Metaphors and Civil Strife in the Iliad

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

Od. 17.246

“Bad shepherds ruin their flocks.”

… αὐτὰρ μῆλα κακοὶ φθείρουσι νομῆες.

During his argument with Agamemnon in book 1 of the Iliad, Achilles’ rage increases with each conversational turn. Before he throws down the scepter and withdraws from the coalition—thus driving the action of the first two-thirds of the epic—Achilles insults Agamemnon multiple times.

Iliad 1.226-231

“Drunkard with a dog’s eyes and a dear’s heart:
Never have you dared to arm yourself to go to war with the army
Nor to join the ambush with the best of the Achaeans
Since your heart knows that this is your end.
No, really, it’s much easier to range through the wide host of the Achaeans
And steal the goods of anyone who speaks against you.
You’re a people-eating king who rules over nobodies.”

οἰνοβαρές, κυνὸς ὄμματ’ ἔχων, κραδίην δ’ ἐλάφοιο,
οὔτέ ποτ’ ἐς πόλεμον ἅμα λαῷ θωρηχθῆναι
οὔτε λόχον δ’ ἰέναι σὺν ἀριστήεσσιν ᾿Αχαιῶν
τέτληκας θυμῷ· τὸ δέ τοι κὴρ εἴδεται εἶναι.
ἦ πολὺ λώϊόν ἐστι κατὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν ᾿Αχαιῶν
δῶρ’ ἀποαιρεῖσθαι ὅς τις σέθεν ἀντίον εἴπῃ·
δημοβόρος βασιλεὺς ἐπεὶ οὐτιδανοῖσιν ἀνάσσεις·

The insults in this speech are culturally shaped, as in most invective. Calling Agamemnon a drunkard impugns his self-control. In the cultural metaphors of animals, having a dog’s eyes most likely means he is greedy. A deer’s heart indicates that Agamemnon is a coward, a theme Achilles expands on in the next three lines. These insults are mostly personal in nature, by which I mean that Achilles is attacking Agamemnon’s character. He shifts, however, to focus on Agamemnon as a ruler. The pivot is an (implied) explanation on why Agamemnon does not join the fight himself: he doesn’t need the reward of acting up to the cultural standards of a brave man, because he can just steal his goods from other people. Achilles caps the entire section by moving from the personal to the political: Agamemnon is a “people-eating king who rules over nobodies”.

I don’t think that the general sense of this line requires much explication—I can’t remember anyone in my classes ever struggling to make sense of it. But there are some broader associations if we look into expectations for leadership in Greek epic and archaic poetry in general. My suspicion has always been that to understand the full force of this insult, we need to consider the broader metaphor for leadership in Greek epic, “the shepherd of the host” (*poimên laôn).

Often, I think we see the phrase as indicating a simple relationship. The metaphor is somewhat paternalistic: as a scholiast notes, there is concern involved “for it is right that a ruler be as careful of the led as the shepherd is of his sheep.” (Schol. ad Il. 285b “The shepherd of the host”: For it is right that the ruler be as careful of the led as a shepherd is of his sheep.” ex. <ποιμένι λαῶν:> δεῖ γὰρ τὸν ἄρχοντα τοσοῦτον εἶναι τῶν ἀρχομένων προνούστερον ὅσον ποιμένα προβάτων. λέγει δὲ τὸν ᾿Αγαμέμνονα.) Certain implications are clear in this concept: a leader must care for his people and protect them from external threats. But, as the general and philosopher Xenophon has it in his Memorabilia, it is not enough that a shepherd keep his flock safe, but he must also ensure its prosperity.

Xenophon, Mem. 3.2.1

“When he met a men who had been selected general, Socrates said why do you think that Homer call Agamemnon the shepherd of the host? Do you think that it is because it is right that he take care as a shepherd that his sheep be safe, that they have what they need, and that the reason they are raised will turn out well—that a general must act so that his people are safe, they have what they need and that they will obtain why they became an army? They went on an expedition so that, by overcoming their enemy, they might be happier?

…For a king is selected not so that he may care for himself well, but so that those who chose him may do well because of him. And all go to war so thet their life may be as good as possible, and they choose generals for this reason, so that they might have leaders to this end.”

᾿Εντυχὼν δέ ποτε στρατηγεῖν ᾑρημένῳ τῳ, Τοῦ ἕνεκεν, ἔφη, ῞Ομηρον οἴει τὸν ᾿Αγαμέμνονα προσαγορεῦσαι ποιμένα λαῶν; ἆρά γε ὅτι, ὥσπερ τὸν ποιμένα δεῖ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι, ὅπως σῶαί τε ἔσονται αἱ οἶες καὶ τὰ ἐπιτήδεια ἕξουσι καί, οὗ ἕνεκα τρέφονται, τοῦτο ἔσται, οὕτω καὶ τὸν στρατηγὸν ἐπιμελεῖσθαι δεῖ, ὅπως σῶοί τε οἱ στρατιῶται ἔσονται καὶ τὰ ἐπιτήδεια ἕξουσι καί, οὗ ἕνεκα στρατεύονται, τοῦτο ἔσται; στρατεύονται δέ, ἵνα κρατοῦντες τῶν πολεμίων εὐδαιμονέστεροι ὦσιν.

[3] καὶ γὰρ βασιλεὺς αἱρεῖται οὐχ ἵνα ἑαυτοῦ καλῶς ἐπιμελῆται, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα καὶ οἱ ἑλόμενοι δι᾽ αὐτὸν εὖ πράττωσι: καὶ στρατεύονται δὲ πάντες, ἵνα ὁ βίος αὐτοῖς ὡς βέλτιστος ᾖ, καὶ στρατηγοὺς αἱροῦνται τούτου ἕνεκα, ἵνα πρὸς τοῦτο αὐτοῖς ἡγεμόνες ὦσι.

In Homeric poetry, as Johannes Haubold observes, “Failure of the shepherd is the rule not the exception” (2015, 20). And there is a clear connection in Homeric language between the failure of a king and the destruction of his people: this criticism is essential to the characterization of both Agamemnon and Hektor. I also suspect that there is something dangerous in the metaphor that reifies social relationships: the sheep never get to become the leader. In addition, at its base, the relationship between a shepherd and flock is about consumption: even the kindest shepherd shears his sheep for wool; the noblest shepherd slaughters lambs for their meat. If a leader is a shepherd and a bad leader causes the ruin of his people, we can imagine cognitive metaphors of eating and excessive consumption combining with potential associations of the shepherd. It should not then be difficult to imagine that a an insult resulting in the image of a king eating his people.

When Achilles announces “You are a people-eating king who rules over nobodies” the attack capitalizes upon aspects of the king as a good shepherd and a failed leader. The king here is becomes an excessive eater, recognized by ancient commentators who gloss the word dêmoboros as meaning “one who eats the people’s common goods” (Apollonius Sophista s.v. δημοβόρος: “People-eater: one who eats the people’s common goods” δημοβόρος ὁ τὰ τοῦ δήμου κοινὰ κατεσθίων) Another scholiast makes the metaphor more economically specific, explaining it as the act of “making the common goods your own” (Schol bT ad. Il. 1.231ex “This disturbs the masses. For the most serious accusation is making the common goods your own.” δημοβόρος: κινητικὰ ταῦτα τοῦ πλήθους· μεγίστη γὰρ κατηγορία τὸ σφετερίζεσθαι τὰ κοινά.) In a world where “money makes the man”, individuals who have no goods are concretized as nobodies, individuals of no account as inhuman, perhaps, as the metaphorical shepherd’s flocks. Such a transformation implicitly justifies their mistreatment and slaughter.

I think the metaphor has deeper reach still: the noun dêmoboros is verbalized in the scholia when it refers to the Trojan “hope of destroying the people” (dêmoborêsai: Schol. bT ad Il. 18.312 “the hope of destroying the people” ἡ ἐλπὶς τοῦ δημοβορῆσαι.) This is an enemy’s action, not a leader’s.

The commentator Eustathius, for example, sees the actions as going both ways: rulers can eat the possessions of their people, but the people can consume their rulers’ possessions too (which seems to be the danger in the Odyssey). Eustathius, however, echoing Xenophon’s focus on the shepherd’s virtue, emphasizes the consumptive power of a king when he offers the parallel from Hesiod, “gift-devourer” (δωροφάγοι) and mentions in passing that Agamemnon is also criticized for drinking and eating in excess.

Eustathius, Commentary on the Iliad 1.143.27

“The insult “people-devouring king” is aimed especially at moving the people and provoking Agamemnon to Anger. Just as the term “gift-devourer” emphasizes the evil of taking bribes, just so here the term dêmoboros highlights the injustice which is more subtly announced in the phrase “deprive one of gifts”. Note as well that Agamemnon is maligned not just for drinking [being “wine-heavy”] but also for eating.”

σφόδρα δὲ κινητικὸν τοῦ δήμου τὸ δημοβόρος βασιλεύς καὶ ἐρεθιστικὸν εἰς θυμόν. ὥσπερ δὲ παρ’ ῾Ησιόδῳ τὸ δωροφάγοι ἐπιτείνει τὸ κακὸν τοῦ δωροληπτεῖν, οὕτω κἀνταῦθα τὴν ἀδικίαν τὸ δημοβόρον, ὃ ἠρέμα ὑπελαλήθη καὶ ἐν τῷ «δῶρ’ ἀποαιρεῖσθαι». ὅρα δὲ καὶ ὅτι οὐ μόνον οἰνοβαρὴς ὁ ᾿Αγαμέμνων σκώπτεται ἀλλὰ καὶ βορός.

In Hesiod’s Words and Days, kings who offer crooked judgments are called bribe-eating (221 and 264),[2] another usage framed as an issue of virtue by ancient scholars who believe that kings should be above the desire for money.

Works and Days 219-223; 263-266

“Oath runs immediately from crooked judgments.
And a roar rises from wounded Justice where men strike,
Bribe-eating men who apply the law with crooked judgments.

αὐτίκα γὰρ τρέχει ῞Ορκος ἅμα σκολιῇσι δίκῃσιν·
τῆς δὲ Δίκης ῥόθος ἑλκομένης ᾗ κ’ ἄνδρες ἄγωσι
δωροφάγοι, σκολιῇς δὲ δίκῃς κρίνωσι θέμιστας·

“Guard against these things, kings, and straighten your stories,
Bribe-eaters, forget about your crooked rulings completely.
Who fashions evil for another man brings it on himself.
The vilest end comes for the man who has made evil plans.”

ταῦτα φυλασσόμενοι, βασιλῆς, ἰθύνετε μύθους,
δωροφάγοι, σκολιέων δὲ δικέων ἐπὶ πάγχυ λάθεσθε.
οἷ αὐτῷ κακὰ τεύχει ἀνὴρ ἄλλῳ κακὰ τεύχων,
ἡ δὲ κακὴ βουλὴ τῷ βουλεύσαντι κακίστη.

A scholiast explains that there is a divine prerogative for kinds to ensure the wealth of their people.

Schol ad Hes. Prolg. 125

“He says this educationally, answering to the kings who should make a great effort to make people prosperous even though some of them take bribes. Not only this, he says clearly that if the kingly right is bestowed by the gods to do good, then it is right that kingly men be givers of wealth, and to expunge wrong doing, including a desire for money, for which they should be leaders for others according to the will of the gods.”

ΠΛΟΥΤΟΔΟΤΑΙ. Τοῦτο παιδευτικῶς εἶπεν, ἀποκρινόμενος πρὸς τοὺς βασιλεῖς, οἳ πολλοῦ δέουσιν εὐπόρους ποιεῖν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους δωροφάγοι τινὲς ὄντες. Μονονουχὶ λέγει σαφῶς, εἰ γέρας ἐστὶ βασιλικὸν προτεινόμενον ὑπὸ τῶν θεῶν τὸ ἀγαθοποιεῖν, καὶ πλουτοδότας εἶναι δεῖ τοὺς βασιλικοὺς ἄνδρας, καθαρεύειν τε πάσης κακουργίας, καὶ τῆς τῶν χρημάτων ἐπιθυμίας, ὧν εἰσιν ἄλλοις χορηγοὶ κατὰβούλησιν τῶν θεῶν.

The only other close parallel for the term people-eating king comes from the archaic elegist Theognis:

Theognis 1179-1182

“Kyrnus, revere and fear the gods. For this restrains a man
From doing or saying anything sinful.
Put a people-eating tyrant to rest however you want—
No criticism will come from the gods for that.”

Κύρνε, θεοὺς αἰδοῦ καὶ δείδιθι· τοῦτο γὰρ ἄνδρα
εἴργει μήθ’ ἕρδειν μήτε λέγειν ἀσεβῆ.
δημοφάγον δὲ τύραννον ὅπως ἐθέλεις κατακλῖναι
οὐ νέμεσις πρὸς θεῶν γίνεται οὐδεμία.

Theognis stops just short from saying there is a divine mandate to overthrow kinds who consume their people. Instead, he uses the traditional phrase “there’s no criticism…” to indicate it is an acceptable if not necessary action.

N.B. Some of this draws on my article “Shepherds, Fathers, and Ships: Ancient Greek Leadership Metaphors and Some Consequences,” Science et Esprit 74: 164–79.

Some things to read

Agamben, Giorgio. 2015. Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Translated by Nicholas Heron. Redwood City, CA.

Barker, E. T. E. 2009. Entering the Agôn: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy, Oxford.

Benveniste, Émile. 1969. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. 1. Économie, parenté, société. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Brock, Roger. 2013. Greek political imagery from Homer to Aristotle. New York ; London: Bloomsbury.

Drews, Robert. 1983. Basileus: The Evidence for Kingship in Geometric Greece. New Haven.

Elmer, David. 2013 The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad, Baltimore.

Hammer, Dean. 2002. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. University of Oklahoma Press.

Handl, Sandra & Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2011. Introduction: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending. 10.1515/9783110238198.1.

Johannes Haubold. Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation. Cambridge: 2000.

Huntzinger, Jonathan David. The end of exile: a short commentary on the shepherd/sheep metaphor in exilic and post-exilic prophetic and Synoptic Gospel literature. [S. l.]: [s. n.], 1999.

Lakoff, Georg and Johnson, Mark 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago.

Loraux, Nicole. 2006. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Translated by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort. New York.

Macé, Arnaud. 2017. “Purifications et distributions sociales : Platon et le pastorat politique. Philosophie antique – problèmes, renaissances, usages” Presses universitaires du Septentrion, Platon et la politique: 101–123.

Marks, Jim. 2008. Zeus in the “Odyssey.” Hellenic Studies 31. Washington, DC.

Muellner, L. C. 1996. The Anger of Achilles: Mēnis in Greek Epic. Ithaca, NY.

Naiden, Fred. 2012. Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through the Roman Period. Oxford.

Petit, A. 1999. “Le pastorat ou l’impossible raccourci théologico-politique.” dans E. Cattin, L. Jafro & A. Petit (éd.), Figures du théologico-politique, Paris: 9–24.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre., Detienne, Marcel., Durand, Jean-Louis. The cuisine of sacrifice among the Greeks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Uhlig, Anna. “Sailing and singing: Alcaeus at sea.” Textual events : performance and the lyric in early Greece. Eds. Budelmann, Felix and Phillips, Tom. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2018. 63-92

Zanker, Andreas. 2019. Metaphor in Homer: Time, Speech, and Thought. Cambridge.

What Can the Iliad Tell us About Artificial Intelligence?

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

Last year I did a few posts about artificial intelligence and Homeric epic, highlighting some recent research and then sharing the results of a workshop I organized. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what Homeric epic might have to say about it on a cultural or metaphorical level. Turns out, Homer applies to everything.

When Thetis knocks on Hephaestus’ door, the narrator invites us to look inside his workshop and gives the audience a fantastic surprise:

Homer, Iliad 18.417-21

“He took the wide scepter and went limping to the door.
The handmaidens when supporting their lord,
Golden ones who look like living young women.
In each of them was a mind among thoughts, and each had
A voice and strength—indeed, they know the works from immortal gods
They were all busy around their master. But he was limping.”

… ἕλε δὲ σκῆπτρον παχύ, βῆ δὲ θύραζε
χωλεύων· ὑπὸ δ’ ἀμφίπολοι ῥώοντο ἄνακτι
χρύσειαι ζωῇσι νεήνισιν εἰοικυῖαι.
τῇς ἐν μὲν νόος ἐστὶ μετὰ φρεσίν, ἐν δὲ καὶ αὐδὴ
καὶ σθένος, ἀθανάτων δὲ θεῶν ἄπο ἔργα ἴσασιν.
αἳ μὲν ὕπαιθα ἄνακτος ἐποίπνυον· αὐτὰρ ὃ ἔρρων

It is becoming something of a trend to mention Hephaestus’ statues in the Iliad as one of the first instances of artificial intelligence. Why this is attractive is certainly understandable from this passage. The golden statues of women are certainly artificial (they are made by Hephaestus) and the narrator here takes pains to emphasize that they are intelligent: they have noos in their thoughts–which probably means that they have understanding of their perceptions and reactions–and they know how to do and make thanks to the gods themselves.

But how does this passage relate to other inanimate and made things in the Homeric tradition? I suspect that the answer to this and the information in this passage can help to outline some of the assumptions that go into our own approach to artificial intelligence.

Homer, Iliad 18.478-473

“So he spoke and he left her there and went to his forges.
He turned those towards the fire and ordered them to start working
All twenty of them began to blow into the melting bins,
Releasing every kind of well-directed breath,
They were by his side when he was rushing here, and at another time over there,
Wherever Hephaestus desired and was completing his work.”

῝Ως εἰπὼν τὴν μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ, βῆ δ’ ἐπὶ φύσας·
τὰς δ’ ἐς πῦρ ἔτρεψε κέλευσέ τε ἐργάζεσθαι.
φῦσαι δ’ ἐν χοάνοισιν ἐείκοσι πᾶσαι ἐφύσων
παντοίην εὔπρηστον ἀϋτμὴν ἐξανιεῖσαι,
ἄλλοτε μὲν σπεύδοντι παρέμμεναι, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε,
ὅππως ῞Ηφαιστός τ’ ἐθέλοι καὶ ἔργον ἄνοιτο.

In general, I think that Hephaestus’ workshop says more about the depiction of Hephaestus and the tension between able-bodied gods and the one disabled divinity more than anything else. The golden statues support him physically and their actions are described in close proximity to Hephaestus’ stilted movement. They are both a physical prosthesis for him and an extension of his own mental activity. Amy Lather has written well in describing the automata in his shop as an extension of his will. Note how their movement is related both to his physical limitations and his craft.

I have written before about how Greek epic presents bodies and have used insights from disability studies to help explain tensions between fitness of body and fitness of mind. There is a lengthy bibliography already about Hephaestus’ body, the tension between intelligence and force, and the exploration of action and outcomes through heroes of the body and the mind. Hephaestus supports and confirms a system that endows disabled bodies with compensatory gifts. He does not appear with these assistants in Greek art, but he is typically depicted as seated, with a staff, or riding on a mule when the other gods walk. I think that understanding automata in Homer as prostheses, especially in conjunction with Hephaestus, is really useful. But I don’t think it tells the entire story.

Let’s start with other automata. Hephaestus may be the only Greek divinity who engages in conventional physical labor without it being a punishment (leaving aside pastoral activities). But how he does that labor matters. The cloud garages of the gods described in the Iliad or the metal dogs created by Hephaestus for Alkinoos in the Odyssey (7.91-94). The former are like the labor assistance in Hephaestus’ forge. Divine automata function to support the lives of ease that Homer creates for the gods. Actual labor is for the most part reserved for humans. “Artificial Intelligence” serves to support a distinctly Olympian lifestyle. Alkinoos’ dogs are a kind of cybersecurity, a watchful unwavering fantasy of safety that cannot be suborned.

But this line of thinking takes me back to the golden girls described above. The dogs and tripods aren’t said to have intelligence or voice. The artificial object that is shaped like a human girl gets voice and intelligence unlike the dogs and tripods. Is it significant that the statues crafted to assist Hephaestus and endowed with thought are coded as women? Can we make a connection between that shaping and the female voice given to most AI speakers or the woman-coded bodies that are typical of our ‘androids’? The gendered nature of the fabricated laborers is part of a cultural system of subordinated and exploited labor. Outside of this forge, blacksmiths and their helpers are generally male in Greek myth. The gender choice here is marked and meaningful.

In addition, consider the nature of the intelligence. The tripods are part of what Lather calls Hephaestus’ “extended mind”. The golden girls have a mind and thoughts in them, but I wonder if we consider these qualities as necessarily connected to the works they know/have learned from the gods. These golden statuettes have only service and replicative knowledge. They are not generating knowledge or tasks, but ‘think’ and operate only in reference to their creators and their functions. Truly intelligent artificial life would have aesthetics, intentions, and knowledge of their own.

One of the things that concerns me about AI in the modern era is the lack of imagination that attends its use. First, we don’t actually have artificial intelligence; we have predictive models that anticipate the kinds of things human users expect as outputs (like the tripods and the golden girls). But, second, our AI is being used in the service of creating a life of ease for some by appropriating the products and labors of others. Generative AI in being “trained” on our writing and art and then sold back to us as services will eventually generate a massive transfer of wealth back to those who had the political and financial means to create it and ‘own’ it.

Apart from the prosthetic and aesthetic value of thinking about Hephaestus’ androids, then, there is political insight as well. Homer’s artificial intelligences function to support those whose lives are already easy and they rely and perpetuate cultural patterns of labor exploitation based on physical attributes. Homer’s robots–like generative AI–don’t create anything new but, when pressed, can tell us a lot about what already is. Our adoption of technology from the industrial age through to the information age and the artificial intelligence age is following similar patterns. Rather than being applied for the good of all humankind, AI is using public resources (energy, water) and the collected production of human minds (language, literature, and art) to benefit a small number of people.

Short bibliography on Hephaestus’ automata

Faraone, Christopher A.. “Hephaestus the magician and near Eastern parallels for Alcinous’ watchdogs.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. XXVIII, 1987, pp. 257-280.

Gerolemou, Maria. Technical automation in classical antiquity. Bloomsbury Classical Studies Monographs. London ; New York: Bloomsbury, 2023..

Lather, Amy. “ The extended mind of Hephaestus: automata and artificial intelligence in early Greek hexameter.” The Routledge handbook of classics and cognitive theory. Eds. Meineck, Peter, Short, William Michael and Devereaux, Jennifer. Routledge Handbooks. London ; New York: Routledge, 2019. 331-344.

Mayer, Adrienne. 2019. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton.

A short bibliography on Disability Studies and Homer

Brockliss, W. 2019. “Out of the Mix: (Dis)ability, Intimacy, and the Homeric Poems.” Classical World 113: 1–27.

Burkert, W. 1997. “The song of Ares and Aphrodite: on the relationship between the Odyssey and the Iliad,” in G.M. Wright and P.V. Jones, eds. and trans., Homer: German Scholarship in Translation. Oxford: 249–262.

Caldwell, R. S. 1978. “Hephaestus: A Psychological Study.” Helios 6: 43–59.

Christensen, Joel. “Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: some applications of disability studies to Homer.” Classical World, vol. 114, no. 4, 2020-2021, pp. 365-393. Doi: 10.1353/clw.2021.0020

Davis, L. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York.

Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.-P. 1978. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago.

Dolmage, J. 2006. “‘Breathe upon Us an Even Flame’: Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 25 119–140.

Dunkle, J. R. 1987; “Nestor, Odysseus and the Mêtis-Biê Antithesis: The Funeral Games, Iliad 23.” The Classical World 81: 1–17.

Garland, R. 1995. The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Greco-Roman World. Ithaca.

Grmek, M. D. 1991. Diseases in the Ancient Greek World. Baltimore.

Johnson, R. L. 2011. “Introduction: Health and Disability.” Health and History 13: 2–3.

Kelley, N. 2007. “Deformity and Disability in Greece and Rome,” in H. Avalos, S. J. Melcher, and J. Schipper, eds., This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, Atlanta: 31–46.

Laes, C., C. Goodey, and M. L. Rose. 2016. Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem. Leiden.

Laes, C. 2011. “How does one do the History of Disability in Antiquity?” One thousand years of case studies. Medicina nei secoli , N. S., 23(3), 915–946.

Linton, S. 1998. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York.

Lowry, E. R. 1991 Thersites: A Study in Comic Shame.

Marks, Jim. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus.” AJP 126:1–31.

Mitchell, D. T. and S. L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependency of Discourse. Ann Arbor.

Noel, Anne-Sophie. “« Prosthetic imagination » in Greek literature.” Prostheses in antiquity. Ed. Draycott, Jane. Medicine and the Body in Antiquity. London ; New York: Routledge, 2019. 159-179.

Penrose, Walter D. 2015. “The Discourse of Disability in Ancient Greece.” The Classical World, 108: 499–523.

Porter, J. L. ed. 1999. Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor.

Postlethwaite, N. “Thersites in the Iliad.” Greece & Rome 35: 83-95.

Rankin, H. D. 1972. “Thersites the Malcontent: A Discussion,” Symbolae Osloenses 47: 36–70.

Rose, M L. 2003. The Staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece. Ann Arbor.

Stiker, H.-J. 1999. A History of Disability. Trans. by W. Sayers. Ann Arbor (=Corps infirmes et sociétés. Paris, 1997).

Thalmann, W. G. 1988. “Thersites: comedy, scapegoats and heroic ideology in the Iliad.” TAPA 118:1-28.

Thomson, R. G.. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York.

Vernant. J.-P. 1982, “From Oidipous to Periander: Lameness, Tyranny, Incest, in Legend and History”, Arethusa 15, 1992, 19-37.

Wills, D. 1995. Prosthesis. Stanford.

Sociolinguistics and Homer

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

At the beginning of Iliad 14, Agamemnon appears in a panic. All of the leading captains are injured; Hektor has led the Trojans among the Achaean ships on the shore; and there seems to be little hope of reversing the trend. He calls to a small group of leaders and suggests that they row a ship out into the bay and await nightfall to avoid further harm. Then, they might return and lead the rest of the ships home. Agamemnon asserts with a proverbial air that “there’s no shame in fleeing evil, not even during the night” (οὐ γάρ τις νέμεσις φυγέειν κακόν, οὐδ’ ἀνὰ νύκτα, 80).

Odysseus responds with incredulity, questioning Agamemnon’s sense before telling him, essentially, to shut up:

Iliad 14.90‑94

“Quiet, lest any other of the Achaeans hear this
Speech, the kind no man would allow out of his mouth at all,
If he’s the sort who knows how to utter apt words in his thoughts,
And is a scepter-bearer, and who an army obeys,
One the size of the one you lead among the Argives.”

σίγα, μή τίς τ’ ἄλλος ᾿Αχαιῶν τοῦτον ἀκούσῃ
μῦθον, ὃν οὔ κεν ἀνήρ γε διὰ στόμα πάμπαν ἄγοιτο
ὅς τις ἐπίσταιτο ᾗσι φρεσὶν ἄρτια βάζειν
σκηπτοῦχός τ’ εἴη, καί οἱ πειθοίατο λαοὶ
τοσσοῖδ’ ὅσσοισιν σὺ μετ’ ᾿Αργείοισιν ἀνάσσεις·

The first verb here–σίγα—is an abrupt, even rude way to address the commander in chief. Without a companion imperative such as ἄγε (often combined with imperatives) or a vocative with an honorific, Odysseus expresses his frustration with the leader with a ‘bare’ imperative, both treating him the way one who can’t lead might deserve and shocking him into reconsideration.

This interpretation—that Odysseus is rude to Agamemnon—is not based in the diction (which is not essentially colloquial or harsh) but on a pattern of linguistic behavior rooted in social relationships. Such a pattern is difficult for modern readers to sense without wide reading in Homeric language. But the challenge is that our intuition of social contexts for language may be rooted in our own cultural contexts. A detail or phrase that might seem inappropriate in translation may have a perfectly reasonable (and different) valence in the context.

Sociolinguistics is a multidisciplinary field that examines how social frameworks shape language use (and, sometimes, vice versa). Frameworks within sociolinguistics help us to approach variations in language use even in ancient texts when we do not have recourse to speech communities and competent audiences.

I first started thinking about questions like this while working on my dissertation. I was primarily interested in rhetorical structures and assumptions for Homeric speeches. I spent a few months diagramming every speech in the Iliad and tracking for differences in characterization among the heroes, major devices used by Homeric speakers (e.g. similes, direct-speech, examples from myth), and noticed that there were significant variations based on speech context.

The most marked difference comes in the public speeches of the assembly (ekklêsia) vs. the more private exchanges of the small advisory council (boulê) where the ‘best of the Achaeans’ gather to strategize. Assembly speeches tend to be more structurally complex, vivid, and replete with wide array of rhetorical devices while the council speeches are shorter, more direct, and generally free of what we might consider oratorical ornament. Admittedly, this does not seem to be all that surprising, but as far as I could tell at the time, no one had made that observation before.

Language use is conditioned by speaker-experience and from social structures that govern the application of various rules (politeness/rudeness/deference) and can involve different ‘registers’ or ‘codes’ based on the identities of the speakers. Contextual differences between assembly speeches and council speeches imply that they serve distinct purposes: the rhetoric of the assembly aims for creating group unity or and adjudicating conflict, while also being a venue designed for persuasion. In contrast, the council functions to offer and vet plans. Difference in language use communicates social assumptions about what words can/should do in each circumstance

One of the first articles I read that helped me think in this way was H. Paul Brown’s “Addressing Agamemnon: A Pilot Study of Politeness and Pragmatics in the Iliad (2006). This article looks especially at vocative use and applies frameworks from politeness theory and pragmatics and argues that “the distribution of these forms [vocatives and patronymics] is constrained by the relative social standing of the speaker and the addressee.” The article is important both for the individual arguments it makes and the demonstration that an amalgam dialect like that of Homeric epic still conveys sociolinguistic difference. That is, despite the formulaic nature of Homeric composition, forms of address and imperatives are selected for sociolinguistic reasons within the conventional rhythmic form.

Michael Lloyd’s article about “off the record conversation strategies” (2004) is another one that uses linguistic concepts like conversational implicature to help recuperate implied meanings in the conversation between Achilles and Priam at the end of book 24. (See his more recent piece from 2021 for more on politeness). Subsequent studies like Kirstein 2002, Lentini 2018 have looked at a range of politeness and rudeness, overlapping at time with affect theory. Sometimes studies like this engage as well with etymology and close semantic reading. Jakob Stensgard uses these techniques when he argues that Homeric peithomai should mean assent/consent to rather than “obey” for sociolinguistic reasons (2003).

Elizabeth Minchin has been one of the most important scholars to work on sociolinguistics in Homer. Her book Homeric Voices makes some important advances in distinguishing speaking habits based on gender in Homer (among other conventions). I build on this a little in my article on “Performative Futures”, suggesting that women use a more ‘polite’ or less ‘real’ preface to introduce their own speech acts in Homer. Minchin has written a few recent pieces on sarcasm in Homer. Her piece on sarcasm and the Odyssey—which got me thinking about sociolinguistics for this post—is characteristic of her work: she surveys modern studies on sarcasm, applies the frameworks transparently to Homer, and then offers a few key interpretations to show the value of the work. In particular, she shows how sarcastic language use by the suitors, especially in dealing with beggars and people of lower classes, helps to characterize heroes (and not to the suitors’ benefit).

This approach applies the best of modern and ancient practice. For the former, it means learning from other fields, cultures, and languages, to help us escape the limits of our own linguistic and cultural rootedness, to reimagine what language can or may do. For the latter, it is essentially a reformulation of the Aristarchean principle that “one must clarify Homer through Homer”. This means that the forms, uses, and general rules of Homeric language are best judged by the patterns evident in the epics themselves. While culturally competent speakers of Homeric Greek are not available to us, we can recuperate some understanding ourselves by listening to Homer carefully. And repeatedly.

Short Bibliography

Brown, H. Paul. “Addressing Agamemnon: a pilot study of politeness and pragmatics in the « Iliad ».” TAPA, vol. 136, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-46.

Christensen, Joel P.. “First-person futures in Homer.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 131, no. 4, 2010, pp. 543-571.

Conti, Luz. “Sobre el valor pseudo inclusive de la primera persona del plural en la « Ilíada ».” Glotta, vol. 99, 2023, pp. 2-20. Doi: 10.13109/glot.2023.99.1.2

Kirstein, Robert. “Emotions and politeness in Homer’s « Odyssey ».” Emotions and narrative in ancient literature and beyond: studies in honour of Irene de Jong. Eds. De Bakker, Mathieu, Van den Berg, Baukje and Klooster, Jacqueline. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 451. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2022. 119-134. Doi: 10.1163/9789004506053_009

Lentini, Giuseppe. “(Im)politeness in the « Iliad » : the pragmatics of the Homeric expression ἀγαθός περ ἐών.” Trends in Classics, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 255-274. Doi: 10.1515/tc-2018-0020

Lloyd, Michael. “The Politeness of Achilles: off-record conversation strategies in Homer and the meaning of kertomia.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 124, 2004, pp. 75-89. Doi: 10.2307/3246151

Lloyd, Michael (Michael A.). “Positive Politeness and Mock Politeness in Homer”. Scienze dell’Antichità 27, no. 3 (2021)

Martos Fornieles, Marina. “Análisis del diálogo de Odiseo y Nausícaa (Od. 6.148-197) desde la perspectiva de la cortesía verbal.” Veleia, vol. 39, 2022, pp. 129-141. Doi: 10.1387/veleia.22760

Minchin, Elizabeth. “From gentle teasing to heavy sarcasm:

instances of rhetorical irony in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Hermes, vol. 138, no. 4, 2010, pp. 387-402.

Minchin, Elizabeth. “The expression of sarcasm in the « Odyssey ».” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 63, no. 4, 2010, pp. 533-556. Doi: 10.1163/156852510X456192

Minchin, Elizabeth. Homeric voices: discourse, memory, gender. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2007.

Stensgaard, Jakob. 2003. “Peitho in the Iliad: A Matter of Trust or Obedience?” Classicalia et Medievalia 54: 41–80.

Part 3: Rehumanized

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

I missed a week of posting, thanks to a whirlwind of work and a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to present a talk at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. To make up for the skipped week, I will present the talk here in three parts. . The First part, on Violence and Lament, is here. For the second part, A Theoretical Interlude, go here.

Priam and Achilles

In book 24, Priam’s journey to Achilles invokes a liminal space between life and death. This space is also one where the regular boundaries between nations and peoples may not apply—a zone potentially open to different ways of engaging and viewing the world. How this scene achieves its impact informs how epic works in general and can answer why Aristotle thinks the Iliad is the most tragic of epics, not in form but in function and effect. So far, I have talked about the family-rending violence anticipated in book 6, the way laments in book 19 invite us to see witnesses to suffering understanding it by making comparison to their own lives. I have offered a simple framework of blending to explain how the structure of archaic poetry supports this. I want to turn now to the epic’s end, to think about concepts from tragedy like recognition and identification, and why the Iliad emphasizes the difficulty of Achilles’ final scene.

Homer, Iliad 24.477-512

Great Priam escaped the notice of [Achilles’ companions] when he entered the room
And he stood right next to him, clasping his knees and kissing his hands
Those terrible [deinas] murderous hands that had killed so many of his sons.
As when bitter ruin overcomes someone who killed a man
In his own country and goes to the land of others
To some rich man, and wonder [thambos] over takes those who see him.
So too did Achilles feel wonder [thambêsen] when he saw godlike Priam.
The rest of the people there were shocked [thambêsan] and they all looked at one another
Then Priam was begging as he addressed him.
“Divine Achilles, remember [mnêsai] your father—
The same age as I am, on the deadly threshold of old age.
The people who live around him are wearing him out,
I imagine, and there is no one there to ward off conflict and disaster.
But when that man hears that you are alive still,
He rejoices in his heart because he will keep hoping all his days
That he will see his dear son again when he comes home from Troy.
But I am completely ruined. I had many of the best sons
In broad Troy, but I think that none of them are left.
I had fifty sons when the sons of the Achaeans arrived here.
Nineteen of them were mine from the same mother,
And other women bore the rest to me in my home.
Rushing Ares loosened the limbs of many of them,
But the one who was left alone for me, who defended the city and its people
You killed as he warded danger from his fatherland,
Hektor, for whom I have home now to the Achaeans’ ships
To ransom him from you. And I am bringing endless exchange gifts.
But feel fame before the gods, Achilles, and pity [eleêson] him
Once you have remembered [mnsêsamenos] your father. I am more pitiful [eleeinoteros] still,
I who suffer what no other mortal on this earth has ever suffered,
putting the hand of the man who murdered my son to my mouth.’
So Priam spoke and a desire for mourning his father rose within him.
He took his hand and pushed the old man gently away.
The two of them remembered [tô mnêsamenô]: one wept steadily
For man-slaying Hektor, as he bent before Achilles’ feet,
But Achilles’ was mourning his own father, and then in turn
Patroklos again—and their weeping rose throughout the home.”

τοὺς δ’ ἔλαθ’ εἰσελθὼν Πρίαμος μέγας, ἄγχι δ’ ἄρα στὰς
χερσὶν ᾿Αχιλλῆος λάβε γούνατα καὶ κύσε χεῖρας
δεινὰς ἀνδροφόνους, αἵ οἱ πολέας κτάνον υἷας.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἄνδρ’ ἄτη πυκινὴ λάβῃ, ὅς τ’ ἐνὶ πάτρῃ
φῶτα κατακτείνας ἄλλων ἐξίκετο δῆμον
ἀνδρὸς ἐς ἀφνειοῦ, θάμβος δ’ ἔχει εἰσορόωντας,
ὣς ᾿Αχιλεὺς θάμβησεν ἰδὼν Πρίαμον θεοειδέα·
θάμβησαν δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι, ἐς ἀλλήλους δὲ ἴδοντο.
τὸν καὶ λισσόμενος Πρίαμος πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπε·
μνῆσαι πατρὸς σοῖο θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ’ ᾿Αχιλλεῦ,
τηλίκου ὥς περ ἐγών, ὀλοῷ ἐπὶ γήραος οὐδῷ·
καὶ μέν που κεῖνον περιναιέται ἀμφὶς ἐόντες
τείρουσ’, οὐδέ τίς ἐστιν ἀρὴν καὶ λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι.
ἀλλ’ ἤτοι κεῖνός γε σέθεν ζώοντος ἀκούων
χαίρει τ’ ἐν θυμῷ, ἐπί τ’ ἔλπεται ἤματα πάντα
ὄψεσθαι φίλον υἱὸν ἀπὸ Τροίηθεν ἰόντα·
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ πανάποτμος, ἐπεὶ τέκον υἷας ἀρίστους
Τροίῃ ἐν εὐρείῃ, τῶν δ’ οὔ τινά φημι λελεῖφθαι.
πεντήκοντά μοι ἦσαν ὅτ’ ἤλυθον υἷες ᾿Αχαιῶν·
ἐννεακαίδεκα μέν μοι ἰῆς ἐκ νηδύος ἦσαν,
τοὺς δ’ ἄλλους μοι ἔτικτον ἐνὶ μεγάροισι γυναῖκες.
τῶν μὲν πολλῶν θοῦρος ῎Αρης ὑπὸ γούνατ’ ἔλυσεν·
ὃς δέ μοι οἶος ἔην, εἴρυτο δὲ ἄστυ καὶ αὐτούς,
τὸν σὺ πρῴην κτεῖνας ἀμυνόμενον περὶ πάτρης
῞Εκτορα· τοῦ νῦν εἵνεχ’ ἱκάνω νῆας ᾿Αχαιῶν
λυσόμενος παρὰ σεῖο, φέρω δ’ ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα.
ἀλλ’ αἰδεῖο θεοὺς ᾿Αχιλεῦ, αὐτόν τ’ ἐλέησον
μνησάμενος σοῦ πατρός· ἐγὼ δ’ ἐλεεινότερός περ,
ἔτλην δ’ οἷ’ οὔ πώ τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἄλλος,
ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι.
῝Ως φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα πατρὸς ὑφ’ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο·
ἁψάμενος δ’ ἄρα χειρὸς ἀπώσατο ἦκα γέροντα.
τὼ δὲ μνησαμένω ὃ μὲν ῞Εκτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο
κλαῖ’ ἁδινὰ προπάροιθε ποδῶν ᾿Αχιλῆος ἐλυσθείς,
αὐτὰρ ᾿Αχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ’, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε
Πάτροκλον· τῶν δὲ στοναχὴ κατὰ δώματ’ ὀρώρει.

The language of the encounter between Achilles and Priam resonates with the framing I emphasized from the laments in book 19. Many of the words also signal poetic creation/memory (words of remembering) in setting up a parallel (Priam relating his loss to Achilles’ father’s potential loss; both heroes seeing their own pain in another). Note as well the affective emphasis in the passage and the set-up, in particular on feelings of “pity” and “wonder” or ‘fear”. Wonder/surprise is operative in characterizing Achilles’ response and his ability to feel pity, which in this context seems to correlate to what happens in the narrative, which is that Priam and Achilles together engage in an act of remembering that stems from a shared performance (Priam’s speech) but extends to their individual experiences and a very real difference in the way they internally narrativize their brief common ground.

There is a repeated emphasis on pity. Prior to the supplication, Hermes provides Priam with very specific instructions (Iliad 24.354-357) And this follows an invocation Zeus sending Hermes to Priam because he pitied him (“When [Zeus] saw the old man, he pitied him and / Quickly addressed his own son Hermes…”, ἐς πεδίον προφανέντε· ἰδὼν δ’ ἐλέησε γέροντα, / αἶψα δ’ ἄρ’ ῾Ερμείαν υἱὸν φίλον ἀντίον ηὔδα, 24.354-57). Recall how the women who grieve for Patroklos turn from him to their own pains (῝Ως ἔφατο κλαίουσ’, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες / Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ’ αὐτῶν κήδε’ ἑκάστη, 19.302-303), then Achilles himself moves from topic to topic, comparing his loss in one instance to other possible losses, finally inspiring the other old men to mourn along with him, using his pain as kindling for their own fires of memory and loss.

That earlier passage helps us see as well how Achilles’ grief is metonymic for his own loss and others as well. Achilles’ grief presents a narrative others see themselves in, they project their experiences into his pain and grieve alongside him. Lament becomes a way of recuperating community through not just despite loss. The exchange between Priam and Achilles is the culmination of this narrative arc and it has individual ramifications as well as potential information for how we should understand the epic genre. Central to this movement is the sustained importance of pity. Scholars have taken different approaches to this. Dean Hammer (2002) has emphasized how Achilles’ view of his relation to other dominates his “ethical stance”, arguing for a transformation that allows him to feel pity for Priam because his experiences within the epic have changed how he views suffering. Graham Zanker makes a similar argument in The Heart of Achilles where he suggests that it is important that Achilles came to this change on his own, that the gods did not support him: His present behavior is therefore a pole apart from his cruel rejection of the supplications of men like Tros, Lykaon, and Hektor. Homeric theology allows Achilles’ present generosity, or rather magnanimity, to be based on his own volition” (Zanker 1996, 120). Jinyo Kim’s full study The Pity of Achilles traces the language of pity throughout the Iliad to demonstrate that this theme supports the epic’s unity. For Kim, “Achilles’ pity for Priam constitutes no incidental detail, but is instead the thematic catalyst of the reconciliation’ (2000, 12).

I agree with all of this. But I think there’s more to be found in the model of experiencing others’ grief as your own and its connection to how the epic conceives of our reaction to stories. I earlier used the word ‘dramatize’ and not accidentally: there’s something of tragic performance to this function. Marjolein Oele (2011) has suggested that when Priam and Achilles cry together they come to identify with each other in a way that anticipates Aristotle’s comments throughout his work—their unique moment isn’t merely pity, but instead it is a shared experience of suffering and wonder that helps them accomplish what Aristotle would call recognition. Here I want to pause to make a semantic and clinical distinction: any emotion or expression there of is rooted in social contexts.

Pity in English too often has a pejorative valence–it conveys a power structure as well as a sense of superiority, even contempt. But I think the pity signaled here in the Iliad is one of sympathetic remorse, rooted in the very nature of recognition and identification. While most scholars see some relationship between the dramatic personae of epic and tragic performances (see especially Irene J. F. De Jong’s 2016 essay, Stroud and Robertson’s essay, or Emily Allen-Hornblower’s 2015 book), I think there has been less focus on the affective impact modeled within epic poetry. Epic’s gradual but persistent emphasis on generative and combinatory acts of memory as loci for exploring one’s own experiences in a shared common frame reminds me as well of Aristotle’s famous focus on “pity and fear”. Consider again the emotions evoked during book 24: wonder, pity, fear.

Aristotle, Poetics 1449b21-27

“We’ll talk later about mimesis in hexameter poetry and comedy. For now, let’s chat about tragedy, starting by considering the definition of its character based on what we have already said. So, tragedy is the imitation (mimesis) of a serious event that also has completion and scale, presented in language well-crafted for the genre of each section, performing the story rather than telling it, and offering cleansing (catharsis) of pity and fear through the exploration of these kinds of emotions.”

Περὶ μὲν οὖν τῆς ἐν ἑξαμέτροις μιμητικῆς καὶ περὶ κωμῳδίας ὕστερον ἐροῦμεν· περὶ δὲ τραγῳδίας λέγωμεν ἀναλαβόντες αὐτῆς ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων τὸν γινόμενον ὅρον τῆς οὐσίας. ἔστιν οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾿ ἀπαγγελίας, δι᾿ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.

There are several other passages throughout his work where Aristotle adds to his conceptualization to include reversal (peripateia) and recognition (anagnorisis), but in the steady focus on memory/narrative (mimesis and memory), as well as the experience of pity and fear/wonder I have highlighted in book 24, I see a much stronger tragic/dramatic potential within Homer. And this is supported in part by one of the few scenes we have from the 4^th century that describes the work of a rhapsode, a performer of Homeric poetry. In his dialogue, the Ion, Plato has his rhapsode describe what he feels and sees when performing Homer

Plato, Ion 535d-e

Ion: Now this proof is super clear to me, Socrates! I’ll tell you without hiding anything: whenever I say something pitiable [ἐλεεινόν τι], my eyes fill with tears. Whenever I say something frightening [φοβερὸν ἢ δεινόν], my hair stands straight up in fear and my heart leaps!

Socrates: What is this then, Ion? Should we say that a person is in their right mind when they are all dressed up in decorated finery and gold crowns at the sacrifices or the banquets and then, even though they haven’t lost anything, they are afraid still even though they stand among twenty thousand friendly people and there is no one attacking him or doing him wrong?

Ion: Well, by Zeus, not at all, Socrates, TBH.

Socrates: So, you understand that you rhapsodes produce the same effects on most of your audiences?

Ion: Oh, yes I do! For I look down on them from the stage at each moment to see them crying and making terrible expressions [δεινὸν], awestruck [συνθαμβοῦντας] by what is said. I need to pay special attention to them since if I make them cry, then I get to laugh when I receive their money. But if I make them laugh, then I’ll cry over the money I’ve lost!”

Note how Ion uses language we see in the Iliad itself and the passage where Priam and Achilles meet. Where the internal evidence of epic shows its own audiences (the women, the old men, and Zeus) internalizing and responding to the narrative, Plato’s Ion features a performer expecting the same kinds of reactions from his audience (even if for less than noble reasons). When it comes to pity in particular, Emily Allen-Hornblower suggests that “The emotional charge that comes with the act of watching a loved one suffer (or die) is directly apparent in the phraseology of the Iliad…” (2015, 26) and later that Achilles’ position as a spectator during most of the epic is an important part of his development. This provides, to me, another signal of what epic audiences were expected to be doing: watching, listening, feeling, and changing in turn. Yet, there is a tension between epic as something to passively feel about and epic as a call to action. Another way to parse pity is the difference between empathy and sympathy, or, as some bioethicists have posed it, pity that enables action or pity that limits it. Empathy is feeling something like what someone else does; sympathy is sometimes described as a third person perspective, one that motivates actions based on concerns for another’s suffering. A larger question, but is the impact of mimetic art primarily aesthetic and personal, or is it ethical and communal?

I think the Iliad expects people to respond to suffering with pity that reminds them of their own suffering–empathy; second, I think the epic models this process as something that is potentially humanizing, creating a community of care where others’ experiences matter, sympathy, even if it is not necessarily so; third, I think the dramatic scope within the epic combined by some evidence for similar expectations outside the epic helps to support both a dynamic model of reading for Homer itself and also a shared performative ground for epic and ancient tragedy, helping to provide a different reason for why the Iliad is the most tragic of ancient epics.

Becoming Human

The Iliad is in part the story of ‘civilizing’ conventions of wars dismissed. What we learn from the beginning is that political institutions are not strong enough to enforce the maintenance of normative behaviors. The personal decisions of individuals–Paris before the war, Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad–run roughshod across principles of ransom in exchange for life that the assembled Greeks cheer for in book 1. Empathy seems here to fail; only to be reasserted after suffering. In a way, this is a restatement of Aristotle’s notion of the benefit of experiencing pity and fear: recognition and identification make it possible for us to see the self in the other. Perhaps, then, we could reposition catharsis as a communal recuperation of empathy.

But then, what can we say of the effect of art aimed to humanize? The very audiences who enjoyed the Iliad engaged in monumental violence like that in the reduction of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. The story of excessive violence in the Iliad is that of the rejection of conventions meant to make war in some way predictable and ‘acceptable’ to the combatants. The planned sexual violence of the Achaeans, the rejection of ransom-exchange, and the promotion of infanticide all come within the frame of the breakdown of political control over individual behavior. ‘Rage’ is the break from limitations enforced by social conventions; it unleashes the true hell of war and unveils the brutal, dehumanizing violence pulsating beneath the service of ‘civilization’. War reduces people to casualty numbers. But dehumanization comes before it: the refusal of reciprocal relationships, the call to eradicate a people, Achilles’ transformation into animal violence, met by the oppressed Hecuba’s wish to eat his liver raw.

Even the epic’s conclusion is compromised: the cessation of Achilles’ rage only comes through monstrous behavior (corpse-disfigurement and human sacrifice) and occurs at the personal level between a bereft father and a surrogate son whose potential for violence has ebbed through exhaustion and divine intervention. It thematically seals the epic’s arc: book 1 saw the breakdown in social convention thanks to the whims of an angry king; book 24 sees the conventions briefly reinforced, thanks to the needs of two kings in despair. Yet their attitude is not one of rejection violence or rehabilitation, but resignation to the continuing war that will take both of their lives.

In his work on human evolution and development, Michael Tomasello has foregrounded a definition of humanity in our communication and collaboration, our “shared mentality” rooted in imitative behavior and social learning alongside the development of what he calls a moral identity. In her recent work, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson shows that this is promise is not universally applied–the very practices of the west that create common culture can also define people out of humanity, by reducing them to objects, by racializing, genderizing, or otherwise categorizing other beings as outside the purview of the moral identity that defines us.

This too is a part of the Iliad’s story and its dramatic impact. The culture, practices, and relationships that define the Achaeans from the epic’s beginning also make it possible for one exceptional figure to instrumentalize, objectify, and reduce others. The poem’s thematic lesson is that once loose in the world, such a reduction in status knows no end: Achilles does not mean for Patroklos to die, but it is a direct result of his own excess and reduction of others to satisfy his story of loss. The poem’s mimetic lesson shows how it takes repeated suffering to comprehend a human world beyond oneself. The premise, I suggest, is that humanization is a process that must always be ongoing. Poetry, performance and art–the humanities–offer this promise, but require patience, observation, identification and community and for its fulfillment.

Selected Bibliography

Allen-Hornblower, Emily. 2015. From agent to spectator : witnessing the aftermath in ancient Greek epic and tragedy, De Gruyter, 2015.

Anderson, Michael J. 1997 The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art Oxford.

Anderson, Warren D. 1956 “Achilles and the Dark Night of the Soul.” The Classical Journal 51, no. 6: 265–68.

Austin, Emily P. 2021. Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Burgess, Jonathan. 1997. “Beyond Neo-Analysis: Problems with the Vengeance Theory.” The American Journal of Philology 118, no. 1: 1–19.

Christensen, Joel P. 2025. Storylife, On Epic, Language, and Living things. Yale.

Christensen, Joel P. 2020. The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic. Cornell.

Cook, Erwin. 2014. “Structure as Interpretation in the Homeric Odyssey.” In Defining Greek Narrative, edited by Douglas Cairns and Ruth Scodel, 75–102. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

De Jong, Irene. J. F. 2016. ‘Homer : the first tragedian’, Greece and Rome, Ser. 2, 63.2:149-162.

Douglas, Mary. 2007. Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dué, Casey. Homeric variations on a lament by Briseis. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

Ebbinghaus, Susanne. 2005. “Protector of the City, or the Art of Storage in Early Greece.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 125: 51–72.

Ervin, M. 1963. “A relief pithos from Mykonos”, Archaiologikon Deltion 18 (1963), pp. 37-75.

Gaca, Kathy L. 2014. “MARTIAL RAPE, PULSATING FEAR, AND THE SEXUAL MALTREATMENT OF GIRLS (Παῖδες), VIRGINS (Παρθένοι), AND WOMEN (Γνναῖκες) IN ANTIQUITY.” The American Journal of Philology 135, no. 3 (2014): 303–57.

Hammer, Dean C. 2002. “The « Iliad » as ethical thinking: politics, pity, and the operation of esteem.” Arethusa, vol. 35, no. 2: 203-235.

Heiden, Bruce. 1998 “The simile of the fugitive homicide, Iliad 24.480-84: analogy, foiling, and allusion.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 119, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1-10.

Jackson, Zakkiyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. NYU.

Kim, Jinyo. 2000. The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity of the Iliad. Rowman & Littlefield.

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

Lowenstam, Steven. “Patroclus’ death in the Iliad and the inheritance of an Indo-European myth.” Archaeological News, vol. VI, 1977, pp. 72-76.

Lowenstam, Steven. 1981. The Death of Patroclus: A Study in Typology.

Most, Glenn W. “Anger and pity in Homer’s « Iliad »’, Yale Classical Studies, 32. (2003) 50-75.

Rinon, Yoav. Homer and the dual model of the tragic. Ann Arbor (Mich.): University of Michigan Pr., 2008.

Rutherford, Richard. “Tragic form and feeling in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. CII, 1982, pp. 145-160.

Marjolein Oele, ‘Suffering, pity and friendship: an Aristotelian reading of Book 24 of Homer’s « Iliad »’, Electronic Antiquity, 14.1 (2010-2011) 15.

Sparkes, B. A. “The Trojan Horse in Classical Art.” Greece & Rome 18, no. 1 (1971): 54–70.

Stroud, T. A., and Elizabeth Robertson. “Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and the Plot of the ‘Iliad.’” The Classical World 89, no. 3 (1996): 179–96.

Tomasello, Michael. 2019. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard.

Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Warwick, C. (2019). “The Maternal Warrior: Gender and Kleos in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology 140(1), 1-28.

Warwick, C. (2019). “We Two Alone: Conjugal Bonds and Homoerotic Subtext in the Iliad. “Helios 46(2), 115-139.

Zanker, Graham. 1996. The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad. University of Michigan.

Part 2: Theoretical Interlude

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

I missed a week of posting, thanks to a whirlwind of work and a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to present a talk at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. To make up for the skipped week, I will present the talk here in three parts. The First part, on Violence and Lament, is here.

Some of the thoughts and words from this section are from Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things.

Narrative Blends

The way I take about how audiences engage with Homer draws on work I have done on cognitive psychology and the Homeric Odyssey and on the structure and generation of Homeric poetry in my recent Storylife, On Epic, Language, and living things, which applies a series of biological analogies to Homeric poetry and early Greek myth as a test case for exploring how narratives are more like living organisms than they are not. When I talk about the structure of ancient Greek poetry, I emphasize that there is a reciprocal relationship between the shape of the story and its cognitive function.

One of the most significant structures in early Greek poetry is ring composition. The structure, however, also has semantic functions. Just as a formula answers the needs of both structure and meaning, so too do the larger structures beyond the line. A ring frames, providing opportunities for both structure and interpretation. Such mirroring repetition helps to refocus or emphasize the beginning idea and invites audiences to reconsider the elements in between in light of such parenthetical reminders. As Erwin Cook argues, further, ring composition is essential to how the narrative helps guide reception. Rings have parenthetical function—they set the material they contain off from what surrounds them. But they are more permeable than our punctuation: they invite us to consider how the part set apart by the repetition relates to itself and material outside the ring: ringed structures make propositions about what goes together and how things should be understood.

Other epic structures have similar effects: Lines of speech introduction and conclusion, for example, help us transition into direct speech and out of it from narrative while also providing some information on how the speech is intended and/or received (or is to be received). Similarly, similes are bounded by “just as” and “just so” statements that separate narrative or speech from comparison, directing audiences to follow through the comparison both at its beginning and end. These comparisons are rarely 1:1 and perfectly clear, they often shift and move from one element inside the simile (a vehicle) to a different corresponding element outside the simile (the tenor).

In the shifts and interpretive demands put on audiences by narrative structures, speeches, and similes alike I see an echo, if not a confirmation, of a model of reading explored by Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind. As Turner describes, when we hear (or read) a story, we do not actually experience the narrative created by the teller of the tale. Instead, the story unfolds in a cognitive blend in a space between the world of the narrative and the reader’s mind. From this perspective, when we hear a story, we fill in details that are not expressed but we are also guided in understanding the plot and its themes by our own experiences. When we hear narratives together in group settings, we each construct our own notional blend, one we adapt and shift as we reflect on it together. So, not only is the ‘same’ story not actually the same for different people, but the ‘same’ story is different for the ‘same’ person over time.

The parenthetical framing strategies I have discussed all similarly mark the movement from a more concrete space into a blended one, to an invitation to make connections in the blended space between self and story. This happens within epic with mimetic speeches and challenging similes, but we can see characters engage in reading meaning into the world when discussing omens or experimenting with telling stories themselves. If we follow the part-for-whole structure of epic itself, then the interpretive invitation of a speech or a simile is in part a model for the relationship between the audience and the whole poem. Characters in the poem model anticipating responses to speeches, encountering misinterpretations, and trying to use narrative to understand their world; similes invite us as readers outside the poem to compare the action of the narrative to different worlds and imagery. The process of witnessing the former and then engaging in the latter, I believe, helps to train audiences in the iterative and ambiguous task of applying epic narratives to the worlds around us.

Similes and Similarities

Similes are an important device to help us understand the structure and interpretation of Homeric poetry. They replicate pars pro toto the blending and movement that happens when audiences hear and begin to interpret the stories. Two things I would like to emphasize in the similes I have selected are the slippage or blending of detail between the domains of tenor and vehicle and the movement within the simile from the initial comparison to include a greater part of a world than one might expect.

The first example has Paris finally dressed to go to war in Iliad. The verbal repetitions link the tenor and vehicle for us, and the effect of comparing Paris to a show-horse is comedic and pointed. But note as well the bleedover of human-traits to the horse in the simile: the horse’s extravagant hair evokes as much a dandy princeling tossing his hair as that of a stallion. The bathing, the swift feet, the jaunting off for mares, all speak to a horse compared to Paris as much as a prince compared to a horse. The bleedover is a species of the very kind of cognitive blending that happens when we absorb any narrative and try to process it through the language and experiences that are familiar to us.

Simpler, but still telling is the simile from book 7: When Hektor and Paris leave the gates, the relationship between tenor and vehicle is unstable: we start out, perhaps wrongly, thinking that they are the sailors but find out as we move through the simile that their return to battle is witnessed by the Trojans, who are the at first unexpressed tenor to the simile’s sailors. Hektor and Paris are the favorable wind sent to relieve them. This shifting, re-blending of space through the unfolding of the narrative aims our mental gaze first at the princes returning to war, then to an imagined vessel, then to the Trojans altogether, moving us through the narrative and to a new place in the tale. The details left unexplored may strike different audience members: the inversion of Trojans as sailors, the emphasis on the toil of their work, the implication of divine agency, so crucial throughout Hektor’s characterization from this moment until Achilles’ return. The simile refracts and bends, leaving listeners to recompose its meaning.

To be clear, I am arguing that epic poetry provides models for its own interpretation within it—not as a clever puzzle for audiences to discover, but as an outgrowth of its development over time. This structure, moreover, is not home to epic poetry alone. Indeed, I think we find it as a central compositional principle of early Greek poetry, even when it is not explicit. Let’s consider a famous example from lyric poetry, Sappho’s fragment 16 (c. 6^th Century BCE; Lesbos)

This poem starts out with a narrative conceit of an imagined debate, at some level communicating the ancient equivalent of “different strokes for different folks”. The first stanza has at times been characterized as being about poetic topics and genres: talking about love, the argument goes, is the function of lyric, while horsemen and cavalry are about war. Then, the speaker moves from the debate about the relative nature of beauty and passion to a point of comparison from myth: Helen chose her love for Paris over all else. The narrator closes the comparison after two stanzas to turn back to her narrative world, comparing Anaktoria both to Helen and to the “loveliest things” on the dark earth.

This striking poem offers a couple of important points about parenthetical thinking and the cognitive blend. Note how a structural ring that starts in the narrator’s projected ‘real world’ circles around the world of myth. But as we move from the outside in, then to the outside again, the narrator accumulates detail: the world of myth ‘contaminates’ the external world: Sappho (the narrator) is Helen, but Anaktoria is Helen too, standing amidst the Lydian chariots and infantrymen. The move from the myth back to the framing device is made through the self-conscious “this reminds me of….” The resulting concatenation of myth-detail with the narrative frame performs for the audience the kind of cognitive blending that Mark Turner describes. Sappho’s narrator is at once a singer opining on the relativity of beauty and also a besotted lover who sees in the world of myth the longing and force of her own experiences. As audience members witnessing this process, we recombine the details, starting at first in the debate about beauty, then trying to unpack and understand the jump to talking about Helen before moving all too quickly to follow the narrator’s logic and blending in the closing stanza.

The Iliad betrays a consciousness of this process. Consider the long story that Phoinix tells Achilles in book 9 of the Iliad. When Phoinix arrives, he is trying to persuade Achilles to return to battle through a long story from the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt. But he frames this story with reference to Achilles: he says that it is right to listen to the pleas of those who are dear to you, “just as we have learned previously from the famous stories (klea andrōn) of heroic men / whenever intense anger overtakes someone” In doing so, Phoenix echoes the narrative’s presentation of Achilles earlier , where it depicts him as singing through the klea andrōn to himself as the embassy approaches and it engages with the thematic situation at hand.

The story that Phoinix tells, however, presents a rather targeted version of the Calydonian boar hunt. The hunt can be a tale of heroes banding together to kill a massive boar, devolving into a conflict over the spoils when Meleager, the young prince of the city, tries to give the boar’s hide to the heroine Atalanta. In rage, Meleager’s mother, Althaia, destroys a log that is tied to Meleager’s life force, resulting in his death. In Phoinix’s story, Meleager sits out of the conflict until even his wife, Kleopatra—a clear inversion of Patroklos’ name—asks him to join the battle. According to Phoinix, Meleager ignored the promises of gifts, had to fight anyway, and ended up laboring without recompense. Phoenix ends by telling Achilles to “think about this,” warning him that he too will end up fighting without honor. Achilles tells him he does not care about the gifts and threatens to leave for home in the morning.

Phoinix frames his narrative with explicit invitations to make comparisons between the experiences of his addressee and that of the central character in his story. He offers a specific interpretation that Achilles rejects because Achilles is likely taking a different lesson from the narrative (to stay out of battle because he does not want the goods or the social obligations they imply). This exchange, then, features both how storytellers adapt stories to the experiences of the audiences and also how audiences misread or reread the stories through their own perspectives.