The Athenian democracy had a fraught history that included sometimes attractive ideas like ostracism and frighteningly volatile features that led them to vote for the destruction of Mytilene one day only to rescind the order the next. One of their founding narratives also included the near-beatification of the killers of the tyrant Hipparchus, Harmodios and Aristogeitôn.
The following poems are taken from traditions of drinking songs in their honor.
PMG 893-897
“I will wrap my sword in a crown of myrtle
As Harmodius and Aristogeiton did
When they killed the tyrant
And made the Athenians equal under the law.”
“Dearest Harmodius, you have never died,
But they say you live in the isles of the blest
Where swift-footed Achilles
And Tydeus’ fine son Diomedes are”
“I will wrap my sword with a branch of myrtle,
Just as Harmodius and Aristogeiton did
When at the Athenian sacrifices
They killed the tyrant, a man named Hipparchus”
“Fame will always be yours in this land,
Dearest Harmodios and Aristogeiton,
Because you killed the tyrant
And made the Athenians equal under the law.”
“When Harmodios defeated his lawsuit, as he intended, [Hipparkhos] insulted him. After they invited his sister to come out to carry a basket in a certain procession, they rejected her, claiming they had not invited her at all because she was not good enough. Even as Harmodios took this badly, Aristogeitôn was a great deal angrier. Then all of the arrangements were made for the deed with those who were sympathetic to them but they were waiting for the great Panathenaia festival, because on that day there would be no suspicion at all if the citizens who were going to be part of the procession would be armed.
They had to begin the act, but the others were supposed to take care of the bodyguard immediately. The conspirators were few for safety’s sake, since they hoped that even those who did not know beforehand would be willing to share the struggle for their own freedom necessarily if they had arms in their hands and saw so few acting boldly.”
“But his death is said to have occurred by the more polished people not in the way most believe, because his sister was not allowed to be a basket-bearer in the procession. That’s pretty simplistic. Instead, they say Harmodius was Aristogeitôn’s brother and had been educated by him. For this reason, Aristogeitôn also took pride in educating people and considered Hipparkhos his rival. At the same time, it seems, Harmodios was in love with one of the fine and well-born young men of the day. People use his name but I don’t remember it. This young man was enamored with both Harmodios and Aristogeitôn for a while because they were wise. But when he started hanging out with Hipparkhos, he despised them and they were so pissed off by this slight that they killed Hipparkhos.”
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.
One of the most well-known passages of Iliad 5 is when Athena spurs Diomedes to wound Aphrodite. The goddess of sex flees the battlefield and goes to be comforted by her mother.
Hom. Iliad 5.370-4
Then divine Aphrodite fell to the knees of Diône Her own mother. She took her own daughter into her arms. She touched her with her hand, named her, and spoke: “Dear child, who of the Olympians has done these kinds of things to you, Pointlessly, as if you were doing something wicked in the open?”
Once Aphrodite tells her the story, her mother then goes on to provide her a catalogue of gods who had to endure wounding by mortals. While the passage is amusing, it produces a little dissonance based largely on the significant detail of Aphrodite having a mother.
Schol. D ad. Hom. Il. 5.374
“Note that according to Hesiod, Aphrodite is the product of Ouranos’ genitals and the sea, but according to Homer, she is from Diône and Zeus.
Terracotta figurine of Aphrodite, Antikensammlung Berlin, c. 2nd Century BCE
An instructive detail here is that the scholion here doesn’t take a stance about whether either or not Homer or Hesiod are “correct” or one is prior to another, and I think this is pretty important. From a narrative perspective each genealogy makes sense for the story in question: Aphrodite is a powerful elemental force in Hesiod’s Theogony and there is both poetic and political logic behind her birth from Ouranos’ testicles. In the Homeric tradition, this is more complicated. Zeus needs to humiliate Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where he ‘gets back’ at her for infecting the gods with lust by inducing her to have sex with the mortal Anchises. In the Iliad, Aphrodite is rendered subordinate to Zeus as one of his children. Aphrodite is often mentioned as a daughter of Zeus (as G. S. Kirk notes in his Cambridge commentary on the Iliad), but this is the only place we hear about her mother. To make it a little more bewildering, Diône seems top merely be a feminine form of Zeus (cf. the genitive Dios).
Frederick Combellack writes in his 1976 article “Homer the Innovator” that “any person who spends very much time in the study of the Homeric poems will almost certainly find himself involved, perhaps with regret, in the study of Homeric scholarship” (44). He drops this “diss track” by way of introducing an argument against the very idea that Homeric poetry could “innovate” or “invent” new detail, an assertion supported by many scholars in the twentieth century, dismissed by Combellack as being possible, but implausible based on our evidence.
So-called “Ludovisi Throne”: main panel, Aphrodite attended by two handmaidens as she rises ouf the surf. Thasos marble, Greek artwork, ca. 460 BC (authenticity disputed).caption…
While I don’t necessarily share Combellack’s aversion to reading Homeric scholarship, despite a weighty tradition mocking its pedantry going all the way back to Seneca (and likely earlier, given the evidence of Palladas the Alexandrian poet), I do think the asperity of his comments point to an important problem in thinking about Homeric poetry: making any sense of the relationship between our ‘Homer’ and what may have come before.
The relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and antecedent ‘traditions’ is not just about mythological narratives: it pervades our view of Homeric language (the formula), devices (e.g. similes), as well as content. Indeed, a great deal of Homeric scholarship of the 20th century was engaged with this question in one way or another. (Sidenote, this is a topic that will always inspire debate: The first 45 minutes of my dissertation defense in 2007 was occupied by my readers debating among themselves the meaning of the word ‘tradition’ in relation to the Iliad.)
I have discussed neoanalytical approaches before, and I don’t really want to recap that. Here I am interested in two problems presented by the nature of Homeric poetry itself: First, Homeric poetry is generically meant to seem old and authoritative, without having to actually be so. Second, Greek poetry and myth in general have a very different approach to veracity or fidelity than a culture immersed in fixed textual traditions like ours might expect.
For the first problem, I always find it useful to flip our belief about Homeric poetry on its head: what if, instead of assuming that Homeric poetry stands as the authoritative origins of Trojan war narratives (and other myths) it stands at the end of a certain kind of flexible tradition, imposing an authoritative order only over time thanks to a privileged cultural position. I find starting from this approach useful especially with other archaic and classical age poets because we can’t actually know what ‘Homer’ they were exposed to and it is strange to think that epic performance was not shaped by other genres as well.
Birth of Aphrodite. Attic red-figure pyxis. MET, c. 460 BCE
For the second challenge, I often think back to what Hesiod announces before the cosmogonic narrative of the Theogony even begins. The Muses approach ‘Hesiod’ while he is tending his flocks:
Theogony 26-28
“Rustic shepherds, wretched reproaches, nothing but bellies, We know how to say many lies similar to the truth And we know how to speak the truth when we want to.”
When I teach myth I emphasize that while this passage can be taken as a disclaimer (i.e., you may know different stories than mine!) for communities of divergent, even conflicting narrative traditions, I think it is also a conditioning framework for setting aside concerns about veracity. Hesiod the narrator here attributes poetic authority to the Muses along with the ability to discern what is true from what is false. The result is that mortals simply cannot know and, therefore, probably shouldn’t worry about it.
But I have also taken recourse to ideas from scholars of memory to rethink moments like this. In studying memory systems, Martin Conway suggests that there are two forces in human memory: correspondence, which is about equivalence between details of ‘reality’ (or experience) and details of a story and coherence, which means that details make sense together in a narrative. When it comes to the way these systems operate in the human mind, not only does he argue that the memory systems have different neuro-anatomy, but he suggests that the episodic memory system (which prizes correspondence) developed earlier and is more basic to day-to-day survival than the autobiographical memory system which focuses more on coherence and is essential for the development of a goal or ‘identity’ driven self. The two systems are not exclusive—autobiographical memory selects from episodic memory in the creation of a coherent self.
In expanding these ideas to communities of audiences and narrative traditions, what I think we can say is that ancient audiences were accustomed to making sense of each story on its own terms, nonplussed by details that might conflict with other story traditions, because they belong to those other stories. The force of narrative coherence supersedes correspondence to ‘facts’ in other tales because what matters in each telling is the story in process. To an extent, these forces and the aesthetics they imply are operative throughout early Greek poetry (consider Pindar) and at play as well in the ‘innovations’ we see in Athenian Tragedy.
To return to book 5 of the Iliad: Aphrodite has a mother because it makes sense for the global context of the epic (where Zeus is the “father of gods and men”) and because it makes sense for this scene. Whether or not this is Homeric “invention” is almost beside the point. Certainly the simplicity of the name Diône and the lack of her presence in other narratives implies that this detail is important, even idiopathic to this (kind of) scene, but it tells us nothing about whether or not earlier versions of this theme including this detail or whether similar moments occurred in antecedent or parallel traditions. The challenge, as always, is to make sense of how this passage supports the Iliad we possess.
Cribbing from the Muses here: we cannot know if ‘Homer’ made something up, so should we bother worrying about it?
Alden, Maureen Joan. “The rôle of Calypso in the Odyssey.” Antike und Abendland, vol. XXXI, 1985, pp. 97-107.
Barker, Elton T. E.. “The « Iliad »’s big swoon: a case of innovation within the epic tradition ?.” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-17.
Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies
Berg, Nils and Haug, Dag Trygve Truslew. “Dividing Homer. 2,: Innovation vs. tradition in Homer : an overlooked piece of evidence.” Symbolae Osloenses, vol. 75, 2000, pp. 5-23. Doi: 10.1080/003976700300005811
Bruce K. Braswell. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 21 (1971) 16-26.
Christensen, Joel P.. “Innovation and tradition revisited: the near-synonymy of ἀμύνω and ἀλέξω as a case study in Homeric composition.” The Classical Journal, vol. 108, no. 3, 2012-2013, pp. 257-296.
Combellack, Frederick M.. “Homer the innovator.” Classical Philology, vol. LXXI, 1976, pp. 44-55.
Martin A. Conway. “Memory and the Self,” Journal of Memory and Language 53 (2005) 594-628.
Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. “« Kyklos », the Epic Cycle and Cyclic poetry.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 1-40.
Bernard Fenik. Homer: Tradition and Invention. Leiden, 1978.
Ingalls, Wayne B.. “Linguistic and formular innovation in the mythological digressions in the Iliad.” Phoenix, vol. XXXVI, 1982, pp. 201-202.
Jones, Peter. “Poetic invention: the fighting around Troy in the first nine years of the Trojan War.” Homer’s world: fiction, tradition, reality. Eds. Andersen, Øivind and Dickie, Matthew W.. Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens; 3. Athens ; Bergen: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1995. 101-111.
Mueller-Goldingen, Christian. “Tradition und Innovation: zu Stesichoros’ Umgang mit dem Mythos.” L’Antiquité Classique, vol. 69, 2000, pp. 1-19. Doi: 10.3406/antiq.2000.2419
Nussbaum, Alan J.. “The Homeric formulary template and a linguistic innovation in the epics.” Language and meter. Eds. Gunkel, Dieter and Hackstein, Olav. Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics; 18. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2018. 267-318.
Ready, Jonathan L.. The Homeric simile in comparative perspectives : oral traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2018.
David C. Rubin. “The Basic-systems Model of Episodic Memory,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006) 277-311.
M. M. Willcock. “Mythological Paradeigmata in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 14 (1964) 141-151.
—,—. “Ad Hoc Invention in the Iliad.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977) 41-53.
Then divine Aphrodite fell to the knees of Diône
Her own mother. She took her own daughter into her arms.
She touched her with her hand, named her, and spoke:
“Dear child, who of the Olympians has done these kinds of things to you,
Pointlessly, as if you were doing something wicked in the open?”
The Iliad ends with the burial of Hektor, but the mythographical tradition would not let him lie in peace. There is a tradition for the exhumation and the reburial of his remains.
Aristodemos BNJ383 F7 [“Brill’s New Jacoby”=Schol. AB ad Il. 13.1]
“the Trojans and Hektor”: He has separated Hektor in particular from the rest of the Trojans. Following the sack of Troy, Hektor the son of Priam obtained honor from the gods after death. For the Thebans in Boiotia were beset by evils and solicited a prophecy about their deliverance. The oracle told them that they would stop the troubles if they would transfer the bones of Hektor from Ophrunion in the Troad to a place in their land called the “birthplace of Zeus”. They, once they did this and were freed from the evils, maintained the honors for Hektor and during hard times they used to call for his manifestation. This is the account in Aristodemos.
“At Thebes there is also the grave of Hektor, Priam’s son. It is next to a spring called the Oedipus Spring. The Thebans say that they brought the bones from Troy to this place because of the following oracle:
Thebans living in the in the city of Kadmos,
If you want to live in a country with blameless wealth
Bring the bones of Hektor, Priam’s son, home
From Asia to be honored as a hero in accordance with Zeus
The spring was named after Oedipus because it was the same place where Oedipus washed off the blood from his father’s murder
Lykophron in his Alexandraalludes to a strange tale of the transfer of Hektor’s remains from Troy to Thebes. Since Lykophron is virtually unreadable, here is the account from scholia (Schol. In Lykrophon 1194):
“They say that when there was a famine in Greece Apollo decreed that they should transfer the bones of Hektor, which were at the place called Ophrunos, from Troy to some city in Greece which did not take part in the expedition against Troy.* When the Greeks realized that Thebes in Boiotia had not fought against Troy, they retrieved the remains of the hero and installed them there.”
* In the Iliad, though the Boiotians (2.494-510) are named prominently in the catalogue of ships alongside the prominent city of Orchomenos (511-516), only Hypothebes is mentioned alongside recognizable topographical features of Thebes (οἵ θ’ ῾Υποθήβας εἶχον ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον, 505). One explanation for this is that “The place below Thebes” is the settlement surviving after the Epigonoi sacked the city. Diomedes, prominent in the Iliad, was instrumental in that expedition. In mythical time, then, Thebes was a ruined city for the advent of the expedition against Thebes.
The transfer of heroic remains is reported frequently in ancient texts. For Theseus’ bones see: Plut. Vit. Cim. 8.57; Vit. Thes. 36.1–4; Paus. 1.17.6, 3.3.7. Cf. Hdt. 167-68; Paus 3.3.6 for Orestes’ bones. McCauley (1999) identifies 13 different instances of the transfer of remains in ancient Greece, with 9 of them being clearly political in motivation.
Simon Hornblower accepts that the cult of Hektor at Thebes was historical. One suggestion for this (Schachter 1981-94: 1.233-4) is that when Kassandros re-founded Thebes in 316 BCE he consciously affiliated with Hektor in response to Alexander’s earlier association with Achilles (Kassandros had a great enmity for Alexander). Hornblower (427) also posits the bone tale as an instance of rivalry between Thebes and Athens as part of Thebes establishing a connection in the Hellespont to challenge Athenian commercial interests in the region. The first suggestion places the bone transfer tale after 316 BCE; the second dates it back to 365. Hornblower suggests that there were two stages involved with an oracle being reported c. 465 BCE (428) and the bones being retrieved near the end of the century.
A. Schachter, Cults of Boeotia1–4 (London, 1981-1994).
Hornblower, Simon 203. Lykophron: Alexandra. Oxford.
McCauley, B. 1999. “Heroes and Power: The Politics of Bone Transferal.” In R. Hägg (ed.) Ancient Greek Hero Cult. Stockholm, 1999:85-98
Phillips, D. D. 2003. “The Bones of Orestes and Spartan Foreign Policy.” In Gestures: Essays in Ancient History, Literature, and Philosophy Presented to Alan L. Boegehold, edited by G. W. Bakewell and J. P. Sickinger, 301–16. Oxford.
Seneca the Elder, Historical Fragments, 1 [=Lactant. Inst. Div. 7.15.14]
“Seneca outlined the periods of Roman history in “life-stages”. The first was her infancy under the king Romulus, who parented Rome and educated her. Then there followed a childhood under various kings thanks to whom the city grew and was shaped by many practices and institutions. Then, while Tarquin was king and Rome began to become more adult, it could not endure servitude and, once the yoke of arrogant rule was thrown off, preferred to heed laws instead of kings.
Once the Roman adolescence ended with the close of the Punic war, it began to show the full strength of adulthood. For, when Carthage was subdued, that city which was an ancient rival for power, Rome extended her hands over the whole earth, both land and sea until every king and nation had bent to her power.
But, since there was no reason left for wars, Rome began to use her strengths poorly and wore herself out. This was the first step of old age: when Rome was wounded by civil wars and suffering from internal evil, she returned again to the practice of individual rule, as if she had devolved into a second infancy. Thus she lost the freedom which she defended when Brutus was its agent and champion and grew weak in old age, as if she had not the strength to support herself unless she could use the ‘cane’ of kings.”
Seneca Romanae urbis tempora distribuit in aetates; primam enim dixit infantiam sub rege Romulo fuisse, a quo et genita et quasi educata sit Roma, deinde pueritiam sub ceteris regibus, a quibus et aucta sit et disciplinis pluribus institutisque formata. At vero Tarquinio regnante, cum iam quasi adulta esse coepisset, servitium non tulisse, et reiecto superbae dominationis iugo maluisse legibus obtemperare quam regibus, cumque esset adulescentia eius fine Punici belli terminata, tum denique confirmatis viribus coepisse iuvenescere. Sublata enim Carthagine, quae diu aemula imperii fuit, manus suas in totum orbem terra marique porrexit, donec regibus cunctis et nationibus imperio subiugatis, cum iam bellorum materia deficeret, viribus suis male uteretur, quibus se ipsa confecit. Haec fuit prima eius senectus, cum bellis lacerata civilibus atque intestino malo pressa rursus ad regimen singularis imperii recidit quasi ad alteram infantiam revoluta. Amissa enim libertate, quam Bruto duce et auctore defenderat, ita consenuit tamquam sustentare se ipsa non valeret nisi adminiculo regentium uteretur.
Roman copy: 1st century BC-AD 1st century; Greek original: 3rd century BC
“Let us consider now how many ways a man may be called unjust. It is indeed clear that a man who breaks laws is unjust but so is someone who is greedy and inegalitarian—thus it is clear that the just man will be law-abiding and fair. Justice, then, is lawful and fair; injustice is unlawful and unfair.
Since the unjust man someone who is greedy, he will be selfish regarding good things, not everything, but those things upon which good fortune and bad fortune rely—those things which are universally always good but not always for the same person. People pray for these things and pursue them; it is not right, however, that they pray for things which are universally good and good for them, but that they choose things that are just good for them.
The unjust man does not always choose the larger portion;for he will choose the smaller portion of bad things. But even here he is more selfish of the good because he appears to take on less evil, which is a type of good, and for that reason he seems greedy. He should be called unfair. This also embraces the common sense.”
“There are some people who get puffed up if they manage to talk about something tolerably after they have themselves selected a strange and impossible subject. Men have also grown old claiming that it is impossible to say or disprove a lie or to speak two ways about the same matters. Others claim that courage, wisdom, and justice are the same thing, that we have none of these by nature, and that there is a single knowledge about them all. Others waste their time in conflicts which bring no benefit, which can only create more trouble for those who approach them.
I, if I saw that this superfluity had only just emerged in speeches and that these men were eager for honor in the novelty of what they discover, I would not be a surprised at them. But, now, who is such a late-learner that he does not know Protagoras and the sophists who were active at his time and that they left to us these types of things and speeches even more excessively composed than these? How could anyone overcome Gorgias who dared to say that nothing exists at all or Zeno who tried to demonstrate that the same things are possible and impossible or even Melissos who—although some things are countless in number—tried to provide a proof that everything is one!”
“I would have a hard time enduring your attacks with a level mind, Marcus Tullius, if I believed that this petulance of yours came from good judgment rather than a sick mind. But, since I discover in you neither balance nor modesty, I will answer you just so you may lose the pleasure you get from slandering someone when you are slandered yourself.
Where shall I complain, whom shall I address, Senators, to tell that the Republic is being divided up as booty for any kind of daring pirate? Can I call to the Roman people, the people who are so corrupted by expenditures that they offer themselves and their fortunes for sale? Can I call to you, Senators, whose authority is a joke to any of the foulest and most criminal—especially when Marcus Tullius defends the laws, the courts, and the Republic and lords over this order as if he were the last scion of a famous family of Scipio Africanus and not some orphan citizen, just recently rooted in this city?
Come on, Marcus—aren’t your words and deeds perfectly clear? Haven’t you lived in such a way from boyhood that you believed that there was nothing sinful which anyone could do to your body? Or, I guess you did not develop this excessive elegance of yours with Marcus Piso by offering up your shame? It is thus hardly a wonder that you sell it so criminally since you won it so disgustingly.”
[The text goes on to insult Cicero’s wife, daughter, his relationship with Crassus and more…Many apologies to anyone who cares for Cicero, I have a weakness for excessive Latin invective…and Cicero did too…]
Graviter et iniquo animo maledicta tua paterer,M. Tulli, si te scirem iudicio magis quam morbo animi petulantia ista uti. Sed cum in te neque modum neque modestiam ullam animadverto, respondebo tibi ut si quam male dicendo voluptatem cepisti, eam male audiendo amittas.
Ubi querar, quos implorem, patres conscripti, diripi rem publicam atque audacissimo cuique esse praedae? apud populum Romanum? qui ita largitionibus corruptus est, ut se ipse ac fortunas suas venales habeat. an apud vos, patres conscripti? quorum auctoritas turpissimo cuique et sceleratissimo ludibrio est; ubi M. Tullius leges, iudicia, rem publicam defendit atque in hoc ordine ita moderatur quasi unus reliquus e familia viri clarissimi, Scipionis Africani, ac non reperticius, accitus, ac paulo ante insitus huic urbi civis.
An vero, M. Tulli, facta tua ac dicta obscura sunt? an non ita a pueritia vixisti ut nihil flagitiosum corpori tuo putares quod alicui collibuisset? aut scilicet istam immoderatam eloquentiam apud M. Pisonem non pudicitiae iactura perdidicisti! itaque minime mirandum est quod eam flagitiose venditas quam turpissime parasti.
(c) Manchester City Galleries; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
“Kyrnos, this city is pregnant and I am afraid she will bear a man
Meant to correct our evil arrogance.
The citizens are still sane, but the leaders have changed
And have fallen into great evil.
Good people, Kyrnos, have never yet destroyed a city,
But whenever it pleases wicked men to commit outrage,
They corrupt the people and issue legal judgment in favor of the unjust,
For the sake of their own private profit and power.
Don’t expect this city to stay peaceful for very long
Even if it is not at a moment of great peace now.
When these deeds are dear to evil men,
their profit accrues with public harm.
Civil conflicts and murder of kin comes from this,
And tyrants do too: may this never pleasure to our state.”
Abstract: Cartoon showing snake, representing monopolies involving senators, with tail wrapped around dome of the U.S. Capitol, facing personification of “Liberty”, and “Puck” asking Uncle Sam, “What are you going to do about it?” Physical description: 1 print : lithograph, color.
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.
In my earlier posts on Iliad 4, I emphasized the opening scene, where Zeus toys with the other gods and entertains the idea of ending the conflict, and one part of the so-called epipolesis, where Agamemnon goes around ‘rallying’ the troops to start the war. I barely discussed the intermediary scene where the gods rekindle the war by prompting Pandaros to break the truce made in book 4 by shooting at Agamemnon.
The structure of the book ends up looking something like this:
Structure of Iliad 4
1-72 Divine Assembly, Articulation of Local Plan
72-222 Rekindling of the Conflict, Wounding of Agamemnon
233-421 Epipolesis
422-544 Battle Scene
As with earlier books, we find the action splits into smaller parts, often 3 or 4, in an analogy to the way we can break down each line of dactylic hexameter into smaller, yet still sensible parts. Each part of this book could conceivably function alone or in a different order. The first section connects us to larger narrative arcs (e.g., the Trojan War and its causes); the second creates a join between the mythical narrative and the particular story of the Iliad (indeed, providing a kind of bridge from Zeus’ “plan” in the cosmic sense to end the race of heroes and the ‘local’ Iliadic plan of having the Greeks lose to appease Achilles’ slighted honor); the third section, building on the wounding of Menelaos in the second, serves chiefly to recharacterize Agamemnon as a leader in the war and to introduce us to warriors who have not spoken much so far, but who will be primary players later (e.g. Idomeneus, Diomedes); and the final martial chaos of the book provides a bridge to the battle and aristeia of book 5.
Hera and Prometheus. Tondo of an Attic red-figured kylix, 490–480 BC. From Vulci, Etruria.
There’s a lot in this book I haven’t talked about. From the perspective of some of my recent posts attempting to imagine how Homeric heroes think (or are managed etc.). The example of Pandarus being induced to shoot Menealos and break the truce–thus providing some moral case against the Trojans–is interesting. I’d like to spend more time thinking about what Athena says and the figure she dons to persuade him, but that’s probably for the next time I go through the Iliad.
Every time I read Iliad 4 I find myself struck by Hera’s offer to Zeus after he suggests that they just have peace made between the Trojans and Greeks. On one level–if we are thinking about the overlapping motivations of mortals and gods–Hera’s response reflects the deep enmity that either side of a human conflict might feel. Just as at the end of the Odyssey there is no resolution to the cycle of vengeance between Odysseus and the suitors families, so too is there no way to resolve this war without the destruction of Troy (or the Greeks, in an alternate timeline). This is the terrible logic of violence, the inevitable outcome of revenge-fueled ‘justice’: arms are merely put aside until the next opportunity for slaughter. The Odyssey’s final dea ex machina dramatizes this; but before we can get there–or, more properly, to the reconciliations of Illad–by first witnessing the depths and consequences of holding a grudge.
So, we get to Hera’s response to Zeus.
Homer, Iliad 4.51-61
“I hold three cities dearest to me of all: Argos, Sparta and Mykene of the wide ways. Destroy them whenever they are hateful to your heart. I am not standing before them and I don’t care about them. For even if I am jealous over them and I don’t want you to destroy them, I do not deny you in my jealousy because you are stronger than I am. But it is not right to render my labor useless. I am a god too, and my lineage comes from the same place as yours. Crooked minded Kronos fathered me as the most honored of the gods Both in terms of my birth and because I am called your wife And you rule among the immortals”
Here, Hera shows that she is so vengeful that she is willing to give up cities that were sacred to her for the destruction of the city of Troy. Any casual reader might note that these are the very cities that have brought some of the largest contingents to Troy! Ancient scholiasts note variously that this scene provides an explanation for Hera’s anger that does not include the judgment of Paris: these are the cities that started all the problems with Helen to begin with!
Schol. bT Ad Hom. Il 51-2 51
“It is notable that the poet wants to place a probable cause for the anger on Hera and it is not that which the myth fashions, that she is angry at the Trojans because Aphrodite was honored ahead of her in the judgment over beauty, instead he says that she loves those cities over which the injustice against Helen occurred.”
“Note [that she mentions this] that they are fighting alongside the Greeks on account of these cities, not because of the judgment about beauty offered by Paris, which Homer doesn’t know about”
Others (see the bibliography below) have written well about the tension here between a “savage” goddess and the emerging concerns of the Iliad. In particular, there is a thematic arc between this book and book 24 where Hera argues against having Achilles give Hektor’s body back to his family for burial. In each scene, Hera represents that primal vengeance we often associate with chthonic deities like the Furies. In book 4, Zeus doesn’t make Hera relent, but by the end of the epic, Apollo stands to argue against her, and Zeus makes a judgment against her.
Fresco depicting Hierogamia, the sacred wedding of Hera and Zeus, witnessed by winged Iris, personification of the rainbow. Many ancient Greek cities and towns celebrated this event as a sacred rite. Pompeii, House of the Tragic Poet (VI 8, 5, atrium 3) 45-79 CE
From the perspective of Hesiod’s Theogony, where Zeus stabilizes the divine realm by ensuring that each god has their own honors and place in his universe, this horse-trading of favored cities could be seen as an echo of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles: Hera is offering to effect a redistribution of honor through the sacrifice of a favored city. Potential strife is averted through the offer of an exchange of one geras (that token of honor and esteem) for another. There is also an argument I have read suggesting that the cosmic aspect of this exchange of cities provides an explanation for the absence of these cities in the time of the epic’s audience. Such an argument suggests that while Zeus does not agree to take these three cities immediately, but their later obliteration supports the larger motivation of Zeus’ plan to rid the earth of the race of heroes.
But the rights of the gods are more or less fixed. Their world cannot change, so there’s more going on here. From a perspective that makes Iliad 24 a crucial resolution of the epic’s themes, book 4’s dispute is anticipatory: it perpetuates the violence for the audience to experience on the way to the realization that this kind of conflict is not merely unsustainable but it is fundamentally dehumanizing in that it makes people into things and obliterates families and cities. In my own reading of the Iliad in the light of modern violence, the poem itself attempts to re-humanize, to prompt its audience to recognize the folly and the damage of war and the endless, unendurable logic of comeuppance.
In this reading, Hera’s speech should shock audiences into thinking about vengeance and divine caprice. The peril of vengeance is clear; but Hera’s caprice may hint at a theological shift: Zeus’ playfulness and the malice of other gods might just convince some mortals that we need to rely on ourselves to make our lives better, since the gods are certainly not on our side.
A Few things to read
Van Erp Taalman Kip, A. Maria. “The gods of the « Iliad » and the fate of Troy.” Mnemosyne, vol. 53, no. 4, 2000 Ser. 4, pp. 385-402.
O’Brien, Joan V.. The transformation of Hera: a study of ritual, hero and the goddess in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1993.
O’Brien, Joan. “Homer’s savage Hera.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXVI, 1990-1991, pp. 105-125.
Synodinou, Katerina. “The threats of physical abuse of Hera by Zeus in the Iliad.” Wiener Studien, vol. C, 1987, pp. 13-22.
Judgement of Paris. Fragment of an Attic black-figure hydria, 520–510 BC. The name of each character is inscribed above his/her head. Louvre
