One of the most well-known passages of Iliad 5 is when Athena spurs Diomedes to wound Aphrodite. The goddess of sex flees the battlefield and goes to be comforted by her mother.
Hom. Iliad 5.370-4
Then divine Aphrodite fell to the knees of Diône Her own mother. She took her own daughter into her arms. She touched her with her hand, named her, and spoke: “Dear child, who of the Olympians has done these kinds of things to you, Pointlessly, as if you were doing something wicked in the open?”
Once Aphrodite tells her the story, her mother then goes on to provide her a catalogue of gods who had to endure wounding by mortals. While the passage is amusing, it produces a little dissonance based largely on the significant detail of Aphrodite having a mother.
Schol. D ad. Hom. Il. 5.374
“Note that according to Hesiod, Aphrodite is the product of Ouranos’ genitals and the sea, but according to Homer, she is from Diône and Zeus.
Terracotta figurine of Aphrodite, Antikensammlung Berlin, c. 2nd Century BCE
An instructive detail here is that the scholion here doesn’t take a stance about whether either or not Homer or Hesiod are “correct” or one is prior to another, and I think this is pretty important. From a narrative perspective each genealogy makes sense for the story in question: Aphrodite is a powerful elemental force in Hesiod’s Theogony and there is both poetic and political logic behind her birth from Ouranos’ testicles. In the Homeric tradition, this is more complicated. Zeus needs to humiliate Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where he ‘gets back’ at her for infecting the gods with lust by inducing her to have sex with the mortal Anchises. In the Iliad, Aphrodite is rendered subordinate to Zeus as one of his children. Aphrodite is often mentioned as a daughter of Zeus (as G. S. Kirk notes in his Cambridge commentary on the Iliad), but this is the only place we hear about her mother. To make it a little more bewildering, Diône seems top merely be a feminine form of Zeus (cf. the genitive Dios).
Frederick Combellack writes in his 1976 article “Homer the Innovator” that “any person who spends very much time in the study of the Homeric poems will almost certainly find himself involved, perhaps with regret, in the study of Homeric scholarship” (44). He drops this “diss track” by way of introducing an argument against the very idea that Homeric poetry could “innovate” or “invent” new detail, an assertion supported by many scholars in the twentieth century, dismissed by Combellack as being possible, but implausible based on our evidence.
So-called “Ludovisi Throne”: main panel, Aphrodite attended by two handmaidens as she rises ouf the surf. Thasos marble, Greek artwork, ca. 460 BC (authenticity disputed).caption…
While I don’t necessarily share Combellack’s aversion to reading Homeric scholarship, despite a weighty tradition mocking its pedantry going all the way back to Seneca (and likely earlier, given the evidence of Palladas the Alexandrian poet), I do think the asperity of his comments point to an important problem in thinking about Homeric poetry: making any sense of the relationship between our ‘Homer’ and what may have come before.
The relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and antecedent ‘traditions’ is not just about mythological narratives: it pervades our view of Homeric language (the formula), devices (e.g. similes), as well as content. Indeed, a great deal of Homeric scholarship of the 20th century was engaged with this question in one way or another. (Sidenote, this is a topic that will always inspire debate: The first 45 minutes of my dissertation defense in 2007 was occupied by my readers debating among themselves the meaning of the word ‘tradition’ in relation to the Iliad.)
I have discussed neoanalytical approaches before, and I don’t really want to recap that. Here I am interested in two problems presented by the nature of Homeric poetry itself: First, Homeric poetry is generically meant to seem old and authoritative, without having to actually be so. Second, Greek poetry and myth in general have a very different approach to veracity or fidelity than a culture immersed in fixed textual traditions like ours might expect.
For the first problem, I always find it useful to flip our belief about Homeric poetry on its head: what if, instead of assuming that Homeric poetry stands as the authoritative origins of Trojan war narratives (and other myths) it stands at the end of a certain kind of flexible tradition, imposing an authoritative order only over time thanks to a privileged cultural position? I find starting from this approach useful especially with other archaic and classical age poets because we can’t actually know what ‘Homer’ they were exposed to and it is strange to think that epic performance was not shaped by other genres as well.
For the second challenge, I often think back to what Hesiod announces before the cosmogonic narrative of the Theogony even begins. The Muses approach ‘Hesiod’ while he is tending his flocks:
Theogony 26-28
“Rustic shepherds, wretched reproaches, nothing but bellies, We know how to say many lies similar to the truth And we know how to speak the truth when we want to.”
When I teach myth I emphasize that while this passage can be taken as a disclaimer (i.e., you may know different stories than mine!) for communities of divergent, even conflicting narrative traditions, I think it is also a conditioning framework for setting aside concerns about veracity. Hesiod the narrator here attributes poetic authority to the Muses along with the ability to discern what is true from what is false. The result is that mortals simply cannot know and, therefore, probably shouldn’t worry about it.
But I have also taken recourse to ideas from scholars of memory to rethink moments like this. In studying memory systems, Martin Conway suggests that there are two forces in human memory: correspondence, which is about equivalence between details of ‘reality’ (or experience) and details of a story and coherence, which means that details make sense together in a narrative. When it comes to the way these systems operate in the human mind, not only does he argue that the memory systems have different neuro-anatomy, but he suggests that the episodic memory system (which prizes correspondence) developed earlier and is more basic to day-to-day survival than the autobiographical memory system which focuses more on coherence and is essential for the development of a goal or ‘identity’ driven self. The two systems are not exclusive—autobiographical memory selects from episodic memory in the creation of a coherent self.
In expanding these ideas to communities of audiences and narrative traditions, what I think we can say is that ancient audiences were accustomed to making sense of each story on its own terms, nonplussed by details that might conflict with other story traditions, because they belong to those other stories. The force of narrative coherence supersedes correspondence to ‘facts’ in other tales because what matters in each telling is the story in process. To an extent, these forces and the aesthetics they imply are operative throughout early Greek poetry (consider Pindar) and at play as well in the ‘innovations’ we see in Athenian Tragedy.
To return to book 5 of the Iliad: Aphrodite has a mother because it makes sense for the global context of the epic (where Zeus is the “father of gods and men”) and because it makes sense for this scene. Whether or not this is Homeric “invention” is almost beside the point. Certainly the simplicity of the name Diône and the lack of her presence in other narratives implies that this detail is important, even idiopathic to this (kind of) scene, but it tells us nothing about whether or not earlier versions of this theme including this detail or whether similar moments occurred in antecedent or parallel traditions. The challenge, as always, is to make sense of how this passage supports the Iliad we possess.
Cribbing from the Muses here: we cannot know if ‘Homer’ made something up, so should we bother worrying about it?
Short bibliography
Alden, Maureen Joan. “The rôle of Calypso in the Odyssey.” Antike und Abendland, vol. XXXI, 1985, pp. 97-107.
Barker, Elton T. E.. “The « Iliad »’s big swoon: a case of innovation within the epic tradition ?.” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-17.
Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies
Berg, Nils and Haug, Dag Trygve Truslew. “Dividing Homer. 2,: Innovation vs. tradition in Homer : an overlooked piece of evidence.” Symbolae Osloenses, vol. 75, 2000, pp. 5-23. Doi: 10.1080/003976700300005811
Bruce K. Braswell. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 21 (1971) 16-26.
Christensen, Joel P.. “Innovation and tradition revisited: the near-synonymy of ἀμύνω and ἀλέξω as a case study in Homeric composition.” The Classical Journal, vol. 108, no. 3, 2012-2013, pp. 257-296.
Combellack, Frederick M.. “Homer the innovator.” Classical Philology, vol. LXXI, 1976, pp. 44-55.
Martin A. Conway. “Memory and the Self,” Journal of Memory and Language 53 (2005) 594-628.
Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. “« Kyklos », the Epic Cycle and Cyclic poetry.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 1-40.
Bernard Fenik. Homer: Tradition and Invention. Leiden, 1978.
Ingalls, Wayne B.. “Linguistic and formular innovation in the mythological digressions in the Iliad.” Phoenix, vol. XXXVI, 1982, pp. 201-202.
Jones, Peter. “Poetic invention: the fighting around Troy in the first nine years of the Trojan War.” Homer’s world: fiction, tradition, reality. Eds. Andersen, Øivind and Dickie, Matthew W.. Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens; 3. Athens ; Bergen: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1995. 101-111.
Mueller-Goldingen, Christian. “Tradition und Innovation: zu Stesichoros’ Umgang mit dem Mythos.” L’Antiquité Classique, vol. 69, 2000, pp. 1-19. Doi: 10.3406/antiq.2000.2419
Nussbaum, Alan J.. “The Homeric formulary template and a linguistic innovation in the epics.” Language and meter. Eds. Gunkel, Dieter and Hackstein, Olav. Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics; 18. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2018. 267-318.
Ready, Jonathan L.. The Homeric simile in comparative perspectives : oral traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2018.
David C. Rubin. “The Basic-systems Model of Episodic Memory,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006) 277-311.
M. M. Willcock. “Mythological Paradeigmata in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 14 (1964) 141-151.
—,—. “Ad Hoc Invention in the Iliad.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977) 41-53.
Book 5 contains several speeches that engage with themes of theomachy and the Iliad’s relationship with the past. A few of them also can help us think about the poem’s composition and its relationship to other poetic traditions. One speech where many of these issues emerge is Dione’s speech to Aphrodite after Diomedes wounds her.
Aphrodite rescuing her son Aeneas wounded in fight, scene from The Iliad. Shoulder of an Etruscan black-figure amphora, ca. 480 BC. Martin-von-Wagner-Museum, L 793 (work on display in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, room 3, as of Februar 2007).
Homer, Iliad 5. 381-416
“Dione, the shining goddess, answered her then: ‘Endure my child, and restrain yourself even though you are grieving. For many of us who have Olympian homes have caused each other hard pains because of humans. Ares once endured when Otos and strong Ephialtes, The children of Aloes, chained him in a powerful bond. He was tied down for thirteen months in a bronze jar. And then Ares, insatiate of war, would have perished there If their step-mother, the super pretty Eeriboia Had not informed Hermes. He freed Ares Who was in a lot of pain, since his bonds were hurting him. And Hera endured, when the powerful son of Amphitryon Struck her in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow. Then untreatable pain overtook her indeed. And huge Hades endured when the same son of Aegis-bearing Zeus Gave him pain by shooting him among the corpses. Then he went to great Olympos to Zeus’ home, Grieving that he had been allotted pain. That arrow Was lodged in his massive shoulder, and suffered in his heart. Paeon relieved his pains by applying medicine, Since he wasn’t mortal in any way at all. The one who doesn’t hesitate at doing sacrilegious things Is a violence-doing criminal, that guy who harms the gods with arrows. Athena the grey-eyed goddess sent him against you. The fool. Doesn’t Tydeus’ son recognize in his thoughts That someone who fights the gods doesn’t live very long, He won’t ever have children saying “daddy” at his needs When he comes home from war and the terrible battle. So now the son of Tydeus, even if he is super strong, Let him not even think about fighting someone better than you, Lest prudent Aigialeia Adrastus’ daughter Should wake her dear servants from sleep, weeping, Longing for her wedded husband, the best of the Achaeans, That strong wife of horse-taming Diomedes.”
This passage has a few interesting things in it. First, while there is some evidence for Dione as a goddess outside of the Iliad, in Hesiod and her Homeric Hymn she is the product of Ouranos’ castrated testicles. By having a mother in Homer, Aphrodite is more neatly fit into an Olympian pantheon as a child of Zeus rather than a goddess from an earlier generation. Dione, coincidentally, has been seen as a feminine version of the alternate root for Zeus, Dios.
A short digression, one of the features of the flexibility of Homeric verse is that it admits formal variants that other dialects would tend to reduce. So, for convenience of metrical shape, there are two ways to decline Zeus:
Zeus/ Zēnos / Zēni /Zēna
Zeus / Dios / Dii / Dia
For those who don’t know an inflected language, the declension of a noun is the set of the forms needed to communicate their grammatical function in the sentence. So, Homeric Greek provides two ways to say “of Zeus” (Zēnos/Dios) or “to/for Zeus”(Zēni/Dii). The rhythmic shape of each pair differs long/short vs. short/short; and, further, the initial consonants can change the length of final vowels that precede them. Complex consonants like zeta (closer to the sound ds) can make short vowels that precede them (what we call “long by position” in contrast to “long by nature”).
Back to Dione’s speech: this is a good example of what I have mentioned before, a paradeigma, an example from the past used to persuade someone in the poem’s presence. This one provides a catalogue of divine suffering at the hands of humans to ‘console’ Aphrodite. Each of these examples have story traditions that are explained in the scholia (on which see below) or appear in other extant texts.
Beyond the details, this passage is also often compared for its structure to an epic fragment ascribed to the poet Panyasis in the 5th century BCE:
Panyasis Herakleia fr. 3 Benarbé = 16 K
“Demeter endured; the famous Lame-god endured;
Poseidon endured; and silver-bowed Apollo endured
to serve a mortal human being for one year
and even Ares strongheart endured under his father’s compulsion,”
τλῆ μὲν Δημήτηρ, τλῆ δὲ κλυτὸς ᾿Αμφιγυήεις,
τλῆ δὲ Ποσειδάων, τλῆ δ’ ἀργυρότοξος ᾿Απόλλων
ἀνδρὶ παρὰ θνητῷ θητευσέμεν εἰς ἐνιαυτόν,
τλῆ δὲ καὶ ὀβριμόθυμος ῎Αρης ὑπὸ πατρὸς ἀνάγκῃ
Note the repetitions in structures (τλῆ μὲν…τλῆ δὲ), themes (immortals harmed by mortals), and even diction (ὀβριμόθυμος in Panyasis is parallel to ὀβριμοεργὸς in Homer). The similarity between this passage and the longer speech in Homer has led to much speculation as to the cause: is this catalogue a common structuring motif in early Greek poetry or is it a case of Panyasis imitating Homer (or Homer imitating Panyasis) or something more complex.
(Elton Barker and I have written about this a little: See our discussion in Homer’s Thebes).
An Issue of Texts
Iliad 5.403 reads σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ’ αἴσυλα ῥέζων but there is a scholion that notes that the Hellenistic editor Aristarchus read αἰσυλοεργός.
That would give us a different line σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ’ αἴσυλα ῥέζων (Schol. T ad Il. 5.403).. The difference is minor: σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς is something like a “violence-doing criminal” while σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός is something closer to a “sacrilege-committing criminal”. My guess is that other editors preferred ὀβριμοεργὸς because it is not a hapax legomenon (a word said only once) and because the compound αἰσυλοεργός (aisuloergos) has its sense repeated at the end of the line with αἴσυλα ῥέζων (aisula rezôn).
These two aesthetic criteria–uniqueness of words, close repetition–are not necessarily at home with the basic aesthetics of Greek poetry. Our scholia–the collection of marginal comments culled from centuries of scholarly editing of and commentary on ancient texts–preserve layers of different approaches to Homer. The editor Aristarchus, one of Homer’s earliest editors, is criticized by some modern authors for preserving unique or otherwise uncommon readings. (See this review by Gregory Nagy of Martin West’s edition of the Iliad for more.) My personal take on this is that the kind of repetition in this line is characteristic of something like an intentional archaism, a close repetition that hearkens back to the legendary era the speaker is evoking. While the repetition and unique diction may seem odd from Hellenistic and modern aesthetic perspectives, I think it rings better for the context and is truer to the complexity of Homeric poetry.
I have discussed similar textual differences before in an article about a later scene in book 5, centering around Ares where our common text preserves rather bland vocabulary in preference to exceptional diction.
A World of Stories: Mythographical scholia
Another kind of material preserved in the scholia includes additional information about myth from outside Homer. There are several versions of the story of Diomedes’ wife, Aigialeia, in the scholia to Homer. The scholion in this case seems to read Dione’s comment’s as an allusion or even a coded threat about the impact of Athena’s anger on Diomedes in the long run.
Schol. T Ad Hom. Il. 5.512ex
“They say that Aigialeia, the youngest of the daughters of Adrastus, was Diomedes’ wife and really longed for him and troubled herself over him through the nights as well. But later, thanks to the rage of Aphrodite, she slept with a band of Argive youths and later on, Kometes, the son of Sthenelos, to whom Diomedes had entrusted the affairs of his household. Although she was planning to kill him when he returned home, she spared Diomedes because he fled to the altar of Athena. People say that when he left there he went to Iberia, as some claim, and that he was deceitfully killed by the king Daunus. Others claim that he was killed by Iounios the son of Daunos during a hunt. For this reason, Athena turned him into a god and changed his companions into herons.
The poet does not know of the desire of Kometes and Aigialeia.”
There is no way of knowing if this account was written into our out of our Iliad. By which I mean: we can’t really know if ancient audiences had access to this story and part of this is because we don’t have evidence of whether this story was told to flesh out what is said in the speech or if the speech reflects stories that were well known.
The scholiast’s notion that the “poet did not know this story” is a problematic one and one that reflects misunderstanding about Homeric poetic strategy. Homeric narrative tends to suppress stories that don’t support its local and general aims, something I discuss elsewhere in reference to the Homeric treatment of Cassandra.
It does seem peculiar that Dione would bring up Diomedes’ wife as all–but it is likely that she was a well-known part of his story as one of the Epigonoi. Actual evidence from early Greek poetry is limited. As far as I can see (and this is more or less confirmed by Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth, 1993: 699), the story is later than the classical period, although a much later scholion to Lykophron suggests the story was told by the archaic poet Mimnermus:
Schol. To Lykophron, Alexandra 610
“Aphrodite, according to Mimnermus, was wounded by Diomedes and caused Aigialeia to sleep with many adulterers and to be loved by Kometes the son of Sthenelos. When he returned to Argos, she plotted against him. Then he fled to the altar of Hera and left with his companions in the night. Then he went to Italy to King aunos who killed him with a trick.”
Sale, W. Merritt. “Aphrodite in the Theogony.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92 (1961): 508–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/283834.
Willcock, M. M. “Mythological Paradeigma in the Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1964): 141–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/637720.
Book 5 presents the first full aristeia of the Iliad as Athena supports Diomedes’ destruction of the Trojan lines and opposition to the gods. Athena provides Diomedes the ability to see the gods and points him directly at Aphrodite. Diomedes and Athenelos are pitted against Aeneas and Pandaros–in the first of two significant testings of Aeneas in the Iliad–and Diomedes prevails. He wounds Aphrodite when she appears to rescue her son (Aeneas), replacing him with a fake version. To balance this weighing of different heroic traditions, Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, encounters Herakles’ son Tlepolemos. Sarpedon wins but is wounded and has to be saved. The flow of the action angers Athena and Hera who prepare to battle Ares. Zeus permits them to harry him and Diomedes wounds Ares as well. The book ends with the gods pulling back from the battle field, leaving space for the more human plots of book 6.
Each of the major scenes in book 5 contributes critically to some of the major themes I have noted to follow in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions. But the central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 5 are narrative traditions, heroism, and gods and humans. The paradigmatic consolation Dione offers Aphrodite when she is injured is structurally and thematically interesting, but the primary narrative entanglements of book 6 involve (1) Theomachy and (2) the characterization of Diomedes.
Theomachy and Homeric Gods
One of the chief themes of Book 5 is deferred theomachy. The gods engage in direct conflict elsewhere in the epic (most notably in books 13-15 and 20), but here we get a mix of theomachy by proxy (Diomedes wounding Aphrodite at Athena’s urging) and direct conflict (Athena vs. Ares) with Zeus intervening. The behavior of the gods in Homer, however, is crucial to understanding the epic’s messages about human beings.
The theme of theomachy (“war among the gods”) is integrated into the epic both to engage with its place in cosmic history and to appropriate themes from other traditions. For the latter, we have multiple echoes of earlier conflicts between the gods: the apostasy of Poseidon and Apollo that led to their service to build the walls of Troy (see books 7 and 12), reminders from Zeus of how powerful he is and how he punished them before (books 4, 8, 15) and reflections from other gods of how they settled and distributed their rights, alluding to moments that could be (but aren’t) represented in Hesiod’s Theogony.
While the Iliad is not explicit about it, divine-conflict deferred or avoided is central to the Trojan War myth writ large, especially around the character of Achilles and his mother Thetis (on which, no one has yet improved upon Laura Slatkin’s elegant The Power of Thetis). The story is deep, but easy to summarize: Prometheus had the secret knowledge of a nymph who would bear a son greater than his father, endangering the cosmos if Zeus or one of his brothers ended up the daddy in question. Zeus releases Prometheus from his bondage and torture in exchange for this information, leading to the arranged marriage of Thetis and Peleus.
So, at the center of Achilles’ apostasy from Agamemnon and his mother’s intervention on his behalf (triggering even more conflict among the gods) is the traditional threat that Achilles’ birth averted: upheaval among the gods. Nevertheless, as a narrative tradition seeking to encompass if not surpass all others, the Iliad still tries to include themes and motifs that would be proper both to the story that was never told (Zeus overthrown by a son) and those that were (Gigantomachies, Titanomachies, etc.)
Book 5 is the first time the gods really get into the action in the Iliad. They stage manage it in books 3 and 4, but finally get their hands dirty here. And a lot of what they do seems pretty embarrassing or even sacrilegious to modern audiences. This connects with the other main function of the gods and theomachy in the Iliad: to elevate the human condition.
Thank you for reading Painful Signs, Or, Joel’s Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Xenophanes, fragments 10-11
“Homer and Hesiod have attributed everything to the gods that is shameful and reprehensible among men: theft, adultery and deceiving each other
* * *
How they have sung the most the lawless deeds of the gods! That they steal, commit adultery and deceive one another…
“Hieronymos says that when Pythagoras went down into Hades he saw the ghost of Hesiod bound to a bronze pillar, squeaking, and that Homer’s ghost was hanging from a tree surrounded by snakes. They were being punished for the things they said about the gods. And in addition he saw men who were not willing to have sex with their own wives. This is the reason, that Pythagoras was honored by the inhabitants of Croton. Aristippos of Cyrene in his work Peri Physiologoi says that Pythagoras was given his name because he spoke the truth publically [agoreuô] no less than the Pythian oracle.”
There’s a tension between comments like those of Xenophanes and Heraclitus and the assertion by Herodotus (in book 2 of the Histories) that Homer and Hesiod Olympian Pantheon. I think a lot of this tension is a misunderstanding of what the gods in Homer are doing. They are simultaneously representations of divine beings (although not universal) and characters in a story. They do and do not reflect shared Greek beliefs about the gods. In addition, they serve as inducement for audiences to think about things like ‘fate’ and human agency. But they also serve to contrast with humans. The gods can do whatever they please because they face no consequences and live forever; by contrast, human beings face consequences for their actions and have a limited lifespan. The value of human life is thus actually increased by its scarcity and the importance of human choice and agency is all the more elevated by the fact that we can lose something so preciously limited at any moment. The gods end up looking somewhat distant and pathetic by comparison–but this is part of a general cosmic goal of justifying the separation between the worlds of gods and men.
People who focus on epic narrative have noted that the narrative worlds of gods and men overlap but are not coterminous. Divine players can learn about everything that goes on in the mortal realm, but mortals know only what is directly revealed to them. The external audience witnesses everything.
Venus, Wounded by Diomedes, is Saved by Iris by Joseph-Marie Vien
Why Diomedes?
Diomedes is a central figure in book 5’s allusions to theomachy and he helps defer these themes from god-on-god violence to god-by-proxy violence. Part of the reason Diomedes can function as a Theomahkos (on which, see Zoe Stamatopoulou’s great article cited below) is because he is also a substitute Achilles. But, because he is wholly mortal, he does not represent the same threat to the cosmic order. As covered a bit in posts on book 4, Diomedes is an important figure because of his place as a hero who was part of both the Theban and Trojan War traditions.
In the Iliad, his character is adapted to tell a different story about the way a young hero might be part of a larger coalition. There is of course a lot going on with Diomedes from a mythographical tradition, and he channels that as the Athena-aided hero who does great things in book 5; but he follows an important pattern in the development of his political acumen.
I have written several times on the importance of Diomedes in the Iliad’s political arc (sorry to be obnoxious, but Christensen 2009, 2015, and 2018 below). Here’s a table of his political/forensic actions in the epic.
(1) Diomedes (implicitly) witnesses the actions and speeches of Iliad 1-3
(2) Diomedes shows he knows the appropriate parameters for political and martial speech (Il. 4)
(3) Diomedes practices public speech and is acclaimed by all the Achaians in his refusal of Paris’ offer to return the gifts but not Helen (7.400-2). Acclamation (7.403-4):
(4) Diomedes practices public speech in criticizing Agamemnon and is acclaimed by all (9.50-1) but is criticized by Nestor for not reaching the télosmúthôn (9.53-62). Acclamation (9.50-1)
(5) Diomedes practices public speech in reaction to Achilles’ rejection of the assembly (9.697-709) and is acclaimed by all the kings.
(6) Diomedes volunteers to go on a nocturnal spying mission during the council of kings and is encouraged by Agamemnon to choose any companion he wants regardless of nobility (10.219-39)
(7) Diomedes executes public speech at a critical moment and offers a plan (14.110-32). He is obeyed by all the kings and departs from the epic as a speaker.
Book 5, of course, stands outside of this narrative arc. Here, he carries out the ideal actions of a god-aided hero, fully replacing Achilles in the ranks of the Achaean warriors, but only for a short time. As you follow Diomedes throughout the epic, note that as soon as Achilles returns, Diomedes recedes from the stage entirely.
Some guiding questions
What is the relationship between Diomedes and Athena like in book 5?
How does the depiction of the gods in Book 5 contribute to their overall presentation in the Iliad?
How are stories outside the Iliad used in Book 5?
What is the impact of the violence in book 5?
Bibliography on Diomedes
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Andersen, Ø. 1978. Die Diomedesgestalt in der Ilias. Oslo.
Christensen, J. P. 2009. “The end of speeches and a speech’s end: Nestor, Diomedes, and the telos muthôn.”’ in K. Myrsiades, ed. Reading Homer: Film and Text. Farleigh.
Christensen, J. P. 2015. “Diomedes’ Foot-wound and the Homeric Reception of Myth.” In Diachrony, Jose Gonzalez (ed.). De Gruyter series, MythosEikonPoesis. 2015, 17–41.
Christensen, J. P. 2018. “Speech Training and the Mastery of Context: Thoas the Aitolian and the Practice of Múthoi” for Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators and Characters, Christos Tsagalis and Jonathan Ready (eds.). University of Texas Press, 2018: 255–277.
Christensen, Joel P., and Elton T. E. Barker. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi Dei Testi Classici, no. 66 (2011): 9–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41415488.
Griffin, Jasper. 1986. “Homeric Words and Speakers.” JHS 106: 36–57.
Harries, Byron. “‘Strange Meeting’: Diomedes and Glaucus in ‘Iliad’ 6.” Greece & Rome 40, no. 2 (1993): 133–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/643154.
Martin 1989, R. The Language of Heroes, Ithaca 1989.
Morrison, James V. “The Function and Context of Homeric Prayers: A Narrative Perspective.” Hermes 119, no. 2 (1991): 145–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4476812.
Stagakis, George. “DOLON, ODYSSEUS AND DIOMEDES IN THE ‘DOLONEIA.’” Rheinisches Museum Für Philologie 130, no. 3/4 (1987): 193–204. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41233632.
Stamatopoulou, Zoe. “Wounding the Gods: The Mortal Theomachos in the Iliad and the Hesiodic Aspis.” Mnemosyne 70, no. 6 (2017): 920–38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26572880
Stamatopoulou, Zoe. “Wounding the Gods: The Mortal Theomachos in the Iliad and the Hesiodic Aspis.” Mnemosyne 70, no. 6 (2017): 920–38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26572880
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.
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.
Erbse, Hartmut (1986). Untersuchungen zur Funktion der Götter im homerischen Epos. Berlin: de Gruyter
Friedman, Rachel. 2001. “Divine Dissension and the Narrative of the Iliad.” Helios 28:–118.
Griffin, Jasper. “The Divine Audience and the Religion of the Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1978): 1–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/638707.
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.
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
In my earlier posts on Iliad 4, I emphasized the opening scene, where Zeus toys with the other gods and entertains the idea of ending the conflict, and one part of the so-called epipolesis, where Agamemnon goes around ‘rallying’ the troops to start the war. I barely discussed the intermediary scene where the gods rekindle the war by prompting Pandaros to break the truce made in book 4 by shooting at Agamemnon.
The structure of the book ends up looking something like this:
Structure of Iliad 4
1-72 Divine Assembly, Articulation of Local Plan
72-222 Rekindling of the Conflict, Wounding of Agamemnon
233-421 Epipolesis
422-544 Battle Scene
As with earlier books, we find the action splits into smaller parts, often 3 or 4, in an analogy to the way we can break down each line of dactylic hexameter into smaller, yet still sensible parts. Each part of this book could conceivably function alone or in a different order. The first section connects us to larger narrative arcs (e.g., the Trojan War and its causes); the second creates a join between the mythical narrative and the particular story of the Iliad (indeed, providing a kind of bridge from Zeus’ “plan” in the cosmic sense to end the race of heroes and the ‘local’ Iliadic plan of having the Greeks lose to appease Achilles’ slighted honor); the third section, building on the wounding of Menelaos in the second, serves chiefly to recharacterize Agamemnon as a leader in the war and to introduce us to warriors who have not spoken much so far, but who will be primary players later (e.g. Idomeneus, Diomedes); and the final martial chaos of the book provides a bridge to the battle and aristeia of book 5.
There’s a lot in this book I haven’t talked about. From the perspective of some of my recent posts attempting to imagine how Homeric heroes think (or are managed etc.). The example of Pandarus being induced to shoot Menealos and break the truce–thus providing some moral case against the Trojans–is interesting. I’d like to spend more time thinking about what Athena says and the figure she dons to persuade him, but that’s probably for the next time I go through the Iliad.
Every time I read Iliad 4 I find myself struck by Hera’s offer to Zeus after he suggests that they just have peace made between the Trojans and Greeks. On one level–if we are thinking about the overlapping motivations of mortals and gods–Hera’s response reflects the deep enmity that either side of a human conflict might feel. Just as at the end of the Odyssey there is no resolution to the cycle of vengeance between Odysseus and the suitors families, so too is there no way to resolve this war without the destruction of Troy (or the Greeks, in an alternate timeline). This is the terrible logic of violence, the inevitable outcome of revenge-fueled ‘justice’: arms are merely put aside until the next opportunity for slaughter. The Odyssey’s final dea ex machina dramatizes this; but before we can get there–or, more properly, to the reconciliations of Illad–by first witnessing the depths and consequences of holding a grudge.
So, we get to Hera’s response to Zeus.
Homer, Iliad 4.51-61
“I hold three cities dearest to me of all: Argos, Sparta and Mykene of the wide ways. Destroy them whenever they are hateful to your heart. I am not standing before them and I don’t care about them. For even if I am jealous over them and I don’t want you to destroy them, I do not deny you in my jealousy because you are stronger than I am. But it is not right to render my labor useless. I am a god too, and my lineage comes from the same place as yours. Crooked minded Kronos fathered me as the most honored of the gods Both in terms of my birth and because I am called your wife And you rule among the immortals”
Here, Hera shows that she is so vengeful that she is willing to give up cities that were sacred to her for the destruction of the city of Troy. Any casual reader might note that these are the very cities that have brought some of the largest contingents to Troy! Ancient scholiasts note variously that this scene provides an explanation for Hera’s anger that does not include the judgment of Paris: these are the cities that started all the problems with Helen to begin with!
Schol. bT Ad Hom. Il 51-2 51
“It is notable that the poet wants to place a probable cause for the anger on Hera and it is not that which the myth fashions, that she is angry at the Trojans because Aphrodite was honored ahead of her in the judgment over beauty, instead he says that she loves those cities over which the injustice against Helen occurred.”
“Note [that she mentions this] that they are fighting alongside the Greeks on account of these cities, not because of the judgment about beauty offered by Paris, which Homer doesn’t know about”
Others (see the bibliography below) have written well about the tension here between a “savage” goddess and the emerging concerns of the Iliad. In particular, there is a thematic arc between this book and book 24 where Hera argues against having Achilles give Hektor’s body back to his family for burial. In each scene, Hera represents that primal vengeance we often associate with chthonic deities like the Furies. In book 4, Zeus doesn’t make Hera relent, but by the end of the epic, Apollo stands to argue against her, and Zeus makes a judgment against her.
Fresco depicting Hierogamia, the sacred wedding of Hera and Zeus, witnessed by winged Iris, personification of the rainbow. Many ancient Greek cities and towns celebrated this event as a sacred rite. Pompeii, House of the Tragic Poet (VI 8, 5, atrium 3) 45-79 CE
From the perspective of Hesiod’s Theogony, where Zeus stabilizes the divine realm by ensuring that each god has their own honors and place in his universe, this horse-trading of favored cities could be seen as an echo of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles: Hera is offering to effect a redistribution of honor through the sacrifice of a favored city. Potential strife is averted through the offer of an exchange of one geras (that token of honor and esteem) for another. There is also an argument I have read suggesting that the cosmic aspect of this exchange of cities provides an explanation for the absence of these cities in the time of the epic’s audience. Such an argument suggests that while Zeus does not agree to take these three cities immediately, but their later obliteration supports the larger motivation of Zeus’ plan to rid the earth of the race of heroes.
But the rights of the gods are more or less fixed. Their world cannot change, so there’s more going on here. From a perspective that makes Iliad 24 a crucial resolution of the epic’s themes, book 4’s dispute is anticipatory: it perpetuates the violence for the audience to experience on the way to the realization that this kind of conflict is not merely unsustainable but it is fundamentally dehumanizing in that it makes people into things and obliterates families and cities. In my own reading of the Iliad in the light of modern violence, the poem itself attempts to re-humanize, to prompt its audience to recognize the folly and the damage of war and the endless, unendurable logic of comeuppance.
In this reading, Hera’s speech should shock audiences into thinking about vengeance and divine caprice. The peril of vengeance is clear; but Hera’s caprice may hint at a theological shift: Zeus’ playfulness and the malice of other gods might just convince some mortals that we need to rely on ourselves to make our lives better, since the gods are certainly not on our side.
A Few things to read
Van Erp Taalman Kip, A. Maria. “The gods of the « Iliad » and the fate of Troy.” Mnemosyne, vol. 53, no. 4, 2000 Ser. 4, pp. 385-402.
O’Brien, Joan V.. The transformation of Hera: a study of ritual, hero and the goddess in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1993.
O’Brien, Joan. “Homer’s savage Hera.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXVI, 1990-1991, pp. 105-125.
Synodinou, Katerina. “The threats of physical abuse of Hera by Zeus in the Iliad.” Wiener Studien, vol. C, 1987, pp. 13-22.
Judgement of Paris. Fragment of an Attic black-figure hydria, 520–510 BC. The name of each character is inscribed above his/her head. Louvre
As Elton Barker and I emphasize in our work on Homer, we think poetic rivalry was a formative feature of the generation of epic poetry in performance over time. The culture projected within the Homeric world is deeply competitive and rivalry between the Homeric poems through the main figures Achilles and Odysseus is clear as well. But we also argue that agonism should be seen as a primary force in the way Homeric poems relate to other traditions as well, particularly those surrounding Thebes.
Thebes comes to the fore in book 4 when Agamemnon reviews his troops and exhorts them to battle in the so-called Epipolesis. By the time he gets to Diomedes, he leans a little more into the language of reproach and attempts to shame Diomedes by comparing him to his father.
Hom. Il. 4.387-393; 396-400
There, stranger though he was, horse-driver Tydeus was not frightened, alone among many Cadmeans. But he challenged them to contests and won victory in all easily. Such a guardian was Athena for your father! But the Cadmeans, drivers of horses, were angered and, as he departed from the city, they set up a close ambush of fifty youths; there were two leaders…. But Tydeus let loose on them a unseemly fate: he slew them all and only one man he sent to return home: he sent Maion, trusting in the signs of the gods. Such a man was Aitolian Tydeus; but he fathered a son weaker than he in battle, but better in the assembly
After he does this, Sthelenos, the Patroklos to Diomedes’ Achilles, objects strongly. Asserting that he and Diomedes actually sacked a city when their fathers failed to do so.
Homer, Iliad. 4.404-110
Son of Atreus, don’t lie when you know how to speak clearly. We claim to be better than our fathers: we took the foundation of seven-gated Thebes though we led a smaller army before better walls because we were relying on the signs of the gods and Zeus’ help. Those men perished because of their own recklessness. Don’t put our fathers in the same honour’’
This response contains a few curiosities for Homeric epic. For one, instead of valuing the past, it directly contests the past as matching up to the present. For another, it assumes audience knowledge of a multigenerational war tradition around the city of Thebes to make sense of this. As we talk about in our book, Homer’s Thebes, the sacks of Thebes and Troy are positioned as a cosmic pair in ending the race of Heroes. For the particular stance of the Iliad, however, it is important to raise up the heroes of its epic: Diomedes and Sthenelos were heroic enough to take care of Thebes when their fathers could not; and yet, despite that, Troy is so much of a bigger deal that Diomedes and Sthenelos are merely role players on a much larger team.
But what of the tradition they are referring to? We have broad and deep evidence for narratives around Thebes from early iconography (8th century BCE) through extant and fragmentary dramas on the Athenian stage. But there is also a tradition of epic poetry more-or-less contemporaneous with Homer and Hesiod. Pausanias, the later travel writer, even claims that the Thebais was best, after the Iliad and the Odyssey (see below). The primary texts that may be targets of Homeric play here, are the Thebais and the Epigonoi.
Take these fragments with healthy skepticism, however. It is likelier that Homeric poetry was competing with Theban narratives in general rather than particular poems. And, of course, we always run the risk of a scholarly circularity with these fragments as well: they have been largely preserved in scholarly traditions commenting on and explaining the canonized texts of Homer and the Greek Tragedians. In our work, Elton and I don’t believe that we can accurately reconstruct Theban narratives from extant Homeric poetry, since the Iliad and the Odyssey strive so far to establish themselves as authoritative narratives.
The remains of an ancient epic called the Thebais that was attributed to ‘Homer’ by multiple sources in antiquity (although most scholars today, following Aristotle, agree that ‘Homer’ = Iliad and Odyssey or something like that). This epic seems to have told the Theban tale from the cursing of Polyneices and Eteocles by Oedipus through the events of the Seven Against Thebes.
Thank you for reading Painful Signs, Or, Joel’s Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Pausanias, IX 9.5
“The epic called Thebais was composed about this war. Kallinos, when he comes to mention this epic, says that Homer composed it. Many authors of considerable repute have believed the same thing. And I like this poem especially, after the Iliad and Odyssey at least.”
The Seven Chiefs against Thebes, 1826, history painting by Angélique Mongez
Fragments of the Thebais
Fr. 1 (found in The Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
“Goddess, sing of very-thirsty Argos, from where the Leaders [departed for Thebes]”
῎Αργος ἄειδε, θεά, πολυδίψιον, ἔνθεν ἄνακτες
Fr. 2 (Found in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists)
“Then the god-bred hero, blond Polyneices, First placed before Oedipus a fine silver platter, A thing of god-minded Kadmos. And then He filled a fine golden cup with sweet wine. But when he noted that lying before him were the Honored gifts of his own father, a great evil filled his heart. Quickly he uttered grievous curses against both Of his own sons—and he did not escape the dread Fury’s notice— That they would not divide their inheritance in friendship But that they would both have ceaseless war and battles.”
Fr.4 (Found in Scholion to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, 1375)
“When [Oedipus] noticed the cut of meat, he hurled it to the ground and spoke: ‘Alas, my children have sent this as a reproach to me…’ He prayed to King Zeus and the other gods That they would go to Hades’ home at each other’s hands.
As early as Herodotus (4.32) it was doubted that the epic that told the story of the sons of the Seven Against Thebes was by Homer. Instead, it was attributed later to a man named Antimachus from Teios. We have two lines most people agree on, and a handful of uncertain lines.
Fr. 1 (From the Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
“Now, Muses, let us sing in turn of the younger men” Νῦν αὖθ’ ὁπλοτέρων ἀνδρῶν ἀρχώμεθα, Μοῦσαι
Fr. 4 (From Clement of Alexandria)
“Many evils come to men from gifts”
ἐκ γὰρ δώρων πολλὰ κάκ’ ἀνθρώποισι πέλονται.
Fr. 6 (Dub. from the Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
“So then they divided the meat of bulls and wiped clean The sweat-covered necks of horses, since they had their fill of war.”
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. If there is anything you’d like to read that you don’t have free access to, let me know.
Barker, E.T.E. . 2009. Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.” Leeds International Classical Studies 7.2. (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classiscs/lics/)
———. 2011. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 66:9–44.
———. 2014. “Even Herakles Had to Die: Epic Rivalry and the Poetics of the Past in Homer’s Iliad.” Trends in Classics: Homer and the Theban Tradition, ed. Christos Tsagalis, 249–277.
Christensen, Joel. 2018. “Eris and Epos: Composition, Competition and the ‘Domestication’ of Strife.” YAGE.
Cingano, E. 1992. “The Death of Oedipus in the Epic Tradition.” Phoenix 46:1–11.
———. 2000. “Tradizioni su Tebe nell’epica e nella lirica greca arcaica.” In La città di Argo: Mito, storia, tradizioni poetiche, ed. P. A. Bernardini, 59–68. Rome.
———. 2004. “The Sacrificial Cut and the Sense of Honour Wronged in Greek Epic Poetry: Thebais frgs. 2-3D.” In Food and Identity in the Ancient World, ed. C. Grotanelli and L. Milano, 269–279. Padova.
Collins, Derek. . 2004. Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry. Hellenic Studies 7. Washington DC.
Book 4 of the Iliad moves away from the dominant interests of book 3 in providing a kind of ‘flashback’ to the beginning of the Trojan War to the beginning of the violence in this poem. Where book 3 introduces the duel between Paris and Menelaos, book 4 turns back to Agamemnon’s leadership and the beginning of proper Iliadic violence. To ‘begin’ yet again, the scene returns to Zeus with the other gods on Olympos pondering not destroying Troy. Of course, the notion of preserving Troy is impossible, but this motif reinforces Zeus’ position as the ringmaster. As Bruce Heiden explores in a series of articles (see the bibliography before), Zeus’ speeches both outline the plot to come in the epic and provide guidelines for where the books break and how performances of the whole song may have been structured.
In my view on the reading and teaching and my general sense of the five major themes, book 4 is most engaged with the themes of politics, the relationship between gods and humans, and the positioning of Iliadic content and themes in and against other narrative traditions.
Zeus’ ‘stage-managing’ of the plot is an important part of the theme of divine will vs. human agency. Book 4 takes pains to (more firmly) establish the Trojans as oath-breakers, responsible for the conflict (as if we needed more reasons!). The initial argument between Zeus, Athena, and Hera, moreover, anticipates similar re-articulations of the plot in book 8 and echoes of theomachy in books 5, 8, 13, 14, and 15.
The central framing mechanism of book 4 is the so-called Epipōlēsis (ἐπιπώλησις) . The epipolesis (perhaps best translated as “the inspection of the troops” or something like that) is one of those episodes named specifically by ancient scholars. It denotes Agamemnon’s actions in book 4 when he goes around exhorting Idomeneus, the two Ajaxes, Nestor, Odysseus, and then finally Diomedes and Sthenelos. Elton Barker and I have written about this scene a few times, but I think Rachel Lesser puts it well when she argues in chapter four of her Desire in the Iliad that the epipolesis “may be the only scene in the Iliad where Agamemnon practices effective leadership.”
Indeed, along with actions in book 11, where Agamemnon enjoys his own aristeia, book 4 is one of the chief places where he is characterized both as a leader and as a brother (when Menelaos is wounded). But part of what makes this sequence interesting is that Agamemnon is at times somewhat inept at his task. Odysseus gets annoyed with him; the Ajaxes just nod and go on their way. But when he lays into Diomedes to shame him for not fighting (when he is on his way, he tells a story about Dioemdes’ father Tydeus that doesn’t make a lot of sense for the world of Homer. In this paradeigma, Agamemnon provides another example of a Homeric hero trying to make sense of his experiences through stories from the past and coming up short. As I see it, these are moments where the epic itself models the problems of paradigmatic thinking by exploring the limits of different stories’ analogical value. ( This is covered a little in the post Speaking of Centaurs.)
But as Elton Barker and I talk about in Homer’s Thebes and our article “On not Remembering Tydeus”, this moment is also central to the Iliad’s appropriation from other traditions in order to establish itself as the best story in town. Note how Sthenelos, in responding to Agamemnon, argues that he and Diomedes are better than their fathers:
“Son of Atreus, don’t lie when you know how to speak truly. We claim to be better than our fathers: we took the foundation of seven-gated Thebes though we led a smaller army before better walls because we were trusting the signs of the gods and Zeus’ help. Those men perished because of their own recklessness. Don’t put our fathers in the same honor.”
This scene is somewhat unique in an epic that privileges the past as a place where men were greater than they are today. It capitalizes upon Sthenelos and Diomedes’ status as warriors who actually sacked Thebes to question whether the good old days were anything but merely old.
So, when reading book 4, pay close attention to how these speeches fulfill multiple tasks: they supercharge the plot, provide essential opportunities to characterize individual heroes, and give us a glimpse into how the Iliad pillages other traditions to foreground its own interests.
Some guiding questions for book 4
What does Zeus’ speech at the beginning of the epic do?
What is the cumulative effect of Agamemnon’s epipolesis (his rallying of the troops?)
What is the impact of the exchange between Diomedes, Sthenelus, and Agamemnon?
Brief Bibliography on the epipolesis and Agamemnon
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Christensen, Joel P., and Elton T. E. Barker. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi Dei Testi Classici, no. 66 (2011): 9–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41415488.
Haft, Adele J. “Odysseus’ Wrath and Grief in the ‘Iliad’: Agamemnon, the Ithacan King, and the Sack of Troy in Books 2, 4, and 14.” The Classical Journal 85, no. 2 (1989): 97–114. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297409.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. “Confronting Mortality: The Iliad’s Androktasiai.” Literature and Medicine 17, no. 2 (1998): 181-196. https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.1998.0022.
Holmes, B. (2007). The Iliad’s Economy of Pain. Transactions of the American Philological Association137(1), 45-84. https://doi.org/10.1353/apa.2007.0002.
Andrew Porter, Agamemnon, the pathetic despot: reading characterization in Homer. Hellenic studies series, 78. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 264 p.. ISBN 9780674984455 $24.95 (pb).
Ready, Jonathan L. “Toil and Trouble: The Acquisition of Spoils in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137, no. 1 (2007): 3-43.
“But when each of them were lined up with their leaders,
The Trojans went forward screeching and cries just like birds,
With the sound like the call of cranes near the sky.
Those birds that flee the winter and its endless rain
And fly with a cry over the ocean’s streams
Bringing death and murder to the Pygmies.
The Achaeans went forward exhaling rage in silence,
Eager in their heart to stand in defense of one another.”
This opening simile offers a somewhat surprising transition from the catalogs that end book 2 on the way to the action of book three. As I discuss in earlier posts about book 3, it is a fascinating book that continues some of the themes and concerns that emerge in book 2: a (re)introduction of the Trojans (starting with their catalog) and a (re)starting of the Trojan War. In my reading of the way the Iliad works as a coherent narrative that engages with and communicates the larger interest of both the Trojan War and the tradition of epic performance, book 3 presents episodes that evoke the character of the war’s beginning while still working within the narrative arc of the story of the rage of Achilles
1-111 Beginning, Proposal of a Dual [request for Priam to be fetched]
112-263 Teikhoskopia (“viewing from the walls”): Helen describes the Greeks
264-376 Duel
377-461 Aphrodite and the Reunion of Helen and Paris
The sequence of events laid as laid out here takes the audience almost in reverse from the war to the meeting of Helen and Paris. One could imagine the debate between Helen and Aphrodite and Helen’s begrudging acceptance of Paris as the Iliad’s take on blaming Helen, Paris’ character, and the shared conspiracy of divine will and human frailty. In this, the book offers one narrative arc that begins with Hektor upbraiding and shaming his brother and ends with Paris’ rather pathetic “aw shucks” return to the scene of their ‘crime’ (i.e., the bedroom). At the same time, if we think about the wide angle lens approach, this arc also allows us an early meeting between Menelaos and Priam and a view of the Greeks from the Trojans’ perspective. Book 3 situates the audience in space between Troy and the Greeks (anticipating book 6 in a way) and while also integrating potentially ‘famous’ episodes from the fuller war into its narrative.
National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Fresco from Pompeii
Given these primary functions of book 3, what sense can we make of the opening simile? It compares the sound of the assembled Trojan armies (and their allies) to the cry of migratory cranes who bring “death and doom to the Pygmies” during the winter. A simple reading of the simile might see the Trojans as moving away from their home and bringing death to the Greeks. For moving us into the action, this interpretation suffices, but I don’t think it is enough.
Fortunately, two of my favorite pieces of Homeric scholarship address this passage and in very different ways. Hilary Mackie, in her Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad [substack.com] (1996), opens with this simile to suggest that unlike the Achaeans, the Trojan use of language “suggest[s] a lack of social order” (14). She contrasts the depiction of the Greeks following the simile as one of cohesion (16) and recalls the similes from book two that marks the Achaeans in mutiny or chaos as resolving into an eventual reimposition of order through the scapegoating of Thersites (17). Mackie relates this passage to the assertion from book 2 that the Trojans and their allies have many different languages (2.802-806) and for that reason must rely on captains to command only their own troops (19). She concludes that this passage extends a process of “underselling the Trojan army” (21) and suggests “when the Trojans march out at the beginning of Book 3, they are still dominated by undifferentiated clamor (klaggê). With their mixed languages, the Trojans cannot function as an articulate group.
I have always appreciated this argument insofar as it helps modern audiences understand differences between Trojan and Achaean politics (something Mackie also goes on to discuss). But I do worry if this interpretation against a linguistic pluralism may lean too much into the Iliad’s own attempt to downplay the strength of the Trojans (who have managed to hold the mighty Achaeans off for ten years!). I fear, in addition, that some might misinterpret such an argument as implying that the Iliad is essentially against heterogeneity. (And I don’t think this is Mackie’s argument at all. See Shawn Ross’ paper on language and Panhellenism in the Iliad for a perspective from contemporary audiences.)
A Pygmy fights a crane, Attic red-figure chous 430–420 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Spain
The other example of Homeric scholarship that engages with this opening is Leonard Muellner’s “The Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies”. I am deeply fond of this article because my first Greek teacher and many decade mentor and friend, Lenny, wrote it; but beyond that, it is one of the finest works on Homeric similes from the 20th century. Lenny uses this article to argue both that similes are not less traditional than other parts of Homeric epic (contra someone like Shipp or others who claim similes are ‘later’ than other parts of the Iliad or Odyssey) and also to show how a ‘device’ like this “continually enhances and preserves the epic’s expressive and evocative power” (61).
Lenny delves into the grammar of this simile by walking his reader through how other bird similes operate in the Iliad, emphasizing in part the group nature of this comparison and their place high in the sky, where predators usually roam , marking these birds as “deadly” and their “shriek [is a] war cry” (75). There is something of an inversion in this role, as Lenny notes, because cranes are not typically predatory birds in similes and this is the only extant example of massed birds compared to an attacking army. The second half of the essay examines this peculiarity.
National Archaeological Museum of Florence, Froicoise Vase
One argument Lenny provides is based on the context of book 3 and the character of the Trojan(s) who fight in the book. He notes that soon after this passage, Paris is criticized by his brother for not being a fighter, for being a dancer/lover instead, a theme that pervades the book and is emphasized again at the end when Paris is returned to his bedroom. Cranes, in the language of Greek poetry and myth, are birds who dance. In this light, the cranes reflect the unaccustomed place of the Trojans themselves in the Iliad: “in an unaccustomed role, in an unaccustomed locale: shrieking high above the river-plains, they descend like predators upon the Pygmies” (90).
The information about the Pygmies is less clear: Lenny notes a tradition from Egypt where a tribe of people called pygmies where known for “the god’s dances” (100). There was a tradition of the war of cranes and pygmies in art outside of Homer [substack.com] that may or may not be related to this. I suspect that the inversion of the cranes (as Trojans) going across the ocean to battle a non-bellicose foe may be significant to the resonance of the image here. At its most extreme/absurd, we can imagine something of a dance battle, a conflict resolved in a different dimension and a world far away.
Works Mentioned
Mackie, Hilary Susan. Talking Trojan: speech and community in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.
Karis Nemik, Andor, episode 12
If you spend a little time learning about Greek myth and ancient epic, you’ll encounter the Epic Cycle, a term for a group of poems around that told the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?) to the very end (Odysseus’ return home and its aftermath). Recent years have seen dozens of articles and books on the topic. As a Homerist, I have had to engage with this scholarship a great deal.
And my central problem is this: I think the Epic Cycle, as we talk about it, is a scholarly fiction.
I watched the Disney+ series Andor and found myself agreeing deeply with a general opinion of its excellence–the plot is exciting, the characters are moving, and the themes of the rebellion both advance those of the original movie and complicate them. The rebels here are conflicted–some are aggrieved, some are true believers, and some are more venal. Together, they dramatize the cost of resistance and the seductive dangers of that complacency that makes us all complicit in oppression.
But watching Andor and enjoying it–after also cheering for The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, and the Book of Boba–has made me think repeatedly about the relationship between canon and fixity and what it means to be an audience to an expanding universe. As a Homerist who comes from the end of Gen X (I was born in 1978), watching the explosion of the Star Wars universe has made me think a lot about the epic cycle and secondary narratives.
The making of a canon
It is impossible for my children to imagine what Star Wars meant when I was their age. One of my first memories is seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a drive-in theater with my parents and being terrified by Darth Vader. Anyone who can remember prior to 1999 knew of Star Wars as an unfinished but finished trilogy: there were always rumors that George Lucas would return to a galaxy far away and long ago, seeded especially by the numbering of the first movie as IV, but for a decade or so it seemed like it would never happen.
To be a fan of Star Wars prior to the return of the movies was to rewatch VHS cassettes and read authorized novels and wait for random viewings of the super strange Ewok adventures, The Battle for Endor and Caravan for Courage. Part of what made Star Wars moving was its boundedness and the promise of more. As a child, I would weep at the end of Return of the Jedi because I didn’t want it to end. As an adult, I have written about our uncomfortable relationship with narrative closure, how we want it to come but we also dread it because it is the end of a world and is, in some way, an echo of our own deaths.
Episodes and Universes
There are two ways of thinking about entries or episodes in a narrative universe. For Star Wars what became canon were the movies–but the more episodes added to the list, the less stable the canon became. There’s a danger of surplus narrative and how we refer to the whole changes two. I think people mean two different things when they talk about the epic cycle. One is general, expansive: the cycle refers to the full range of narratives associated with the Trojan War. The other is an imagined canon of episodes.
So, the classic Trojan Cycle described by Proclus include the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (also called, according to some, The Return of the Atreids [ἡ τῶν Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος], and the Telegony. We have only a handful of fragments for most of these poems Some scholars have also suggested different ‘cycles’ which would focus around heroes (a cycle of epics about Herakles, for example, the Calydonian Boar Hunt or the Argo) or centering around cities other than Troy (where a Theban cycle might include the Oidipodeia, Thebais, Epigonoi, and perhaps even the Alkmeonis). This is the one I don’t think is real.
The larger a canon is, the less effective it is in exerting authority. I think that the original Star Wars trilogy exerted a centripetal force on its audiences, pulling them together to a narrative center. As the universe expands–or as the canon multiples–its force is more centrifugal, moving audiences into clusters. This is one way I think comparing a modern entertainment ‘universe’ to Trojan War narratives is useful: the Iliad and the Odyssey were panhellenic texts that persisted in applying aesthetic pressures on other traditions and their audiences. But the narrative world of the Trojan War included countless other stories and spanned many different kinds of genres.
Often when we talk about the authority of the Homeric poems, we are talking about the cultural position they occupied in Archaic and Classical Greece as performance narratives connected to political power. This authority transformed as they moved into fixed texts and aesthetic objects for Hellenistic readers and later. Over time, they became quasi-sacred. But other stories set in the Trojan War world existed prior to our epics and kept on spinning out from a notional but fictive center: local, epichoric traditions preceded the Iliad and Odyssey and persisted well into the Christian era. The discrete episodes filled out the Universe and allowed audiences to live within them: the static nature of the canonized object is mitigated by the fluidity of ongoing traditions.
This comes clear often in accounts of ritual and local practices, like those observed by Pausanias who puts Penelope’s grave in the Peloponnese, not far from that of Aeneas’ father Anchises. What’s different, I think, about ancient Trojan War narratives is that these local or epichoric narratives developed prior to the canonized epics and continued long after. As Irad Malkin has shown in The Returns of Odysseus, as Greeks spread across the Mediterranean, they took their stories with them, adapting their myths of people like Odysseus to accommodate their new realities.
When I first watched the Mandalorian, I was simultaneously charmed and critical: prior to the new movies, you could not imagine two characters with more commercial potential than a Boba Fett analog and a baby Yoda. People my age loved Boba Fett because his action figure looked so cool. (I used to sleep with Boba as a toddler, I confess.) These characters are also tangential to the canonized storyline, they allow the space to create a new story while also still drawing on the nostalgia and cache of the center. This is part of the thrill and peril of expanding narrative traditions: the cameo of a main character in a peripheral story can be fun, but when the canon limits overmuch, the story becomes campy and over allusive (which explains, in part I think, why Rogue One works well but Solo does not).
The cultural forces of capitalism that produced the Mandalorian are, of course, different from those that perpetuated Trojan War narratives in Archaic and Classical Greece, but they remain somewhat analogous cultural forces. Both rely on audience interest and respond to changing cultural trends.
Audiences and Change
When we talk about the market forces that influence the expansion of the Star Wars universe, we are talking in part about audiences. Discussions of the epic cycle–and Homer in general–too often forget that ancient performers responded to their audiences as well. Audiences exist through time and time creates different kinds of audiences. When we talk about interpreting or making sense of cultural objects, we emphasize the intention of creators because it is so difficult to talk about the multiplicity of audiences. But I have been thinking about audiences as palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been cleaned and repurposed for a new text, and yet the old text can often be seen underneath it. Christos Tsagalis has used it productively as a metaphor for how oral traditions work. Yet this model is still about the object and not the people who view it. We change as individuals over time and our relationship to a text or cultural object changes from one generation to another.
I took dates to the rerelease of the original three movies in high school. When The Phantom Menace was released, I was there on the first weekend with roommates and my future wife (who purchased Star Wars legos while waiting to see the movie and assembled them during the film). And despite the exhilaration of the opening chyron and the music, I left disappointed. The second trilogy is cluttered, confused and confusing, and tries too hard to fill in the blanks of the later/earlier films. The second trilogy is both shaped and trapped by nostalgia.
Part of the problem is the difference between a backstory that is unexplained and a forced explanation. The “clone wars” as referenced in Star Wars are nebulous and strange: we know they were in the past and bad. When we get to them in the later trilogy, they lose the menace and strangeness. What was a detail in service of another narrative fails in certain ways when it is fleshed out because it does not and cannot exist on its own terms.
The later Star Wars films have a secondariness in that they both serve to fill out a preexisting story and they also attempt to establish intertexts and references to the earlier films that prevent them from truly being their own. This is part of the challenge of judging narratives that develop in the shadow of a canon: we love them because they continue the larger story, but also begrudge them for not being the originals they imitate. Indeed, when authors like Jasper Griffin critique the poems of the epic cycle–without actually having access to them–for their fantastic content or their derivative nature, they are judging them by aesthetic standards, by rules, that they can never actually attain.
But changing some of the boundaries creates new space: consider the effectiveness of different kinds of Trojan War narratives on the tragic stage. Similarly, the later film Rogue One and the television series inhabit a familiar and attractive world but have their own stories to tell. They are compelling because they do not rely on their audiences fully knowing the original trilogy, but merely being familiar with the general ‘rules’ and characteristics of the Star Wars universe. They are free to respond to contemporary concerns and to establish new narratives. Further, with the television shows especially, they benefit from different generic boundaries: the pacing of episodic television lends itself to different kinds of stories from a 120 minutes space opera.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the process of canonization limits narratives that try to do the same thing as the canonized object but provides space for those that forge into new genres or plots. In addition, the further from the canon that narratives go, the more space they have to respond to changing audiences. Once Lucas released Star Wars into the world as a billion dollar intellectual property, others were able to escape the canonicity, to use the familiar world to tell new stories.
Mykonos vase (Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, Inv. 2240). Decorated pithos found at Mykonos, Greece depicting one of the earliest known renditions of the Trojan Horse[/caption]
Homer and Trojan War Narratives
The relationship between the later narratives of the Star Wars universe and the original trilogy has made me think a lot about the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and Trojan War narratives. This analogy fails at a certain point because the Homeric epics likely had many different versions of their own narratives and were engaged with and responding to epic performance of all kinds (and not just Trojan War and heroic poems). But the main point I take with me is the willingness of audiences to engage in the expansion of narrative worlds and how narratives in the expanded Trojan War universe change based on new genres and new audiences.
One of the things I regularly emphasize about the limits of our own ability to understand ancient epic because we know so little about what ancient audiences knew or how they experienced epic. Think here of the difference between someone like me for whom Star Wars was canonical and my children who love Grogu and have always known who Luke Skywalker’s father was. They don’t labor under the same aesthetic weight either: they do not judge Phantom Menace by the standard of Star Wars because they don’t remember a time before when these films did not co-exist. The difference between the expanded Star Wars universe material and the second trilogy is that between inhabiting/exploring a world and concretizing/freezing it.
When it comes to the cultural position of the Homeric epics, we make the mistake of assuming the Iliad and the Odyssey always had the same monumental status as they gained by the end of the 5th century BCE. I have had exchanges recently with the Assyriologist Seth Sanders who has been somewhat perplexed by Classicists’ tendency to see “cycles” in ancient near eastern literature. He has remarked on how the development of fixed–or ‘charismatic texts’–occludes the varied and continuing nature of oral traditions and living narrative mythscapes. As a comparison, he points out the possibility that some texts from the Hebrew bible were transmitted as “monuments”. In calling it this, he notes he is adapting the art historian Alous Reigl’s notion of monumentality as a dialogic dynamic between a cultural artifact and an audience for whom that object defines something of their community’s past or authoritative identity.
The impulse to tell the whole story is a feature of post-canonization. Audiences yearned for more Star Wars and eventually got them. But the narrative satiety that resulted was disappointing until the limits set by the canon could be exceeded. As the Iliad and the Odyssey became canon, the Trojan War mythscape moved to another genre with different boundaries (tragedy) and different narrative traditions. There was no cycle telling the later tale until scholars of a post-canonized period felt the need for it.
The Fictive Epic Cycle
Imagine a future scholar of narrative, say in 3023, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe. The collapse of time might very well lead them to believe that the nine movies of three trilogies were always part of an authoritative cycle. But the content and contemporary responses to the later movies would likely perplex them. The collection of stories about the Trojan War are from a much longer period in time than the mere forty years that spans the release of the Star Wars movies. We know less about the alleged poems origins than we do about their contents, but they are not centered in the same cultural space and time.
But to step back for a moment: what is the epic cycle? The ‘Epic Cycle’ most often refers to the Trojan War poems recorded by Proclus (2nd or 4th Century ce) in his Chrestomathia (appended to the Venetus A manuscript; 10th Century ce, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822) and summarized by the later Photius (9th Century ce, Patriarch). The limited fragments of these poems are conventionally dated to the 7th through 6th centuries bce. The phrase Epic Cycle refers both to the mythical events spanning from creation to the end of the race of heroes and in the same way as Proclus, in isolating a specific group of poems that tell the story of the Trojan War. There are many similarities between Proclus’ summary and the work of the mythographer Apollodorus; but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the Trojan War myths and the poems of the cycle.
Rudolf Pfeiffer suggested that kuklos meant everything that was composed by Homer, everything that was attributed to a heroic world set in the story of the Trojan War. Gregory Nagy suggests that there’s some relationship between the etymology of the name Homeros as “one who fits things together” and that the kuklos points to the whole. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis expand on this idea in their introduction to their 2015 handbook by suggesting that the term is “historically ambiguous” referring to the entirety of the sky, a ring composition, or anything that repeats and returns.
The dual notion of totality and repetition, I think, makes the or a kuklos an attractive concept but an impossibility in actuality. It is both a metonym and a metaphor. This reading works well if we consider kuklos as indicating potential entirety or completion rather than an actual one. In the world of performance, the terms kuklos and Homeros may rightly become signals of authority: to be Homeros is to be a singer who has the skills to bring the potential of the kuklos into reality; to assert that a story or song is part of the kuklos is to authorize it ex post facto as part of the tradition. It is both a nodding to a canon and an alteration of it.
I am only partly convinced that kuklos functioned in this way in performance traditions in Greece; I am certain, however, that it became something completely different in the hands of literate and literary scholars. There is a wider discussion of kuklika poems and kuklikoi poets among Hellenistic scholars (starting with Aristarchus of Samothrace, 3rd-2nd Centuries bce). But evidence for both the term kuklos and the practice of separating the kuklikoi poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey is often traced back to Aristotle who makes a few enigmatic references to Kuklos poetry (Elench. 171a10 7-11) and who also distinguishes Homeric epics from other poems by other poets based on assessments of quality (Poetics 1459a37). The poems (and poets) who appear in these scholarly traditions, however, do not align with Proclus’ summary. Scholars have explained this away by saying there were other cycles, e.g., those around Thebes, Herakles, or other topics.
Here is my summary of the principles to keep in mind.
There is no evidence of a series of epic poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from the same performance tradition and period of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
All of our evidence comes from Aristotle and later. The evidence is from literary scholars treating the Iliad and the Odyssey as texts.
There is evidence of long narrative poems about other traditions (e.g. Thebais)
Our emphasis on the Epic Cycle is skewed by the gravity of Homer: We have more extensive fragments from Panyassis and Aristeas than we have for anything from the epic cycle
There is significant evidence of Trojan War narratives in other genres: lyric, elegiac, iconographic contemporaneous to or even prior to the epics we possess
The Epic Cycle is an initial creation of Hellenistic scholars trying to provide narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the Iliad and the Odyssey. This initial creation has been concretized by subsequent Classical scholarship, a process intensified by some of the scholarship of the past decade.
The positivistic assumption of the epic cycle as a stable set of texts and plots reasserts textual and literary aesthetics on a system that was much more fluid and dynamic (leading to a range of interpretive problems)
And, from this, a secondary list of things we can say about the epic cycle:
Everything we know about the epic cycle is subordinate to the Iliad and the Odyssey as canonized, monumentalized epics.
This subordination occurred either as part of trying to tell the whole story of The Trojan War or as evidence of the aesthetic superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The fragments and their summaries were selected to facilitate point #2 and are likely secondary or tertiary selections rather than excerpts taken from whole poems at the hands of Hellenistic editors.
The privileging of Trojan War narratives as part of these efforts has suppressed the extent and importance of non-Trojan War epics: e.g. Thebais, Oedipodea, Heraklea
There are many moments while watching a show like Andor that invite audiences to think about its relationship to various narrative authorities–to the shape of the empire in the original trilogy to the future events of Rogue One. But it succeeds in part because its narrative is different enough. Successful expansions of narrative universes allow traditional narratives to respond to contemporary concerns, the way that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos turns an ancient myth to an opportunity to reflect on plague and politics in contemporary Athens. Authoritative narratives exert a special gravity on their audiences; but audiences push back too: they make these stories into vehicles for their own lives. When the stories become too inflexible, they adapt them or make new ones.
The expanding Star wars universe allows this now too, and sometimes with discomfort. One of the subplots of Mandalorian Season 3 troubled me: the presentation of the New Republic’s amnesty program and the betrayal of Dr. Pershing by Elia Kane suggests that while the attempts of the New Republic to be progressive and inclusive are more just than the fascism of the Empire (and its descendants), they remain coercive and subject to the baser impulses of human nature.
This ‘both-sides’ approach to the struggle against fascism in an imaginary universe is a reflex of our own contemporary experiences and conversations. Such a thematic reflection would likely be lost on future audiences as they treat the Star Wars narratives as part of a canonized cycle of tales. In much the same way, Trojan War stories developed in particular times and places, in responses to their audience’s experiences and needs. Subsequent scholars imposed an order and created a systemized series of tales that never truly existed, to respond to their own needs for stability and closure.
Some things cited and some things to read
Alwine, A. T., ‘‘The Non-Homeric Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey’’, GRBS 49 (2009) 323-333.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Barker, E.T.E. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus
Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”
Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.
Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.
Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11.
Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.
L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.
Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.
Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.
Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”
Malkin, I., The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley 1998.
Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.
Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.
Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.
Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.
Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.
Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.
Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.
Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.
Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.
Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.
Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).
Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hephaistos Polishing Achilles’ Shield – THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. Caskey-Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings (MFA), no. 082.[/caption]
This post provides a series of ancient texts that reflect on Helen and the Trojan War in different ways.
Part of the Iliad’s engagement with the broader mythological tradition of the Trojan War is the way it positions and characterizes Helen. She first shows up in book three and steals the show:
Homer, Iliad 3.146-160
The men who were near Priam, Panthoos, Thymoites Lampos, Klutios, and Hiketaôn, the descendent of Ares, Were Oukalegôn and Antênôr, two intelligent men. The council of elders sat there on the Skaian gates Slowed by old age, but still fine public speakers Something like cicadas who sit on the leaf Of a tree trailing along their lily-thin voices. When they saw Helen approaching the wall, They addressed each other with winged words:
“There’s no reason to criticize the Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans For suffering pain for so long for this woman. She has the terrible appearance of the immortal goddesses. But, even though she is like this, let her return in the ships, To prevent more pain from being left for our children.”
They also destroyed the famous, blessed, large city of Priam after leaving from Argos thanks to the plans of Zeus, taking on the much-sung strife for the beauty of fair Helen in that mournful war; Destruction climbed the ruined city because of golden-haired Aphrodite.
Now, I don’t long to sing of host-deceiving Paris or tender-ankled Kassandra, or the rest of the children of Priam and the nameless day of the sacking of high-gated Troy, Nor yet the overreaching virtue of heroes whom the hollow, many-banched ships brought as the destruction of Troy.
Fine heroes and Agememnon was their leader, a king from Pleisthenes, a son of Atreus, a noble father.
The learned Muses of Helicon might take up these tales well; but no mortal man, unblessed, could number each of the ships Menelaos led across the Aegean sea from Aulos, from Argos they came, the bronze-speared sons of the Achaeans…”
But there are several other traditions that provide a more complex context for Helen’s behavior. One of them attributes the misdeeds of Helen and her sisters to their father:
Schol. Ad Euripides’ Orestes 249
“Stesichorus says that when Tyndareus was sacrificing to the gods he overlooked Aphrodite. For this reason, the angry goddess made his daughters thrice and twice married deserters of husbands. The segment reads like this:
“Because when Tyndareus was sacrificing to all the gods He neglected only the gentle-giving Kyprian She was enraged and she made the daughters of Tyndareus Twice and thrice married deserters of husbands.”
A fragment of Hesiod agrees with this (fr. 176):
“Smile-loving Aphrodite Was enraged when she saw them: then she hung bad fame upon them. After that, Timandra abandoned Ekhemos and left; She went to Phyleus who was dear to the holy gods. And so Klytemnestra abandoned shining Agamemnon To lie alongside Aigisthos as she chose a lesser husband; In the same way, Helen shamed the marriage-bed of fair Menelaos…”
This passage provides an explanation for why the daughters of Tyndareus—Helen and Klytemnestra—were unfaithful: it was Aphrodite’s game from the beginning because their father did not worship her correctly. A few interesting aspects here: first, Helen is “thrice-married” because after Paris dies, she marries Deiphobus (although some accounts associate her with Theseus too). Second, Hesiod’s fragmentary poems seems to be in the process of cataloging women who leave their husbands.
The first woman in the tale is Timandra, who, according to only this passage, was a third daughter of Tyndareus who left her husband Ekhemos, a king of Arcadia. They had a son together, named Leodocus before she eloped with Phyleus. In another fragment from Hesiod (fr. 23) we learn more about the family of Tyndareus and Leda:
“After climbing into the lush bed of Tyndareus Well-tressed Leda, as fair as the rays of the moon, Gave birth to Timandra, cow-eyed Klytemnestra, And Phylonoe whose body was most like the immortal goddesses. Her…the arrow bearing goddess Made immortal and ageless for all days.”
Later on in the same fragment –after hearing about the marriage and children of Klytemnestra—we learn about Timandra:
“Ekhemos made Timandra his blooming wife, The man who was the lord of all Tegea and Arcadia, wealthy in sheep, A rich man who was dear to the gods. She bore to him Laodakos, the horse-taming shepherd of the host, After she was subdued by golden Aphrodite.”
This section of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women seems to be mentioning only Leda’s children with Tyndareus and not those possibly fathered by Zeus (Helen, Kastor, Polydeukes). But we hear nothing of the future of Leda’s attractive daughter Phylonoe (also spelled Philonoe) other than that Artemis made her immortal.
But one of the earlier and more creative responses about the whole affair was a “shaggy” defense: it wasn’t her! It was someone who looked like her (Stesichorus)
“This is not the true tale: You never went in the well-benched ships You did not go to the towers of Troy… [It is a fault in Homer that He put Helen in Troy And not her image only; It is a fault in Hesiod In another: there are two, differing Recantations and this is the beginning. Come here, dance loving goddess; Golden-winged, maiden, As Khamaileôn put it. Stesichorus himself says that an image [eidolon] went to troy and that Helen stayed back with Prôteus…”
Herodotus tells this story too as part of a rhetorical tradition that practiced debating whether or not Helen was at fault. Here are two excerpts from this practice:
Isocrates, Helen 1-3
“There are some people who get puffed up if they manage to talk about something tolerably after they have themselves selected a strange and impossible subject. Men have also grown old claiming that it is impossible to say or disprove a lie or to speak two ways about the same matters. Others claim that courage, wisdom, and justice are the same thing, that we have none of these by nature, and that there is a single knowledge about them all. Others waste their time in conflicts which bring no benefit, which can only create more trouble for those who approach them.
I, if I saw that this superfluity had only just emerged in speeches and that these men were eager for honor in the novelty of what they discover, I would not be a surprised at them. But, now, who is such a late-learner that he does not know Protagoras and the sophists who were active at his time and that they left to us these types of things and speeches even more excessively composed than these? How could anyone overcome Gorgias who dared to say that nothing exists at all or Zeno who tried to demonstrate that the same things are possible and impossible or even Melissos who—although some things are countless in number—tried to provide a proof that everything is one!”
“Kosmos for a city is a good-population; for a body it is beauty; for a soul, wisdom. For a deed, excellence; and for a word, truth. The opposition of these things would be akosmia. It is right, on the one hand, to honor a man and a woman and a deed and a city and a deed worthy of praise with praise and to lay reproach on the unworthy. For it is equally mistaken and ignorant to rebuke the praiseworthy and praise things worthy of rebuke.
It is thus necessary for the same man to speak truly and refute those who reproach Helen, a woman about whom the belief from what the poets say and the fame of her name are univocal and single-minded, that memory of sufferings. I want, by giving some reckoning in speech, to relieve her of being badly spoken, and, once I demonstrate and show that those who reproach her are liars, to protect the truth from ignorance”
The debate about Helen’s character proceeded in part through etymology. Inn a choral ode from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, we find a folk etymology implied for Helen’s name. Where I have translated “killer”, the Greek has versions of the aorist of αἵρεω (εἶλον) which, without its augment looks like the beginning of Helen’s name (ἑλ-).
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 684-696
“Whoever pronounced a name So thoroughly true? Wasn’t it someone we’d not see Guiding the tongue with luck From a foreknowledge of fate? Who named the spear-bride, Struggled-over woman Helen? For, appropriately, That ship-killer [hele-nas], man-killer [hel-andros] City-killer [hele-ptolis], sailed From her fine-spun, curtains On the breath of great Zephyr and many-manned bands Of shield-bearers followed The vanished journey struck By the oars to the banks Of leafy Simois For a bloody strife.”
MET 56.171.18 black-figure amphora with Menelaos reclaiming Helen. c. 540 BCE
Ancient etymologies do not follow this Aeschylean play.
Etym. Gudianum
“Helenê. From attracting [helkein] many to her beauty. Or it is from helô, helkuô, she is the one who drags young men to her personal beauty. Or it comes from Hellas [Greece]. Or it comes from being born on the ground [helos].”
“Helenê: A heroine. From helô,helkuô, she is the one who drags young men to her personal beauty. Or it comes from Hellas [Greece]. Or it comes from being born on the ground [helos]. Or because she was thrown in a marshy [helôdei] place by Tyndareus once she obtained some divine prescience and she was taken back up by Leda. Helenê was named from pity [heleos].”
Modern linguistics show that Helen’s name is just really hard to figure out.
In Lakonia, Helen was original spelled with a digamma. (And this may have extended to Corinth and Chalcidice too Cf. R. Wachter Non-Attic Vase Inscriptions 2001, §251).
74 Von Kamptz 1958, 136 suggests that her name is a “cognate of σέλας” to evoke a sense of “shining”, as in her beauty. Cf. Kanavou 2015, 72
Vedic Saranyu: Skutsch 1987, 189; Puhvel 1987, 141–143 (The initial breathing in Greek often points to a lost initial *s but the digamma in certain dialects confuses this) The Vedic name means swift. The PIE root suggested here is *suel-.
Helen has variously been suggested as coming from a vegetation goddess (see Helena Dendritis, Paus. 3.19.9–10; Herodotus 6.61; cf. Skutsch 1987) or a goddess of light.
Helen ‘appears’ for the first time in the Iliad in book 3. What does she look like?
A few years ago, there was a bit of a to-do about the ethnicity of Homeric heroes. While some sketchy applications of DNA testing are eager to establish continuity between the people of antiquity and modern populations, others rightly argue that so many of our ideas about race, color, and identity have little to do with the ancient world and everything to do with our own. (See also the discussion on Pharos.)
But questions about DNA and color concepts are separate issues from myth and epic. Sure, the images and values of the ‘real’ world shape fantasy, but there is no direct accord cross-culturally between what people look like and how they imagine their heroes. Consider, e.g., the over-representation of blonde characters in American media in comparison to actual culture or the difference in skin tones in Bollywood from the general population. Racism and colorism shape representation, rendering the reality of genetics and appearance less important than the grammar of idealized bodies.
How did the Greeks imagine their heroes? This is nearly unsolvable because who the Greeks are and what their heroes do for them changes by time and location. We can start, though by looking at some of the language. Greek poetry describes Helen as xanthê and kuanopis. An insensitive and simplistic reading of these facts might claim that she was “blonde” with “blue eyes”. Not only is the situation far more interesting and complicated than this, but I am pretty sure that even if we accept these two words as applying to Helen they would not be equivalent to the appearance these two terms denote in modern English.
Let’s start with the barest fact. What Helen actually looks like is never stated in Homer. When the Trojans look at her, they say she has the “terrible appearance of goddesses” (αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν). This, of course, is not terribly specific.
Elsewhere, she is “argive Helen, for whom many Achaeans [struggled]” (᾿Αργείην ῾Ελένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν, Il. 2.161) she has “smooth” or “pale/white” arms (῏Ιρις δ’ αὖθ’ ῾Ελένῃ λευκωλένῳ ἄγγελος ἦλθεν, 3.121), but this likely has to do with a typical depiction of women in Archaic Greece (they are lighter in tone than men because they don’t work outside) or because of women’s clothing (arms may have been visible). Beyond that? In the Odyssey, she has “beautiful hair” (῾Ελένης πάρα καλλικόμοιο, 15.58) and a long robe (τανύπεπλος, 4.305).
Black-figure Belly Amphora with the Reclamation of Helen and Herakles and Kerberos. c 540 BCE; Walters Art Museum
If anyone is looking for a hint of the ideal of beauty from the legend who launched a thousand ships, they will be sorely disappointed. Why? I think the answer to this partly has to do with the nature of Homeric poetry and with good art in general. Homeric poetry developed over a long duration of time and appealed to many different peoples. To over-determine Helen’s beauty by describing it would necessarily adhere to some standards of beauty while alienating others.
In addition, why describe her beauty at all when the audience members themselves can craft an ideal in their mind? As a student of mine said while I mused over this, Helen “cannot have descriptors because she is a floating signifier”. She is a blank symbol for desire upon which all audience members (ancient and modern, male and female) project their own (often ambiguous) notions of beauty. To stay with the ancient world, think of that seminal first stanza in Sappho fr. 16:
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest thing on the dark earth, but I say it is [whatever] you love
As long as beauty is relative and in the eye of the beholder, any time we disambiguate it by saying that it is one thing and not another we depart from an abstract timeless idea and create something more bounded and less open to audience engagement. I think that part of what makes Homeric poetry work so well is that it combines a maximum amount of specificity within a maximized amount of ambiguity.
Outside of Homer, Helen is described with a little more detail, but in each case the significance of the signifier is less than it appears. In Hesiod, she has nice hair again (῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο, Works and Days 165; this is repeated a lot in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue). In fr. 9 of the Cypria she is merely a “Wonder for mortals” (θαῦμα βροτοῖσι·). Much later she has “spiraling eyebrows/lashes” (῾Ελένης ἑλικοβλεφάροιο, Quintus Smyrnaeus, 13.470). (N.b. there is a scholion glossing heliko- as “dark-eyed” when it is used in the Iliad).
If we want to learn more about Helen, she has additional features outside of epic poetry in lyric. I would be bold enough to claim that the more personal and erotic character of the genre is a better explanation for this specificity than anything else.
In lyric (e.g. Mesomedes, κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας,) Helen is “cyan-eyed”, but if we look at the semantic range of this nominal root—which describes dark stones and eyes of water divinities—I think we can argue fairly that this indicates a dark and shiny, even watery texture (like lapis lazuli). I suspect this is about the sheen of eyes rather than their hue.
Eustathius remarks that the epithet κυανώπιδα is common (κατὰ κοινὸν ἐπίθετον) and is often used for dark sea creatures, describing as well his hair (Ποσειδῶνα κυανοχαίτην, Ad Hom. Il 1.555.23). Indeed, nymphs in general are “dark-eyed” in lyric (καὶ Νύμφαι κυανώπιδες, Anacr. fr. 12.2) and water deities remain so in Homer (κῦμα μέγα ῥοχθεῖ κυανώπιδος ᾿Αμφιτρίτης, Il. 12.60). Outside of Homer marriageable women also receive this epithet, including Helen’s sister Klytemnestra (Hes. Fr. 23a κού[ρην Τυνδαρέοιο Κλυταιμήσ]τρην κυανῶπ[ιν· cf. fr. 23.27 and for Althaia, 25.14, Elektra (169).
From Robert Beekes. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill, 2010
So, in lyric, Helen has dark pools for eyes. But what about her hair? At Sappho fr. 23 Helen is described as “xanthai” ([ ] ξάνθαι δ’ ᾿Ελέναι σ’ ἐίσ[κ]ην; cf. Stesichorus Fr. S103: [ξ]α̣νθὰ δ’ ῾Ελένα̣ π̣ρ[ ; Ibycus, fr. 1a.5: ξα]νθᾶς ῾Ελένας περὶ εἴδει ). But it is important to note that in this context there is a first-person narrator speaking (“I liken you to fair Helen…”). Note as well that there is something formulaic in these lyric lines: the epithet seems to begin the phrase each time.
When it comes to Hair color, xanthus is used in Homer to describe heroes, but not Helen (Menelaos is Xanthus, for example). A byzantine etymological dictionary suggests that the core meaning of this root has something to do with fire (Ξανθὴν, πυῤῥοειδῆ) and argues that the hair “symbolizes the heat and irascibility of the hero” (αἰνίττεται, τὸ θερμὸν καὶ ὀργίλον τοῦ ἥρωος, Etym. Gud, s.v.). But outside the Iliad and Odyssey the adjective is applied to goddesses: both Demeter (H. Dem. 302) and Aphrodite (Soph. fr. 255) are called Xanthê. Modern etymology sees this as anywhere from yellow to brown. But this is altogether relative again. “Light hair” in a group of people who are blond is almost white; among black/brown haired people, light hair can merely be a different shade of brown.
Again, from Beekes 2010:
In the second book of Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem Trilogy” The Dark Forest, one of the main characters Luo Ji creates an ideal woman to love in his mind and goes so far as to converse with her, to leave his actual girlfriend for her, and then to go on a trip with her. When he consults a psychologist about this, his doctor tells him his is lucky because everyone is in love with an idea–where the rest of the world will inevitably be disillusioned when they realize this, Luo Ji will never suffer this loss.
Trying to make Helen look like an actual person is not only impossible, but it is something which Homeric epic avoids for good reason.
