On what to expect and Zeus’ Plan in the Iliad

The Plan

When a substack representative approached me about moving my work from wordpress I was at first perplexed (why?) and then intrigued (what?) and then perplexed again (how?). Over a few days, though, a plan unfolded. I have spent the better part of 15 years blogging at sententiaeantiquae.com, using it with others as a digital commonplace work, and then a kind of classics commons, and always a kind of carnival space, a textual museum of the past. It was a workbook, a place for discussion, and a venue for building out ideas. But over the past few years, it has felt sluggish. I spent the last year doing thematic things: excerpting something from everything by Pindar; reading all of Seneca’s letters.

Substack wanted me to move it all over, but I used this opportunity as if I were moving from one home to another. I wanted to start from scratch, to leave the other things in storage, and to work on something that gave me what the other site used to: some structure, a sense of community/conversation, and a direction.

In the first few months of this project, then, I plan on focusing almost exclusively on the Iliad. I am going to publish more than once a week (no promises) three or four basic kinds of posts: (1) essays meant for people teaching or learning about the Iliad in translation; (2) book-by-book reading questions; (3) revised essays, thoughts on epic from other sources; (4) random posts on scholia, certain passages, the the bric-a-brac that Homer geeks thrive on. (Also, no promises I will stick just to those four categories).

In the spirit of trying to raise some money for worthy causes, I am going to make category 3 mainly for paid subscriptions and I will embargo parts of category 2. If you’re a student working on Homer or a high school teacher or adjunct professor teaching this material, send me an email and I will make it free for you. For anyone wild enough to take up a paid subscription, I will write a post based on a prompt you provide.

This series on the Iliad will start with 5 posts before focusing on a book by book treatment:

1. Polysymphonic: How to Listen to Homer

2. The Plan, and Imperfect Translations: What the substack is for and how it will proceed

3. 99 Homeric Problems: On the ‘Homeric Question’ and other similar issues

4. Reading and Teaching Homer: Some practical advice on encountering Homer alone or in the classroom

5. Major Themes for Reading and Teaching the Iliad: A summary of five themes emphasized in the substack: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans); (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions.

The Plan, for real

Over the next few weeks I will try to establish a pattern of a post per book of the Iliad per week with reading questions. In addition I am going to work on short posts for people who are engaging with Homer at an early stage (or those who are guiding others) that will focus on three main categories (Origins, What is the Iliad; Reading and Teaching Homer; and Major Themes).

What category is this post?

This post doesn’t fit into any of the categories, but I will add somethingabout what I think of when I see the word “plan” associated with Homer. The fifth line of the Iliad ends with the line Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή. A scholion to the Iliad emphasizes the larger cosmic importance of the line.

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

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

This story is told in the Kypria composed by Stasinus who says as follows (Cypria fr. 1)

There was a time when the countless mortal clans

Constantly weighed down the broad chest of the trampled earth.

When Zeus noticed, he felt pity and in his complex thoughts

Devised to unburden the all nourishing land of human beings.

He sowed the seeds of the great conflict around Ilion

To lighten that weight through death. And so at Troy

The heroes were dying and Zeus’ plan was being fulfilled.

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

ἦν ὅτε μυρία φῦλα κατὰ χθόνα πλαζόμενα <αἰεί

ἀνθρώπων ἐ>βάρυ<νε βαθυ>στέρνου πλάτος αἴης.

Ζεὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε, καὶ ἐν πυκιναῖς πραπίδεσσιν

κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο γαῖαν,

ῥιπίσσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο,

ὄφρα κενώσειεν θανάτωι βάρος. οἳ δ᾿ ἐνὶ Τροίηι

ἥρωες κτείνοντο, Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή.

Here’s the Iliad again with my simple, artless translation.

Hom. Iliad 1.1-8

Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω ᾿Αχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ ᾿Αχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς ῎Αϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
᾿Ατρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος ᾿Αχιλλεύς.

“Goddess, sing the rage of Pelias’ son Achilles,
Destructive, how it gave the Achaeans endless pains
And sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades—
And it made them food for the dogs
And all the birds as Zeus plan was being fulfilled.
Start from when those two first diverged in strife,
The lord of men Atreus’ son and godly Achilles.”

Note the thematic words and how they echo each other, but imprecisely. (In a later post I will borrow from Donna Wilson’s 2002 book Ransom and Revenge to talk about how Homeric poetry ‘refracts’ rather reflects evenly.) Where the Kypria fragment has eris for the whole Trojan War, the Iliad turns the eris into the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles. Both situate their conflicts in and amidst the race of heroes. But the world is somewhat limited when we move through the Iliad: the D Scholia channels Hesiod’s Works and Days by situating the Trojan War along with the Theban War as part of the end of the heroic age–something Elton and I talk about nearly ad nauseam in our book Homer’s Thebes. But the Iliad rarely mentions Thebes and Troy or the Trojans are absent altogether from its opening lines.

The plan of Zeus may be multiple things. It is clear from the scholion that ancient audiences may have taken this half line as referring to the larger cosmic turning. But it is also the particular plan of this particular epic to have the Trojans win for a while to honor Achilles.  At Iliad 15.71, when Zeus delivers his most detailed articulation of his plan yet, he ascribes it to “the plans of Athena” (Ἀθηναίης δὶα βουλάς). At Odyssey 8.82 Demodokos’ song about the Trojan War has the similar phrase Διὸς μεγάλου διὰ βουλάς, where the plotting is again assigned to Zeus. 

In the Iliad Zeus’ plan is explicitly connected to causing pain for the Achaeans (and Trojans) in the wake of Achilles’ absence from battle. So, the formulaic line “and the will of Zeus was being accomplished” means that Zeus’ plan also potentially encompasses the entire narrative of the Iliad, including the initial quarrel that provokes Achilles’ wrath in the first place. 

The form of the verb ἐτελείετο is imperfect, which means it implies ongoing, incomplete action. At the beginning of the epic, then, this makes it clear that the story about to be told is part of a cosmic narrative, of a larger story, that is not complete. This lack of completion is metonymic, indicating that everything going on is an extension of an affair in action. But I also think it is performative, that is, that it signals that the story can never be finished, that epic itself is ongoing and iterative for the audiences hearing the tale.

Both Stanley Lombardo (“as Zeus’ will was done”) and Emily Wilson (“and so the plan of Zeus unfolded”) seem not to reflect this incompletion in their translations. Yet both are arguably doing some of the work with different phrasing. Lombardo’s use of the temporal clause (“as….”) makes the action of Achilles’ rage occur during the process of Zeus’ will while Wilson’s “unfolded” is perfective but has something of a revelatory character. The unfolding, paired with the “so” makes Achilles’ rage subordinate to and therefore part of a larger plan that is still in motion.

The one thing that neither translation can do, however, is reflect the echoic language of the dios boulê. No modern reader without experience of the larger mythic cosmos or a suitable footnote can have access to the resonance triggered by Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή. And while I and others who can read the Greek might recoil at this reflexively, neither Lombardo nor Wilson are composing in an oral-formulaic context. Few readers would sense the importance of an imperfect translation in English; and most of those who would, probably aren’t the audience for translations to begin with.

[For an analysis of the polysemy of Zeus’ will, see Clay 1999. For the imperfect tense as emphasizing the incompletion of the plan, see Lynn-George 1988:38. On the dios boulê in the wider tradition, in particular the proem of the Cypria and the annihilation of the race of Heroes: Mayer 1996 (esp. for Helen); Murnaghan 1997; Marks 2002; Barker 2008.]

Lyric Bonus:

While many would consider these themes and the key words evoking them to be a special province of epic, I think it is important to note that they exist all over early Greek poetry. Here is a good example from Lyric:

Ibykos, fr. 282 (=fr. 1a) Oxyrhynchus papyrus (c. 130 b.c.); lines 1-32

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…”

οἳ κ]αὶ Δαρδανίδα Πριάμοιο μέ-
γ’ ἄσ]τυ περικλεὲς ὄλβιον ἠνάρον
῎Αργ]οθεν ὀρνυμένοι
Ζη]νὸς μεγάλοιο βουλαῖς
ξα]νθᾶς ῾Ελένας περὶ εἴδει
δῆ]ριν πολύυμνον ἔχ[ο]ντες
πό]λεμον κατὰ δακρ[υό]εντα,
Πέρ]γαμον δ’ ἀνέ[β]α ταλαπείριο[ν ἄ]τα
χρυ]σοέθειραν δ[ι]ὰ Κύπριδα.
νῦ]ν δέ μοι οὔτε ξειναπάταν Π[άρι]ν
..] ἐπιθύμιον οὔτε τανί[σφ]υρ[ον
ὑμ]νῆν Κασσάνδραν
Πρι]άμοιό τε παίδας ἄλλου[ς
Τρο]ίας θ’ ὑψιπύλοιο ἁλώσι[μο]ν
ἆμ]αρ ἀνώνυμον· οὐδεπ̣[
ἡρ]ώων ἀρετὰν
ὑπ]εράφανον οὕς τε κοίλα[ι
νᾶες] πολυγόμφοι ἐλεύσα[ν
Τροί]αι κακόν, ἥρωας ἐσ̣θ̣[λούς·

τῶν] μὲν κρείων ᾿Αγαμέ[μνων
ἆ]ρχε Πλεισθ[ενί]δας βασιλ[εὺ]ς ἀγὸς ἀνδρῶν
᾿Ατρέος ἐσ[θλοῦ] πάις ἐκ π̣[ατρό]ς·
καὶ τὰ μὲ[ν ἂν] Μοίσαι σεσοφ[ισμ]έναι
εὖ ῾Ελικωνίδ[ες] ἐμβαίεν λογ̣[ ·
θνατὸς δ’ οὔ κ[ε]ν ἀνὴρ
διερὸ[ς] τὰ ἕκαστα εἴποι
ναῶν ὡ[ς Μεν]έλαος ἀπ’ Αὐλίδος
Αἰγαῖον δ[ιὰ πό]ντον ἀπ’ ῎Αργεος
ἠλύθο̣[ν …..]ν
ἱπποτρόφο[ν …]ε φώτες
χ]αλκάσπ[ιδες υἷ]ες ᾿Αχα[ι]ῶν

Some things to read

Allan, W. 2006. “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 126:1–35.

Barker, Elton. ———. 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.

Clay, J. S. ———. 1999. “The Whip and the Will of Zeus.” In Literary Imagination, 1.1:40–60.

Lynn-George, M. 1988. Epos: Word, Narrative, and the Iliad. Atlantic Highlands.

Mayer, K. 1996. “Helen and the ΔΙΟΣ ΒΟΥΛΗ.” The American Journal of Philology 117:1–15.

Marks, J. R. 2002. “The Junction between the Cypria and the Iliad.” Phoenix 56:1–24.

Murnaghan, Sheila. ———. 1997. “Equal Honor and Future Glory: The Plan of Zeus in the Iliad.” In Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. F. M. Dunn, D. P. Fowler, and D. H. Roberts, 23–42. Princeton.

Wilson, D. F. 2002a. Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge.

Interpreting and Translating Homer

A few years ago, I wrote about Orchards and Trees, using them as a metaphor to think about the development of Homeric poetry and its promulgation. Metaphors, of course, are not the things themselves! While one comparison can help us see a truth of a thing, several can help us get a better understanding of the things day-to-day language and thinking have trouble encapsulating.

The metaphor of the tree is at its core, a visual one. It may call to mind things and how we use them (ships and wood) or roots and branches, as in the stemmata of textual traditions. Homeric poems developed in a song culture, an aural landscape. Aural memory and oral performance inspire different qualia. And it is difficult–if not mistaken–to try to transfer an aural understanding to a visual one. As Epicurus observes, our senses do not translate from one domain to another. What does it mean to feel a smell?

So, here’s my other one Imagine a supremely complex symphony: as you listen, melodies rise and fall over time, movements come and go and they return again, sometimes changed, sometimes syncopated, sometimes just an echo of what they once were. But some three or four note sequences are more insistent than others—they press through the sound and are emphasized first by this instrument and then by those.

Early 16th-century manuscript in mensural notation, containing a Kyrie by J. Barbireau. I have always been jealous of the talented musicians who can ‘see’ songs[/caption]

The problem is that there are many of these sequences and some repeat intensely only to be lost and never to return, while others burst back through the rising wall of music to take over when they are least expected.

The music is beautiful but terrifyingly hard to follow: when you pause, however briefly, you realize you’ve been listening to one line of song when there were three or four others going on at the same time.  It is hard to start again because you don’t want to lose track of the one you just heard. But you are already thinking about that brief gasp of song that escaped you.

The 16 thousand lines of the Iliad and 12 thousand lines of the Odyssey are like 24 and 20 hours of polyphonic music, played by musicians in separate rooms who can’t really hear each other but are somehow working in concert. The audience stands someplace apart. If we relax and let the composition fall over us, we can get some idea of the whole. But when we listen closely, we can get lost in the depth of each passing strain. 

This is how I explain why it is so hard to translate epic or even to interpret it well. Each line has melodies full of resonant meaning that echo differently based on who you are and what you’ve heard before. When someone tells you the Iliad is about this or the Odyssey is about that they are following one repeated series of notes for their movement and resolution, and necessarily leaving others aside.

The total density of the soundscape of the poems and the generations of meaning’s potential within them makes them impossible to understand or explain in ‘real time’. When I hear someone talking about what epic means, sometimes it is like hearing a different poem talked about altogether. I have been listening to other movements, contemplating different themes.

The individual lines of Homer break into three units—segments scholars from Milman Parry and Albert Lord to John Miles Foley and Egbert Bakker have seen as units of composition (intonation units) or what we might even think of as ‘measures’. The ‘formulae’ are repeated patterns in a bounded soundscape. They are not simple building blocks, they are merely the observable repetitions of a system with clear limits: words and rhythm are part of the form of expression, not something imposed upon it.

We make meaning differently based on our sensory inputs and our cultures of performance and reception. There’s a strange prejudice Walter Ong identifies (explored more by Foley too) that visual cultures and literary productions are in some way more sophisticated and elaborate in both creation and reception than others. This ‘primitive’ pose is an outcropping of colonialism, yes, but it is also a simple observer bias. Even literary Greeks like Aristotle saw ‘writers’ in Homer where he should have found song.

Oral-formulaic theory helps break down our own cultural prejudices by revealing what is instrumentally possible for composition in performance. This is on the side of production; theories like J. M. Foley’s “traditional referentialtiy” or Barbara Graziosi’s and Johannes Haubold’s “resonance”. Each in part also draws on reader response theory, centering how audiences hear and respond to poems. If we try, we can intellectually grasp how intricate songs emerge in performance and how audiences dynamically receive them.

From Song to Translations

All this leaves aside how the epics moved from living song to the fossils we piece together on the page. This runs through the problems of performance, text, and reperformance. I emphasize song and aurality here because Homeric epic developed and flourished outside the constraints of a page. When a translator or interpreter tries to make sense of what they see on the page, it is like a conductor looking at a score for a symphony written in a different system of notation with many sections unclear.

The role of some instruments is left undesignated; some sounds cannot be made anymore; and some sequences just don’t make sense to a modern ear. As Casey Dué notes, Greg Nagy proposes a movement from performance, to transcript, to script, to scripture in the stabilization of the narrative: a translator has to move backward through these stages, yet abandon none

Because of the polyphony of Greek epic it is charged with meaning: the lines of song exist through time and carry many meanings at once. A translator listens to the whole song as it echoes and picks the melodies that ring strongest now.

Each of us is to an extent a translator of Homer and those of us who read the Greek but teach in another language are constantly moving from one domain to another. If Homer is a langue each of us has our own Homeric parole. In my first semester teaching as a professor, I gave a full lecture on the mythic, even Iliadic “plan of Zeus” (Dios d’eteleieto boulê), going so far as to have the students recite the line in the Greek. At the end of the class, a kind and forgiving student came up to me and said, “that was really cool, but there’s no plan of Zeus in my Iliad.”

I had assigned Stanley Lombardo’s fine translation. He writes about “Zeus’ Will” (as many others do). I hadn’t checked the translation and sounded as if I were speaking of a poem none of the students had read.

The way we each create our own Homer is in part why I have such trouble reading any version other than the Greek. This is why for even the best translations the fairest reaction is to crib from Richard Bentley’s response to Pope’s Iliad:  “a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” Here’s another quick example of this danger from Emily Wilson’s successful Odyssey translation.

Let’s start with my simple translations and the Greek. In the Odyssey’s proem, the narrator says of Odysseus:

“But he didn’t save his companions even though he wanted to.
They perished because of their own recklessness”
The fools! They ate up the cattle of Hyperion’s son Helios
And he deprived them of their homecoming day.”

ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ·
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς ῾Υπερίονος ᾿Ηελίοιο
ἤσθιον· αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

The line σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν (their own recklessness/stupidity) echoes through the poem as a theme that connects Odysseus’ companions, the suitors, and the hero too.

It comes again a mere 20 lines later as Zeus complains

“Friends, how mortals are always blaming the gods!
They say that evils come from us. But they themselves
Have pain beyond their fate because of their own recklessness.
So now Aigisthus too [suffered] beyond his fate…”

“ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται.
ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ’ ἔμμεναι· οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ
σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε’ ἔχουσιν,
ὡς καὶ νῦν Αἴγισθος ὑπὲρ μόρον ᾿Ατρεΐδαο

This is one of those four-note sequences, a melody earlier scholars would have called a formula that follows, indexes and guides the interpretation of the poem. When I read/teach the Odyssey I point to these passages as inviting us to see the world and its actors in a particular frame

In Wilson’s translation, σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν disappears from the proem altogether, yielding the following.

“…He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
They ate the Sun God’s Cattle, and the god
Kept them from home…”

And soon after, σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν is rendered simply as “By folly.”

“This is absurd,
That mortals blame the gods They say we cause
Their suffering, but they themselves increase it
By folly. So Aegisthus overstepped:”

These choices limit the repetition and play down the theme of responsibility and recklessness that is central to the poem (from my reading). “Folly’ also disambiguates the complexity of atasthalia, which evokes foolishness, rashness, arrogance, and blindness. Of course, this is not an oversight Wilson commits alone: Lombardo translates the first example as “recklessness” and the second as “witlessness”

To be clear, Wilson and Lombardo have to make some choices; no language conveys the same semantic ambiguities of another. Translators perform hermeneutic magic, moving things from one realm to another.  Some moments dazzle, others are imperfect illusions.

This takes us  back to the symphony played in separate rooms heard only in parts. When people ask me why Homer is different, I sputter about its bigness and depth and land on the layers and power. Like translation itself, analogy and metaphor only take us so far.

There are several works cited above, but for the atasthalia theme see my recent Many Minded Man or these better books:

Erwin Cook, The Odyssey in Athens. 1995. passim.

Egbert Bakker The Meaning of Meat. 2013. 96–119