At the end of book 16, Patroklos dies and prophesies the death of Hektor. Book 17 opens with Menelaos ‘noticing’ Patroklos fall and then turning to attack one of his killers, the Trojan Euphorbus. This character seems to be created for the moment, although he has something of a life outside of Homer. In the Iliad, he is described as someone with gold and silver in his hair and understood by some as a doublet for Paris, in the reading that makes the killing of Patroklos an echo of the killing of Achilles. Outside of Homer, the story goes that Pythagoras claimed he was Euphorbus reincarnated (according to Diogenes Laertius).

In the Iliad, Euphorbus has a brief narrative: he appears for the first time to kill Patroklos (at 16.808) and dies under 200 lines later. His death is marked by a quick exchange with Menelaos and then a remarkable pair of similes.

Homer, Iliad 17.43-60

“So he spoke and struck his evenly balanced shield,
But the bronze did not pierce, instead the tip bent back
On the strong shield. Then Atreus’ son, Menelaos, attacked
Again with his bronze, following a prayer to father Zeus.
He struck Euphorbus near the bottom of his throat
As he backed away, and he pressed forward, trusting his heavy hand.
The point travelled straight through his tender neck.
The man made a sound as he fell and his armor clattered around him.
His hair was dyed with blood something like the locks of the Graces,
Hair interwoven with silver and gold.
It’s like when a man nourishes an olive shoot
In some isolated place, where there’s plenty of water,
A good, healthy sapling. But then even as gusts of wind
Make it shake, it still blooms in white flower.
But a sudden storm overcomes it with a fierce wind
Rips it up from the furrow and lays it flat on the earth.
That’s how Menelaos, Atreus son killed Euphorbus
The son of Panthous, And then he stripped him of his arms.”

῝Ως εἰπὼν οὔτησε κατ’ ἀσπίδα πάντοσ’ ἐΐσην·
οὐδ’ ἔρρηξεν χαλκός, ἀνεγνάμφθη δέ οἱ αἰχμὴ
ἀσπίδ’ ἐνὶ κρατερῇ· ὃ δὲ δεύτερος ὄρνυτο χαλκῷ
᾿Ατρεΐδης Μενέλαος ἐπευξάμενος Διὶ πατρί·
ἂψ δ’ ἀναχαζομένοιο κατὰ στομάχοιο θέμεθλα
νύξ’, ἐπὶ δ’ αὐτὸς ἔρεισε βαρείῃ χειρὶ πιθήσας·
ἀντικρὺ δ’ ἁπαλοῖο δι’ αὐχένος ἤλυθ’ ἀκωκή,
δούπησεν δὲ πεσών, ἀράβησε δὲ τεύχε’ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ.
αἵματί οἱ δεύοντο κόμαι Χαρίτεσσιν ὁμοῖαι
πλοχμοί θ’, οἳ χρυσῷ τε καὶ ἀργύρῳ ἐσφήκωντο.
οἷον δὲ τρέφει ἔρνος ἀνὴρ ἐριθηλὲς ἐλαίης
χώρῳ ἐν οἰοπόλῳ, ὅθ’ ἅλις ἀναβέβροχεν ὕδωρ,
καλὸν τηλεθάον· τὸ δέ τε πνοιαὶ δονέουσι
παντοίων ἀνέμων, καί τε βρύει ἄνθεϊ λευκῷ·
ἐλθὼν δ’ ἐξαπίνης ἄνεμος σὺν λαίλαπι πολλῇ
βόθρου τ’ ἐξέστρεψε καὶ ἐξετάνυσσ’ ἐπὶ γαίῃ·
τοῖον Πάνθου υἱὸν ἐϋμμελίην Εὔφορβον
᾿Ατρεΐδης Μενέλαος ἐπεὶ κτάνε τεύχε’ ἐσύλα.

When I was discussing book 17 with Mimi Kramer, a friend and author of the great substack Unrelatable, the first thing she mentioned was the hair simile. It is remarkable, among many reasons, for the comparison to the graces and the sense that the dyeing of the hair darkened it to match that of the Graces. The comparison itself may stand to mark Euphorbus as effeminate, or at least falling short of martial exemplarity, like Paris. Yet, when he is introduced, Euphorbus surpassed the men of his age “at the spear, horse-riding, and with his swift feet” (ἔγχεΐ θ’ ἱπποσύνῃ τε πόδεσσί τε καρπαλίμοισι).

With respect to Mimi, I actually find the subsequent simile fascinating. The basic image is of an olive shoot planted in an extreme place, cared for but cut off young by an extreme blast of wind. Menelaos ends up compared to the wind while Euphorbus is the shoot. One really straightforward way to understand the simile, then, is to see it as marking Euphorbus’ youth, his growth despite hostile circumstances, and his death in response to larger forces.

As I have written about before, I am pretty interested in the way Homeric similes engage with contextual themes and advance the plot as well. In earlier posts, I have placed similes in the same categories as other devices and narrative itself, as providing blended spaces between the story and the world of the audience (leaning on cognitive ideas about narrative outlined by authors like Mark Turner in The Literary Mind). I think this simile creates the potential for audience members to think about the tension between the overall narrative of the Trojan War and the particular details of the Iliad.

When Euphorbus is involved in killing Patroklos, he may increase the echoes between Patroklos’ death and Achilles’ and he may also serve to soften or alter Hektor’s reputation, but he also introduces the threat that Achilles’ rage may go the wrong way. Euphorbus is immediately a loose end and the tradition abhors loose ends. And, so, the narrative introduces a rapid way to ‘snip’ a wild strand out of existence. Menelaos, compared to the wind, is an extension of fate or the sky-god Zeus’ ultimate responsibility for maintaining cosmic order.

In writing this way, I am thinking a little bit about causal sequences and time travel paradoxes. When I was working on book 17 a few years ago, I had just watched the show Bodies and was intrigued by its time travel loop and the nearly divine power granted to the universe to erase paradoxes. In a way, it reminded me of “All You Zombies” by Robert Heinlein. In both stories, the supreme agent who can control time is someone who somehow gets outside of time, to establish a causal loop that centers around them. Reestablishing a ‘proper’ or ‘natural’ narrative sequence requires the dissolution of that loop, the erasure of that agency. Homeric poetry, for all of his agentive power, is still beholden to a temporal sequence with specific causes and outcomes and can only work within those limits in telling its story. (And, indeed, often becomes the most interesting when pressing against or expanding those limits.)

So, I have begun to think of moments like the brief life and death of Euphorbus as akin to resolving a temporal paradox. Instead, we find Homeric poetry working in the creases of narrative traditions, adapting as much as possible, and deviating to the point that some people notice. And then, in a truly performative fashion, marking the moment of return with something surprising. To lay on even more to this: there is a metapoetic motif in Homeric poetry that may link trees and plants to narrative traditions.

Elton Barker and I have followed scholars like John Henderson and Alex Purves in seeing trees as a potential metaphor for poetic creation, if not for actual traditions of narratives and poetic traditions. From the leaves of trees for generations of heroes to the orchard of Laertes where Odysseus and his father recount their shared past, trees and their substance can be stand ins for sequences, for identity, and for the stories that put these things in context. When Euphorbus is compared to a shoot of an olive tree, flourishing and isolated, plucked and laid to rest before it is grown, the Iliad is really marking him as an abortive narrative tradition, snuffed out by the force of a storyworld that has no space for its growth and expansion.

A Starter Bibliography on Similes in Homer

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Bassett, Samuel E. “The Function of the Homeric Simile.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 52 (1921): 132–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/282957.

Ben-Porat, Ziva. “Poetics of the Homeric Simile and the Theory of (Poetic) Simile.” Poetics Today 13, no. 4 (1992): 737–69. https://doi.org/10.2307/1773297.

Mandel, Oscar. “Homeric Simile.” Prairie Schooner 69, no. 2 (1995): 124–124. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40633938.

Minchin, Elizabeth. “Similes in Homer: image, mind’s eye, and memory.” Speaking volumes: orality and literacy in the Greek and Roman world. Ed. Watson, Janet. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 218. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2001. 25-52.

Moulton, Carroll. “Similes in the Iliad.” Hermes 102, no. 3 (1974): 381–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4475864.

Muellner, Leonard. “The Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies a Study of Homeric Metaphor.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 93, 1990, pp. 59–101. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/311283. Accessed 6 Jan. 2024.

Naiden, Fred S.. “Homer’s leopard simile.” Nine essays on Homer. Eds. Carlisle, Miriam and Levaniouk, Olga Arkadievna. Greek Studies. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 177-203.

Notopoulos, James A. “Homeric Similes in the Light of Oral Poetry.” The Classical Journal 52, no. 7 (1957): 323–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3294076.

Pache, Corinne. “Mourning lions and Penelope’s revenge.” Arethusa, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-24.

Porter, David H. “Violent Juxtaposition in the Similes of the ‘Iliad.’” The Classical Journal 68, no. 1 (1972): 11–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296022.

Ready, Jonathan. 2011. Character, Narrator and Simile in the Iliad. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ready, Jonathan L. “The Comparative Spectrum in Homer.” The American Journal of Philology 129, no. 4 (2008): 453–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27566727.

Scott, William C. 2009. The Artistry of the Homeric Simile. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Andreas Thomas Zanker, Metaphor in Homer: time, speech, and thought. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x, 263 p.. ISBN 9781108491884 $99.99.

This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 17 Here is a link to the overview of Iliad 16 and another to the plan in general.

Book 17 of the Iliad is likely one of the most skimmed or skipped books in the reading of epic. And this is not because there is anything wrong with it! On the contrary, it is a masterpiece of expansion and suspense. I think it tends to get ignored because so much of what it does is keyed into the aesthetics of performance. The book starts with Menelaas “not failing to notice the death of Patroklos” and centers around a struggle over his armor, and his body. But it also includes mourning immortal horses, Zeus inspiring a charioteer, Hektor and Aeneas chasing after horses, and Ajax defending Menelaos and Meriones as they carry Patroklos’ body away from the ships and Antilochus, Nestor’s son, rushes to tell Achilles what has happened. Book 18 starts with Achilles finding out what has happened.

At the end of book 15, the audience knows the plot of the rest of the epic. They know what will happen, but they don’t know how it will unfold. There are universes of stories to be told in the how of the events of the Iliad anticipated by Zeus: the deaths of Sarpedon, Patroklos, and Hektor could unfold in myriad ways and most audiences listening to the performance of the ‘rage of Achilles’ would know the basic plot details, but not the connective tissue between them. The 761 lines of book 17 create suspense for the audience as they await Achilles’ response, but at the same time they also provide opportunities to characterize the heroes in this specific telling of the epic and to engage with other narratives traditions.  The plot of this book engages critically with the major themes I have noted to follow in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions, but the central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 17 are heroism, politics  and Narrative Traditions.

Book 17, the Epic Cycle, and Neoanalysis

Let me start by talking about Narrative traditions. When I summarize book 17 above, I mention Menelaos, Hektor, Aeneas, and then Ajax and Antilochus. The collocation of characters here would, for many audiences, likely recall events from outside the Iliad as we know it, from narrative traditions authors like Proclus (in his Chrestomathia) and earlier scholars placed in the so-called epic cycle. As I have written about before, I think that the Epic Cycle is in many ways “a scholarly fiction.” It posits that there was a fixed group of poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from beginning to end. I think that both the notion of telling the whole story and having one set of poems doing this work is out of touch with how performed songs worked in antiquity while also ignoring that there were many other narrative traditions that aren’t included in the small group of poems in the Trojan Cycle.

One of the reasons I am rather committed to this point of view has to do with what subsequent generations of scholars have done with the idea of the epic cycle, which is to reconstruct the content of the poems and then spend a good deal of time trying to figure out the relationship between such reconstructions and the poems we actually possess. This is dangerous in a few ways: First, almost everything we have about the so-called cycle has been preserved because of its similarity or relevance to our Homeric epics. So, we can’t trust that this material has been represented well or fully. Second, any speculation on the relationship between these reconstructions and the poems we have is complicated by the performance history of the narrative traditions that we have to try to separate from the fixed texts that have come down to us. Many different versions of the ‘rage of Achilles’ could have circulated in antiquity and influenced other poetic traditions, which in turn ended up influencing or shaping the Rage-song that survived for us.

(Elton Barker and I discuss a lot of this in our book Homer’s Thebes)

I don’t want to be dismissive of Neoanalysis entirely, however. Anyone who knows me as Homerist knows the approach gets under my skin, but I have tried to be fairer in years with what it can contribute. At its best–if it adopts a kind of epistemic humility about the actual relationship between texts we have and those we have reconstructed or lost–neoanalysis retains the ability to show us how complex the narrative backgrounds of the Iliad and the Odyssey are and how much our understanding of the poems can be enriched by thinking through these other traditions. This value is attenuated, however, by overly positivistic assertions that a specific passage in the Iliad or Odyssey was modeled on a specific moment in another poem. Such moves, I believe, underappreciate how many story traditions there were drawing on similar motifs while also failing to take into account the many possible versions of a given tradition. In addition, and this is probably what makes me the most irrational, such a positivistic approach also typically does not consider what audiences knew or could have known.

These considerations bear significantly on book 17 because it is possible to frame the book from its echoes of other narratives, foremost the struggle over Achilles’ body, rescued by Ajax, and, second, the relationship between Antilochus and Achilles in the Aithiopis. According to our ancient sources, the Aithiopis begins after the end of the Iliad and includes juicy details like Achilles allegedly falling in love with Penthesilea and killing her,  only to kill Thersites too for accusing him of it. Then, Memnon, the son of Dawn, arrives to support the Trojans, kills Antilochus, which sends Achilles into another rage, that leads to him slaughtering Memnon. Once he has killed Memnon, Achilles pushes too far pursuing the Trojans into the city, and is killed by Apollo and Paris, near the very gate where Patroklos fell.

There are, from this summary, innumerable parallels between books 16 and 17 of the Iliad and the lost Aithiopis. I have shifted to the word “parallel” here instead of my usual “echo” or “resonance” because it is a visual metaphor, common in setting texts side-by-side. I am suspicious of taking such parallels too seriously because they are made up of the same very basic plot detail as Zeus’ outline of the events of the Iliad in book 15: they are just dots on a map, as yet unconnected by the detail that gives epic its force. Even if we assume that the plot of the lost Aithiopis has been faithfully transmitted and not ‘juiced’ or crafted to match the Iliad better, we have no way of knowing whether one poem or narrative tradition influenced the other and have not really developed the scholarly language to describe two closely related traditions influencing each other over time as their stories are told and retold and as they come in contact with other traditions.

We can say, I think, that the Iliad seems conscious of the importance of Antilochus and the basic details of his story (note how much he and Achilles engage in book 23, for example). We also know that the Odyssey is conscious of the fallout over the rescue of Achilles’ body and the awarding of his arms to Ajax instead of Odysseus. (Odysseus acts all surprised that Ajax won’t talk to him in the underworld!) But we can’t say with any confidence to what extent the Iliad we have relies on audience knowledge of the rescue of Achilles’ body in the drama of book 17. 

Book 17 works because of its detail, not because of its plot: the horses mourning, Menelaos striving, Hektor making some bad decisions, Glaukos laying into Hektor, the length of the expansion straining the suspension of our disbelief. All of these things put flesh on what would be pretty bare bones with just the basic outline of Achilles’ death.  The rescue of Achilles’ body, indeed, was a popular motif, appearing in greek art well before the textualization of the Iliad as we know it. But it–and the judgment of the arms, and the rage of Achilles over Antilochus–all could have been episodes in a fluid and living oral tradition from which both the Iliad and the Aithiopis emerged.

(Provided, of course, we believe there was an Aithiopis with the scenes reported by Proclus, and that such summaries did not merely collocate all of the major episodes from the Trojan War later scholars dug up in order to tell the whole story.)

Some reading questions on book 17

Why is the Iliad a better epic with book 17 than without it?

What do Hektor’s actions in book 17 contribute to our understanding of his character?

Why does the narrative spend so much time on the struggle for Patroklos’ body?

A short Bibliography on the epic cycle and neoanalysis

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. 

Degener, Michael. “Euphorbus’ plaint and plaits: the unsung valor of a foot soldier in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Phoenix, vol. 74, no. 3-4, 2020, pp. 220-243. Doi: 10.1353/phx.2020.0037

Fenno, Jonathan Brian. “The mist shed by Zeus in Iliad XVII.” The Classical Journal, vol. 104, no. 1, 2008-2009, pp. 1-9.

Harrison, E. L. “Homeric Wonder-Horses.” Hermes 119, no. 2 (1991): 252–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4476820.

Kozak, Lynn. “Character and context in the rebuke exchange of Iliad 17.142-184.” Classical World, vol. 106, no. 1, 2012-2013, pp. 1-14.

Moulton, C.. “The speech of Glaukos in Iliad 17.” Hermes, vol. CIX, 1981, pp. 1-8.

Neal, Tamara. “Blood and hunger in the « Iliad ».” Classical Philology, vol. 101, no. 1, 2006, pp. 15-33. Doi: 10.1086/505669

Schein, Seth L.. “The horses of Achilles in Book 17 of the « Iliad ».” « Epea pteroenta »: Beiträge zur Homerforschung : Festschrift für Wolfgang Kullmann zum 75. Geburtstag. Eds. Reichel, Michael and Rengakos, Antonios. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002. 193-205.

West, M. L. “‘Iliad’ and ‘Aethiopis.’” The Classical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2003): 1–14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3556478.

A short Bibliography on the epic cycle and neoanalysis

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.

Barker, E.T.E. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.

———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”

Leeds International Classical Studies 7.2. (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classiscs/lics/)

———. 2011. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 66:9–44.

———. 2015. “Odysseus’ Nostos and the Odyssey’s Nostoi.” G. Philologia Antiqua

87–112.

Albertus Benarbé. Poetorum Epicorum Graecorum. Leipzig: Teubner, 1987.

Jonathan Burgess. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 

Cingano, E. 1992. “The Death of Oedipus in the Epic Tradition.” Phoenix 46:1–11.

———. 2000. “Tradizioni su Tebe nell’epica e nella lirica greca arcaica.” In La città

di Argo: Mito, storia, tradizioni poetiche, ed. P. A. Bernardini, 59–68. Rome.

———. 2004. “The Sacrificial Cut and the Sense of Honour Wronged in Greek

Joel Christensen. “Revising Athena’s Rage: Kassandra and the Homeric Appropriation of Nostos.” YAGE 3: 88–116.

Malcolm Davies. Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Göttingen : Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1988.

Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.

Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.

Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11. 

Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.

L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.

Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.

Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.

Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”

Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.

Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.

Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.

Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.

Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.

Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.

Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.

Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.

Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.

Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.

Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.

Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).

Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.