Andromache’s Lament for Hektor in Iliad 22

This is one of a few posts dedicated to 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 (ἀεικέα μήδετο ἔργα.) 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.

Iliad 22.482-507

“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.”

νῦν δὲ σὺ μὲν ᾿Αΐδαο δόμους ὑπὸ κεύθεσι γαίης
ἔρχεαι, αὐτὰρ ἐμὲ στυγερῷ ἐνὶ πένθεϊ λείπεις
χήρην ἐν μεγάροισι· πάϊς δ’ ἔτι νήπιος αὔτως,
ὃν τέκομεν σύ τ’ ἐγώ τε δυσάμμοροι· οὔτε σὺ τούτῳ
ἔσσεαι ῞Εκτορ ὄνειαρ ἐπεὶ θάνες, οὔτε σοὶ οὗτος.
ἤν περ γὰρ πόλεμόν γε φύγῃ πολύδακρυν ᾿Αχαιῶν,
αἰεί τοι τούτῳ γε πόνος καὶ κήδε’ ὀπίσσω
ἔσσοντ’· ἄλλοι γάρ οἱ ἀπουρίσσουσιν ἀρούρας.
ἦμαρ δ’ ὀρφανικὸν παναφήλικα παῖδα τίθησι·
πάντα δ’ ὑπεμνήμυκε, δεδάκρυνται δὲ παρειαί,
δευόμενος δέ τ’ ἄνεισι πάϊς ἐς πατρὸς ἑταίρους,
ἄλλον μὲν χλαίνης ἐρύων, ἄλλον δὲ χιτῶνος·
τῶν δ’ ἐλεησάντων κοτύλην τις τυτθὸν ἐπέσχε·
χείλεα μέν τ’ ἐδίην’, ὑπερῴην δ’ οὐκ ἐδίηνε.
τὸν δὲ καὶ ἀμφιθαλὴς ἐκ δαιτύος ἐστυφέλιξε
χερσὶν πεπλήγων καὶ ὀνειδείοισιν ἐνίσσων·
ἔρρ’ οὕτως· οὐ σός γε πατὴρ μεταδαίνυται ἡμῖν.
δακρυόεις δέ τ’ ἄνεισι πάϊς ἐς μητέρα χήρην
᾿Αστυάναξ, ὃς πρὶν μὲν ἑοῦ ἐπὶ γούνασι πατρὸς
μυελὸν οἶον ἔδεσκε καὶ οἰῶν πίονα δημόν·
αὐτὰρ ὅθ’ ὕπνος ἕλοι, παύσαιτό τε νηπιαχεύων,
εὕδεσκ’ ἐν λέκτροισιν ἐν ἀγκαλίδεσσι τιθήνης
εὐνῇ ἔνι μαλακῇ θαλέων ἐμπλησάμενος κῆρ·
νῦν δ’ ἂν πολλὰ πάθῃσι φίλου ἀπὸ πατρὸς ἁμαρτὼν
᾿Αστυάναξ, ὃν Τρῶες ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν·
οἶος γάρ σφιν ἔρυσο πύλας καὶ τείχεα μακρά.

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.”

… σὺ δ’ αὖ τέκος ἢ ἐμοὶ αὐτῇ
ἕψεαι, ἔνθά κεν ἔργα ἀεικέα ἐργάζοιο
ἀθλεύων πρὸ ἄνακτος ἀμειλίχου, ἤ τις ᾿Αχαιῶν
ῥίψει χειρὸς ἑλὼν ἀπὸ πύργου λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον
χωόμενος, ᾧ δή που ἀδελφεὸν ἔκτανεν ῞Εκτωρ
ἢ πατέρ’ ἠὲ καὶ υἱόν, ἐπεὶ μάλα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν
῞Εκτορος ἐν παλάμῃσιν ὀδὰξ ἕλον ἄσπετον οὖδας.

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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.

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.

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.

Dimock, Wai Chee. “After Troy: Homer, Euripides, total war.” Rethinking tragedy. Ed. Felski, Rita. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 2008. 66-81

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.

LEFKOWITZ, MARY R. “The Heroic Women of Greek Epic.” The American Scholar 56, no. 4 (1987): 503–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41211464.

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

Lohmann, Dieter. Die Andromache-Szenen der Ilias. Ansätze und Methoden der Homer-Interpretation. Spudasmata; XLII. Hildesheim: Olms, 1988.

Maiullari, Franco. “Andromache, a post-traumatic character in Homer.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, N. S., no. 113, 2016, pp. 11-27.

Muich, Rebecca. “Focalization and Embedded Speech in Andromache’s Iliadic Laments.” Illinois Classical Studies, no. 35–36 (2011): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.5406/illiclasstud.35-36.0001.

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.

Hektor Sweet-talks Achilles in Iliad 22

This is one of a few posts dedicated to 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.

The most memorable details of Iliad 22 are probably Hektor running away from Achilles, then being tricked to facing him by Athena, and, finally, the mistreatment of his corpse before the book’s end. Before the antagonists face each other, however, Hektor has a remarkable speech where he chides himself for not taking advice to retreat within the walls earlier. He confesses that fear of shame—both for cowardice and for wasting so many Trojan lives—keeps him from returning to the city at this point.

In the final moments before he faces Achilles, when the narrative describes him as a coiled snake, Hektor imagines a different outcome. His dream-world can help us understand what happens in the rest of the book.

Iliad 22.111-128

“I wish I could put my embossed shield down
Along with my mighty helmet, then lean my spear against the wall,
And go face-to-face with blameless Achilles.
I’d promise him Helen and the possessions along with her,
Everything that Alexander took in his hollow ships
When he went to Troy, the very beginning of our conflict,
To give her back to the sons of Atreus and in addition
To divide up all the things this city has kept safe.
Then I would have an oath sworn among the Trojan elders
Not to hide anything at all, but to divide up everything,
Every possession the lovely city keeps inside.
But why does my dear heart discuss these things?
I can’t go forward and approach him—he wouldn’t pity me
Nor feel any shame at all, but he will kill me even unarmed
Just the way he would a woman, once I lay my weapons down.
There’s no way at all from oak or stone
To sweet-talk him, the way that a young woman and a young man
or a young man and a young woman sweet talk one another.”

εἰ δέ κεν ἀσπίδα μὲν καταθείομαι ὀμφαλόεσσαν
καὶ κόρυθα βριαρήν, δόρυ δὲ πρὸς τεῖχος ἐρείσας
αὐτὸς ἰὼν ᾿Αχιλῆος ἀμύμονος ἀντίος ἔλθω
καί οἱ ὑπόσχωμαι ῾Ελένην καὶ κτήμαθ’ ἅμ’ αὐτῇ,
πάντα μάλ’ ὅσσά τ’ ᾿Αλέξανδρος κοίλῃς ἐνὶ νηυσὶν
ἠγάγετο Τροίηνδ’, ἥ τ’ ἔπλετο νείκεος ἀρχή,
δωσέμεν ᾿Ατρεΐδῃσιν ἄγειν, ἅμα δ’ ἀμφὶς ᾿Αχαιοῖς
ἄλλ’ ἀποδάσσεσθαι ὅσα τε πτόλις ἧδε κέκευθε·
Τρωσὶν δ’ αὖ μετόπισθε γερούσιον ὅρκον ἕλωμαι
μή τι κατακρύψειν, ἀλλ’ ἄνδιχα πάντα δάσασθαι
κτῆσιν ὅσην πτολίεθρον ἐπήρατον ἐντὸς ἐέργει·
ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός;
μή μιν ἐγὼ μὲν ἵκωμαι ἰών, ὃ δέ μ’ οὐκ ἐλεήσει
οὐδέ τί μ’ αἰδέσεται, κτενέει δέ με γυμνὸν ἐόντα
αὔτως ὥς τε γυναῖκα, ἐπεί κ’ ἀπὸ τεύχεα δύω.
οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης
τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠΐθεός τε
παρθένος ἠΐθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλοιιν.

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Hektor paints a vivid scene of disarming and meeting Achilles to make a truce. The language throughout is filled with references to pity and shame, those softer cultural correctives against the worst behavior. He also emphasizes redistributing goods, perhaps reaching back to the beginning of the epic when Achilles and Agamemnon fought over war spoils, but ultimately, Hektor knows neither his disarming nor the redistribution of goods is going to make a difference. Achilles is not merely upset, he is enraged. His loss of honor in book 1 led him to question and perhaps abandon the entire system of shame and esteem to which Hektor alludes. The death of Patroklos at Hektor’s hands, moreover, shook Achilles’ cosmic reality.

Schol. Ad Il. 22.126 bT

”There’s no way from oak or stone to sweet-talk him” to describe  ridiculous ancient sayings: it is either from the generation of humans who were in the mountains, or it is because early people said they were ash-born or from the stones of Deukalion. Or it is about providing oracles, since Dodona is an oak and Pytho was a stone. Or it means to speak uselessly, coming from the leaves around trees and the waves around stones. Or it is not possible for him to describe the beginning of the human race.

<οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν> ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης / τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι: ληρώδεις ἀρχαιολογίας διηγεῖσθαι, ἢ ἀπὸ τοῦ τὸ παλαιὸν ὀρεινόμων ὄντων τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐκεῖσε τίκτεσθαι ἢ ἐπεὶ μελιηγενεῖς λέγονται οἱ πρώην ἄνδρες καὶ <λαοὶ> ἀπὸ τῶν λίθων Δευκαλίωνος.  ἢ χρησμοὺς διηγεῖσθαι (Δωδώνη γὰρ δρῦς, πέτρα δὲ Πυθών). ἢ περιττολογεῖν, ἀπὸ τῶν περὶ τὰς δρῦς φύλλων καὶ περὶ τὰς πέτρας κυμάτων. ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν αὐτῷ τὴν ἀρχὴν τοῦ γένους διηγεῖσθαι τῶν ἀνθρώπων.

When Hektor declares that “There’s no way at all from oak or stone…” to talk to Achilles, he uses a proverbial comment to tap into a cosmic/metaphysical assertion: Achilles is beyond shame and pity, he is beyond seeing anyone else in the world as more than an obstacle to his ends. But he still ruminates and fantasizes. In my first post on book 22, I suggest that we see Hektor as frozen in that moment of fight or flight for years, wrangling with the trauma of inaction and desperation. Fabian Horn, in an article from 2018, argues similarly that Hektor exhibits a combat stress reaction along with post-traumatic stress disorder—that he runs not from death but from a world lost in fear and out of his control

To add to these readings, I think we also need to think about what Hektor longs for, what he desires. Rachel Lesser considers Hektor and Achilles at some length in her recent book, Desire in the Iliad  (2022, 208-214). In discussing lines 123-138, Lesser suggests that “When Hektor concludes, “he will kill me naked, just like a woman,” he acknowledges Achilleus’ unstoppable aggression and imagines himself as a vulnerable and passive victim” (209), emphasizing that Hektor imagines a equal relationship, one not of assault but of courtship (following Owen 1946’s observation that Hektor echoes his exchange with Andromache in that book—the language of intimate conversation Hektor uses here (e.g. ὀαρίζετον) appears there as well (cf. Il. 6.516). Such an image of romance, I think, dials back the story of the Iliad to the time before the beginning of the trouble. His repetition of youth and maiden, maiden and youth, shows him stumbling over the image, nearly trying to will it into being despite its impossibility.

Lesser argues that this erotic—in terms of courtly or romantic—language is operative throughout the faceoff between Achilles and Hektor, pervading the former’s eagerness and passion and helping us to understand the heightened language to describe Hektor and “[providing] a window into Achilleus’ psychology thatsupports the interpretation of Achilleus’ libidinal fixation on Hektor as an external displacement of his ambivalent longing for Patroklos. The final death blow to Hektor is a kind of “sexual consummation” as Achilles’ spear enters his enemy’s neck (211).

I really like the formulation of understanding Achilles’ “displacement” of his intensity for Patroklos onto the fire of his rage towards Hektor. There is a slippage that occurs in intense emotions we can observe here as Achilles identification with Patroklos moves from an acceptance of surrogacy in book 16 to a lamentation about what that surrogacy actual means in books 18 and 19 to redirecting it towards Hektor. Hektor becomes the reason Achilles lost part of himself but also a target for the emotional immensity so characteristic of Peleus’ only son. In addition to displacement, however I think there is also a kind of complementarity modeled by Hektor’s speech itself.

When Hektor imagines himself and Achilles as young lovers, he may make himself passive to Achilles’ agent, but he also positions them in a complementary stance to negotiate a different outcome to their conflict. Both in the repetition of identities near the end and in the overall scenario, Hektor imagines an egalitarian relationship where Achilles pursues him through speech, in a less aggressive and less destructive way than the actual outcome. For us as modern readers, however, it can be easy for us to misunderstand some of the assumptions attending marriage for Homeric audiences. One of the most well-known quotes about marriage from antiquity is the blessing Odysseus offers to Nausikaa in Odyssey 6 (6.180-185)

“May the gods grant as much as you desire in your thoughts,
A husband and home, and may they give you fine likemindedness,
For nothing is better and stronger than this
When two people who are likeminded in their thoughts share a home,
A man and a wife—this brings many pains for their enemies
And joys to their friends. And the gods listen to them especially”

σοὶ δὲ θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν ὅσα φρεσὶ σῇσι μενοινᾷς,
ἄνδρα τε καὶ οἶκον, καὶ ὁμοφροσύνην ὀπάσειαν
ἐσθλήν: οὐ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ γε κρεῖσσον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἢ ὅθ᾽ ὁμοφρονέοντε νοήμασιν οἶκον ἔχητον
ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή: πόλλ᾽ ἄλγεα δυσμενέεσσι,
χάρματα δ᾽ εὐμενέτῃσι, μάλιστα δέ τ᾽ ἔκλυον αὐτοί.

This passage is often viewed as a positive statement on marriage, while it also articulates a notion of justice (hurting friends/helping enemies) that is debated in Plato’s Republic as well. As James Redfield argues in his book The Locrian Maidens, the language of marriage and political stability overlap in emphasis in similarity of thought (more often homonoia). But as the story of the Odyssey shows, what this often means is the occluding of the desires and the interests of the passive/subordinate group by the values and interests of the group in power. Hektor gives up the possessions of Troy as something like a bridegift, yielding to Achilles what he wishes Achilles would desire in place of his blood and life.

There’s another angle to the moment that it took me a modern novel to see more clearly. Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan uses a medieval fantasy world to retell the story of Muslim Spain during the time of El Cid. Two of the primary characters, the cavalry captain Rodrigo Belmonte and the warrior/poet Ammar ibn Khairan end up on opposite sides of the war as the ‘foreigners’ are driven back across the sea. The two men start out as uneasy allies and are driven apart by diverging loyalties until they lead armies against each other.

One of the most remarkable scenes in a remarkable book comes near the end when Rodrigo and Ammar face each other on the field in single-combat. When the two approach that final moment, Kay leaves a silence to be filled by the audience: “No one escorted either man, so no one knew what it was that Rodrigo Belmonte and Ammar ibn Khairan said to each other when they stopped their horses a little distance apart, alone in the world.” Their former intimacy remains private, informing and anticipating the action to come.

The unfolding duel is watched by a woman named Jehane who loves them both. As she watches, the narrative moves and obscures their identities. One of the men thinks as the scene moves on:

It would have been pleasant, the thought came to him, to be able to lay down their weapons on the darkening grass. To walk away from this place, from what they were being made to do, past the ruins, along the river and into the woods beyond. To find a forest pool, wash their wounds and drink from the cool water and then sit beneath the trees, out of the wind, silent as the summer night came down.

As she observes this scene, Rodrigo’s wife, Miranda remembers, “But she had never, ever heard Rodrigo speak of another man—not even Raimundo, who had died so long ago—the way he’d talked about Ammar ibn Khairan during the long, waiting winter just past. The way the man sat a horse, handled a blade, a bow, devised strategies, jested, spoke of history, geography, the properties of good wine. Even the way he wrote poetry.”

Rodrigo and Ammar are different men in many ways, but they are united in their dedication to their people and their sense of duty. When Hektor briefly imagines chatting with Achilles and sharing a world outside of war with him, I imagine him, the breaker of horses, as occupying such a complementary space, where one fills the space left by another. Indeed, as Owen Lee argues, Hektor and Achilles are both versions of heroes who change the world, who bring a new reality into being. They mirror and refract, but do not perfectly overlap. As the duel continues in The Lions of Al-Rassan, it becomes difficult to trace who strikes and who defends and, in the final moments, it is left briefly unclear which warrior survives.

The interplay of love and death, of longing and fear, in the final moments between Rodrigo and Ammar has led me to see more of what Rachel Lesser sees in Hektor’s final moments. Achilles, Patroklos, and Hektor represent something of a trans-mortal triangle, as each represents life and/or death for the others and a series of replacement and displacement that alters the world they all briefly shared. The greatness of either hero is measured by the other—Hektor’s death matters in part because of Achilles’ life, their stories are entwined in the Iliad to the point that the differences are nearly obscured. As Kay writes of the duel in The Lions of Al-Rassan: “Most of the time, eyes narrowed against the sun, Jehane could tell them apart. Not always, though, as they overlapped and merged and broke apart. They were silhouettes now, no more than that, against the last red disk of light.”

The signal difference in Lions, however, is that dreadful balance between duty and rage. The heroes of Kay’s world are driven by the loyalties to face one another; Achilles and Hektor are driven by their roles into a series of choices that upends duty and common sense and leads them both to their deaths. But in Hektor’s speech we find a different desire that anticipates the very elision Kay describes: when he speaks contra-factually of Achilles’ ability to pity him or feel shame in his treatment, he echoes the very language Priam uses of Achilles in book 24 (503-504):

“But revere the gods, Achilles, and pity him,
thinking of your own father. And I am more pitiable still…”

ἀλλ’ αἰδεῖο θεοὺς ᾿Αχιλεῦ, αὐτόν τ’ ἐλέησον
μνησάμενος σοῦ πατρός· ἐγὼ δ’ ἐλεεινότερός περ

Priam, even if briefly, becomes for Achilles what rage makes impossible for Hektor: another human being whose love and brief light in the world reminds him of his own. The tragedy of Rodrigo and Ammar is that they find this in each other but then must leave it behind; Hektor and Achilles never have the time to find this in each other and Priam and Achilles are allowed only a brief glimpse before they return to their final days.

A short bibliography

Bassett, S. E.. “Achilles’ treatment of Hector’s body.” TAPA, 1933, pp. 41-65.

Kay, Guy Gavriel. The Lions of Al-Rassan. Viking Canada. 1995.

Jasper Griffin, ‘Achilles kills Hector’, Lampas, XXIII. (1990) 353-369.

Hadjicosti, Ioanna L.. “Hesiod fr. 212B (MW): death at the Skaean gates.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 58, no. 4, 2005, pp. 547-554.

Horn, Fabian. “The psychology of aggression: Achilles’ wrath and Hector’s flight in Iliad 22.131-7.” Hermes, vol. 146, no. 3, 2018, pp. 277-289. Doi: 10.25162/hermes-2018-0023

Lee, M. Owen. “Achilles and Hector as Hegelian heroes.” Échos du monde classique = Classical views, vol. XXX, 1981, pp. 97-103.

Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad. Oxford.

Owen, E. T. 1946. The Story of the Iliad. Toronto.

Rabel, Robert J.. “The shield of Achilles and the death of Hector.” Eranos, vol. LXXXVII, 1989, pp. 81-90.

Redfield, James R. The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Italy. Princeton, 2004.

Vermeule, Emily D. Townsend. “The vengeance of Achilles. The dragging of Hektor at Troy.” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, vol. LXIII, 1965, pp. 34-52.

Introducing Iliad 22

This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 22. Here is a link to the overview of Iliad 21 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 22 has three basic parts, creating suspense before the final face-off between Achilles and Hektor; the faceoff itself followed by the mistreatment of Hektor’s body; and the first responses to Hektor’s death, culminating in Andromache’s first lament. In the first part, Hektor ignores pleas from his parents to return to the city and speaks to himself; the second part presents a famous and somewhat confusing (in terms of motivation) duel between Hektor and Achilles; and the third features some of the most emotional speeches in the epic.

Each of these narrative concerns 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 22 speaks most directly to heroism, gods and humans, and friends and family.

All of the segments in book 22 are deeply interdependent. Understanding Hektor’s behavior may be one of the most important interpretive challenges in approaching book 22. A simile before he speaks may help us start.

Homer, Iliad 22.93-98

“As a serpent awaits a man in front of its home on the mountain,
One who dined on ruinous plants [pharmaka], and a dread anger overtakes him
As it coils back and glares terribly before his home.
So Hektor in his unquenchable [asbestos] fury [menos] would not retreat,
After he leaned his shining shield on the wall’s edge.
He really glowered as he spoke to his own proud heart

ὡς δὲ δράκων ἐπὶ χειῇ ὀρέστερος ἄνδρα μένῃσι
βεβρωκὼς κακὰ φάρμακ᾽, ἔδυ δέ τέ μιν χόλος αἰνός,
σμερδαλέον δὲ δέδορκεν ἑλισσόμενος περὶ χειῇ:
ὣς Ἕκτωρ ἄσβεστον ἔχων μένος οὐχ ὑπεχώρει
πύργῳ ἔπι προὔχοντι φαεινὴν ἀσπίδ᾽ ἐρείσας:
ὀχθήσας δ᾽ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν

As he stands before the walls of his city in book 22, Hektor is compared to a snake, coiled to strike an intruder. This moment of anticipation of violence is prolonged as Hektor turns away from the pleas of his family not to face Achilles. In a moment marked by the repeated speech introduction “ (ὀχθήσας δ᾽ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν),  Hektor ruminates, and worries despite what the opening simile anticipates. He resolves to face Achilles, but then immediately changes his mind: “When Hektor noticed Achilles, a tremor overtook him and he could not bear to wait for him / but he left the gates behind and left in flight” Ἕκτορα δ᾽, ὡς ἐνόησεν, ἕλε τρόμος: οὐδ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔτλη / αὖθι μένειν, ὀπίσω δὲ πύλας λίπε, βῆ δὲ φοβηθείς).

What happens between the end of Hektor’s speech and his choice to run from Achilles? Very few people who read or write about the Iliad can make great sense of Hektor. His traditional character is part of James Redfield’s widely cited The Tragedy of Hektor (1975) and his strange engagement with his advisor Polydamas–with whom he argues on three separate occasions–is seen as a function of the limits of Trojan politics but rarely as evidence of the emotional response of an actual human being. 

Indeed, throughout the Iliad, Hektor’s behavior can be hard to parse, and so much harder to defend. He is harsh to his brother, but within limits; his kindness to Helen and joy in his son seems ill-fit to his rejection of Andromache’s advice. In war, he seems relentless, speaking repeatedly of glory and the alternating chance of war, while pursuing an offensive onslaught that seems either wholly irrational or an artificial hastening of the war’s ultimate plot. Sure, we see the man-killing Hektor in all his unquenchable fury, but there are questions: he barely fights Ajax to a draw in book 7; he needs the help of another man and a god to slay Patroklos in book 16; he must be tricked to face Achilles when the final conflict awaits him.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started to think of Hektor as someone marked by prolonged uncertainty and torturous anticipation. In a way, we have lived in our own kind of siege over the past year: often unable to leave our homes, afraid of what days and weeks would bring, and plagued beyond all else by uncertainties that undermined many things we held to be true, even sacred. I started to think of Hektor and the Trojans as living this way not for one year, but for nine, hearing of the deaths or abductions of family members in other cities, seeing no way to break out. Before the beginning of the epic we know, Hektor spent nine years pacing the walls of his city, unable to fight off his enemies yet unable to flee. Until, of course, the Iliad’s action lets him break free.

Fight, Flight, or Freeze

In the third edition of his The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease (2014), Robert Scaer looks at the cycle of arousal and rest that characterizes the function of our nervous system in response to crisis or danger. In simple terms, we can think of the fight or flight response which triggers different neurotransmitters to prepare for rapid response: in a resting state, our bodies are prepared for and more efficient at digesting and storing nutrients and also at processing and storing knowledge of facts and events (13). The fight/flight response puts us in a high-energy nervous state, raising blood-pressure and moving blood into our muscular system.

Such a shifting of biological resources is an essential survival tool. But when we experience prolonged arousal without release or resolution we can become locked in or frozen, establishing an unstable state that may look immobile but may actually be “rapid and exaggerated sympathetic/parasympathetic oscillation (15). To put it in other words: when we face a crisis situation we can neither fight nor flee, our “freeze” reaction is a parafunctional cycling through the same fight/flight and resting process over and over again. In this state, our minds can become “numb and dissociated” and our vascular and digestive systems suffer.

As Scaer outlines (15-16), Animals often show remarkable responses to this freeze (a “discharge”) that can include convulsions and more in an instinctive attempt to restore “autonomic homeostasis” (16), that is, stability. Human beings, however, rarely show such ‘rests’ to discharge the trauma and reset the body. Such an inability to resolve the freeze moment, it seems, compounds the long term dangers of physical responses to trauma and the likelihood that memories of the events will incite similar physical responses, a return to a traumatized state. Scaer argues that many chronic diseases may be rooted in the reshaping of our brains by trauma and the inability of our conscious minds to distinguish between now and traumatizing events.

Reading Hektor’s Trauma

When we see Hektor before the walls of Troy, he is “coiled” like a snake (elissomenos) and he wouldn’t retreat because of his unquenchable heart. Note that I translate that participle clause ἄσβεστον ἔχων μένος causally. This is, of course, a significant choice, but I think a well-motivated one. This is the only time in Greek epic when menos—one’s energy, life force—is described as asbestos, “inextinguishable, unsatisfiable”. The adjective appears to mark extreme or powerful expressions of emotion as in describing the laughter of the gods at Hephaistos (1.599) or war cries of groups as they engage in battle (11.500, 11.530; 13.169; 13.450; 16.267). In the Odyssey, asbeston twice modifies kleos (4.584; 7.133). This word seems to describe extreme moments of pitch, or aggression with a sense of duration. But as Lorenzo Garcia argues in his Homeric Durability, asbestos marks things that ultimately cannot endure: what the sound of a laugh or a war-cry share in common with Hektor’s menos is an unsustainable intensity. In addition, the adjective marks something that is public, shared, or heard by others. Here, the asbeston menos is something private, a massive, unsustainable thing somehow contained within a single person.

The simile compares Hektor to an animal coiled for attack; in describing his refusal to retreat, the narrative uniquely describes the energy driving him; the speech introduction that follows places him in a motif of deliberation over fighting or fleeing. Speeches introduced by the formula “He really glowered as he spoke to his own proud heart” (ὀχθήσας δ᾽ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν) are dramatic representations of deliberation—moments that happen in an instant but are unfolded in the time of performance to allow audiences to consider the inner workings of heroic minds. The simile of the serpent creates extra space and invites audiences to consider the space between the image of the coiled snake and Hektor’s actions: it is as much about how Hektor is the snake and how he is not.

For mortals, the moment of deliberation seems to be that very freeze before the selection of fight or flight: at 11.404-410, Odysseus, caught alone in battle worries about being overcome as the battle rages around him. At 17.90, Menelaos pauses in the defense of Patroklos’ body, afraid to face Hektor alone. At 18.5, Achilles is paralyzed by fear that something has happened to Patroklos and later at 20.143, Achilles finds himself perplexed at the sudden disappearance of Aeneas who has been rescued by the gods. At 21.552, Agenor the son of Antenor pauses mid-battle to decide to run or face Achilles.

The participle characterizing the speech, okhthêsas, moreover, expresses anger or resentment and may be an iterative of ekhthomai, that same root that gives us Greek words for hostility and enmity. Especially when combined with the asseverative particle ἄρα, this verb communicates an inward wrath at a choice with no good options. It is the coiling of anticipation, of loss, and of a loss of control. It is, I think, a formulaic marker for the process of navigating between fight and flight. In its pairing with the opening simile, it marks Hektor in that same moment, in an extended freeze. His resolution, however, contrasts with the other scenes: Hektor ends up acting contrary to his choice to stand. 

Hektor’s menos, his anger, is a reflex of his loss of control and of his longing for something to be different. Andromache anticipates this when she speaks to him in book (6.407-409):

“Divine one, your menos will destroy you and you do not pity
Your infant child and my wretched fate, the one who will soon
Be your widow. For the Achaeans are on their way to kill you…”

δαιμόνιε φθίσει σε τὸ σὸν μένος, οὐδ’ ἐλεαίρεις
παῖδά τε νηπίαχον καὶ ἔμ’ ἄμμορον, ἣ τάχα χήρη
σεῦ ἔσομαι· τάχα γάρ σε κατακτανέουσιν ᾿Αχαιοὶ

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Hektor’s drive to protect those he cares for most is the very thing that separates him from them, that unites them only in loss and longing. This calls to my mind the work of my friend, Emily Austin, who has written a book foregrounding the thematic importance of loss and longing (pothos) in the Iliad: it is the sudden absence that motivates Achilles’ menis. I think it is also the unconquerable fire that keeps Hektor from ever truly being still. 

Thinking about the fight/flight/freeze complex as described by Scaer helps us confirm the poetic function of a Homeric formula: it also serves to invite audiences into a mind navigating a moment of crisis, of choice or judgment (hence Greek krisis) over running away or facing danger. In combination with a striking simile and a strange description of Hektor’s menos, this pattern also helps us see what can happen when the deliberation fails, when the freeze prolongs. Hektor’s menos is overloaded, it is too thoroughly interiorized, coiled inside him, breaking him from within.

Hektor, Fighting and Fleeing

Almost 15 years ago, Elton Barker and I wrote an article about debates over fight or flight in the New Archilochus Poem and Homer. In it, we argued that both Homer and Archilochus were engaged in a tradition of poetic debate about the merits of fight or flight, transcending our narrow concepts of genre and operating ahierarchically, that is, prioritizing neither Homer nor Archilochus, but providing evidence of debate and reflection over time. I don’t think we’re wrong, still; but I do think that this debate is about more than drama and poets: it is about representing human emotion and cognition.

Broadly speaking, Scaer’s framework and my own experience makes me think that we need to rethink Hektor’s behavior throughout the epic and the depiction of Trojan responses to the war in general, allowing more richness to the emotive and cognitive content. There are thematic ties that tell a story of their own.

When Hektor speaks to Andromache in book 6, he anticipates the shame he worries about in book 22 and considers his wife’s suffering after his death. He expresses a characteristic fatalism when he dismisses Andromache to her weaving, saying, “I claim that there is no one who has escaped his fate, / whether a good person or a bad one, after they are born” (μοῖραν δ’ οὔ τινά φημι πεφυγμένον ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν,  /οὐ κακὸν οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλόν, ἐπὴν τὰ πρῶτα γένηται, 6.488-489). 

Perhaps it is too much to read into this passage to say that Hektor thinks flight is impossible (he does…), but it certainly helps explain his subsequent actions: keeping the Trojan army out on the field at night in book 8, breaking through the Greek fortifications despite a bad omen in book 12, and refusing to return to the defense of the city in book 18. When Polydamas calls for them to retreat, Hektor continues to insist Zeus is on their side and declares, “I will not flee him from the ill-sounding battle, but I will stand / against Achilles either to win great strength or to be taken myself. War is common ground and the one who kills is killed” (…οὔ μιν ἔγωγε  / φεύξομαι ἐκ πολέμοιο δυσηχέος, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ ἄντην  /στήσομαι, ἤ κε φέρῃσι μέγα κράτος, ἦ κε φεροίμην / ξυνὸς ᾿Ενυάλιος, καί τε κτανέοντα κατέκτα, 18.306-309).

When Hektor freezes in the choice to fight or flee in book 22, he knows there is no other option. In his speech, he often surprises modern audiences with a wish that he and Achilles could exchange pledges like young lovers and wishes neither would have to die even as he admits that shame would prevent him from retreat. It is as if Hektor has a handful of cards and is repeatedly flipping through them, looking for one that will change a fate he knows cannot be changed. He goes back through his own stories, perhaps stopping at his conversation with Andromache and thinking about what he loses, what he needs, and the absence of choices remaining to him.  At the end, he returns to that deceptive idea, that fate alternates and he just might win the day (εἴδομεν ὁπποτέρῳ κεν Ὀλύμπιος εὖχος ὀρέξῃ, 130).

The Trojans in Trauma

Of course, there’s not a single way to think about this moment. David Morris in his 2015 The Evil Hours notes that Freud theorized that war neuroses came from an internal conflict between self preservation and responsibility to honor and comrades (15). As Jonathan Shay adds in his Achilles in Vietnam, trauma undermines “the cohesion of consciousness” (1995,188). And this fragmentation has been born out by neurobiological studies since. 

The additional thing to think about for Hektor and for us, is that the impact of trauma can be increased by duration. What if we think of the Trojan leader as coiled for nine years, as representing a people besieged, constantly poised between the need to fight and the desire for an impossible flight. The repeated suppression of the fight or flight choice, the prolonged freeze would be traumatizing neurobiologically. It would change the way Hektor’s mind and body worked.

I do want to be careful to say that I am not saying the Greeks would have seen it this way precisely, but rather that there is clearly a traditional marker through the collocation of simile, deliberative introduction, and the invitation to the audience to linger with Hektor for a moment (the freeze) that modern observers have seen as having both psychological and neurobiological components. Ancient audiences would have seen their own peers shaped and reshaped by similar traumas and their poems show evidence of understanding the long term impact experiences like isolation, betrayal, and helplessness can have on the working of human minds (think of Philoktetes, Ajax, Odysseus, and others like Klytemnestra and Medea in tragedy).

So, this is not a positivistic reading saying “this thing is definitely that” but more that our modern scientific discourse has outlined a space of behavior that traditional poetics found meaningful too and that the correlation between these observations may help us understand something about Hektor others have missed. But I think this is bigger than Hektor: it may be about the Trojans, a people besieged, as a whole.

In the traditional story of the Trojan War, the story of the horse seems all but ridiculous (ok, it is ridiculous). But what if we considered the Trojan willingness to accept a clear trap, to engage in such extreme denial, as a function of their collective trauma? We are no strangers to large parts of our population refusing to accept what others see as fact, in engaging in clearly self-destructive behavior because it adheres so much more closely to what they want to be true and reality causes them so much pain.

In Greek myth, trouble tends to run in families and cities, traveling from father to son and grandson until the whole line is used up. This too resounds with what we have learned over the past century. We know trauma can be passed down three generations. Large-scale studies of oppressed populations show greater evidence of trauma related behaviors (depression, suicide, drug use) in the grand-children of those who suffered abuse and displacement than their peers. And these responses may be about more than the power of discourse and socialization.  There’s growing evidence for the reshaping of DNA as a result of trauma. Our ancestors’ experiences may impact those parts of our DNA that inform our mental health and shape our responses to traumatic events in our lives.

Trauma impacts our physical health; it impedes learning and new memories; it alters how we respond to crisis; untreated, it deprives us of even instinctual advantages. The Iliad’s story of the Trojan War gives its audiences traumatized warriors and families on both sides. It shows people fraying then unraveling under the pressures of long term conflict. And it provides us with vignettes of men and women trying to make sense of the world as everything they know breaks down. When Hektor tries to face his death, but then runs, the traditional language and its images unfold a human mind at its most intense moment of crisis.

Over the past few years, I have often found myself arguing about what the humanities are, about what they are good for. A poem like the Iliad is not some timeless relic, a perfect object to be worshipped for the unmixed good it can bring. But it is a deeply complex inheritance, a poem that gives us the opportunity to move between what we know and see now and what others experienced thousands of years ago. By tracing out the story of Hektor’s mind and his body’s burden, we may find just a little help in learning how to carry our own.

Short bibliography on Hektor

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. Follow-up posts will address kleos and Trojan politics

Clark, Matthew. “Poulydamas and Hektor.” College Literature 34, no. 2 (2007): 85–106. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115422.

Combellack, Frederick M. “Homer and Hector.” The American Journal of Philology 65, no. 3 (1944): 209–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/291490.

Farron, S. “THE CHARACTER OF HECTOR IN THE ‘ILIAD.’” Acta Classica 21 (1978): 39–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24591547.

Horn, Fabian. “The psychology of aggression: Achilles’ wrath and Hector’s flight in Iliad 22.131-7.” Hermes, vol. 146, no. 3, 2018, pp. 277-289. Doi: 10.25162/hermes-2018-0023

Lynn Kozak, Experiencing Hektor: Character in the Iliad. Bloomsbury Classical Studies Monographs. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. xiv, 307. 

Hillary Mackie. Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.

Van der Mije, Sebastiaan Reinier. “Bad herbs: the snake simile in Iliad 22.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 64, no. 3, 2011, pp. 359-382. Doi: 10.1163/156852511X505079

W. R. Nethercut. “Hektor at the Abyss.” Classical Bulletin 49 (1972) 7-9.

Oele, Marjolein. “Priam’s despair and courage: an Aristotelian reading of fear, hope, and suffering in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Logoi and muthoi : further essays in Greek philosophy and literature. Ed. Wians, William. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Albany (N. Y.): State University of New York Pr., 2019. 297-317.

Pantelia, Maria C. “Helen and the Last Song for Hector.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 132, no. 1/2 (2002): 21–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20054056.

Pucci, Pietro. “Divine protagonists in the « Iliad »: Hector’s death in book 22.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 175-205.

Ready, Jonathan L.. “Iliad 22.123-128 and the erotics of supplication.” The Classical Bulletin, vol. 81, no. 2, 2005, pp. 145-164.

James Redfield. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hektor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Scott, John A. “The Parting of Hector and Andromache.” The Classical Journal 9, no. 6 (1914): 274–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3287165.

Scott, John A. “Paris and Hector in Tradition and in Homer.” Classical Philology 8, no. 2 (1913): 160–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/262449.

Traill, David A. “Unfair to Hector?” Classical Philology 85, no. 4 (1990): 299–303. http://www.jstor.org/stable/269583.

On Mortals and Gods in Iliad 21

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 21. 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 last post on Iliad 21, I suggested that the supernatural violence of the book from when Achilles starts to fight the river Scamander to the realization of theomachy within the Iliad has the effect of overwhelming audiences, if inducing in them a ‘fog of war’ sensation as the events described get bigger, louder, more chaotic. The increase in intensity is both a function of Achilles’ rage and a narrative crescendo to help emphasize what comes next (the final meeting of Hektor and Achilles). As the noise quiets and the chaos simplifies, the narrative creates space for the speeches and encounters of book 22.

But the violence of 21 is about more still than building up the plot. It also dramatizes the danger intrinsic to a hero like Achilles and the cosmic disorder inherent to a world that mixes gods and mortals. One of the broader themes of the Iliad and the Odyssey together is the movement of the history of the divine world toward a settlement closer to the lives of Homer’s audiences. One metaphysical question attending Greek epic is why there are no demigods in their world.

As Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold argue in their Homer: The Resonance of Epic, the Iliad and the Odyssey work in concert with other ‘Homeric’ poems (the Hymns) and the works of Hesiod to tell the story of the development of the cosmos up to the point of the basic perspective of the Archaic age in Greece. This process takes us from the creation of the world in Hesiod’s Theogony to the life of work and human intrigue described in the Works and Days. The Homeric narratives provide dramatic vignettes from steps along the way: The Hymns detail how individual gods came to occupy their sphere of influence and the epics tell about the end of the generation of heroes.

As Elton Barker and I discuss (probably too much) in Homer’s Thebes, Hesiod positions the end of the race of heroes as happening in the wars around Thebes and Troy. And, as I mentioned in a post on Zeus’ “plan”, a fragment from the lost epic, the Kypria confirms that this is all part of the cosmic order.

Hesiod, Works and Days, 161 165

Evil war and dread battle destroyed them (tous men),
some at seven-gated Thebes in the land of Cadmus,
when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus,
and others (tous de) when it had led them in their ships over the great deep sea
to Troy for lovely-haired Helen.

καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνὴ
τοὺς μὲν ὑφ’ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ, Καδμηίδι γαίῃ,
ὤλεσε μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’ Οἰδιπόδαο,
τοὺς δὲ καὶ ἐν νήεσσιν ὑπὲρ μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης
ἐς Τροίην ἀγαγὼν ῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο.

D Schol. Ad Hom. Il. 1.5, Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή

“Some have claimed that Homer is riffing on another story. For people say that the earth was weighed down by an overpopulation of human beings, and since there was no sense of reverence among them, she asked Zeus to lighten her burden. First, Zeus arranged the Theban War right away. He used that to kill a lot of them, and then in turn he caused the Trojan War, because he listened to Momos’ advice. This is what Homer calls the plan of Zeus, since he was capable of destroying them all with lightning or floods (kataklysm). Momos prevented this, offering instead two plans: first, Thetis’ marriage to a mortal and then the birth of a beautiful girl. From these two events there would be a war between Greeks and barbarians which would result in unburdening the earth because so many were killed.

This story is told in the Kypria composed by Stasinus who says as follows (Cypria fr. 1)
There was a time when the countless mortal clans
Constantly weighed down the broad chest of the trampled earth.
When Zeus noticed, he felt pity and in his complex thoughts
Devised to unburden the all nourishing land of human beings.
He sowed the seeds of the great conflict around Ilion
To lighten that weight through death. And so at Troy
The heroes were dying and Zeus’ plan was being fulfilled.

ἄλλοι δὲ ἀπὸ ἱστορίας τινὸς εἶπον εἰρηκέναι τὸν Ὅμηρον. φασὶ γὰρ τὴν Γῆν βαρουμένην ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπων πολυπληθίας, μηδεμιᾶς ἀνθρώπων οὔσης εὐσεβείας, αἰτῆσαι τὸν Δία κουφισθῆναι τοῦ ἄχθους· τὸν δὲ Δία πρῶτον μὲν εὐθὺς ποιῆσαι τὸν Θηβαϊκὸν πόλεμον, δι᾿ οὗ πολλοὺς πάνυ ἀπώλεσεν, ὕστερον δὲ πάλιν τὸν Ἰλιακόν, συμβούλωι τῶι Μώμωι χρησάμενος, ἣν Διὸς βουλὴν Ὅμηρός φησιν, ἐπειδὴ οἷός τε ἦν κεραυνοῖς ἢ κατακλυσμοῖς ἅπαντας διαφθείρειν· ὅπερ τοῦ Μώμου κωλύσαντος, ὑποθεμένου δὲ αὐτῶι γνώμας δύο, τὴν Θέτιδος θνητογαμίαν καὶ θυγατρὸς καλῆς γένναν, ἐξ ὧν ἀμφοτέρων πόλεμος Ἕλλησί τε καὶ βαρβάροις ἐγένετο, ἀφ᾿ οὗ συνέβη κουφισθῆναι τὴν γῆν πολλῶν ἀναιρεθέντων. ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ Στασίνωι τῶι τὰ Κύπρια πεποιηκότι, εἰπόντι οὕτως·

ἦν ὅτε μυρία φῦλα κατὰ χθόνα πλαζόμενα <αἰεί ἀνθρώπων ἐ>βάρυ<νε βαθυ>στέρνου πλάτος αἴης.
Ζεὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε, καὶ ἐν πυκιναῖς πραπίδεσσιν
κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο γαῖαν,
ῥιπίσσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο,
ὄφρα κενώσειεν θανάτωι βάρος. οἳ δ᾿ ἐνὶ Τροίηι
ἥρωες κτείνοντο, Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή.

I think that one helpful way to imagine book 21 is to see it as a rapid re-progression from the creation of the Universe and its potential theomachies to an explanation for why the gods are less involved in human affairs in ‘real life’ than in epic poetry. At the same time, the exploration of Achilles’ excess in his choosing of sacrificial victims, his refusal of a suppliant, and his onslaught against the river, emphasizes just how much suffering has been caused by a ‘hero’.  The exchange of Poseidon and Apollo in the later half of the book emphasizes some of these themes.

Homer, Iliad 21.435-469

Then the powerful shaker of the earth addressed Apollo:
Phoibos: Why indeed do the two of us stand apart? It isn’t right
Now that the rest have begun. No, it would be more shameful
If we returned to the bronze-threshold of Zeus on Olympos without fighting.
Start, since you are the younger by birth. It isn’t right for me
Since I was born earlier and know more.
Fool, you have a thoughtless heart. You don’t remember
How many evils we two suffered over Ilion,
Alone of the goods, when we had to serve
Arrogant Laomedon for a year thanks to Zeus
For some promised pay. He ordered us around, telling us what to do!
I myself built the wall around the city for the Trojans,
I made it broad and very fine, so the city would be unbreakable.
And you, Phoibos, herded their ambling cattle
In the glens of forested and hilly Ida.
But when the year’s seasons produces the end of our contract,
Then that monster of a man cheated the two of us
Of all of our wages. And he sent us away with a threat.
He promised he would tie our feet and hands up
And sell us to islands far afield.
Then he threatened to cut both our ears off with bronze!
The two of us went back again with angry hearts
Enraged over the money he promised us but didn’t pay.
Now you are currying favor with his people and you don’t try
Along with us to make sure that the arrogant Trojans die out
Completely and horribly with their children and wives.”

Far-shooting Apollo then answered him in turn:
“Earth-shaker, you would not describe me as wise
If I made war with you, at least, over the mortals,
Those unlucky creatures who grow like leaves
At one time flourishing into life, eating the fruit of the fields,
But then they shrink and wither. Come, let’s stop our fighting
As fast as we can. Let them fight on their own.”

So he turned him back by speaking like this. For he was ashamed
To engage in violence with his father’s brother.”

῝Ως φάτο, μείδησεν δὲ θεὰ λευκώλενος ῞Ηρη.
αὐτὰρ ᾿Απόλλωνα προσέφη κρείων ἐνοσίχθων·
Φοῖβε τί ἢ δὴ νῶϊ διέσταμεν; οὐδὲ ἔοικεν
ἀρξάντων ἑτέρων· τὸ μὲν αἴσχιον αἴ κ’ ἀμαχητὶ
ἴομεν Οὔλυμπον δὲ Διὸς ποτὶ χαλκοβατὲς δῶ.
ἄρχε· σὺ γὰρ γενεῆφι νεώτερος· οὐ γὰρ ἔμοιγε
καλόν, ἐπεὶ πρότερος γενόμην καὶ πλείονα οἶδα.
νηπύτι’ ὡς ἄνοον κραδίην ἔχες· οὐδέ νυ τῶν περ
μέμνηαι ὅσα δὴ πάθομεν κακὰ ῎Ιλιον ἀμφὶ
μοῦνοι νῶϊ θεῶν, ὅτ’ ἀγήνορι Λαομέδοντι
πὰρ Διὸς ἐλθόντες θητεύσαμεν εἰς ἐνιαυτὸν
μισθῷ ἔπι ῥητῷ· ὃ δὲ σημαίνων ἐπέτελλεν.
ἤτοι ἐγὼ Τρώεσσι πόλιν πέρι τεῖχος ἔδειμα
εὐρύ τε καὶ μάλα καλόν, ἵν’ ἄρρηκτος πόλις εἴη·
Φοῖβε σὺ δ’ εἰλίποδας ἕλικας βοῦς βουκολέεσκες
῎Ιδης ἐν κνημοῖσι πολυπτύχου ὑληέσσης.
ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ μισθοῖο τέλος πολυγηθέες ὧραι
ἐξέφερον, τότε νῶϊ βιήσατο μισθὸν ἅπαντα
Λαομέδων ἔκπαγλος, ἀπειλήσας δ’ ἀπέπεμπε.
σὺν μὲν ὅ γ’ ἠπείλησε πόδας καὶ χεῖρας ὕπερθε
δήσειν, καὶ περάαν νήσων ἔπι τηλεδαπάων·
στεῦτο δ’ ὅ γ’ ἀμφοτέρων ἀπολεψέμεν οὔατα χαλκῷ.
νῶϊ δὲ ἄψορροι κίομεν κεκοτηότι θυμῷ
μισθοῦ χωόμενοι, τὸν ὑποστὰς οὐκ ἐτέλεσσε.
τοῦ δὴ νῦν λαοῖσι φέρεις χάριν, οὐδὲ μεθ’ ἡμέων
πειρᾷ ὥς κε Τρῶες ὑπερφίαλοι ἀπόλωνται
πρόχνυ κακῶς σὺν παισὶ καὶ αἰδοίῃς ἀλόχοισι
Τὸν δ’ αὖτε προσέειπεν ἄναξ ἑκάεργος ᾿Απόλλων·
ἐννοσίγαι’ οὐκ ἄν με σαόφρονα μυθήσαιο
ἔμμεναι, εἰ δὴ σοί γε βροτῶν ἕνεκα πτολεμίξω
δειλῶν, οἳ φύλλοισιν ἐοικότες ἄλλοτε μέν τε
ζαφλεγέες τελέθουσιν ἀρούρης καρπὸν ἔδοντες,
ἄλλοτε δὲ φθινύθουσιν ἀκήριοι. ἀλλὰ τάχιστα
παυώμεσθα μάχης· οἳ δ’ αὐτοὶ δηριαάσθων.
῝Ως ἄρα φωνήσας πάλιν ἐτράπετ’· αἴδετο γάρ ῥα
πατροκασιγνήτοιο μιγήμεναι ἐν παλάμῃσι.

One of the striking things about this passage is the repeated language of evaluation or judgment: Poseidon (and then the narrator) are concerned with shame and propriety. It may seem strange that Poseidon spends so much time describing their mistreatment at the hands of Laomedon, but it works thematically well for this section. First, it shows how the Trojans failed a test of theoxeny (when gods go in disguise to test people); second, it demonstrates that gods themselves suffer pain from human beings; and, third, I think it also implies that humans suffer from these exchanges as well. Imagine how much less suffering there would be if the Trojans’ did not possess a wall built by Poseidon!

While Poseidon focuses on the insolence of the Trojans, extending the behavior of the long-gone forefather to the entire city, Apollo steps quickly away. He does not emphasize their shame, but his own prudence, or imprudence were he to fight Apollo for the sake of mortals. In a way, Apollo echoes Glaukos in book 6 of the Iliad when he compares human generations to the leaves. (Note the similar battlefield context and the use of the image of brevity if not futility to disengage from a fight through speech.) But this also echoes Sarpedon’s speech to Glaukos in book 12 when he says they must fight and die because they are mortal. The general argument of the Iliad—and I think a theological/metaphysical theme for the epic world—is that humans receive glory because they sacrifice what they have in short supply. Human life can have morality, shame, duty, and meaning because there are consequences that cannot be surmounted by time.

For the gods, whose lives cannot change because the cosmos is fixed in place by Zeus’ order, there’s no advantage from fighting with or about mortals any more. The gods, from the Homeric perspective, can gain no honor; they can not actually change. The only thing they receive any longer from mingling with human beings is pain—the loss of honor, as in Poseidon’s shaming by Laomedon; the physical pain Aphrodite feels when Diomedes wounds her in book 5; and, most of all, the emotional pain of loss Zeus feels for the death of Sarpedon alongside the terrible grief Thetis faces in empathizing with her son and anticipating his death.

Apollo, the god who started the divine actions in the Iliad, is shown here declaring he has had enough. And while the speech is short, Poseidon agrees. They leave the battle to let the mortals work it out for themselves as the gods watch from the distance in lives of eternal ease.

A short bibliography on Homeric Gods

A W. H. Adkins. ”Homeric Gods and the Values of Homeric Society.” JHS 92 (1972) 1-19.

W. Allan. “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic” JHS 126 (2006) 1–35.

Burkert, Walter.1986. Greek Religion. 119-125.

G. M. Calhoun. “Homer’s Gods: Prolegomena”.  TAPA 68 (1937) 24-25.

Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London: Duckworth, 2005.

Jenny Strauss Clay. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton    University Press, 1983.

—,—. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

—,—. Hesiod’s Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Erwin Cook. The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins. Ithaca: Cornell University         Press, 1995.

E. R. Dodds. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, 1951.

Erbse, Hartmut (1986). Untersuchungen zur Funktion der Götter im homerischen Epos. Berlin: de Gruyter

Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London: Duckworth, 2005.

Christopher Gill. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Jasper Griffin. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Heiden, Bruce 2002. “Structures of Progression in the Plot of the Iliad.” Arethusa 35 (2002) 237-54.

Emily Kearns. “The Gods in the Homeric Epics.” In Robert Fowler (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 59-73.

Lamberton, Robert. 1986. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley and Los Angeles.

N. J. Lowe. The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

W. F. Otto. 1954. The Homeric Gods The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion. Trans. M, Hadas.

Pietro Pucci. “Theology and Poetics in the Iliad.” Arethusa 35 (2002) 17-34.

Naoko Yamagata. Homeric Morality. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994.