“If there is anything that can make a life happy, it is the good in its own right. For it cannot be debased into evil. How do we mess this up, when everyone wants a happy life? It is because people mistake the means to happiness for the thing itself–while they seek it, they flee it.
Although the summit of a happy life may be unshakeable safety, unbothered by events, most people collect the causes of anxiety and don’t merely carry their baggage through the dangerous journey of life, but gather more! They are always falling further away from the state they seek and the more they try the more they get in their own way and fall back. This is how it goes if you rush into a labyrinth: speed itself ensnares you. Goodbye.”
Si quid est, quod vitam beatam potest facere, id bonum est suo iure. Depravari enim in malum non potest. Quid est ergo, in quo erratur, cum omnes beatam vitam optent? Quod instrumenta eius pro ipsa habent et illam, dum petunt, fugiunt. Nam cum summa vitae beatae sit solida securitas et eius inconcussa fiducia, sollicitudinis colligunt causas et per insidiosum iter vitae non tantum ferunt sarcinas, sed trahunt; ita longius ab effectu eius, quod petunt, semper abscedunt et quo plus operae inpenderunt, hoc se magis impediunt et feruntur retro. Quod evenit in labyrintho properantibus; ipsa illos velocitas inplicat. Vale.
This is one of a few posts dedicatedto Iliad 23. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
In the first post on Iliad 23, I provide a good deal of framing for understanding the funeral games from Patroklos from a thematic/political perspective. At some point, I think I planned to write a second post on that topic, detailing the exchanges during the chariot race as a recapitulation of the events in Iliad 1 and 2. I think that this work has largely been done and would refer to the bibliography there for further reading.
I remain interested—if not stuck—in how to understand the run-up to the games, which includes a lengthy burial ritual. This process is crucial for understanding Achilles’ character, but I think it can also help us think more about how epic poetry, about how much it tells and how much we assume it tells. The most prominent part of this, for me, is the human sacrifice that was promised in book 21. As I mention in that post, the seemingly casual presentation of the human sacrifice always reminds me of the murder of the suitors and the mutilation of the enslaved people in the Odyssey. Just as in that case, however, I think part of my/our sense that the acts are downplayed is connected to our cultural distance from ancient audiences.
Detail from the Ricci Hydria, Etrurian Black-figure Hydria by the Painter of the Louvre E739, ca. 530 BCE, depicting the slaughtering of a sacrificial pig.
As modern readers, we often find ourselves at a loss when it comes to evaluating epic actions without seeming terribly anachronistic or facing criticism for projecting our values on the past. The solution to this challenge is not maintaining neutrality, but allowing our responses to surface, interrogating them alongside the narrative, and using both ancient evidence and modern theoretical frameworks to ‘triangulate’ values. The point is not to cede evaluative ground, but to proceed with care, using transparency and owning our own perspectives to engage in a dialogue with the past rather than issuing a summary judgment.
My basic argument for both is that the non-combat murders that occur at the end of the Iliad and the Odyssey are certainly framed as excessive, if not transgressive, by each epic. These scenes contribute to an exploration of the dangers of the heroic figure who suffers and causes suffering. In the Odyssey, the slaughter functions, I think, to indicate the extremity of Odysseus’ vengeance and the stark violence endemic to autocracy. In the Iliad, we find the sacrifices as part of a narrative arc that takes Achilles far away from the realm of ‘civilized’ people and returns him again, if only briefly, to practices of reciprocity in book 24.
When I make arguments like this, I often encounter doubt, if not derision. This is why I think it is important to look at what the text does. In the case of the sacrifice of the twelve Trojan youths, the epic narrator marks it as “wicked” twice, once when the young men are captured in book 21 and again at the moment of their sacrifice in book 23. In between, Achilles calls them “glorious children of the Trojans, I am ready to sacrifice because I am angry over your death” (23.22-23). When we get to the act nearly two hundred lines later, the narrator is subtle, but to my mind clear.
Homer, Il. 23.161-191
Once Agamemnon, the lord of men, heard [Achilles] He immediately dispersed the army to their fine ships, While those who were close to Patroklos stayed by and piled the wood. They made a pyre one-hundred strides wide to all sides, And placed the body on the top of it, as they grieved in their hearts. They flayed and butchered many sheep and in addition Many ambling cattle in front of the pyre. Then great-hearted Achilles took the fat from all of them and covered the corpse. He heaped it over the body from head to toe. Then he added to the rest large jars of honey and oil, Leaving them next to the platform. He toppled four, high-necked horses On the pyre quickly while he groaned outloud. There were nine dogs who waited at the table for the lord, And Achilles added two of them to the pyre, after cutting their throats. He slaughtered the twelve sons of the great-hearted Trojans With bronze. He was contriving wicked things in his thoughts. And he kindled the iron-strong power of the fire, so he could spread it around. Then, indeed, he mourned out loud and called his friend by name. “Hello, my Patroklos, mine even in Hades’ home. I am finishing everything that I promised to you before. The fire is consuming all of these men for you—the twelve Fine sons of the great-hearted Trojans. I will not give Hektor Up to Priam to put in the fire. I’ll give him to the dogs.”
So he threatened. But the dogs did not descend on Hektor. No, Zeus’ daughter Aphrodite protected him from the dogs All day and all night, keeping him anointed with rosy-olive oil, Ambrosial stuff, so that he would not rip while being dragged. And Phoebus Apollo cast over him a dark cloud From the sky to the ground, and covered the whole land Where the corpse stretched out, to stop the sun’s intensity From drying out the skin still set on his muscles and limbs.
We should start by noting how much this passage is doing. Consider the multiple mentions of grief and lamentation, making it clear that Achilles is in an extreme state of mind. The focus on the process of sacrifice may in part be a reflection on the importance of the ritual for processing grief. As anyone who has lost a loved one has learned, the concrete steps funerary rituals give us in the immediate days after our loss provides us with a feeling of control, of agency at a moment when we have been reminded that we ultimately have anything but that (over death). Rituals provide an outlet for grief, but they also importantly provide us with something to do. From a neurobiological perspective, sudden loss and extreme grief triggers a survival impulse: Achilles’ lashing out and slaughter is probably too ordered to simply be this, but his adaptation of ritual and his slowness to proceed may be a reflex of traumatic shock.
But to focus on the possibility of narrative judgment: the poem itself increases the importance of the human sacrifice by placing it in an ascending scale with the other victims. We start with the normal sheep and cattle, followed by the surprise dogs, ending with the twelve Trojan youths who are called “fine sons” of the great-hearted Trojans here, when they were referred as boys in book 21 and mere children before. The relevance of that choice increases for me: the label of sons enters them into families, into relationships that are torn by Achilles’ acts and the use of the adjective recalls the heroic language of nobility in the exchange with Lykaon in book 21 as well. Achilles repeats this line when he mourns later on, and a scholion reports that the adjective esthlous may have been replaced in some texts with a simple demonstrative toutous “these sons”).
Regardless of the repetition (or lack thereof), the narrative’s description is followed by the clearest line of judgment in the epic, the statement that Achilles is “devising wicked deeds” (κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα·). If there is any doubt that there is something off about this sequence, following the speech, Achilles has trouble lighting the pyre and must appeal to the gods for help.
The cumulative effect of the rhetorical treatment (placing the slaughter at the end of a list, in the longest description), the familial and qualitative description of the youths, in contrast with earlier lines, the narrative judgment on the deeds, and the appearance of divine dissatisfaction, is to mark the sacrifice as extreme and as a feature of Achilles’ particular excess in his grief.
Detail from 1884 Engraving of Achilles sacrificing a Trojan youth on Patroclus’ funeral pyre – as narrated by Homer in the Iliad 23.181-2. Greek Apulian Red-figure Volute Krater, attributed to the Painter of Darius, ca. 330 BCE. Naples Arch Museum
The view from outside
My reading of this scene requires a little more work to support. The cultural meaning of human sacrifice may be different for ancient audiences, and it is important to measure our response against what we can reconstruct from theirs. As Dennis Hughes writes in his introduction to Patroklos’ funeral (1991, 49), ancient authors were perplexed, if not horrified by this scene: “This incident so distressed Plato that he simply denied that Achilles had committed the deed, and the reactions of many modern Homeric scholars have been similar: shock and distaste (reactions sometimes projected back onto the psyche of Homer himself), a quick dismissal, or, more often than not, complete silence”.
The specter of human sacrifice overshadows the Iliad. The Trojan War narrative centers the sacrifice of Iphigenia to start the war, but other traditions also have the Trojan Polyxena sacrificed for/to Achilles as well. War itself demands a kind of sacrifice from soldiers, but the Iliad in particular sets up the Achaeans to be ‘sacrificial victims’ to Achilles’ honor while the surrogacy of Patroklos has something of a ritual substitution sacrifice to it. (Margo Kitts’ work is particular good at summarizing issues regarding sacrifice in the Iliad)
There have been questions for some time about to what extent Achilles’ sacrifice echoes historical practices. In addition to myths of human sacrifice in Athens, as well as in Sparta and Syracuse, and more broadly in myth among the family of Lykaon, or the self-sacrifice of the Lokrian Maidens, there is some archaeological evidence of human sacrifice in ancient Greeceand theoretical speculation that ‘scapegoat’ narratives may have been related to ancient sacrificial practices. Herodotus mentions it too, but as an extreme. There is some caution here though: As Albert Henrichs suggests, the evidence for human sacrifice outside of Greece is far better than inside it, during the bronze age.
As Dennis Hughes argues, our interpretations have tended to imagine that this sacrifice was like other animal sacrifices or performed to provide Patroklos attendants in the Underworld and that the Iliad’s composers had lost knowledge about the practice. The other possibility—that Achilles’ act is meant as extreme, as an extension of his rage, is reconcilable with human sacrifice as an actual or forgotten practice. As Hughes notes, it seems difficult to argue that Homer is “downplaying” the incident when he mentions it three times, goes to great length to describe it, and then leaves the human portion of the sacrifice in the rhetorically marked, final position. It is perfectly possible that Achilles’ sacrifice is both an extreme outlet for his rage and a recognizable ‘ritual killing’ with real world antecedents.
This last point is important: As Henrichs argues, from the perspective of Greek myth and tradition, human sacrifice can happen but it is extreme and ritual killing “is something which uncivilized men inflict upon one another but which no Greek in his right mind with contemplate” (2019, 63). Achilles is steadily depicted throughout the Iliad as someone who has withdrawn from the communion of human beings, flirting with the excesses of the god of war when he is not descending to the animal realm. Tamara Neal demonstrates that Achilles has a particular blood-lust, marked even for the Iliad, shared with Ares and predatory animals in similes. His rage pushes him to animalistic and supernatural extreme, but at this moment in the epic, the sense seems more of irresolvable grief.
The excess of the sacrifice functions in part to characterize the agent of the act. As Sarah Hitch argues, sacrifices in the Iliad are subject to a system of reciprocity that emphasizes the status of the doer. The sacrifice in Iliad 23 is an evocation not just of the magnitude of Achilles’ grief, but the otherworldliness of his character. To my mind, it is part of a larger motif exploring the threat that figures like Achilles represent to their communities. Achilles’ life (and death) is one of cosmic proportion and significance. This sacrifice shows that his loss is too.
A short Bibliography on the sacrifice
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Bremmer, J. (1978) “Heroes, Rituals and the Trojan War,” Studi storico-religiosi 2, 5–38.
Burkert, W. (1966a) “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies7, 87–121.
Clement, P. (1934) “New Evidence for the Origin of the Iphigeneia Legend,” L’Antiquité classique 3, 393–409.
Compton, Todd M. 2006. Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History. Hellenic Studies Series 11. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Graf, F. (1978) “Die lokrischen Mädchen,” Studi storico-religiosi 2, 61–79
Henrichs, Albert. “3. Human sacrifice in Greek religion: Three case studies”. II Greek Myth and Religion, edited by Harvey Yunis, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 37-68. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110449242-003
Hitch, Sarah. 2009. King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 25. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Hughes, Dennis. 1991. Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge.
Kitts, Margo. “KILLING, HEALING, AND THE HIDDEN MOTIF OF OATH-SACRIFICE IN ILIAD 21.” Journal of Ritual Studies 13, no. 2 (1999): 42–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44368561.
This is one of a few posts dedicatedto Iliad 23. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Book 23, as I discuss in the first post, revisits political and heroic themes from books 1 and 2 and offers an opportunity for the epic’s participants and audience alike to reconsider issues of honor, distribution, and institutional order through Achilles’ chairmanship of the funeral games for Patroklos. Often these games are seen as “filler” or a digression following the violence and deaths of books 20-23; but as many others have noted, the whole book is a matter of ritual performance with deep ties both to the material experiences of ancient audiences and to myth in general.
One of the harder things for modern audiences to sense is the extent to which Patroklos’ death in the Iliad is anticipation of or in surrogacy for Achilles’ outside of the Iliad (usually located in the lost cyclic poem the Aethiopis). As I have written about before, I get a little nervous about some of the approaches that fall under the scholarly rubric of “neoanalysis”—the general approach that explores how the Iliad relates to ‘prior’ or, in better cases, ‘other’ narrative traditions. It makes me anxious because, while in its best form it can provide us with an idea of how the Iliad absorbs and responds to other motifs and stories, it too often provides the impression of hierarchical relationships between tales and that certain episodes were fixed in specific ‘poems’ to which ancient audiences had access.
Menelaus and Patroclus, after the Antique (recto and verso). Henry Fuseli, 1770-78. MET
There’s a lot of uncertainty in such assumptions about the relationship among various narratives and what audiences knew. When it comes to the funeral games in particular, this approach surfaces because they are often seen as an echo/doubling/recapitulation of/model for the funeral games for Achilles. As a general rule, I am not opposed to the idea that there is a significant relationship between the episodes, I just think it more likely that an epic grammar of funeral games developed around retelling of tales that centered the death of a great hero and, further, that the depictions of the burial honors for Patroklos and Achilles were so interdependent in their development over time that any ancient audience member would be hard-pressed to articulate clearly where one began and another ended.
This presupposes the timelessness of performance, the space that is created outside a hierarchy of what story was told when by the ever pressing now of the story being told. I think part of the power of the Iliad’s funeral games resides in how much we understand them as anticipating Achilles’ own death and burial. But given how much Achilles is central in the games and how thorough the political theme is, it is really hard to imagine how to evaluate this power. We would need to know what audiences knew, and that is at some level impossible.
Before we get to the games, however, we have the issue of the burial itself. One of the surprising things about book 23 is its setup: most people remember the elaborate games; I think far fewer remember clearly the continued mutilation of Hektor’s body at the book’s beginning, the slaughter of the 12 Trojan youths, or Patroklos appearing as a ghost to chide Achilles for not burying him already.
Peleus’ son was lying there on the strip of the much-resounding sea, Groaning deeply among the many Myrmidons, In a cleared space where the waves were lapping at the sand. There sleep found him, softening the concerns in his heart, Once it fell around him, sweet. His powerful limbs were exhuasted From chasing Hektor toward windy Troy. Then the soul of pitiful Patroklos arrived Alike to himself in every way, in size and his beautiful eyes- His voice too, and he had similar clothes enveloping him. He stood above Achilles’ head and addressed him. “You are sleeping? Then you have forgotten me, Achilles. You were never careless when I was alive, but now I am dead. Bury me as quickly as possible so I can enter Hades’ gates. The souls, those little ghosts of worn out men, are holding me far off— They will not allow me to join them beyond the river at all, But I am wandering like this through the home of wide-gated Hades. Give me your hand too. I am in sorrow, since I will never again Return from Hades, once you have granted me fire. We will never again sit alive, apart from our dear companions, Making our own plans together. Now a hateful fate has Swallowed me whole, the allotment given as I was born. This is your fate too, Achilles, even though you are like the gods, To die in front of the walls of the wealthy Trojans. But I am going to tell you something, I’ll ask you, if you’ll listen. Don’t keep my bones apart from yours, Achilles, But just as we were raised together in your home, When I was just a young child and Menoitios send me From Opoeis to your home because of a painful murder, On that day when I killed the son of Aphidamas, the fool I was, I did it unwillingly, sent into a rage over a game of dice. Then the horseman Peleus welcomed me into your home And raised me in a kind way and named me your attendant. So have one vessel safeguard our bones together, A golden chamber with two handles, the one your mother gave you.”
Achilles and the Shade of Patroclus, 1793. John Flaxman. MET
The sequence of events that leads up to this speech is remarkable enough that a scholiast felt the need to comment on the sudden change. At one moment, we are witnessing Achilles mourning on the sea, and then he is asleep and a dream is looming over him.
Schol. bT ad Hom. Il. 23.65a
“The sudden change is credible: for, after Achilles’ lamentations, the poet has devised something rather new, and he has provided words for someone who died through a dream.”
The language the scholiast uses here—peripateia—is reminiscent of the terminology Aristotle uses for tragedy. In Greek drama, from an Aristotelian perspective, the peripateia is a reversal, a sudden inversion of fate or outcomes that (sometimes) drives audience and/or character towards a recognition (anagnorisis). The sudden turnabout here is nearly akin to a divine intervention. Patroklos appears, but as George Gazis notes, he is not an envoy of the dead in the same way that is represented in book 11 of the Odyssey. Instead, he appears as a dream. The immediacy of it and the rapid transition leaves us little time to think about the other dream in the Iliad, the false dream sent by Zeus in book 2 to persuade Agamemnon to lead his people to war that day (in part to honor Achilles’ request and advance the ‘plan’ of the Iliad).
I bring up that first dream for thematic and structural reasons. Thematically, dreams elsewhere are sent by the gods. Here, we have no agent, no spoken reason. Unbidden, a supernatural force appears to Achilles and confirms his course of action, providing additional information to the audience. It is tempting to read this, as some do, as an exploration of Achilles’ guilt rather than a literal ghost in a dream; but the vividness and detail leads me to believe that ancient audiences would have taken this as a literal dream. Again, thematically, this makes sense for where we are in the epic.
Dreams and sleep are often paired in early Greek myth as moving between the realms of the seen (the world of the living/day) and the unseen (the underworld/night). Achilles, moreover, has been depicted directly and indirectly as separated from the realm of the living, so much so that when Priam travels to meet him in Iliad 24, he is guided by Hermes, whose role as the psychopompos (the “marshal of souls”) is to guide the dead to Hades’ realm. Perhaps we can imagine Achilles in a space where the fabric between the realms is thinning, frayed, and Patroklos can reach him thanks to their indelible bond, stretching across life’s final boundary.
(Although, to be fair, this sounds a bit too much like a tagline for the movie Ghost.)
Whether we see Patroklos as an actual ghost or an outlet for Achilles’ conscience, the speech provides some background for their relationship and an implicit critique of Achilles. The story Patroklos tells about how they came to know one another is explained in another scholion.
Schol. D ad Il. 12.1 [see Apollodorus 3.13.8]
“Menoitios’ son Patroklos grew up in Opos in Locris but was exiled for an involuntary mistake. For he killed a child his age, the son of the memorable Amphidamas Kleisonumos, or, as some say, Aianes, because he was angry over dice. He went to Phthia in exile for this crime and got to know Achilles there because of his kinship with Peleus. They cemented a deep friendship with one another before they went on the expedition against Troy. This story is from Hellanicus.”
The detail I think is really interesting here and in the speech is that Achilles and Patroklos were brought together by a rage-induced mistake that shattered one community only to create a new one. Patroklos starts out by telling Achilles that he is still suffering, that he cannot rest because Achilles has not cared for his body. Achilles’ rage, then, has been entirely for himself. It had no hope of raising the dead and only has increased the amount of bodies to be buried.
Patroklos reminds Achilles of his own story only after he asks him to make sure that their bones are interred together in one vessel. When he reminds Achilles of how they came to be together, he uses a thematic word for anger (kholôtheis) that should remind audiences of all the damage anger has done in the Iliad’s world. I suspect that Patroklos’ story redounds on Achilles as well, inviting him (and us) to think about the other actions undertaking “unwillingly” and their outcomes, the way Achilles’ anger led him to pray for his people to suffer, the way his people suffering meant Patroklos’ death too.
The point, I think, is an analogical one: the union in death following rage and its ruin is a remaking of life, but in a final fashion. Just as Patroklos’ childhood error led to an adolescent life with Achilles, so too will Achilles’ adult mistake still lead to a kind of eternal life with Patroklos. It is a small solace and no replacement for a life together, but it is something. And it is something Achilles, now, has to create on his own. If there is a peripateia in this moment, it is to be found both in the plot (a move from lament to action) and in the character who drives the plot.
The blending of the Achilles and Patroklos in death—both through the metaphorical overlapping of tales and the literal blending of bones—should remind us of the powerful themes of surrogacy that bind Achilles and Patroklos further together. In this near-final articulation, however, I wonder how much we need to consider Achilles response and the subtle narrative revelation that Achilles reached out to him, but could not grab him, because his spirit “like smoke”. Achilles’ request for an embrace is unfulfilled, yet he turns almost immediately to start the process of burial.
One of the things I emphasize when talking about Achilles’ amazing second lament for Patroklos is that he still seems to be expressing his own sense of loss primarily. This is, of course, a realistic representation of grieving and I may be mistaken in believing that it is only a step toward a broader sense of loss in the world. When my father died suddenly at 61, I don’t know that I started to grieve for what he lost until years later and it was prompted mostly by feelings of joy, tempered by his absence. In times of loss I have come to think more about what the missing miss out on: for my father and his mother, getting to see my children born and grow, taking joy at their joy in the world, and comfort with a world born anew through them.
In my reading of the multiple audiences to Achilles’ speech about his disappointed expectation that Patroklos would be the one to live on and take his place in the world, I think the Iliad is anticipating the epic’s end, when Achilles ever so briefly sees Priam as real through their intersecting yet separate pain. Part of the point of dramatic narrative, I think, is to give us an access to a world outside ourselves, to help us fill our bodies and minds with others’ light and love, both so we can be more unto ourselves and we can make a better world alongside others because we know they are real.
But even this approach, as magnanimous as it might sounds, runs the risk of instrumentalizing others’ pain for the sake of individual gain. Just as easily as someone can mourn what a loved one misses out on, we could take the opposite corollary, to celebrate all they will not suffer. Such a pessimistic view is not far off from the so-called “wisdom of Silenus,” that the best fortune is not to live long or die in glory, but never to have been at all.
And yet, for all it’s apparent logic, this seems too bleak. An epic so invested in showing us the power of loss, can’t possibly be telling us that a superior alternative is never feeling love at all.
Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825). Achille saisit l’ombre de Patrocle, vers 1810 Mine de plomb, craie et aquarelle – 34 x 60 cm Zurich, Kunsthaus
A short Bibliography on the Ghost of Patroklos
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Anderson, Warren D. “Achilles and the Dark Night of the Soul.” The Classical Journal 51, no. 6 (1956): 265–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3292885.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Jonathan Burgess. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love. Oxford.
Devereux, George. “Achilles’ «suicide » in the Iliad.” Helios, vol. VI, no. 2, 1978-1979, pp. 3-15.
G
azis, George Alexander, ‘The Dream of Achilles’, Homer and the Poetics of Hades (Oxford, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 May 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198787266.003.0003, accessed 19 Mar. 2024.
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.
Mouratidis, Ioannis. “Anachronism in the Homeric games and sports.” Nikephoros, vol. III, 1990, pp. 11-22.
MUELLNER, L. Metonymy, Metaphor, Patroklos, Achilles. Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos, [s. l.], v. 32, n. 2, p. 139–155, 2019. DOI 10.24277/classica.v32i2.884
Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.
Paschalis, Sergios. “The Epic Hero as Sacrificial Victim: Patroclus and Palinurus.” Hermathena, no. 199 (2015): 135–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26921696.
Rengakos, Antonios. “Aethiopis.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 306-317.
Roller, Lynn E. “Funeral Games in Greek Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 85, no. 2 (1981): 107–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/505030.
Russo, Joseph. “The Ghost of Patroclus and the Language of Achilles”. Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Philosophy, History, and Literature, edited by Peter Burian, Jenny Strauss Clay and Gregson Davis, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 209-222. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605938-012
This post is a basic introduction to readingIliad 23. Here is a link to the overview of Iliad 22 and another to the plan in general. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Book 23 of the Iliad provides a break in the relentless action following Achilles’ return. It is entirely dedicated to the honoring of Patroklos, both through his burial and the funeral games in his honor. But I suspect that many audiences miss out on the sustained rituals for Patroklos because the games become such an engrossing distraction. The book starts with a reminder that Patroklos remains unburied (through a conversation with a ghost!), then moves through the preparations for his cremation and burial, and then proceeds through a long series of athletic contests in his honor. Along the way, we have some human sacrifice when Achilles kills the twelve Trojan youths he selected in book 21 to slaughter over Patroklos’ pyre.
Iliad 23 is actually anything but fun and games, even if it appears to be a bit of a diversion (or what some have dismissed as a “mere interlude”). The burial is an important part of heroic honors for the dead, yet is marked by a strange sacrifice and the ongoing mutilation of Hektor’s corpse; the games echo the political questions of Iliad 1, 2, 9, and 19; and the funeral games themselves may also be engaging with traditions both of the death of Patroklos outside the Iliad and of the games that were held following Achilles’ death. As such, each of part the book adds something to the themes I have outlined in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions. Among these, however, I think book 21 speaks most directly to politics, heroism, and narrative traditions.
Black Figure Charioteer, c. 500 BCE British Museum, GR 1837,0609.75 (Vases 131)
Contextualizing the Funeral Games
Funeral games are an important context in Greek narrative from myths around the foundation of the four major Panhellenic contests (Olympian, Nemean, Pythian, and Isthmian games) to providing settings and inflection points for myths in general.. Funeral games feature in narrative traditions around Thebes (especially Oedipus and Laius) and Pelias (which leads to the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts) and extend to less well-known traditions like those of Erginos of Orchomenos. Of course, by the classical age, games had become a significant ritualized part of aristocratic culture in Greece.
It is that groundedness of athletic contests in elite/aristocratic culture that can provide some perspective for modern audiences to understand how ancient audiences saw games in the Homeric epics. In the Archaic and Classical periods, Panhellenic games developed as the context for aristocrats from individual city states to compete against each other outside of war, to assert/establish their worth vis a vis their peers (for themselves and for people back in their cities), and to explore a shared elite culture across city-boundaries. Athletic competitions are the kinds of things that ‘heroes’ do when they aren’t in war or some civil conflict.
There’s some disagreement about how much of what is represented would have been at home in the world of Homeric audiences. Ioannis Mouratidis suggests that the Iliad includes material from the oral tradition going all the way back to the Mycenaen age but including elements through the Archaic age as well, reflecting the movement from an autocratic model to the city-state that shaped the perspectives of most ancient audiences. Jonas Grethlein adds to this the recognition that the burial and the games are ritual acts too—as such, they are doubly removed from political ‘reality’ but serve even more as a metanarrative device, another mirror to allow internal and external audiences to work through interpretations of the epic.
Antimenes Painter, C. 510 Metropolitan Museum of Arts
As such, games in ancient Greek culture and in Homeric epic are never just play—they are opportunities to create and establish individual identities in a competitive yet not destructive context. Within Homer, then, the games provide a familiar, albeit likely still fantastic, context for ancient audiences while also offering a context for participants in epic to revisit the political rancor of book 1. As William Scott (1997) notes, the games create a cooperative atmosphere where Achilles is in charge to enforce a particular order of games and of valuing other people. In its structures and discussions, however, it corresponds both to the break of Iliad 1 and the reunification of the Achaean assembly in book 2 (As Richardson points out [1993, 164-6]. Cf. Whitman 1958, 261-4). As several scholars have point out, there is a close connection between the institutional structure of the assembly throughout the Iliad and context of the Funeral Games. See, for example, Wilson 2002, 57 and Hammer 2002, 134ff. Deborah Beck (2005, 233-41) makes explicit the connection between the Achaean assembly and the funeral games.
The games function both as a space for re-imagining politics and for putting Achilles in a position to lead. For the former, Hammer offers five reasons for this (Hammer 1997, 14-16; cf. Ulf 2004.): (1) The burial rites are performed by the Achaeans as a community; (2) The subsequent games performed at the gravesite of a dead hero evokes cult-hero practices; (3) Public challenges regarding prize distribution are offered and answered; (4) Formal procedures for adjudicating disputes appear; and (5) Zeus is invoked as a guarantor of distribution in a different way. Good analyses of the games (see below) look at the way the disputes between characters are played out, the language they use, and what happens when someone intervenes or mediates.
While some see Iliad 23 as a collective effort to reimagine Greek political activity (see, e.g. Donlan 1979), many others have seen the games as being particular to Achilles’ efforts to rethink and rework the events that dominated the epic’s beginning. Kenneth Kitchell (1998) argues that Achilles’ settlement of the disputes in the games as well as his treatment of the wrestling match and spear-contest illustrate his profound character change while Oliver Taplin has suggested that “one of the main poetic functions of the funeral games [is] to show Achilles soothing and resolving public strife, instead of provoking and furthering it” (1992, 253). Recently, Adrian Kelly has emphasized that the funeral games are the last opportunity for Achilles to demonstrate excellence in speaking and action, straining for that heroic ideal of surpassing everyone. And the results, according to Kelly, are mixed: “It is entirely fitting, then, that Achilles’ arbitrations in the Funeral Games show his shortcomings, and his exceptionalism, all too clearly, both in terms of what he does and what others achieve without him” (108).
As I will discuss in one of the subsequent posts about this book, the funeral games for Patroklos are a fantasy of political redistribution that help audiences think through just how difficult it is to resolve the tensions left over from book 1. If they demonstrate anything, it is that maintaining a status quo without coercive violence is hard work, but perhaps a more possible goal than a world where everyone is valued as they think they should be.
Reading Questions for book 23
How does the conversation with Patroklos’ ghost shape our understanding of his relationship with Achilles?
How does Achilles run the funerary games?
How do the debates in the games reflect/refract the conflicts of book 1
Short bibliography on the Funeral games
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Deborah Beck. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005.
Walter Donlan. “The Structure of Authority in the Iliad.” Arethusa 12 (1979) 51-70.
Dunkle, Roger. “Nestor, Odysseus, and the μῆτις-βίη antithesis. The funeral games, Iliad 23.” Classical World, vol. LXXXI, 1987, pp. 1-17.
Ellsworth, J. D.. “Ἀγων νεῶν. An unrecognized metaphor in the Iliad.” Classical Philology, vol. LXIX, 1974, pp. 258-264.
Elmer, D.F. (2013). The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., https://doi.org/10.1353/book.21075.
Garland, R.S.J. “‘GERAS THANONTON’: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CLAIMS OF THE HOMERIC DEAD.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, no. 29 (1982): 69–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43646122.
Grethlein, Jonas. “Epic narrative and ritual: the case of the funeral games in Iliad 23.” Literatur und Religion: Wege zu einer mythisch-rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen. Eds. Bierl, Anton, Lämmle, Rebecca and Wesselmann, Katharina. MythosEikonPoiesis; 1.1-2. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 151-177.
Dean Hammer.“ ‘Who Shall Readily Obey?” Authority and Politics in the Iliad.” Phoenix 51 (1997) 1-24.
Kelly, Adrian. “Achilles in control ? : managing oneself and others in the Funeral Games.” Conflict and consensus in early Greek hexameter poetry. Eds. Bassino, Paola, Canevaro, Lilah Grace and Graziosi, Barbara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2017. 87-108. Doi: 10.1017/9781316800034.005
Kenneth F. Kitchell. “‘But the mare I will not give up’: The Games in Iliad 23.” The Classical Bulletin 74 (1998) 159-71.
Mouratidis, Ioannis. “Anachronism in the Homeric games and sports.” Nikephoros, vol. III, 1990, pp. 11-22.
Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.
Rengakos, Antonios. “Aethiopis.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 306-317.
Nicholas Richardson. The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Roller, Lynn E. “Funeral Games in Greek Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 85, no. 2 (1981): 107–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/505030.
Scott, William C.. “The etiquette of games in Iliad 23.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 213-227.
H. A. Shapiro, Mario Iozzo, Adrienne Lezzi-Hafter, The François Vase: New Perspectives (2 vols.). Akanthus proceedings 3. Kilchberg, Zurich: Akanthus, 2013. 192; 7, 47 p. of plates.
Oliver Taplin. Homeric Soundings: The Shape of the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Christoph Ulf. “Iliad 23: die Bestattung des Patroklos und das Sportfest der “Patroklos-Spiele”: zwei Teile einer mirror-story.” in Herbert Heftner and Hurt Tomaschitz (eds.). Ad Fontes! Festschrift für Gerhard Dobesch zum 65 Geburtstag am 15. September 2004. Wien: Phoibos, 2004, 73-86.
Cedric Hubbell Whitman. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Malcolm M. Willcock, ‘The funeral games of Patroclus’, Proceedings of the Classical Association, LXX. (1973) 36.
Donna F. Wilson. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hades stole away this pretty girl because of her beauty and form
Suddenly, this girl most desirable to all people alive.
Mattios fathered me and my mother Eutukhia
Nursed me. I have died at twelve years old, unmarried.
My name is Mattia, and now that I have left the light
I lie hidden in the dark chamber of Persephone.
I left a lifetime’s grief for my father and mother
Who will have many tears for the rest of time.”
“This grave holds Plauta
who lived twenty years,
Pregnant twice, leaving a single child,
She was equal to the goddesses,
But perished through sickness and childbirth.
Her loomcloth goes unknown
In the shadow and her talkative shuttle
Sits similarly on her skilled distaff.
Yet the fame of her life sings on
As deep as her dear husband’s endless grief.”
This is one of a few posts dedicatedto Iliad 22. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Once Achilles kills Hektor and starts to mistreat his body, the narrative provides the clearest judgment on his acts as possible by marking the treatment as shameful (ἀεικέαμήδετοἔργα.) and then moving from his excess to the responses of the epic’s internal audience. Almost too late do we as the external viewers of the horror realize that Hektor’s death has been witnessed by his people and members of his family. In an echo of the first part of the book, we hear from Priam and then Hecuba as they begin their laments. The structure is in a way an expansion of the rhetorical rising tricolon: Priam and Hecuba are followed by a much longer segment that moves us toward Andromache.
Andromache, as some audience members might recall, was last seen in book 6 when she was sent by Hektor back to her weaving. We find her near the end of book 22 weaving still. When the narrative takes us to her, she is calling for a bath to be drawn for her husband. But when she hears the sounds from without, she freezes, dropping the weaving from her hands. In a scene Charles Segal has described as an anagnorisis (the word Aristotle uses for recognition or realization in tragedy), Andromache is overcome, she faints, and needs the help of her attendants to go outside. She removes her veil, and is compared to a maenad “in a state of ecstatic frenzy” (as Christos Tsagalis puts it).
The prolonged setup accompanied by the description of grief’s impact on her body introduces one of the most remarkable speeches in Homer. Once so complex and moving, that if the epic’s political and reciprocal themes were not still left to be resolved, this might be the poem’s true end.
“And now you go under the hidden places of the earth to Hades’ home, But you leave me in hateful grief, a widow in our home— And your child too, still an infant, the one we bore You and I, ill-fated, Hektor, you will not be of any use to him Since you have died, and he won’t be to you.
For even if he should escape the Achaeans’ war of many tears, Still there would be toil and griefs for this child afterward. For others will deprive him of his lands.
The day that makes a child an orphan separates him from his peers. He looks down all the time; his cheeks are covered in tears; And the child goes in need to his father’s friends, Asking one for a cloak and another for a tunic. He holds out his little cup while they pity him— He can moisten his lips but never fill his hunger.
A luckier child chases him from the feast, Striking him with his hands and laying into him with words: “Go away—your father doesn’t dine with us.”
And the cheerful child will return to his widowed mother, Astyanax, who used to eat only marrow and the rich fat Of sheep as he sat on his father’s needs. Then when sleep would come over him, he would stop playing And rest on a bed in the arms of a nurse, his heart full Of everything good on that soft bed.
But now, he would suffer much once he has lost this dear father, Astyanax, as the Trojans call him as a nickname, For you alone defended their bulwarks and great walls.”
“Pyrrhus and Andromache at Hector’s Tomb“ by Johan Ludwig Lund. Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark
In describing this speech from a narratological perspective, Rebecca Muich notes that even in her grief, Andromache seems to recede into her narrative, imagining someone else’s pain, creating a scene where “her own experiences do not figure into [the] story” (14). Her focus on Hektor’s place in book 6 and his absence in this first speech “seeks to stress the father’s role in grounding a child within a community” (14) and indicates, in part, that Andromache cannot see past the personal loss to her family unit and see the impact on the whole city (contrasting with Hektor’s earlier emphasis on his responsibility to the people).
I was profoundly moved by this speech for its vividness and terrible irony long before I was a parent myself. The first time I read this passage in Greek as I prepared for my PhD exams, I wept while completing it. As a parent now, I struggle even to think about reading it. The terrible irony of course is that Astyanax is actually killed by the victors before he can suffer the deprivations his mother predicts, although she does fear this fate:
Iliad 24.732–738
“You, child, will also either follow me Where you will toil completing the wretched works Of a cruel master or some Achaean will grab you And throw you from the wall to your evil destruction Because he still feels anger at Hektor killing his brother Or father or son, since many a man of the Achaeans dined On the endless earth under Hektor’s hands.”
In the popular tradition the one who carries out the killing of Astyanax is Odysseus, that ‘hero’ of that other epic who gets to go home to his own son and father. If the way we talk about and treat our enemies dehumanizes them—and us—what does it mean when we murder, torture, or harm children? This is not an ‘academic’ question in the Iliad. As I discuss in a post on book 6, transgressive violence– ‘war crimes’–is central to the epic’s exploration of what rage and revenge does to people. When Agamemnon tells his brother they will kill even children in the wombs, it anticipates Astyanax’s future death and increases the pain we feel for Andromache in book 6.
In the future Andromache imagines, Astyanax is marginalized even among his own people by the loss of his father–he loses his status, his friends, and his former happiness. But in a foreign land, he loses all hope of happiness–he is a slave to another if he is lucky to be alive. The reality is, of course, worse–given that nearly every account of what happens in the sack of Troy (or after) has Astyanax dying terribly.
And the future is not much better for Andromache. Her pairing with Hektor as Achilles’ opposite is matched with her possession by Achilles’ son, Neoptolemos, who is awarded her in his father’s stead. Andromache bears children to the son of her husband’s killer (and her story is explored in different ways in Euripides’ Andromache and Trojan Women.
“Andromache Mourning Over Body of Hector“ by Jacque-Louis David. Louvre DL 1969-1, MR 1433 and DL 1969 1
In a moving article, Franco Maiullari suggests that taking three of Andromache’s speeches together helps us see here as a character suffering from trauma: first, the loss of her family (brothers, father, mother), described in dialogue in book 6; second, this speech from book 22, when she is described as in some kind of a trance before her speech. Maiullari focuses on Andromache’s collapse and the narrative’s description of her as nearly deed. And then, in the speech herself, her emphasis on her son instead of herself shows her fixating, looking away from the grief, but perhaps projecting her own experience as an orphan to her child’s future. The third speech is her final lament for Hektor, where she revisits many of the same themes, in a tighter, charged fashion. Maiullari suggests that Astyanax becomes a stand-in for both parents and, perhaps, for the lost future of the city: “Astyanax is the symbol of a childhood that will always remain in its potential state: a tragic repeated destiny for the mother and an unfulfilled promise for the father” (2016, 26).
Andromache’s imagined future hurts even more than it should because even this vision of suffering is less grievous than Astyanax’s actual death and Andromache’s passage into slavery and the sexual violence it implies. The image of the lonely child, separated from his peers is an echo of Andromache at that moment, bereft of her only family, looking forward to a future of begging and shame.
But it will be one without this precious son. And in the end, I think this is what we should take away from the Iliad–how violence destroys cities, how it takes away all that is good, and how the promises of goods and glory are empty and hollow in the face of irreparable loss. While we know all too well that the ability is about heroes and their futile rage, recent books by Emily Austin and Rachel Lesser remind us that epic is also about loss and desire for what can never be returned.
Children dying in war, murdered when they should be playing and dreaming, should be an unforgivable sin. They represent so many futures foreclosed, so much hope and potential undone for reasons that have nothing to do with them. But what is violence apart from unreasonable, unforgivable loss? The Iliad shows us this through the deaths of Patroklos, Hektor, and the future death of this child, the “lord of the city” through whose singular future we grieve the collapse of an entire people.
Andromache and Astyanax – painting by Pierre Paul Prud’hon, completed by Charles Pompée Le Boulanger de Boisfrémont (MET, 25.110.14)
A short bibliography
Biondi, Francesca. “Il velo di Andromaca in Il. 22, 468-472 : analisi della tradizione esegetica antica.” Giornale Italiano di Filologia, vol. 69, 2017, pp. 11-25. Doi: 10.1484/J.GIF.5.114572
Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Casey Dué. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis.
Easterling, Patricia E.. “The tragic Homer.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London, vol. XXXI, 1984, pp. 1-8. Doi: 10.1111/j.2041-5370.1984.tb00524.x
Karanika, Andromache. “Women’s tangible time: perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer.” Narratives of time and gender in antiquity. Eds. Eidinow, Esther and Maurizio, Lisa. London ; New York: Routledge, 2020. 13-27.
Segal, Charles. “Andromache’s anagnorisis. Formulaic artistry in Iliad 22.437-476.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. LXXV, 1971, pp. 33-57.
Tsagalis, Christos. 2008. The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 29. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
“But should all these things befall us, the Ides of March may console. Our heroes too accomplished most gloriously and magnificently everything it was in their power to do. For the rest, we need money and troops, neither of which we have.”
Sed omnia licet concurrant, Idus Martiae consolantur. nostri autem ἥρωες quod per ipsos confici potuit gloriosissime et magnificentissime confecerunt; reliquae res opes et copias desiderant, quas nullas habemus
Cicero, Letters to Brutus I.15 (23) 14 July 43
“Therefore, come here, by the gods, as fast as possible; Convince yourself that it would do your country no greater good if you come quickly than you did on the Ides of March when you freed your fellow citizens from slavery.”
subveni igitur, per deos, idque quam primum, tibique persuade non te Idibus Martiis, quibus servitutem a tuis civibus depulisti, plus profuisse patriae quam, si mature veneris, profuturum.
Cicero, Letters to Brutus, 1.15 (23) July 43
“After the death of Caesar and your unforgettable Ides of March, Brutus, you will not have lost sight of the the fact that I said that one thing was overlooked by you—how much a storm loomed over the Republic. The greatest disease was warded off thanks to you—a great blight was cleansed from the Roman people—and you won immortal fame for your part. But the mechanism of monarchy fell then to Lepidus and Antonius—one of whom is more erratic, while the other is rather unclean—both fearing peace and ill-fit to idle time.”
Post interitum Caesaris et vestras memorabilis Idus Martias, Brute, quid ego praetermissum a vobis quantamque impendere rei publicae tempestatem dixerim non es oblitus. magna pestis erat depulsa per vos, magna populi Romani macula deleta, vobis vero parta divina gloria, sed instrumentum regni delatum ad Lepidum et Antonium, quorum alter inconstantior, alter impurior, uterque pacem metuens, inimicus otio.
The death of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate by Vincenzo Camuccini
“You write to me that Cicero is amazed that I say nothing about his deeds. Since you are hassling me, I will write you what I think thanks to your coaxing.
I know that Cicero has done everything with the best intention. What could be more proved to me than his love for the republic? But certain things seem to me, what can I say, that the most prudent man has acted as if inexperienced or ambitiously, this man who was not reluctant to take on Antony as an enemy when he was strongest?
I don’t know what to write to you except a single thing: the boy’s desire and weakness have been increased rather than repressed by Cicero and that he grinds on so far in his indulgence that he does not refrain from invectives that rebound in two ways. For he too has killed many and he must admit that he is an assassin before what he objects to Casca—in which case he acts the part of Bestia to Casca—
Or because we are not tossing about every hour the Ides of March the way he always has the Nones of December in his mouth, will Cicero find fault in the most noble deed from a better vantage point than Bestia and Clodius were accustomed to insult his consulship?
Our toga-clad friend Cicero brags that he has stood up to Antony’s war. How does it profit me if the cost of Antony defeated is the resumption of Antony’s place? Or if our avenger of this evil has turned out to be the author of another—an evil which has a foundation and deeper roots, even if we concede <whether it is true or not> those things which he does come from the fact that he either fears tyranny or Antony as a tyrant?
But I don’t have gratitude for anyone who does not protest the situation itself provided only that he serves one who is not raging at him. Triumphs, stipends, encouragement with every kind of degree so that it does not shame him to desire the fortune of the man whose name he has taken—is that a mark of a Consular man, of a Cicero?
1Scribis mihi mirari Ciceronem quod nihil significem umquam de suis actis; quoniam me flagitas, coactu tuo scribam quae sentio.
Omnia fecisse Ciceronem optimo animo scio. quid enim mihi exploratius esse potest quam illius animus in rem publicam? sed quaedam mihi videtur—quid dicam? imperite vir omnium prudentissimus an ambitiose fecisse, qui valentissimum Antonium suscipere pro re publica non dubitarit inimicum? nescio quid scribam tibi nisi unum: pueri et cupiditatem et licentiam potius esse irritatam quam repressam a Cicerone, tantumque eum tribuere huic indulgentiae ut se maledictis non abstineat iis quidem quae in ipsum dupliciter recidunt, quod et pluris occidit uno seque prius oportet fateatur sicarium quam obiciat Cascae quod obicit et imitetur in Casca Bestiam. an quia non omnibus horis iactamus Idus Martias similiter atque ille Nonas Decembris suas in ore habet, eo meliore condicione Cicero pulcherrimum factum vituperabit quam Bestia et Clodius reprehendere illius consulatum soliti sunt?
Sustinuisse mihi gloriatur bellum Antoni togatus Cicero noster. quid hoc mihi prodest, si merces Antoni oppressi poscitur in Antoni locum successio et si vindex illius mali auctor exstitit alterius fundamentum et radices habituri altiores, si patiamur, ut iam <dubium sit utrum>ista quae facit dominationem an dominum [an] Antonium timentis sint? ego autem gratiam non habeo si quis, dum ne irato serviat, rem ipsam non deprecatur. immo triumphus et stipendium et omnibus decretis hortatio ne eius pudeat concupiscere fortunam cuius nomen susceperit, consularis aut Ciceronis est?
