“But when each of them were lined up with their leaders,
The Trojans went forward screeching and cries just like birds,
With the sound like the call of cranes near the sky.
Those birds that flee the winter and its endless rain
And fly with a cry over the ocean’s streams
Bringing death and murder to the Pygmies.
The Achaeans went forward exhaling rage in silence,
Eager in their heart to stand in defense of one another.”
This opening simile offers a somewhat surprising transition from the catalogs that end book 2 on the way to the action of book three. As I discuss in earlier posts about book 3, it is a fascinating book that continues some of the themes and concerns that emerge in book 2: a (re)introduction of the Trojans (starting with their catalog) and a (re)starting of the Trojan War. In my reading of the way the Iliad works as a coherent narrative that engages with and communicates the larger interest of both the Trojan War and the tradition of epic performance, book 3 presents episodes that evoke the character of the war’s beginning while still working within the narrative arc of the story of the rage of Achilles
1-111 Beginning, Proposal of a Dual [request for Priam to be fetched]
112-263 Teikhoskopia (“viewing from the walls”): Helen describes the Greeks
264-376 Duel
377-461 Aphrodite and the Reunion of Helen and Paris
The sequence of events laid as laid out here takes the audience almost in reverse from the war to the meeting of Helen and Paris. One could imagine the debate between Helen and Aphrodite and Helen’s begrudging acceptance of Paris as the Iliad’s take on blaming Helen, Paris’ character, and the shared conspiracy of divine will and human frailty. In this, the book offers one narrative arc that begins with Hektor upbraiding and shaming his brother and ends with Paris’ rather pathetic “aw shucks” return to the scene of their ‘crime’ (i.e., the bedroom). At the same time, if we think about the wide angle lens approach, this arc also allows us an early meeting between Menelaos and Priam and a view of the Greeks from the Trojans’ perspective. Book 3 situates the audience in space between Troy and the Greeks (anticipating book 6 in a way) and while also integrating potentially ‘famous’ episodes from the fuller war into its narrative.
National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Fresco from Pompeii
Given these primary functions of book 3, what sense can we make of the opening simile? It compares the sound of the assembled Trojan armies (and their allies) to the cry of migratory cranes who bring “death and doom to the Pygmies” during the winter. A simple reading of the simile might see the Trojans as moving away from their home and bringing death to the Greeks. For moving us into the action, this interpretation suffices, but I don’t think it is enough.
Fortunately, two of my favorite pieces of Homeric scholarship address this passage and in very different ways. Hilary Mackie, in her Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad [substack.com] (1996), opens with this simile to suggest that unlike the Achaeans, the Trojan use of language “suggest[s] a lack of social order” (14). She contrasts the depiction of the Greeks following the simile as one of cohesion (16) and recalls the similes from book two that marks the Achaeans in mutiny or chaos as resolving into an eventual reimposition of order through the scapegoating of Thersites (17). Mackie relates this passage to the assertion from book 2 that the Trojans and their allies have many different languages (2.802-806) and for that reason must rely on captains to command only their own troops (19). She concludes that this passage extends a process of “underselling the Trojan army” (21) and suggests “when the Trojans march out at the beginning of Book 3, they are still dominated by undifferentiated clamor (klaggê). With their mixed languages, the Trojans cannot function as an articulate group.
I have always appreciated this argument insofar as it helps modern audiences understand differences between Trojan and Achaean politics (something Mackie also goes on to discuss). But I do worry if this interpretation against a linguistic pluralism may lean too much into the Iliad’s own attempt to downplay the strength of the Trojans (who have managed to hold the mighty Achaeans off for ten years!). I fear, in addition, that some might misinterpret such an argument as implying that the Iliad is essentially against heterogeneity. (And I don’t think this is Mackie’s argument at all. See Shawn Ross’ paper on language and Panhellenism in the Iliad for a perspective from contemporary audiences.)
A Pygmy fights a crane, Attic red-figure chous 430–420 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Spain
The other example of Homeric scholarship that engages with this opening is Leonard Muellner’s “The Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies”. I am deeply fond of this article because my first Greek teacher and many decade mentor and friend, Lenny, wrote it; but beyond that, it is one of the finest works on Homeric similes from the 20th century. Lenny uses this article to argue both that similes are not less traditional than other parts of Homeric epic (contra someone like Shipp or others who claim similes are ‘later’ than other parts of the Iliad or Odyssey) and also to show how a ‘device’ like this “continually enhances and preserves the epic’s expressive and evocative power” (61).
Lenny delves into the grammar of this simile by walking his reader through how other bird similes operate in the Iliad, emphasizing in part the group nature of this comparison and their place high in the sky, where predators usually roam , marking these birds as “deadly” and their “shriek [is a] war cry” (75). There is something of an inversion in this role, as Lenny notes, because cranes are not typically predatory birds in similes and this is the only extant example of massed birds compared to an attacking army. The second half of the essay examines this peculiarity.
National Archaeological Museum of Florence, Froicoise Vase
One argument Lenny provides is based on the context of book 3 and the character of the Trojan(s) who fight in the book. He notes that soon after this passage, Paris is criticized by his brother for not being a fighter, for being a dancer/lover instead, a theme that pervades the book and is emphasized again at the end when Paris is returned to his bedroom. Cranes, in the language of Greek poetry and myth, are birds who dance. In this light, the cranes reflect the unaccustomed place of the Trojans themselves in the Iliad: “in an unaccustomed role, in an unaccustomed locale: shrieking high above the river-plains, they descend like predators upon the Pygmies” (90).
The information about the Pygmies is less clear: Lenny notes a tradition from Egypt where a tribe of people called pygmies where known for “the god’s dances” (100). There was a tradition of the war of cranes and pygmies in art outside of Homer [substack.com] that may or may not be related to this. I suspect that the inversion of the cranes (as Trojans) going across the ocean to battle a non-bellicose foe may be significant to the resonance of the image here. At its most extreme/absurd, we can imagine something of a dance battle, a conflict resolved in a different dimension and a world far away.
Works Mentioned
Mackie, Hilary Susan. Talking Trojan: speech and community in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.
Karis Nemik, Andor, episode 12
If you spend a little time learning about Greek myth and ancient epic, you’ll encounter the Epic Cycle, a term for a group of poems around that told the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?) to the very end (Odysseus’ return home and its aftermath). Recent years have seen dozens of articles and books on the topic. As a Homerist, I have had to engage with this scholarship a great deal.
And my central problem is this: I think the Epic Cycle, as we talk about it, is a scholarly fiction.
I watched the Disney+ series Andor and found myself agreeing deeply with a general opinion of its excellence–the plot is exciting, the characters are moving, and the themes of the rebellion both advance those of the original movie and complicate them. The rebels here are conflicted–some are aggrieved, some are true believers, and some are more venal. Together, they dramatize the cost of resistance and the seductive dangers of that complacency that makes us all complicit in oppression.
But watching Andor and enjoying it–after also cheering for The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, and the Book of Boba–has made me think repeatedly about the relationship between canon and fixity and what it means to be an audience to an expanding universe. As a Homerist who comes from the end of Gen X (I was born in 1978), watching the explosion of the Star Wars universe has made me think a lot about the epic cycle and secondary narratives.
The making of a canon
It is impossible for my children to imagine what Star Wars meant when I was their age. One of my first memories is seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a drive-in theater with my parents and being terrified by Darth Vader. Anyone who can remember prior to 1999 knew of Star Wars as an unfinished but finished trilogy: there were always rumors that George Lucas would return to a galaxy far away and long ago, seeded especially by the numbering of the first movie as IV, but for a decade or so it seemed like it would never happen.
To be a fan of Star Wars prior to the return of the movies was to rewatch VHS cassettes and read authorized novels and wait for random viewings of the super strange Ewok adventures, The Battle for Endor and Caravan for Courage. Part of what made Star Wars moving was its boundedness and the promise of more. As a child, I would weep at the end of Return of the Jedi because I didn’t want it to end. As an adult, I have written about our uncomfortable relationship with narrative closure, how we want it to come but we also dread it because it is the end of a world and is, in some way, an echo of our own deaths.
Episodes and Universes
There are two ways of thinking about entries or episodes in a narrative universe. For Star Wars what became canon were the movies–but the more episodes added to the list, the less stable the canon became. There’s a danger of surplus narrative and how we refer to the whole changes two. I think people mean two different things when they talk about the epic cycle. One is general, expansive: the cycle refers to the full range of narratives associated with the Trojan War. The other is an imagined canon of episodes.
So, the classic Trojan Cycle described by Proclus include the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (also called, according to some, The Return of the Atreids [ἡ τῶν Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος], and the Telegony. We have only a handful of fragments for most of these poems Some scholars have also suggested different ‘cycles’ which would focus around heroes (a cycle of epics about Herakles, for example, the Calydonian Boar Hunt or the Argo) or centering around cities other than Troy (where a Theban cycle might include the Oidipodeia, Thebais, Epigonoi, and perhaps even the Alkmeonis). This is the one I don’t think is real.
The larger a canon is, the less effective it is in exerting authority. I think that the original Star Wars trilogy exerted a centripetal force on its audiences, pulling them together to a narrative center. As the universe expands–or as the canon multiples–its force is more centrifugal, moving audiences into clusters. This is one way I think comparing a modern entertainment ‘universe’ to Trojan War narratives is useful: the Iliad and the Odyssey were panhellenic texts that persisted in applying aesthetic pressures on other traditions and their audiences. But the narrative world of the Trojan War included countless other stories and spanned many different kinds of genres.
Often when we talk about the authority of the Homeric poems, we are talking about the cultural position they occupied in Archaic and Classical Greece as performance narratives connected to political power. This authority transformed as they moved into fixed texts and aesthetic objects for Hellenistic readers and later. Over time, they became quasi-sacred. But other stories set in the Trojan War world existed prior to our epics and kept on spinning out from a notional but fictive center: local, epichoric traditions preceded the Iliad and Odyssey and persisted well into the Christian era. The discrete episodes filled out the Universe and allowed audiences to live within them: the static nature of the canonized object is mitigated by the fluidity of ongoing traditions.
This comes clear often in accounts of ritual and local practices, like those observed by Pausanias who puts Penelope’s grave in the Peloponnese, not far from that of Aeneas’ father Anchises. What’s different, I think, about ancient Trojan War narratives is that these local or epichoric narratives developed prior to the canonized epics and continued long after. As Irad Malkin has shown in The Returns of Odysseus, as Greeks spread across the Mediterranean, they took their stories with them, adapting their myths of people like Odysseus to accommodate their new realities.
When I first watched the Mandalorian, I was simultaneously charmed and critical: prior to the new movies, you could not imagine two characters with more commercial potential than a Boba Fett analog and a baby Yoda. People my age loved Boba Fett because his action figure looked so cool. (I used to sleep with Boba as a toddler, I confess.) These characters are also tangential to the canonized storyline, they allow the space to create a new story while also still drawing on the nostalgia and cache of the center. This is part of the thrill and peril of expanding narrative traditions: the cameo of a main character in a peripheral story can be fun, but when the canon limits overmuch, the story becomes campy and over allusive (which explains, in part I think, why Rogue One works well but Solo does not).
The cultural forces of capitalism that produced the Mandalorian are, of course, different from those that perpetuated Trojan War narratives in Archaic and Classical Greece, but they remain somewhat analogous cultural forces. Both rely on audience interest and respond to changing cultural trends.
Audiences and Change
When we talk about the market forces that influence the expansion of the Star Wars universe, we are talking in part about audiences. Discussions of the epic cycle–and Homer in general–too often forget that ancient performers responded to their audiences as well. Audiences exist through time and time creates different kinds of audiences. When we talk about interpreting or making sense of cultural objects, we emphasize the intention of creators because it is so difficult to talk about the multiplicity of audiences. But I have been thinking about audiences as palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been cleaned and repurposed for a new text, and yet the old text can often be seen underneath it. Christos Tsagalis has used it productively as a metaphor for how oral traditions work. Yet this model is still about the object and not the people who view it. We change as individuals over time and our relationship to a text or cultural object changes from one generation to another.
I took dates to the rerelease of the original three movies in high school. When The Phantom Menace was released, I was there on the first weekend with roommates and my future wife (who purchased Star Wars legos while waiting to see the movie and assembled them during the film). And despite the exhilaration of the opening chyron and the music, I left disappointed. The second trilogy is cluttered, confused and confusing, and tries too hard to fill in the blanks of the later/earlier films. The second trilogy is both shaped and trapped by nostalgia.
Part of the problem is the difference between a backstory that is unexplained and a forced explanation. The “clone wars” as referenced in Star Wars are nebulous and strange: we know they were in the past and bad. When we get to them in the later trilogy, they lose the menace and strangeness. What was a detail in service of another narrative fails in certain ways when it is fleshed out because it does not and cannot exist on its own terms.
The later Star Wars films have a secondariness in that they both serve to fill out a preexisting story and they also attempt to establish intertexts and references to the earlier films that prevent them from truly being their own. This is part of the challenge of judging narratives that develop in the shadow of a canon: we love them because they continue the larger story, but also begrudge them for not being the originals they imitate. Indeed, when authors like Jasper Griffin critique the poems of the epic cycle–without actually having access to them–for their fantastic content or their derivative nature, they are judging them by aesthetic standards, by rules, that they can never actually attain.
But changing some of the boundaries creates new space: consider the effectiveness of different kinds of Trojan War narratives on the tragic stage. Similarly, the later film Rogue One and the television series inhabit a familiar and attractive world but have their own stories to tell. They are compelling because they do not rely on their audiences fully knowing the original trilogy, but merely being familiar with the general ‘rules’ and characteristics of the Star Wars universe. They are free to respond to contemporary concerns and to establish new narratives. Further, with the television shows especially, they benefit from different generic boundaries: the pacing of episodic television lends itself to different kinds of stories from a 120 minutes space opera.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the process of canonization limits narratives that try to do the same thing as the canonized object but provides space for those that forge into new genres or plots. In addition, the further from the canon that narratives go, the more space they have to respond to changing audiences. Once Lucas released Star Wars into the world as a billion dollar intellectual property, others were able to escape the canonicity, to use the familiar world to tell new stories.
Mykonos vase (Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, Inv. 2240). Decorated pithos found at Mykonos, Greece depicting one of the earliest known renditions of the Trojan Horse[/caption]
Homer and Trojan War Narratives
The relationship between the later narratives of the Star Wars universe and the original trilogy has made me think a lot about the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and Trojan War narratives. This analogy fails at a certain point because the Homeric epics likely had many different versions of their own narratives and were engaged with and responding to epic performance of all kinds (and not just Trojan War and heroic poems). But the main point I take with me is the willingness of audiences to engage in the expansion of narrative worlds and how narratives in the expanded Trojan War universe change based on new genres and new audiences.
One of the things I regularly emphasize about the limits of our own ability to understand ancient epic because we know so little about what ancient audiences knew or how they experienced epic. Think here of the difference between someone like me for whom Star Wars was canonical and my children who love Grogu and have always known who Luke Skywalker’s father was. They don’t labor under the same aesthetic weight either: they do not judge Phantom Menace by the standard of Star Wars because they don’t remember a time before when these films did not co-exist. The difference between the expanded Star Wars universe material and the second trilogy is that between inhabiting/exploring a world and concretizing/freezing it.
When it comes to the cultural position of the Homeric epics, we make the mistake of assuming the Iliad and the Odyssey always had the same monumental status as they gained by the end of the 5th century BCE. I have had exchanges recently with the Assyriologist Seth Sanders who has been somewhat perplexed by Classicists’ tendency to see “cycles” in ancient near eastern literature. He has remarked on how the development of fixed–or ‘charismatic texts’–occludes the varied and continuing nature of oral traditions and living narrative mythscapes. As a comparison, he points out the possibility that some texts from the Hebrew bible were transmitted as “monuments”. In calling it this, he notes he is adapting the art historian Alous Reigl’s notion of monumentality as a dialogic dynamic between a cultural artifact and an audience for whom that object defines something of their community’s past or authoritative identity.
The impulse to tell the whole story is a feature of post-canonization. Audiences yearned for more Star Wars and eventually got them. But the narrative satiety that resulted was disappointing until the limits set by the canon could be exceeded. As the Iliad and the Odyssey became canon, the Trojan War mythscape moved to another genre with different boundaries (tragedy) and different narrative traditions. There was no cycle telling the later tale until scholars of a post-canonized period felt the need for it.
The Fictive Epic Cycle
Imagine a future scholar of narrative, say in 3023, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe. The collapse of time might very well lead them to believe that the nine movies of three trilogies were always part of an authoritative cycle. But the content and contemporary responses to the later movies would likely perplex them. The collection of stories about the Trojan War are from a much longer period in time than the mere forty years that spans the release of the Star Wars movies. We know less about the alleged poems origins than we do about their contents, but they are not centered in the same cultural space and time.
But to step back for a moment: what is the epic cycle? The ‘Epic Cycle’ most often refers to the Trojan War poems recorded by Proclus (2nd or 4th Century ce) in his Chrestomathia (appended to the Venetus A manuscript; 10th Century ce, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822) and summarized by the later Photius (9th Century ce, Patriarch). The limited fragments of these poems are conventionally dated to the 7th through 6th centuries bce. The phrase Epic Cycle refers both to the mythical events spanning from creation to the end of the race of heroes and in the same way as Proclus, in isolating a specific group of poems that tell the story of the Trojan War. There are many similarities between Proclus’ summary and the work of the mythographer Apollodorus; but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the Trojan War myths and the poems of the cycle.
Rudolf Pfeiffer suggested that kuklos meant everything that was composed by Homer, everything that was attributed to a heroic world set in the story of the Trojan War. Gregory Nagy suggests that there’s some relationship between the etymology of the name Homeros as “one who fits things together” and that the kuklos points to the whole. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis expand on this idea in their introduction to their 2015 handbook by suggesting that the term is “historically ambiguous” referring to the entirety of the sky, a ring composition, or anything that repeats and returns.
The dual notion of totality and repetition, I think, makes the or a kuklos an attractive concept but an impossibility in actuality. It is both a metonym and a metaphor. This reading works well if we consider kuklos as indicating potential entirety or completion rather than an actual one. In the world of performance, the terms kuklos and Homeros may rightly become signals of authority: to be Homeros is to be a singer who has the skills to bring the potential of the kuklos into reality; to assert that a story or song is part of the kuklos is to authorize it ex post facto as part of the tradition. It is both a nodding to a canon and an alteration of it.
I am only partly convinced that kuklos functioned in this way in performance traditions in Greece; I am certain, however, that it became something completely different in the hands of literate and literary scholars. There is a wider discussion of kuklika poems and kuklikoi poets among Hellenistic scholars (starting with Aristarchus of Samothrace, 3rd-2nd Centuries bce). But evidence for both the term kuklos and the practice of separating the kuklikoi poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey is often traced back to Aristotle who makes a few enigmatic references to Kuklos poetry (Elench. 171a10 7-11) and who also distinguishes Homeric epics from other poems by other poets based on assessments of quality (Poetics 1459a37). The poems (and poets) who appear in these scholarly traditions, however, do not align with Proclus’ summary. Scholars have explained this away by saying there were other cycles, e.g., those around Thebes, Herakles, or other topics.
Here is my summary of the principles to keep in mind.
There is no evidence of a series of epic poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from the same performance tradition and period of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
All of our evidence comes from Aristotle and later. The evidence is from literary scholars treating the Iliad and the Odyssey as texts.
There is evidence of long narrative poems about other traditions (e.g. Thebais)
Our emphasis on the Epic Cycle is skewed by the gravity of Homer: We have more extensive fragments from Panyassis and Aristeas than we have for anything from the epic cycle
There is significant evidence of Trojan War narratives in other genres: lyric, elegiac, iconographic contemporaneous to or even prior to the epics we possess
The Epic Cycle is an initial creation of Hellenistic scholars trying to provide narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the Iliad and the Odyssey. This initial creation has been concretized by subsequent Classical scholarship, a process intensified by some of the scholarship of the past decade.
The positivistic assumption of the epic cycle as a stable set of texts and plots reasserts textual and literary aesthetics on a system that was much more fluid and dynamic (leading to a range of interpretive problems)
And, from this, a secondary list of things we can say about the epic cycle:
Everything we know about the epic cycle is subordinate to the Iliad and the Odyssey as canonized, monumentalized epics.
This subordination occurred either as part of trying to tell the whole story of The Trojan War or as evidence of the aesthetic superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The fragments and their summaries were selected to facilitate point #2 and are likely secondary or tertiary selections rather than excerpts taken from whole poems at the hands of Hellenistic editors.
The privileging of Trojan War narratives as part of these efforts has suppressed the extent and importance of non-Trojan War epics: e.g. Thebais, Oedipodea, Heraklea
There are many moments while watching a show like Andor that invite audiences to think about its relationship to various narrative authorities–to the shape of the empire in the original trilogy to the future events of Rogue One. But it succeeds in part because its narrative is different enough. Successful expansions of narrative universes allow traditional narratives to respond to contemporary concerns, the way that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos turns an ancient myth to an opportunity to reflect on plague and politics in contemporary Athens. Authoritative narratives exert a special gravity on their audiences; but audiences push back too: they make these stories into vehicles for their own lives. When the stories become too inflexible, they adapt them or make new ones.
The expanding Star wars universe allows this now too, and sometimes with discomfort. One of the subplots of Mandalorian Season 3 troubled me: the presentation of the New Republic’s amnesty program and the betrayal of Dr. Pershing by Elia Kane suggests that while the attempts of the New Republic to be progressive and inclusive are more just than the fascism of the Empire (and its descendants), they remain coercive and subject to the baser impulses of human nature.
This ‘both-sides’ approach to the struggle against fascism in an imaginary universe is a reflex of our own contemporary experiences and conversations. Such a thematic reflection would likely be lost on future audiences as they treat the Star Wars narratives as part of a canonized cycle of tales. In much the same way, Trojan War stories developed in particular times and places, in responses to their audience’s experiences and needs. Subsequent scholars imposed an order and created a systemized series of tales that never truly existed, to respond to their own needs for stability and closure.
Some things cited and some things to read
Alwine, A. T., ‘‘The Non-Homeric Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey’’, GRBS 49 (2009) 323-333.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Barker, E.T.E. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus
Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”
Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.
Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.
Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11.
Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.
L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.
Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.
Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.
Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”
Malkin, I., The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley 1998.
Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.
Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.
Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.
Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.
Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.
Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.
Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.
Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.
Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.
Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.
Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).
Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hephaistos Polishing Achilles’ Shield – THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. Caskey-Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings (MFA), no. 082.[/caption]
Helen ‘appears’ for the first time in the Iliad in book 3. What does she look like?
A few years ago, there was a bit of a to-do about the ethnicity of Homeric heroes. While some sketchy applications of DNA testing are eager to establish continuity between the people of antiquity and modern populations, others rightly argue that so many of our ideas about race, color, and identity have little to do with the ancient world and everything to do with our own. (See also the discussion on Pharos.)
But questions about DNA and color concepts are separate issues from myth and epic. Sure, the images and values of the ‘real’ world shape fantasy, but there is no direct accord cross-culturally between what people look like and how they imagine their heroes. Consider, e.g., the over-representation of blonde characters in American media in comparison to actual culture or the difference in skin tones in Bollywood from the general population. Racism and colorism shape representation, rendering the reality of genetics and appearance less important than the grammar of idealized bodies.
How did the Greeks imagine their heroes? This is nearly unsolvable because who the Greeks are and what their heroes do for them changes by time and location. We can start, though by looking at some of the language. Greek poetry describes Helen as xanthê and kuanopis. An insensitive and simplistic reading of these facts might claim that she was “blonde” with “blue eyes”. Not only is the situation far more interesting and complicated than this, but I am pretty sure that even if we accept these two words as applying to Helen they would not be equivalent to the appearance these two terms denote in modern English.
Let’s start with the barest fact. What Helen actually looks like is never stated in Homer. When the Trojans look at her, they say she has the “terrible appearance of goddesses” (αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν). This, of course, is not terribly specific.
Elsewhere, she is “argive Helen, for whom many Achaeans [struggled]” (᾿Αργείην ῾Ελένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν, Il. 2.161) she has “smooth” or “pale/white” arms (῏Ιρις δ’ αὖθ’ ῾Ελένῃ λευκωλένῳ ἄγγελος ἦλθεν, 3.121), but this likely has to do with a typical depiction of women in Archaic Greece (they are lighter in tone than men because they don’t work outside) or because of women’s clothing (arms may have been visible). Beyond that? In the Odyssey, she has “beautiful hair” (῾Ελένης πάρα καλλικόμοιο, 15.58) and a long robe (τανύπεπλος, 4.305).
Black-figure Belly Amphora with the Reclamation of Helen and Herakles and Kerberos. c 540 BCE; Walters Art Museum
If anyone is looking for a hint of the ideal of beauty from the legend who launched a thousand ships, they will be sorely disappointed. Why? I think the answer to this partly has to do with the nature of Homeric poetry and with good art in general. Homeric poetry developed over a long duration of time and appealed to many different peoples. To over-determine Helen’s beauty by describing it would necessarily adhere to some standards of beauty while alienating others.
In addition, why describe her beauty at all when the audience members themselves can craft an ideal in their mind? As a student of mine said while I mused over this, Helen “cannot have descriptors because she is a floating signifier”. She is a blank symbol for desire upon which all audience members (ancient and modern, male and female) project their own (often ambiguous) notions of beauty. To stay with the ancient world, think of that seminal first stanza in Sappho fr. 16:
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest thing on the dark earth, but I say it is [whatever] you love
As long as beauty is relative and in the eye of the beholder, any time we disambiguate it by saying that it is one thing and not another we depart from an abstract timeless idea and create something more bounded and less open to audience engagement. I think that part of what makes Homeric poetry work so well is that it combines a maximum amount of specificity within a maximized amount of ambiguity.
Outside of Homer, Helen is described with a little more detail, but in each case the significance of the signifier is less than it appears. In Hesiod, she has nice hair again (῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο, Works and Days 165; this is repeated a lot in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue). In fr. 9 of the Cypria she is merely a “Wonder for mortals” (θαῦμα βροτοῖσι·). Much later she has “spiraling eyebrows/lashes” (῾Ελένης ἑλικοβλεφάροιο, Quintus Smyrnaeus, 13.470). (N.b. there is a scholion glossing heliko- as “dark-eyed” when it is used in the Iliad).
If we want to learn more about Helen, she has additional features outside of epic poetry in lyric. I would be bold enough to claim that the more personal and erotic character of the genre is a better explanation for this specificity than anything else.
In lyric (e.g. Mesomedes, κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας,) Helen is “cyan-eyed”, but if we look at the semantic range of this nominal root—which describes dark stones and eyes of water divinities—I think we can argue fairly that this indicates a dark and shiny, even watery texture (like lapis lazuli). I suspect this is about the sheen of eyes rather than their hue.
Eustathius remarks that the epithet κυανώπιδα is common (κατὰ κοινὸν ἐπίθετον) and is often used for dark sea creatures, describing as well his hair (Ποσειδῶνα κυανοχαίτην, Ad Hom. Il 1.555.23). Indeed, nymphs in general are “dark-eyed” in lyric (καὶ Νύμφαι κυανώπιδες, Anacr. fr. 12.2) and water deities remain so in Homer (κῦμα μέγα ῥοχθεῖ κυανώπιδος ᾿Αμφιτρίτης, Il. 12.60). Outside of Homer marriageable women also receive this epithet, including Helen’s sister Klytemnestra (Hes. Fr. 23a κού[ρην Τυνδαρέοιο Κλυταιμήσ]τρην κυανῶπ[ιν· cf. fr. 23.27 and for Althaia, 25.14, Elektra (169).
From Robert Beekes. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill, 2010
So, in lyric, Helen has dark pools for eyes. But what about her hair? At Sappho fr. 23 Helen is described as “xanthai” ([ ] ξάνθαι δ’ ᾿Ελέναι σ’ ἐίσ[κ]ην; cf. Stesichorus Fr. S103: [ξ]α̣νθὰ δ’ ῾Ελένα̣ π̣ρ[ ; Ibycus, fr. 1a.5: ξα]νθᾶς ῾Ελένας περὶ εἴδει ). But it is important to note that in this context there is a first-person narrator speaking (“I liken you to fair Helen…”). Note as well that there is something formulaic in these lyric lines: the epithet seems to begin the phrase each time.
When it comes to Hair color, xanthus is used in Homer to describe heroes, but not Helen (Menelaos is Xanthus, for example). A byzantine etymological dictionary suggests that the core meaning of this root has something to do with fire (Ξανθὴν, πυῤῥοειδῆ) and argues that the hair “symbolizes the heat and irascibility of the hero” (αἰνίττεται, τὸ θερμὸν καὶ ὀργίλον τοῦ ἥρωος, Etym. Gud, s.v.). But outside the Iliad and Odyssey the adjective is applied to goddesses: both Demeter (H. Dem. 302) and Aphrodite (Soph. fr. 255) are called Xanthê. Modern etymology sees this as anywhere from yellow to brown. But this is altogether relative again. “Light hair” in a group of people who are blond is almost white; among black/brown haired people, light hair can merely be a different shade of brown.
Again, from Beekes 2010:
In the second book of Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem Trilogy” The Dark Forest, one of the main characters Luo Ji creates an ideal woman to love in his mind and goes so far as to converse with her, to leave his actual girlfriend for her, and then to go on a trip with her. When he consults a psychologist about this, his doctor tells him his is lucky because everyone is in love with an idea–where the rest of the world will inevitably be disillusioned when they realize this, Luo Ji will never suffer this loss.
Trying to make Helen look like an actual person is not only impossible, but it is something which Homeric epic avoids for good reason.
“For poets certainly tell us that they bring us songs by drawing from the honey-flowing springs or certain gardens and glades of the Muses just like bees. And because they too are winged, they also speak the truth.”
When I start working on Homer with students, one of the first things I do is discuss what the epics are. I think this is important because they are fraught with historical weight thanks to their inclusion in multiple canons; but they also present ample opportunities for confusion because they derive from very different aesthetic principles than a modern novel or movie.
The hardest thing for me to come to terms with over the years has been that the epics are different things to different people over time. They are diachronic objects, even if we insist that they came together in the form we have them at a particular time and place. They have been changed by the aesthetics of editors and readers in distinct periods–they have their origin in performance and flexibility, in orality and ritual, yet for the majority of history, they have been read. So, any fair approach to the Iliad or the Odyssey needs to understand that the epics have been different interpretive objects to different audiences over time and that the assumptions that attend them in each period set up distinct expectations based on often unarticulated aesthetics.
There are so many things to say about the “Homeric Question” that it could (and does) fill many books. The variations on the questions include how and when were the epics ‘written’ down; whether they are ‘by’ the same ‘author’; what the importance is of the oral tradition as opposed to the written one; if we have the ‘same’ versions of the texts discussed in antiquity, and so on. (And each of these topics is complicated in turn by how we define or gloss the words I put in scare quotes.)
I am not even going to try to answer all these questions, instead I want to give a brief overview of what I see as the (1) primary tensions governing the Homeric problems, (2) the transmission models that have produced the texts we possess; (3) the stages I think are important for shaping these diachronic objects; and (3) more or less correlative stages of reception. In a later post I will expand more on what I think all of this means for teaching Homer.
I think there are five primary tensions that warp the way we think and talk about our Homeric problems: (a) Ancient Biographical traditions; (b) notions of unity vs. disunity (Unitarians vs. Analysts); (c) prejudices inherent in the dichotomy of orality vs. textuality; (d) cultural assumptions about authorship (tradition vs. the idea of monumental poets); (e) and the impact of Western chauvinism in forestalling the adoption of multicultural models. ‘Homer’ was an invention of antiquity: there’s no good reason to think that one ‘author’ in the modern sense is responsible for the Homeric epics (a); instead, we have ample reason to believe otherwise, from the scattershot madness of ancient biographies (see Barbara Graziosi’s Inventing Homer and the discussions in Gregory Nagy’s Homer the Preclassic; for much more positivistic textualist accounts, see M. L. West’s The Making of the Iliad or The Making of the Odyssey) to all the evidence we have for composition in performance (start with Milman Parry’s Studies in Homeric Verse Making and Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales).
The fact remains, however, that after Plato (and certainly by the time of Aristotle) most authors in antiquity treated Homer as an author responsible for the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey with little compunction for challenging the attribution. (But prior to Aristotle, there was much more given to Homer than a mere two epics.) While there are echoes and whispers to the contrary (and, indeed, an entire scholarly tradition from Alexandria through to Modern Germany trying to shoehorn Homer into the shape of an author), it really isn’t until the end of the 18th Century and the publication of F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum that scholars stopped worrying about which island Homer was from and started really questioning the nature of the text they received.
By the end of the 19th century, (b) Homeric studies had split into camps that argued that the epics we have are products of editors stitching them together (Analysts) or that the epics are Unitary creations of a genius (or two; Unitarians) and the Analysts were clearly winning: such is the confusion, the repetitions, the omissions, and (apparent) inconsistencies of the Homeric texts (that word there is important). It was really the revelation of oral-formulaic theory and the articulation of composition in performance that broke this logjam.
Oral-formulaic theory shows that long, complex compositions can be created without the aid of writing and helps us to understand in part that the aesthetic ‘problems’ of the Homeric epics are features of their genesis and performance context and not problems. (So, features not bugs of epic poetry.) Homeric scholarship, however, spent nearly a century establishing that this was actually the case leading us to the profound issues of the 20th century (c+d), first, resistance to oral formulaic theory (on which see Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy or John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem) and then second, debate over how oral the Homeric epics are. One of the favorite canards for the textualists to toss about is that oral-formulaic poetry posits “poetry by committee.” From this perspective, only an individual author could have produced the intricacies of meaning available in Homeric epic.
I contend that this is nonsense that misunderstands both oral formulaic theory and language itself. But who has time to argue that? The fact is that Homeric poetry as we have it comes to us as text and this text is oral-derived but has been edited and handled for centuries (ok, millennia) by people who think it is all text. No matter how we reconstruct its origins, then, we must treat it as a diachronic object that was textualized, that was treated as a text from a single author by editors for 2000 years, and whose inclusion in the canon has shaped both what we think verbal art should be like and what we think the epic is. (Nevertheless, since our culture is literate, literary, and prejudiced towards textualized ways of thinking, as redress we need to learn more about orality and performance based cultures.)
A final aspect of Homeric epic that I believe we have far underestimated, due to racist fantasies like the “Greek miracle,” is its multiculturalism. The world of archaic Greece (and before) was heavily engaged with people from other language groups and cultures. Since the decipherment of the Gilgamesh poems, scholars have seen deep thematic and linguistic parallels between the remains of the ancient Near East and early Greek poetry. A lot of this is detailed well in M. L. West’s The East Face of Helicon; Mary Bachvarova’s From Hittite to Homer is revelatory in providing even more material from ancient Asia Minor. The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.
The Venetus A Manuscript offers a similar image (lower left of Folio 100 verso
Transmission Models and Stages for the Epic
There are three primary transmission models that present different dates for the textualization of the Homeric epics.
1000-800 BCE Homer at the Origin of Culture (Barry Powell and Friends)
800-510 BCE Dictation Theories (Richard Janko; Minna Skafte Jensen; see Jonathan Ready’s recent book for an overview)
800-c. 280 BCE: Evolutionary Model (Gregory Nagy)
I lean really heavily toward the third option with one caveat, it still requires a bit of magical thinking or at least a suspension of disbelief. We don’t know how or when the epics we have were put down in writing, although it is clear from textual evidence that they went through ‘sieves’ or ‘funnels’ in Athens prior to the Hellenistic period and in Hellenistic libraries (and I will talk about Power and Publishing in a later post.)
To my taste, the two earlier models require equally magical thinking with somewhat more dismissiveness: the first requires an ahistorical and unlikely narrative for the adoption of writing in Greece and the promulgation of texts. It insufficiently considers the material conditions for the textualization of the epics and the adoption of the new technology for a performance form. (Like most arguments, it is driven by an ideology that encourages that magical thinking.) The second is easier to accept, but it does not account for motivations for dictation or the material conditions for preservation and dissemination. As Jensen observes, if the text were in fact written down during the 6th century, we have no evidence for its wide dissemination as a monumental text nor its use in literary reading apart from performance. The third option is the hardest to accept because of its complexity; but once accepted, it provides the most dynamic models of meaning-making available to Homeric interpreters.
The process and moment of epic textualization is an aporia–it is an unresolvable problem. Even if it were resolved, it would not change the history of the reception of the text. Rather than worry overmuch about the method and time of textualization, I think it is more useful to think about the impact of the epics being different things over time. So, I like to break the stages of these diachronic objects down as follows (and, to be clear, we have evidence for people engaging with the texts in the following ways.
Stages of performance, textuality, and fixity
Oral composition and Performance ?-5th century BCE
Canonization, Panhellenization 8th Century BCE through 323 BCE
Episodic engagement and occasional monumental performance, ?-4th Century BCE
Textualization, 6th-4th Centuries BCE
Editing and Standardization, 323 BCE-31 BCE (?)
Passage Use in Rhetorical Schools 280 BCE-? (5th Century CE? 12th century CE)
Creation of Synoptic Manuscripts we have, 9-12th Century BCE
These stages, to my mind, represent the full range of metamorphoses for the diachronic objects we currently possess, on a scale from least to most certainty. We have Byzantine manuscripts–they provide us with the texts we translate from to this day. We only have partial evidence for everything before that.
Reception Models
“What is lacking in Homer, that we should not consider him to be the wisest man in every kind of wisdom? Some people claim that his poetry is a complete education for life, equally divided between times of war and peace.”
Quid Homero deest, quominus in omni sapientia sapientissimus existimari possit? Eius poesim totam esse doctrinam vivendi quidam ostendunt, in belli tempora pacisque divisa, Leonardo Bruni de Studiis et Litteris 21
I think it is important to distinguish between models for transmission and reception of the Homeric epics, even if they overlap to a significant extent. The former is about what we can say about where our physical texts came from; the latter is about how versions of the epics have been used by audiences over the years.
The main thing I want to emphasize here–and which I will elaborate on more in a later post–is that for most of the history of the transmission of the Homeric epics only a small percentage of people would have read them from beginning to end as we do today. Ancient performances would have been more frequently episodic (that is, performance of specific parts or scenes). Even in the case of monumental performances, audience engagement over several days would be effectively episodic as people tuned in and out of the performance.
The more I think about the evidence we have for the use of Homer in antiquity, I convince myself that a majority of Hellenistic through Byzantine era readers were primarily engaging with excerpts and passages for rhetorical training rather than reading through the whole beginning to end (with the exception of editors and scholars who dedicated their lives to thinking about the whole).
So, when I think of what people have done with these objects over time, I split them into post-performance era stages of reception
Panhellenic Authority
Hellenistic/Greco-Roman Authority/Literary Model
Renaissance Model/Authority
Modern Canon
Each of these periods has different assumptions about what the Homeric epics do in the world and in response prompt different questions from the epics on the part of interpreters. Not to be lost in this periodization is the implication that as early as Aristotle (if not a century before that), the Homeric epics as cultural objects do something different for the communities that praised them than they did during their first singing(s). So, when we talk about the Homeric epics, I think it is useful to acknowledge that nearly every interpretive engagement is anachronistic. We should not forbid this, but instead be careful to identify the layers of historical notions piled upon them.
In addition, I think if we look at the stages of transmission and reception together, one really important detail to consider is whether audiences were engaging with the Greek as ‘native’ speakers or learners and when they were working only with translation. This likely changed over time, but my sense is that most people who engaged with Homer in antiquity were reading it as a learned dialect, either an extension of their native Greek or as part of a language learned during their education. Translations like those of Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey were literary events of their own and should be treated that way.
With the Renaissance, I think we can safely say that most Western European encounters with Homer were with passages or translations (Petrarch famously mentions putting Homer into Latin). Whole there were certainly excellent scholars in every nation who read Homer in Greek, I think the story of Homer in the modern canonization is of an idea in translation.
Iliad 12, from the Venetus A Manuscript (via the Homer Multitext Project)
Some things cited/Some things to read.
Bachvarova, Mary R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Foley, J. M. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington.
———. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia.
———. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
“The rest of them were sitting, and they had taken their seats. Only Thersites, a man of measureless speech, was still declaring– A man who knew many disordered things in his thoughts and who Strived pointlessly with kings out of order, –whatever he thought would be amusing to the Argives. And he was the most shameful man who came to Troy. He was cross-eyed and crippled in one foot. His shoulders Were curved, dragged in toward his chest. And on top His head was misshaped, and the hair on his head was sparse. He was most hateful to both Achilles and Odysseus For he was always reproaching them. Then he was shrilly cawing At lordly Agamemnon again, as he spoke reproaches. The Achaeans Were terribly angry at him and were finding fault in their heart. As he shouting greatly, he was reproaching Agamemnon.”
Thersites’ description also uses some language of disability in the ancient world: here, aiskhos (for “ugly” or “deformed”) and khlôlos (for “crippled” or lame”). The correlation between the disorderliness of his body and thoughts (ὃς ἔπεα φρεσὶν ᾗσιν ἄκοσμά) may not be causative, but it helps to establish a meaningful relationship between Thersites’ body, his behavior, and the hate his presence elicits.
Schol T. ad Il. 2.216a
“most shameful: this is also said of an ape.”
ex. αἴσχιστος: τοῦτο καὶ ἐπὶ πιθήκου.
Schol. BT [Aristonicus] ad Il. 2.217a
“pholkos: this is spoken once. Homeric pholkos means when the eyes are narrowed together, which means turned.”
Homer presents a overlap between ‘beautiful body’ and ‘beautiful mind’ (a topic I explore in this article.) This physiognomic category error pervades a great deal of classical Greek culture. In the Iliad, Thersites transgresses physical boundaries through his unheroic body and ethical boundaries by using the genre of rebuke upward in the social hierarchy. He is hateful to both Achilles and Odysseus because they exemplify in a complementary fashion the ‘center’ or ideal of the heroic person—Achilles is the beautiful body, Odysseus is a beautiful mind. But both of them stay within the boundaries of ‘normal’ in their own deviance (Achilles’ political straying, Odysseus’ aging, imperfect body).
Thersites, labelled by many as a comic scapegoat, functions as an inferior in order to define the center as non-transgressive. This is, in particular, why he is hateful to Achilles and Odysseus: without him, their persons might be monstrous or disabled. And this also helps explain why Odysseus must physically beat Thersites in public.
But there is a tradition to Thersites outside of the way he is used in Homer. Ancient scholars etymologize his name and report, ironically, that he became disabled because of punishment for cowardice (making his body a marker of the consequences of his character).
Schol. T ad Hom. Il. 212a1 ex
“Thersites: the name is made from the Aiolic [version of tharsos] audacity, thersos. ex. Θερσίτης δ’ ἔτι: ὠνοματοποίησε τὸ ὄνομα παρὰ τὸ θέρσος Αἰολικόν
Schol. D ad Hom. Il. 2.212 [= Euphorion fr. 82]
“Because the goddess was enraged at Oineus’ lack of concern for sacrifices to Artemis, she sent a wild boar against the city. A band of the best of Greece when against it when it was ruining the country, as the poet says in the ninth book. Among them was also Thersites who, because he was coward, abandoned his assigned guard post and went instead hunting safety in some high position. He was being reproached and pursued by Meleager and fell from a cliff; [this is how] he became the sort of man Homer describes him as. Euphorion tells this story.”
“Pherecydes says that [Thersites] was one of those who gathered to hunt the Kalydonian boar but that he was avoiding the fight with the boar and was thrown from a cliff by Meleager. This is how his body was deformed. People say he is a child of Agrios and the daughter of Porthaon. But if he is Diomedes’ relative, there is no way Odysseus would beat him. For he would only hit common soldiers. Hence, [the poet] has deployed him not [because of] his father or his country but only because of his manner and form, the things which the current situation needs.”
In the broader tradition, Thersites’ boldness leads to his death at Achilles’ hands.
Proclus, Chrestomathia 178–184
“Then Achilles killed Thersites because he was mocked by him when he reproached him, claiming he loved Penthesileia. A conflict arose among the Achaeans over the murder of Thersites. After that Achilles went sailing to Lesbos where, after he made a sacrifice to Apollo, Artemis and Leto, he was cleansed of the murder by Odysseus.”
“A bit farther along among the final souls, he saw that of the ridiculous Thersites taking on the form of a monkey. By chance, he came upon the soul of Odysseus last of all as it made its choice still remembering its previous sufferings and, having decided to rest from the pursuit of honor, was spending an excessive among of time seeking the life of an untroubled private citizen. He found it barely situated somewhere and ignored by the rest of the souls. When he saw it, he said that he would have made the same choice even had he drawn the first lot and was happen to make this choice.”
“Accordingly, then, they differ from one another in magnitude of more or less, just as the whiteness in show compares to the whiteness of milk: it is white for each it is not different in this, but it contrasts in being more or less white. In the same manner, if you will allow me to say, the health of Achilles does not differ from that of Thersites: inasmuch as it is health, it is the same, but it differs in another thing.”
Many of the structural and plot questions of the Iliad’s first third can be categorized as anxiety about anachronism, specifically the events that occur within books 2-8 that more ‘logically’ occur prior to the beginning of the Iliad. These include the listing of all the combatants (the catalogue of ships), the teikhoskopia (the viewing from the walls), the duel between Paris and Menelaos, and the building of fortifications around the Greek ships. Amid these actions are the repeated divine councils in books 1, 4, and 8 that clarify the coming action of the epic, and sundry other scenes that don’t really relate to the theme of the rage of Achilles.
When we talk about the postponement of the theme of Achilles’ rage and his presence in the epic, we often compare it to the absence of Odysseus at the beginning of the Odyssey. It is a delaying mechanism that creates magnitude and inspires suspense. But in reviewing the poem again, I think there may be more going on here. Part of books 2-8 is the Iliad answering the challenge of telling the whole of the Trojan War narrative through only a few days. It does this by evoking famous episodes, but I think it also structurally echoes it as well.
A ring structure, the order of events, and the refinement of Zeus’ plan supports this. First, Agamemnon’s speech, longing to go home, is repeated in great part at the beginning of book 9. This speech in its first iteration initiates the series of events that reunify the Achaeans and return them to battle. A great deal of the catalogue of ships sounds like a flashback, taking us to the beginning of the Trojan War. Yet, once the sides are assembled, the plot moves through echoes of the first 9 years of the War before returning to the scene of the rage, in book 9 Agamemnon’s speech is a repetition with a difference, collapsing the action between 1, 2, and 9, and taking us through the years back to the ninth.
Zeus’ plan, referred to in the proem as ongoing, is refined several times during these books: first in 1, where he promises to honor Achilles by having the Trojans win for a while, then in book 4, and again in book 8 where he announces that Hektor will win until he gets to the ships. There has been some debate over what Zeus’ “plan” is at the beginning of the poem, whether it is the plan to rid the earth of the race of heroes, as mentioned at the beginning of the fragmentary Kypria, the plan to repair Achilles’ wounded honor, or the plot of the Iliad itself. The process of refinement we witness in books 1-8 fully integrates all three plans into one. It is a rewriting of the first nine years of the Trojan War to center Achilles’ rage as the pivotal point. This kind of rewriting is daring, from one perspective: it reorders the series of events and causal relationships through a retelling of the past nine years to make this story the most important one.
Here’s a chart I am working on. Note the thematic impact of considering the Iliad‘s structure this way as we move from a fresh start to the war to exhausted and frightened Achaeans by the end.
I am trying to make very little of the fact that nine books are standing in for nine years of the war (Greek poetry tends to count inclusively), but in laying the structure of the first third out like this, it seems clear to me that the structure enables an analepsis (flashback function) in order to revise the war, rewrite Zeus’ plan, and amplify the importance of book 9. Functionally, it covers all the necessary plot points, introduces all the characters and themes of the poem, and enacts the famous inversion of besieger and besieged that makes the rest of the Iliad so powerful
In addition to this, there are several performance models of the Iliad that see the break between 8 and 9 as a possible natural breaking point for the “monumental” performance of the Iliad
Some bibliography on Zeus’ Plan:
Allan, W. 2006. “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 126:1–35.
Barker, Elton. ———. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.
Clay, J. S. ———. 1999. “The Whip and the Will of Zeus.” In Literary Imagination, 1.1:40–60.
Lynn-George, M. 1988. Epos: Word, Narrative, and the Iliad. Atlantic Highlands.
Mayer, K. 1996. “Helen and the ΔΙΟΣ ΒΟΥΛΗ.” The American Journal of Philology 117:1–15.
Marks, J. R. 2002. “The Junction between the Cypria and the Iliad.” Phoenix 56:1–24.
Murnaghan, Sheila. ———. 1997. “Equal Honor and Future Glory: The Plan of Zeus in the Iliad.” In Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. F. M. Dunn, D. P. Fowler, and D. H. Roberts, 23–42. Princeton.
Wilson, D. F. 2002a. Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge.
On the performance of the Iliad and book 8
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. Follow-up posts will address book 8 and other traditions
Cook, Erwin F. “On the ‘Importance’ of Iliad Book 8.” Classical Philology, vol. 104, no. 2, 2009, pp. 133–61. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/605340
Fenno, Jonathan. “‘A Great Wave against the Stream’: Water Imagery in Iliadic Battle Scenes.” The American Journal of Philology 126, no. 4 (2005): 475–504. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804872.
Foley, J. M. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington.
———. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Bruce Heiden. “The Placement of ‘Book Divisions’ in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998): 68–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/632231.
Heiden, B. 2008. Homer’s Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad. Oxford.
Lord, Albert. 2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
MORRISON, J. V. “‘KEROSTASIA’, THE DICTATES OF FATE, AND THE WILL OF ZEUS IN THE ‘ILIAD.’” Arethusa 30, no. 2 (1997): 273–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578099.
Scodel, Ruth. 2002. Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Stroud, T. A., and Elizabeth Robertson. “Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and the Plot of the ‘Iliad.’” The Classical World 89, no. 3 (1996): 179–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/4351783.
Taplin, Oliver. . 1992. Homeric Soundings: The Shape of the Iliad. Oxford.
The second book of the Iliad can be split into three basic sections: the so-called diapeira (Agamemnon’s testing of the troops); the assembly speeches following the rush to the ships in response to the ‘test’ (the protest of Thersites, followed by the speeches of Odysseus and Nestor); and the Catalogue of Ships). Each of these scenes contributes critically to the some of the major themes I have notedto 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 2 are politics and narrative traditions.
Antalya Archaeological Museum. Ancient Roman sarcophagus of Aurelia Botania Demetria ( 2nd century AD ): Achilles striking Thersites.
The first half of book 2 essentially addresses the political problems set into play in book 1: Agamemnon tests his men to see if they are still dedicated to the mission and they run away. Thersites appears to channel some of Achilles’ dissent from book 1 and to act as a scapegoat for that political fracture. When he is literally beaten out of the assembly by Odysseus, it opens up space for Odysseus and Nestor in turn to refocus their efforts, reemphasize their collective goals, and reconstruct Agamemnon’s authority. (Disclosure, I have written on Agamemnon’s test and the debates around it and have some opinions.) I have included a bibliography on Thersites below. I will provide a later post about Agamemnon’s so-called test.
The result of this series of events is clear if you trace the similes of in book 2: the Achaeans start compared to images of clashing and conflict and end up compared to unified forces of nature directed against a common goal. This resolves in part some of the political tension in book 1, but does not address Achilles’ absence fully. The actions of the Achaean assembly are sufficient to return the coalition to war with a unified front, but insufficient to winning there. As part of the larger political theme, this helps to illustrate that the political resilience of the Achaeans, despite their bloody internecine conflict, resides in the multiple leaders who work together.
The unity at the end of the assemblies translates in part to a throwback to the beginning of the war in the performance of the Catalogue of Ships. Strictly speaking, a catalogue of all the participants in the war begins in a very different narrative, not recited nine years after its beginning. I suspect that the Catalogue was a popular motif in antiquity and was integrated into our Iliad both as a recognition of this and as a reflection of its audiences geographical knowledge and political realities. I think this interactive map of the catalogue is really fascinating and worth playing around with. Here’s a list of all the contingents with some links
In addition to being a fascinating reflection on the interaction between mythical space and the lived geography of antiquity, the catalogue is also evidence of how our Homeric epic engages with other versions of its own story and the larger Trojan War narrative in general. The catalogue clearly predates the action of the epic–figures like Philoktetes are listed as being elsewhere or dead (Protesilaos)–and the contents help us to understand the political dynamics: as Nestor puts it in book 1, Agamemnon is powerful politically because he rules over more people.
But the catalogue is also a lesson in how epic narrative works. Every figure is a potential story, a genealogy or a tragedy waiting to be unveiled. At the same time, the catalogue is an opportunity to silence other traditions by leaving them unmentioned, something Elton Barker and I examine in Homer’s Thebes.
Previous generations of scholars might have bracketed the catalogue as being imported from another poem or tradition. I think its position in this book following the reconstitution of the experimental Achaean polity is a brilliant ‘literary’ response to the particular challenge of creating an authoritative Trojan War poem. It makes sense to have a retrospective overview of the war at this point: The test itself raises the question of the stakes of the war; Odysseus and Nestor remind us of its beginning and the anticipated length; and the catalogue itself returns us from the theme of Achaean politics to the war in general. The inclusion of ‘traditional’ material both appropriates other narratives and instrumentalizes them. In effect, the larger mythical storyscape becomes a footnote to the story being told. And the catalogue is re-tunes the audience for the confrontation with the Trojans in book 3. In addition, this use of narrative material extraneous to the timeline of this particular plot also sets the audience up for even more surprising ‘flashbacks’: a duel between Paris and Menelaos (after 9 years!) and Helen’s description of the Greek heroes from the walls of Troy (the so-called Teikhoskopia).
Often left out of discussions of the Catalogue are the Trojans, who get their own list at 2.816-877. As Eunice Kim has recently argued, there is an art and message to this section that helps us to understand Hektor and the Trojans in general. So, make sure you read it to the end! Hilary Mackie’s book Talking Trojan, also has a nice treatment of this section and Benjamin Sammons’ The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue provides a great overview and fine bibliography on this type of poetry in general.
Book 2 touches upon other themes as well. Zeus’ intervention to send Agamemnon a false dream at the beginning of book 2 engages with questions about his “plan” as well as notions of human will and divine fate (so, Gods & Humans) and the inset heroic narratives of the catalogue provide many different ways to think about local heroes and larger traditions (Heroism).
Some guiding questions
What does the Diapeira do and how does it respond to the conflict of Iliad 1?
How do we understand Thersites’ dissent and its treatment?
How would you characterize Nestor and Odysseus in this book?
What are the impact(s) of the catalogue of ships?
Bibliography on Thersites
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
BARKER, ELTON. “ACHILLES’ LAST STAND: INSTITUTIONALISING DISSENT IN HOMER’S ‘ILIAD.’” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, no. 50 (2004): 92–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44696692.
Brockliss, W. 2019. “Out of the Mix: (Dis)ability, Intimacy, and the Homeric Poems.” Classical World 113: 1–27.
Christensen, J. (2021). Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer. Classical World114(4), 365-393. https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2021.0020.
Robert Kimbrough. “The Problem of Thersites.” The Modern Language Review 59, no. 2 (1964): 173–76.
Lowry, E. R. 1991 Thersites: A Study in Comic Shame.
Marks, Jim. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus.” AJP 126:1–31.
Postlethwaite, N. “Thersites in the Iliad.” Greece & Rome 35: 83-95.
Rose, M. L. 2003. The Staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece. Ann Arbor.
ROSE, PETER W. “THERSITES AND THE PLURAL VOICES OF HOMER.” Arethusa 21, no. 1 (1988): 5–25.
Rosen, R. M. 2003. “The Death of Thersites and the Sympotic Performance of Iambic Mock-ery.” Pallas 61:21–136.
Stuurman, Siep. “The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of Equality.” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 2 (2004): 171–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654205.
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.
Williams, B. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley and Los Angeles
Anyone who knows me would be unsurprised that I generally set out to start talking about the Iliad and take rather long to get to the point. Once, probably in 2003 or so, my wife asked me to tell her what the epic was about. After 45 minutes or so, she interrupted me and asked me what point of the poem I was talking about. She was somewhat unamused that I had not yet finished book 1.
Anyone who knows the Iliad well should not find this surprising. The epic is filled with action; but even the ‘simple’ scenes are full of associated meanings, replete with potential resonances, and deeper meanings based on what one knows (or think they know). On top of this there are thousands of years of interpretive traditions and engagements that are labyrinthine enough to make Reddit seem linear.
So, one of the things I find to be useful when teaching Homer or guiding people through the Iliad is to focus on a handful of themes. By nature of both the structure of the poem and the character of its plot, the Iliad presents a series of interwoven themes that ebb and flow as the epic progresses to its end. To return to the musical composition analogy I use in another post, I think it is helpful to imagine certain melodies or movements introduced early in the epic and reintroduced for new meaning and contrast as the plot moves us from one notional position to another. The repetition here is far from simple iteration: each return to familiar language and ideas is a repetition with difference: the audience and the characters are changed by the events that unfold, and the combination and reintroduction of themes in the changing contexts has a complicating if not generative effect.
I hope to highlight activations of these themes in posts on each book, but before I start on that project, I want to summarize them and anticipate their major movements. As a note, there are sub-themes I consider more like contributing motifs (e.g. ransom, xenia, mourning) or imagery (e.g. water, fire, laughter); and some of the themes I emphasize may be better posed as subordinate in some way. I think readers and teachers are free to identify and explore other themes as well. The five themes I like to emphasize are (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans); (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions. I will give brief introductions to each in this post and follow up with additional references when I focus on these themes in subsequent posts.
Politics
“Really, may I be called both a coward and a nobody If I yield every fact to you, whatever thing you ask”
As everyone knows from the beginning of the Iliad, the epic is not about the Trojan War, it is a story set within it. It is, according to its own proem, a tale of how Achilles’ rage brought ruin on his own people. The Iliad is intensely political in that it asks questions about where authority should come from, who should wield it, how they should wield it, and what the consequences of dysfunctional politics may be. The primary ‘melody’ in this movement is of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, but this reverberates through questions of how the war is prosecuted by the Greeks, how they maintain their coalition, and how their experimental polity compares to the governance of Olympos and and the politics of the city of Troy.
There has been a lot written about the political conflicts among the Greeks but much less on Trojan politics and even less on divine political arrangements. I have argued more than once that to really get into the political questions of the Iliad, we need to understand that the epic explores politics on three separate stages (the Greeks, Trojans, and Gods) that are both comparative and contrastive. The major political treatments of the Greeks occur in books 1, 2, 4, 9, 19, and 23. (People often miss that the Funeral Games of Patroclus are an attempt by Achilles to explore different allocations of goods and power). Trojan politics are really emphasized in books 2 (briefly in the catalogue of ships), in the contrast of assemblies in book 7, in the depiction of Hektor in books 6, 8, 12, 13, 18, 22 (especially in his engagement with Polydamas). The politics of the Gods are explored in assemblies/exchanges in books 1, 4, 8, 15, 16, and 24.
Heroism
“Homer made Achilles the best man of those who went to Troy, Nestor the wisest, and Odysseus the most shifty.”
It is really hard to talk about the Homeric epics without talking about “heroism”. I start by explaining to students that, rather than evoking notions of virtue and self-sacrifice, in epic poetry a “hero” can mean three things: (1) a person in their full bloom of strength (in accord with the etymology shared with the name Hera); (2) a member of the generation before ours, the race of Heroes as described in Hesiod’s Works and Days; or (3) a figure who follows a narrative pattern of withdrawal and return (see Oedipus, Perseus, etc. Note, I am not using the language Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.). Homeric heroes, as Erwin Cook describes them, are not savior figures, but are instead figures who suffer and cause suffering. These three ideas are oversimplifications as well: there is a religious/cult aspect to heroes outside the worlds of the poems, explored well by scholars like Greg Nagy.
I think that the Iliad emphasize that heroes are dangerous to communities and that the Iliad and Odyssey together work in concert to provide an etiology for the destruction of the race of heroes, a justification for their absence from our world, and an exploration of how we value human beings across sub-themes like words/deeds, community/individuals, destruction/construction, mortality and immortality, etc. There is almost no book of the Iliad that doesn’t address heroism in some way, but the chief ones follow Achilles and Hektor with some interludes treating characters like Aeneas (5 and 22), Sarpedon (12 and 16), or Lykaon (21). For Achilles and Hektor, see especially Books 1, 6, 9, 11, 16, 22, and 24
Gods and Humans
“Whenever the poet turns his gaze to divine nature, then he holds human affairs in contempt.”
ὅταν δὲ ἀποβλέψῃ εἰς τὴν θείαν φύσιν ὁ ποιητής, τότε τὰ ἀνθρώπινα πράγματα ἐξευτελίζει Scholion to Homer
As Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold argue in their book Homer: The Resonance of Epic, the Homeric epics are part of a sequence with Hesiodic poetry that traces “cosmic history” from the foundation of the universe to the lives of archaic Greek audience. Part of this movement in Homer is to establish metaphysical ‘baselines’, the differences between gods and human beings, and what to expect from the human lives. The Iliad helps to explain why the worlds of gods and humans should be more separate, explores the relationship between divine will and human agency, and also provides a backdrop for the shared beliefs and customs of the Greeks that we might call ‘religion’ today.
The depiction of the gods can be difficult because they are at once characters in the narrative and reflections of actual Greek beliefs. Ancient and modern critics have been troubled by the less-than-positive depiction of the gods (Xenophanes and Heraclitus famously complained about it). But the general literary view is that the gods provide the framework for underscoring the importance of human behavior. Gods can misbehave, they can cheat, and lie and commit adultery because they are immortal. They don’t face the same level of consequences that human beings do because they have virtually limitless opportunities to screw up and try again. In line with the theme of heroism, the treatment of mortality and immortality in the Iliad helps audiences to understand that human lives have meaning because they are limited.
Interactions between the gods and humans happen throughout the epics, but some of the most critical moments are when the gods intervene in human actions or reflect on them in Books 1, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 24. Of chief importance among these are the speeches of Zeus, the discussion about the death of Sarpedon, and the final divine assembly in book 24 that (re-)establishes the primacy of burial and mourning rites.
Lekythos, ca. 550–530 BCE. Attributed to the Amasis painter. Scenes of weaving, upright loom. Terracotta, H. 17.15 cm The Met
Family & Friends
Throughout the themes I have already discussed, the sub-theme or motif of violence is dominant. Indeed, one way of thinking about the Iliad is that it is a prolonged invitation to think about war and when to fight. The answer I think it gives is that we should fight to defend the people we love and for little else. Sub-themes within this are women and children in Homer and the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos. Indeed, just as violence could be its own theme, so too could the treatment and experience of women in Homeric epic. I generally discuss these topics as a group because they orbit around Homeric treatments of heroes, politics, and violence. The place of friends and enslaved women is central to the political questions of book 1, but we see them both especially in the depiction of Trojan families. Book 6 is a powerful opportunity to think about life during wartime for non-combatants, as are the laments of books 18 and 24.
Narrative Traditions
One of the topics I have long been most interested in is how Homeric epic relates to other narrative traditions. (This is the motivating question at the core of the book I wrote with Elton Barker, Homer’s Thebes). I provide an overview of some of these issues in my post on Centaurs, but I think the question of how Homeric epic appropriates from and responds to other mythical narratives is key to understanding its composition, the date of its composition, and its eventual pre-eminence. A simple place to start is with the stories Homeric heroes tell (the paradeigmata), but there are moments of engagement with other traditions in nearly every line of Homeric epic. How we think about these engagements–whether they are allusions, intertexts, or something else–are important questions in current Homeric scholarship that also reflect how we think about the making of meaning and storytelling in general. One of the things I really like to emphasize is that the Iliad seems very conscious not just of other story traditions but of its own status as a story to be used as a (counter-)model for their lives.
Lekythos, ca. 550–530 B.CE. Attributed to the Amasis painter. Scenes of weaving, upright loom. Unrolled. The Met. Accession Number: 31.11.10
Some resources for thinking about Homer and History.
Achilles—like most of us—attributes motivations to others. He interprets the world and his misinterpretations often have disastrous effects. During a famous scene in book 1, I think we can see a strategy for managing and redirecting this tendency.
Iliad 1.202-204
“Why have you come here, child of aegis-bearing Zeus? Is it so that you may see the hubris of Agamemnon, Atreus’ son? But I declare this and I think it will happen this away: He is going to destroy his own life soon because of his arrogance.”
When people think about Greek myth—and heroes in particular—they often bring up the concept of hubris, that excess of behavior, be it a specific act of outrage or a general demeanor, that is often mischaracterized as a kind of character ‘flaw’. (See this brief post about why the tragic flaw is a misunderstanding.) And while any reasonable reader can certainly see the thematic patterns of excess and arrogance as significant to the Iliad, the word itself appears sparingly in the epic. Of its four occurrences, two appear in Achilles’ exchange with Athena as he briefly considers just killing Agamemnon during the conflict in book 1.
One of the topics I am probably too obsessed with in my re-reading(s) of the Iliad is the extent to which characters are narrativizing their lives. What I mean by this are those scenes where it is either clear or arguable that we as audience members might imagine Homeric characters as acting under the influence of stories. This is what I think happens in book 9 when Achilles is seen singing the stories of famous heroes and then reinterprets Phoinix’s story of Meleager.
In addition to clear moments where external stories are implicated in the shaping (or misshaping) of the Iliad’s tale, I think we can also take some cues from moments of clear theatricality. Here, I don’t mean excessive behavior or histrionics, but those moments where the observation of a character’s action is shown to be determinative in the viewer’s subsequent behavior. This is ‘dramatic’ in the sense that it provides a show to be watched and interpreted by others; but it is also meta-mimetic, in that it inspires a change of action in the viewer, either in mirroring or reflecting on the action being seen.
In this later category, I have in mind Achilles’ lamentation for Patroklos that inspires similar emotions and actions from the epic’s internal audiences (both other Achaeans and the gods) or the final scene between Priam and Achilles that builds on those earlier exchanges, where Achilles and Priam feel pity and through sympathy identify with each other’s essential humanity, even if only briefly. In my current reading of this movement, Achilles’ extreme position as an elevated hero renders all of his actions larger-than-life with corresponding consequences. The epic strains to show the damage of Achilles self-absorption and how hard it is for him to see in others the suffering he recognizes in himself. While he weeps for Patroklos in book 19, he still primarily laments his own loss; when he identifies with Priam in book 24, he has a fleeting moment of self-transcendence, a humanizing instant. The epic’s point—I think—is both that such moments are possible and necessary to transcend our selfish violence but also that they are very hard to achieve, and nearly impossible to do so if everything about your own identity leads you to center yourself and your experiences to the detriment of all else in the world.
In re-reading the Iliad again, one of the things I am contemplating is the extent to which everyone ‘manages’ Achilles’ feelings and expectations. When Athena arrives, he asks her a direct question and makes it very clear what he thinks is going on. Athena’s response is a careful study in effective ‘de-escalation; another way to put it, is that she ‘manages’ Achilles by using his concepts and words and then forestalls the satisfaction of his rage by redirecting him:
“I have come for the purpose of slowing your anger, if you’ll consent, From the sky. Hera, that white-armed goddess sent me, Since we both love you and care about you in our hearts. But, come, lay off the conflict, don’t draw your sword to hand. But rebuke him with words about how it will turn out. For I am declaring this and this is what will happen: At some point you’ll get three times as many glorious gifts In exchange for this outrage. But you, hold back. Listen to me.
Athena doesn’t mince words to start: she tells Achilles’ what she is there to do (stop his wild behavior) and explains the authority behind her actions (Hera and herself). She uses direct imperatives to avoid any confusion and mirrors the structure of his speech: he makes a prediction (or a threat) and she makes a promise that he will receive more later. Only after using these strategies does she return to Achilles’ own language (hubris), using a demonstrative to acknowledge his views, without specifying the behavior that qualifies as such.
Achilles Restrained by Athena, Johan Tobias Sergel (c. 1740-1814)
The reason I think this is a moment of narrativization is that Achilles expects a reaction from the gods for a certain kind of behavior: cosmic offense against the gods (i.e., hubris) is punished by divine will. To my reading, Achilles complains of a cosmic wrong to his being that is analogous to stories of myth. He sees Agamemnon as an arrogant mortal striving against a heroic demigod and articulates his expectation of divine recompense at Athena’s arrival. (We may even imagine him as anticipating the comeuppance himself and then reassigning the role to Athena when she appears).
We should not underestimate the importance, then, when Athena characterizes the issue as one of strife (eris). Achilles presents the situation using one kind of a mythical script: mortal commits hubris receives divine punishment. But Athena restates the experience using a different script: mortals involved in eris over a distribution of goods. Her promise that Achilles will receive three times more his lost compensation assures Achilles that Agamemnon has done wrong, but her framing of the situation shifts it from one story pattern to another.
At the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon refusers to honor the ransom request of Chryses for his daughter Chryseis and this prompts the “rage of Apollo” and the plague that initiates the epic’s conflict. When Achilles calls an assembly after nine days of suffering, the poem introduces the seer Calchas:
Homer, Iliad 1.69-72
"Kalkhas the son of Thestor, the best of the bird-men readers
who knew what is, what will be, and what was before,
and lead the ships of the Achaeans to Troy
through the power of prophecy Phoibos Apollo granted him.
Κάλχας Θεστορίδης οἰωνοπόλων ὄχ' ἄριστος,
ὃς ᾔδη τά τ' ἐόντα τά τ' ἐσσόμενα πρό τ' ἐόντα,
καὶ νήεσσ' ἡγήσατ' ᾿Αχαιῶν ῎Ιλιον εἴσω
ἣν διὰ μαντοσύνην, τήν οἱ πόρε Φοῖβος ᾿Απόλλων·
The scholia to this passage suggest that Calchas led them to Troy and prophesied that it would take 10 years (a story told by Odysseus in Iliad 2). After Calchas speaks, however, Agamemnon’s aggressive response has prompted many questions:
Iliad 1.106-9
"Prophet of evils, you've never said anything good for me!
It's always dear to your thoughts to prophesy wicked things--
you never utter or complete any kind of noble word!"
μάντι κακῶν οὐ πώ ποτέ μοι τὸ κρήγυον εἶπας·
αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ' ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι,
ἐσθλὸν δ' οὔτέ τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ' ἐτέλεσσας·
Schol. T. ad Hom. Il. 1.106b
“The poet does not know the name Iphigenia. Since it is not known, then this is not an issue of a falsification, but [Agamemnon] is speaking his slander because of the delay of the victory.”
The D Scholia (to lines 108=109b) insist that the “younger poets” (neoteroi i.e., later accounts) tell the story of Calchas’ prophecy at Aulis. Whether or not ‘Homer’ ‘knew’ the tale is immaterial, I think, because later audiences certainly knew it and could have attributed the tension in book 1 to that event. The Homeric Iliad is perfectly capable of suppressing details that serve its own ends; and ancient scholars are equally capable of taking Homeric poetry at its face value. The question for me is how does it change our reading of the Iliad to imagine that we could be thinking about Iphigenia.
At one level, this might be too much: there’s already a sufficient thematic pattern in a leader (here, a king) at odds with an expert with unwanted knowledge (here, a prophet). Consider, for example, the similar beginning to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. However, it seems to me highly unlikely that audiences of the fifth century did not think of Iphigenia at the beginning of the poem. Homer “not knowing” the name Iphigenia could mean simply that; or, it could be one of many examples of Homeric poetry downplaying details that are not convenient to its plot. A clear allusion to a sacrificed daughter might change the way we think of Agamemnon when he refuses to return a daughter at the beginning of the poem.
The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a pivotal moment in the tale of the House of Atreus—it motivates Agamemnon’s murder and in turn the matricide of Orestes—and the Trojan War, functioning as it does as a strange sacrifice of a virgin daughter of Klytemnestra in exchange for passage for a fleet to regain the adulteress Helen, Iphigeneia’s aunt by both her father and mother. The account is famous in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and the plays Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides. Its earliest accounts, however, provide some interesting variations:
Hes. Fr. 23.13-30
“Agamemnon, lord of men, because of her beauty,
Married the dark-eyed daughter of Tyndareus, Klytemnestra. She gave birth to fair-ankled Iphimede in her home And Elektra who rivaled the goddesses in beauty. But the well-greaved Achaeans butchered Iphimede on the altar of thundering, golden-arrowed Artemis on that day when they sailed with ships to Ilium in order to exact payment for fair-ankled Argive woman— they butchered a ghost. But the deer-shooting arrow-mistress easily rescued her and anointed her head with lovely ambrosia so that her flesh would be enduring— She made her immortal and ageless for all days. Now the races of men upon the earth call her Artemis of the roads, the servant of the famous arrow-mistress. Last in her home, dark-eyed Klytemnestra gave birth after being impregnated by Agamemnon to Orestes, who, once he reached maturity, paid back the murderer of his father and killed his mother as well with pitiless bronze.”
This fragment presents what is possibly the earliest account of the tale of Iphigenia and contains the major elements: the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter is tied to vengeance against Helen; the daughter is rescued by Artemis, made immortal and made her servant. [In some traditions she is either made immortal or made into a priestess of Artemis at Tauris]. Orestes kills the murderer of his father and his mother.
Note that several details are not spelled out, but assumed: namely, Agamemnon’s agency in the death of his daughter (either in angering the goddess or in arranging her sacrifice) and the murder of Agamemnon. Note as well, the name is different: here we have Iphimedê instead of Iphigeneia. Of course, the situation gets stranger: according to Pausanias (1.43.1) Artemis turned Iphigeneia into Hekate. According to Proclus (in his Chrestomathia, “useful knowledge”; 135-143), the story was told in the Kypria as follows:
“When the fleet gathered a second time at Aulis, Agamemnon struck a deer while hunting and claimed he had surpassed Artemis. The goddess, enraged, kept them from sailing by sending storms. When Kalkhas explained the origin of the goddess’s anger and called for Iphigeneia to be sacrificed to Artemis, they attempted to complete the sacrifice by sending for her with the pretext of a marriage to Achilles. But Artemis snatched her away and settled her among the Taurians and made her immortal; she put a deer in place of the girl on the altar.”
In the fifth century, the story becomes a little more consistent: Aeschylus’ account is probably the best known (Agamemnon, 229-249) but Pindar discusses it too (Pyth. 11.22-28)
“Was it the fact that Iphigeneia
was butchered far from her homeland at Euripos that incited [Klytemnestra’s] heavy-handed rage? Or did nocturnal sex, breaking her to another’s bed, lead her astray? That is most hateful and intractable in young wives—but it is impossible to hide because of other people’s tongues: Townsfolk are gossip-mongers.”
Sophokles, who also wrote an Iphigeneia (lost), has Elektra defend her father’s decision by portraying him as accidentally killing the deer and having no choice in the killing of his daughter (Elektra, 563-576).
The situation with the naming of the daughters of Agamemnon is a bit knotty. In the Iliad he declares: “I have three daughters in my well-made home / Khrysothemis, Laodikê, and Iphianassa” (τρεῖς δέ μοί εἰσι θύγατρες ἐνὶ μεγάρῳ εὐπήκτῳ / Χρυσόθεμις καὶ Λαοδίκη καὶ ᾿Ιφιάνασσα, 9.144-145) whereas the Hesiodic fragment cited above lists only two (Elektra and Iphimedê). Some scholars have assumed that Homer suppresses the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (although the events of the epic’s first book seem to rely on that tension). According to Aelian the name Elektra was a pejorative nickname for Laodikê (Varia Historia, 4.26):
“Xanthus the lyric poet—the one who was older than Stesikhoros—says that the daughter of Agamemnon Elektra did not have that name at first, but instead was Laodikê. After Agamemnon was killed and Aigisthos married Klytemnestra and was king, because she was “unbedded” (a-lektron) and was growing old as a virgin, the Argives called her Elektra because she didn’t have a husband and had no experience of a marriage bed.”
Aeschylus in his Libation-Bearers gives Agamemnon only Elektra. Sophokles and Euripides preserve Khrysothemis. Strangely, according to one scholion, the lost Kypria named both Iphigeneia and Iphianassa as Agamemnon’s daughters. West (2013, 110) concludes that in this tradition (following Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon once had four daughters).
Fourth Style fresco depicting the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, Naples National Archaeological Museum
Sources: Timothy Gantz. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore, 1993. Bryan Hainsworth. The Iliad: A Commentary. III: books 9-12. Cambridge, 1993. R. Merkelbach and M. L. West. Hesiodea Fragmenta. Oxford, 1967. Glenn Most. Hesiod: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments. Cambridge, 2003. M. L. West. The Epic Cycle. Oxford, 2013.
