Beginning Iliad 11

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.

Book 11 of the Iliad is filled with action. But it begins with a sunrise. This particular dawn resets the action for the poem and is a good example of how much resonance with myth and other traditions the Homeric narrator can create with just a few words.

Iliad 11.1-14

Then Dawn rose from her bed alongside glorious Tithonos
In order to bring light to the immortal and mortals alike.
But Zeus sent Strife to the swift ships of the Achaeans,
Harsh strife, clutching an omen of war in its hands.
It stood on the dark sear-faring vessel of Odysseus,
And then bellowed in the middle in both directions.
First to the shelters of Ajax, the son of Telamon
And then to those of Achilles—they had pulled their ships up
At the farthest ends, because they trusted in their bravery and strength.
She stood there tall and shouted terribly, loudly,
And imbued the heart of each Achaean who hear her
With the great strength needs to fight and battle without end.
For them, war became sweeter than returning home
In their hollow ships to their dear fatherland.”

᾿Ηὼς δ’ ἐκ λεχέων παρ’ ἀγαυοῦ Τιθωνοῖο
ὄρνυθ’, ἵν’ ἀθανάτοισι φόως φέροι ἠδὲ βροτοῖσι·
Ζεὺς δ’ ῎Εριδα προΐαλλε θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας ᾿Αχαιῶν
ἀργαλέην, πολέμοιο τέρας μετὰ χερσὶν ἔχουσαν.
στῆ δ’ ἐπ’ ᾿Οδυσσῆος μεγακήτεϊ νηῒ μελαίνῃ,
ἥ ῥ’ ἐν μεσσάτῳ ἔσκε γεγωνέμεν ἀμφοτέρωσε,
ἠμὲν ἐπ’ Αἴαντος κλισίας Τελαμωνιάδαο
ἠδ’ ἐπ’ ᾿Αχιλλῆος, τοί ῥ’ ἔσχατα νῆας ἐΐσας
εἴρυσαν ἠνορέῃ πίσυνοι καὶ κάρτεϊ χειρῶν
ἔνθα στᾶσ’ ἤϋσε θεὰ μέγα τε δεινόν τε
ὄρθι’, ᾿Αχαιοῖσιν δὲ μέγα σθένος ἔμβαλ’ ἑκάστῳ
καρδίῃ ἄληκτον πολεμίζειν ἠδὲ μάχεσθαι.
τοῖσι δ’ ἄφαρ πόλεμος γλυκίων γένετ’ ἠὲ νέεσθαι
ἐν νηυσὶ γλαφυρῇσι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν.

When I returned to this passage, I was at first a bit perplexed by the beginning. It is not uncommon to reset the plot or mark changes in the action with daybreaks in Homer. Indeed, dawn often anticipates the beginning of an assembly (divine or mortal, cf. Iliad 8.1 “When yellow-robed Dawn stretched over the whole earth…” ᾿Ηὼς μὲν κροκόπεπλος ἐκίδνατο πᾶσαν ἐπ’ αἶαν [cf. 19.1; 24.295]). There are some variations in the expressions, and the introductory dawn is much more regular in the Odyssey (see, e.g.  ἦμος δ’ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος ᾿Ηώς, 4.306) But there’s really no parallel for what happens in this passage: the mention of Tithonos, followed by the immediate divine intervention described here.

There are a few ways to understand what this passage is doing, I think. First, this exceptional re-beginning marks the epic’s longest day. As I discuss in a post on book 13, books 11-18 comprise a majority of the central action of the epic, but cover a single day in the action (day 29, depending on how you count). So, an exceptional introduction would be called for here. But I don’t think that covers it.

In addition to the length of the day, Zeus sending Eris may have thematic and generic implications as well. As I discuss in an article from YAGE, eris is both a thematic marker and a titling function in Greek epic. It is the kind of story that is typical of Homeric epic while also being characteristic of the cultural force that generated epic. Here, I think we can imagine the reinvocation of eris here as emphasizing the conflict about to come, but also as refocusing the cosmic nature of this poem.

The proem to the Iliad mentions eris twice: first, it asks the Muse to start the tale from a time when “those two men first fell out in strife” (ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε, 1.6) and then “what god first set them to struggle in strife” (Τίς τάρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι;  1.8). The answer to the second question is disharmonious with what happens after book 1, when Zeus takes over the plot and causes the Greeks to lose in order to honor Achilles. This redeployment of a personified strife here, at the beginning of book 11, re-instantiates the conflict at Zeus’ behest and between the Greeks and Trojans, rather than between Agamemnon and Achilles. This reinitiates questions about the relationship between human agency and Zeus’ plan as well.

But wait, there’s more! Note as well the pains taken to describe Achilles’ and Ajax’s dwellings as on either end of the Greek fleet with Odysseus in the middle. As Jenny Strauss Clay shows in Homer’s Trojan Theater (2011), the battle books following Iliad 11 are consistent in the way they lay out the actions across the imagined geography of the poem. This opening resituates the audience in time and space before the most complex and prolonged violence of the poem.

And the last question, the one that got be started to begin with, is why is Tithonos invoked here and not elsewhere in the poem. The scholia to the Iliad are not incredibly helpful here, but they do bring up some salient points: first, Tithonos was a Trojan, and famously so. Second, he is known from the story told in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite for being the unwitting victim of an apotheosis gone wrong. Dawn famously asked Zeus to make Tithonos immortal (that is, deathless) but not eternally young (or ageless). In the poetics of Greek myth, divine immortality is bipartite, requiring both deathlessness (a-thanatoi, immortals, literally means deathless ones) and agelessness (a-gerws). As a result, Tithonos grows older and older until he turns into (something like) a cicada and can only be heard.

It is hard to see at first glance how this can be appropriate for the beginning of book 11, but I suspect it works like this. Tithonos is a Trojan and he is in a place in medias res in relationship to his overall narrative, the story most people know. He is not a cicada yet, because he is still glorious and in bed with dawn. His appearance both invokes the closeness of the Trojans to the gods but also subtly implies that their story too is in the midst of its telling and everyone knows it is going to turn out badly.

(Some may suggest that this also recalls the child of Dawn and Tithonos, Memnon, who leads the fight for the Trojans after Hektor’s death. The Iliad and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite both seem rather uninterested in Memnon’s very existence.)

If my interpretation is right, there may also be a connection to Zeus here: as an agent he is uniquely responsible for Trojan prominence (lover of Ganymede, judge who caused Apollo and Poseidon to build the Trojan walls) and as the chief god he is also uniquely responsible for the mixed promises and tricky plans that yield unexpected consequences. There’s a warning here, but also a metaphysical reinforcement. Like the old man who briefly lived alongside a goddess, the Trojan successes will be brief. The cicada’s song remains alongside Troy’s tragic fame, after the worse part of the stories have ended.

One might reasonably ask whether this is simply a reflection on the mortal condition.

Theme and Fit in Iliad 10

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.

As I mention in an earlier post, much of the debate around book 10 of the Iliad centers around its “fit” to our Iliad and our concept of what the Iliad should contain. Even the most strident critic of Iliad 10—M. L. West—concedes its antiquity, insisting that it was added to an authentic text by later editors. From my perspective, this argument is nullified if we see the Iliad as a composition in performance that intentionally brings together disparate pieces to evoke the whole story of the Trojan War. Recent studies of the language of book 10 using statistical models have come to different conclusions about its ‘authenticity’. The analysis of Chiara Bozzone’s and Ryan Sandell shows notable differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey; that Iliad 10 seems to be an outlier linguistically, and that some of Odyssean books are closer to the Iliad.

Yet, from another perspective in the work of John Pavlopoulos and Maria Konstantinidou, the language of book 10 is no more anomalous for the rest of the Iliad than book 11, and certainly more regular than book 9 (which no one disputes as Homeric).

As any student of oral poetry knows, language follows theme. The contents of book 10 are thematically and lexically different from the rest of the epic because they describe events that are dissimilar to those that unfold elsewhere. Any decision about the ‘fit’ of book 10 is therefore based on its content and preformed ideas of what the Iliad should be like. As I said in that earlier post, Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott have pretty much made the best case for the traditionality of the Iliad 10 in their Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary.

Book 10, structurally, occupies the night between thee failed embassy to Achilles in book 10 and the resumption of warfare in book 11. The day that follows occupies nine books of the epic (11-18). The book itself furnishes an opportunity to reflect again on differences in politics between the Achaeans and Trojans, differences in characterization, and differences in tone. But I also suspect that it is playing with mythical traditions that pair Odysseus and Diomedes together.

When Agamemnon and Nestor gather the Achaean chieftains to consider spying on the Trojans. Diomedes volunteers and Agamemnon gives him enigmatic advice about whom to choose as a companion.

Iliad 10.234-239

“Indeed, choose a companion, whomever you want,
the best one of those who are present, since many are eager at least.
Do not, because you are keeping shame in your thoughts, leave behind
the better man, but choose the lesser man because you yield to shame
when you consider his birth, not even if he is kinglier.”

Τυδεΐδη Διόμηδες ἐμῷ κεχαρισμένε θυμῷ
τὸν μὲν δὴ ἕταρόν γ’ αἱρήσεαι ὅν κ’ ἐθέλῃσθα,
φαινομένων τὸν ἄριστον, ἐπεὶ μεμάασί γε πολλοί.
μηδὲ σύ γ’ αἰδόμενος σῇσι φρεσὶ τὸν μὲν ἀρείω
καλλείπειν, σὺ δὲ χείρον’ ὀπάσσεαι αἰδοῖ εἴκων
ἐς γενεὴν ὁρόων, μηδ’ εἰ βασιλεύτερός ἐστιν.

A scholion suggest that Agamemnon provides this advice because he is worried that Diomedes will feel pressured to choose Menelaos. Diomedes’ response indicates that Agamemnon probably didn’t have much to worry about.

Iliad 10.242-247

“If you are really asking me to choose my own companion,
How could I then overlook divine Odysseus,
Whose heart and proud energy are preeminent
In all toils. And Pallas Athena loves him.
If he’s accompanying me, then we would both come back
Even from a burning fire, since he really knows how to think.”

εἰ μὲν δὴ ἕταρόν γε κελεύετέ μ’ αὐτὸν ἑλέσθαι,
πῶς ἂν ἔπειτ’ ᾿Οδυσῆος ἐγὼ θείοιο λαθοίμην,
οὗ πέρι μὲν πρόφρων κραδίη καὶ θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ
ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι, φιλεῖ δέ ἑ Παλλὰς ᾿Αθήνη.
τούτου γ’ ἑσπομένοιο καὶ ἐκ πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο
ἄμφω νοστήσαιμεν, ἐπεὶ περίοιδε νοῆσαι.

There are not many moments in the Iliad that pair these two heroes together. And, if we follow what happens in the plot here, the two men sneak into the Trojan camp after capturing and killing Dolon, then they kill a bunch of men in their sleep and steal their horses. Diomedes is the one who does most of the murdering, but it seems to be Odysseus who has a plan.

I suspect that part of what is going on in this seen is an echo of stories that put Diomedes and Odysseus together in the Trojan War tradition. In part, Diomedes as a stand in for Achilles may invite consideration of the rivalry between the two iconoclastic heroes. As the figures of force (Achilles) and wit (Odysseus) the two have been seen as in rivalry (Gregory Nagy lays this out memorably in The Best of the Achaeans). Such a feature of myth is confirmed to a degree by the unexplained song of the “strife of Achilles and Odysseus” mentioned in the Odyssey.

Odyssey 8.73-78

“The Muse moved the singer to sing the tales of men,
The story whose fame had reached to the wide heaven,
The strife of Odysseus and Peleus’ son Achilles,
How they were in conflict at a sacred feast of the gods
With harsh words for one another, and the lord of men, Agamemnon
Took delight in his heart, that the best of the Achaeans were in conflict.”

Μοῦσ’ ἄρ’ ἀοιδὸν ἀνῆκεν ἀειδέμεναι κλέα ἀνδρῶν,
οἴμης, τῆς τότ’ ἄρα κλέος οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἵκανε,
νεῖκος ᾿Οδυσσῆος καὶ Πηλεΐδεω ᾿Αχιλῆος,
ὥς ποτε δηρίσαντο θεῶν ἐν δαιτὶ θαλείῃ
ἐκπάγλοισ’ ἐπέεσσιν, ἄναξ δ’ ἀνδρῶν ᾿Αγαμέμνων
χαῖρε νόῳ, ὅ τ’ ἄριστοι ᾿Αχαιῶν δηριόωντο.

But how does a potential rivalry between Achilles and Odysseus translate into a nighttime buddy-comedy of murder? Here we may also want to consider a tradition of difficulties between Diomedes and Odysseus from the lost Little Iliad According to Apollodorus, Diomedes and Odysseus were paired together to go get the bow of Herakles from Philoktetes and then went together again to sneak into the city to steal the Palladion. In that summary, Diomedes waits and watches while Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar to infiltrate the city.

The basic story is that, in order to take Troy, the Greeks needed to steal the Palladion, an image of Athena. In other traditions, Odysseus showed himself to be less than a team player. On the way back from the city, Odysseus tried to kill Diomedes. According to other accounts (summarized by Servius in his commentary on the Aeneid, see Gantz 1992, 643-5), Odysseus just wanted the glory all to himself.

We can see the Palladion-tale is a re-doubling of other Trojan War motifs: the requirement of Herakles’ bow and Philoktetes or the need to have Neoptolemus present, for example, are similar talismanic possessions to end the long war. Odysseus’ conflict with Diomedes, here, is not dissimilar either to his quarrel with Ajax or his feud with Achilles (mentioned in the Odyssey). I suspect that part of what is going on in book 10 is an echoing of these other traditions. I would go so far as to suggest that ancient audiences may have wondered whether Odysseus would betray Diomedes here. Instead of an act of betrayal, however, we see a scheming Odysseus who manages to get Diomedes to do most of the bloody work himself.

There is one fragment from the Little Iliad about this moment:

“It was the middle of the night, and the bright moon lay on them”

νὺξ μὲν ἔην μεσάτη, λαμπρὴ δ’ ἐπέτελλε σελήνη.

Iliad 10

1. Night Raids and Gimmick Episodes: Learning to Love Iliad 10: The Doloneia and the authenticity of Book 10; ‘Gimmick Episodes’; Television and Homer

2. Homeric Redshirts and Iliad 10: Introducing Dolon: Dolon as a character; throwaway figures; physiognomy, again; Television and Homer

3. Dolon and Achilles; Dolon AS Achilles: Politics and Iliad 10: Trojan Politics, redux; Correlations between Achilles and Dolon