Achilles’ Speech to Lykaon 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.

Book 21 of the Iliad is like one of those extended fight scenes in a Transformers or Marvel movie: superpowered giants smashing against one another in a dizzying array of violence that leaves almost any audience reeling with confusion, immersed in a battlefield but uncertain how things are going. The effect can be to lose the thread of the narrative, to sit with the action itself and feel wearied, bewildered. An adventurous modernist reading might suggest that this is the very point, to bring the fog of war to an audience reclining on their couches or seated near friends.

The Iliad (and those CGI-filled modern movies) is doing more than this, however. The violence itself is somewhat formulaic, alluding to other fight scenes, to other narrative traditions that help us understand the one we are witnessing. And the mayhem sets up new emphasis in performance for when the bloodletting pauses: brief exchanges in the eye of the battlefield’s storm are charged. In Iliad 21 there are two moments that always stick out for me: the exchange between Achilles and Lykaon near the beginning of the book and the even briefer conversation between Poseidon and Apollo near its end. Both reflect on the brevity of human life; both engage with the Iliad’s narrative arc on mortality, violence, and heroism’s brittle promises.

After Achilles has captured and passed on twelve Trojan youths to slaughter over Patroklos’ funeral pyre, he encounters the son of Priam, Lykaon, whom we learn he had captured earlier in the war and ransomed back to his family. When Lykaon sees Achilles, he rushes to him to grab his knees “and he was deeply desiring in his heart / to flee terrible death and dark fate” (περὶ δ’ ἤθελε θυμῷ ἐκφυγέειν θάνατόν τε κακὸν καὶ κῆρα μέλαιναν, 21.65-66). Achilles pushes him back and gives one of the most memorable speeches from the Iliad.

Iliad 21.103-10

“So the glorious son of Priam addressed him,
Begging with words, but he heard a cruel voice
‘Fool, don’t mention ransom to me nor address me in public.
Before the fateful day took Patroklos away
Then is was dearer to my thoughts to spare Trojans,
And I took many of them alive and then sold them back.
But now there is no one who will avoid death, no one
whom the god, at least, puts in my hands in front of Troy,
no one of all the Trojans, and especially the sons of Priam.
So friend, die too. Why do you mourn like this?
Even Patroklos died and he was much better than you.
Do you not see what kind of man I am, how fine and large?
I come from a noble father and a divine mother bore me,
but strong fate and death await me too.
There will come a time at dawn, in the afternoon, or at midday
When some Ares rips the life from even me
Either by striking me with a spear or from a bowstring.”

῝Ως ἄρα μιν Πριάμοιο προσηύδα φαίδιμος υἱὸς
λισσόμενος ἐπέεσσιν, ἀμείλικτον δ’ ὄπ’ ἄκουσε·
νήπιε μή μοι ἄποινα πιφαύσκεο μηδ’ ἀγόρευε·
πρὶν μὲν γὰρ Πάτροκλον ἐπισπεῖν αἴσιμον ἦμαρ
τόφρά τί μοι πεφιδέσθαι ἐνὶ φρεσὶ φίλτερον ἦεν
Τρώων, καὶ πολλοὺς ζωοὺς ἕλον ἠδ’ ἐπέρασσα·
νῦν δ’ οὐκ ἔσθ’ ὅς τις θάνατον φύγῃ ὅν κε θεός γε
᾿Ιλίου προπάροιθεν ἐμῇς ἐν χερσὶ βάλῃσι
καὶ πάντων Τρώων, περὶ δ’ αὖ Πριάμοιό γε παίδων.
ἀλλὰ φίλος θάνε καὶ σύ· τί ἦ ὀλοφύρεαι οὕτως;
κάτθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅ περ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων.
οὐχ ὁράᾳς οἷος καὶ ἐγὼ καλός τε μέγας τε;
πατρὸς δ’ εἴμ’ ἀγαθοῖο, θεὰ δέ με γείνατο μήτηρ·
ἀλλ’ ἔπι τοι καὶ ἐμοὶ θάνατος καὶ μοῖρα κραταιή·
ἔσσεται ἢ ἠὼς ἢ δείλη ἢ μέσον ἦμαρ
ὁππότε τις καὶ ἐμεῖο ῎Αρῃ ἐκ θυμὸν ἕληται
ἢ ὅ γε δουρὶ βαλὼν ἢ ἀπὸ νευρῆφιν ὀϊστῷ.
῝Ως φάτο, τοῦ δ’ αὐτοῦ λύτο γούνατα καὶ φίλον ἦτορ·

This scene should remind readers of discussion between Agamemnon and Menelaos in book 6 when the former tells his brother not to spare a suppliant Trojan. That moment follows the theomachy-resonant chaos of book 5 and extends the transgression against reciprocity in the ransom denied in book 1 (when Agamemnon refuses to give Chryseis back) to the battlefield. The Iliad’s war has no rules or boundaries and the sequence in book 21, starting with the ransom-denied followed by a second (or third or fourth?) theomachy creates a reminder and a narrative ring. All of the tension of battle, all of the extremity of war is loaded into Achilles’ fury.

This speech is marked out as different, moreover, before it even begins. To my knowledge, this is one of the only examples in Greek epic of a speech introduction that emphasizes the recipient’s position rather than the speaker. The transition “begging with words, but he heard a cruel voice” makes Achilles somewhat more distance from the external audience (us) and may have the effect of drawing our perspective closer to Lykaon’s than Achilles.

If we were to cluster together a few of Achilles’ speeches after the death of Patroklos, it would be easy to see how much he continues the motif of surrogacy, mourning over the fact that Patroklos took his place in war when he imagined instead that Patroklos would take his own place in life when he was gone. Patroklos has become for Achilles a “transitional object”, through him he is seeing himself and others differently. Many readers have made thematic connections between this plot and the story of the Gilgamesh poems, where it is through the death and loss of Enkidu that the god-king of Uruk realizes his own mortality, transitioning his narrative from one of adventure to a journey for eternal life.

I am agnostic about any literal connection between the Gilgamesh poems and Homer (I think we make the connections and have no idea if ancient audiences could have). But I think there is also a significant difference between the two situations. Losing Patroklos does not make Achilles value his life more or desire to extend it. Instead, it induces in him a murderous nihilism: first, he laments that he didn’t die instead (rather than mourning for the portion of life denied to his friend), then becomes an instrument of death himself (instead of a vessel seeking for more life). (At least I put it somewhat this way when I wrote among some other of my juvenalia “Achilles internalises and then generalises Patroklos’ death: these two passages reveal his acceptance of his own death but here he goes further. In denying the obligations of suppliancy, he himself becomes the instrument of death’s inevitability” (2009, 191)

Achilles’ “identification” with Patroklos through death emerges as a kind of jejune narcissism, a philosophizing or catastrophizing adolescent first imagining that the universe ceases to be with his own death and then in some way seeking to make it happen. Note the rapid movement in that second part from Lykaon, to Patroklos, to Achilles himself. If I am right that there is a thematic movement in Achilles’ grief that helps him see others as real again, then this speech should be seen as a negative turn from his lament in book 19. He acknowledges Lykaon as another person, but considers him less than himself and insofar as people he loved have died, everyone is due to die too.

There’s a lot of interesting language in this section about beauty and the body. From the grasping at the knees to Achilles’ spearing of Lykaon after this speech where he points to his own body, the language here may flirt with the erotic as Achilles projects his loss—his lack of the rest of himself—on the world around him. In her recent book, Rachel Lesser suggests (following Vermeule 1979) “Here Achilleus’ spear metonymically, expresses the hero’s own frustrated desire, and its phallic shape suggests the similarity between aggressive and sexual urges” (2022, 206). Read in an intrageneric context of song—where lyric and elegy exist alongside epic and we understand Achilles as mourning his lost companion—this scene has a sense of displaced desire.

In addition to providing insight into the tension of desire that can never be fulfilled, Achilles’ language in this passage also speaks to the symbolism of the heroic body. As I discuss in an article on disability studies and Homeric epic “Homeric poetry presents a system in which to have a beautiful body signals an authoritative place in a community and a monstrous or disabled body de-authorizes or dehumanizes a figure” (2022).  Frequently observations on body size and shape are used to confirm membership in a particular class. When Athena sees Telemachus in the Odyssey, she says “I see that you are really big and noble, and brave” μάλα γάρ σ’ ὁρόω καλόν τε μέγαν τε, 1.302: = 3.199 (Nestor addressing Telemachus). Cf. 4.141–47 where Helen recognizes Telemachus because he looks like his father and Menelaos responds “I was just now thinking this too, wife, as you note the similarity: / these are the kinds of feet and hands / the eye glances, and head and hair belonging to that man” (οὕτω νῦν καὶ ἐγὼ νοέω, γύναι, ὡς σὺ ἐΐσκεις· / κείνου γὰρ τοιοίδε πόδες τοιαίδε τε χεῖρες / ὀφθαλμῶν τε βολαὶ κεφαλή τ’ ἐφύπερθέ τε χαῖται, 4.148–50).

By using similar language, Achilles acknowledges the physiognomic assumptions of heroic bodies, but insists that they are still subject to the rules of mortality. In the broader context of heroic myth, Achilles is emphasizing that heroes do in fact die and that their perfect bodies are not proof against human decay and weakness. He articulates this for himself when he more or less correctly predicts his own death (“by a spear or an arrow”).

As a final note, the tone of Achilles’ opening address to Lykaon as “friend” has been read as biting or sarcastic. But if we reconsider the etymology of philos as indicating something that is part or akin to you, Achilles’ address to Lykaon may signal a transfer of identity or a sharing of class. When Achilles calls Lykaon “friend”, then, he performs a kind of identification that obscures the boundaries between the two of them and his lost companion.

Christensen, Joel P. 2009. “Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad.” In Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità e del Vicino Oriente dell’Università Ca’ Foscari, 4. E. Cingano and L. Milano (eds.), 179–202.

Christensen, Joel. P. 2021. “Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer.” Classical World 114.4: 365–393.

Danek, Georg. “Troilos und Lykaon : ein Beitrag zur Intertextualität Homers.” Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaftlicher Anzeiger, vol. 151, no. 1, 2016, pp. 5-54.

Fisher, Nick. “The friendships of Achilles and the killing of Lykaon.” Ethics in ancient Greek literature: aspects of ethical reasoning from Homer to Aristotle and beyond : studies in honour of Ioannis N. Perysinakis. Ed. Liatsi, Maria. Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes; 102. Berlin ; Boston (Mass.): De Gruyter, 2020. 31-57. Doi: 10.1515/9783110699616-003

Karp, Andrew. “The harmony of eleos and aidôs in the moral universe of the Iliad.” New England classical newsletter & journal, vol. 21, 1993-1994, pp. 106-110.

Lane, Nicholas. “Homer, Iliad 21.51-52.” Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 30, 2005, pp. 7-9.

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

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

Introducing Iliad 21

This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 21. Here is a link to the overview of Iliad 20 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 21 follows book 20 as Achilles rampages over the battlefield in search of Hektor. As mentioned in discussing book 20, the two movements together serve both to delay the anticipated clash between Achilles and Hektor and also to depict the extremes to which Achilles’ rage will take him. Where book 20 features the hero facing another son of a goddess (Aeneas) and engages the Iliad with other heroic traditions, book 21 takes the violence to a cosmic scale. Achilles goes from slaughtering nameless young men to refusing to spare a suppliant, to fighting with gods.

If Achilles has superhuman strength and his mênis has the potential to destabilize the universe, then book 21 dramatizes just how dangerous he is by invoking narrative themes of theomachy. His onslaught brings him into conflict with an anthropomorphized river (Skamandros) which he begins to lose, resulting in another appeal to the gods. When Hephaistos enters the fray to counter the river, it nearly breaks apart the fabric of the narrative, eliciting a battle between Athena and Ares. In this back and forth, the epic not only echoes motifs from tales of gigantomachy and titanomachy, but it uses language and imagery that may have reminded some audiences of the tales of Herakles.

At the same time, the events of book 21 recall earlier moments in the Iliad, from Achilles’ initial pleas in book 1 through the near theomachy of book 6, centered around the actions of Diomedes. Here, the gods eventually decide not to continue the fighting. When Poseidon and Apollo decline to battle one another, they confirm that there will be no proxy succession battle and there will be no cosmic disorder. The threat of Achilles is ultimately contained to the mortal realm, affirming the Iliad’s part in a narrative tradition that enacts and justifies the separation between the worlds of gods and humans.

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 21 speaks most directly to narrative traditions, Gods and humans, and heroism.

Judging Achilles

One of the chief challenges of the Iliad’s second half—if not of the entire epic—is establishing just what we are supposed to think of Achilles. There are no simple answers at any point in the epic as he moves from frustratingly reactive in book 1 to almost persuasively reflective in book 9 to concerned but recalcitrant in books 11 and 16 and finally a force like nothing else but a god once he returns to the battlefield. Book 20 showed that even the best of the mortals—a demigod!—is no match for Thetis’ son. Book 21 takes it one step further.

Homer, Iliad 21.17-33     

“Then godly Achilles left his spear there on the bank,
Leaning on the tamarisks and he leapt into the river,
Holding only his sword as he devised wicked deeds in his thoughts.
And he was striking constantly. An unseemly groan rose up
From the people he killed with the sword. And the water grew red with blood.
As when other fish fill the hollows of a safe harbor
When they are fleeing in front of a great-jawed dolphin
Out of fear, since it eats up whatever it catches,
So too did the Trojans cower in the currents of the terrible river
Right beneath the banks. But when he tired out his hands in the killing,
Achilles took twelve young men out of the river alive
As payback for the death of Menoitios’ son Patroklos.
He let them out and they were stunned like fawns.
He bound their hands behind them with the well-twisted belts
They were carrying themselves to cinch their tunics.
He handed them over to his attendants to take to the hollow ships.
Then he sprang back into action again, eager to murder some more.”

Αὐτὰρ ὃ διογενὴς δόρυ μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ ἐπ’ ὄχθῃ
κεκλιμένον μυρίκῃσιν, ὃ δ’ ἔσθορε δαίμονι ἶσος
φάσγανον οἶον ἔχων, κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα,
τύπτε δ’ ἐπιστροφάδην· τῶν δὲ στόνος ὄρνυτ’ ἀεικὴς
ἄορι θεινομένων, ἐρυθαίνετο δ’ αἵματι ὕδωρ.
ὡς δ’ ὑπὸ δελφῖνος μεγακήτεος ἰχθύες ἄλλοι
φεύγοντες πιμπλᾶσι μυχοὺς λιμένος εὐόρμου
δειδιότες· μάλα γάρ τε κατεσθίει ὅν κε λάβῃσιν·
ὣς Τρῶες ποταμοῖο κατὰ δεινοῖο ῥέεθρα
πτῶσσον ὑπὸ κρημνούς. ὃ δ’ ἐπεὶ κάμε χεῖρας ἐναίρων,
ζωοὺς ἐκ ποταμοῖο δυώδεκα λέξατο κούρους
ποινὴν Πατρόκλοιο Μενοιτιάδαο θανόντος·
τοὺς ἐξῆγε θύραζε τεθηπότας ἠΰτε νεβρούς,
δῆσε δ’ ὀπίσσω χεῖρας ἐϋτμήτοισιν ἱμᾶσι,
τοὺς αὐτοὶ φορέεσκον ἐπὶ στρεπτοῖσι χιτῶσι,
δῶκε δ’ ἑταίροισιν κατάγειν κοίλας ἐπὶ νῆας.
αὐτὰρ ὃ ἂψ ἐπόρουσε δαϊζέμεναι μενεαίνων.

The simile here is memorable, but it may strike modern readers as a little odd. We don’t often think of dolphins as bloody murderers. One scholion, however, expands on the comparison’s aptness based on its location.

Schol. bT Ad Hom. Il. 21.22-24

“The [elements] of the comparison work really well. On the one hand, the pursuer is on land, but those who are fleeing are pressed together into the river. The poem previously compared him to a fire and them to locusts [21.12-140]. But when the pursuer and the pursued are in the water, it harmonizes them to the newly established space.”

καλῶς τὰ τῆς παραβολῆς. ὅτε μὲν γὰρ ὁ διώκων ἐπὶ γῆς ἦν, οἱ δὲ φεύγοντες εἰς τὸν ποταμὸν συνωθοῦντο, τὸν μὲν πυρί, τοὺς δὲ ἀκρίσιν ὡμοίωσεν· ὅτε δὲ ἐν ὕδατι ὁ διώκων καὶ οἱ διωκόμενοι, πρὸς τὸν ὑποκείμενον τόπον ἡ παραβολὴ συνᾴδει.

Schol. T ad Hom. Il. 21.22

“The comparison to a dolphin is well-put. For Achilles the son of a sea-god. The narrative says “the other [fish]” because a dolphin is a fish.”

καλῶς δὲ καὶ δελφῖνι εἴκασται· θαλασσίας γὰρ δαίμονος υἱός. ὡς ἰχθύος δὲ ὄντος τοῦ δελφῖνος τὸ ἄλλοι (22) εἶπεν.

Ok, so the first scholion seems to show no interest in dolphins whatsoever. But it is interested in how the local space of the narrative corresponds to the frame of the simile. Such a ‘harmony’ between form and content directs me to think about what we can think about the correspondence between the actions Achilles undertakes and their narrative framing.

This scene, where Achilles captures the twelve Trojan youths he will sacrifice on Patroklos’ grave later on in the epic, is nearly understated compared to what happens later on in book 21. But it stands for me in the same notional space as the murder of the suitors in the Odyssey and the hanging of the enslaved women. One of my concerns for all of these scenes is how we as modern readers should receive the Homeric drama: are these scenes exploration of excessive violence, of transgressive action, or are they merely vivid depictions of the kinds of actions heroes commit in the heat of battle. To put it differently, how do we understand the Homeric narrator’s tone here. Often, when discussing the Odyssey, scholars couch Odysseus’ vengeance against the suitors and his son’s treatment of the enslaved women as justified as part of the epic’s homecoming narrative. I think this kind of reading is both insensitive to the language of Homeric poetry and naive concerning the complexity of its capacity to convey ‘traditional’ actions in a negative light.

I am certain that Odysseus’ homecoming vengeance was understood as going to far and initiating a potential endless cycle of violence. Similarly, I think that Achilles’ violence in books 21-23 is marked as going way too far, both to characterize the absolute ruin caused by his raise and also to implicitly frame the danger represented by a figure possessing so much power that he cannot be restrained by other mortals and amounts to a threat even to the gods. The story of the Iliad is not about the excellence of heroes; it is about the danger they represent and the damage they cause.

When we talk about excessive violence in the Iliad, we sometimes miss out on how the epic itself marks some of it as exceptional or transgressive. Achilles’ capture of the Trojan youths is prefaced by the narratives seemingly blithe “then he was devising wicked deeds”. The combination kaka erga implies some judgment on the part of the narrative, but kakon can at times mark a deed as merely base or ignoble. The combination with the verb mêdeto seems to invoke a pattern in the Iliad around Achilles’ actions in particular. In book 22, when Achilles is about to pierce Hektor’s ankles and drag his body around the city, he is described as “devising unseemly deeds against shining Hektor” (῏Η ῥα, καὶ ῞Εκτορα δῖον ἀεικέα μήδετο ἔργα, 22.395=23.24) and then, again, in book 23, before he actually sacrifices the twelve Trojan youths, the same phrase as in 21 appears, marking the sacrifice in particular as transgressive (…κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα, 23. 176).

While the adjective modifying erga changes, there’s something in the verb in that penultimate position that marks supernatural agency. In the Odyssey,  mêdeto appears in this position when ascribing the responsibility for actions to a generic god or to Zeus. In the Iliad,  only Zeus (x2) and Achilles (x4) are subjects of this verb in this position and for it is localized to his sacrifice of the Trojan youths and his mistreatment of Hektor’s corpse. For Zeus, it marks Agamemnon’s ignorance about Zeus’ actual plans in book 2 (νήπιος, οὐδὲ τὰ ᾔδη ἅ ῥα Ζεὺς μήδετο ἔργα, 2.38) and Zeus’ preparations for the return to war in book 7 (παννύχιος δέ σφιν κακὰ μήδετο μητίετα Ζεὺς, 7.478).

The Iliadic use of this phrasal shape, then, makes a connection between Zeus’ prosecution of his plan within the Iliad and Achilles’ superhuman destruction. While narrative judgment in each case may be subject to some debate, it seems clear to me that the cumulative effect is to acknowledge the particular cruelty of the events of the Iliad (as requested by Achilles) and the excess of heroic action. The Homeric narrative does not clearly state that Achilles criminal acts of horror, but I cannot imagine how any attentive audience would not hear such an implication.

One scholion—and I am not sure I have understood it completely—seems to say that these scenes are motivated in part by a need to do something different, now that the Iliad has done everything it could with fighting on the plain, around the walls, and among the ships. It also adds that there’s no way “barbarians” would be worthy of fighting him, so that it makes sense to pit Achilles against gods instead.

Schol. bT ad Hom. Il. 21.18a ex

“Once he went through every kind of battle in the plain, around the fortification, and among the ships, now [the poet] has devised something new in Achilles’ onslaught in the battle along the river, not only in emphasizing the single idea, but adding new/strange compositions to the poetry. For he contrived this fourth kind of battle for the closing of his poem, since he does not see barbarians as worthy of fighting Achilles; and it ends the poem in a strange incompleteness, and he introduces the battle of the gods and the river, taking as a convenient starting point the constraint [imposed on the river] by the corpses”

πᾶσαν ἰδέαν μάχης διελθὼν ἐν τῷ πεδίῳ καὶ περὶ τὸ τεῖχος καὶ ἐν ταῖς ναυσί, καινόν τι ἐξεῦρεν ἐπὶ τῇ ᾿Αχιλλέως ἐξόδῳ τὴν παρὰ τῷ ποταμῷ μάχην,

οὐ μόνον τὴν μονοείδειαν περιϊστάμενος, ἀλλὰ καὶ καινὰς διαθέσεις ἐπεισφέρων τῇ ποιήσει· τετάρτην γὰρ ταύτην συνιστὰς μάχην ἐπὶ λήξει τῆς ποιήσεως, ἐπεὶ μὴ ἀξιομάχους οἶδε βαρβάρους ᾿Αχιλλεῖ, καὶ ἄτοπον εἰς ἀκατέργαστον λῆξαι τὴν ποίησιν, θεῶν τε μάχην παρεισάγει καὶ τὸν ποταμὸν †καθίστησιν†, εὔλογον ἀφορμὴν λαβὼν τὴν ἀπὸ τῶν νεκρῶν στένωσιν

Another makes it clear that at least some ancient readers saw the behavior as excessive.

Schol. bT ad Hom Il. 21. 27

This passage is here because he is going to introduce later the sacrifice called the dôdecad. The poem presents a great excess through this, showing that he selects the prisoners of a certain kind and number and that he binds these men together into one group, tying up their hands as if slaves captured in war.”

εἰς θυσίαν μέλλων παριστάνειν τὴν καλουμένην δωδεκάδα. μεγάλην δὲ τὴν ὑπεροχὴν διὰ τούτου παρίστησιν, ἐπιλέξασθαι αὐτὸν τοὺς αἰχμαλώτους λέγων οἵους καὶ ὅσους ἐβούλετο, εἶτα καὶ τούτους καθ’ ἕνα συνδῆσαι, ὥσπερ ἀνδράποδα προτείνοντας τὰς χεῖρας (cf. Φ 30).

Reading Questions for Book 21

What does the conversation between Achilles and Lykaon contribute to themes of heroism, violence, and convention?

What does Achilles’ battle with the river add to our understanding of the Iliad?

Why do the gods fight each other directly in this book and how does this compare to other divine conflicts (e.g. in books 6, 14 and 15)?

Homeric Contrafactuals and Rescuing Aeneas

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 20. 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.

Schol. T Ad Hom. Il. 20.307-8

“Some people say that [the children of Aeneas live on] through the Romans, which the poet knew from the oracles of the Sibyl, while others claim that the Aiolians expelled the descendants of Aeneas. But those who claim that Aphrodite devised the Trojan War because she knew this are wrong”

οἱ μὲν διὰ ῾Ρωμαίους φασίν, ἅπερ εἰδέναι τὸν ποιητὴν ἐκ τῶν Σιβύλλης  χρησμῶν, οἱ δέ, ὅτι Αἰολεῖς ἐξέβαλον τοὺς ἀπογόνους Αἰνείου. πταίουσι δέ, ὅσοι φασὶ τοῦτο εἰδυῖαν ᾿Αφροδίτην μηχανήσασθαι τὸν Τρωϊκὸν πόλεμον.

The greater portion of book 20 is dedicated to the faceoff between Achilles and Aeneas, one I have described earlier as a kind of heroic Superman vs. Batman. (And, yes, I think this Aeneas is more Ben Affleck Batman than a Michael Keaton….). Books 20 and 21 together work to delay the inevitable meeting of Hektor and Achilles, but they also provide something of a deliberate tour through different kinds of heroism. In book 21, Achilles challenges divine beings and wrestles a river, turning into his most Heraklean self. In book 20, he faces Aeneas, a hero of a different shape altogether.

As I discuss in the earlier post, Aeneas and Achilles engage in heroic flyting that is more or less an elaborate ‘meta-flyting’. Metapoetic moments in literature invite audiences to think about the rhetorical content of the forms that are entertaining them, both in a critical way and in one that invites enjoyment from those who recognize play and engagement with other traditions. Meta-moments, when they are successful, work on different levels, responding to audience capacity to catch references to other narratives or to understand comparisons in motif, trope, and genre.

When Achilles and Aeneas meet, the audience is invited to a series of meta-motifs: the heroic boast, followed by shifts in type scenes, and hints that there is a world larger than the already very large one contained within the Iliad. For the Iliad, such moments allow it to appropriate from other traditions without becoming them, by subordinating them to its own story.  (The Odyssey does this constantly too!) But the act of appropriation itself is adaptive and integrative: it always carries within it the potential for recursive doubling of meaning, for multiple, even contradictory ideological frames to coexist, in tension, producing meaning only when the audience resolves the tension by leaning toward one or the other.

When Achilles and Aeneas meet, there is a problem: Achilles is on a murderous rampage and gets to kill everyone he wants. Aeneas is the son of a goddess who is supposed to live. What in the world is the epic to do?!

Homer, Iliad 20.288-308

Then Aeneas would have struck [Achilles] as he rushed at him
With a stone in the helmet or shield, which would have projected him from ruin,
But Peleus’s son would have robbed him of his life with his sword near at hand—
If Poseidon the earth-shaker had not sharply noticed it all.
Immediately, he spoke this speak among the immortal gods:
“Shit! Truly, I have grief for great-hearted Aeneas
Who soon will go to Hades overcome by Peleus’ son,
All because he listened to the words of far-shooting Apollo,
The fool, that god will not be of any use against harsh ruin.
But why should this guy who isn’t at fault suffer grief now
Without any reason because of other people’s pain when he always
Gave cherished gifts to the gods who hold the wide sky.
But come on, let’s lead him away from death
So that Kronos’ son won’t get enraged somehow if Achilles
Kills him. It is his fate to escape
So that the race of Dardanos won’t go seedless and erased,
Dardanos whom the son of Kronos loved beyond all his children
Who were born to him from mortal women.
Kronos’ son has already turned against Priam’s offspring.
Now, mighty Aeneas will be lord over the Trojans
Along with the children of his children who will be born later on.”

ἔνθά κεν Αἰνείας μὲν ἐπεσσύμενον βάλε πέτρῳ
ἢ κόρυθ’ ἠὲ σάκος, τό οἱ ἤρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον,
τὸν δέ κε Πηλεΐδης σχεδὸν ἄορι θυμὸν ἀπηύρα,
εἰ μὴ ἄρ’ ὀξὺ νόησε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων·
αὐτίκα δ’ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖς μετὰ μῦθον ἔειπεν·
ὢ πόποι ἦ μοι ἄχος μεγαλήτορος Αἰνείαο,
ὃς τάχα Πηλεΐωνι δαμεὶς ῎Αϊδος δὲ κάτεισι
πειθόμενος μύθοισιν ᾿Απόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο
νήπιος, οὐδέ τί οἱ χραισμήσει λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
ἀλλὰ τί ἢ νῦν οὗτος ἀναίτιος ἄλγεα πάσχει
μὰψ ἕνεκ’ ἀλλοτρίων ἀχέων, κεχαρισμένα δ’ αἰεὶ
δῶρα θεοῖσι δίδωσι τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν;
ἀλλ’ ἄγεθ’ ἡμεῖς πέρ μιν ὑπὲκ θανάτου ἀγάγωμεν,
μή πως καὶ Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται, αἴ κεν ᾿Αχιλλεὺς
τόνδε κατακτείνῃ· μόριμον δέ οἵ ἐστ’ ἀλέασθαι,
ὄφρα μὴ ἄσπερμος γενεὴ καὶ ἄφαντος ὄληται
Δαρδάνου, ὃν Κρονίδης περὶ πάντων φίλατο παίδων
οἳ ἕθεν ἐξεγένοντο γυναικῶν τε θνητάων.
ἤδη γὰρ Πριάμου γενεὴν ἔχθηρε Κρονίων·
νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει
καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται.

This passage is interesting because of the way it plays upon so many different Homeric motifs. To start, the battle scene is upended: an outcome of the fight is predicted but then denied, twice, as each hero’s next moves are anticipated, but denied. The denial proceeds through a somewhat regular motif in Homeric epic that goes by various names such as “if not-situations” (de Jong 2004, 68-71), “reversal passages” (Morrison 1992) and “pivotal contrafactuals” (Louden 1993, 181). Mabel Lang was one of the first to focus on these ‘unreal conditionals’ that provide the Homeric narrator and characters alike to express what would (or could) have happened, had events turned out different. Like English, Greek grammar marks unreal conditionals—in this case, contrary to fact—with clear signs, such as the use of specific particles in conjunction with particular verb forms (in this case, the aorist indicative in each clause with the Greek modal particle (a short word indicating that the situation is unreal) κε and introductory “if then not/unless” (εἰ μὴ).

It is one thing to describe the grammatical and semantic nature of a construction like this, however, and a wholly different thing to outline the use of a construction in a particular narrative. Unreal conditinoals in Homer seem in particular to create a space wherein Homeric epic flirts with deviating from the external constraints. Morrison, for example,  argues that these scenes constitute moments where the traditional story or plot is nearly upended as Homer challenges and distinguishes himself from the tradition.

Morrison divides “reversal passages” into three types: (a) violations of the sack of Troy motif; (b) violations of the Iliad’s plot; and (c) minor variations during battle and in the funeral games (61). Lorenzo Garcia agrees that “in such instances Homer appears to challenge the very tradition in which he is working—which we may think of as a kind of “destiny” for the narrative in its own right…and asserts his own authority for the direction the narrative takes. Such events, As Gregory Nagy puts it, would be “untraditional”. Bruce Louden, however, suggests that commentators have overemphasized the tendency for this device to raise violations of the tradition. Across the 33 instances of this construction in the Iliad, 15 are “corrected” by divine intervention; 15 are addressed by mortals.

I think an undervalued aspect of the construction is its ability to draw attention to an event as contrary to patterns and expectations. It indicates a breaking of suspense and invites audiences to view this event as a course correction. In this way, a small measure of chaos is admitted into an ordered text, acknowledging the instability of narrative even as exerting control over it. This is an appropriate structure, then, for pointing to the potentially tradition-rattling encounter of Achilles and Aeneas.

Such tension intrigues me with this case in particular because we have pretty good evidence for extra-Iliadic traditions of Aeneas surviving the fall of Troy from archaeological and iconographic evidence. There are black figure vases from the sixth century BCE that depict Aeneas carrying his father Anchises from Troy. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which centers Anchises, appears to be one of the ‘older’ hymnic tradition; yet in this speech, Poseidon focuses on the future and omits such a reference to the past. The iconography and this speech both point to Aeneas’ survival as a basic fact of the narrative universe, but other than that there is no good reason to imagine these passages as in any way responding to each other, unless we imagine the Homeric epic as leaning away from such a common image, doing the very Homeric thing of making its own space and meaning in between the immutable lines of the larger tradition. As I usually emphasize, there’s no good reason to insist that the images and text are engaging directly with each other or existing in some sort of a temporal—therefore interpretive—hierarchy rather than to understand them as both variations on a shared narrative theme. Instead, it is interesting to go through the process in multiple directions, leaving space as well for the stories we have lost in between.

Divine interest in supporting fate—if we can call it that rather than the narrative instrumentalization of divinity to allow the story to both diverge and converge with what is known—leads me to some final observations on this speech. The presence and the absence of the gods are both felt keenly here. For example, a scholiast asks why Aphrodite isn’t the one to save him and answers it is because she is afraid of Athena ( ἡ ᾿Αφροδίτη τὸν υἱὸν οὐ σῴζει;  δέδιεν ᾿Αθηνᾶν, Schol. T ad Il. 20.291a1). When Poseidon worries about the impact of Apollo’s words on Aeneas, I wonder if we can imagine a general anxiety about how the ‘words of Apollo (prophecy and poetry especially) may lead people to ruin.

There may also be wordplay as well around the name Achilles or at least the importance of ‘grief’ for the plot. Poseidon notes that akhos (“grief, woe”), a word often associated with etymologies of Achilles (e.g akhos + laos, “woe for the people”) comes over him when he hears about Aeneas and that Aeneas is suffering because of “other peoples akhos”. I may be so bold as to suggest that Poseidon feels the very same reaction that audiences might be feeling at this moment but also in response to the events of the Iliad. At the same time, he is extending the impact of the same emotion on ‘players’ in the epic itself: akhos drives the plot of the Trojan War, but it also reshapes the plot of the Iliad even as it flirts with diverging from that larger narrative structure.

But we are not yet done with emotional responses to these. In discussing the earlier passage in book 20 where Zeus claims that he is going to sit apart taking pleasure in watching the unfolding events, I suggested that king of gods and men derived this feeling from the sense that the narrative was moving toward a particular end, to a closure he had anticipated, if not arranged. Here, Poseidon notes Zeus’ potential displeasure at a particular outcome’s failure: Zeus will “be angry”( κεχολώσεται) if Achilles should kill Aeneas. Kholos, as I discuss in other posts, drawing on Thomas Walsh’s work, is anger that is socially motivated, among peers. It is an operative word in the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon in book 1, strife among the gods in books 13-15, and during the funeral games in book 23. (It contrasts, in a complementary way, with menis, which tends to signal rage at cosmic disorder, as Lenny Muellner argues). Indeed, to connect this back to the introductory form, the “pivotal contrafactual”, Tyler Flatt has argued that this structure appears in moments where we may be expected to consider the overlap between the need to mourn and the need to hear further narrative. Poseidon’s concern for Zeus’ emotions foreground the affective nature of narratives that go where we don’t want them to go.

It is almost as if Zeus is presented as both audience and author of the narrative unfolding and, while we could imagine him as indicating the swings of the poem’s external audience, we could also frame this theologically. Zeus is something like an especially keen game master (or DM, dungeon master for the older crowd). He knows where he wants the story to go: he takes pleasure in the players finding their way there, and gets angry when they try to change his plans.

A Short bibliography

BECK, DEBORAH. “EMOTIONAL AND THEMATIC MEANINGS IN A REPEATING HOMERIC MOTIF: A CASE STUDY.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 150–72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26575923.

Bouxsein, Hilary. “That Would Have Been Better: Counterfactual Conditions in Homeric Character Speech.” Mnemosyne 73, no. 3 (2020): 353–76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26989141.

De Jong, Irene J. F. Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad. 2^nd Edition. London: Bristol, 2004.

Tyler Flatt. “Narrative Desire and the Limits of Lament in Homer.” The Classical Journal 112, no. 4 (2017): 385–404. https://doi.org/10.5184/classicalj.112.4.0385[JC1] .

Garcia, Lorenzo F., Jr. 2013. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 58. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.

Lang, Mabel L.. “Unreal conditions in Homeric narrative.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. XXX, 1989, pp. 5-26.

Bruce Louden. “Pivotal Contrafactuals in Homeric Epic.” Classical Antiquity 12 (1993) 181-98.

James V. Morrison. Homeric Misdirection: False Predictions in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

—,—. “Alternatives to the Epic Tradition: Homer’s Challenges in the Iliad.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 122 (1992) 61-71.

Muellner, Leonard. 1996. The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic. Cornell.

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Revised ed. Baltimore. Orig. pub. 1979. 1999

SAUSSY, HAUN. “WRITING IN THE ‘ODYSSEY’: EURYKLEIA, PARRY, JOUSSE, AND THE OPENING OF A LETTER FROM HOMER.” Arethusa 29, no. 3 (1996): 299–338. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26309735.

Walsh, Thomas. Feuding Words, Fighting Words: Anger in the Homeric Poems. Washington, D. C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. 2005

Aeneas’ Speech to Achilles in Iliad 20

This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 20. 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.

As I mention in the first post on book 20, the larger part of the book is dedicated to the faceoff between Achilles and Aeneas, which is, as the tradition would have it, not their first. The two heroes are well-matched for the clear reason that they both have divine mothers and the less clear reason that they are both subordinate to lesser kings and may be experiencing frustration or displacement thanks to this (see Cramer 2000 and Fenno 2008 on Aeneas’ rage; Nagy 1979 on the episode in general). But this passage also brings into conflict heroes on radically different paths: one of them will die Troy falls; the other will live beyond them, despite his own desires.

It is fair to wonder what this episode brings to the epic. Some have imagined families tracing their lineage back to Aeneas having an undue effect on the formation of the Iliad as we have it. Others have seen thematic ties exploring similar heroes and their place in the universe, as part of epic’s movement towards the mortal world. This encounter certainly primes audiences to think about what kind of man Achilles is in comparison to others and it provides a fine transition to the otherworldly events of Iliad 21 even as it delays the progression of the plot towards Hektor’s death. I suspect it does all of these things while also reflecting on the power of narratives to shape the world and our perspectives on it.

Homer, Iliad 20. 199-258

Aeneas answered him and spoke:
Son of Peleus, Don’t expect to frighten me off with words
Like I am a little child, son of Peleus. I myself know well
How to utter insults and threats.
We know each other’s families; we know each other’s parents,
Listening to the older famous stories [epea] of mortal beings—
But you have never seen my parents with your eyes nor have I seen yours.
People say that you are the offspring of blameless Peleus,
From fine-haired Thetis the sea-nymph, your mother.
But I claim that I am the son of great-hearted Anchises
And my mother is Aphrodite.
Now one set of parents will mourn their dear child
Today. For I don’t think that we will wear out battle
Making some kind of distinction from each other with childish words.
But if you want, learn these things too, so that you may know
my lineage, many men know me indeed.

Cloud-gathering Zeus fathered Dardanos first.
He founded Dardanis, since sacred Troy was not yet
Populated by mortal people in the plain,
But they were inhabiting the foothills of many-ridged Ida.
Dardanos fathered a son, king Erikthonios
Who became the richest of mortal men.
He had three thousand horses pastured in his land,
Mares who delighted in their tender foals.
The wind Boreas started to long for some of them as they were grazing
And he took the form of a dark-haired stallion and laid down beside them.
They became pregnant and gave birth to twelve foals.
Whenever these offspring would leap over the fertile land,
They would fly without breaking the fruit of the grain;
But when they went leaping over the wide back of the sea,
They used to run on the tops of the waves of the salty-grey.
Erikhthonios fathered Trôs, the lord of the Trojans.
In turn there were three blameless children born from Tros:
Ilos, Assarakos, and divine Ganymede
Who was the most beautiful of all mortal human beings.
The gods snatched him up to be their wine-bearer
Because of his beauty, so he could stay among the immortals.
Ilos then fathered a blameless son, Laomedon;
Laomedon then fathered Tithonos and Priam and then
Lampos and Klutios and Iketon, offshoot of Ares.
Assarakos fathered Kapus, and he fathered the child Anchises.
Then Anchises fathered me and Priam fathered shining Hektor.
I claim to be of this lineage and bloodline.
Zeus increases and diminishes the excellence of men
However he wishes—for he is mightiest of all.

But come, let’s not say these things any longer, like children
Who have stopped in the middle of a violent fight.
It is easy for both to hurl out reproaches,
To very many that a hundred-benched ship couldn’t bear the burden.
The mortal tongue is sharp and has every kind of speech
In full supply: the field of words is expansive this way and that.
Whatever kind of thing you can say, you can hear that kind of thing too.
But why really is it necessary for the two of us to reproach
Each other with insults and slander facing one another
Like women who are enraged over some heart-consuming strife,
Going out into the middle of the street to harangue one another
With true things and not. Anger compels them to say these things too.

Don’t try to turn me away from courage with words when I am eager
To face you directly with bronze. Come closer now
Let’s take a taste of one another with our bronze spears.”

Aeneas’ speech exchange needs to be understood in part through the framework of the kind of speech in which he is engaging, in this case neikos or what scholars have called “flyting”. The term flyting is typically used to apply to a stylized form of boasting, threats, and insults that appear in Northern European heroic poetry (e.g. Beowulf). Richard Martin argues in his 1989 The Language of Heroes that the genre of aggressive speech marked by reflexes of the noun neikos  (“strife, conflict”) share a performative and competitive domain with Homeric poetry itself. So dynamic speakers like Achilles, Aeneas, and others who use narratives from the past are creative and generative in a way the Homeric narrator is. As Jon Hesk summarizes (2006), Homeric flyting follows basic rules—such as not undermining one’s own martial prowess—but that the best speakers bend and break the rules, as with any dynamic and creative genre. And it may be a part of the flyting genre to dismiss the flyting genre—the first rule of Flyte club is you have to talk about flyte club.

Other exchanges show some ambivalence about the efficacy of words instead of wounds—consider the exchanges between Tlepolemos and Sarpedon in book 5 as another example of heroic sons bragging about divine parents. But battlefield performances may also be an opportunity for warriors to imagine and even create different ‘worlds’: consider how the similar genealogical narratives provided by Diomedes and Glaukos in Iliad 6 allow the heroes not to fight one another.

Hesk argues, further, that Aeneas’ speech in response to Achilles functions in a way as “anti-flyting” (or, at least, an instance of what he calls “meta-flyting”). Then structure of this speech is built around three basic parts, linked with  a repeated complaint about speaking like children, and then expanded into a dismissal of what they are doing by comparing them to women in the street. In these moves, Aeneas casts their shared actions as un-heroic, comparing them to children and women the way Diomedes denigrates Paris when he shoots him in the foot in book 11. Yet, as in that example, the truth of the matter is that the words don’t change the reality: Paris may not have killed Diomedes, but for all the latter’s bluster, he still needs to retreat from battle.

Aeneas creates a ring structure in his speech that minimizes the language with which he is engaging even as he uses the form to an immediate effect: he calls boastful speech childish twice, then provides a lengthy genealogy that emphasizes his paternal line, not the line of his divine mother, and then closes by questioning the genre again. His genealogy is, as Hesk observes, the most extensive in the Iliad. After delivering it, Aeneas calls the form of the speech childish for a third time, but expands on what he means: he says it is easy to hurl out reproaches and people can say anything they want to say at all. He then shifts to comparing them to women in the street, insulting each other with “true things and not” conceding that they are driven by anger, whatever they say. I have long been intrigued by this speech: I suspect that Aeneas’ emphasis on his paternal genealogy may be aimed at indicating the greater nobility of his family over Achilles’ and his close connection with the city of Troy. As Jon Hesk suggests, Aeneas is responding in part to Achilles’ earlier taunt that he is not Priam’s son.

At the same time, Aeneas’ gesture to the multiplicity of stories available and the willingness of people to say anything, true or false, combined with his emphasis on his mortal genealogy, may downplay both his and Achilles’ divine parentage. After he acknowledges that that people claim are both children of goddesses, Aeneas’ narrative becomes one he presents as genealogical fact, while Achilles’ background is relegated to other peoples’ stories. Ultimately, Aeneas plays the delicate game of criticizing a speech genre even while fully engaging in it. And his speech is memorable and forceful, all the more appropriately since Apollo advised him to meet Achilles in the first place. And, ultimately, as other readers have noted, Achilles’ taunts are proved false by the narrative: Aeneas does not die.

Hesk concludes that Aeneas’ speech “is geared toward the subtle undermining of Achilles as a specific individual in relation to what we know about his character and verbal traits from the rest of the poem” (2006). He builds on some work by Gregory Nagy who has argues that the Iliad admits a different epic tradition into its narrative where Aeneas was a central character (1979, 265-275). When Achilles and Aeneas face each other in battle, there can be no definitive outcome because they are bound by the ‘rules’ of the narrative tradition: Achilles cannot die by Aeneas’ hands and Aeneas must survive to lead the Trojan survivors after the fall of the city. And, yet, the desire to have them meet at all is the fulfillment of the desire for something like a ‘crossover’ episode. This is Superman vs. Batman. No one reasonable believes that the latter could actually defeat the former except under very specific circumstance; and everyone knows that at some point, both of them need to be returned to their own stories.

Again, according to Nagy, a central feature of Aeneas as a character pay have been his ability to craft blame and praise in speech, reflected in his name Aineias, which Nagy links to the word ainos (for praise). In telling a different story about the world, one that makes it focused on mortal genealogy, I suspect that Aeneas may be writing Achilles out of history and imagining a post-heroic world for himself where being a child of a goddess is less important than carrying on a family story.

Much of this makes me reconsider another ‘meta-flyting’ moment in the Iliad and that is when Hektor pauses before facing Achilles and admits he wishes he and Achilles could just talk to each other like young lovers. We may imagine Hektor ruminating over the limits of flyting and the martial performance of speech. His genealogy and story-telling is of little use in the conflict he is about to face. Yet, if they were allowed to speak under different rules, the outcome might be different.

A Short Bibliography for Iliad 20

Andrews, P. B. S.. “The falls of Troy in Greek tradition.” Greece and Rome, vol. XII, 1965, pp. 28-37. Doi: 10.1017/S0017383500014753

Ballesteros, Bernardo. “On « Gilgamesh » and Homer: Ishtar, Aphrodite and the meaning of a parallel.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 71, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1-21. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838821000513

Beck, Bill. “Harshing Zeus’ μέλω: reassessing the sympathy of Zeus at Iliad 20.21.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 143, no. 3, 2022, pp. 359-384. Doi: 10.1353/ajp.2022.0015

Cramer, David. “The wrath of Aeneas: Iliad 13.455-67 and 20.75-352.” Syllecta classica, vol. 11, 2000, pp. 16-33.

Fenno, Jonathan Brian. “The wrath and vengeance of swift-footed Aeneas in Iliad 13.” Phoenix, vol. 62, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 145-161.

Hesk, Jon. “Homeric flyting and how to read it: performance and intratext in Iliad 20.83-109 and 20.178-258.” Ramus, vol. 35, no. 1, 2006, pp. 4-28.

Konstan, David. “Homer answers his critics.” Electryone, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-11.

D. Lohmann, Die Komposition der Reden in der Ilias (Berlin 1970).

Martin, Richard P.. The language of heroes : speech and performance in the Iliad. Myth & poetics. Ithaca (N. Y.): Cornell University Pr., 1989.

Pucci, Pietro. “Theology and poetics in the « Iliad ».” Arethusa, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 17-34.

Reece, Steve Taylor. “σῶκος ἐριούνιος Ἑρμῆς (Iliad 20. 72): the modification of a traditional formula.” Glotta, vol. 75, no. 1-2, 1999, pp. 85-106.

Smit, Daan W.. “Achilles, Aeneas and the Hittites : a Hittite model for Iliad XX, 191-194 ?.” Talanta , vol. XX-XXI, 1988-1989, pp. 53-64.

P. M. Smith, ‘Aineiadai as patrons of Iliad XX and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, LXXXV. (1981) 17-58.

Wakimoto, Yuka. “Aeneas in and before the « Iliad ».” Journal of Classical Studies, vol. 45, 1997, pp. 28-39.