way among defenseless animals. The language is fairly formulaic to start—the mountain-bred lion who trusts in his strength marks Menelaos out as preeminent at this moment.
But, as with many other similes, the tenor (the thing compared) and the vehicle (the comparison) shift as the image unfolds. The narrator’s gaze moves from the attacking lion to the act of despoiling Euphorbos’ weapons, compared to the lion breaking and consuming the hero as other animals (dogs) and humans (shepherds) watch in horror from a distance. While the narration is visual, we can’t forget the verb ἰύζουσιν is rare in Greek literature and seems to correlate to animal or animalistic sounds (although a scholiast is sure to let readers know that the dogs are actually barking, οἱ δὲ κύνες ὑλακτοῦσι).
When the narrator leaves the simile, the “pale fear” that overtakes them, that prevents them from facing the rampaging lion, seems to be compared to the heart in each of the Trojan warriors that will not allow them to face him. The concatenation of images is dizzying: the Trojans are at once other cattle, dogs, and humans witnessing the lion who began as the focal point of the simile. Menelaos’ eventually abortive despoiling of Euphorbus’ corpse leaves almost a vivid crunching sound, even though it never happens.
This simile creates a narrative space within epic that is like a fantasy within a fantasy. I have discussed similes a few times before (Patroklos crying like a girl; Hektor as a beast; Hektor as a snowy mountain; the similes of Iliad 12). As I mention in several points, I think that the way similes unfold echo the associative and unpredictable ways that narrative blends unfold in our minds. In a talk I gave in 2024 at Vanderbilt University (presenting part of Storylife), I compared similes to the bounded forms of ring composition. These parenthetical structures have also developed a cooperative function of inviting audiences to think about the characteristics of the speech in a particular way. 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).
Before getting into a few details, I want to offer an exam type analogy: the tenors and vehicles of Homeric similes are to each other what external audiences and epic are outside of the poem. That is, 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. Two examples help show this.
Iliad 6.503‑514
“Paris did not then linger in his lofty halls, But, once he had put on his shining weapons, inlaid with bronze, Then he hurried through the city, fully trusting his swift feet. As when some cooped up horse, fully fed at the manger, Breaks his bond and rushes out, luxuriating in the field, Glorying in his habit of bathing in the fine-flowing river– How he holds his head up high and his hair darts Around his shoulders, and as he trusts in his glory, His light limbs carry him to the hangouts and pasture of mares– That’s how the son of Priam, Paris, went to the top of Pergamon, Shining in his armor like the shining sun Exulting, and his swift feet were carrying them….
The first example is about 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 what I find interesting here is 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 speaks to a horse compared to Paris as much as a prince compared to a horse. The bleedover is, I think, 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
Iliad 7.1-7
So he spoke and shining Hektor rushed out of the gates And his brother Alexandros went with him. Both of them Were truly eager in their heart to go to war and fight. As when a god grants a wind to sailors who are just Waiting for it, after they have worn themselves out By driving their smooth oars into the sea, and their limbs have been wearied, That’s how these two appeared to the Trojans awaiting [them].”
Simpler, but no less interesting is the simile from book 7: When Hektor and Paris leave the gates, we are not sure what the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle is: we start out, perhaps wrongly, thinking that they are the sailors but find out as we move through the simile that the tableau of them returning to battle is being seen 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, this 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. All of this occurs in a way that is deeply akin to the cognitive blend proposed by Mark Turner in The Literary Mind.
Ancient testimony indicates that similes like this have caused audience confusion over time.
Schol. Ad Hom. Il. 17.60-69 ex
“Everything [in the simile] is compared to everything [without]: the mass of the Trojans is the herd of cattle; Eurphorbos who us the best is compared to the best of the cattle. The poet acknowledges that he is the best earlier [Il. 17.80]. Menelaos [is compared] to the lion as he kills him and the uselessness of the best of the Trojans [is compared] to the cowherds and dogs who are not able to defend [the cow].”
The takeaway, I think, should be that devices like this in Homer follow organic growth rules rather than the rigid structures of parallels and allusions that dominate literate/literary art. The images move where the inspiration takes them, adding ideas (paratactically) to create complex layers of meeting that respond to diverse perspectives and invite audiences to disentangle them. They are less puzzles to be solved, than landscapes to be explored and worlds to inhabit.
“Aegisthus, why do you push me again into the deep
And re-kindle my rage which was just cooling down?
The victor has indulged himself a bit with a captive girl—
It befits neither a wife nor a mistress to acknowledge it.
The law for the throne is different from the one for a man’s bed.
Even with this, why does my mind not allow me
To bring the harsher laws to bear on my husband when I have been shamed?
It’s right for the one who needs forgiveness to grant it easily.”
Aegisthe, quid me rursus in praeceps agis
iramque flammis iam residentem incitas?
permisit aliquid victor in captam sibi:
nec coniugem hoc respicere nec dominam decet.
lex alia solio est, alia privato in toro.
quid, quod severas ferre me leges viro
non patitur animus turpis admissi memor?
det ille veniam facile cui venia est opus.
