Schein - Homeric Epic and Its Reception. Interpretive Essays (2016)

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HOMERIC EPIC AND ITS RECEPTION

Homeric Epic and its

Reception
Interpretive Essays
SETH L. SCHEIN
1
3
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To Sherry and Daniel

Preface
THIS volume is addressed primarily to scholars and students of

ancient Greek literature, in particular those specializing in Homeric
epic and its reception. I hope that it will also be of interest to those
who read Homer in translation and to students of other literatures,
and with that in mind I have translated all the Greek in the main text
of the twelve chapters and almost all the Greek in the footnotes.
These chapters were written over a period of 45 years, during
which I have accumulated many personal and professional debts.
I acknowledge those who helped with individual essays in notes
placed at the end of each chapter, and I also would like to thank the
two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press for their con-
structive criticism and helpful suggestions. More generally I would
like to acknowledge the teaching of Charles Kahn and Howard Porter,
with whom I first studied the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek as an
undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia University, and of
Bruno Snell, with whom I studied ‘the Homeric language’ as a
graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, when he
was Sather Professor of Classical Literature. I also was privileged to
know and at one point work with Ioannis Kakridis, Professor of
Ancient Greek Philology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
whose scholarship and personal example were inspiring. He intro-
duced me to the work of many outstanding European Homerists and,
in some cases, to the scholars themselves, and mainly through him
I came to feel that I was part of a larger community of Homerists
from many countries and spanning multiple generations.
Over the years I have benefited from the ideas, interpretations, and
encouragement of friends and colleagues too numerous to mention or
even to remember. I would, though, like to thank David Bouvier,
Pascale Brillet-Dubois, Georg Danek, Nancy Felson, Katherine Callen
King, Maria Serena Mirto, Sheila Murnaghan, Alex Purves, and
Laura Slatkin for their scholarship, support, friendship, and conver-
sation over the years on Homeric epic and its reception. I would also
like to thank Zoë Stachel for drafting the Indexes. I also am grateful
to the many students with whom I read and discussed Homer at
Columbia University, the State University of New York, College
viii Preface
at Purchase, Queens College and the Graduate School of the City
University of New York, and the University of California at Davis, at
Santa Cruz, and at Berkeley. I benefited greatly from the libraries at
these institutions and the librarians who helped to make my scholarly
work possible.
I would like to thank the editors at Oxford University Press for
their expertise and professionalism. Hilary O’Shea and Charlotte
Loveridge welcomed and encouraged my work; Annie Rose prepared
the book for production; Kizzy Taylor-Richelieu and Emma Slaughter
were the Production Editors, who kept things on course and on
schedule.
I am especially grateful to Heather Watson for her salutary copy-
editing, which improved this book by making it more accurate, clear,
and consistent. Working with her has been enjoyable and instructive.
I would also like to thank Tom Chandler for his alert and beneficial
proofreading.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Albert Schein and
Sylvia Orlikoff Schein, for the copies of the Samuel Butler translation
of the Iliad and the Andrew Lang and Samuel H. Butcher translation of
the Odyssey that I read as a child and for their later encouragement
of my work.
I happily dedicate this book to my wife, Sherry Crandon, and our
son, Daniel Schein.
Acknowledgements and Details

of Original Publication
Chapter 1. ‘The Death of Simoeisios: Iliad 4.473–489’, lightly revised

version of an article originally published in Eranos 74 (1976), 1–5;
reprinted with the kind permission of the Board of Editors of Eranos.
Chapter 2. ‘The Horses of Achilles in Book 17 of the Iliad’, lightly
revised version of a chapter originally published in M. Reichel and
A. Rengakos (eds.), EPEA PTEROENTA: Beiträge zur Homerforschung.
Festschrift für WOLFGANG KULLMANN zum 75. Geburtstag (Franz
Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 2002), 193–205; reprinted with the kind
permission of the Franz Steiner Verlag.
Chapter 3. ‘Odysseus and Polyphemos in the Odyssey’, revised and
expanded version of an article originally published in Greek, Roman
and Byzantine Studies 11 (1970), 73–83; reprinted with the kind
permission of the Editor of Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies.
Chapter 4. ‘Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey: Herakles and the
Bow of Odysseus’, lightly revised version of a chapter originally
published in F. Montanari and P. Ascheri (eds.), Omero tremila
anni dopo (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura: Rome, 2002), 185–201;
reprinted with the kind permission of the Editors and of Edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura.
Chapter 5. ‘Divine and Human in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite’,
revised and expanded version of a chapter originally published in
R. Bouchon, P. Brillet-Dubois, and N. Le Meur-Weissman (eds.),
Hymnes de la Grèce antique: Approches littéraires et historiques (Maison
de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée: Lyon, 2012), 295–312; reprinted with
the kind permission of La Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée.
Chapter 6. ‘Homeric Intertextuality: Two Examples’, lightly revised
version of a chapter originally published in J. N. Kazazis and
A. Rengakos (eds.), Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Epic and its Legacy
in Honor of Demetrios N. Maronitis (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart,
1999), 349–56; reprinted with the kind permission of the Franz
Steiner Verlag.
x Acknowledgements and Original Publications

Chapter 8. ‘Milman Parry and the Literary Interpretation of Homeric
Poetry’, lightly revised version of a chapter originally published in
F. Létoublon (ed.), Hommage à Milman Parry: Le style formulaire de
l’épopée homérique et la théorie de l’oralité poétique (J. Gieben:
Amsterdam, 1998), 275–81; reprinted with the kind permission of
E. J. Brill Publishers.
Chapter 10. ‘Cavafy and Iliad 24: A Modern Alexandrian Interprets
Homer’, revised version of a chapter originally published in
K. C. King (ed.), Homer (Garland Publishing Company: New York,
1994), 177–89; reprinted with the kind permission of the Taylor and
Francis Group.
Chapter 11. ‘“War—What is it Good For?” in Homer’s Iliad and
Four Receptions’, revised and expanded version of an essay scheduled
to appear in V. Caston and S.-M. Weineck (eds.), Our Ancient Wars:
Rethinking War through the Classics (University of Michigan Press:
Ann Arbor, 2016); reprinted with the kind permission of the Univer-
sity of Michigan Press.
Chapter 12. ‘An American Homer for the Twentieth Century’, lightly
revised version of a chapter originally published in B. Graziosi and
E. Greenwood (eds.), Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between
World Literature and the Western Canon (Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2007), 268–85; reprinted with the kind permission of Oxford
University Press.
Contents
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Death of Simoeisios: Iliad 4.473–489 5
2. The Horses of Achilles in Book 17 of the Iliad 11
3. Odysseus and Polyphemos in the Odyssey 27
4. Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey: Herakles and the
Bow of Odysseus 39
5. Divine and Human in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 55
6. Homeric Intertextuality: Two Examples 81
7. A Cognitive Approach to Greek Metre: Hermann’s
Bridge in the Homeric Hexameter and the Interpretation
of Iliad 24 93
8. Milman Parry and the Literary Interpretation of Homeric
Poetry 117
9. Ioannis Kakridis and Neoanalysis 127
10. Cavafy and Iliad 24: A Modern Alexandrian Interprets
Homer 137
11. ‘War—What is it Good For?’ in Homer’s Iliad and Four
Receptions 149
12. An American Homer for the Twentieth Century 171
Bibliography 189
Index of Passages 207
General Index 216
Abbreviations
Cunliffe R. J. Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, new edn.,

Norman, 1963 [1924]
DELG P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque.
Histoire des mots, Paris, 1968–80. 2nd edn. with Supplement,
1999
Ebeling H. Ebeling et al., Lexicon Homericum, 2 vols. Leipzig, 1880–5.
Reprinted Hildesheim, 1963
GH P. Chantraine, Grammaire homérique, 3rd edn. 2 vols. Paris,
1958–63
LfgrE B. Snell et al. (eds.), Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos,
Göttingen, 1955–2010
LSJ Greek–English Lexicon, compiled by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott,
revised by H. S. Jones, 9th edn., Oxford, 1925–40; revised
Supplement by P. G. W. Glare, 1996
RE G. Wissowa et al. (eds.), Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie der
classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Stuttgart, 1894–1980
Introduction
The twelve chapters of this book were written over the past forty-five
years. Chapters 1–6, 8, 10, and 12 are lightly revised (and in some
cases, expanded) versions of previously published papers. Chapters 7,
9, and 11 are new, though a shorter (by 30%) version of Chapter 11
will appear in Caston and Weineck (eds.) 2015. Most of the papers
were originally written for oral presentation. I have kept their original
form and occasionally informal tone in memory of the occasions on
which they were presented and as a tribute to the audiences’ helpful
comments, questions, and suggestions.
The twelve chapters illustrate my long-standing scholarly interests
in, and approaches to, the literary interpretation of Homeric poetry.
Since all but two of the previously published pieces first appeared in
conference volumes and Festschriften that are not to be found in most
North American college and university libraries and not readily
accessible online, I wanted to make them more widely available.
More important, I think that all twelve essays gain by being brought
together in a single volume that focuses on the Iliad, the Odyssey, and
the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite as literary works.
The chapters do not appear in chronological order of composition
or publication, but are grouped thematically and methodologically.
1–3 and 5 pay close attention to the diction, metre, style, and thematic
resonance of particular passages and episodes and combine close
reading with more general ideas and interpretations. Chapters 4, 5,
6, and 7 also focus on diction, style, and thematic resonance and test
the usefulness for literary interpretation of mythological allusion and
intertextuality, hexameter metrics, and the contrast between human-
ity and divinity. Chapters 8 and 9 focus on the work of Milman Parry
and Ioannis Kakridis, who founded the two most fruitful twentieth-
century scholarly approaches to Homeric epic: the study of the Iliad
2 Introduction
and Odyssey as traditional oral formulaic poetry and of the ‘epic tech-
nique of oral versemaking’ (Parry, see Chapter 8) and the ‘Neoanalytical’
approach to the Homeric adaptation and transformation of traditional
mythology, folktales, and poetic motifs (Kakridis, see Chapter 9). Finally,
Chapters 10 and 11 discuss some of the most compelling poetic and
critical receptions of the Iliad since the late nineteenth century, by
Constantine Cavafy, Alice Oswald, Christopher Logue, Simone Weil,
and Rachel Bespaloff, while Chapter 12 studies the institutional recep-
tion of the Iliad and Odyssey in colleges and universities in the United
States over the past two centuries.
*
Some of the interpretive pathways that I explore in this book go back
to my discovery, when I read the Homeric epics as a graduate student,
of the scholarly work of Parry, Kakridis, and Hermann Fränkel, who
demonstrated the fourfold colometric structure of the Homeric hex-
ameter.1 Together, the contributions of these three scholars in the
1920s and 1930s provided a basis for new kinds of literary Homeric
scholarship: they enabled Homerists to get past the ‘weary, stale, flat
and unprofitable’ debates between Analysts and Unitarians that had
dominated Homeric scholarship since the late eighteenth century.
Fränkel and Parry showed, in different ways, that the language, metre,
and style of Homeric epic were traditional and had changed only
minimally over many centuries of oral composition and performance,
and therefore that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, by these criteria
alone, to draw significant conclusions about the contested authenti-
city of particular passages or to attribute specific parts of the poem to
different authors or different eras. Kakridis, on the other hand,
showed how the narrative and mythological inconsistencies and so-
called illogicalities, which Analysts had seen as signs of the work of
different poets at different times, should not be ignored or dismissed
out of hand, as they were by most Unitarians, but should be under-
stood as traces of a single poet’s distinctive appropriation and adap-
tation of traditional narrative or mythological motifs for his own
artistic purposes. It took about another half-century for the debates
between Analysts and Unitarians to give way to more fruitful inter-
pretive approaches (see p. 129), and when things finally changed, it
1
Fränkel 1960 [1926].
Introduction 3
was largely because of the work of Fränkel, Parry, and Kakridis and
scholarship that their writings inspired.
In their discussions of metre and formulaic style, neither Fränkel
nor Parry offered much in the way of literary interpretation, but their
discoveries established a new foundation for such interpretation,
grounded in a truer understanding than had previously existed of
the poems’ metrical, linguistic, and stylistic norms. Kakridis did offer
literary interpretation, but his greatest contribution was to show how
mythological allusion and what today one might call intertextuality
help to shape Homer’s narrative and serve his poetic purposes. Both
Fränkel and Parry, in different ways, made it possible to appreciate
in detail how Homeric epic generates and satisfies audiences’ and
readers’ expectations and desires for the fulfilment of metrical, styl-
istic, and narrative norms and patterns that had been established over
many centuries of poetic tradition, before the Iliad and Odyssey, as we
know them, were written down in the late eighth or early seventh
century BCE. Even more interesting, at least to me, is that Fränkel and
Parry made it possible for audiences and readers to perceive and
appreciate the poetic significance of departures from these norms,
just as Kakridis showed that deviations from traditional mythology
and contradictions in narrative details are best understood as evi-
dence of a creative poet’s distinctive aims and achievements.
Since the 1920s and 1930s, there has been a vast amount of
scholarship on Homeric poetry from which all students of the epics
can now profit, even though no one person can read and profit from
all of it. The essays in this book have benefited, in particular, from
scholarship on the language and style of the epics, their narrative
strategies and techniques, their treatment of time and space, their
representations of social institutions, practices, and values, and the
ways in which they engage listeners and readers artistically and
ethically.
After much consideration, I decided not to revise the nine previ-
ously published essays in any fundamental way, since their arguments
still seem valid. I have, however, corrected errors, made numerous
stylistic improvements, sometimes inserted a sentence or two or even
a whole paragraph, and rewritten and reorganized parts of Chapter 5.
I have not systematically updated the footnotes and bibliography,
though I have made a number of small changes and added new
references here and there to work published since a particular paper
was written, if it seemed especially useful to readers. I have also added
4 Introduction
a short bibliographical postscript to Chapter 3 (the earliest essay in
the book). The original dates of composition of the previously pub-
lished chapters are as follows: 1: 1976, 2: 2002, 3: 1970, 4: 2002, 5:
2012, 6: 1999, 8: 1998, 10: 1994, 12: 2007.
*
I feel fortunate to have been working on Homeric epic during five
decades of outstanding scholarly achievements, which have provided
new resources for my own work and the work of all Homerists
interested in the literary interpretation of the Iliad and Odyssey.
These achievements include the completion of the Lexikon des früh-
griechischen Epos (1955–2010); the revised editions (1962) by
B. Marzullo of the Homer concordances of G. Prendergast and
H. Dunbar, and the computer-generated concordances to both
poems by J. Tebben (1994, 1998); the edition of the Iliad scholia by
H. Erbse (1969–88); P. Chantraine’s Dictionnaire étymologique de la
langue grecque (1968–80, Suppl. 1999); the six-volume Cambridge
commentary on the Iliad, with individual volumes by various scholars
under the general editorship of G. S. Kirk (1985–93), and the three
volume Oxford commentary on the Odyssey, with individual volumes
by various scholars under the general editorship of A. Heubeck
(1988–92, translated with revisions from the six-volume Fondazione
Lorenzo Valla edition and commentary, 1981–6); the recent editions
of the Iliad by M. L. West and the Iliad and Odyssey by H. van Thiel,
the in-progress, multivolume Basel Gesamtkommentar on the Iliad
by various authors, and the smaller-scale commentaries on indi-
vidual books of both poems, published by Cambridge University
Press and Oxford University Press; The Homer Encyclopedia, edited
by M. Finkelberg (2011); and the creation, sophistication, and ever-
increasing availability of texts, commentaries, and other scholarly
resources in electronic form, including the Chicago Homer (at
<http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/homer/>), the Homer Mul-
titext Project (at <http://www.homermultitext.org>), the Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae (at <http://www.tlg.uci.edu>), and the Perseus
Project (at <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu>).2
2
I am grateful to Nancy Felson, Sheila Murnaghan, and Alex Purves for comments
on an initial draft of this Introduction.
The Death of Simoeisios: Iliad 4.473–489
The description of the death of Simoeisios at 4.473–89, which has

been generally neglected by students of the Iliad,1 is the richest and
most exquisite of many passages which recapitulate an important
theme of the poem: the cost in human terms of heroic achievement.
The death of the Trojan youth is, on a smaller scale, analogous to the
tragic destiny of Hektor and of Troy itself as they are portrayed
elsewhere in the poem.
In the Iliad, war is never without a terrible beauty that results from
Homer’s feeling for human brilliance in swift, violent killing and his
simultaneous sense of the loss that the killing involves. On the one
hand, war is the medium of human achievement: bravery and excel-
lence in battle win wealth, honour, and glory, and thus endow life
with meaning.2 On the other hand, the brilliant, flashing action with
which Homer’s warriors kill and which, in a sense, represents for the
poet the fullest realization of human potential, necessarily involves
the death of another warrior or other warriors: limbs that had them-
selves been active become cold and still. Human feelings of love for
and solidarity with comrades, family, and native land are suddenly
ended. Homer never becomes naively sentimental or thoughtlessly
brutal about death. He balances equally the greatness of the slayer and
the humanity of the slain, and shows us the beauty of each. This can
be seen clearly in the Simoeisios episode.
1
Friedrich 1956: 65 and Fenik 1968: 152 note, respectively, the ‘Mitgefühl’ and
‘peculiar pathos’ aroused by the description of Simoeisios’ death. Cf. Komninou-
Kakridi 1947: 44. Strasburger 1954: 37 ff. discusses the passage in light of others that
involve ‘Erweiterungen der Herkunft’ of the victims and contain similes. The present
essay owes much to Strasburger’s perceptive book.
2
Cf. Sarpedon’s speech to Glaukos at Il. 12.310–28.
6 The Death of Simoeisios

Ł’ Æº’ Łø
ıƒe ºÆØ
АYÆ
,
M Ł ŁÆºæe Ø Ø , ‹ Åæ
”ÅŁ ŒÆØ FÆ Ææ’ ZåŁÅØØ Ø
475
ªÆ’, K ÞÆ ŒFØ –’ BºÆ NŁÆØ.
hŒ Ø Œº Ø Ø , Pb ŒFØ
ŁææÆ çº Ø
IøŒ, ØıŁØ
ƒ ÆNg
ºŁ’ ’ `YÆ
ªÆŁ ı ıæd ÆØ.
æH ªæ Ø NÆ º BŁ
Ææa ÆÇe 480
Ø˙ IØŒæf b Ø’ þ ı åºŒ ªå
qºŁ· › ’ K Œ ÅØØ åÆÆd ÆYªØæ

u
,
l Þ ’ K ƒÆBØ º
ªº Ø çŒØ
ºÅ, Iæ ƒ ZÇ Ø K’ IŒæ ÅØ çÆØ·
c Ł’ ±æÆ Åªe
Icæ ÆYŁøØ ØæøØ 485
KÆ’, ZçæÆ Yı ŒłÅØ æØŒÆººœ çæøØ.
’ ±Ç Å ŒEÆØ Æ E Ææ’ ZåŁÆ
.
E ¼æ’ ŁÅ Ø Ø KæØ
`YÆ
Ø ª
. . .
Then Ajax, son of Telamon, killed the son of Anthemion,

unmarried, blooming Simoeisios, whom once his mother
coming down from Ida beside the banks of the Simoeis 475
gave birth to, when she followed along with her parents to see
the flocks.
Therefore they called him Simoeisios. Nor did he give a return
to his dear parents for rearing him, but his life was brief,
conquered by the spear of great-hearted Ajax.
For as he was moving in the front ranks, Ajax hit him in the
chest beside 480
the right nipple; straight through his shoulder the bronze spear
went, and he fell to the ground in the dust like a black poplar,
which has grown in the lowland of a great marsh,
smooth, but branches grow at its very top;
and which a man who makes chariots cuts down with the
shining 485
iron, so he can bend it into a wheel for a very beautiful chariot,
and it lies hardening beside the banks of a river.
Such then was Anthemion’s son, Simoeisios, whom Ajax,
sprung from Zeus, killed.
This seventeen-line passage is framed in normal ring-compositional

style. In 473 and again in 488–9 it is stated that Ajax killed Simoeisios.
It is notable that Ajax is described by the proper adjective ºÆØ
(‘son of Telamon’) in 473 and merely by Ø ª

(‘sprung from Zeus’)
The Death of Simoeisios 7

in 489, while Simoeisios in each case is called the ‘son of Anthemion’—
Łø
in 473 and ŁÅ in 488. In the case of Ajax the
patronymic merely tells us which Ajax is in question and there is no
need to repeat it, but Simoeisios’ repeated patronymic calls attention to
itself. It suggests the word ¼Ł
(‘flower’) and thus associates the youth
with the gentle beauty and natural growth of a flower.3
This vegetal association is reinforced by the comparison of Simoei-
sios’ fall beneath Ajax’s bronze spear to that of a tree cut down by the
‘shining iron’ of a chariot-maker. Just as the chariot-maker puts a
complete end (KÆ’, 486) to what had been a living poplar that
then lies drying, so Ajax ends the life of the youth, whose body, as
dead bodies do, will become dry and hard. That the chariot-maker
cuts down the tree in order to make an instrument of war, a chariot, is
ironically appropriate to Simoeisios’ own effort to be a hero in war: he
is killed æH . . . NÆ (‘moving in the front ranks’, 480).
Simoeisios is called ŁÆºæ (‘blooming’, 474), an etymologically
vegetal word (cf. Łº
, ‘a young shoot or branch’) used elsewhere in
the Iliad of ‘blooming’ or ‘warm’ or ‘lusty’ young men, especially
husbands.4 But he is also M Ł (‘unmarried’, 474). The juxtaposition
of adjectives, virtually an oxymoron, suggests a youth both blooming
and potentially a husband, warmth and energy that might have been
directed toward a fruitful, procreative life but were instead turned
toward war, where death put an end to warmth, flowering, and
potential. The sense of non-fulfilment is strengthened by the detail
that Simoeisios did not repay his dear parents for rearing him
(ŁææÆ, 478 = Attic æ çEÆ, ‘gifts in return for rearing a child’).5
The vignette about Simoeisios’ birth is as moving as the details of
his death. Like many other vignettes and similes in the Iliad, it moves
from the realm of battle and death to a world of peacetime and
everyday life. His mother had been visiting her parents’ flocks on
3
The greater Ajax in the nominative is ºÆØ
`YÆ
21 times at the end of the
hexameter and `YÆ
Ø ªc
(or, in the vocative, `rÆ Ø ª
) five times at the
beginning of the line. Therefore some scholars would doubtless ‘explain’ the epithets
in 473 and 489 merely as normal formulaic language, signifying in each case no more
than ‘Ajax’, which seems to me simplistic. For a theory of the formula and of oral
composition that takes into account questions of ‘denotative and poetic meaning’, see
Nagler 1967: 269–311, revised and expanded in Nagler 1974: 1–63.
4
Young men: Il. 3.26, 10.259, 11.414, 14.4, 17.282; husbands: 6.430, 8.156, 190
(and a wife, 3.53). The word is also used of tears (2.266, 6.496, 24.709, 794), a voice
choked by tears (17.696, 23.397), and, less tenderly, Ares’ thighs (15.113).
5
4.477–9 Pb ŒFØ . . . e ıæd ÆØ = 17.301–3.
8 The Death of Simoeisios

Mt. Ida, an activity no longer possible during the war, and gave birth
to him on the banks of the Simoeis River. One feels the rhythm of a
normal, peaceful pastoral life, and there is a particular significance to
the river as birthplace. As a source of fertility for the Trojan plain and
a landmark associated with the city, the Simoeis, like the Skamandros
River, serves as a kind of landscape symbol of Troy itself. Simoeisios’
death is felt, indirectly and on a small scale, as the death of Troy.6
The detail (487) that the poplar lies hardening by the banks of a
river, Æ E Ææ’ ZåŁÆ
, in itself not especially significant, echoes
Ææ’ ZåŁÅØØ Ø
(475), and thus associates the fall of the tree
more closely with the death of the youth and almost makes visible the
gradual drying and stiffening of his body. Likewise, one can associate
the description of the poplar, ºÅ, Iæ ƒ ZÇ Ø K’ IŒæ ÅØ
çÆØ (‘smooth, but branches grow at its very top’, 484), with that
of Simoeisios. We visualize the smooth body of an adolescent, hairless
except for the top of his head. This vividness makes the whole scene
more poignant, as does the somehow moving detail that Ajax’s spear
struck beside the right nipple. The bronze spear, passing straight
through the shoulder, coldly destroys that which is tender, warm,
rooted in life like the poplar. Yet the youth is destroyed by the highest
Homeric excellence, heroic Iæ, both his own (æH . . . NÆ,
‘moving in the front ranks’, 480) and that of Ajax, whose honour and
glory are based on just such killing of lesser warriors. And the chariot
for the sake of which the poplar is cut down is æØŒÆººœ (‘most
beautiful’, 486).
The Simoeisios passage is but one of many such vignettes and similes
about young men that occur as Homer narrates their deaths. None of
the others is so carefully wrought, but each, to some extent, makes a
reader aware of what the war, with its splendid killing, costs in human
terms. It is significant that almost all the young victims are Trojans, for
the greatest cost of the war is to Troy itself, whose eventual destruction
6
Cf. the battle between Achilles and the river Skamandros in Book 21, where at
first Skamandros calls to Simoeis to rise in defence of Troy (21.308 ff.), and where his
ultimate surrender to Hephaistos explicitly symbolizes the fall of the city. See
Whitman 1958: 140. The death of Simoeisios, by its poetic elaboration, is made far
more significant than the deaths of the superficially similar Satnios (14.442 ff.), who
was also named after the river by whose banks he was born, and of Skamandrios
(5.49), Ilioneus (14.489 ff.), and Tros (20.463 ff.), whose names similarly suggest Troy
or the Trojan landscape. To some extent, every Trojan death prefigures the fall of
Troy. Cf. n. 7.
The Death of Simoeisios 9

is clearly prefigured by that of Hektor (22.410f., 24.728ff.).7 Indeed,
Hektor’s visit with Andromache and Astyanax in Troy in Book 6 is, as
it were, an expanded version, set in the action of the poem, of a vignette
describing how a man had gone to war, leaving his wife and child
whom he was never to see again. Homer achieves a similar effect by the
description at 22.147ff. of how Achilles pursued Hektor past the twin
springs of Skamandros and the washing troughs ‘where the wives and
beautiful daughters of the Trojans used to wash / their shining gar-
ments before, in peacetime’ (22.155–6). Here Homer suspends an
image of the normal, domestic life of the Trojans ‘before the sons of
the Achaians came’ in the midst of the climactic episode of the war and
of the poem. The effect of this juxtaposition is to remind a listener or
reader of the social cost of Achilles’ supreme heroic act. Hektor dies
fighting not only for glory but for a life of peace and tender domesticity,
a life of which he and Andromache are the prime exemplars and which,
in the Iliad, is characteristically Trojan.
‘The whole Iliad, we should not forget, is from beginning to end a
poetry of death (Todesdichtung).’8 In the deaths of minor figures like
Simoeisios and major warriors like Hektor, Homer expresses his
profound perception of the cost of the heroism that the Iliad cele-
brates and of the poem’s representation of the tragic nature of the
human condition.
7
Cf. Strasburger 1954: 125: ‘The Trojans constitute the far greater number of the
fallen, because they are from the start the weaker ones, the losers hastening towards
their destruction . . .’. It is no coincidence that, with one exception (5.559 f.), all the
warriors who fall like trees are on the Trojan side: 13.178 ff., 13.389 ff. = 16.482 ff.,
14.414 ff., 17.53 ff.; cf. 13.436 ff.
8
Reinhardt 1951: 338 = Reinhardt 1960: 13.
The Horses of Achilles in Book 17

of the Iliad
The scene in which the horses of Achilles stand immobile on the field of
battle, weeping for the dead Patroklos, and Zeus asks himself why the
gods involved them in the miseries of mortal existence (17.426–55),
memorably expresses the poem’s fundamental contrast between div-
inity and humanity and anticipates its emphasis in the final seven
books on the mortality and death of Achilles. Although, like the rest
of the Iliad, this scene is composed of traditional formulas and themes,
as a whole it is ‘unparalleled’ and ‘unlike anything else in the poem’.1 In
this chapter, through close attention to its diction, style, and thematic
resonance, I attempt to elucidate the significance of this remarkable
episode for the overall interpretation of the Iliad.
The scene with the horses takes place at a point in the narrative
when the two armies have taken turns pushing one another back from
the body of Patroklos (17.270–80, 316–32, 342–3) and are locked in
desperate, relentless combat (384–422). The scene is introduced by
twenty-five lines that are noticeably unusual in their diction, syntax,
and the action they describe—lines that help to establish the context
in which the passage about the horses should be understood.
17.400–1 sum up, as it were, the desperate battle raging over the
corpse of Patroklos since the beginning of the Book, and sound the
note of divine responsibility for human suffering in a deadlocked
battle: E Zf Kd —ÆæŒºøØ I æH ŒÆd ¥ø / X
ÆØ HØ
Kı ŒÆŒe (‘Such an evil toil of men and horses did Zeus /
draw tight over Patroklos on that day’).2 Æ ø, ‘draw tight’, and its
1
Fenik 1974: 180.
2
Cf. 13.358–60, with the comment by Janko 1992: 92 ad loc.
12 The Horses of Achilles

near synonym ø are regularly used in descriptions of deadlocked
combat, usually with explicit reference to a god or gods as responsible
for the human struggle (11.336, 13.359, 14.359, 16.662; 12.436 =
15.413, 17.543, 736, 20.101). Lines 400–1, however, are stylistically
and formulaically atypical in several ways. For example, it is unusual
for a genitive or genitives at the end of one line to be governed by a
word (, ‘toil’) in the third colon of the following line, and
unparalleled that X
ÆØ in 401 is followed simply by the demonstra-
tive HØ (‘on that day . . .’) rather than by a ‹ clause (‘on the day
when . . .’).3 Most striking, however, is the phrase I æH ŒÆd
¥ø (‘of men and horses’), which is unique in Homeric poetry,
where ¥ø ŒÆd I æH (‘of horses and men’) is the usual formu-
laic phrase (8.214, 10.338, 17.740, 21.16). The reversed order of the
nouns, with ¥ø coming emphatically at the end of the line,
anticipates the focus on the horses of Achilles in 426ff., and the
multiple stylistic anomalies call attention to these lines and heighten
a listener’s or reader’s focus on what follows.
Lines 401–11 move from the action on the battlefield to the mind
of Achilles:
P ’ ¼æÆ Ø
XØ —æŒº ŁÅÆ E åØºº ·
ººe ªæ Þ’ IıŁ H
æÆ Łø,
åØ o æø·
Ø h º Łı
HØ
Ł
, Iººa Çøe KØåæØ
çŁÆ ºÅØØ 405
ił IØ, Kd P b e º
Æ,
KŒæØ ºŁæ ¼ı Ł, P f ÆPHØ·
ººŒØ ªaæ ª
Åæe K Ł çØ IŒ ø,
l ƒ IÆªªººŒ ˜Øe
ªºØ Å
Æ.
c ª’ h ƒ Ø ŒÆŒe ‹ K åŁÅ 410

Åæ, ‹Ø Þ ƒ ºf çºÆ þºŁ’ KÆEæ.
Achilles was not yet
afraid that Patroklos was dead, because the fighting
was taking place a great distance away from the ships,
beneath the walls of Troy; he never expected in his heart
that he was dead, but that he would return alive, 405
after going right up to the gates, for he didn’t at all expect
that he would sack the city without him, or even with him;
for often, listening apart, he had learned this from his mother,
3
Edwards 1991: 100 on 400–1. On X
ÆØ HØ . . . , see de Jong 1987: 234–5.
The Horses of Achilles 13
who would report to him the intention of great Zeus.

Then, however, his mother did not tell him how great an evil 410
had happened, that the comrade who was by far the dearest to
him had perished.
It is relatively rare in Iliadic narrative to be told at such length what

a character is thinking, as opposed to learning this from his or her
words in direct discourse. Here the report of Achilles’ thoughts sets
the scene with the horses in the context of his personal loss and of the
futility associated with being the son of Thetis. Nowhere else do we
hear that Thetis ‘would report to [Achilles] the intention of great
Zeus’, though we see her doing so at 24.133–7. This detail arouses pity
for Achilles on the part of a listener or reader by making him seem
hopeful and unaware of impending disaster.4 It anticipates Achilles’
recollection at 18.9–11 that Thetis had told him that ‘the best of the
Myrmidons would leave the light of life at the hands of the Trojans, /
while I am still alive’, as well as his frustration with all Zeus had
accomplished for him, because ‘my dear comrade perished, / Patrok-
los, whom I honoured beyond all comrades / equally to my own head’
(18.80–2).
The unusually extended indirect report of Achilles’ thoughts in
401–11 is followed by two comments in direct discourse, describing
the thoughts of a representative Greek (416–19) and a representative
Trojan (420–2), as the two armies ‘relentlessly pressed one another at
close quarters and killed each other’ (øº
b Kªåæ
ŒÆd
Iºººı KæØÇ, 413).5 There is a strange absence in these anonym-
ous statements: both speakers are thinking of Achilles, but neither
actually refers to him.6 The Greek considers that immediate death
would be ‘much more profitable’ (Œæ Ø) than the loss of glory in
retreating to the ships and allowing the Trojans to drag the corpse of
Patroklos back to their city and ‘win the boast of triumph’ (ŒF
IæŁÆØ, 419). The Trojan does not even mention winning or losing
the corpse or glory, but simply says, ‘Even if it is destiny (
EæÆ) that
4
Cf. the bT Scholia cited by Edwards 1991: 101 on 404–11: ‘[Homer] often arouses
sympathy like this when the greatest sufferers are unaware of disaster and are borne
up by loving hopes . . .’. Cf. Fenik 1974: 179.
5
As parallels to these comments by anonymous members of the opposing armies,
Edwards 1991: 103, cites 3.297–301, 319–23; 7.178–80, 201–5.
6
Mirto 1997: 1294.

we all be killed in the same way / beside this man, let no one pull back
from the fighting’ (421–2).
These desperate statements are followed by a remarkable comment
on the part of the poem’s (implied) narrator: ‘thus they fought, and
the iron din / reached the bronze heaven through the barren air’ (S
Q
b
æÆ, Ø æØ ’ Oæı
Æª e / åºŒ PæÆe xŒ Ø’
ÆNŁæ IæıªØ, 424–5). Only here in the Iliad and Odyssey does
the word Iæ ª, ‘barren’(?), designate the sky rather than the sea.7
Furthermore, though iron is used elsewhere of the stubborn strength,
spirit, or heart of a warrior (22.357, 24.205, 521; Od. 5.191, 12.280),
and the heaven is iron which the Suitors’ ‘wanton violence and force’
(oæØ Å ) reached (Od. 15.329 = 17.565) and bronze when the
Greeks are struggling in battle (5.504), only here does ‘iron’ refer to
the harsh, incessant sound of the battle, while ‘bronze’ seems to
suggest a medium that amplifies this loud noise (Oæı
Æª , 424).8
These metallic metaphors provide a grim, pitiless background to the
pitiful weeping of the horses of Achilles (427, 437–8) and the com-
passion of Zeus (441ff.).
The two horses stand motionless, far from the battle, ‘weep[ing]
since the two of them first learned that their charioteer [Patroklos,
who use to guide the horses when Achilles took part in the fighting] /
had fallen in the dust beneath man-slaughtering Hektor’ (427–8):
g ’ h’ ił Kd BÆ Kd ºÆf Eºº

MŁºÅ NÆØ h’ K º

’ åÆØ ,
Iºº’ u ºÅ
Ø
, l ’ Kd
øØ
Iæ ŒÅØ ŁÅ Mb ªıÆØŒ, 435
S
IçÆºø æØŒÆººÆ çæ å,
h Ø KØŒ
łÆ ŒÆæÆÆ· ŒæıÆ çØ
Łæ
a ŒÆa ºçæø åÆ
Ø Þ
ıæ
ØØ
ØåØ ŁøØ· ŁÆºæc ’ K
ØÆ åÆÅ
Ç ªºÅ KæØFÆ Ææa Çıªe I
çæøŁ. 440
7
See, though, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 67 and 457, where IæıªØ
similarly modifies ÆNŁæ. In both these instances the unexpected appearance of the
adjective reflects Demeter’s viewpoint: in 67 the negatively charged IæıªØ cor-
relates with her despair at hearing ‘the voice of her daughter through the barren air, as
if she were suffering violence’; in 457 Demeter rushes through the air that is ‘barren’ in
the absence of her daughter to meet Persephone for the first time since her abduction.
8
Edwards 1991: 101. Cf. Mirto 1997: 1294: ‘. . . gli epiteti che ornano la
descrizione . . . del fragore, che dal campo di battaglia raggiunge il cielo, sembrano
evidenziare l’inesorabile crudeltà del massacro.’

The two of them were unwilling either to go back to the
broad Hellespont,
to the ships, or to follow the Achaians into battle;
but as a stele remains fixed in place, which stands
on the tomb of a man who has died or of a woman, 435
so they remained motionless, holding steady the beautiful
chariot,
the two of them resting their heads on the ground; hot
tears flowed down from their eyes to the ground as they wept
with longing for their charioteer; their rich, full mane was
stained,
as it tumbled out on both sides from the pad beneath the yoke. 440
(17.432–40)
The main point of comparison in this beautiful simile is between

the stillness of the horses, which have lost the will to move in the
midst of the rush of battle, and that of a funeral stele. The image
effectively expresses the horses’ sorrow and sympathy at the death of
Patroklos.9 Their tranquil, funereal stillness is quite different from the
immobility of the Trojan ally Alkathoos, who is compared to ‘a stele
or a tall, leafy tree’ (u ºÅ j æ łØÅº), after
Poseidon ‘magically charmed his two shining eyes and shackled his
glorious knees’ (ŁºÆ Z çÆØ, Å b çÆ Ø
Æ ªıEÆ), so that
he could neither flee nor escape Idomeneus, who then easily kills
him (13.434–9). There the emphasis is on the grotesque death of
Alkathoos, who ‘fell with a thud, and the spear was stuck in his heart, /
which made the butt end of the spear vibrate as it throbbed convul-
sively, / until Ares took away its force’ (13.442–4). In Book 17, however,
the focus is on the two sorrowing horses, whose monumental stillness
and longing for Patroklos seems to preserve his memory, just as a
stele was meant to preserve the memory of a dead man or woman.10
There is, too, a curious reflexivity in this simile: many of the earliest
extant inscriptions on actual stelai, which date from the century
9
Komninou-Kakridi 1947: 139.
10
Perhaps the horses depicted on Mycenaean kraters and Geometric and Archaic
funeral amphorae, and occasionally found in Mycenaean graves, are meant to pre-
serve the memory of dead warriors in just this way. Cf. Vermeule 1979: 59–61, 226–7
nn. 40–1; Edwards 1991: 106 on 434–6, 283 on 23.404–17. Edwards: 105–6 notes that
the phrase ‘to the broad Hellespont’ (Kd ºÆf Eºº, 17.432), found in 7.86
and Od. 24.82), ‘suits the context and looks forward to the gravestone simile two lines
later’.

following the composition of the Iliad, are in hexameters and probably
were intended implicitly to compare the prowess and glory of a dead
warrior to those of a Homeric hero.11 Stelai similar to those mentioned
in the similes in Books 13 and 17 must have been familiar to Homer’s
audiences both from the poetic tradition and from their actual lives, to
judge by the way they are taken for granted in these two passages; in
references to the burial of Sarpedon ‘with a tomb and a stele, for the dead
have this honour’ (
øØ ºÅØ · e ªaæ ªæÆ Kd ŁÆø,
16.457 = 675); and in the passing mention of the stele set upon the
funeral mound of Ilos, son of Dardanos, ‘a leader of the community in
days of old’ (ÆºÆØF Å
ªæ), against which Paris leans as he
aims an arrow at Diomedes (11.371–2; cf. Od. 12.14–15).
Although as immortals the horses should be immune to death and
the ravages of time, their tears and the language in which they are
described make them seem virtually human in their suffering.12 In
particular, their manes are ‘rich, full’ (ŁÆºæ, 439), a word that
literally means ‘shooting up’ or ‘blooming’ in a vegetal sense and is
used elsewhere of vigorous warriors in their prime (3.26, 4.474,
10.259, 11.414, 17.282); of spouses, both male and female (3.53,
6.430, 8.156, 190); and of marriage itself (Od. 6.66, 20.74). In
17.439, as elsewhere (e.g. 4.474), ŁÆºæ is used in the context of a
warrior’s death to express the poignancy of strength and the potential
for fertility and growth cut off once and for all in an untimely
fashion.13 The word is also used of powerful, developed parts of the
body (Ares’ thighs at 15.113, a ‘rich, full’ voice at 17.696 = 23.397 =
Od. 4.705 = Od. 19.472). It is significant that in all four passages in
which ŁÆºæ is used of a ‘rich, full’ voice, that voice is checked as the
eyes are filled with tears: [g ƒ Z /] ÆŒæıçØ ºBŁ, ŁÆºæc
ƒ å çø. The most frequent use of ŁÆºæ in the Iliad and
Odyssey is to describe copious tears (2.266, 6.496, 24.9, 794; Od. 4.556,
11
S. Cole, oral communication.
12
The horses of Achilles, offspring of the Harpy Podarge and the West Wind,
Zephyros (16.150), are described as ‘immortal’ at 16.154, 17.444, and 23.277 (cf.
10.402–4). Their immortality distinguishes them from other horses in the poem
with divine connections: those of Eumelos, ‘swift-footed like birds, / . . . / which
Apollo of the silver bow bred and reared . . . ’(2.764–6), and those given by Zeus to
Tros in recompense for his son Ganymede, ‘the best / horses there are, East or West’
(5.266–7). There is no indication in the text that the remarkable horses of Rhesos,
‘whiter than snow and running like the winds’ (10.437), have anything to do with the
gods.
13
See p. 7.

10.201, 409, 570, 11.5, 391, 466, 12.12, 16.16, 22.447) or strong
lamentation (Od. 10.457).14 In 17.437–8, ŒæıÆ (‘tears’) is modified
by Łæ
(‘hot’), and in 439 ŁÆºæ describes åÆÅ, the horses’ ‘mane’
that is stained as it rests upon the ground. Hélène Monsacré observes
that in this passage and in 17.695–6, when Antilochos learns of
Patroklos’ death and ‘his two eyes / were filled with tears, and his
rich, full voice was checked’, a word for tears is present, but its usual
adjective, ŁÆºæ, is transferred or displaced onto the checked voice.
In 15.113 no word for ‘tears’ is present, but Oºçıæ
(‘weeping’)
in the ensuing line may signal a similar displacement, in which ‘the
blooming nature of the tears is transferred to another element of the
character who weeps’, in this case, Ares’ thighs.15
It is no accident that in 17.437–8, ŒæıÆ is modified by Łæ

(‘hot’), which is a frequent epithet of tears when, for metrical reasons,
a plural form of ŒæıÆ is desirable rather than a singular (7.426, 16.3,
18.17, 235). At the same time, the phrase ‘hot tears’ intensifies the
pathos of a death (18.17, 235) or a funeral (7.426) for the one who is
weeping, or, in the case of Patroklos in 16.3, the pathos of the defeat of
the Greek army considered as a kind of collective death. Thus, when
the horses weep ‘hot tears’ for Patroklos in 17.437–8, they express the
effect of his death on themselves, but at the same time the displaced
ŁÆºæ, describing their ‘rich, full’ manes, invokes the vitality associ-
ated with their own unaging immortality. These manes, however, are
‘stained’ (K
ØÆ, 17.439), which powerfully expresses the contra-
diction between this immortality and their participation in the sor-
rows of human existence—the contradiction for which Zeus pities
them (441–7).16
When the horses stain their manes and have ‘longing’ (ŁøØ, 439)
for their charioteer, these too are human actions, like Achilles’ pour-
ing dust over his head in lamentation for Patroklos at 18.23–4 and
‘longing’ for him at 19.321 and 24.6.17 Generally speaking, horses in
14
On the association of ŁÆºæ with tears, see Lowenstam 1979: 125–35.
15
Monsacré, 1984: 177.
16
æÅ (‘round’, or perhaps ‘delicate’), another adjective used to describe tears
(3.142, 16.11, 19.323; Od. 16.332), also is associated with vitality: it is used of leaves
and flowers that are full of life (13.180, Od. 9.449, 12.357), and also of human flesh
(4.237, 13.553, 14.406).
17
See Mirto 1997: 1295. Edwards 1991: 106, on 437–40, compares the gesture of
Laertes at Od. 24.316–17 and notes that ‘Patroklos used to wash and oil [the horses’]
manes’ (23.280–2).

the Iliad are like human companions: they share the toil and danger
of the heroes, who in turn care for them, address them by name, and
urge them on in battle (8.185–97, 19.399–403, 23.402–17). Apart
from human beings, they are the only animals said to ‘feel longing’
(ŁØ: 5.234, 11.161; Ł: 17.439; cf. 23.283–4), and the only ones
compared with other animals in similes (2.764, 20.495–502; cf.
10.437), a kind of comparison that normally serves to clarify some
aspect of human existence.18
It is no accident that the horses’ sorrow is made to seem human in
17.437–40, just before the narrative moves to Zeus looking at them
with pity for their involvement in mortal suffering. He expresses this
pity in a brief monologue addressed to his Łı
—a characteristically
human response to emotion (443–7):
p Øº, çHœ
—ÅºBœ ¼ÆŒØ
ŁÅHØ,
E ’ Ke Iªæø IŁÆø ;
q ¥Æ ıØØ
’ I æØ ¼ºª’ åÅ; 445
P
b ªæ KØ OœÇıææ I æe
ø ‹Æ ªÆEÆ Ø Ø ŒÆd æØ.
Ah, you two wretches, why did we give the pair of you to lord
Peleus,
a mortal, while you two are ageless and immortal?
Was it so that you two might have sorrows along with wretched
men? 445
There is nothing anywhere more miserable than a man,
of all the things that breathe and move over the earth.
These five lines include several of the words that most frequently
denote the misery and suffering of the human condition: Øº,
‘wretches’ (443), from Øº, a word that typically expresses pity for
the suffering of others (e.g. Patroklos in 17.670; 23.65, 105, 221) or self-
pity (e.g. Thetis in 18.54, Hekabe in 22.431);19 ıØØ, ‘miserable’
(445), from Å, a word that often suggests human misfortune or
unhappiness; OœÇıææ, ‘more miserable’ (446), from OœÇıæ, a
word associated with the physical hardship, pain, and sorrow of the
human condition, and in particular with Achilles, whom Thetis
describes at 1.417 as ‘swiftly doomed and miserable beyond all men’
18
Cf. Schnapp-Gourbeillon 1981: 175.
19
On the meaning and associations of Øº in the Iliad, see Kim 2000: 30–1 n. 80.

(TŒ
æ ŒÆd OœÇıæe æd ø).20 Zeus uses Øº and ıØØ
of the two horses themselves and OœÇıææ of ‘a man’, the most
wretched creature on earth, whose ‘sorrows’ the horses have just been
said to share. The effect of these three words coming in just five lines is
to intensify the contrast between the horses’ human misery and their
unaging immortality. This contrast is strengthened by the hiatus after
the enjambed predicate adjective ŁÅHØ (‘mortal’, referring to Peleus)
at the beginning of 444, which gives the word a particular emphasis in
contrast to IŁÆø (‘and immortal’, referring to the two horses) at
the end of the same line.21 Zeus’ pity, it should be emphasized, is for the
weeping horses, not for Peleus or for suffering humanity in general. He
is moved ‘because, although they are immortal and should be free from
the sufferings of mortals, they have now become subject to the pain
normally allotted to humans, namely, the loss through death of some-
one they love’.22
Earlier, the contrast between the horses’ immortality and their
forced connection with mortality had been expressed in their being
yoked together with the trace horse Pedasos, ‘who although he was
mortal kept up with the immortal horses’ (n ŒÆd ŁÅe Kg Ł’
¥Ø IŁÆØØ, 16.154).23 When Sarpedon accidentally kills Ped-
asos with an errant spear-cast intended for Patroklos, and the horse
‘fell in the dust, bellowing’ and ‘lay dead in the dust’, the reins of the two
immortal horses become entangled as they rear in opposite directions
(16.467–71). Their helpless confusion in the face of Pedasos’ tangible
mortality is relieved only by Automedon’s quick action in cutting away
the dead trace horse, so that they can again move coordinatedly (g ’
ÆsØ ıÅ, 16.476). This incident is especially striking because
normally ‘in duels in the Iliad it is . . . the eventual victor who misses
20
Slatkin, 1991: 38 n. 24, makes the connection between 17.446 ff. and 1.417 and
notes that ‘what mortals are by nature, Achilles is most’.
21
Cf. Edwards 1991: 107 on 443–5; Mirto 1997: 1295.
22
Kim 2000: 44; cf. Macleod 1982: 15. Zeus’ pity for the horses is quite different
from his pity elsewhere in the poem for individual mortals who are facing death: his
son, Sarpedon, at 16.431–3, 450, 459–61, and Hektor at 22.169–76. Similarly, the focus
in 17.446–7 is on the contrast between human suffering and immortal freedom from
misery and care, not on the helpless human condition itself, though this is what
Odysseus emphasizes when he addresses Amphinomos in similar terms at Od.
18.130–1. See Edwards 1991: 107 on 446–7.
23
Leinieks 1973: 102–7 sees Pedasos as ‘in effect, a symbol of Patroklos’ mortality’
(103); Thalmann 1984: 200 n. 40 adds that ‘Pedasos evokes the idea of Achilles’
mortality too . . .’. Cf Atchity 1978: 276, 305.

with his first spear-cast’,24 but here Patroklos, not Sarpedon, will
conquer.
A comparable paralysis grips the horses following the death of
Patroklos, rendering Automedon helpless (17.429–33), until Zeus
breathes ‘huge strength’ (
M, 17.456) into them, whereupon
‘the two of them, shaking the dust to the ground from their manes, /
lightly bore the swift chariot through the Trojans and Achaians’ (g ’
Ie åÆØø ŒÅ s Æº /Þ
çÆ çæ Łe –æ
Æ
a
æHÆ ŒÆd åÆØ , 17.457–8). Just as the horses’ manes drooping in
the dust expresses sorrow for the death of Patroklos, so their shaking
the dust from their manes is a sign of restoration to their immortal
detachment from human suffering. This restoration, however, is only
temporary: at 19.405–6, one of them, Xanthos, in a gesture recalling
that of the two horses in 17.439–40, ‘. . . bent down his head, and his
whole mane / tumbling out from the pad beside the yoke reached the
ground’ ( . . . X
ı ŒÆæÆØ· AÆ b åÆÅ / Ç ªºÅ KæØFÆ Ææa
Çıªe s Æ ¥ŒÆ) in anticipatory mourning for the death of Achilles,
which he foretells at 19.409, 416–17. The pair of immortal horses are
further implicated in human suffering when they drag the corpse of
Hektor ‘without caring and without funeral rites’ (IŒÅ ø) to the
Greek ships (22.464–5) and around the tomb of Patroklos (24.14–16).
In language reminiscent of 17.439–40, Achilles explains why they will
not compete in the chariot race during Patroklos’ funeral games: ‘the two
of them stand grieving for him, and their manes have reached down / to
rest on the ground, and the two of them stand with sorrow in their
hearts’ (e ª’ Æ Ł, h œ çØ / åÆEÆØ KæÅæ ÆÆØ,
g ’ Æ Iåı
ø ŒBæ, 23.283–4).25
24
Thalmann 1984: 46, 200 n. 41.
25
It is possible too that in 17.426 ff. and 23.283–4 the horses are thinking not only of
Patroklos but of the approaching death of Achilles himself, as at 19.409, 416–17.
Certainly a listener or reader of the poem cannot help doing so. Cf. Kakridis 1954:
113; Thalmann 1984: 48. Kullmann 1960: 329 suggests that ‘the motif “Automedon and
the horses of Achilles” ’ may in some pre-Iliadic form have already been associated with
the mythology of Achilles’ death. In this light, it is probably no accident that the only
other instance in the Iliad of a trace horse being killed in battle, and having to be cut
away from the other two horses, occurs at 8.80–8, when Paris’ arrow kills Nestor’s trace
horse. Diomedes then comes to Nestor’s rescue in a scene that is generally connected
with the episode in the Aithiopis, in which Antilochos rescues his father in a similar
situation and is killed by Memnon (cf. Pindar, Pythian 6.28–42). The conspicuous
killing of the trace horses in the narratives of the deaths of Antilochos and Patroklos
suggests that both the Aithiopis and the Iliad drew on older mythology in which this
motif was associated with the events leading to the death of Achilles.

Zeus’ apparently rhetorical question in 17.443–4, ‘. . . why did we
give the pair of you to lord Peleus, / a mortal, while you two are
ageless and immortal?’, is actually a question fundamental to the
interpretation of the entire poem and its central figure, Achilles. For
‘we’ gave the horses to Peleus, just like the immortal armour, ‘gigan-
tic, a wonder to behold, / beautiful’, which, as Achilles reminds
Thetis, ‘the gods gave to Peleus as a glorious gift, / on the day when
they threw you into the bed of a mortal man’ ( . . . ºæØÆ, ŁÆF
Æ
N ŁÆØ, / ŒÆº· a
b —ÅºBœ Łd Æ IªºÆa HæÆ / X
ÆØ HØ ‹
æF Iæ
Æº PBØ, 18.83–5; cf. 17.194–6).26 Thetis
herself recalls this event more bitterly and at greater length in
18.429–41, when she tells Hephaistos,
˙çÆØ’, q ¼æÆ Ø, ‹ÆØ ŁÆ N’ K Oº
øØ,
’ Kd çæd wØØ Iå Œ Æ ºıªæ, 430
‹’ K
d KŒ Æø ˚æ Å Zf ¼ºª’ øŒ;
KŒ

’ Iººø ±ºØø I æd
Æ,
`NÆŒ ÅØ —ÅºBœ, ŒÆd ºÅ Iæ Pc
ººa
º’ PŒ KŁºıÆ. ›
b c ªæÆœ ºıªæHØ
ŒEÆØ Kd
ªæØ IæÅ
, ¼ººÆ
Ø F· 435
ıƒe K
Ø HŒ ªŁÆØ æÆç
,
å æø· › ’ I æÆ
æœ r·
n
b Kªg ŁæłÆÆ çıe S ªıHØ IºøB,
Åıd KØæÅŒÆ ŒæøØ ”ºØ Yø
æød
ÆåÅ
· e ’ På
ÆØ ÆsØ 440
YŒÆ ÆÆ
—Åºœ Yø.
Hephaistos, did any of the goddesses, as many as there are on
Olympos,
endure so many painful sufferings in her mind, 430
26
There is no explicit indication that the horses were a wedding gift to Peleus like
the armour, but many scholars have drawn that conclusion, as they have in regard to
Cheiron’s gift to Peleus of the Pelian ash spear (16.143–4 = 19.390–1). See, e.g.,
Kullmann 1960: 232–6; Wilson 1974: 385–9, esp. 385; Willcock, 1984: 254 on
16.867; Mirto 1997: 1299; Seiradaki 2014: chapter 4. At 23.277–8, Achilles says that
Poseidon gave the horses to Peleus, and this seems to contradict the statement that
they were a gift of the gods collectively (16.381 = 867, 17.443–4). Achilles, however,
may simply be emphasizing how outstanding the horses are by attributing the gift to
the god especially associated with horses and horsemanship (cf. 23.307, 582–5). Cf.
Willcock 1978: 62–3, 140–1 nn. 11–15 on Pandaros’ bow as a gift of Apollo. On
Poseidon and horses, see Burkert 1985: 138–9. It is also possible that Poseidon was
associated with the gift of the horses to Peleus, because he was one of the divine suitors
of Thetis for whose sake she was forced to marry a mortal. Cf. Pindar, Isthmian
8.26–48[SnM].
as many sorrows as Zeus, son of Kronos, gave to me, out of

all the goddesses?
He subdued me, out of the other sea-goddesses, to a man,
Aiakos’ son, Peleus, and I endured a man’s bed
very much against my will. That man lies in his halls
worn out by painful old age, and now I have other sorrows: 435
for he gave me a son to bear and rear,
outstanding among heroes; and he shot up like a sapling;
I reared him like a young tree in the best spot in the orchard
and sent him forth in the curved ships to Ilion
to fight with the Trojans, but I will not receive him back again, 440
returned home to the house of Peleus.
Laura Slatkin has shown that there is a pattern of allusion in the Iliad
to mythology associated with Thetis as a cosmic, theogonic power and
‘efficacious protectress . . . of the gods’, and in particular to the story,
familiar from Pindar Isthmian 8.26–48 and elsewhere, that despite
the desire of Zeus and Poseidon to mate with her, she was forced into
the bed of the mortal, Peleus, because of a prophecy that she would give
birth to a son mightier than his father.27 Had Zeus mated with her, he
would have lost control of the cosmos to his son, like Ouranos and
Kronos before him. Therefore the gods decided, at Themis’ urging, that
Thetis must marry a mortal and ‘see her son die in battle’ (Pindar,
Isthmian 8.36a [SnM]. In other words, as Slatkin demonstrates, Thetis’
grief at her subjection to Peleus and at Achilles’ short-lived mortality is
part of the price of Zeus’ continued mastery over the cosmos.28
Thus Zeus’ apparently rhetorical question, ‘Why did we give the
pair of you to lord Peleus, / a mortal, while you two are ageless and
immortal?’ has a quite specific answer: ‘we’ did so in celebration of a
marriage that was arranged specifically to maintain the cosmic order
in which Zeus is supreme. This marriage implicated both Thetis and
the immortal horses in human suffering—specifically, the suffering of
Achilles and, by extension, that of Patroklos—in effect sacrificing
their immortal ease and freedom from care to those of Zeus and the
other Olympians. It is no accident that Thetis describes herself as
‘wretched’ ( Øº)—the same word by which Zeus addresses the two
horses in 17.441—in the same line in which, using a unique coinage,
she calls herself ıÆæØŒØÆ (‘the bitterly unfortunate mother of
27 28
Slatkin 1991: passim. The words quoted appear on p. 52. Ibid. 101–3.

a son who is the best’, 18.54), and in the same passage in which she
laments that she cannot rescue him from sorrows while he is alive or
expect him to survive the war with the Trojans (18.59–62).29
Elsewhere in the poem both Thetis and the horses are regularly
associated with the mortality of Achilles. When Thetis comes to visit
Achilles in Books 1, 18, and 24, on each occasion their conversation
includes a mention of his brief life and impending death.30 Similarly,
when one of the horses, Xanthos, warns the son of Peleus that his
death-day is near (19.409, 416–17), Achilles tells him that there is no
reason for him to prophesy his death—that ‘I myself know well that
my destiny is to perish here, / far from my dear father and mother’ (s
ı e r Æ ŒÆd ÆPe ‹
Ø
æ KŁ ’ OºŁÆØ / çØ çºı Ææe
ŒÆd
Åæ, 19.421–2). As I have already pointed out, this passage
recalls the scene in Book 17 where the horses stand motionless in
mourning for Patroklos. The similarity between the two scenes sug-
gests that Xanthos’ posture in 19.405–6 is also one of mourning, and
the parallel is enhanced by the horse’s prediction that ‘it is destined
[for Achilles] to be mightily conquered by a god and a man’
(
æØ
KØ ŁHØ ŒÆd IæØ r çØ Æ
BÆØ, 19.417), just as Patrok-
los was at the end of Book 16.31
In the latter scene, when Apollo strikes Patroklos in the back with the
flat of his hand, he makes his two eyes whirl dizzily (16.791–2). Then
F ’ Ie
b ŒæÆe ŒıÅ º !E ººø·
b ŒıºØ
Å ŒÆÆåc å d ç’ ¥ø
ÆPºHØ æıçºØÆ,
ØŁÅÆ b ŁØæÆØ 795
Æ¥
ÆØ ŒÆd ŒÅØØ· æ ª
b P Ł
Ø q
ƒŒ
ºÅŒÆ
ØÆŁÆØ ŒÅØØ,
Iºº’ I æe ŁØ ŒæÅ åÆæ
ø
Þ ’ åØººB.
Phoibos Apollo threw the helmet from his head,
and the plumed headpiece with holes for the eyes clattered as it
rolled
29
Kim 2000: 44 n. 29 aptly compares ‘Thetis’ suffering through Achilles’ death’ to
that of the immortal horses. On ‘the horses of Achilles, gifts of the gods (Iliad
17.426–53)’ and the mythology of Thetis as alluded to in the poem, see now
Rutherford 2013: 114–17.
30
See Schein 1984: 92, referring to Owen 1946: 11.
31
The god, of course, is the same, Apollo. Hektor makes a more specific prophecy
to Achilles at 22.359 that he will die at the hands of Apollo and Paris. Cf. Edwards
1991: 283.
beneath the horses’ feet, and the horsehairs were stained 795
with blood and dust; before it was not permitted
that the helmet crested with horsehair be stained with dust,
but it protected the head and handsome forehead of a man
of divine descent, Achilles.
(16.793–9)
The words
ØŁÅÆ b ŁØæÆØ / Æ¥
ÆØ ŒÆd ŒÅØØ (‘and the horse-
hairs were stained / with blood and dust’) recalls the horses’ mane[s]
being ‘stained’ (K
ØÆ) as they touch the ground in 17.438–9 (cf.
19.405–6, 23.283–4). Both the horses and the helmet are emblems of
Achilles’ unique relation to divinity, and there is, in particular, a
special emphasis in the word ŁØ (‘of divine descent’, 16.798):
only here in the Iliad and Odyssey does this adjective modify the
word ‘man’ (I æ) in a quasi-oxymoronic usage, and only here and
in 10.314 does the genitive ŁØ occur at position 5.5, the so-called
B1 caesura.32 These two anomalies call attention to the word and to
‘the irony and incongruity of its use’,33 which involve not only
Achilles’ having a goddess for a mother, but also the whole history
of Thetis being forced to marry a mortal and Achilles’ consequent,
short-lived mortality. As with the immortal horses implicated in
human misery, whose manes are defiled in mourning for Patroklos
and Achilles, the helmet defiled just before the death of Patroklos
evokes the painful combination in Achilles of humanity and divinity.
In one other significant passage, at the end of Book 20, the horses of
Achilles are associated with a kind of defilement and with the contradic-
tions inherent in the human condition and especially in Achilles himself:
. . . ‰ ’ ‹ Ø Ç ÅØ Æ ¼æÆ Pæı

ı 495
æØ
ÆØ ŒæE ºıŒe KßŒØ
ÅØ K IºøBØ,
Þ
çÆ º’ Kª H e ’ KæØ
Œø,
S ’ åØººB
ªÆŁ
ı
ıå ¥Ø
E ›
F Œı ŒÆd I Æ· Æ¥
ÆØ ’ ¼ø
æŁ –Æ ºÆŒ ŒÆd ¼ıª ÆQ æd çæ, 500
L ¼æ’ Iç’ ƒø ›ºø ÞÆŁ
Øªª Æºº
Æ¥ ’ I’ KØæø·
32
See p. 109. At 10.314 ŁØ modifies ŒæıŒ, in reference to Eumedes, the
father of Dolon. It is hard to see any ‘divine descent’ in this use of ŁØ, but here too,
as a T Scholion ad loc. suggests, the unexpected adjective may signal a contrast
between the fortunate herald and his wealthy but unfortunate son (e b heoio, ‹Ø
I
Ø HØ Ææ).
33
Thalmann 1984: 48.

. . . as when a man yokes together male oxen with broad
foreheads 495
to crush white barley on a well-founded threshing floor,
and quickly the barley is stripped under the feet of the
loud-bellowing oxen,
so under great-hearted Achilles the single-footed horses
were trampling corpses and shields alike, and the axle beneath
was all splattered with blood, and the rims which went around
the chariot, 500
were being struck with drops from the horses’ hooves
and from the chariot wheels.
(20.495–502)
This vision of Achilles’ overwhelming power, impressive in itself, is all

the more effective because the destruction that he and his horses are
wreaking is expressed in terms of threshing, an activity associated
with fertility and life, as the threshed barley is used to produce
sustaining food. The man who had been, in his own words, ‘a fruitless
burden on the fertile earth’ (KØ ¼åŁ Iæ æÅ, 18.104) is now a
thresher, but this activity, though in a sense personally productive
and fruitful, is at the same time destructive and fruitless. The immor-
tal horses, which should be living easily a life of unaging immortality,
are instead imaged as labouring oxen. They also resemble Hektor’s
mortal horses at 11.531–7 bloodily carrying his chariot through the
Greeks and Trojans, trampling corpses and shields (11.534–7 ~
20.499–502), rather than the immortal horses of Poseidon, who
skim his chariot lightly over the waves, and the bronze axle beneath
the chariot is not even wet (13.29–30). Like the oxen to which they are
compared, the horses of Achilles are associated with a particular kind
of human toil. In a sense, at the end of Book 20 they become as savage
as their master as he presses on ‘to win the boast of triumph / . . . and
his unconquerable hands were splattered with gore’ (20.502–3).34
The scene featuring the horses of Achilles in Iliad 17 encapsulates
the poem’s fundamental contrast between humanity and divinity
34
On this simile and the horses of Achilles generally, see Schnapp-Gourbeillon 1981:
175–6. Mirto 1997: 1384 and Edwards 1991: 345, note that the final clause in Book 20,
‘his unconquerable hands were splattered with gore’ (20.503), is also used of Agamem-
non at 11.169 in the course of his savage IæØÆ, and Edwards asks, ‘[I]s there a
suggestion that Achilles has become as brutal as Agamemnon?’ Actually he has become
far more brutal, as is indicated by the continuation of his rampage in Book 21, including
his slaughter of Lykaon (21.34–135), and by his killing of Hektor in Book 22.

both in general and in the person of Achilles, and it anticipates the
emphasis in the final seven books on the mortality and death of the
son of Peleus. It is hard to think of a richer or more beautiful passage
of equal length in the Iliad or one that is more moving. If it is true that
‘[w]hoever reads it once never forgets it’,35 it also is true that close
study of its diction, style, and thematic resonance helps to throw light
on some of the poem’s most fundamental themes and values.36
35
Kakridis 1954: 111.
36
I am grateful to Nancy Felson for criticism and suggestions that improved this
essay.
Odysseus and Polyphemos in the Odyssey
In the first chapter of The Homeric Odyssey, Denys Page analyses

the ways in which the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos in Book 9 of
the epic differs from a common folktale found in many parts of the
world.1 Page (p. 4) summarizes this tale as follows:
‘The hero, with companions, is prisoner in the cave of a one-eyed
giant shepherd; some or all of the companions are cooked by the giant
on a spit over a fire; the giant sleeps after his heavy dinner; the hero
takes the spit, heats it in the fire, and plunges it into the giant’s eye;
the giant opens the door of the cave in the morning to let his sheep
out and the hero escapes by walking out on all fours dressed in a
sheep’s skin or (less often) by clinging to the underside of a sheep.’
There is a sequel in which the hero mocks the giant and is almost
captured by him.
Page concludes that the story told in Odyssey 9 differs from the
common tale in five main particulars: (1) Polyphemos eats his victims
raw, not cooked on a spit; (2) he is blinded by a heated olive-wood
stake, not by the spit used for the cooking; (3) he is put to sleep by
‘excessive indulgence in wine’ (p. 4), not as a result of his meal; (4)
Odysseus says that his name is ‘Nobody’, not ‘Myself ’; (5) Odysseus
and his men are almost killed when Odysseus shouts out his real
name, not when a magic ring, a gift of the giant, begins to shout ‘Here
I am’.
Although Page acknowledges that, ‘The entire story of Polyphemos
is most carefully constructed and most firmly settled in its place among
the adventures of Odysseus’ (p. 14), his analysis is independent of the
1
Page 1955: 1–20, referring to Hackman 1904 and other earlier studies; see p. 18,
especially nn. 1 and 5.
28 Odysseus and Polyphemos

rest of the Odyssey. He treats the story as one of a number of
‘Weltmärchen, universal folk-tales, independent of each other and
of the main theme of the Odyssey’, which ‘are fitted into the
framework of the main theme, the folk-tale of the Returning
hero’, but which otherwise have nothing to do with it (pp. 1–2).
In this chapter I argue that the five differences from the usual
version of the tale that Page finds in the story of Odysseus and
Polyphemos as told in Book 9 can best be understood in terms of
the Odyssey as a whole, since each is connected with a main theme or
motif of the poem. That Book 9 is thematically typical of the entire
epic and offers a convenient interpretive pathway into its central
ethical concerns will become clearer through separate consideration
of each of the five particulars in which the story of Odysseus and
Polyphemos in Book 9 differs from Page’s ‘common tale’.
(1) Polyphemos eats his victims raw, not cooked on a spit. In
almost all other versions of the folk-tale, the giant shepherd cooks
his victims over a fire on a metal spit.2 Page conjectures (p. 11) that
‘the cooking of human victims . . . was rejected as being a deed of the
utmost barbarism, outside the law prescribed by tradition to the
Odyssean story’. He is certainly right to focus on the opposition
between barbarism and law, which is important in Book 9 and in
the Odyssey generally. Odysseus thrice wonders about the ethical
values of the characters he encounters,
X Þ’ ¥ ª’ æØÆ ŒÆd ¼ªæØØ, ı b ŒÆØØ,

q çØº
ØØ, ŒÆ çØ
Kd Łı .
whether they are savage and violent, and not just,
or hospitable to strangers and with minds that are god-fearing.3
(9.175–6 = 6.120–1 =13.201–2)
Polyphemos, whom Odysseus calls ¼ªæØ, h ŒÆ s N

Æ, h
ŁØÆ (‘wild, with no true knowledge of laws or any good customs’,
9.215), obviously belongs in the first category,4 and his eating his
victims raw enhances his ‘barbarism’: it is, by Homeric standards, a
2
Page 1955: 9, 19 n. 16. Cf. Hackman 1904: 164.
3
In this chapter translations of lines and passages in the Iliad and Odyssey are from
Lattimore 1951 and Lattimore 1965 (occasionally adapted).
4
The barbarism and lawlessness of the Kyklopes as a group are emphasized at
9.105 ff. That of Polyphemos is obvious throughout the story, e.g. at 9.278 ff.
Odysseus and Polyphemos 29

more savage act than eating them cooked. At Il. 4.34–6, when Zeus
wants to indicate what Hera would have to do before she could satisfy
her anger against the Trojans, he says,
If you could walk through the gates and through the towering
ramparts
and eat Priam and the children of Priam raw, and the other
Trojans, then, then only might you glut at last your anger.
At Il. 22.346–8, Achilles wishes
. . . that my spirit and fury would drive me myself
to hack your [sc. Hektor’s] meat away and eat it raw for the things
that you have done to me,
and at Il. 24.212–14, Hekabe, speaking of Achilles, says:
I wish I could set my teeth
in the middle of his liver and eat it. That would be vengeance
for what he did to my son . . .
Both Hekabe’s and Achilles’ wishes cannot be fulfilled; the two differ
only insofar as Hekabe has no power at all to take vengeance on
Achilles, while Achilles is about to take vengeance on Hektor, though
in a manner less savage than he would prefer. For both of them, as for
Zeus, cannibalism is the most extreme, least civilized deed imaginable.5
Polyphemos’ savagery is emphasized in the description of how he
devoured two of Odysseus’ companions (9.292–3):
like a lion reared in the hills, without leaving anything,
[he] ate them, entrails, flesh and the marrowy bones alike.
The overall effect of Homer’s making Polyphemos eat Odysseus’
companions raw, rather than cooked, is to sharpen the portrait of
him as savage, monstrous, and lawless.
(2) Polyphemos is blinded by a heated olive-wood stake, not by a
metal spit. As Page observes, the usual folk-tale in which the giant
shepherd is blinded by a heated metal spit is well constructed, because
‘one action follows necessarily from another throughout. The fire
provides the spit, the spit provides the giant’s dinner and the hero’s
weapon . . .’ (p. 4). In Book 9, however, since the Kyklops eats his
5
Cf. the horror of Odysseus’ men eaten by the Laistrygones at Od. 10.116–24.

victims raw, there is no straightforward provision of a weapon for
Odysseus to use. Instead, Homer makes Odysseus and his men find
and use a huge olive-wood club, which Polyphemos happens to have
in his cave.
In terms of the narrative itself, the substitution of the stake for the
spit seems to weaken the story by breaking the flow of the action. But
in terms of the entire Odyssey, the substitution constitutes one of six
occasions in the poem on which olive wood or an olive tree is
somehow associated with Odysseus’ salvation. In 5.234–5, Kalypso
gives Odysseus an axe with which to build the raft that will carry him
from Ogygia: its handle is of olive wood. At the end of Book 5, after he
has struggled to safety on Scherie, Odysseus falls asleep protected by
thick, intertwined wild and domesticated olive trees (5.477).6 In
13.116–23, the Phaeacian crew that has brought the sleeping Odys-
seus to Ithaca, leaves him and his possessions beside the trunk of the
slender-leaved olive tree located at the head of the harbour of Phor-
kys, near the cave of the nymphs, and in 13.372–3 Athene and
Odysseus sit down in the same place to plan the destruction of the
Suitors. Finally, in 23.173–204, Penelope’s testing of Odysseus and his
proof to her of his identity involve his knowledge that the foundation-
post of their bed was a rooted olive tree, and it is upon this bed that
they reunite sexually and fall asleep together (23.295–6).7
Clearly Homer associated olive wood in some essential way with
Odysseus, and the recurrence of this motif in Book 9 is one thematic
link between this Book and the rest of the poem. Odysseus’ blinding
of Polyphemos with the olive-wood stake is an expression of his
identity in the same way as are his skilful building of the raft, his
struggling ashore to safety on Scherie, his accumulated wealth and
relationship with the nymphs in Ithaca, his plotting the Suitors’
destruction with Athene, and his role as Penelope’s husband. Each
6
I follow the B, P, Q, and T scholia in taking çıºÅ (5.477) as a kind of wild olive,
but the identification is uncertain and evidence inconclusive. See Chantraine 1968–80
s.v. çıºÆ and, for the ancient evidence, Ebeling 1880–5: 2.445 s.v. çıºÅ.
7
Segal 1962: 62 n. 31 (cf. 63 n. 41) mentions ‘the saving aspect of the olive tree for
Odysseus’. Porter 1962: 5–6 sees in the olive wood and olive trees mentioned at 5.236,
476–8, 9.319–20, 382–3, 13.102, 372, and 23.190–1, 195, 204, ‘an elaborate recurrent
image which punctuates . . . the narrative, marks its major stages . . . by symbols evoking
the idea of death and rebirth’. Dimock 1963 [1956]: 72 speaks of ‘the fruitfulness . . .
hinted at . . . particularly by the image of the olive’.

of these details exhibits a facet of the complete Odysseus, and each is
similarly associated with the wood of the olive.8
It is worth noting that both the absence of a metal spit and
Polyphemos’ eating his victims raw emphasize an important trait of
the giant: his technological primitiveness. Since he has milk-pails, he
should have a spit or pot with which to cook his victims, but Homer,
portraying him as so undeveloped that he lacks these utensils, reduces
the role of fire in the cave to providing light.9 This is in accordance with
the representation of the Kyklopes as pastoralists, ignorant of planned
agriculture (9.107–11) and community organization (9.112–15), and
without skilled carpenters to build ships able to reach even the small
island near their land, let alone to cross the sea to other societies
(9.125–30). The contrast between Polyphemos’ primitiveness and
Odysseus’ technological skill is obvious. Odysseus applies his skill to
cutting and sharpening the olive-wood club into a stake, and when he is
blinding the Kyklops (9.382–94), his activity ‘is described in images of
the arts of civilization, metal-working and shipbuilding’.10 Throughout
the Odyssey, Odysseus’ identity and salvation are associated with his
technological skill, as when he builds himself a raft or a bed. The
contrast between the technologically primitive Kyklops and the skilled
Odysseus, exemplifies a theme of fundamental importance throughout
the poem and clarifies who Odysseus is and what he stands for.11
(3) and (4) Polyphemos is put to sleep ‘by excessive indulgence in
wine’, not as a result of his meal; Odysseus says that his name is
‘Nobody’, not ‘Myself ’. I consider these two departures from the usual
8
Cf. Porphyry, De antro nympharum 33–4, where the olive tree at the head of the
harbour of Phorkys near the cave of the nymphs (Od. 13.102–4) is made to symbolize
that ‘the kosmos is an accomplishment of a god’s reason and of intellectual nature.
. . . For it is the plant of Athena, and Athena is practical wisdom’ (› Œ
. . . Ø
çæø ŁF ŒÆd æA çø IºÆ. . . . ŁÅA b ªaæ e çı
, çæ
ÅØ
b ŁÅA’. In 33, Porphyry says that the olive tree is appropriate to Odysseus, who
has successfully returned to Ithaca by his own mental prowess and with Athena’s help,
who has so often survived when he seemed about to die (the quality for which the
olive tree is properly called IØŁÆº (‘ever-blooming’), and who is a suppliant to the
nymphs and Athena (cf. 13.355–60). (I thank J. A. Coulter for the reference to
Porphyry.) For the olive as a tree of life, cf. Kallimachos Epode 4.
9
At 9.251, Polyphemos catches sight of Odysseus and his men immediately after
lighting the fire. Cf. Stanford 1965–7: 1.356 on 9.234.
10
Segal 1962: 34.
11
For similar contrasts between the Kyklopes and the Phaiacians, see Porter 1962:
8–9; Segal 1962: 33–5; Vidal-Naquet 1996 [1970]: 49–50.

folk-tale together, because they go closely together in the narrative:
Odysseus lies about his name (9.363–7) immediately after he has
made the Kykops drunk (9.347–62). While each ‘departure’ is found
in certain other folk-tales, both are foreign to the tale of the blinding
of, and escape from, a giant shepherd.12 Homer introduces these
motifs into Book 9, because they allow him to portray most strikingly
Odysseus’ characteristic craftiness and resourcefulness, the qualities
on account of which he is repeatedly called ºÅØ and
ºıåÆ (‘of much cunning’, ‘of many devices’) throughout the
poem and which are so often responsible for his survival.
Homer shows that he is familiar with the usual version of the story,
in which the giant falls asleep as a result of his meal, for this is
precisely what happens to Polyphemos at 9.296–8:
ÆPaæ Kd ˚Œºøł ªºÅ KºÆ Å f

I æ
Æ Œæ’ ø ŒÆd K’ ¼ŒæÅ ªºÆ ø,
ŒE’ Ł’ ¼æØ Æı Øa ºø.
But when the Kyklops had filled his enormous stomach, feeding
on human flesh and drinking down milk unmixed with water,
he lay down to sleep in the cave sprawled out through his sheep.
Odysseus wishes to slay the sleeping Polyphemos with his sword, ‘but
another impulse held me back’ (æ Łıe æıŒ, 9.302), since
he and his men would then be trapped within the cave, unable to move
the heavy boulder from the entrance. The expression æ . . . Łı
is
unparalleled in Homer and is a catachresis of traditional language for
the sake of describing Odysseus’ unique intelligence and resourceful-
ness.13 These mental qualities had already been illustrated at 9.281ff.,
where Odysseus, N
Æ ºº (‘knowing many things’), deceitfully
( ºØ KØ) tells Polyphemos that his ship was totally wrecked.
12
Page 1955: 3–8, 19 n. 8. The inebriation of the Kyklops is borrowed from a type
of folk-tale in which a man ‘inebriates a devil or demon in order to capture him and
force him to reveal some knowledge or perform some act’ (p. 6).
13
The scholiast ad loc. (Dindorf 1855: 2.430) glosses Łı
(‘impulse’) by the word
ºªØ
(‘calculation’), but this is too simple-minded. Snell 1953: 14 writes: ‘But
thymos may . . . serve as the name of a function, in which case we render it as “will” or
“character”; and where it refers to one single act, the word once more transcends the
limitations of our “soul” or “mind”. The most obvious example occurs at Od. 9.302,
where Odysseus says, “Another thymos held me back”; each individual impulse,
therefore, is also a thymos.’ Odysseus has a ‘second thought’, but this ‘thought’ is
too impulsive to be translated as ‘calculation’ or, indeed, ‘thought’.

They are also evidenced later in Book 9 by the device of sharpening and
heating the olive-wood club, as well as by the ruse of concealing himself
and his men under the bellies of the sheep.14 There are, however, no
more striking applications of Odysseus’ cleverness and intelligence than
the inebriation of the Kyklops and the use of the name ‘Nobody’.
Page points out (p. 7) that the use of the wine is carefully prepared
by its repeated mention earlier in the book. At 9.161–8 it and its
history are first described, and at 9.196–211 this history is amplified
and the special strength and nature of the drink are stressed:
Whenever he drank this honey-sweet red wine, [Maron] would
pour out
enough to fill one cup, then twenty measures of water
were added, and the mixing bowl gave off a sweet smell;
magical; then would be no pleasure in holding off.
(9.208–11)
The powerful effect that the wine might have on the Kyklops is
implied in 297, where it is said that he was eating human flesh and
‘drinking unmixed milk’ (¼ŒæÅ ªºÆ ø). Page (pp. 7–8) argues
that only wine can be drunk ‘unmixed’ and that the poet ‘forgets’ both
that wine grapes grow in the land of the Kyklopes (9.110–11) and that
Polyphemos himself drinks a domestic wine (9.357–8). He suggests
that the phrase ¼ŒæÅ Łı ø (‘drinking unmixed wine’) would
be more appropriate in 297, but, leaving aside the invention of an
otherwise unknown phrase, this is to miss the effect of making the
Kyklops more susceptible to drunkenness by describing him as a milk
drinker, and to insist on an un-Homeric consistency of detail.
After cleverly making Polyphemos drunk, Odysseus falsely identi-
fies himself: ˇsØ K ª’ ZÆ· ˇsØ ŒØŒºŒıØ (‘My name
is Outis [“Nobody”], and they call me Outis’, 9.366). The use of the
name ‘Nobody’ does not occur in any other version of the folk-tale of
the blinding of the giant, but is a unique variant of another common
tale, in which a man outwits a demon and, having given his name as
‘Myself ’, escapes when the demon tells his fellow demons, who come
to his aid, ‘Myself did it’.15 Homer has adapted this story to his own
narrative, and in changing the false name from ‘Myself ’ to ‘Nobody’,
has once more linked Odysseus’ words and actions in Book 9 to
motifs present elsewhere in the poem.
14 15
Page 1955: 13–14. Page 1955: 5, 18–19 nn. 6–8.

Everyone appreciates the punning on ou tis (‘not anyone’, ‘nobody’) in
the name Outis (Nobody), but most readers overlook the more extensive
word-play in 9.403ff., which is largely based on the similarity between
mê tis = ou tis and mêtis = ‘cunning intelligence’, ‘device’, ‘clever plan’.16
When the other Kyklopes come to Polyphemos’ cave in response to his
cries, they ask why he has shouted and wakened them (9.405–6):
q Ø ı BºÆ æH IŒ KºÆØ;
q Ø ’ ÆPe ŒØ
ºøØ Mb ÅçØ;
Surely no one can be driving your sheep off against your will?
Surely no one can be killing you by force or treachery?
Polyphemos replies (9.408),

t çºØ, ˇs ŒØ
ºøØ, P b ÅçØ
Good friends, Nobody is killing me by treachery, and not by force,
meaning to say that the man ˇsØ (‘Nobody’) is killing him by a trick,
not by force. But the others understand him to say h Ø (‘not anyone’,
‘nobody’ ), a negated indefinite pronoun rather than a man’s name, and
say (9.410–11),
N b c ØÇÆØ r K
Æ–
F
ª’ h ø Ø ˜Øe ªºı IºÆŁÆØ . . .
If, alone as you are, nobody uses violence on you,
why there is no avoiding the sickness sent by great Zeus . . .
and Odysseus’ heart laughs (9.414) at

‰ Z’ KÆÅ Ke ŒÆd BØ Iø
how my name and my faultless cunning intelligence had fooled him.
This use of the word BØ (‘cunning intelligence’) suggests that in

9.405–6, the other Kyklopes can be heard to be asking, ‘Cunning
intelligence is driving away your flocks against your will? / Cunning
intelligence is killing you?’, as well as, ‘Surely no one can be driving
your sheep off against your will? / Surely no one can be killing you by
force or treachery?’ It also would mean that in 9.410–11, again without
being conscious of how they are being understood, the Kyklopes tell
16
Podlecki 1961: 125–33, esp. 130–1, discusses this word-play in detail. Stanford
1965–7: 1.361 and 1939: 105 also notes the paronomasia.

Polyphemos, ‘If cunning intelligence uses violence on you / why there
is no avoiding the sickness sent by great Zeus’.17
The amusing paradox, that the BØ (‘cunning intelligence’) of
Odysseus, a mental quality, ØÇÆØ (‘does violence to’) Polyphemos,
the embodiment of wholly non-mental physical force, is explicitly
linked to a central theme of the Odyssey as a whole by 9.412, Iººa
ª’ hå Ææd —Ø øØ ¼ÆŒØ (‘But you pray to your father, King
Poseidon’). Throughout the poem Poseidon, the sea, an overpower-
ing, natural physical force, is the great enemy of ºÅØ O ı
(‘Odysseus of much cunning’). Just as in Book 9 Poseidon’s son,
Polyphemos, is defeated by BØ (‘cunning intelligence’) and cannot
escape a disease from Zeus, so in the larger poem Odysseus, as it were,
defeats Poseidon by the will of Zeus and with the help of Athene,
Zeus’ daughter, who constantly protects Odysseus and identifies with
him as a figure of ‘cunning intelligence’ (cf. 13.296–302). It is clear
how the trick with the name ‘Nobody’, a detail in which the story of
Odysseus and Polyphemos differs from the common folk-tale of the
blinding of the giant shepherd, evokes a theme that is important
throughout the Odyssey.18
(5) Odysseus and his men are almost killed when Odysseus shouts
out his real name, rather than when a magic ring, a gift of the giant
shepherd, begins to shout, ‘Here I am’. Such an episode with a ring is
the usual ending of the tale. The ring is given by the giant after the
17
For a different theory of how the name ‘Nobody’ is connected with a basic theme
of the poem, based on a play on words involving h Ø (‘nobody’) and T (‘a bird
with long ears’, a ‘bustard’) or t , ‘a long-eared owl’), see Carpenter 1946: 139–41.
According to Carpenter, ‘Odysseus told Polyphemos his boyish nickname ‘Big Ears’,
and the giants had only themselves to blame for their misinterpretation’ (p. 140).
Carpenter’s interpretation, however, does not take into account the play on Ø and
BØ .
18
Cf. Segal 1962: 34. Porphyry, De antro nympharum 35, finds it significant that
the harbour where the cave of the nymphs is located, and where the Phaeacians leave
Odysseus, is ‘the harbour of Phorkys’ (13.96). Phorkys is the grandfather of the
Kyklops (1.71–2) and a god of the sea. For Porphyry, the sea represents matter (
ºØŒc ÆØ ), and Odysseus, symbolizing the spirit moving through becoming to
being, is reminded by the name of the harbour that he is not yet free from the BØ
±ºø ŒÆd ºØŒH ŁH (‘the wrath of the gods of the sea and of matter’), which he still
must appease. According to Porphyry, Odysseus will be ÆºH Æº . . . ŒÆd
¼Øæ ŁÆºÆø ŒÆd Kºø æªø (‘completely out of the sea and without experi-
ence of actions that have to do with matter and the sea’) only when he carries out
Teiresias’ instructions (11.121 ff.) and encounters c H KÆºø Oæªø ŒÆd æªø
ÆºB IØæÆ (‘the complete inexperience of sea instruments and actions’).

hero has escaped from the cave; as soon as the hero puts it on his
finger, it begins to shout its location; the hero cannot remove it and
finally escapes the giant only by cutting off his finger (Page, p. 9). As
Page notes, such a magical, talking ring would be quite out of keeping
with the realistic narrative in Book 9 and with the tendency every-
where in Homer to play down or suppress the magical. In these
respects, the ending of the story in Book 9 is much better suited to
the Odyssey than the ending with the ring.
Yet the ending of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos is con-
nected with the rest of the poem in far more significant ways than the
mere avoidance of magic. Odysseus calls out to the Kyklops twice.
The first time, before he has identified himself, he says (9.475ff.) that
evil (ŒÆŒa æªÆ) overtook Polyphemos,
Kd ı På –Ç HØ Kd YŒøØ
KŁÆØ· HØ Zf Æ ŒÆd Łd ¼ººØ
. . . for you did not shrink out of fear from eating guests
in your own house, so Zeus and the other gods have punished you.
(9.478–9)
One of the principal themes of the Odyssey is that guests and suppliants
should be received with hospitality and gifts, because, as Odysseus
reminds Polyphemos (9.270–1),
Zf ’ KØØøæ ƒŒø ø
Ø , n ØØ –’ ÆN ØØ OÅ E.
Zeus the guest god, who accompanies respected strangers with honours,
avenges any wrong done to strangers and suppliants.
Zeus in the Odyssey represents moral right, and hospitality is a mark of

civilization and morality. Repeatedly, the characters whom Odysseus
meets prosper or suffer according to the attitude with which they
receive him and the hospitality they offer.19 Furthermore, Odysseus’
statement that Polyphemos was blinded because (K, 9.478) he did
not shrink from eating his guests, makes the Kyklops similar to the
Suitors and the Companions, to Aigisthos, and even to the Phaeacians:
19
ŒÆd
ªø (‘and he learned of their mind’, 1.3) refers to Odysseus’ knowledge
of the attitudes of those whom he meets while journeying home—whether each was
hçæø or ŒÆŒ
çæø, ‘well-minded’, i.e. ‘friendly’, or ‘evilly-minded’, i.e. ‘hostile’. Cf.
Stanford 1965–7: 1.207 on 8.559.

ÆPH ªaæ çæÅØØ IÆŁÆºÅØØ Zº (‘for they were destroyed
by their own wild recklessness’, 1.7). This is a great moral theme of the
poem, and the abuse of the guest–host relationship, whether by guest
or host, is its prime example. In the case of Polyphemos, the abuse is
particularly great, for he not only eats his guests but mocks them and
the very institution of hospitality and guest-friendship, telling Odys-
seus that his guest-gift will be to be eaten last, after his men.
The other principal way in which the end of the story is thematically
connected with the entire poem has been pointed out by George
Dimock, Jr., who observes that ‘[i]n a way, the whole problem of the
Odyssey is for Odysseus to establish his identity’ and finds the constant
establishment and re-establishment of this identity in the pain and
trouble Odysseus causes to himself and others.20 When Odysseus
taunts Polyphemos for the second time (9.502–5), he boastfully iden-
tifies himself by name, father, and homeland and, in one of his most
destructive aspects, as city-sacker. This boast is possible because he has
blinded the Kyklops, and both the blinding and the boast are Odysseus’
responses to the felt need to establish his identity. Before he blinded
Polyphemos, he was ˇsØ /h Ø (‘Nobody’ / ‘not anyone’); afterward,
he is Odysseus, the inflicter of pain.21 The desire to show this process of
self-identification was perhaps Homer’s main reason both for substi-
tuting Odysseus’ boasts and taunts for the magic ring and for grafting
the folk-tale about the outwitting of the demon onto the tale of the
escape from the giant shepherd, with the unique and basic change from
the name ‘Myself ’ to the name ‘Nobody’.
Dimock adduces further textual evidence concerning Odysseus as
inflicter of pain. After he has been blinded, the Kyklops is described as
T ø O ÅØØ (‘travailing in pains’, 9.415). Dimock points out that
T ø means, basically, ‘to be in labour of childbirth’ (cf. Il. 11.269ff.),
and argues that Odysseus’ establishing his identity is metaphorically
expressed in his adventure with Polyphemos as his being born and
‘casting [his] name in the teeth of a hostile universe’ (p. 59). This
interpretation is supported by the suggestion in the words T ø
O ÅØ of the name O ı (Odysseus), especially in the context
in which they occur, just one line after the word-play on ˇsØ /h Ø
and BØ / Ø .22 When Odysseus shouts his name to Polyphemos at
20 21
Dimock 1963: 54 et passim. Ibid. 58.
22
The interpretation is also supported by the play on O ı /O ÆŁÆØ at
1.62 and 19.407–9 (cf. 5.340).

9.502–5, he is asserting his re-birth as Odysseus, the giver of pain. This
assertion would have been impossible if Homer had followed the usual
ending of the standard folk-tale, with its magic ring. Once again it is
clear that Homer departs from his ‘source’ in such a way as to make the
story of Odysseus and Polyphemos resonate with a central theme of the
entire poem.
The analysis of the Homeric epics into their supposed components
is a well-known chapter in the history of Homeric scholarship,
though it has few adherents today. As I have tried to show in this
chapter, such analysis bears fruit only when the atypical or unex-
pected details it reveals in a particular part of the poem are under-
stood in light of the major themes and motifs of the entire poem. One
highly productive approach to such understanding is the method of
Neoanalysis developed by Ioannis Kakridis, which interprets such
details (1) in terms of their poetic relevance to diction, themes,
ideas, and values that are of fundamental importance throughout
the epic, and (2) in light of the poet’s allusion to and adaptation of
traditional mythological and folkloric motifs in accordance with his
own poetic purposes. Neoanalysts have focused mainly on the Iliad,
but this chapter has tried to show the usefulness of such an approach
for the literary interpretation of the Odyssey as well.23
Postscript (2014): of the many discussions of Odysseus and Polyphe-

mos in Odyssey 9 since this essay was first published in 1970, I mention
four that usefully address some of the themes and interpretive prob-
lems on which I focus: Glenn 1971, Austin 1972, Peradotto 1990: 46–7,
140–2, 143–70, and Danek 1998: 172–93. (Danek 1998 is by far the
fullest and most illuminating Neoanalytical study of the Odyssey, while
Peradotto 1990 is perhaps the most sophisticated in its use of linguistic
and narratological theory for the purpose of literary interpretation.)
On the relationship of traditional folk-tales to Homeric epic, especially
the Odyssey, see Page 1974, Hölscher 1978, 1989. For a mainly nar-
ratological commentary on the Odysseus–Polyphemos episode, see de
Jong 2001: 231–49.
23
On the adaptation of traditional folk-tales and folk motifs, see Kakridis 1949:
106–26, 1971: 25–53, 141–63. Cf. Chapter 9, this volume.
Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey:

Herakles and the Bow of Odysseus
Mythological allusion helps to define the subject matter of the Odys-

sey and the genre to which the poem belongs, in part because the
generic differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey involve, even
demand, different uses of allusion. It has been suggested that in the
case of an oral poetic tradition such as that of which the Homeric
epics are end-products, ‘[W]e [should] show great caution when we
speak about allusion, because the audience could not have shared
with the poet the kind of familiarity with the tradition that makes
allusion possible’.1 This suggestion, however, seems to me unduly
pessimistic: in an oral poetic tradition an allusion can function as a
quotation does in written literature, referring the audience not only to
a specific character or event, but to a recognizable poetic representa-
tion or treatment of that character or event.2 In this chapter I focus on
the story of Odysseus’ bow that is told at the beginning of Book 21 of
the Odyssey and on the poem’s main allusions to Herakles, who
figures at different points in the epic as both a paradigm for and a
heroic antitype to Odysseus.3
1
Andersen 1998: 137–48. The words quoted appear on p. 148.
2
This is essentially the position of Danek 1998, who shows by detailed and
convincing analyses how what he calls ‘quotations’ (Zitaten), but some might term
‘allusions’ (Anspielungen), tend to have a programmatic relevance not only to the
dramatic situations in which they occur, but to the main themes and distinctive values
of the Odyssey as a whole.
3
Clay 1983: 90–6 and Danek 1998: 247–9, 403–6 discuss the significant contrasts
between Herakles and Odysseus, but not the equally important similarities. See Clay
1983: 91 n. 68 for references to earlier scholarship on differences between the two
characters.
40 Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey

In contrast to the Iliad, where mythological allusions function
mainly to exclude other than the poem’s own, distinctive themes
and values, thus heightening its tragic intensity,4 the mythological
allusions in the Odyssey contribute to that poem’s inclusion within
itself of alternative possibilities and alternative ways of evaluating its
characters’ actions and sufferings. These allusions help to expand the
range of human possibilities that the poem embraces and the range of
ethical judgements it invites. Even though the Odyssey privileges
Odysseus’ and Penelope’s distinctive kind of tenacity and resource-
fulness and traces the development of these qualities in Telemachos
as he comes of age, its mythological allusions contribute to the sense
that there are other ways in which to evaluate the individual achieve-
ments and social institutions that the poem represents.
In the Iliad, most mythological allusions occur in speeches by
characters, when they wish to present themselves in a particular light
or try to persuade other characters to take some course of action.
Among the best known examples are Phoinix’s reference in Book 9
to the story of the wrath of Meleager, when he is trying to persuade
Achilles to rejoin the fighting, and Achilles’ recourse to the story of
Niobe in Book 24, when he is trying to persuade Priam to eat, after the
corpse of Hektor has been ransomed. This kind of mythological allu-
sion by a character is less common in the Odyssey than in the Iliad,
though one might recall Penelope’s moving comparison of herself to
the ‘daughter of Pandareos [ . . . ], the nightingale’ (19.518–22), which
gives rise to the story of Prokne killing her own and Zethos’ son, Itylos,
or Antinoos’ remarkably un-self-aware reference (21.295–304) to the
story of the centaur Eurytion’s drunken disruption of the marriage
of Peirithoos and Laodameia and the ensuing battle of the Lapiths
and the centaurs.
The most significant mythological allusions in the Odyssey are
made not by characters but by the poem’s (implied) narrator. To
give a familiar, if minor, example, Book 5 begins with a reference to
‘Dawn ris[ing] from bed, from beside noble Tithonos, / so she might
bring light to immortals and mortals’ ( Hg ’ KŒ ºåø Ææ’ IªÆı F
ØŁø E / þæıŁ’, ¥’ IŁÆ Ø Ø çø çæ Ø Mb æ E Ø, Od.

5.1–2). This is the only one of the poem’s numerous references to
dawn breaking that mentions Tithonos, the story of whose futile
4
Slatkin 1991 (= 2011a: 17–95).
Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey 41

immortality as the consort of the goddess, Aphrodite, is told in the
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218–38 (cf. Mimnermos, fr. 4 [West],
Sappho fr. 58.19–22 [Voigt]).5 The description of Dawn as bringing
light to immortals as well as mortals is equally unparalleled within the
Odyssey, and both this description and the reference to Tithonos are
of obvious thematic relevance to a Book in which Odysseus declines
Kalypso’s offer to remain with her as her immortal husband and
chooses instead to return to Penelope and a life of mortal heroism.6
A more developed example of such a mythological allusion by the
poem’s narrator is the story of the bow of Odysseus (21.11–41). When
Penelope goes to get the bow and arrows of Odysseus that she will use
in the contest to determine which Suitor will marry her, the narrator
tells how Odysseus had received this bow from his guest-friend Iphitos,
who had inherited it from his father, the great archer Eurytos; how
Iphitos was killed by Herakles in a gross breach of guest-friendship;
and how Odysseus did not take this bow to Troy with him when he
went to war, but left it behind, having used it only in his own land.
This story, though told by the poem’s narrator, is ‘focalized’ by
Penelope, that is, told from her viewpoint. From the moment at
which the narrator states that ‘Athene put it into [Penelope’s] mind /
[ . . . ] / to set up the bow and gray iron for the Suitors / in the halls of
Odysseus—the prize-contest and the beginning of slaughter’ (21.1–4),
the story is told as Penelope remembers it when she goes to fetch the
bow from the palace storeroom. Whether or not the proleptically
significant words, ‘the prize-contest and the beginning of slaughter’
(IŁºØÆ ŒÆd ç ı Iæå, 21.4) should be understood as reflecting a
plan or wish, conscious or unconscious, on the part of Penelope, or it is
a comment by the narrator, it makes sense that the whole story of the
bow reflects Penelope’s memory of Odysseus as well as her conscious-
ness of the possibility of a new husband. Hence she ‘weeps aloud’ when
she takes the bow out of its case and sits with it on her lap (21.55–6).7
5
The lines on Tithonos in Sappho 58 do not actually appear in Voigt 1971 or in
any standard edition of Sappho’s fragments, because they were discovered only
recently in two papyri first published in 2004: Cologne Papyrus 21315 and Cologne
Papyrus 21376. These papyri expanded the text of the fragment radically, which, in
the case of lines 19–22, was previously limited to two or three words at the end of each
line. See Obbink 2011. Od. 5.1–2 are identical to Il.11. 1–2.
6
Vernant 1982: 13–9 [=Engl. trans.: 185–9].
7
Cf. Finley, Jr. 1978: 20–1. Penelope does not make the allusion to Iphitos and the
bow in direct speech, as would most likely have been the case in the Iliad (though in

Many mythological allusions in the Iliad and Odyssey refer to
characters whose actions and sufferings take place outside the myth-
ology of the Trojan War, often in an earlier generation of heroes.
Some of these characters are known from the fragments and
summaries of early Greek epics that do not survive as complete
poems. For example, Eurytos and Iphitos were important figures in
the Sack of Oichalia; the warriors later known as the Seven against
Thebes and their sons appeared in the Thebais and Epigonoi; and
Herakles, who in both the Iliad and the Odyssey is the ‘lionhearted’
(Łı º Æ) hero par excellence (Il. 5.639, Od. 11.267), figured in
the Sack of Oichalia and in some sort of Herakleis. Other characters
are alluded to only in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the stories
about them in later texts, including the Homeric scholia, suggest
that they too were familiar from traditional oral epic, and this is
perhaps confirmed by the way in which their names and formulaic
epithets seem thoroughly embedded metrically and stylistically in
the Homeric hexameter.
Perhaps because the Odyssey actually incorporates so much mater-
ial from outside the mythology of the Trojan War and its aftermath
into its complex and wide-ranging narrative, it contains relatively few
mythological allusions, compared with the Iliad. Therefore the schol-
arly discussion of mythological allusions in Homer has focused
mostly on the latter poem. There have been three main interpretive
approaches in the past seventy-five or eighty years, all of which are
based on the notion that these allusions serve the poem’s or the poet’s
distinctive purposes. Some scholars consider ‘that Homer has a genial
habit of inventing mythology for the purpose of adducing it as a
that epic too, when Patroklos puts on the armour of Achilles and is said not to have
taken Achilles’ great spear of Pelian ash, ‘which no one else of the Achaians could
wield’—a gift of the Centaur Cheiron to Achilles’ father ‘to be slaughter for mortal
heroes’ (Il. 16.140–4)—perhaps this reference to the spear and the reason for not
taking it should be thought of as focalized by Patroklos. Odysseus’ bow and Achilles’
spear bear comparison as instances of the common folk-motif ‘of an object that only
one man can wield’ (Janko 1992: 355 on Il.16.141–4, referring to Thompson 1955–8:
D 1651.1.1). Although neither Patroklos nor the rest of the Greeks can wield the spear,
Achilles uses it to take vengeance on the man who killed his comrade (cf. Il.
19.388–91), just as Odysseus uses the bow that none of the Suitors can string to
work his vengeance on them. On the place of the spear in the poetic and ethical
economy of the Iliad, see now Seiradaki 2014: chapter 4.

parallel to the situation in his story’.8 Others argue that Homer, for
his own poetic purposes, adopted or adapted already existing passages
of epic poetry that were well known to his audience either as written
texts or from oral performance.9 In The Power of Thetis: Allusion and
Interpretation in the Iliad, Laura Slatkin argues that early Greek epics
programmatically rearrange and redistribute traditional formulas and
themes and transform traditional myths in accordance with their
distinctive subject matter, values, and genres. For example, in the
Iliad, Thetis, the mother of Achilles, is merely one of the fifty daugh-
ters of Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea, but Slatkin shows convin-
cingly that in traditional mythology, Thetis was a divinity of cosmic
power and dignity, whose son was destined to overthrow Zeus. By
transferring her power and wrath to Achilles, the mortal son she was
forced to bear, the Iliad revises this traditional poetry as part of its
exploration of ‘the vulnerability of even the greatest of heroes’ (p. 7)
and implies that the rule of Zeus and the cosmic order are, as it were,
maintained by Achilles’ mortality. Unlike Kakridis, Kullmann, and
Danek, who argue that the audience’s familiarity with specific pas-
sages and motifs of traditional poetry enabled them to recognize and
interpret the appearance and significance of these passages and motifs
within the Iliad or Odyssey, Slatkin emphasizes that ‘the epic audi-
ence’s knowledge of alternative [mythological] possibilities allows the
poet to build his narrative by deriving meaning not only from what
the poem includes but from what the poem excludes’ (p. 4).
No pattern of mythological allusion in the Odyssey works in quite
the same way as the allusions to the mythology of Thetis do in the
Iliad. Perhaps the frequent references to the myths associated with the
house of Atreus come close, but Menelaos, Helen, and Agamemnon
(or at least his łıå in the Land of the Dead) actually are characters in
the poem, unlike Briareos in the Iliad, whom Thetis is said by Achilles
to have summoned on one occasion to save Zeus from a rebellion by
Athene, Hera, and Poseidon (Il. 1.397–406). Furthermore, in the Odys-
sey the events involving Agamemnon, Klutaimestra, and Orestes are
nearly contemporaneous with those involving Odysseus, Penelope,
and Telemachos, not set in a mythological past in which the cosmos
8
See Willcock 1977: 41–53. The words quoted appear on p. 43. Cf. Willcock, 1964:
141–54; Braswell 1971: 16–26. Andersen 1998: 148, comments: ‘What the poet evokes,
is often what he creates.’
9
e.g. Kakridis 1949, 1971; Kullmann 1960; Danek 1998.

had not yet arrived at its ‘present’ order. The references to the murders
of Agamemnon and Kassandra and the vengeance of Orestes on
Klutaimestra and Aigisthos function analogically within the narrative,
rather than allusively by pointing beyond it. There is no sense that
traditional formulas, themes, and mythology associated with the family
of Atreus are being rearranged or reallocated, or that audiences and
readers are being invited to draw on their familiarity with a tradition
not explicitly mentioned in the poem, in order to understand the
actions and characters that the poem does represent.
There are, however, at least two related groups of mythological
allusions in the Odyssey that challenge interpreters to make sense of
complex—even contradictory—versions of stories and raise ethical
questions about the poem’s dominant values. These allusions have to
do with Herakles and with the bow of Odysseus. For example, toward
the end of Book 11, after describing his encounters with Agamemnon,
Achilles, and Ajax in the Land of the Dead, Odysseus tells his Phaeacian
audience that he met with the Yøº (‘image’) of the ‘Herakleian
violence’ (Å ˙æÆŒºÅÅ, 11.601–2). This formulaic periphrasis for
the name ‘Herakles’ usually is considered to be metrically motivated,
since Herakles in the nominative and accusative cases cannot fit into the
dactylic hexameter in which the Odyssey, like all Greek epic poetry, is
composed. In the Iliad and Odyssey, however, such periphrases, com-
bining Å (‘violence’), its near-synonym Y (‘strength’, ‘force’), or one of
a few other nouns, with a proper adjective or the genitive form of a
proper name is not only metrically motivated, but tends to be used
mainly in connection with heroes of an earlier mythological generation,
such as Herakles, Eteokles, and Iphikles.10 This is the generation that
Hesiod, at Works and Days 148, associates with ‘great violence’ (ªºÅ
Å), in contrast to the ‘better and more just, divine race of warriors’ in
the next generation, who fought at Troy (ØŒÆØæ ŒÆd ¼æØ /
IæH æø ŁE ª , WD 158–9).11 Thus Odysseus’ use of Å
10
See Schein 1984: 136–7, 164. Telemachos, however, is referred to seven times in
the Odyssey as Y . . .
Åºå Ø (2.409 = 18.405 = 23.101; 16.476; 18.60 = 21.130 =
22.354. The use of Y with Æ E (‘river’, Il. 21.356), I ı (Il. 15.383) and I Ø
(‘wind’, Il. 17.739, Od. 9.71, 13.276, 19.186), and of Oı B (Odysseus, Il. 23.720) is
not quite periphrastic, because in these places Y denotes the actual strength of a river,
a wind, or Odysseus. See Richardson 1993: 82 on Il. 21.356.
11
See Schmitt 1967: 110 n. 67, cited by Nagy 1979: 318 §2 n. 2. Schmitt argues that
periphrases combining a noun with a proper adjective are more archaic than those
combining a noun with the genitive case form of a name, and Nagy notes, ‘In this light

˙æÆŒºÅÅ at Od. 11.601 characterizes Herakles as a cruder kind of
hero from an earlier age, in contrast to himself.
Almost immediately, however, as Odysseus and the ‘image’ of
Herakles converse, the ‘image’ tells Odysseus (11.618–21):
p º’, q Øa ŒÆd f ŒÆŒe æ ªÅºÇØ,

‹ æ Kªg Oå Œ ’ ÆPªa Mº Ø ,
ZÅe b œ qÆ ˚æ , ÆPaæ OÇı 620
rå IØæ Å.
Ah, wretch, you too are undergoing an evil doom,
the very one that I kept on suffering beneath the rays of the sun.
I was the son of Zeus, the son of Kronos, but I had 620
endless hardship.
Herakles goes on to make the similarity between Odysseus and

himself even greater, when he recalls that he had to serve ‘a much
worse man’ (622–6):
› Ø åÆº f Kºº’ IŁº ı.

ŒÆ ’ KŁ’ ł Œ’ ¼ ’· P ªaæ ’ ¼ºº
çæÇ F ª Ø ŒæÆææ rÆØ ¼Łº .
e b Kªg IØŒÆ ŒÆd XªÆª K Æ · 625
EæÆ ’ Nb ªºÆıŒHØ ŁÅ.
He imposed difficult hardships on me,
and once he sent me here to bring the dog; for he thought
no other hardship was more overpowering than this one.
I led him off and brought him up from Hades, 625
and Hermes escorted me and grey-eyed Athene.
Herakles not only draws a parallel between himself and Odysseus as

heroes who have travelled alive to the Land of the Dead, but he says
that he himself brought back the dog (Kerberos) with the assistance of
Athene and Hermes, two divinities who conspicuously help Odysseus
elsewhere in the poem. Furthermore, at different points in the Odys-
sey, the word that I have translated as ‘hardship(s)’, ¼Łº , is asso-
ciated specifically with Odysseus. For example, it is used in the plural
by the poem’s narrator at the beginning of Book 1 to denote the trials
and struggles that Odysseus could not avoid even after returning to
the preponderance of biê plus adjective of [Herakles] over biê plus genitive of
[Herakles] is itself significant’.

Ithaca (1.18); in Book 23 Odysseus twice uses the same word of the
troubles with which he and Penelope were ‘both / sated’ (23.350–1)
but of which they had not yet ‘reached the limits’ (23.248). In Book 21
Telemachos (21.135) uses a singular form of the same word to denote
the impending bow contest, as does Odysseus himself at 22.5, when
the contest has just been completed. In other words, Herakles’ diction
at the end of Book 11, as reported by Odysseus, seems to establish him
as similar to, even a paradigm for, the son of Laertes, just after
Odysseus’ choice of the words Å ˙æÆŒºÅÅ had seemed to
distinguish the two as different kinds of heroes.
The difficulty of interpreting this encounter between Odysseus and
the ‘image’ of Herakles is heightened by Odysseus’ report in 11.602–3
that he spoke with the ‘image’, but that ‘[Herakles] himself rejoices in
the fullness of happiness / with the immortal gods and has [as his
wife] beautiful-ankled Hebe’ (ÆPe b ’ IŁÆ Ø Ø Ł E Ø /
æÆØ K ŁÆºÅØ ŒÆd åØ ŒÆºº çıæ ˙Å). Here Odysseus
refers to a version of the Herakles-myth in which he was posthu-
mously deified and lived as a god on Olympos. This is in striking
contrast to the words of Achilles at Il. 18.117–19, when he is assuring
his mother that he is willing to die, if only he can first take vengeance
on Hektor for the death of Patroklos:
Pb ªaæ Pb Å ˙æÆŒºB çª ŒBæÆ,
‹ æ çºÆ Œ ˜Ød ˚æ øØ ¼ÆŒØ·
Iºº Eæ’ KÆ ŒÆd IæªÆº åº ˙æÅ
For no, not even the violence of Herakles avoided death,
who was dearest to the lord Zeus, son of Kronos,
but his portion mastered him, and the hard anger of Hera.
In this self-comparison to the warrior-hero par excellence, who had

once sacked Troy (Il. 5.642, 14.251) as Achilles himself is now trying
to do, Achilles acknowledges that even the greatest hero is subject to
the limit of mortality. This focus on mortal heroism is appropriate
both to Achilles and to a fundamental theme of the Iliad: it is no
accident that Achilles ignores the alternative mythological tradition
in which Herakles achieved deification for his heroism. Does this
mean, however, that Odysseus, by alluding to this tradition at
11.602–4, is suggesting that the human condition is not necessarily
one of mortality, and even that he himself might escape death
through his outstanding survivor’s skills? This seems highly unlikely,
given Odysseus’ rejection of the immortality Kalypso offered him in
Book 5. Rather, Odysseus’ reference to the deification of Herakles is

one example of how the poem asks its audiences and readers to hold
in mind apparently contrasting realities: yes, Odysseus differs from
Achilles as a hero of nostos (‘return-home’) poetry differs from a hero
of kleos (‘warrior’s glory’) poetry, a survivor from one who is com-
mitted to his own and everyone else’s death; no, Odysseus does not
differ from Achilles in any freedom from the limitations imposed
(and the opportunities offered) by being human. The apparent
contradiction in Odysseus’ description of Herakles is, mutatis mu-
tandis, like the contrasting descriptions of Odysseus’ body at dif-
ferent points in the poem: sometimes his body is that of a beggar
driven by the desperate needs of his belly (7.216–21, 17.473–6,
18.2, 53–4), and sometimes it is enhanced by Athene to emphasize
its extraordinary handsomeness and strength (6.229–37, 16.172–6,
23.156–62). It is characteristic of the Odyssey to maintain a series
of twofold versions of its hero, which are sometimes in unrecon-
ciled contradiction to one another and defy any impulse toward
complete certainty. This is one aspect of the poem’s complexity and
interpretive open-endedness, in contrast to the clearer and more
straightforward Iliad.
Apart from Book 11, two other allusions to Herakles contribute
significantly to the interpretive complexity of the Odyssey. In Book 8,
after telling the Phaeacians that only Philoktetes surpassed him with
the bow in the land of the Trojans, Odysseus says (8.223–8):
Iæ Ø b æ æ Ø Ø KæØÇ PŒ KŁº ø,

hŁ’ ˙æÆŒºBœ h’ ¯PæøØ ˇNåÆºØBœ,
¥ ÞÆ ŒÆd IŁÆ Ø Ø KæÇ Œ æd ø. 225
H ÞÆ ŒÆd Ærł’ ŁÆ ªÆ ¯hæı P’ Kd ªBæÆ
¥Œ’ Kd ªæ Ø Ø· å ºø ªaæ ººø
ŒÆ, oŒ Ø æ ŒÆºÇ Ç ŁÆØ.
(but) I would not wish to compete with men of earlier times,
neither with Herakles nor with Eurytos of Oichalia,
who repeatedly competed with the immortals with bows. 225
Therefore great Eurytos died quickly and did not come
to the threshold of old age in his halls; for Apollo, angered,
killed him because he challenged him to shoot with bows.
Odysseus here describes Herakles and Eurytos as ‘men of earlier

times’ (8.223) who transgressed by ‘repeatedly competing’ (8.225)
with the gods. Though he does speak of Herakles’ death, he relates
that of ‘great Eurytos’ (8.226) to this kind of transgressive behaviour,
implying that he himself is more sensible. Furthermore, by referring

to Herakles and Eurytos in the same line and to Eurytos’ death at the
hands of Apollo, Odysseus both alludes to and contradicts a myth
that was presumably told in the epic known as ˇNåÆºÆ –ºø Ø (The
Sack of Oichalia), which is referred to by the V scholion on Od. 21.22
and by Apollodoros (The Library 2.6.1, 2.7.7). According to this story,
Herakles himself killed Eurytos because he would not give him his
daughter Iole in marriage, although Herakles had won her in an
archery contest with Eurytos and his sons, including Iphitos.12 This
version of the myth of Eurytos’ death would have been well known to
Homer’s audience from the oral poetic tradition, and it turns out to
be especially relevant.
Book 21 opens with Penelope going to get the bow and arrows of
Odysseus and with the story of how Odysseus had received that bow
as a gift of guest-friendship from Iphitos, son of ‘great Eurytos’
(21.32). Thus Odysseus’ bow, with which he wins the bride contest
and kills the Suitors, once belonged to the transgressive figure whom
Apollo killed because of his desire to compete with the gods—or, in
the story from The Sack of Oichalia, whom Herakles killed because he
would not honour the results of a bride contest with bows. The bow in
Book 21 is both the vehicle and symbol of Odysseus’ possession of
some of the old-fashioned, raw heroic violence associated with those
figures of an earlier age. In addition, the allusion to the bride contest
12
The V scholion says only that Herakles killed Iphitos because he and his father
would not give him Iole in marriage, although he had won her as a prize. Apollodoros
offers more detail, saying that Eurytos had offered Iole as a bride to whoever should
defeat his sons and himself in an archery competition, but when Herakles surpassed
them in this competition, he did not receive the bride. Therefore Herakles later killed
Iphitos when the latter came to his house seeking some cattle that had been stolen
from Euboia by Autolykos, but that Eurytos thought Herakles had taken. Subse-
quently, after being punished for this murder by enslavement to the Lydian queen,
Omphale, Herakles campaigned against Oichalia, killed Eurytos and the rest of his
sons, and sacked the city (2.7.7). The BQ scholia on Od. 21.22 briefly mention Iphitos’
quest for horses stolen by Autolykos and sold to Herakles, and state explicitly that
Homer ‘does not know about the passion for Iole, nor that [Herakles], when he was
unsuccessful in his passion for Iole, stole Eurytos’ mares’. For other relevant sources,
see Thalmann 1998: 167 n. 37. Thalmann, however, doubts the relevance of the story
of the archery contest for Iole as told in the scholia, and emphasizes instead the
significance of ‘the whole tradition of the courtship competition . . .’ (pp. 167–8).
Schwisani 1995: 247–54 argues that the ‘Odyssey poet’ transformed a traditional story
in which Eurytos was killed by Apollo and left his bow to Iphitos, who was killed by
Herakles in connection with an incident of cattle rustling. She suggests that the poet
did this and invented a situation that would bring Odysseus together with Iphitos,
because he wanted the famous bow to play a positive role in his poem.

with bows between Eurytos and Herakles suggests that the bow brings
to Odysseus, in his contest with the Suitors, a special power associated
with its use in that legendary contest for the hand of a bride. In that
contest, however, the loser, Eurytos, wielded the bow. This allusion
casts an odd shadow on Odysseus’ victory and subsequent slaughter
of the Suitors by associating him both with Eurytos’ transgressive
behaviour and with the loss of a bride to a better archer. Indeed, in
figurative terms, it almost makes Odysseus one of the Suitors.
It is significant, in relation to Herakles, that Odysseus received the
bow specifically as a gift of guest-friendship from Iphitos, though ‘the
two men did not know one another at the table’ ( Pb æÆÇÅØ /
ªÅ Iºººø, 21.35–6)—that is, neither had the opportunity to
entertain the other hospitably with a meal in his own home. This was
because ‘[Herakles] killed [Iphitos] although he was a guest-friend in
his own house, / the wicked man, nor did he show respect for the gods
looking on or for the table / that he set beside him’ (‹ Ø E KÆ
ŒÆŒÆ zØ Kd YŒøØ, / åºØ , Pb ŁH ZØ ÆN Æ’ Pb
æÇÆ, / c l ƒ ÆæŁÅŒ, 21.27–9). The contrast between
Herakles, who violated the institution of guest-friendship in his own
house, and Odysseus, who is about to kill the Suitors in large part for
their violation of guest–host proprieties in his palace, is clear. Herakles
and the Suitors are aligned thematically with the poem’s other, phys-
ically violent abusers of guest-friendship, such as Polyphemos, ‘who are
both violent and savage and not just’ ( ¥ ª’ oæØ Æ ŒÆd ¼ªæØ Ø Pb
ŒÆØ Ø), in contrast to those characters who are ‘friendly to strangers
and their mind is god-fearing’ (çØºØ Ø, ŒÆ çØ K d Ł ı,
6.120–1 = 9.175–6 = 13.201–2).13 Yet Herakles also is aligned with
Odysseus as a pre-eminent hero who lived the same sort of evil destiny
as the son of Laertes; like him, successfully achieved a journey to the
Land of the Dead with the help of Athene and Hermes; and, again like
him, triumphed in a bridal contest with his bow.
There is also, implicitly, another problematic similarity between
Herakles and Odysseus in relation to their bows. Homer’s audience
probably knew the story, familiar from later mythology, that Herakles
used poisoned arrows that had been envenomed with the blood of
the Hydra. One of the first things the Odyssey tells about its hero is
that he too poisoned his arrows. In Book 1 Athene, disguised as
13
Cf. Clay 1983: 95–6; Danek 1998: 405–6.

Mentes, tells Telemachos how Odysseus had gone to Ephyra, to Ilos,
son of Mermeros,
. . . çæÆŒ Iæ ç ØÇ , ZçæÆ ƒ YÅ

N f åæ ŁÆØ åÆºŒæÆ· Iºº’ › b h ƒ
HŒ, K ÞÆ Ł f Ç ÆNb KÆ,
Iººa Ææ ƒ HŒ K· çØº Œ ªaæ ÆNH.
. . . seeking a man-slaughtering drug with which
he might smear his bronze arrows; Ilos did not give it
to him, since he respected the gods who exist forever,
but my father gave it to him, for he used to be terribly friendly to him.
(1.261–4)
The very mention of Odysseus poisoning his arrows would have

reminded an audience familiar with the poetic tradition of Herakles,
and in this way would have made the heroes resemble one another. On
the other hand, Odysseus’ comment at 8.219–20 that ‘only Philoktetes
surpassed me with the bow / in the land of the Trojans, when we
Achaians used to compete with bows’, would have reminded the same
audience of the opposition between Herakles and Odysseus, since at
Troy Philoktetes wielded the bow of Herakles, given to him when he
was a young man in return for lighting the hero’s pyre, and with that
weapon not only surpassed Odysseus in archery but also killed Paris
and shared with the son of Laertes in the glory of sacking Troy.
These allusions to Herakles—including the explicit mention of his
murder of Iphitos at the table, which is analogous to the feast Odysseus
prepares for his ‘guests’ at his tables (21.428–30, cf. 22.19–20)—make
Odysseus’ vengeance on the Suitors ethically more complicated than it
might otherwise seem to be. The climax of the poem involves Odysseus
using his bow—the bow of Iphitos and his father Eurytos—to kill
uninvited guests in his own halls, at his own table, because they have
no respect for his property and violate the norms of guest-friendship.
Clearly the poem expects its audiences and readers to approve of the
slaughter of the Suitors, and in the end Odysseus and Telemachos get
away with killing them all, thanks to the assistance and approval of the
gods. On the other hand, as I have mentioned, Odysseus’ slaughter of
the Suitors is introduced by the story of Herakles killing a guest in his
own halls, at his own table, and stealing the guest’s property in violation
of the divinely sanctioned norms of guest-friendship. According to
Odysseus, Herakles offered himself in the Land of the Dead as a model
for Odysseus, but in Book 8 Odysseus had already declined to associate

himself as an archer with Herakles, because this hero of earlier times
had competed with his bow against the gods. Yet, as I have pointed out,
one of the first things said in the poem about Odysseus as an archer is
that he poisons his arrows, which makes Odysseus resemble Herakles
in a behaviour which, as Athene/Mentes implies, is disapproved of by
the gods (‘Ilos did not give [the poison] / to him, since he respected the
gods who exist forever, 1.262–3). The ethical contradictions in these
allusions to Herakles are clear and strong.14
The story of the bow of Odysseus resonates thematically with the
Odyssey as a whole in still another significant way. Odysseus met
Iphitos in Messene at the house of Ortilochos, when, ‘as a boy’ (ÆØe
K, 21.21), he was sent by his father and the other Ithacan elders to
collect a debt owed to the community—herds and herders who had
been taken by Messenian rustlers. Similarly, Iphitos was seeking twelve
mares and their mule foals that had been stolen by Herakles. It is easy to
see Odysseus’ embassy, in ritual terms, as a kind of initiation into
manhood, like his journey to Parnassos to get ‘glorious gifts’ from his
grandfather Autolykos and his uncles (19.413–66). Odysseus returns
with these gifts and with the scar resulting from his being wounded by a
wild boar that he subsequently kills—the scar that is the emblem of his
heroic identity as a sufferer and giver of pain and suffering.15 In the
same way he returns from Messene, presumably with the herds and
herders he was seeking and with the bow he received from Iphitos. This
bow, like the scar, is associated with Odysseus’ initiation into man-
hood, but unlike the scar it is also associated with his political identity
as king of Ithaca, since he displayed and used it only in his own land
and, when he went to Troy, left it behind in the palace storeroom as one
of the ŒØºØÆ . . . ¼ÆŒ (‘the king’s . . . treasures’, 21.9).16 Both the
bow and the scar are instruments by which Odysseus (re-)establishes
his identity and is recognized by others as being who and what he is.17
14
Cf. Crissy 1997: 42–6, Thalmann 1998: 174–7.
15
Cf. Dimock, Jr. 1963 and 1989: 258–9.
16
See Ready 2010: 134–41, 148, who argues that Odysseus’ displaying the bow on
Ithaca contributes to and advertises his ‘coercive power’ as the island’s main leader
(Æ Øº) and his household’s wealth. Cf. Nagler 1993: 250–1 on Odysseus’ bow as
‘stand[ing] for violence used to control one’s own community’ (cited by Thalmann
1998: 178, Ready 2010: 145).
17
Murnaghan 1987: 115–16, sees ‘the scar, which is the most frequently used token
of Odysseus’ identity’, as combining the social aspect of the bow, as ‘the token by
which Odysseus reveals himself as someone deserving to be considered a guest-friend
and the avenger of the Suitors’ offences against hospitality’, with the personal aspect of

In addition to being both a symbol and an instrument of Odysseus’
renewed rule over Ithaca, in part through the Eurytan power of old
that it transmits, the bow is also a sign and product of Odysseus’
ability, even as a youth, to participate in the rituals of gift exchange
required of a successful king.18 He acquired it as part of an exchange
with Iphitos that was the ‘beginning of a guest-friendship involving a
close tie’ (Iæåc Ø Å æ ŒÅ , 21.35), like the guest-
friendship formed by Telemachos with Peisistratos on his first journey
away from home (15.195–7)—a journey that constitutes Telemachos’
initiation into the realities and responsibilities of adulthood and of
his eventual role as king of Ithaca.
The story of the bow, with its references to the death of Iphitos at
Herakles’ hands and its attendant themes of guest-friendship, heroic
identity, and kingship, is a good example of how mythological allu-
sion in the Odyssey coheres with and helps to express the central ideas
and values of the poem. There is an obvious parallel between the
Suitors, for whom the bow was to be ‘a contest and the beginning of
slaughter’ (IŁºØÆ ŒÆd ç ı Iæå, 21.4), and Iphitos, for whom the
mares were ‘slaughter and his portion’ (ç ŒÆd EæÆ, 21.24).19 Yet
Iphitos, the guest-friend of Odysseus and innocent victim of Hera-
kles, presumably should be thought of as a ‘good’ character, while the
Suitors are clearly ‘evil’. Thus the allusion to Herakles, Iphitos, and
the story of the bow of Odysseus brings forward mythological inci-
dents that enhance the poem’s interpretive and ethical complexity.20
This complexity has still another dimension, if Odysseus’ use of
the bow to kill the Suitors is seen in light of his doing so on the feast
day of Apollo, the god of archery (20.277–8, 21.258–9)21—the same
the bed described in Book 23, the ‘inalienable quality’ of which ‘is essential to its use as
a token of Odysseus’ identity to Penelope and as a sign of Penelope’s fidelity to
Odysseus’. In a sense, too, the bow resembles Odysseus’ dog, Argos, in that its
power comes to life only when Odysseus returns home. Argos, however, revives
only momentarily to acknowledge his master and then dies, while the bow serves as
the means by which Odysseus regains his kingdom. For a structural comparison of the
complex narrative ‘digressions’ telling of the bow and the scar, see Gaisser 1969: 20–3.
18
Cf. Ready 2010: 135–8.
19
Cf. Danek 1998: 405–6; Thalmann 1998: 175.
20
Cf. Russo in Russo and Heubeck 2004: 153–5. Cf. Bakker 2013: 132–4 on the
Odyssey as ‘giv[ing] a positive turn’ to the ‘negative depict[ion]’ of Odysseus in epic
tradition ‘by pit[ting] Zeus against Poseidon in a conflict that remains unresolved
throughout the poem’ (134).
21
See Austin 1975: 245–51.

Apollo who, in one version of the story, killed the bow’s former
owner, Eurytos, for his transgressive competition with the gods in a
kind of bow contest. When one considers Apollo as a god of archery
in Homeric epic, it is impossible not to think of the opening of the
Iliad, where ‘he who shoots from afar’ takes vengeance on the Greek
army for Agamemnon’s mistreatment of his priest Chryses with
arrows that might be considered poisoned, like those of Odysseus
and Herakles, insofar as they cause a deadly plague. Just before Apollo
shoots at the army, his bow makes a Ø . . . ŒºÆªª (‘a terrible
piercing sound’, Il. 1.49) analogous to the swallow-like sound the
‘bard’ Odysseus produces when he plucks his bowstring at Od.
21.410–11. The arrows with which Odysseus kills Antinoos, Euryma-
chos, and other Suitors are not explicitly said to be poisoned; they are,
however, called N (plural of N, ‘arrow’), rather than the more
common Oœ (used five times in the first 119 lines of Book 22),
which by a kind of wordplay suggests the word of identical sound and
spelling, N (‘venom’, ‘poison’). The same word is used when Athene/
Mentes tells Telemachos that Odysseus sought a man-slaughtering
drug with which ‘to smear his bronze arrows (N , 1.262) and, in the
singular, when Apollo shoots his first arrow at the Greek army (N,
Il. 1.48). In the slaughter of the Suitors, Odysseus resembles Apollo, a
quasi-identification that is strengthened by the simile comparing him
stringing his bow to an I Ø (‘bard’) attaching a new string to his
çæØª (‘lyre’), an artist and instrument that are associated with
Apollo.22 This quasi-identification with Apollo caps the allusions
earlier in the poem that associate Odysseus with the archer Herakles.
As he takes his vengeance, he is allusively and intertextually both
Herakles and Apollo.23
The way in which mythological allusions complicate the interpret-
ation of the ˇdyssey is correlative with the poem’s genre. In its vision of
Odysseus’ post-war , his return to home and self, the poem offers
a wide-ranging representation of reality, a capacious and manifold
vision of life. By contrast, the Iliad restricts itself to considerations of
Œº (‘heroic glory’) and its contradictions, and its hero, for all his
22
Cf. Il. 1.603 ‘the lyre (çæØª) that Apollo wielded’.
23
Thalmann 1998: 178, anticipated by Nagler 1990: 348, compares Odysseus’
‘quasi-epiphany’ as Apollo, when he has strung the bow, leapt to the threshold, and
is about to begin killing the Suitors, to Apollo at HHAp 2–4, where he enters Zeus’
house and strings his bow, and the other gods leap from their seats in fear.

generosity and insight into the human condition, remains permanently
dislocated from both home and self. By comparison with the Odyssey,
the Iliad is one-dimensional in its intense focus on mortal heroism as
the means of achieving meaning in life and ‘imperishable glory’ in song;
it employs mythological allusions to exclude from consideration com-
peting themes and values. The Odyssey, on the other hand, uses
mythological allusions to include as much as possible within its bound-
aries, challenging audiences and readers to interpret the narrative and
ethical complexities that these allusions generate.24
24
I would like to thank Franco Montanari and the Scientific Committee of the
Congress Omero Tremila Anni Dopo for the invitation that gave rise to this essay.
I also am grateful to Georg Danek, Nancy Felson, and Leslie Kurke for their encour-
agement and helpful criticism of an early draft.
Divine and Human in the Homeric

Hymn to Aphrodite
The Homeric hymns To Aphrodite and To Demeter are the only

surviving examples of archaic Greek epic in which divinity and
humanity are coequal poetic themes.1 The Iliad and Odyssey and, in
a different way, the Works and Days, are concerned mainly with
the human, mortal condition. The Theogony and the other major
Homeric Hymns ‘reinterpre[t] traditional myths in order to create a
set of symbols which give meaning to life as experienced by the poet
and his age’,2 but they are fundamentally about the gods and the
genesis of the Olympian or cosmic order; human beings are signifi-
cant only insofar as their existence and activities are part of or follow
from this order. Only the Hymn to Aphrodite and the Hymn to
Demeter are about ways in which the divine and human realms are
linked. Both narrate an event in mythological time that is not only a
one-time event but speaks to the inevitability of a specific kind of
human female experience: in the Hymn to Demeter, that the daughter
must leave the mother (and the mother lose the daughter) for mar-
riage; in the Hymn to Aphrodite, that the female must subdue herself
to the male sexually for the satisfaction of her own desire—that she
must act ‘female’ according to the normal sexual code, be dominated
and experience defeat, in order to triumph. It is no accident that each
poem features a reduction or readjustment of the power of its titular
divinity in relation to that of Zeus, the supreme male power in the
cosmos.
1
The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women might be another such example, but it is too
fragmentary to speak of as ‘surviving’.
2
Brown 1953: 35.
56 Divine and Human in the Hymn to Aphrodite

The two poems, however, differ in how they represent this
readjustment of power. In the Hymn to Demeter, it occurs in a
positive context as the poem looks forward to the ‘sacred service’
(æÅÅ ƒæH) and ‘beautiful rites’ (ZæªØÆ ŒÆº ) of the Eleusin-
ian mysteries (476). The Hymn ends on the far side of sorrow with the
welcoming of Demeter and Persephone into the Olympian gathering
(›
ªıæØ, 484), the statement that the two goddesses sit ‘august and
respected beside Zeus who rejoices in the thunderbolt’ (ÆæÆd ˜Ød
æØŒæÆøØ, / Æ ’ ÆNEÆ , 485–6), and the assertion that
‘he is prosperous and happy, whomever / of men on earth those [god-
desses] willingly befriend’ (ª’ ZºØ, ‹ Ø’ KŒEÆØ / æçæø
çØºHÆØ KØåŁ ø IŁæø, 486–7).
The Hymn to Aphrodite, however, says nothing about the estab-
lishment or re-establishment of the goddess’s place on Olympus;
rather, it features her ‘defeat’ and ‘a more radical diminution of
[her] power’ than what Demeter suffers.3 Furthermore, the Hymn
to Aphrodite is not ‘religious poetry’ in any ordinary sense of the term.
Its light seduction-narrative and lack of a cultic dimension and of any
formal prayer to the goddess combine to make it seem less ‘hymnal’
and more ‘epic’ than the Hymn to Demeter (or the other major
Homeric hymns). The goddess begins her long, final speech by telling
Anchises that she will bear him a son ‘named Aineias, because a
horrible grief took hold of me / because I fell into the bed of a mortal
man’ (`N Æ Z’ ÆØ, oŒÆ ’ ÆNe / å ¼å, ŒÆ
æF Iæ PBØ, 198–9).4 Aphrodite ends by warning
Anchises never to boast of having slept with her; otherwise, she says,
‘Zeus will become angry and hit you with a smoking thunderbolt.
/ [ . . . ] / Restrain yourself, do not name me, but have regard for
the wrath of the gods’ (Z åºø ÆºØ łºØ ŒæÆıHØ
/ [ . . . ] / Yå, Å’ OÆØ, ŁH ’ K Ç BØ, 288–90). This
ending is ominous and would be all the more so, if we assume that the
3
Clay 1989: 154–5. For older scholarship on the hymn’s religiosity or non-
religiosity, see 152–3.
4
Cf. Il. 13.481–2 ØÆ ’ ÆNH / `N Æ, which also ‘plays on the name’s folk-
etymology’ (Janko 1992: 108–9). There may be a similar, etymological play on the
name Anchises (ªå Å) in Iªå ŁØ (‘near to the gods’, HHAphr 200). Cf.
Gambarara 1984: 157 n. 3; van der Ben 1986: 24; Faulkner 2008a: 261. Gambarara
1984: 136, compares Aphrodite’s naming of Aineias to the naming of Odysseus at Od.
19.406–9 (cf. Od. 1.62). Smith 1981: 126 n. 82 notes the similar play on åØººF,
åÆØH, ¼å, and åÆØ at Il. 16.21–2.
Divine and Human in the Hymn to Aphrodite 57

poet and his audience knew of the tradition, alluded to by Sophokles
and centuries later mentioned by Hyginus and twice by Servius, that
Anchises was punished—with lameness or blindness, rather than
death—for telling what happened.5 This is quite different from the
more upbeat ending of the Hymn to Demeter (and from the endings of
the hymns to Apollo and Hermes). The ‘horrible grief ’ that Aphrodite
feels at having slept with a mortal and become pregnant with Aineias is
an expression of Zeus’ triumph and of her own defeat and dishonour.
Thus the Hymn to Aphrodite is not religious poetry like the Hymn to
Demeter and the other major Homeric Hymns: it serves no ritual,
aetiological, or theological purposes related to a real or imagined cult.
As Karl Reinhardt put it, ‘Der Aphroditehymnus unterscheidet sich
von allen anderen Hymnen zumeist dadurch, dass seine Absicht . . .
nicht sacral, sondern profan ist’.6
Nevertheless, from a different perspective, the Hymn to Aphrodite
might well be called religious poetry, but religious poetry of a special
kind, combining two ways of representing the gods and their relations
with human beings. One way is familiar from Homer’s Iliad, in which
the (sometimes humorous) representation of the gods serves mainly
to clarify by contrast what it means to be human.7 The other is known
from early Greek hexameter poetry generally, including Homer,
Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and the fragments of other archaic
epics. Like these poems, the Hymn to Aphrodite has what Barbara
Graziosi and Johannes Haubold have called ‘the resonance of epic’.
Its narrative and diction evoke a general cosmic history known to both
poets and audiences,8 and this shared familiarity with the cosmic
history enables the composer of a specific poem (1) to ‘allude’ inter-
textually or palimpsestuously to the mythology and even the specific
5
See Hyginus, Fab. 94, Servius on Aeneid 2.649 (Anchises was lamed, after
Aphrodite deflected Zeus’ thunderbolt) and Aeneid 1.617 (Anchises was blinded by
Zeus’ thunderbolt); cf. Soph. fr. 373.1–3, from Laokoon, the details of which may go
back to the Iliou Persis (Sack of Ilium) attributed to Arctinus: F ’ K ºÆØØ `NÆ
› B ŁF / æ’, K’ þø Ææ’ åø jeqaum ou / ı ŒÆ ÇÆ Ø
ç æ (‘Now Aineias, the goddess’s son, is present at the gates, / carrying on his
shoulders his father, who lets fall / a linen robe over his back that had been hit by a
thunderbolt’ (or, with the variant reading loto Ðu in place of ı, ‘his father with his
/ linen robe stained by the lightning’)). Cf. Radt 1999: 332–3, 755; Lloyd-Jones 1996:
200–1; Lenz 1975: 144–52.
6
Reinhardt 1961b: 507.
7
Griffin 1980: 162, 167–70, Schein 1984: 51–6.
8
Graziosi and Haubold 2005.

narrative details of other poems or poetic genres for the sake of
meaningful comparison or contrast; (2) to develop a particular story
or characterization at length and idiosyncratically, relying on audi-
ences’ or readers’ ability to situate and understand any given work in its
broader mythological and poetic contexts.9
The cosmic history implicit in any specific text extended (and still
extends for us, as readers of the poems) from the origin and ordering of
the universe, as told in Hesiod’s Theogony, through the latest events
narrated in the Cyclic epics. The main theme of this cosmic history is
the development and manifestation of the power of Zeus and the
Olympian order under his leadership, including the permanent and
absolute separation of gods and mortals. In the Hymn to Aphrodite,
Zeus enhances this separation by appropriating Aphrodite’s power to
‘throw desire’ into gods, humans, or animals (2, 73, 143), using it
against her (45, 53), and forcing her to stop making male gods mate
with mortal women and goddesses with mortal men. In telling of Zeus’
triumph over Aphrodite, the Hymn tells one small part of the story of
his increasing authority over the cosmos as we mortals know it.10
Jenny Clay has argued that the limitation of Aphrodite’s power by
Zeus means the end of the age and race of heroes, sometimes referred
to by Homer and Hesiod as ŁØ (‘demigods’). Whether or not, as
Clay has suggested, the poem is especially piquant, because the mating
of Aphrodite and Anchises is to be understood as the final such mixed
coupling,11 the end of the age and race of heroes is implicit in Zeus’
treatment of Aphrodite and is consistent with the story mentioned in
Hesiod fr. 204.98–103 M–W (from the Catalogue of Women), that
Zeus planned the Trojan War
to annihilate now most of the race

of mortal humans, . . . as a pretext to destroy
the lives of the demigods . . . , children
of the gods by mortals . . . ,
but that the blessed ones . . . as before
should have their existence and way of life apart from humans.
9
On allusion and intertextuality in early Greek epic, see Chapters 4, 6, and 7;
Slatkin 1991; Danek, 2002; Tsagalis 2008.
10
Cf. Allan 2006.
11
See Clay 1989: 166–70, who refers to van der Ben 1981: 89, 93, 1986: 30–1. But
Thalmann 1991: 146 and Faulkner 2008a are sceptical; cf. Faulkner 2008b: 3–18 and
de Roguin 2007: 192.
XÅ b ª æø IŁæø

ººe IœHÆØ . . . , æ[]çÆØ b OºŁÆØ
łıåa ØŁø . . . , æEØ
ŒÆ ŁH . . . .
Iºº’ ƒ b ŒÆæ . . . ‰ e æ æ
åøæd I’ I[Ł]æø [ ŒÆ]d XŁ’ åøØ.
The story that Aphrodite will be forced to stop boasting that she
makes gods and humans mate with one another also recalls the Hesi-
odic reference to the end of the race of heroes in Works and Days
159–73, which speaks of ‘the divine race of warrior-men, / who are
called demigods’ (IæH æø ŁE ª, Q ŒÆºÆØ / ŁØ,
159–60), who perished in the fighting at Thebes and Troy (161–5) and
for whom ‘father Zeus, son of Kronos, provided an existence and way of
life / apart from human beings and made to dwell at the ends of the
earth’ (E b å’ IŁæø ŒÆd XŁ’ O Æ / Zf ˚æ Å
ŒÆÆ Æcæ K æÆØ ªÆ Å 167–8). The Hymn also coheres
with the retrospective opening of Book 12 of the Iliad, which looks back,
from a time after the end of the Trojan War, to the ‘race of demigod
men’ (ØŁø ª IæH, 12.23) who died fighting at Troy.12 The
reason that Aphrodite will no longer mock the other gods by boasting
that she made them sleep with mortals and have mortal children is that
there will be no more such children, though the Hymn does not say so
explicitly.13 This change in the cosmic order is analogous to the changes
one finds in the other major Homeric hymns, when a god must
subordinate his or her power to that of Zeus, in order to obtain or
retain a place among the Olympians.14
*
If the story of Aphrodite’s seduction of Anchises is a piece of cosmic
history with the kind of resonance found elsewhere in early Greek
epic poetry, the poem’s narrative recalls particularly the representa-
tion of divinity in the Iliad (and, to a lesser extent, the Odyssey). In
these epics the conflicts involving earlier generations of gods, leading
to the established Olympian order with Zeus as ‘father of gods and
men’, are a thing of the past. The Titans are bound in Tartaros, the
12
On the ØŁø ª IæH of Iliad 12.23 and the Hesiodic passages, see
Reinhardt 1961a: 267–9, Nagy 1979: 159–61, 219–20; Scodel 1982: 33–50,
Thalmann 1984: 102–6, and de Roguin 2007: 191–3.
13 14
Clay 1989: 193. Allan 2006: 29.

powers and domains of the individual gods are fixed once and for all,
and the cosmic order is stable. Allusions to these earlier conflicts are
rare and mostly for the sake of rhetorical contrast to present circum-
stances or in order to justify some present action. In Book 15 of the
Iliad, for example, Poseidon, speaking to Iris, refers to the supposedly
equal division of the cosmos among the three sons of Kronos, when
he objects to Zeus’ command that he stop helping the Greek army
and return to the sea (15.187–99). When Achilles asks his mother
Thetis to seek Zeus’ support for him, he reminds her of the time she
rescued Zeus, when other, rebellious gods wanted to bind him
(1.396–406)—one of several occasions on which, as Laura Slatkin
has demonstrated, the poem recalls or alludes to the mythology of
Thetis and her former cosmic power, in order to clarify both its own,
distinctive poetic themes and the significance of Achilles’ mortality
for the supreme rule of Zeus.15
Many interactions among the gods in the Iliad have the same
lightness seen in the seduction of Anchises in the Hymn to Aphrodite.
The quarrel between Zeus and Hera in Book 1, for example, and the
representation of warfare among the gods in Book 21 are almost
burlesque, and illustrate by contrast the seriousness of the conflict
between Achilles and Agamemnon and of the fighting between the
Greeks and the Trojans. In these passages and elsewhere in the poem,
the Olympian gods are characterized by what Karl Reinhardt called
a ‘sublime frivolity’ (erhabener Unernst), which serves to clarify by
contrast the seriousness of what human beings do and suffer.16 The
gods in the Iliad are ‘blessed’ (makares) in their freedom from
the decline and darkness in which everything human must end.
Since they are ‘unaging and immortal’, they risk nothing essential,
and the honour and glory they are sometimes obsessed with winning
or losing are not truly significant. In this respect their existence is
light and trivial compared with that of human beings, who seek to
make their lives meaningful by fighting for these rewards until they
are finally killed. Despite, or because of, their perfection, the gods in
the Iliad serve mainly as foils to bring out what one might call the
tragic limits of the human condition.
Up to a point, Aphrodite in the Hymn is like the essentially frivolous
divinities of the Iliad, though some of the superficially humorous
15
Slatkin 1991: 18–21, 64–6, 68–70 (= Slatkin 2011a: 30–3, 58–60, 61–2).
16
Reinhardt 1961a: 128, 1960 [1938]: 25. Cf. Griffin 1980: 199.

elements in both poems are quite serious, even sinister. For example,
Aphrodite’s seduction of Anchises resembles in many details Hera’s
seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14. Scholars have compared the two scenes
mainly in order to show that one imitates the other, but since both are
traditional and formulaic, no imitation need be posited.17 In each
scene, the goddess’s preparations humorously resemble those of an
Iliadic hero preparing himself for battle. In the Hymn, Aphrodite goes
to her ‘fragrant temple’ in Paphos to be bathed and anointed by the
Graces, then dresses and adorns herself for action, just as in Iliad
14.170–87 Hera goes to her Olympian dwelling to bathe, dress, and
adorn herself. Hera then borrows Aphrodite’s ‘embroidered belt of
many colours’ (Œe ƒ Æ / ØŒ º, 214–15), the source, Hera
says, of the ‘sexual desire with which you master / all the immortals and
mortal human beings’ (çØºÅÆ ŒÆd ¥æ zØ f Æ / ÆAØ
IŁÆ ı Mb ŁÅf IŁæı, 14.198–9).18 Both Hera in the Iliad
and Aphrodite in the Hymn resemble a warrior putting on his armour
in the first stage of what will become a full-blown, triumphant
IæØ Æ.19 This effect is enhanced by the detail in 86 that Aphrodite’s
robe was ‘brighter than the gleam of fire’ (çÆ æ ıæe ÆPª
),
which recalls the description at Il. 18.609 of the breastplate made by
Hephaistos for Achilles. More generally, when Aphrodite puts beauti-
ful necklaces ‘around her delicate neck’, which ‘shone like the moon on
her delicate breasts, a wonder to behold’ (88–90), the richness and
brilliance recall the armour Agamemnon dons in Il. 11.16–45 at the
beginning of his IæØ Æ, especially the snakes depicted on the breast-
plate that reach out toward his throat (11.26); the armour of Achilles,
17
Cf. Clay 1989: 171 n. 62, pace Podbielski 1971: 36–9; Lenz 1975: 118–23. Cf.
Reinhardt 1960 [1938]: 514–15, de Roguin 2007: 184–5.
18
Cf. the exception to Aphrodite’s erotic power at HHAphr 16–17: P ’
æØÆ åæıÅº ŒÆ ŒºÆØc / ÆÆØ K çØºÅØ çØºØc çæ Å
(‘nor does smile-loving Aphrodite ever conquer huntress Artemis of the golden
distaff ’). Cf. Od. 1.100–1, where Athena’s spear, ‘with which she conquers the ranks
of men, / warriors at whom she of the mighty father is angry’, corresponds to the
sexual desire that is Aphrodite’s distinctive weapon.
19
Smith 1981: 41. Reinhardt 1960 [1938]: 515 notes that both goddesses triumph
through ‘the revelation of irresistible beauty’, but ‘was bei Hera Trug ist, ist bei
[Aphrodite] ihr Wesen’. One also might compare the virginal appearance and adorn-
ing of the first woman in Hes. Th. 572–84 and the dressing and adorning of Aphrodite
by the Hours in the minor Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (HH 6.5–12), which leads
each of the gods, when they set eyes on her, to admire her form and ‘pray to bring her
home as his wedded wife’ (HH 6.15–18). Cf. Loraux 1981: 85–7 (= Engl. trans. 1993:
80–2); Bergren 1989: 11–14.

taken from Patroklos, in which Hektor seems to ‘blaze’ (ºÆ) at
Il. 17.213–14; and especially the armour made by Hephaistos that
Achilles puts on at 19.369–83.
There is a similar, humorous play on the language of traditional
epic battle narrative at 130–40, where Aphrodite virtually supplicates
Anchises (ÆPaæ Kª ’ ƒŒÅ, 130) not to have sex with her imme-
diately, but instead to marry her as a virgin. ‘Send a messenger to the
Phrygians’, she says, and ‘[my parents] will send you abundant gold
and / woven clothing; but for your part, accept the glorious ransom’
(137–40). These lines recall the scenes in the Iliad where a defeated
warrior supplicates his conqueror to pity him and spare his life, only
to be refused and pitilessly slain (e.g. Il. 6.45–65, 11.130–47). Here,
however, though Aphrodite says that Hermes had seized her and
brought her to Anchises by ‘a strong compulsion’ (ŒæÆæ
. . .
I ªŒÅ, 130), it is she who conquers by ‘throwing sweet desire into
his heart’ (Ła ªºıŒf ¥æ Æº ŁıHØ, 143).
Another allusion to traditional battle narrative probably should be
seen, when Anchises ‘loosens’ Aphrodite’s ÇÅ in order to have
intercourse with her. ‘Loosen’ (ºø) is often used when one warrior
kills another, as in the formula ªıEÆ ººı (‘[his] knees were loos-
ened’). This play on epic diction recalls Sappho’s technique in fr. 1,
her hymn to Aphrodite, where the speaker calls on the goddess to be
her ‘ally’ (Æå) in language that echoes Diomedes’ appeal to
Athene at Il. 5.115–20.20 In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the poet
uses the language of war to enrich the narrative of the seduction of
Anchises, just as the Iliad uses erotic language to enhance the pathos
of the deaths of individual warriors.21 Epic poets could draw on the
same traditional language for different purposes in different genres
and sub-genres, exploiting their audiences’ familiarity with the reson-
ances of particular formulas, themes, and motifs to add meaning in
any specific poetic context.
One good example of such poetic exploitation is found at HHAphr
162–5, when Aphrodite readies herself for action. The Hymn, how-
ever, does not actually show Aphrodite putting on her clothing and
jewellery, like Hera in the Iliadic arming scene. Rather, in a clever
variation on the conventional arming motif, once she and Anchises
have climbed into bed together, he
20
See Winkler 1990: 167–70, who refers to earlier scholarship.
21
Cf. Monsacré 1984: 63–77, Schein 1990: 96–8.

first removed the shining adornment from her body,
the pins and twisted bracelets and earrings and necklaces;
and he loosened her zônê and took off her shining garments
and put them down on a silver studded chair.
Œ ƒ æH Ie åæe xº çÆØ,
æÆ ªÆ Ł’ ºØŒÆ Œ ºıŒ ŒÆd ‹æı,
ºF ƒ ÇÅ, Nb ¥ÆÆ ØªÆºÆ
Œı ŒÆd ŒÆŁÅŒ Kd Łæı Iæªıæ
ºı.
Not only does the poet of the Hymn reverse the conventional arming
motif by mentioning the goddess’s clothing and adornment when it is
being removed rather than when she puts it on; he wittily adapts
another motif, that of one warrior stripping another’s corpse, which
in the Iliad would signify the defeat and death of the warrior being
stripped and the triumph of the one doing the stripping, to signify
precisely the reverse: the triumph of Aphrodite being undressed over
the defeated Anchises.22
In this context, however, the significance of ‘triumph’ and ‘defeat’
is by no means straightforward. Anchises is defeated in so far as he is
Aphrodite’s victim, after ‘the goddess threw sweet desire into his
heart, / and erôs seized Anchises’ (Ła ªºıŒf ¥æ Æº ŁıHØ.
/ ªå Å ’ æ xº, 143–4); to that extent she is ‘triumphant’, and
her triumph is in keeping with the cultural code, familiar to the poet
and his audiences, that affirms the hierarchy in which the divine is
opposed to, and superior to, the human. At the same time, however,
Anchises is triumphant in so far as he satisfies his desire by having
intercourse immediately with the ‘virgin’ who has presented herself to
him, without having to wait, as she requests, until they are married in a
ritual that will be ‘honourable in the eyes of both mortals and the
immortal gods’ (139–42). In this way he affirms his masculine super-
iority in conformity with another, equally familiar cultural code by
which the male is opposed to, and superior to, the female. Anchises’
masculinity is also expressed in the description of his bedspread, which
consists of the ‘skins of bears and deep-roaring lions / which he himself
had killed in the high mountains’ (158–9). Hunting involves the
domination of nature in a manner analogous to the sexual domination
22
The frequently noted parallels in ancient Mesopotamian texts to the removal of
Aphrodite’s clothing (cf. Faulkner 2008a: 229) are perhaps less significant than the
Hymn’s adaptation of a motif found in traditional Greek epic.

of a female and is a culturally widespread feature of male coming-of-
age rituals. Yet Aphrodite too dominates the animals, as she passes
through the forest, throws lust into them as they trail behind her, and
they immediately begin to mate. The contradiction between Aphro-
dite’s and Anchises’ respective triumphs and defeats is resolved, as it
were, in the poem’s narrative by Zeus’ assertion of his patriarchal
power over the younger, subordinate female, which forces her, though
a god, to be subjected to the desire of a mortal man and to the authority
of her father, that is, to a combination of superior male and superior
divine power.23
The complexity of the Hymn’s distinctive way of privileging the
masculine over the feminine in this scene of seduction is evident,
when one compares Aphrodite’s sexual encounter with Anchises and
her speech to him (after he discovers that he has slept with a goddess),
to the sexual encounter of Poseidon with the mortal Tyro and his
subsequent speech to her at Od. 11.238–52.24 Tyro superficially resem-
bles Aphrodite as a female ‘subject of sexual desire in her own right’,
since ‘she desired’ (Mæ Æ’, Od. 11.238) the river god Enipeus, but
‘she is not united with the lover of her choice; and in fact she is
deprived of any active role in the sexual encounter when Poseidon
puts her to sleep’ (11.245).25 Aphrodite, by contrast, maintains her
agency, but under Zeus’ compulsion she must seduce Anchises with a
complicated and humiliating story that she has come in order to be his
bride, thus enabling him to play the dominant role of a potential
husband, though there really is no question of a marriage. On the
other hand, Poseidon is a free agent who simply and straightforwardly
dominates Tyro and satisfies his desire. He takes on the appearance of
Enipeus, ‘loosens her virgin zônê’, and has sex with her in the mouth of
the swirling stream, while a great wave ‘concealed the god and the
mortal woman’ (11.243–5). Poseidon speaks to Tyro only ‘after he had
completed his sexual deeds’ (Kd Þ’ Kº Łe çØº
ØÆ æªÆ,
11.246), which he apparently does after he has put her to sleep. In the
Hymn, by contrast, Aphrodite tells her lying tale to Anchises before
they go to bed together and he loosens her zônê (164), and she ‘pour[s]
23
Cf. Stehle 1996: 202–3, 207–8.
24
Cf. Faulkner 2008a: 253–4, who compares Zeus’ intercourse with Europa and
subsequent speech at Moschos, Europa 154–61 to the scene of intercourse and
Aphrodite’s speech in the Hymn.
25
Doherty 1995: 111.

sweet sleep’ over him only after they have finished making love
(170). Poseidon briefly informs Tyro that she will have twins, since
‘the matings of the gods are not in vain’ (Kd PŒ IçºØØ PÆd /
IŁÆ ø, ), tells her to rear them, and sends her home (11.249–51).
Aphrodite, however, speaks at length to Anchises about her feelings
at having slept with, and become pregnant by, a mortal (247–55) and
gives a detailed account of how their son will be reared and how he
should be known among mortals (256–85). When Poseidon sends
Tyro home, he enjoins silence in much the same language as Aph-
rodite uses to Anchises (Yå Å’ O
ÅØ, 11.251 Yå Å’
OÆØ, HHAphr. 290), but Poseidon does not speak out of shame
or threaten Tyro, as Aphrodite speaks to and threatens Anchises.
There is no indication that Poseidon has in any way been defeated at
the moment of sexual triumph, as Aphrodite has been, or that he is at
all humiliated by intercourse with a mortal. Rather, Poseidon’s speech
ends proudly and straightforwardly with his self-identification, ‘I am
Poseidon, shaker of the earth’ (Kª NØ —Ø ø K åŁø,
11.252), while Aphrodite’s ends with a warning to Anchises to ‘avoid
the wrath of the gods’ (ŁH ’ K Ç BØ, 290). All these differences
between the sexual encounters of a god and a goddess with their mortal
lovers are grounded in and illustrate the cultural code and social con-
ventions by which females are sexually subordinate to males. One could
say that even after her IæØ Æ, Aphrodite cannot indulge in the boast of
triumph familiar from male IæØEÆØ in the Iliad, not even indirectly
through the boasting of Anchises.
Although the story of the seduction of Anchises shows Aphrodite
being dominated by Zeus, it also demonstrates her own cosmic
power. The poem first suggests this cosmic power in the proem
(2–6), where she is said to
sen[d] sweet longing upon the gods,

and she subdues the tribes of mortal human beings
and the flying birds and all the wild beasts,
both as many as the mainland and as many as the sea nourish;
to all the works of well-crowned Cythereia are a concern.
l ŁEØ Kd ªºıŒf ¥æ tæ

ŒÆ ’ KÆ çFºÆ ŒÆÆŁÅH IŁæø
Nø ØØÆ ŒÆd ŁÅæ Æ Æ,
Mb ‹’ XØæ ººa æçØ M’ ‹Æ ·
AØ ’ æªÆ Åº Kßç ı ˚ıŁæ Å.

This passage asserts Aphrodite’s universal power over all living
beings, divine and human, which live on land, in the sea, and in the
air. Later in the poem, this power is shown more vividly and speci-
fically, when she walks through the forest of Mt. Ida on the way to
Anchises’ dwelling,
and following her,

fawning, went both grey wolves and fierce-eyed lions,
bears and swift leopards insatiable
for deer. Seeing them she rejoiced inwardly in her heart,
and in their breasts she threw desire, and they all
lay down together in pairs in their shady dwellings.
Q b ’ ÆPc
Æ ºØ ºŒØ åÆæ º
¼æŒØ Ææ ºØ ŁÆd æŒ ø IŒæÅØ
XœÆ· ’ ›æøÆ a çæd æ Łı,
ŒÆd E K
ŁØ º’ ¥æ, Q ’ –Æ
ı ŒØ
Æ ŒÆa ŒØÆ KÆºı.
(69–74)
This beautiful passage recalls the description of Poseidon’s chariot ride

over the sea to Troy in Iliad 13.8–19, 27–9, singled out as sublime by
‘Longinus’, where the quivering mountains and forests, the gambolling
dolphins, and the sea ‘parting with joy’ evoke with true grandeur the
presence and progress of the god.26 But the coupling of the wild beasts
who follow behind Aphrodite, when she throws desire into them, is
sinister as well as a sign of her awesome power: in effect she forces
them into sexual heat so that they are compelled to mate with one
another, just as she herself is compelled when Zeus forces her to mate
with Anchises and become pregnant, and she must undergo the further
humiliation of having to disguise herself as human in order to do so.27
The lying tale by which Aphrodite disarms Anchises’ fears and
stimulates his desire is similarly humiliating not only because it
involves the pretence that she is human, but because the goddess
loses her agency. She tells Anchises how Hermes brought her to be his
‘bride’, but asks him to hold off from intercourse with her until they
are married. Aphrodite can simply ‘throw desire’ into the breasts of
26
Cf. Reinhardt 1961b: 515.
27
In a sense, Aphrodite is reduced to the level of an animal, since she acts without
intent or choice (254 Iº ªåŁÅ b Ø).

wild animals, who begin mating when she does so, but a human target
requires a speech of persuasion and deception.28 The combination of
sublimity in the description of Aphrodite’s journey and self-humiliation
in the story she tells Anchises recalls the double perspective in which the
Olympians are represented in the Iliad: on the one hand, as cosmically
powerful and perfect in contrast to tragically limited human beings, on
the other, as humorously frivolous and lacking in seriousness when
compared with humans who strive for heroic achievement and mean-
ing in their lives.
*
It is no accident that Aphrodite’s most frequent epithet in the Hymn,
when she is an agent exercising her power of her own volition, is
çØºØ
(‘smile-loving’, ‘laughter-loving’), which occurs five
times (17, 49, 56, 65, 155). This adjective describes Aphrodite else-
where in early Greek epic, when she herself is sexually active (e.g. Od.
8.362, where she goes to Cyprus, after she and Ares have been set free
by Hephaistos), or when she acts as a goddess of seduction and love-
making (e.g. Il. 3.424, where she brings Helen a diphros on which to
sit, facing Paris; 14.211, where she helps Hera prepare for her seduc-
tion of Zeus).29 She is also called ‘smile-loving’ or ‘laughter-loving’
elsewhere in Greek poetry, when she is praised for her desirability or
her erotic power is invoked—for example at HH 10.2–3 Kç’ ƒæHØ b
æøØ / ÆNd ØØ Ø and Sappho fr. 1.14 ØÆ ÆØ’ IŁÆ øØ
æøØ.30 Perhaps one should think of Aphrodite’s smile as having
the same uncanny, dominating power as the smile of Dionysos in the
Bacchae or even the smile of Medusa. In any case, when, in the Hymn,
Zeus ‘hurl[s] sweet desire into her heart / to mingle with a mortal
man’ (45–6), he does so precisely in order to reduce this power,
28
These activities are traditionally associated with the goddess (cf. Il. 14. 214–17,
Hes. Theog. 205–6); thus her seduction of Anchises instantiates her distinctive power.
Cf. Bergren 1989: 17–25, who discusses the link between erôs and epos.
29
Cf. Boedeker 1974: 33–5; Faulkner 2008a: 92–3.
30
Boedeker 1974: 24. Perhaps çØºØ
came to be used of Aphrodite in erotic
contexts, because it was associated acoustically with the homophonous, metrically
identical çØºÅ
(‘genital-loving’). Cf. Hesiod’s word-play at Theog. 200, when he
lists the epithets given by gods and men to Aphrodite: ‘and genital-loving, because she
appeared from the genitals [sc. of Ouranos]’ (Mb çØºÅÆ, ‹Ø Åø KçÆ ŁÅ).
West 1966: 88, comments on the ‘corresponsion of sound’ and Hesiod’s connection of
the two words, though he accepts Bergk’s emendation çØºØÆ (‘laughter-loving’)
for çØºÅÆ (‘genital-loving’) in his text.

so that laughter-loving Aphrodite among all the gods
might not say boastfully with a sweet smile
both that she had mingled together gods with mortal women,
and they had borne mortal sons to the immortals,
and that she had mingled goddesses with mortal men
Å’. . .
ŒÆ ’ KıÆÅ YÅØ a AØ ŁEØ
f ªºØ
ÆÆ çØºØc çæ Å,
u ÞÆ Łf ıØ ŒÆÆŁÅBØØ ªıÆØ ,
ŒÆ ŒÆÆŁÅf ıƒE Œ IŁÆ ØØ,
u Ła IØ ŒÆÆŁÅE IŁæØ.
(47–52)
It is significant that Zeus’ purpose is not merely to put an end to

Aphrodite’s power to mingle gods and goddesses with mortals, so that
they will not produce mortal offspring, but to stop her from boasting
about it. Such boasting is, in effect, an expression of that power, a
reproach to the other divinities that publicly dishonours them. When
Aphrodite later tells Anchises, ‘Now my mouth will no longer open
wide to say this out loud / among the immortals’ (252–3),31 she
acknowledges that Zeus has put an end to that power and implies
that to publicize her madness in sleeping with a mortal and becoming
pregnant would be worse than the madness itself. Aphrodite ends her
final speech by warning Anchises, ‘If you speak out and boast with a
foolish spirit / that you mingled sexually with fair-crowned Kythereia,
/ Zeus will become angry and hit you with a smoking thunderbolt’
(N Œ K ÅØ ŒÆd KÆØ ¼çæØ ŁıHØ / K çØºÅØ ØªBÆØ
Kßç øØ ˚ıŁæ ÅØ, / Z åºø ÆºØ łºØ
ŒæÆıHØ, 286–8). That Anchises did not obey her is clear from the
very existence of the Hymn, which, from one perspective, can be seen
as saying out loud what the goddess wished to keep secret, in poetry
that celebrates not only her ‘deeds’ and cosmic power, but also the
limit put on this power by Zeus, who is even more powerful.
It is a sign of the poetic sophistication with which the Hymn is
composed that when Aphrodite’s actions are seen as a function of her
subordination to Zeus, she is described not as çØºØ
but as ˜Øe
Łıª Åæ (‘daughter of Zeus’), a metrically equivalent formula suggesting
31
Accepting Martin’s conjecture Æ å ÆØ for Æå
ÆØ, the reading of
the MSS, in 252. Cf. Olson 2012: 259 on 252–4.

his rather than her power (81, 107, 191).32 In the first two of these three
passages, the goddess stands before Anchises ‘resembling an un-
mastered virgin in form and stature’, so he will not be afraid of her
(81–3), and tells him that she is not a goddess but a mortal woman, the
daughter of renowned Otreus (107–11);33 in both cases, Aphrodite
seems to be in control of the situation, but the narrator identifies her to
his audience or reader as ‘daughter of Zeus’ and in this way suggests
that she is really not. The deployment of the two metrically equivalent
formulas for Aphrodite, a striking exception to Milman’s Parry’s
principle of formulaic economy, is a good example of how, in its poetic
wit, the Hymn resembles the Iliad, which likewise calls the goddess
˜Øe Łıª Åæ rather than çØºØ
at 14.194, when the narrator
introduces a brief speech in which she promises to help Hera out of
respect for her as Zeus’ wife (14.212–13) and as a member of an older
generation, who has addressed her just a few lines earlier, at 14.190, as
‘dear child’.34
In the Hymn, ‘smile-loving’ Aphrodite brings gods and mortals
together sexually as an expression of her power and for her own
amusement, but she differs from the gods of the Iliad in one major
respect: they, unlike human beings in the epic, are as a rule free from
any long-term or tragic consequences of their actions, beyond the
inevitable deaths of their mortal children.35 This, however, is not true
32
For ˜Øe Łıª Åæ as an epithet of Aphrodite, see Il. 3.374 = 5.312, 5.131 = 820,
14.193, 224, 21.416, 23.185, Od. 8.308, and HHAp 195. The formula is used elsewhere
of other daughters of Zeus and regularly implies their subordination to his patriarchal
authority: Athene (Il. 2.548, 4.128, 515, Od. 3.337, 378, 13.359, 22.205=24.502);
Artemis (Od. 20.61); Atê (Il. 19.91); Persephone (Od. 11.217); Helen (Od. 4.227); a
Muse (Od. 1.10, HH 14.2); Muses (Hes. Theog. 76). Cf. Boedeker 1974: 30–2. In
HHAphr, where Zeus’ patriarchal authority is a major theme of the poem, ˜Øe
Łıª Åæ is more than usually ‘marked’ in contrast to çØºØ
.
33
At Il. 3.186 Priam mentions Otreus as a Phrygian king alongside whom he once
fought against the Amazons by the banks of the Sangareus (today, the Sakarya) river.
34
Boedeker 1974: 37–8. Cf. how, in a similar distribution of metrically equivalent
epithets, Aphrodite in the genitive is called ºıåæı in the context of her ‘deeds’
(æªÆ), i.e. sexual activity, at 1 and 9 ( cf. Olson 2012: 54, second apparatus), but the
metrically equivalent Nç ı in her epiphany before Anchises at 175 and on her
first appearance before the other immortals at HH 6.18. Cf. too how Hermes is called
åæıææÆØ (‘of the golden staff ’) at 117 and 121, but the metrically equivalent
Ø Œæ (‘runner’) at 213 when he is doing an errand for Zeus.
35
Hephaistos’ lameness may seem to provide a counter-example, if it is the result
of his having once been seized by the foot and thrown ‘from the divine threshold’ by
Zeus (Il. 1.590–4). But this is the kind of event which, in the Iliad, no longer occurs
among the gods, given the established cosmic order under Zeus.

of Aphrodite in the Hymn, whom Zeus punishes by stripping her of
her power to compel himself and the other gods to mate with mortals.
When she tells Anchises, ‘I fell into the bed of a mortal man’ (æF
Iæ ıBØ, 199) and became pregnant with a mortal child,
the word (‘I fell’, first-person aorist of K ø) is striking:
the only other example in Homeric epic of this verb used of a living
entity is at Il. 4.107–8, where the goat struck by Pandaros’ arrow ‘as it
was emerging from the rock . . . fell (backward) into the rock’.36
I suggest that K ø in 199 has the same negative valence as ø
in the Iliad and Odyssey, which is frequently used not only of men
‘falling’ or ‘dying’ in battle,37 but also of gods who (as Alex Purves has
shown), when they fall, ‘experience time . . . in a way that is similar to
how humans experience time’ and undergo ‘quasi-deaths’, so that their
‘immortal status is compromised’. Thus Aphrodite’s ‘fall into the bed of
a mortal’ is a kind of ‘death’ for the potent figure she was before Zeus’
punishment.38 She realizes that henceforth, as a result of her terrible,
unspeakable blindness and madness, the rest of the gods will no longer
fear her power to make them couple with mortals (249–51), and
my mouth will no longer open wide to mention

this among the immortals, since I was altogether blinded—
rashly, unutterably—and went out of my mind,
and put a child beneath my zônê, when I slept with a mortal.
F b c PŒØ Ø Æ å ÆØ KBÆØ
F ’ IŁÆ ØØ, Kd ºÆ ººe I ŁÅ,
åºØ, PŒ OÆ, Iº ªåŁÅ b Ø,
ÆEÆ ’ e ÇÅØ KŁÅ æHØ PÅŁEÆ.
(252–5)
Aphrodite’s situation is in a way similar to that of Thetis in the

Iliad, who complains to Hephaistos at 18.432–4 that
36
Elsewhere K ø is used of a hostile weapon or other force that falls on a
(potential) victim, of an emotion that falls on or into someone’s ‘spirit’ (Łı), and of
the warning () by Teiresias and Circe, which ‘falls on [Odysseus’] spirit’, that he
should avoid the island of Helios—a warning he remembers when he hears the ‘lowing
of the oxen of the Sun in their dwelling / and the bleating of his sheep’ (Od. 12.265–6).
K ø is also used of various items that ‘fall’ into the sea: a rock split by Poseidon’s
trident (Od. 4.508), the sail and top of the mast of Odysseus’ raft (Od. 5.318), and a
diving bird (Od. 5.50). See Cunliffe, s.v. K ø.
37
Cf. LSJ s.v. ø B.II.1; Cunliffe 1963: s.v. ø 7C.
38
Purves 2006: 179–209. The words quoted appear on p. 206.
out of (all) the other sea-goddesses, Zeus forced me to be subject

to a man (sexually, in marriage),
to Peleus, son of Aiakos, and I endured the bed of a man
very much against my will
KŒ ’ Iºº ø ±ºØ ø Iæd Æ,
ººa º’ PŒ KŁºıÆ.
Thetis too, in the traditional mythology to which the Iliad several

times alludes, threatened Zeus’ authority—not by forcing him to mate
with mortal women, but by her power, if he mated with her, to
produce a child who would be mightier than his father and would
overthrow Zeus and take his place as ruler of the cosmos.39 Just as, in
the Iliad, the gods ‘threw [Thetis] into the bed of a mortal man’
(Ł . . . æF Iæ Æº PBØ, 18.84–5) and forced her to
suffer as a mother for her potentially dangerous maternal power,40
so in the Hymn Zeus punishes Aphrodite by subjecting her to the
same kind of erotic mastery that she typically exercises over him and
the other gods. The similarity is marked by Thetis’ description of
herself at Il. 1.414 as ÆNa ŒFÆ (‘having given birth horribly’) and
Aphrodite’s statement in the Hymn (198–9) that ‘a horrible grief took
hold of me, because I fell into the bed of a mortal man’ (oŒ ’
ÆNe/ å ¼å, ŒÆ æF Iæ PBØ).41
*
ÆN (‘horrible’) is an appropriate word to denote the suffering and
grief of Aphrodite and Thetis in relation to their mortal sons. It is
used elsewhere in mother–child contexts, for example, when Hekabe,
after Hektor’s death at the hands of Achilles, asks rhetorically, ‘Why
do I live now, having suffered horribly, / with you dead?’ ( ı
ÆØ, ÆNa ÆŁFÆ, / F IŁÅH; Il. 22.431–2), and when
Andromache, thinking of the destiny she shares with Hektor and of
her own infant son, recalls how her father reared her at home, ‘he ill-
fated, me horribly-fated’ (æ ÆNæ, Il. 22.481). Moreover,
‘horrible’ (ÆN), which occurs most often in contexts of death or
39
See Slatkin 1991: 69–77 (= Slatkin 2011a: 61–7).
40
Ibid.: 84–9 (= 72–4).
41
See Olson 2012: 233 on 196–9, who notes that Iæ PBØ is similar to
Il. 18.85 and describes K ø ‘as a functional passive of K ººø’. For KŒ ø
serving as the passive of KŒ ººø, cf. Eur. Medea 450.

mortal danger,42 is used in three other passages when a god is (over-)
engaged with mortality and its concomitant sufferings: Il. 5.376–80
and 884–7 and HHDem 349–55.
In Il. 5.376–80, Aphrodite complains to her mother, Dione:
The son of Tudeus stabbed me, arrogant Diomedes,
because I was carrying my dear son out of the war,
Aineias, who is much the dearest to me of all.
For it’s not (any longer) a horrible battle of Trojans and Achaians,
but now the Danaans, at least, are fighting with immortals, too.
s ı ıƒe, æŁı ˜Ø
Å,
oŒ’ Kªg ç º ıƒe çæ ºØ,
`N Æ, n Kd ø ºf ç ºÆ KØ.
P ªaæ Ø æø ŒÆd åÆØH çºØ ÆN
,
Iºº’ XÅ ˜ÆÆ ª ŒÆd IŁÆ ØØ åÆØ.
In this passage, Aphrodite’s (over-)engagement with mortality is

twofold: she is wounded by a mortal as she is helping her mortal
son, and her complaint evokes from Dione a long, consolatory speech
(5.382–415) referring to the ‘many’ Olympian gods who have suffered
at the hands of men, including Ares, Hera, and Hades.43
At Il. 5.884–7, Ares concludes his indignant complaint to Zeus that
he himself and Aphrodite have been wounded by Diomedes:
But then, equal to a god, he rushed at me myself,
but my swift feet carried me out of the way; (if not,) I definitely would
be suffering
evils there for a long time among the horrible piles of corpses,
or, while living, I would be strengthless from blows of bronze.
ÆPaæ Ø’ ÆPHØ Ø Kı Æ Ø r·
Iºº ’
ØŒÆ Æå · q Œ Åæe
ÆPF
Æ’ Æå K ÆNBØØ Œ Ø,
X Œ Çg IÅe Æ åÆºŒE ıBØØ.
The strangeness of Ares’ description of his near-mortal helplessness

can be seen in its distinctive diction, including the only occurrence of
the dative plural of ÆN in archaic Greek epic poetry, the unique
instance of çæø (‘bear away’) in archaic epic, the only occurrence
of its aorist form (
ØŒÆ) anywhere in surviving Greek literature,
42
e.g. in the formulas çºØ (-Ø) ÆN
(-
) and ÆNBØ (-B) ÅœBØ (-).
43
But Dione’s warning that if Diomedes fights someone ‘better’ than Aphrodite,
his wife may lament his death, is not borne out.

the dative plural Œ Ø, from Œ (‘a pile of corpses’), a word
not found elsewhere in archaic epic, which is therefore marked and
more vivid than the common, metrically equivalent ŒØ
(‘corpses’), and the striking and unparalleled phrase ‘blows of bronze’,
with ı
(‘blow’) found only here in archaic Greek epic.44
At HHDem 349–55, Hermes tells Hades that Zeus sent him to
bring Persephone from Erebos to the gods,
so that her mother,
when she sees her, may cease from her anger and horrible wrath
at the immortals; for she intends a great deed,
to destroy the strengthless tribes of earthborn humans,
hiding the seed beneath the earth and making the honours
of the immortals
waste away: she has a horrible anger, and she does not mingle
with the gods . . .
ZçæÆ
Åæ
OçŁÆºEØ NFÆ åºı ŒÆd
Ø ÆNB
IŁÆ Ø º
Ø· Kd ªÆ
ÆØ æª,
çŁEÆØ çFº’ IÅa åÆÆØªø IŁæø
æ’ e ªB ŒæıÆ, ŒÆÆçŁØŁıÆ b Øa
IŁÆ ø. m ’ ÆNe åØ åº, Pb ŁEØ
ªÆØ . . .
(HHDem 349–55)
Hermes’s use of ÆNB to describe Demeter’s BØ and åº is

poetically motivated by Demeter’s frustrating experience among mor-
tals in the house of Keleos, when, owing to the intervention of
Metaneira, she is unable to make Demophoon immortal as compen-
sation for her loss of Persephone (231–74). Demeter herself does not
use the word ÆN, but Hermes’ speech is focalized in these lines from
Demeter’s viewpoint, so the word has the same resonance as in the
passages from Iliad 5. It is striking that in each of the passages where
the word ÆN occurs, a divinity has separated himself or herself from
the rest of the immortals and become implicated in mortal existence.
It also is striking that two of these passages include the word IÅ
(‘strengthless’, Il. 5.887, HHDem 352), the same word Anchises uses
at HHAphr 188, when he beseeches Aphrodite not to leave him
44
See Kirk 1990:151–2, who notes the ‘thematic connection’ of 5.885–7 with Ares’
wish at 15.115–18 to avenge his dead son Askalaphos, even if this involves being hit by
Zeus’ thunderbolt and ‘lying together with corpses in the blood and dust’ (15.118).

‘strengthless’ and ‘an impotent man’ (P ØŁ ºØ I
æ, 189), which
is what happens to mortal men who sleep with goddesses (187–90).45
Elsewhere in Homeric poetry, such strengthlessness is typically asso-
ciated with the dead (e.g. Od. 10. 521, 536, 11.29, 49) and thus with
the human condition to which Demeter would, in effect, reduce the
gods by depriving them of their honours–the condition which Ares
(5.885–7) thinks he would experience ‘among the horrible corpses’,
were he not able to escape Diomedes’ onslaught.46
The similarity between Thetis, ‘having given birth horribly’, and
Aphrodite, with her ‘horrible grief ’, does not involve their becoming
‘strengthless’, but each suffers a blow to her divinity through impli-
cation in mortality as the mother of a mortal son. The main difference
is in the consequences for each goddess of her ‘horrible’ action and
emotion: Thetis will see her son Achilles die in battle,47 after he
realizes the fruitlessness of his extraordinary prowess,48 and she will
feel the bitterness of having borne and raised the best of sons and
come to understand the negative quality of her own fertility:
Ah me, wretched me, unhappy in having borne the best hero,
since I gave birth to a son faultless and powerful,
outstanding among warrior-heroes, and he shot up like a young tree;
I nurtured him like a plant on the slope of the orchard,
and I sent him forth in the curved ships to Ilion
to fight with the Trojans, but I shall not receive him again
having returned home into the house of Peleus.
þ Ø Kªg Øº
, þ Ø ıÆæØŒØÆ,
l ’ Kd iæ Œ ıƒe I ŒæÆæ ,
å æø· › ’ IæÆ æœ Y·
e b Kªg ŁæłÆÆ, çıe S ªıHØ IºøB,
Åıd KØæÅŒÆ ŒæØØ ”ºØ Yø
æød ÆåÅ· e ’ På ÆØ ÆsØ
YŒÆ
ÆÆ —Åº
œ Yø.
(Il. 18.54–60)
45
See Giacomelli 1980: 1–19.
46
Perhaps 13.206–7, where Poseidon is angry at the death of his grandson
Amphimachos, who has fallen K ÆNBØ ÅœÅØ, should count as a fourth example
of ÆN used in a passage associated with a god’s (over-)engagement with mortality.
Poseidon himself, however, does not suffer as do Aphrodite, Ares, and Demeter in the
other three passages, the passage is less developed than the other three, and it is
spoken by the poem’s speaker, not by Poseidon himself.
47
Cf. Pindar, Isthm. 8.37. 48
Cf. Il. 18.104 qÆØ . . . KØ ¼åŁ IææÅ.

Aphrodite, however, will feel no such fruitlessness, no such negative
fertility. Although she tells Anchises that she will name their son
Aineias, ‘since a horrible / grief (ainon achos) gripped me, because
I fell into the bed of a mortal man’ (198–9), she also assures him that
he will have a royal lineage:
for you there will be a dear son, who will be king among the Trojans,
and children will be born to children continually
d ’ ÆØ ç º ıƒ, n K æØ I Ø
ŒÆd ÆE Æ Ø ØÆæb KŒªª ÆØ.
(196–7)
This is a distinctively human triumph made possible by the fertility

that is linked with sexual pleasure as the domain and gift of Aphro-
dite, ‘a kind of worthy and desirable compensation for the weakness
of humanity definitively separated from the gods’.49 By contrast, the
Iliadic Achilles will, in the future, have Œº ¼çŁØ (‘imperishable
glory’), but he will have no long-term human lineage.50
*
The difference in the destinies of Achilles and Anchises is a function of
the generic difference between the Iliad and the Hymn to Aphrodite,
between an epic whose main theme is mortal heroism and a narrative
praising a divinity for her power and place in the cosmos. Although the
49
Brillet-Dubois 2006: 75. Cf. Càssola 1975: 230, 233–4. Faulkner 2008a: 1–5, 18
and 2011: 4–7 unconvincingly revives the argument, originating with Matthiae 1800:
66–7 and most influentially set forth in Reinhardt 1961b, that the focus on Aineias
and his descendants in the Hymn has more to do with honour being paid to a family
of Aineiadai, living in the Troad at the time the Hymn was composed, than with
overcoming the limits of mortality through sexual reproduction. Cf. Edwards 1991:
299–301, Olson 2012: 1–9.
50
On the contrast between the warrior-heroism of the Iliad as a means of winning
‘imperishable glory’ and erôs in the Hymn as a means of transcending mortality
through sexual reproduction, see Brillet-Dubois 2001: 250–6: 258–9. It is no accident
that the only close parallel to the phrase ÆE Æ Ø (197) is ŒÆd Æ ø ÆE at
Il. 20.308, which occurs precisely when Poseidon tells Hera and Athene that Aineias
and his children’s children are destined to rule the Trojans. Hoekstra 1969: 39–40
argues on historical grounds that the Hymn passage must be an adaptation of the Iliad
passage, but is refuted by Janko 1982: 158. It is likely that both passages use similar
formulaic language reflecting the traditional motif of Anchises and his son Aineias
overcoming the normal limits of mortality. In the Iliad, this overcoming is associated
with Zeus’ wish that the lineage of Dardanos not perish without seed, despite his
hatred for the lineage of Priam (20.303–6), while in the Hymn it is the result of
Aphrodite’s liaison with Anchises.

Hymn tells the story of how Aphrodite’s power was reduced, of a
development in cosmic history, it balances this reduction at a particular
moment in time with an ‘illustrat[ion]’ of the goddess’s ‘eternal nature
and workings’.51 In the words of Howard Porter, ‘The perfection of the
hymn form is found in the perfect synthesis of the dramatic and the
metaphysical, the temporal and the timeless’.52
In the Iliad, developments in cosmic history, such as Aphrodite being
forced to stop mating gods with humans, are, as I have said, a thing of
the past, and the gods have literally nothing to lose in the long run if
their plans go awry and they are defeated. They may shed some ichôr or
suffer some indignity, but the poem assumes there will be no more
significant changes in the cosmic order or in the powers of specific
divinities. This makes poetic sense because the emphasis in the Iliad, as
in the Odyssey, is on mortals, not gods, and human beings are the ones
who suffer long-term or permanent consequences of their actions. On
the other hand, in Hesiod’s Theogony and the other major Homeric
Hymns, gods, not humans, are of primary poetic importance, and
human beings are significant only insofar as their existence and activities
are a function of, or help to represent, divinity and the cosmic order.
In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, both humanity and divinity are
of central poetic importance. Just as Aphrodite will lose her power to
compel gods to sleep with humans and have children with them, so
Anchises will suffer from his inability to keep his afternoon with
Aphrodite a secret. From a human perspective, what happens to him
is more moving than what happens to Aphrodite. He does his level best
not to sleep with a goddess, questioning his visitor about her identity
and giving in only when she seduces him by telling him a lie that he
cannot see through. Anchises’ mortal helplessness is emphasized by the
rhetorically striking lines describing their sexual intercourse: n ’ ØÆ
ŁH NÅØ ŒÆd ÆYÅØ, / IŁÆ ÅØ ÆæºŒ ŁAØ æ, P çÆ N
(‘He then, by the will of the gods and by his portion / lay beside an
immortal goddess, a mortal, not knowing clearly’ 166–7). What is clear
is that he has no clue as to who she is, what he is actually doing, and
what his all-too-human role in the history of the cosmos really is. Yet as
the object of Aphrodite’s desire, Anchises is, in a sense, better off than
Ganymede and Tithonos, whose stories she tells him (202–17, 218–38).
In antithetical ways, they both end by losing their humanity, because of
51
Fränkel 1975: 248 (= Fränkel 1962: 285).
52
Porter 1949: 270, quoted by Clay 1989: 170 n. 58

the sexual attention of Zeus and Eos. Anchises, on the other hand,
though a humanly helpless and ignorant victim of Aphrodite, will
retain his identity, secure in the knowledge that his son and his
children’s children will rule among the Trojans (196–7)—a distinct-
ively human triumph over mortality made possible by his sexual union
with Aphrodite and a testimony to her power.53
In the Iliad, the ‘glorious gifts of golden Aphrodite’ (3.64) are
associated with Paris, who is fundamentally trivial because, as Hektor
says and as Paris’ duel with Menelaos shows, ‘there is not strength in
your heart and there is not any valour’ (PŒ Ø Å çæd P Ø
IºŒ
, 3.45). In the world of the Iliad, these are what count, not ‘the
lyre and the gifts of Aphrodite’ (Œ ŁÆæØ Hæ’ çæ Å, 3.54) to
which Hektor scornfully refers. In the Hymn to Aphrodite, however,
these are just the qualities that matter: it is no accident that when
Aphrodite first sees Anchises, he cuts a distinctly Paris-like figure,
‘playing the lyre with a piercing sound’ (ØÆæØ ŒØŁÆæ Çø, 80),
and when they go to bed together to make love, their union is not
associated with unheroic weakness, like the union of Paris and Helen
in Iliad 3, but is an activity that in the world of the Hymn has positive
long-term consequences for Anchises and his descendants.
*
Several scholars, including Gottfried Hermann, Howard Porter, and
Karl Reinhardt, have thought that the Hymn to Aphrodite was com-
posed at roughly the same time as the Iliad.54 Hermann called it
‘carmen Homeri nomine dignissimum’, Reinhardt judged both poems
to be by the same poet, and both Reinhardt and Porter emphasized
that the differences between the two texts are a function of their
53
Brillet-Dubois (personal communication) once suggested that Ganymede may
seem to have ‘reached a state of perfect bliss’, and that ‘his father’s mourning is
adequately compensated by the gift of the horses, whose graceful beauty turns sorrow
into joy’ (cf. Il. 5.265–6). But as D. J. Rayor 2004: 136 observes, though ‘[t]he story of
Ganymede would seem to be a positive example . . . ’, Ganymede himself ‘has no
choice in the matter . . . Though the exemplum ends happily . . . Ganymede forever
remains the adolescent cupbearer to the gods, never maturing into an adult man . . .’
Cf. Stehle 1996: 206 with n. 52 on Adonis and ‘other . . . youths who fail to make the
transition to adulthood’. In Iliadic terms, to exchange humanity and mortality for the
ethically trivial status of an immortal god is a loss that no compensation can make
good. Cf. Schein 1984: 51, 53.
54
Hermann 1806: lxxxix–xcv; Porter 1949: 250 and 1951: 34; Reinhardt 1961b:
507–21.

different genres, not their relative chronology.55 On the other hand,
Arie Hoekstra and Richard Janko have argued on stylistic grounds
that the Iliad and the Hymn ‘are not the work of the same poet’ and
that the Hymn is post-Homeric and was composed ‘in the decades
before the middle of the seventh century’ (Janko) or ‘somewhere near
the middle or in the latter half ’ (Hoekstra); similarly, Andrew Faulk-
ner and M. L. West think it dates from ‘the latter half ’ or ‘the last
third’ of the seventh century,56 while Pascale Brillet-Dubois formerly
interpreted the Hymn as a direct response to the Iliad, representing
erôs, rather than ‘imperishable glory’ achieved through heroic war-
fare, as the means par excellence by which human beings can tran-
scend their mortality.57 Given the Iliadic perspective in which the
Hymn views the contrasting conditions of divinity and mortality,
I find the views of Hermann, Porter, Reinhardt, and now Janko
sympathetic and convincing. The linguistic and stylistic evidence
and methods of analysis on which Hoekstra, Faulkner, and West
rely do not seem sufficiently refined to enable them to demonstrate
that one of two poems in different genres, both of which are end
products of the same oral poetic tradition, must be later than the
other. If the Iliad was composed sometime in the final quarter of the
eighth century BCE, why should the Hymn not date from the same
period?58 Similarly, though Brillet-Dubois is right that the two poems
illustrate different ways in which human beings can transcend the
limits of their mortality, there is no reason why two more or less
contemporary works in different genres, in the same poetic tradition,
should not reflect different ethical ideas and values.59
55
Hermann 1806: lxxxix; Reinhardt 1961b: 513, 521; Porter 1949: 271–2. Cf.
Groddeck 1786: 42 (cited by Podbielski 1971: 8), who remarks that the Hymn
‘›ÅæØŒÆ iure appellari debeat’.
56
Hoekstra 1969: 40; Janko 1982: 180; Faulkner 2008a: 49; West 2003: 16. Janko
2012: 21 has changed his mind and now ‘prefer[s] to date the Hymn to Aphrodite to
Homer’s time’, based on the linguistic methodology set forth in Janko 1982: 151–80,
74 fig. 3), which he had formerly ignored because ‘arguments from the detection of
exemplum and imitatio’ seemed to date the Hymn later than Hesiod’s Theogony.
57
Brillet-Dubois 2001: 257–9.
58
G. Nagy has argued, in my view unpersuasively, that a creative Homeric
performance tradition existed well after the end of the eighth century, and that
there were many versions of the Iliad (and Odyssey) until the text was fixed sometime
in the Hellenistic period. See Nagy 1996, 2003, 2010.
59
Brillet-Dubois 2011 modifies her earlier position and suggests that ‘creative and
subtle interaction existed between well-established Aphroditean and Iliadic traditions’
(p. 131), and that ‘the hymnic and heroic traditions [may have] developed

In any case, the contrast between the Hymn to Aphrodite and the
Iliad, and that between divinity and humanity in the Hymn, are only
part of the story. The Hymn develops these contrasts in the context of
the ‘cosmic history’ with which all of early Greek epic resonates, and
goes far beyond the Iliad’s occasional allusions to the mythological
past by making an episode in this cosmic history its main subject. The
distinctive achievement of the Hymn is to combine the divine–human
contrast with the cosmic history in a special kind of religious poetry
that is unique in archaic Greek epic as we know it.60
simultaneously in a fruitful dialogue, and ‘the same poets could adopt alternately [both]
perspectives’ (p. 132).
60
The nucleus of this essay was written for the Ancient Greek Hymns conference
organized by Richard Bouchon, Pascale Brillet-Dubois, and Nadine Le Meur-
Weismann, which took place in Lyon in June 2008. Later I presented revised and
expanded versions at Columbia University, Princeton University, UCLA, the Univer-
sity of Colorado, Boulder, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Univer-
sity of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I thank those present on all
these occasions, especially Ann Bergren, Jim Coulter, Susan Drummond, Helene
Foley, Liz Irwin, Laura McClure, Greg Thalmann, and Nancy Worman, for helpful
comments, questions, and suggestions. I am also grateful to Pascale Brillet-Dubois,
Nancy Felson, John Gibert (and his students in Boulder), Sarah Nooter, Lauri
Reitzammer, and especially Maria Serena Mirto for their encouragement and
thoughtful responses to several earlier drafts.
Homeric Intertextuality: Two Examples
In this chapter I consider two examples of how the Odyssey draws on

the Iliad, or the poetic tradition behind the Iliad, for its own poetic
purposes. In my first example, each poem uses the same formulaic
verse, evoking the same traditional theme. The Iliad, however,
employs this verse merely en passant, while the Odyssey plays against
its traditional significance and integrates both the verse and its
associated theme into its own, complex narrative. In my second
example, the Odyssey clearly alludes to a heroic attitude and way of
speaking that are characteristic of Achilles and of Iliadic heroism. It
does so in order to represent the heroism of Odysseus, at a particular
point in the narrative, as uncharacteristically and significantly Achil-
lean and Iliadic. It is possible either that the Odyssey is referring
intertextually, and quite specifically, to the Iliad as we know it, or
that the Odyssey is evoking a particular kind of heroic mood and
values that were well known in the oral poetic tradition, and that the
Iliad too drew on this traditional kind of mood and values to char-
acterize its central hero.
*
In Book 18 of the Odyssey, when Antinoos promotes the fight
between the beggar Iros and the disguised Odysseus, he tells the
other Suitors (Od. 18.44–9):
ªÆæ Æ¥’ ÆNªH ŒÆ’ K ıæ

, a K d æ øØ
ŒÆŁŁÆ Œ
Å ŒÆd Æ¥Æ K ºÆ. 45
› æ Œ ØŒÅØ Œæ
ø ªÅÆØ,
ø l Œ’ KŁºÅØØ IÆa ÆPe ºŁø·
ÆNd ’ ÆsŁ’ lØ ÆÆ
ÆØ, P Ø’ ¼ºº
øåe ø
ªŁÆØ K ÆN Æ.
82 Homeric Intertextuality: Two Examples

These goat-bellies lie here on the fire, which we
filled with fat and blood and set aside for a meal. 45
Whichever of the two is stronger and conquers,
let him stand up and take for himself the one he wants;
then he will always dine with us, and we won’t allow
any other beggar inside to mingle with us and beg.
About forty lines later, when Iros seems afraid to fight, after seeing
Odysseus’ mighty build (as enhanced by Athene), Antinoos threatens
him (18.83–7):
ÆY Œ ’ y ØŒÅØ Œæ

ø ªÅÆØ,
łø ’ X Øæ, Æºg K ÅU ºÆ
ÅØ,
N 0Eå ÆØºBÆ, æ H Åº Æ ø, 85
‹ Œ’ I e ÞEÆ ÅØØ ŒÆd hÆÆ Åºœ åÆºŒHØ
’ KæÆ ÅØ Œıd Ta ÆŁÆØ.
If this man is stronger and conquers you,
I’ll throw you in a dark ship and send you to the mainland,
to King Echetos, waster of all mortals, 85
who will cut off your ears and nose with the pitiless bronze
and pull off your genitals and give them to his dogs to eat raw.
Antinoos’ conditional sentences in 18.46–7 and 18.83–4 are strik-

ing, because in both protases the word ØŒÅØ (‘conquers’) overruns
the normal position in the verse of the penthemimeral or ‘B’ caesura.
Without this caesura, each line has an audibly atypical metrical
structure.1 Furthermore, although in both lines there seems to be a
customary ‘A’ caesura at position 3 (at the end of the word
› æ ) or at position 2 (following ÆY Œ ’), the post-positive
and enclitic Œ following › æ in 18.46 and the sequence of
two enclitics and elision preceding y in 18.83 dilute the effect of
these ‘A’ caesuras and, in effect, stretch out the opening colon of each
line to position 4 (› æ Œ . . . ; ÆY Œ ’ y . . . ). Combined
with a hephthemimeral caesura at position 7, this word-end at pos-
ition 4 gives each line a distinctive, tripartite structure and makes it
stand out in an otherwise normal metrical environment.
1
Just under 99% of the lines in the Iliad and Odyssey have a penthemimeral or ‘B’
caesura at position 5 or 5.5. I name the caesurae and number the metrical positions in
the hexameter according to the system employed by Porter 1951: 3–61, esp. p. 16. See
Chapter 7, Appendix 1.
Homeric Intertextuality: Two Examples 83

The only other occurrences of Od. 18.4683, with the same met-
rical anomaly involving the word ØŒÅØ overrunning the ‘B’ caesura,
are Il. 3.71 and 92, which are identical to Od. 18.46: › æ Œ
ØŒÅØ Œæ
ø ªÅÆØ. In Il. 3.71 and 92, however, the line
introduces not a fight over a stuffed goat-belly but the duel between
Paris and Menelaos over Helen and all her possessions. Paris tells
Hektor, who has just reproached him severely (Il. 3.39–57), that he is
willing to fight Menelaos in single combat (Il. 3.71–5):
ø ªÅÆØ,
ŒÆŁ’ ºg KV Æ ªıÆEŒ YŒÆ’ IªŁø·
ƒ ’ ¼ºº Ø çØºÅÆ ŒÆd ‹æŒØÆ Øa Æ
Æ
Ø æ
Å KæØºÆŒÆ, d b Łø
@æª K ƒ ŒÆd åÆØ
Æ ŒÆººØªÆØŒÆ. 75
let him bring the woman and all her possessions home with him;
but you others, cutting reliable oaths of friendship—
may you dwell in deep-soiled Troy, and let them go home
to horse-pasturing Argos and Achaia of beautiful women. 75
Then, about twenty lines later, Hektor echoes these words, telling
both assembled armies (Il. 3.92–4):
ø ªÅÆØ,
ŒÆŁ’ ºg KV Æ ªıÆEŒ YŒÆ’ IªŁø·
ƒ ’ ¼ºº Ø çØºÅÆ ŒÆd ‹æŒØÆ Øa ø.
let him bring the woman and all her possessions home with him,
but let the rest of us cut reliable oaths of friendship.
Although the metrically anomalous, and therefore striking, line

seems to be used of different kinds of conflicts in the two poems,
I suggest that in both passages it signals the same traditional theme: a
duel between two warriors over a ‘wife’. This is obvious in the case of
Paris and Menelaos in Iliad 3. It is significant that Il. 3.71 = 3.92 (=Od.
18.46) does not occur in the descriptions of the duels between Hektor
and Ajax in Book 7 and Hektor and Achilles in Book 22. Neither these
single combats nor any other encounter between enemy warriors in
the Iliad is a direct confrontation between two actual or potential
husbands of the same woman. If I am right, the verse, › æ Œ
ØŒÅØ Œæ
ø ªÅÆØ, is associated in the poetic tradition
specifically with such a confrontation, and in the Iliad it occurs only

in a situation where such a confrontation takes place. It may not be
obvious that the fight between Odysseus and Iros in Book 18 of the
Odyssey is similar in this respect to the duel between Paris and
Menelaos.2 Yet Iros is the ‘champion’ of the Suitors, who promote
his combat with Odysseus (18.34–41). He has been their licensed
beggar and messenger (18.7) during their occupation of Odysseus’
house and courtship of Penelope. Elsewhere he shares their propen-
sity for boastful violence and bad manners. Iros is, in the words of
Donald Lateiner, a ‘suitor-surrogate’ and ‘the Suitors’ mascot’, ‘fore-
shadow[ing] them in many bumptious particulars’.3
It has been observed that Odysseus’ return home and winning of
his wife in the archery contest is a version or reflex of two well-known
folk-motifs: of a stranger coming to a new land and winning his wife
in a contest and of a husband returning home to reclaim his wife.4
The first of these motifs is played out in Scheria, where the stranger,
Odysseus, excels in the athletic games in the face of a boastful
opponent, Euryalos, who recalls both Iros and the Suitors.5 Odysseus
is actually offered Nausikaa as a bride, but declines the offer in order
to return home to Penelope, thus disappointing the expectations
raised by the traditional story pattern. The second motif is developed
when he returns to Ithaca. There, in Book 18, the fight between the
beggar and the hero disguised as a beggar ‘plays out on a lower social
level [Odysseus’] quarrel with the Suitors, and his defeat of Iros enacts
in advance his killing of them. . . . Not only does Odysseus explicitly
draw the parallel, in the form of a wish, between his victory over the
beggar and vengeance on the Suitors (18.235–42). When he smashes
Iros’ face, the Suitors “died with laughter” (ªºøØ ŒŁÆ , 18.100).’6
Given Iros’ identification with the Suitors as ‘their’ beggar (18.7), it
is easy to see why a formulaic verse traditionally associated with a
2
Cf. Steiner 2010: 162–3. Monro 1901: 127 on Od. 18.46 seems to me to miss the
point when he speaks of the line as ‘a formula repeated from Il. 3.71,—doubtless in the
spirit of parody’. Monro often tends to see parody in the use of formulaic diction in
the Odyssey that is also found in the Iliad: cf. p. 331 on the scene with Iros, and the
Index, p. 510, s.v. parody.
3
Lateiner 1995: 190–1.
4
Woodhouse 1930 (reprinted 1969): 54–5, 60–1, 90–1, 98–9, 107. Cf. Kakridis
1971: 151–63.
5
Cf. Lateiner 1995: 77; Saïd 1998: 188 (Engl. trans., 199).
6
Thalmann 1998: 103, citing Levine 1982: 200–4. Russo, in Russo, Fernández-
Galiano, and Heubeck 1992: 132 on 18.100, notes that the metaphor anticipates the
actual death of the Suitors ‘in an oddly parodic way’. Cf. Komninou-Kakridi 1969: 201.

duel over a wife would be appropriate and significant in the mouth of
Antinoos before the beggars square off. Odysseus confirms and
completes his victory over Iros by killing the Suitors in Book 22,
and at 23.133–51 he celebrates his triumph as if it were a wedding
with Penelope. Commanding Phemios to play music and his palace
servants to dance, Odysseus tricks the passers-by outside the palace
into thinking that the queen has finally given in and married one of
the Suitors (23.148–51):
z Ø Y Œ ø Œ Ł IŒ ø·

“q ºÆ Ø ªÅ ºıÅ Æ
ºØÆ·
åº
Å, P’ ºÅ Ø y Œ ıæØ
Ø 150
YæıŁÆØ ªÆ HÆ ØÆ æ, x ¥Œ Ø .”
And thus someone would say, hearing from outside the house:
‘Surely someone has married the queen who had many wooers;
she’s cruel and did not have the heart to preserve her husband’s 150
great house forever, until he should arrive home.’
In Iliad 3 the formulaic verse, › æ Œ ØŒÅØ Œæ

ø
ªÅÆØ, is used twice in what I consider its traditional context—a
duel between two heroic warriors over a wife. Odyssey 18, I suggest,
adapts this traditional verse and integrates it into a complex narrative
of the hero’s return home to reclaim and win back his wife and
kingdom. Perhaps in the Iliadic tradition, the verse was associated
specifically with the single combat between the husbands of Helen,
rather than, more generally, with any two warriors duelling over a wife.
If that is the case, then the use of this verse at Od. 18.4618.83 would
anticipate and give added point to Penelope’s virtual identification of
herself with Helen at 23.218–24, when she seems to acknowledge how
close she herself came to marital infidelity.7 In any event, whether
the verse was traditionally associated with a duel between Helen’s
husbands or with any duel between two warriors over a wife, it offers
a good example of how each epic exploits a traditional, formulaic verse
for its own poetic purposes.
*
My second example of Homeric intertextuality is found in Od.
22.61–7, a passage in which the Odyssey adapts a recognizably Iliadic
7
On Penelope’s reference to Helen, see Felson-Rubin 1994: 39–40; Schein 1996a:
29–30.

motif, in order to present its hero, at this point in the poem, as
surprisingly but unmistakably Achillean. I say surprisingly because
in Odyssey 11, when Odysseus tells the story of his meeting with the
łıå (‘soul’) of Achilles in the Land of the Dead, his narrative
suggests the superiority of his own kind of heroism—the heroism of
a survivor who lives to return home—over that of Achilles—the
heroism of a warrior who dies young in battle.8 Moreover, elsewhere
in the poem Odysseus is consistently represented as concerned with
ŒæÆ (‘profits’) and the Ø (‘honour’) associated with them (e.g.
13.215, 14.323–5 = 19.293–5, 18.282, and especially 19.282–6). Thus,
at 22.61–7, his Achillean rejection of such material gain in the interest
of his personal vengeance on the Suitors is somewhat unexpected.
At Od. 22.45–59, Eurymachos begs Odysseus to spare his and the
other Suitors’ lives, now that ‘that man lies dead [who] was guilty of
everything, / Antinoos’ (Iºº’ › b XÅ ŒEÆØ, n ÆYØ º ø,
/
, 22.48–9). Eurymachos promises (22.56–9):
‹Æ Ø KŒ ÆØ ŒÆd K ÆØ K ªæ ØØ,

Øc Içd ¼ª KØŒ Ø ŒÆ ,
åÆºŒ åæı ’ I , N ‹ Œ e ŒBæ
NÆŁBØ· æd ’ h Ø Åe Œå ºHŁÆØ.
as much as has been eaten and drunk in the house,
we will repay in gold and bronze, each of us bringing separately
a payment of honour worth twenty oxen, until your heart
is melted; until then there is nothing wrong with your being angry.
Odysseus, however, rejects Eurymachos’ plea (22.61–4):
¯PæÆå’, P’ Y Ø ÆæØÆ ’ I E,

‹Æ F h’ Kd ŒÆd Y Ł ¼ºº’ K ØŁE,
P Œ z Ø åEæÆ Ka ºÆØØ ç Ø
æd AÆ ÅBæÆ æÆ
Å I EÆØ,
Eurymachos, not even if you should pay me back all your
fathers’ wealth,
as much as you now have, and even if you should add
more from elsewhere,
not even so at this point would I stop my hands from slaughter,
until you Suitors pay back all your transgression.
8
See Schein 1996a: 10–14.

Odysseus’ refusal of Eurymachos’ offer is striking. Elsewhere in the
poem, as I have noted, he is always on the lookout for the kind of
profit (ŒæÆ) and honour (Ø) that such material possessions
would provide. Here he ‘turns down the material gain . . . and chooses
the more difficult and infinitely more dangerous alternative of trying
to kill them all’.9 The complicated conditional sentence in which he
rejects Eurymachos’ offer, P’ N . . . P Œ z . . . æ
. . . (22.61–4),
is structurally unparalleled in the Odyssey,10 but it is found in emo-
tional refusals by Achilles in two contextually similar passages in the
Iliad: 9.379–87 and 22.348–53.11 In Il. 9.379–87, Achilles angrily rejects
Agamemnon’s offer of gifts, if he should rejoin the fighting, and in Il.
22.348–53 he savagely rejects the dying Hektor’s supplication to accept
the gifts of gold and bronze that his parents will offer (22.340–1) and
return his body for burial.
The context and syntax of Il. 9.379–87 are virtually identical to
those of Od. 22.61–4.12 Agamemnon, through Odysseus, has offered a
vast quantity of ‘worthy gifts’ (¼ØÆ HæÆ, 9.261) as an expression of
honour (cf.
ø’, 9.258;
ı’, 9.303; Ø ıØ, 9.297; cf. Ø,
Od. 22.57), but Achilles finds such a quantity irrelevant (Il. 9.379–87):
P’ Y Ø ŒŒØ ŒÆd NŒ ŒØ Æ

Å
‹Æ ƒ F Ø, ŒÆd Y Ł ¼ººÆ ª Ø , 380
P’ ‹’ K Oæå e Ø
ÆØ, P’ ‹Æ ¨Æ
`Nªı
Æ, ‹ŁØ ºEÆ Ø K ŒÆÆ ŒEÆØ,
Æ¥ Ł’ ŒÆ ıº
NØ, ØÅŒØ Ø ’ i ŒÆ
Iæ K ØåFØ f ¥ ØØ ŒÆd ZåçØ·
P’ Y Ø Æ
Å ‹Æ łÆŁ ŒØ , 385
P Œ z Ø Łıe Ke
Ø’ ªÆø,
æ
ª’ I e AÆ K d ÆØ ŁıÆºªÆ ºÅ.
9
Dimock 1989: 298.
10
Contrast, e.g., Od. 1.203–4, 3.113–17, 14.138–41.
11
Cf. Fernández-Galiano, in Russo, Fernández-Galiano, and Heubeck 1992: 232,
on 22.61–3. In the Iliadic passages, however, there are ‘two asyndetic clauses with P’
N, followed by P’ z’; cf. Leaf 1900–2: 2.454 on Il. 22.346.
12
Cf. Leaf 1900–2: 1.398 on Il. 9.379; ˚ Å -˚ÆŒæØ 1969: 242. Currie
forthcoming: ch. 1 notes that ‘there are striking similarities of wording’, as well as of
situation and syntax, between ‘the Odyssean and the two Iliadic scenes’. For example,
both Eurymachos and Phoenix conclude their promises of recompense to Odysseus and
of Agamemnon’s proposed gifts to Achilles in identical language (Od. 22.59 = Il. 9.523
æd ’ h Ø Åe Œå ºHŁÆØ. Cf. Od. 22.62 Il. 9.380.

Not even if he should give me ten and twenty times
as much as he does now, and even if there should be more from
somewhere else, 380
not even as much as comes into Orchomenos or into Egyptian
Thebes,
where the greatest number of possessions lie stored in the houses,
and there are one hundred gates through each of which
two hundred men ride forth with their horses and chariots;
not even if he should give me gifts as numerous as the dust
and the sand, 385
not even so, at this point, would Agamemnon persuade my heart,
until he pays me back all the heart-rending outrage.
Perhaps æÆ
Å (‘transgression’) at Od. 22.64 is slightly less
abstract than ºÅ (‘disgrace’) at Il. 9.387, but both nouns suggest
intangible, injured feelings that cannot be satisfied by any amount of
actual gold, bronze, or other tangible offerings, feelings for which
there is no ‘equivalent measure’.13 In each epic the hero is represented
as taking vengeance for these injured feelings: in the Iliad, Achilles’
vengeance is problematically self-defeating, but in the Odyssey, Odys-
seus overcomes his enemies completely and un-ambivalently, and
there is nothing at all self-defeating about his triumph.
It is entirely consistent with Achilles’ characterization through most
of the Iliad, and especially in Book 9, that his BØ (‘wrath’) cannot be
appeased by conventional offers and expressions of honour. Even when
he accepts Agamemnon’s gifts in Book 19, this wrath is merely trans-
ferred to Hektor and the Trojans as its new objects. Thus in Book 22,
when Hektor begs Achilles to return his body for burial, Achilles’
response once again is to reject tangible quantities of honour, in the
form of gifts of ransom, in the name of his unsatisfiable anger and
hatred (Il. 22.345–54):
, Œ , ª ø ª ıÇ Åb Œø· 345

ÆD ªæ ø ÆP ŒÆd Łıe I
Å
þ’ I Æ ŒæÆ ÆØ, x ’ æªÆ,
13
Hainsworth 1993): 114 on 9.387. It is worth noting that Achilles elsewhere uses
the word æÆ
Å (‘transgression’, Il. 16.18) to describe the behaviour of the Argives
against him, for which ‘they are [deservedly] perishing / by the hollow ships’ (Il.
16.17–18). Cf. Schein 1996a: 9.

‰ PŒ Ł’, n B ª ŒÆ ŒçÆºB I ÆººŒ Ø,
P’ Y Œ ŒŒØ ŒÆd YŒ Ø æØ’ ¼ ØÆ
ø’ KŁ’ ¼ª , åøÆØ b ŒÆd ¼ººÆ, 350
P’ Y Œ ’ ÆPe åæıHØ KæÆŁÆØ Iª Ø
˜ÆæÆ
Å —æ
Æ · P’ z ª ØÆ Åæ
KŁÅ ºåØ ª ÆØ, n Œ ÆP,
Iººa Œ ŒÆd Nø d ŒÆa Æ ÆØ.
You dog, don’t beseech me by my knees and my parents; 345

I wish my heart and fury would impel me
to cut off your flesh and eat it raw, seeing what you have done
to me,
as sure as there is no one who might keep the dogs from your
head,
not even if they bring here and weigh out a ransom
ten times and twenty times your worth, and promise still more, 350
and not even if Priam, the son of Dardanos, should give orders
to weigh
you yourself against gold, not even so will your noble mother
place you on a bier and lament the son whom she herself bore,
but dogs and birds will tear you apart and devour you completely.
The increased strength of Achilles’ wrath toward Hektor, surpass-

ing even what he felt against Agamemnon, is perhaps suggested
by the two mixed conditions in 348–52, in which, first, the optative
PŒ . . . I ÆººŒ Ø (348) in the apodosis corresponds to the more vivid,
subjunctival P’ Y Œ . . . ø’ . . . , åøÆØ . . . (350) in the
protasis; and Y Œ Iª Ø (351) in the protasis is picked up in the
apodosis by the emphatic future indicatives ª ÆØ and ÆØ
(353, 354). More than ever, Achilles refuses to accept mere quantities
as payment for violating his subjective feelings.
In the end, of course, he releases Hektor’s corpse to Priam and
accepts a ‘boundless ransom’ (I æ
Ø’ ¼ ØÆ, 24.579; cf. 24.594),
but it is clear that he does not surrender his feelings because of this
ransom. Earlier, when Thetis tells him that Zeus and the other gods
are angered by his disrespect for Hektor’s body and refusal to release
it, he responds simply, ‘Let the man be here who would bring the
ransom and take the corpse’ (BØ’ YÅ n ¼ ØÆ çæ Ø ŒÆd Œæe
¼ª Ø , 24.139), and speaks of the gifts that have melted his heart
(HæÆ . . . Œ Łıe NÅØ, 24.147, 176, 196). When Priam urges him
to accept the ransom and release Hektor, adding a wish that he might

profit from this in the future (24.555–6), Achilles tells him (24.560–1,
568–70):
ÅŒØ F ’ KæŁØÇ, ªæ · ø b ŒÆd ÆPe 560

‚Œ æ Ø ºFÆØ . . .
H F Ø Aºº K ¼ºªØ Łıe Oæ
ÅØ, 568
, ªæ , P’ ÆPe Kd ŒºØ
ÅØØ Kø
ŒÆd ƒŒÅ æ KÆ, ˜Øe ’ Iº
øÆØ Kç. 570
Don’t irritate me now, old man: I myself have it in mind 560
to release Hektor for you . . .
So don’t stir up my heart any more in its grief, old man, 568
lest I not leave you alone, not even you yourself, in my compound,
although you are a suppliant, and lest I transgress the commands
of Zeus. 570
He is still the same Achilles, quick to anger (cf. 11.564), rising ‘like a
lion’ (24.572),14 and he must keep Hektor’s body out of sight in case
Priam might be unable to control his passion and he himself, in turn,
might lose control and kill him (24.583–6).
In Od. 22.60–7, Odysseus is depicted as absolute and Achillean in
his refusal to soften his anger (Œå ºHŁÆØ, 22.59) and accept the
payment Eurymachos offers, if only he will spare the Suitors’ lives. In
effect, he is represented as a different kind of hero than he has been
through most of the poem, and this representation is strengthened by
the subsequent description of the Iliadic combat in which he kills
all the Suitors.15 The Odyssey registers this temporary shift in its
14
Cf. King 1987: 43.
15
Odysseus’ heroism at this point in the poem could even be thought of as pre-
Iliadic. His slaughter of the suitors recalls Tydeus in the story Agamemnon tells at Il.
4.384–98, who alone, with Athene’s aid, killed all but one of the fifty men sent from
Thebes to ambush him, after he had defeated the Kadmeans in various athletic
contests. Cf. Diomedes’ brief account of this incident at Il. 10.285–90 and Athene’s
version of part of the story at Il. 5.800–8. In mythology outside the Iliad, Tydeus is
associated with a particularly crude kind of heroism, involving his gnawing the brain
of his dead enemy Melanippos, who had mortally wounded him—an action that leads
Athene, who intended to make him immortal, to abandon him to his death. Of course,
even the possibility of immortality would be completely out of place in the Odyssey (as
in the Iliad), where the emphasis is on mortal heroism. In the final lines of the poem,
when Odysseus obeys Athene and shuns the anger of Zeus by sparing the families of
the Suitors, he avoids a transgressive deed that might have been as offensive to the gods
in its brutality as the action traditionally associated with Tydeus. For a convenient
collection of sources for the story of Tydeus’ death, see Gantz 1993: 518.

representation of Odysseus by making him use syntax and diction
that are distinctively and recognizably Iliadic and Achillean, though
once again it is impossible to know whether there is an allusion to the
Iliad as we have it or to a mode of heroism that was conventional in
traditional poetry celebrating warriors who kill and die for the sake of
honour and glory.
I have discussed two examples of how the Odyssey exploits tradi-
tional formulaic diction, metre, and syntax to give its narrative deeper
resonance or to signal a change in the characterization of its hero at a
particular point in the poem. Both of my examples could possibly be
interpreted as intertextual references to the Iliad, if one may rightly
speak of a ‘text’.16 Equally, however, the references could be to con-
ventions of different genres of poetry within the oral poetic tradition.
A shared, intimate familiarity with this tradition on the part of the poet
and the audience would have made such references recognizable and
such a poetic technique possible. The better attuned we can become, as
scholars, to the linguistic and stylistic details of Homeric epic, the more
nuanced will be our understanding of the poems.
16
See Danek 2002, Burgess 2012.
A Cognitive Approach to Greek Metre:

Hermann’s Bridge in the Homeric
Hexameter and the Interpretation
of Iliad 24
Studies of Greek literature that draw on, or are grounded in, cognitive
science have become increasingly conspicuous. Many of these studies
focus on epic, lyric, or dramatic performance and receptions of per-
formance texts by both audiences and readers.1 The present chapter
argues that recent work in cognitive neuro-linguistics provides a
more solid theoretical basis for the study of metre as a pathway into
the interpretation of Homeric epic, both in performance and as a
literary text, than do aesthetic approaches on which scholars have
previously relied. To show this, I first draw on research into ‘Event-
related Brain Potentials’ (or ERPs), a class of stimuli that generate
distinctive, measurable brain activity in the form of brainwaves cor-
related with syntactic, semantic, and prosodic processes. Then, with
this research in mind, I focus on the early Greek hexameter, especially
the metrical norm known as Hermann’s Bridge, which can be defined
as the avoidance of polysyllabic words ending at position 7.5 of the
hexameter (in conventional terminology, after the so-called ‘trochee’ or
first light syllable of the fourth foot).2 This avoidance can be thought of,
more positively, as a function of the normative, desired four-colon
1
e.g. Minchin 2001, 2007, Chaston 2010, Meineck 2012a, 2012b, Budelmann and
LeVen 2014. For cognitive scholarship not having to do with performance, see, e.g.,
Lowe 2000, Battezzato 2009.
2
For the terminology and notation by which I describe the hexameter, see
Appendix 1.
94 A Cognitive Approach to Greek Metre

structure of the hexameter discovered by Hermann Fränkel and put on
a firm statistical basis by Howard Porter,3 and of the cultivation of
particular metrical word-shapes at certain positions in the line.4 Her-
mann’s Bridge, as I define it, is observed in all but 43 or 44 of the 27,803
lines of the Iliad and Odyssey, and more than half of these 43 or 44
exceptions to the norm involve enclitics and may not be exceptions at
all, depending on how one defines ‘word’ and ‘word-end’. Finally,
I discuss the opening of Book 24 of the Iliad, in which there are
violations of Hermann’s Bridge in lines 35 and 60, and I argue that
these metrical anomalies are associated with other unusual features of
language, metre, and style that give a distinctive flavour to the opening
of Book 24, and with interpretatively significant allusions to mythology
familiar to us from what we know of the post-Homeric Cyclic epic, the
Kypria—mythology that was, however, earlier than the Iliad, which
adapted it for its own poetic purposes.
*
I begin with the observation that in every known metrical system,
there is some kind of patterned alternation of opposing elements,
such as stressed and unstressed syllables, odd and even tones, or, as in
Greek poetry, heavy and light syllables. Some scholars have con-
sidered this patterning to be purely phonetic—a matter of physical
sounds—but following Roman Jakobson and Howard Porter, I take it
as axiomatic that metrics is ‘the study of the realization of form in
language, not in meaningless noise’.5 Therefore the object of Greek
metrical study is not the physical sounds of the heavy and light
syllables but their organization into semantic units of linguistic
expression and the placement of these units within the line. Jakobson
and Porter drew on basic principles of Russian formalism and struc-
turalism in describing and analysing statistically the positions and
patterns of word-shape and word-end and the semantic units known
as cola—Jakobson in traditional Serbo-Croatian folk epic and Porter
in early Greek epic verse.6 In this way they could successfully deter-
mine the psychological ‘pattern[s] of expectancy’ with which audi-
ences heard and understood the poetry.7 This approach, they argued,
3
See Fränkel 1960 [1926], Porter 1951. Cf. Fränkel 1975: 30–4.
4
Cf. West 1966: 37–8, who refers to O’Neill 1942; cf. Fränkel 1960 [1926]: 123–4.
5 6
Porter 1951: 7–8. Jakobson 1960 [1933], Porter 1951.
7
Porter 1951: 8.
A Cognitive Approach to Greek Metre 95

puts us in a good position to recognize both the fulfilment and the
occasional disappointment of this normative pattern.
The ‘occasional disappointment’ is especially significant, because,
according to the Russian Formalist principle of ‘defamiliarization’,
when an author renders a linguistic, stylistic, or metrical phenom-
enon, or an object or manner of description, ‘unfamiliar’, it becomes
‘difficult’ to appreciate. This forces a listener or reader to linger on it
in order to understand it, to confront it in a different way or on a
different level from what is ‘familiar’. Accordingly, a defamiliarized
object or linguistic phenomenon can be elevated and transformed
from something ordinary into a work of art, or an element within a
work of art can be given special significance. Structuralist theory
speaks of ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ rather than ‘familiar’ and ‘defa-
miliarized’ phenomena, but the interpretative significance of the
‘marked’ is like that of the ‘defamiliarized’: both have to do with the
degree and kind of attention elicited from an audience or reader.
Since I first studied the formal structure of the iambic trimeter in
Aischylos and Sophokles nearly five decades ago, I have found this
principle of defamiliarization interpretatively useful. Yet despite the
statistical results of my research, I have sometimes felt the lack of a
sufficiently objective basis on which to claim that ancient audiences
or readers of Greek poetry would have drawn interpretative conclu-
sions similar to my own. ‘Why’, I have asked myself and been asked
by others, ‘should I (or ‘we’ or ‘anyone’) believe this?’ Now, however,
recent studies in cognitive neuro-linguistics show that there really is
an objective, physiological basis for this kind of interpretative
response, and that what I had thought of in aesthetic terms can
actually be correlated with measurable brain functioning.
In an essay entitled ‘The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and
Time’, first published in Poetry Magazine in 1983, Frederick Turner
and Ernst Pöppel enumerate thirteen ‘major characteristics of human
cortical information processing’, several of which are relevant to my
concerns in this chapter. One is that ‘the human nervous system
seems designed to register differences. It is habituative. That is, it
tends to ignore repeated and expected stimuli and respond only to the
new and unexpected’ (pp. 278–9). If true, this characteristic suggests
that the brain perceives metrical deviations from, or violations of,
norms to which it has been habituated as something special, and
students of brain activity can detect, even measure, such perception.
Another relevant characteristic, according to Turner and Pöppel, is

that the brain is ‘predictive’: ‘the patterns it extrapolates or invents are
patterns which involve specific expectations of what will happen next
and in the more distant future, expectations which await satisfaction
and are tested by the senses . . .’; in poetry the satisfaction or disap-
pointment of metrical norms can, so to speak, either make the brain’s
predictions come true or falsify them through ‘the new and unex-
pected’ (p. 279).
For Turner and Pöppel, still another ‘major characteristi[c] of human
cortical information processing’ is ‘the brain’s capacity for self-reward’
(p. 282). The brain controls the manufacture and release of specific
chemical compounds—opioids, endorphins, catecholamines—that are
associated with pleasure, and it can utilize these compounds to reward
itself for certain activities. Some of these activities have adaptive utility,
but others involve no more than the accomplishment of a particular
intellectual or emotional task for its own sake. One example of such an
activity would be the brain’s recognition of normative poetic functions,
such as metre or rhyme, and its ability to discern deviations from the
norm.
As Turner and Pöppel point out, metrical verse is an ‘intensified
form of linguistic expression’ used in nearly all cultures, often in basic
social and religious rituals and various kinds of wisdom literature; in
and of itself, this cross-cultural intensification is an indication that
metre is the product of a fundamental, human ‘neurophysiological
mechanism’ (p. 285). Although some might think of metre as an
artificial constraint, it actually helps to make possible the brain’s
production and reception of poetry. Like all linguistic norms, struc-
tures, and rules, metre provides a pattern that, by virtue of its
existence, makes it possible both to generate and to recognize signifi-
cant disturbances of, and deviations from, that pattern. In other
words, metre is a kind of linguistic regulation that increases the
potential variety of human verbal behaviour.
One of the most important advances, in the past few decades, in
understanding the basis of language has been the discovery by cog-
nitive neuro-linguists of a neural network in the brain, in the frontal
lobe, where language is processed. Imaging techniques such as elec-
troencephalography (through EEGs) and magneto-encephalography
(through MRIs) have made it possible actually to observe the brain
processing not only sounds, but also grammatical and syntactic
relations, millisecond by millisecond. Unfortunately I have not
found any studies of how the brain processes poetic metre, but the

same neural network must be involved: the neural basis of language is
also the neural basis of metrical language.
Electroencephalography and magneto-encephalography have led
to the discovery of four relevant ‘components’ or ‘waves’ of brain
activity associated with ‘Event-related Brain Potentials’ (ERPs). As
Angela Friederici and other researchers have found, ‘Two of these
[waves] are correlated with syntactic processes, one with semantic
processes, and one with prosodic processes’:8 (1) the so-called Mis-
match Negativity or MMN wave is observed 150–200 milliseconds
after auditory anomalies are heard; (2) experiments involving such
languages as English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, and Ameri-
can Sign Language have revealed a wave known as the N400, occur-
ring 400 milliseconds after the violation of semantic expectancy in a
sentence, as the brain copes with the unexpected meaning of what
has been said; the amplitude of the N400 wave varies inversely with
the degree of un-relatedness of an unexpected word to the expected
word, as in the sentence, ‘He spread the warm bread with socks’;9 (3)
when rules of syntax are violated in a variety of German phrases and
sentences—for example, ‘Der Freund wurde im besucht’ (‘The friend
was in the visited’), in which there is no noun or noun phrase to
follow the preposition im—one wave is seen about 180 milliseconds
and another about 300–500 milliseconds after the stimulus. When
there are violations not only of syntax but also of sentence structure
and grammatical agreement, the so-called P600 wave occurs 600
milliseconds after the stimulus, as the brain tries to ‘integrate’ or
‘repair’ what it hears in the unexpected verbal sequence; (4) since a
listener to a spoken sentence relies not only on semantic and syntactic
information for comprehension, but also on so-called ‘suprasegmen-
tal’ phonological information such as ‘prosody’ or ‘sentence melody’,
unexpected auditory phenomena, such as the absence of pause
between phrases or the arbitrary variation of pitch, give rise to a
‘Closure Positive Shift’ or CPS, a wave observable by MRI at each
abnormal intonational phrase boundary.
Though none of the four waves I have been describing has been
shown to be generated by a metrical stimulus, they all are significant for
students of metre because they illustrate how the brain operates to
8
In this paragraph I follow Friederici 2004, who brings together and summarizes
the findings of many scholars.
9
Friederici 2004: 467; cf. Debruille 2007: 475.

integrate, update, or repair perceived semantic, syntactic, and prosodic
irregularities. I posit that the brain acts similarly when confronted with
metrical anomalies, and that there actually is a physiological basis for
the claim by Russian formalists and structuralists that such anomalies
are ‘defamiliarized’ or ‘marked’ and therefore significant. In other
words, these waves are one kind of objective evidence with which to
confront those who reject literary interpretations of metrical phenom-
ena and ask, ‘Why should I believe this?’
*
I turn now to one of the most notable metrical phenomena in the early
Greek hexameter, Hermann’s Bridge, which I have already defined as
the avoidance of polysyllabic words ending at position 7.5 of the line,
or, in conventional terminology, after the first light syllable of the
fourth foot. Normally there is no word-end at all—not even monosyl-
labic word-end—at this position unless there also is word-end at
position 7 (the heavy first syllable of the fourth foot) or position 8
(the so-called bucolic diaeresis). There is no consensus among linguists
on the definition of a word, but for my purposes here a ‘word’ is a
sound or combination of sounds, or the written representation of a
sound or combination of sounds, that is both semantically meaningful
and a unit of accentuation as printed in our texts. There is one
exception to this ‘unit of accentuation’ principle: proclitics. Following
the ancient grammarians, I count a proclitic as an individual word, not
as part of the word on which it ‘leans’.10 Hermann’s Bridge takes its
name from the observation by Gottfried Hermann in 1805 that among
all the word divisions in the hexameter, ‘. . . there is especially one
division which, because it weakens the strength and force of the metre,
is rejected by the better poets. I mean that which involves a trochee in
the fourth foot . . .’ (‘una praecipue incisio est, quae quia vim et robur
numerorum debilitat, a melioribus poetis improbata est. Eam dico, quae
habet trochaeum in pede quarto . . . )’.11 Hermann discusses thirty-five
lines in which this principle of rejection is violated, and claims
(wrongly, as it happens) that word-end after ‘the trochee in the fourth
10
See Lentz 1867: 473, 551 ff. G. Hermann 1801: 96 coined the term ‘proclitic’ to
describe words that supposedly ‘lean forward’ on the following word: forms of the
definite article beginning with a vowel (›, , ƒ, Æƒ), the prepositions K, N or K, KŒ or
K, the conjunction N and conjunction/preposition ‰, and the negative adverb P,
PŒ, På.
11
Hermann 1805: 692.

foot’—at what I call position 7.5—is acceptable in any of three circum-
stances: (1) if the line also has word-end at position 9, that is, after the
first syllable of the fifth foot; (2) if the word ending at position 7.5 is not
in the shape of an amphibrach (w‒w); (3) if the word at position 7.5 is a
proclitic. These circumstances account for fourteen of the thirty-five
transgressive lines discussed by Hermann. He emends four others, and
does not try to explain the remaining seventeen exceptions.
In an article published in Mnemosyne in 1890, J. van Leeuwen
collects all the lines in the Iliad and Odyssey that, by his criteria, violate
Hermann’s Bridge.12 They amount to 281, many of which, he argues,
are either justified by special circumstances or should be removed by
emendation. Ninety-three per cent of these lines involve either a pre-
positive at position 7.5 or a post-positive at position 8, and most, by my
definition of Hermann’s Bridge, are not violations. By my count there
are only nineteen or twenty violations of Hermann’s Bridge in the
15,693 lines of the Iliad, depending on whether one reads K Œ
ºÆª or Kd ŒııºÆª in 21.575, and not counting 9.394, where,

with Aristarchus and most modern editors, I read ªıÆEŒ ª ÆØ
rather than ªıÆEŒÆ ªÆÆØ, despite the difficulty of understand-
ing ª as intensive);13 there are twenty-four such violations in the
12,110 lines of the Odyssey.14
It is striking that all but seven of the nineteen or twenty violations
of Hermann’s Bridge in the Iliad involve an enclitic at the end of the
word at position 7.5 (i.e. as the first light syllable of the fourth foot), as
do twelve of the twenty-four violations in the Odyssey. Of the enclitics
in the Iliad that occur at position 7.5, æ is most common (7X). It is
usually followed by a participial form of the verb N in agreement
with the word on which æ leans back (for example, Il. 2.246 = 19.82
ºØª æ K or 23.306 æ KÆ. Œ (Œ) occurs in two or three
12 13
van Leeuwen 1890. Cf. Maas 1962: 60, §87.
14
See Appendix 2, which also includes three lines of Hesiodic poetry (Theog. 23
and 319, WD 751) and four in the Homeric Hymns (HH 1.5, HHDem 17, 452, HHAp
36) that violate Hermann’s Bridge. There is another violation in line 11 of the
‘fragmentum dubium’ in Bernabé 1996: 85–6, though this line may not be archaic
but the product of later Homericizing. Bernabé thinks this fragment, in which an
unknown speaker foretells Achilles’ posthumous translation to the Isles of the Blest,
and Odysseus urges Ajax to help rescue his corpse, may come from an Ilias Parva; it
would, perhaps, better suit an Aithiopis, since in the Argumentum of the Cyclic
Aithiopis, Ajax bears Achilles’ corpse to the ships and Odysseus fights off the Trojans.
In the fragmentum dubium, however, it appears that Odysseus will carry the corpse on
his back (see line 13).

lines (depending on whether one counts 21.575), and a personal
pronoun—, , or çØ—is found in three others. In the Odyssey,
æ occurs in only two of the twelve lines with enclitics at position 7.5,
in six lines (four of which involve the phrase ‹ or ‹
ªªø Æ), Œ in two lines, and ª and in one line each.
I am uncertain of how to understand the frequency of enclitics at
position 7.5 in the lines that violate Hermann’s Bridge. If these
enclitics were treated as accented, monosyllabic words, following
the ancient grammarians, there would be just seven violations of
Hermann’s Bridge in the Iliad and just fourteen in the Odyssey. It is
common practice among metricians to count enclitics in Greek
poetry not as separate words but as belonging to the words on
which they depend for an accent. Ought we, however, to think of an
enclitic as a special kind of word—not fully part of the word on which
it leans, but not fully independent either? One common solution is to
consider an enclitic and the word on which it leans as belonging to the
same word-group along with the word or words following the enclitic;
this is also a common approach to pre-positives, post-positives, and
the words they precede or follow. In many cases, where the words
preceding and following the enclitic are in grammatical agreement,
the word-group seems especially well defined. Perhaps, though, a
word-group should be considered a rhetorical, not a metrical phe-
nomenon, so that in a case like ºØª æ K, there is a tension
between rhetoric (the phrase running from position 6 to position 9,
filling the third colon of the line) and metre (violation of the expected
bridge at position 7.5). This kind of tension is common elsewhere in
the hexameter, for example in the first colon of Il. 1.7, where metric-
ally æÅ overruns the normal A caesura at position 2 or 3, but
lends rhetorical force to the phrase æÅ ¼Æ IæH. Such
tension is common elsewhere in Greek poetry, for example, in the
iambic trimeter, when a word or phrase ending in an enclitic at
position 6 overruns by one syllable the caesura at position 5, where
word-end is expected, and the overrun makes the word ending at
position 6 particularly emphatic. There also can be a different kind of
tension when, as in line 5 of the fragmentary Homeric Hymn to
Dionysos (HH 1.5), ¼ººØ ’ K ¨ÅØØ, ¼Æ, ºªıØ ªŁÆØ,
there is a sense break, strong enough to be marked in our texts by
punctuation, between the word preceding the enclitic and the enclitic
itself, which goes syntactically and rhetorically with the words that
follow.

There are other ways of grouping all the violations of Hermann’s
Bridge in the Iliad and Odyssey, not only the lines in which there are
enclitics at position 7.5. For example, again depending on whether
one counts Il. 21.575, seven of the nineteen or twenty Iliadic
violations occur in the main narrative, two or three in similes; the
other twelve or thirteen violations are found in character speech,
with seven in secondary or embedded narrative. Of the twenty-four
instances in the Odyssey, twenty-three occur in character speech
(four in Odysseus’ first-person ºªØ), with only one in second-
ary narrative; just three lines in the poem’s main narrative fail to
observe Hermann’s Bridge. It is perhaps significant that three of the
Iliadic examples come in the first line of a speech or narrative unit
and one in the final line, while two of the Odyssean examples occur
in the last line of a speech, one in the next-to-last line, and one in
the last line of Book 22. This may suggest that a violation of
Hermann’s Bridge could sometimes help to demarcate a rhetorical
or narrative sub-unit for an audience equipped with the normative
‘pattern of expectancy’.
For what it is worth, violations of Hermann’s Bridge are not evenly
distributed. In the Odyssey, two occur within eighteen lines at 17.381
and 399; three occur within forty-five lines in 18.105–50; five occur in
Book 20, all in direct character speech. Similarly, in the Iliad there are
three violations in Book 23 (23.76, 306, 760) and four violations in
Book 24 (24.35, 60, 423, 753), all but one of the seven in character
speech.15 I’m not sure what these groupings of violations of Her-
mann’s Bridge might mean, but I’d like to think that they are in some
way poetically motivated.
Some individual transgressions of Hermann’s Bridge certainly have
such motivation. For example, several are directly mimetic, if that is
the right word. These include the half-line, occurring three times in
the Odyssey, which says that ‘the Harpies snatched away’ someone
who is missing, AæıØÆØ IÅæ łÆ (1.241, 14.371, 20.77). In these
lines, in which the word AæıØÆØ ends at position 7.5, the ‘monstrous-
ness’ of the metre imitates the monstrousness of the Harpies and their
action. There is a similar mimesis of monstrosity in Hesiod Theogony
319, which describes the Hydra as having given birth to the Chimaira:
b ÆØæÆ ØŒ ıÆ IÆØ Œ Fæ, where the word
15
The single exception, in 23.760, is part of a simile by the poem’s narrator.

ıÆ ends at position 7.5. Wilamowitz called this line Hesiod’s
‘schlechteste Hexameter’, because it combines the violation of Her-
mann’s Bridge with two other metrical anomalies: a monosyllable at
the end of the line and polysyllabic word-end after ÆØæÆ at
position 3.5 (in conventional terminology, after the first light syllable
in the second foot).16 Furthermore, M. L. West observed that the light
syllable ending in at the caesura before mute and nasal (ØŒ
ıÆ) is ‘un-Homeric’, and I would add that it is highly unusual
to have three consecutive words in a single line with the word-shape
w‒w, ÆØæÆ ØŒ ıÆ.17
All of these metrical and stylistic irregularities together would
certainly require the brain of a listener or reader, equipped with the
normative ‘pattern of expectancy’, to make a kind of adjustment to
linguistic anomalies similar to the adjustments implicit in the various
brain waves generated by ERPs. Presumably, this also would happen
in the case of Il. 6.2, describing and imitating the back and forth
surges of Greeks and Trojans on the field of battle, ººa ’ ¼æ’ ŁÆ
ŒÆd Ł’ YŁı åÅ Ø. In this line the violation of Hermann’s
Bridge by the verb YŁı combines with word-end after ŁÆ at
position 3.5 and with the relatively unusual sequence of a disyllabic
word followed by a monosyllable followed by another disyllabic word
followed by another monosyllable in the first half of the line. The
result is a metrically herky-jerky verse that is not at all what a listener
or reader would be expecting, and the anomaly is reinforced in the
next line, Il. 6.3, Iºººø NŁıø åÆºŒæÆ FæÆ, which is one of
the approximately 1.5 per cent of Homeric hexameters without a
mid-line caesura—a nice example of the tendency in Greek verse
for metrical and stylistic anomalies to occur in close proximity to one
another and to work together to produce a special effect.18 At HHDem
452, ŒıŁ ’ ¼æÆ ŒæE ºıŒ, Demeter’s shocking act of ‘hiding the
white barley’ gains emphasis not only from the violation of Hermann’s
16
Wilamowitz 1921: 8 n.1.
17
West 1966: 254 notes that Theogony 319 ‘combine[s] the Chimaera’s epithets Fæ
ıÆ (cf. Hes. fr. 43(a).87, Il. 6.182, Pindar, Olympian 13.90) and IÆØ Œ (Il.
6.179, 16.329), [the latter of] which has become transferred to Fæ in the process’.
18
Cf. Hesiod, Theogony 322, b åØÆ æÅ, ’ ZçØ ŒæÆæE æ Œ, with
relatively rare word-end in a heavy final syllable at position 4 and no B caesura, just
three lines after the anomalous line 319. Cf. Porter 1951: 23, 48; O’Neill 1942: 142,
table 10; West 1966: 256, on line 322.

Bridge by ŒıŁ, but also from the extremely rare monosyllable Œæ at
position 10, which together give the line a distinctive, halting cadence.19
Still another violation of Hermann’s Bridge, which could be considered
both mimetic and dramatic, occurs at HHDem 17, ˝Ø i BØ
Zæı ¼Æ ºıªø, where the word Zæı ending at position
7.5 reflects the shocking sight, focalized by Persephone, of the earth
gaping and Hades rushing with his immortal horses to carry her off.20
It is striking that none of these ‘mimetic’ violations of Hermann’s Bridge
involves an enclitic, and that violations involving an enclitic rarely if
ever seem ‘mimetic’, though they are frequently emphatic.
*
Now I turn to the two violations of Hermann’s Bridge in Il. 24.35
and 60, in speeches by Apollo and Hera, respectively, violations
which are associated with themes of particular importance to the
Book and to the epic as a whole. The metrically, stylistically, and
rhetorically striking opening of the Book, lines 1–21, sets the stage
for these violations, conveying Achilles’ tortured sleeplessness and
obsessive hatred and mistreatment of Hektor’s corpse by repeated
instances of defamiliarization. Nineteen of these twenty-one verses
have word-end exactly two-thirds of the way through the line at
position 8 (the so-called bucolic diaeresis), though normally only
about sixty per cent of Homeric hexameters have word-end at that
position.21 Furthermore, five of these lines have a sense break at
position 8 strong enough to be marked in our texts by punctuation.
This audible peculiarity is directly correlated with the unusual
frequency of enjambment in this passage, in which the sense over-
flows the end of the line about three-fifths of the time, most
conspicuously in lines 1–5, 10–13, and 16–21, although it is rela-
tively unusual in Homeric epic for more than two or at most three
consecutive lines not to be end-stopped strongly enough to be
marked by some sort of punctuation. These enjambments reflect
Achilles’ inability to stop continually abusing Hektor’s corpse, and
this inability is reinforced by two imperfects in line 5 and five
frequentative verbs and the generalizing optative ÇØ (‘he
19
For the rarity of monosyllables at position 10, see Porter 1951: 62, table XXII.
20
There might be another example of a mimetic violation in ¸B (-)
IØåŁÆºÆ (-Æ) at Il. 24.753 and HHAp 36, if only we knew the meaning of
IØåŁÆºÆ.
21
See Porter 1951: 13, 44, with table XIX.

would yoke’) in lines 12–17, denoting Achilles’ obsessively repeated
actions. The overall effect is strengthened rhetorically in lines 10–11
by the sequence ‘sometimes . . . sometimes . . . sometimes . . . and at
other times . . .’, and by Achilles’ continual changes of position: ‘on
his side . . . /on his back . . . face down . . . ; . . . standing straight up’
(¼ºº’ Kd ºıæ ŒÆÆŒ , ¼ºº ’ Æs / oØ, ¼ºº b
æÅ· ’ OæŁe IÆ . . . ), as one night merges into many
nights until ‘it was the twelfth dawn . . .’ (24.31).
Several of the highly marked metrical and rhetorical features in
lines 1-21 involve either unique words and phrases or typical formu-
laic phrases in atypical forms or combinations and at unusual posi-
tions in the line. For example, ‘on his sides’ (Kd ºıæ , 10) is a
unique phrase; ‘standing up’ (IÆ , 11) occurs elsewhere at the
end of the line (1.387, 19.77, 175, 23.542, cf. Od. 4.343 = 17.134,
16.378) only when someone is preparing to speak; ‘straight’ (OæŁ,
11) is apparently the only example in Homer of an adjective modify-
ing a nominative participle. Lines 1–21 are also marked by the
brilliant adaptation of the familiar themes of daybreak and yoking
horses (13–14), which, as Elizabeth Minchin has shown, are associ-
ated elsewhere in Homer with ‘high hopes and eager expectations’,
but here convey in striking fashion Achilles’ ‘stale repetition of
profitless activity’.22 When Apollo intervenes to ward off all ‘unseem-
liness’ from Hektor’s flesh, the word ‘unseemliness’ (IØŒ Å, 24.19)
is unique in Homeric poetry and refers to actions that are equally
unique and shocking.23 The reason given for Apollo’s protection of
Hektor’s corpse, that ‘he pitied the man / even though he was dead’
(çH’ KºÆ æø / ŒÆd ŁÅÆ æ), is similarly striking: ŁÅÆ is
22
Minchin 1985: 272.
23
But cf. I ŒØÇ() in 24.22 and 54, as the Book opens on a strongly ethical note.
Some scholars argue that IØŒ Å, 24.22 I ŒØÇ, and similar comments by the
poem’s primary narrator elsewhere, e.g. 22.395 q æÆ ŒÆd EŒæÆ E I ŒÆ
æªÆ (‘So he [sc. Achilles] spoke and planned unseemly acts against brilliant Hektor’),
do not indicate a negative ethical judgement on the part of the narrator, but should be
understood as focalized by Achilles and therefore as expressing his desire to disfigure
Hektor as part of his revenge. See de Jong 2012: 162–3 on 22.395, citing Bassett 1938:
203, Griffin 1980: 85, van Wees 1992: 129. But Segal 1971: 12–17 argues convincingly
that such language is ethically charged and can connote the narrator’s ‘repugnance
and even some measure of moral outrage’(13). Danek 2014: 139 concludes, ‘[I]t
is clear . . . that the stem IØŒ- can be used both in an objectivizing descriptive way
(“a deed which causes disfigurement of a person”) and an evaluative moralizing way
(“a deed which is unseemly and thus in the first instance disfigures the doer, and not
the damaged one”).’

marked not only by ŒÆ . . . æ, but because this is the only time the
word occurs anywhere in the line other than at position 8; çH’
KºÆ æø is similarly marked because the phrase does not occur else-
where at all; and nowhere else in Homer is a god said to pity a dead
human being.24 In effect, these metrical and stylistic anomalies in lines
18–20 reflect the way in which Apollo is represented as driven by
Achilles’ inhuman actions to respond with a human moral sensibility.
This can be seen in Apollo’s speech to the gods in lines 34–54,
which is as remarkable linguistically and ethically as his intervention
to protect Hektor’s dead body. He begins by blaming his fellow
Olympians for being Åº (‘harmful’, 24.33), a word that occurs
only here in the Iliad, and he asks accusingly, h Ł’
E / ‚Œøæ
Åæ ’ ŒÅ H ÆNªH º ø; / e F PŒ ºÅ Œı æ KÆ
ÆHÆØ . . . (‘Didn’t Hektor ever / burn thighbones of oxen and
unblemished goats for you? / Now you did not bring yourselves to
save him, even though he is a corpse . . .’, 24.33–5). The unexpected
rhetorical question in line 34, expressing a divine view of how human
worship is supposed to work, gains emphasis from the following
asyndeton and the violation of Hermann’s Bridge in line 35 by
Œı æ KÆ, ‘even though he is a corpse’, which calls a listener’s
or reader’s attention to the word ‘corpse’ and anticipates Apollo’s
powerful accusation in the final line of the speech that Achilles ‘in his
rage treats the dumb earth’—the mere dust of which Hektor’s body
now consists—‘in unseemly fashion’ (Œøçc ªaæ c ªÆEÆ IØŒ ÇØ
Æ ø, 54).25
Throughout his speech, Apollo reinforces the violation of Her-
mann’s bridge in line 35 by his use of rare or unparalleled diction
to indicate Achilles’ inhumanity, most strikingly when he compares
him to a lion, a savage predator,
which, when it has given in to its proud spirit and great violence,
will go against the flocks of mortals to take a meal.
So Achilles has lost [or: ‘destroyed’?] (his) pity, and there is no shame
in him . . .
24
At 15.12 Zeus pities Hektor, who has been knocked out and is nearly dead, and
at 16.431 he pities his son, Sarpedon, who is about to die. At 13.15–16 Poseidon pities
the Greeks being conquered by the Trojans, and at 8.350 Hera pities them being
routed by Hektor.
25
See Macleod 1982 and Richardson 1993, ad loc.

‹ ’ Kd iæ ª ºÅØ ÅØ ŒÆd IªæØ ŁıHØ
YÆ r’ Kd BºÆ æH, ¥Æ ÆEÆ º ÅØØ·
S åØºf º b Iº, P ƒ ÆNg
ª ªÆØ . . . 45
(24.42–5)
Achilles is compared to a lion in other similes, but this one is

different: Apollo uses the word ÆEÆ for the lion’s meal, though
elsewhere in Homer the word Æ is used only of human meals.26
By figuratively assimilating Achilles to a savage predator on domes-
ticated flocks, the poet suggests that he has become not only inhuman
but anti-human, in contrast to his victim, the quintessentially human
Hektor. The word ÆEÆ, ‘a meal’, coming not long after the emphatic
Œı æ (‘even though he is a corpse’, 24.35), places Achilles only
one step away from the horrific cannibalism that he envisages for
himself at 22.346–7, when he wishes he could cut off Hektor’s flesh
and eat it raw. In this context, Apollo’s assertion in lines 24.44–5, that
Achilles ‘has lost [or ‘destroyed’?] (his) pity (º) and there is no
shame (ÆN) in him’, recalls Hesiod’s distinction in WD 276–80
between human beings who have ‘justice’ ( ŒÅ) and ‘fishes, wild
beasts, and winged birds’ who ‘eat one another’. ÆN, like ŒÅ, is
a distinctively human institution and value, and according to Apollo,
Achilles has put himself outside—or rather, against—human society,
as have the gods who support him, by refusing to allow the rescue
of Hector’s corpse for burial.27 It is no accident that the violation of
Hermann’s Bridge by Œı æ in 24.35 begins Apollo’s denunciation
of the gods and of Achilles. Such a metrical abnormality is highly
marked and calls the attention of the other gods, to whom Apollo is
speaking, and of the poem’s audience or reader, to Apollo’s extraor-
dinary moral outrage.
My second example of a dramatically and thematically meaningful
violation of Hermann’s Bridge comes 25 lines later, when Hera, with
26
Reading NøE AØ at Il. 1.5 with Aristarchos and the manuscripts, not
NøE ÆEÆ with Zenodotos. See Pfeiffer 1968: 111–13. Æ is also used of an
animal’s meal at Archilochos fr. 175.2, if Lasserre’s conjecture ÆE]Æ is correct, and
Archilochos 179, but this is a matter of genre: both fragments belong to a poetic fable
(of the fox and the eagle), and in fables, animals think, speak, act, and suffer like
human beings.
27
For the association of ÆN with ŒÅ, see Hes. WD 192–3, Tyrtaios fr. 12.40
(West) = fr. 9.40 (Gentili and Prato), Theogn. 291–2, Plato, Protagoras 322c2–d5,
Laws 943e1–2.

the concern for her prerogatives that characterizes her throughout the
poem, objects sarcastically to Apollo’s speech and to what she sees as
the gods’ honouring of Hektor and Achilles equally (24.58–63):
‚Œøæ b ŁÅ ªıÆEŒÆ ŁÆ ÆÇ·
ÆPaæ åØºº KØ ŁA ª, m Kªg ÆPc
ŁæłÆ ŒÆd I ÅºÆ ŒÆd Iæd æ Ææ ŒØØ, 60
—Åºœ, n æd ŒBæØ ç º ª’ IŁÆ ØØ.
’ IØ ÆŁ, Ł , ª ı· K b f EØ
Æ ı’ åø çæØªªÆ, ŒÆŒH Ææ’, ÆNb ¼Ø.
Hektor was mortal and nursed at the breast of a woman,
but Achilles is the offspring of a goddess, whom I myself
brought up and reared and gave as wife and bedmate to a man, 60
Peleus, who was very dear to the immortals in their hearts.
You all were present, you gods, at the wedding; and you had your lyre
and dined among them, you companion of evil men, always
untrustworthy.
In the phrase Iæd æ Ææ ŒØØ (‘I gave [her] as wife and
bedmate to a man’, 24.60), the word Iæ , at position 7.5 of the line,
violates Hermann’s Bridge and thus is particularly emphatic. The
unexpected emphasis, however, is not only on the highly unusual
marriage between a goddess and a mortal, but, given Kªg ÆP in the
preceding line (59) and the explicit reference in the following lines to
the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, on Hera’s role in bringing about
this union.
Hera’s statement is surprising in several ways, given what we hear
earlier in the poem about Thetis’ attitude towards the wedding and
Hera’s attitude towards Thetis. For Thetis herself, the wedding that
Hera recalls so positively was not a positive event. At 18.85 Achilles,
in describing his own troubles to his mother, refers to ‘that day when
the gods threw you into the bed of a mortal man’ and then goes on to
describe ‘the infinite sorrow’ (Ł . . . ıæ ) she suffers because of
the mortality of the son conceived in this marriage (18.88–90). Later
in the same book (18.430–4), Thetis asks Hephaistos, rhetorically, if
any other Olympian goddess
endured so many painful troubles in her mind, 430

as many as the griefs Zeus, son of Kronos, gave to me out of them all:
out of (all) the other sea-goddesses, he subdued me sexually to a man,
to Aiakos’ son Peleus, and I endured a man’s bed
very much against my will.

’ Kd çæd wØØ Iå ŒÆ ºıªæ , 430
‹’ Kd KŒ Æø ˚æ Å Zf ¼ºª’ øŒ;
KŒ ’ Iºº ø ±ºØ ø Iæd Æ,
ººa º’ PŒ KŁºıÆ.
Thus, Hera’s rather upbeat mention of the marriage in Book 24 as

something that she herself brought about, which should therefore
make Achilles deserve greater honour than Hektor, comes as some-
thing of a surprise—all the more so, given the jealous and mistrustful
way in which she speaks of Thetis in Book 1, when she complains
angrily to Zeus that he has been meeting secretly with her and
promising to honour Achilles by destroying many of the Achaians
at their ships (1.555–9). Hera’s story of the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is marked by its difference from the version made familiar to
an audience or reader earlier in the poem. Thus it is, at the level of
myth, a case of defamiliarization, of making strange and so inviting
interpretation.
On the other hand, for members of an audience or readers at home in
traditional poetry and mythology, Hera’s version of the marriage of
Peleus and Thetis might also have seemed familiar. Fragment 2 of the
Kypria, the Cyclic epic about the origin of the Trojan War and the
fighting up to the time at which the Iliad begins, says that Thetis refused
to sleep with Zeus as a favour to Hera (BØ ˙]æÆØ åÆæ[ØÇÅ]), on
account of which Zeus became angry with Thetis and swore that she
would marry a mortal.28 In later versions of the same story, (1) Apollo-
nios of Rhodes (4.790–8) makes Hera say that she reared Thetis and
loved her more than all the other sea-goddesses, because she did not
bring herself to go to bed with Zeus, but avoided him out of fear and
respect for Hera, in return for which Zeus swore that she would never
marry an immortal; (2) Apollodoros (Library 3.13.5) says that Thetis
declined to mate with Zeus, because she had been reared by Hera (‰
e ˙æÆ æÆçEÆ).
Recent commentators on Iliad 24, including Macleod, Richardson,
Mirto, and Brügger, assume that Apollonios and Apollodoros base
their accounts on Hera’s story in 24.58–63, not on the Kypria, and
they endorse B. K. Braswell’s suggestion that this story is an ad hoc
28
Cf. Bernabé 1996: 45, Davies 1988: 36.

mythological invention to provide rhetorical justification for Hera’s
claim that Achilles should be preferred to Hektor.29 It seems to me,
however, far more likely that Hera’s lines are not an ad hoc invention,
but an allusion to the story as told in the Kypria. This allusion
resembles the allusion to the mythology of the Kypria in Book 1 of
the Iliad, when Achilles suggests that Thetis ask Zeus to honour him
by helping the Trojans against the Greek army, and tells her to
remind Zeus of the favour he owes her, because she once helped to
rescue him from a rebellion by Athene, Hera, and Poseidon, calling
to his aid the hundred-handed Briareos, who was ‘greater in strength
than his father’ (1.396–406). Braswell and the commentators inter-
pret this passage too as an ad hoc invention on the part of Homer, but
Laura Slatkin has argued convincingly that it should be understood as
an allusion to the Kypria and to a body of mythology about Thetis as a
cosmic power, able to bring about Zeus’ overthrow, had she mated
with him and given birth to a son greater in strength than his father—
mythology which would have been familiar to Homer’s audience
from the oral epic tradition.30
Hera’s story in Book 24 and Achilles’ speech to his mother in Book
1 are marked in a distinctive way: unlike the familiar version of the
story known from Pindar Isthmian 8.27–38 and hinted at several
times in Aischylos’ Prometheus Bound (755–70, 907–27, 947–59), in
which Zeus chooses not to mate with Thetis, after hearing Themis’
prophecy about the consequences of doing so, the stories in Books 1
and 24, which allude to the Kypria, give the agency to Thetis, not
Zeus, in averting a mating that would have led to his overthrow.31 The
Iliad uses these marked mythological allusions for its own poetic
purposes: in Book 1, despite Thetis having once rescued Zeus, the
power to grant Achilles’ request lies entirely with Zeus; in Book 24,
29
Braswell 1971: 23–4.
30
See Slatkin 1991: 82–4, 114–22 (=2011a: 70–1, 90–5). Cf. Hes. Theog. 897–900,
where one reason that Zeus ‘put Metis into his belly’ is the prophecy by Gaia that ‘she
was going to give birth to a son (who would be) king of gods and men . . .’. Some
scholars reject the possibility or minimize the importance of mythological allusion in
Homeric epic, owing to their conviction that such allusion is impossible in oral poetry,
e.g. Willcock 1964, 1977, Braswell 1971, Andersen 1998. See, however, Kakridis 1949,
1971, Slatkin 1991, esp. 115–19 [= 2011a, esp. 90–3], Danek 1998, 2002, and Schein
2002 [Ch. 4, this volume], who argue that mythological allusion is an important
dimension of Homeric compositional technique and helps to generate poetic meaning
in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
31
Slatkin 1991: 53–84 (= 2011a: 52–71) .

despite Hera’s allusion to the story from the Kypria that emphasizes
Thetis’ refusal of Zeus as a favour to Hera herself, Hera must yield to
Zeus when he decides that Achilles should give up Hektor’s corpse for
burial, and, to add insult to injury, Zeus makes Thetis herself his
messenger to Achilles to tell him to do so (24.74–6, 112–16). Simi-
larly, in Book 1, Hera’s special relationship with Thetis may be
reflected in her having inspired Achilles to call the Greek army to
an assembly, in order to find some way of dealing with the plague (Il.
1.54–5),32 but by the end of the Book, Achilles is no longer following
Hera’s instructions but the plan of Zeus. Thus, allusions to the
supreme power of Zeus and the limited authority of Hera frame the
events of the Iliad, and the cosmic power of Thetis in the mytho-
logical past is just that, a thing of the past, but with meaningful
‘reverberations’ in the poem’s narrative.33
The interpretation of Hera’s lines as an allusion, rather than a
spontaneous mythological invention, gains strength from another
striking allusion to the Kypria in the opening of Book 24—the famous
mention of the Judgement of Paris at lines 25–30. This is the only
explicit reference to the Judgement of Paris in the Iliad, although, as
Karl Reinhardt showed, the stories of Hera’s and Athene’s hatred of the
Trojans (and of Poseidon’s differently motivated hatred, cf. 21.441–57)
are presupposed throughout the poem.34 The Iliad transforms these
stories into new dramatic ‘situations’, but they must already have been
familiar enough to Homer’s audiences in their traditional form for his
characters to allude to them, and these allusions serve the poet’s as well
as the characters’ purposes. For example, both Achilles’ marked allu-
sion in Book 1 to the role of Thetis in helping Zeus, in the face of
rebellion, to maintain power, and the implied narrator’s reference in
Book 24 to those gods without pity for Hektor’s corpse (24.24–6)
involve the same three gods, Hera, Athene, and Poseidon. In Book 1,
however, Achilles opposes them to Zeus in the mythological past, in
order to magnify Thetis, while in Book 24, as throughout the Iliad, the
poet is concerned not only with their present hostility to the Trojans,
but with their subordination to Zeus.
Allusions in the Iliad to traditional myths, especially when these
myths differ from the poem’s own narrative or the narratives of their
32
I owe this point to Jinyo Kim.
33
Cf. Lang 1983; Slatkin 1991: 108–9 (= 2011a: 87–8).
34
Reinhardt 1960 [1938].

characters, call attention to themselves and challenge audiences and
readers to make sense of them in light of the whole story of the Trojan
War and the overall cosmic history that resonates throughout archaic
Greek epic.35 The Iliadic emphasis on Zeus’ power seems to me to
gain strength by contradicting the version of the myth to which Hera
alludes in 24.59–63, in which Thetis herself, not Zeus, decides that she
would not mate with Zeus but would marry Peleus as a favour to
Hera. As in Book 1, so in Book 24, the poem goes out of its way to
emphasize Hera’s weakness in relation to the ‘father of gods and
men’.
I would not claim that the unexpected violation of Hermann’s
Bridge in 24.60, Iæd æ Ææ ŒØØ, by itself calls to mind this
whole range of mythology, but for a listener or reader attuned to
metrical norms, this instance of defamiliarization signals the inter-
pretative importance of Hera’s (and the poet’s) mythological
allusion.
The brain waves associated with ERPs show the brain in the act
of processing not only sounds, but also grammatical, syntactic,
semantic, and prosodic relations, as it adjusts to, ‘repairs’, and
‘integrates’ unexpected verbal sequences. I suggest that the brain
processes anomalies and shifts in traditional mythology in a similar
way. If I am correct, there is a similar psycho-physiological, not
merely an aesthetic, basis for the study of both metrical form
and mythological allusion: in both cases, unexpected and therefore
defamiliarized and marked sequences offer the interpreter of Hom-
eric poetry privileged interpretative opportunities that help to
make reading and engaging with the Iliad so challenging and so
rewarding.36
35
Graziosi and Haubold 2005 speak of ‘the resonance of epic’, while Slatkin 1991:
109–10 (= 2011a: 108–9), adopting Lang’s term (Lang 1983), discusses the ‘reverber-
ation’ in the Iliad of myths of generational strife and ‘divine disorder’ that ‘produc[e]
not a single meaning but a sequence of overlapping significations—as with echoes, in
which it is not the original sound but each subsequent iteration that is picked up and
relayed’.
36
I presented an early version of the first half of this chapter at the Cognitive
Classics conference in London in 2008. I am grateful to the organizers, Felix Budel-
mann and Nick Lowe, for inviting me to try out my ideas, and to the audience for
exceptionally helpful responses. I also thank audiences at Brown University, Bryn
Mawr College, Northwestern University, and The University of Colorado for encour-
agement and constructive criticism of later versions of the full chapter.
APPENDIX 1: DESCRIBING THE HEXAMETER
Hermann Fränkel’s groundbreaking essay, ‘Der kallimachische und der

homerische Hexameter’, was first published in 1926, then expanded and
completely rewritten several decades later as ‘Der homerische und der
kallimachische Hexameter’, a chapter in Fränkel’s Wege und Formen früh-
griechischen Denkens (Fränkel 1960: 100–56). Fränkel argued that the pat-
terned alternation of 12–17 heavy and light syllables per line and the
traditional analysis of these syllables into six metrical ‘feet’ did not do justice
to the actual structure of the line, which consists of four semantic divisions or
‘cola’, which are demarcated by three caesuras and word-end at the end of
the line.37
I follow O’Neill 1942: 113 and Porter 1951: 16 in referring to ‘positions’ in
the hexameter, numbering the syllabic elements of the line from 1 to 12, and,
when there is ww rather than ‒, numbering the light syllables 1.5, 2; 3.5, 4; 5.5,
6, etc.:
1 1.5 2 3 3.5 4 5 5.5 6 7 7.5 8 9 9.5 10 11 12
—— —— —— —— ——
– w w – w w – w w – w w – w w – –.
Thus, in the first line of the Iliad, BØ ¼Ø, Ł , —ÅºÅœ ø åØºB, there
is word-end at positions 1.5, 3.5, 5, 9, and 12.
The main (or B) caesura comes at position 5 or 5.5 (in traditional metrical
terminology after the first or second syllable of the third foot), in almost 99%
of the lines in the Iliad and Odyssey, with the caesura at position 5.5 more
common than that at position 5 by a ratio of approximately 4:3. The
A caesura occurs in about 90% of the lines in the two poems at position 2
or position 3 of the line (in traditional terminology, at the end of the first foot
or after the first syllable of the second foot), or much less commonly,
according to Fränkel but not Porter, at position 1 or 1.5. According to
Fränkel, the C caesura is found at position 8 in about 60% of the lines and
at position 7 (after the first syllable of the so-called fourth foot) in all but 2%
of the rest. Porter 1951 argues that the alternative position of the C caesura is
at position 9 rather than position 7, where the number of syllables in the
third colon are too few to constitute a separate colon, after the B caesura at
position 5 or 5.5; his suggestion, however, has not found favour with most
later scholars. On the other hand, Porter’s essay placed the fourfold structure
of the line on a firm statistical basis and provided a convincing theoretical
37
O’Neill 1942: 105–14 refers to the patterned alternation of heavy and light
syllables and their analysis into ‘feet’ as the ‘outer metric’ of the line, and the fourfold
colometric structure as the ‘inner metric’.

basis for understanding each colon in the line as having a semantic reality,
arguing that sound in language is inseparable from sense, and that metrics is
the study not merely of the phonetic features of the heavy and light
syllables, but of semantic units (cf. Jakobson 1960 [1933]). Other scholars,
including O’Neill 1942 and M. L. West 1982: 37, focus less on colon
boundaries—caesurae—than on the sequences of heavy and light
syllables in particular cola and even speak of the poet as seeking or
preferring to situate some metrical ‘word-types’ or ‘word-shapes’, and to
avoid others, at particular places in the line. Almost all scholars of the
Homeric hexameter in the past half-century, except for Kirk, accept
Fränkel’s analysis of the line into four cola divided by three caesurae,
and they would agree, for example, that if we were to change the word-
order in the opening line of the Odyssey from ¼æÆ Ø , FÆ,
ºæ n ºÆ ºº to ¼æÆ ºæ FÆ Ø n ºÆ
ºº , we would preserve the patterned alternation of heavy and light
syllables and could analyse the line as consisting of six feet, but we would
not have a Homeric hexameter: the new line would lack both the
B caesura at position 5 or 5.5 and the A caesura at position 2 or 3, and
therefore would lack the normal first and second cola that help to make
the hexameter what it is.38
Fränkel’s analysis of the colometric structure of the hexameter, along
with that of Porter, provides a framework in which the individual metrical
observations of earlier scholars can be understood. These observations,
often misleadingly termed ‘laws’, were actually description of norms, of
tendencies to avoid word-end at one or another position in the line (or to
seek particular, semantically meaningful sequences of heavy and light
syllables in particular cola). Within the fourfold structure, one can see
reasons for these tendencies: for example, the relative infrequency of
words ending at position 4, especially polysyllabic words ending in a
heavy syllable, and the avoidance of such polysyllabic word-end in a
heavy syllable at position 8 and especially position 10, must have some-
thing to do with not weakening the force of the B caesura at position 5 or
5.5 or disrupting the final cadence of the line. This is also true of
Hermann’s Bridge, according to which polysyllabic word-end at position
7.5 must be avoided, presumably so that it does not interfere with the final
cadence.39
38
Porter 1951: 13. Cf. Fränkel 1960: 123, who notes that in theory, as far as
heavy and light syllables and ‘feet’ go, there could be lines like a transformed
version of Il. 1.2, PºÅ, l ’ ¼ºªÆ ıæ Æ ŁBŒ åÆØE, but no such lines exist.
39
For analyses of the structure of the hexameter grounded in the work of Fränkel
et al., see Michelazzo 1996, Rossi 1996 [1965], Foley 1991: 68–84.
APPENDIX 2: VIOLATIONS OF HERMANN’S

BRIDGE IN EARLY GREEK EPIC
Iliad (19 or 20 in 15,693 lines)

With enclitics
2.246 = 19.82 . . . ºØª æ Kg IªæÅ

5.571 = 15.585 . . . Ł æ Kg ºØ
10.549 ªæø æ Kg ºØ
23.306 . . . æ K’ Kç ºÅÆ
24.35 . . . Œı æ KÆ ÆHÆØ
1.168 . . . K Œ Œ ø º Çø
2.475 . . . K Œ øØ ØªøØ
21.575 . . . K Œ
ºÆªe [ŒııºÆªe?] IŒÅØ
23.76 . . . K ıæe ºº åÅ
21.483/4 . . . K ºÆ ªıÆØd (/ Z ŁBŒ)
24.423 . . . K çØ ç º æd ŒBæØ
Without enclitics
6.2 . . . ººa ’ ¼æ’ ŁÆ ŒÆd Ł’ YŁı åÅ Ø

9.482 . . . ººEØ Kd Œ Ø
10.317 . . . ŒÆØªØØ
16.627 . . . ŒÆd KŁºe K, IªæØ
23.760 . . . ªıÆØŒe KßÇØ
24.60 . . . ŒÆd Iæd æ Ææ ŒØØ
24.753 (cf. HHAp 36) . . . ŒÆd ¸B IØåŁÆºÆ
Not counted
9.394 . . . ªıÆEŒ ª ÆØ ÆP Aristarchos: ªıÆEŒÆ ªÆÆØ ÆP

codd.
Odyssey (24 in 12,110 lines)

With enclitics
19.253 . . . æ æ Kg KºØ

20.274 . . . ºØª æ K’ IªæÅ
5.400 = 9.473 Iºº’ ‹ IB ‹ ªªø Æ
6.294 Ie ºØ, ‹ ªªø Æ
12.181 Iºº’ ‹ IB, ‹ ªªø Æ
18.105 . . . ŒÆ Æ ’ IæıŒÆ
20.42 ˜Ø Ł ŒÅØ

8.554 K Œ ŒøØ, ŒB
18.150 K Œ ºÆŁæ
ºŁÅØ
1.390 ˜Ø ª Ø IæŁÆØ
15.277 K çıªg ƒŒıÆ
Without enclitics
1.241 = 14.371 = 20.77 AæıØÆØ IÅæ łÆ

4.684 Å’ ¼ººŁ’ ›ØºÆ
5.272 ŒÆd Ołb Æ BÅ
7.192 ¼ıŁ ı ŒÆd I Å
10.415 ŒÅ ’ ¼æÆ ç Ø ŁıHØ
12.47 Kd ’ hÆ’ IºEłÆØ "Æ æø
17.381 ŒÆd KŁºe Kg IªæØ
17.399 = 20.344 c F Łe ºØ
18.140 ŒÆd KEØ ŒÆØªØØ
Hesiod
Theog. 23 EºØŒH o ÇÆŁØ

Theog. 319 b ÆØæÆ ØŒ ıÆ IÆØ Œ Fæ
WD 751 ÆEÆ ıøŒÆÆE, ‹’ Iæ’ IæÆ ØE
Homeric Hymns
HH 1.5 ¼Æ, ºªıØ ªŁÆØ (tension between metre and rhetoric)

HHDem 17 ˝Ø i BØ Zæı ¼Æ —ºıªø
HHDem 452 "ŒØ Æ çıºº· ŒıŁ ’ ¼æÆ ŒæE ºıŒ
HHAp 36 (cf. Il. 24.753) # ”æ KßŒØÅ ŒÆd ¸B IØåŁÆºÆ
Fragmentum Dubium (Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci, 2nd edn., pp. 85–6)
P. Oxy. 2510.11 –]Æ ŒÆd ØØ Œı Yø[
Milman Parry and the Literary

Interpretation of Homeric Poetry
Some of the latest essays in Milman Parry’s all too brief scholarly
oeuvre suggest unresolved contradictions between his insights into
‘the epic technique of oral verse-making’, on the one hand, and, on
the other, his sense of the role and value of poetry in a traditional
culture and of the reasons for studying such poetry. In this chapter
I discuss his eloquent but problematic address to the Overseers of
Harvard College in May 1934 on ‘The Historical Method in Literary
Criticism’.1 My aim is to elucidate the ideas and problematic impli-
cations of this essay and its significance for both classical scholarship
and literary criticism generally, in light of Parry’s work on Homeric
and South-Slavic poetry. I focus on two conflicting features of ‘The
Historical Method . . .’: first, Parry’s tacit adherence to a then current
model of the anthropologist as native and to the possibility, through
empathy and attention, of becoming part of the culture one is study-
ing; second, Parry’s insistence on scholarly exactitude and rigorous
analysis. Parry was committed to both principles, without fully real-
izing the tension between them and how difficult such a commitment
is when they are in conflict.
Addressed to a non-specialist audience, ‘The Historical Method in
Literary Criticism’ raises broader, more fundamental concerns than
Parry’s more technical essays. In it, he quotes the same sentence from
Ernest Renan’s The Future of Science with which he began L’Épithète
traditionelle dans Homère six years earlier, and which expressed a
1
Published posthumously in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin 39 (1936): 778–82, and
reprinted in A. Parry (ed.) 1971b: 408–13. All page references are to this reprint.
118 Milman Parry and the Literary Interpretation

deeply felt methodological and spiritual position basic to all his schol-
arly work:
How can we seize the physiognomy and originality of early literature if
we do not enter into the moral and intimate life of a people, if we do not
place ourselves at the very point in humanity which it occupied in order
to see and to feel with it, if we do not watch it live, or rather if we do not
live for a while with it? (p. 409)
Parry clearly thought his studies of the traditional oral style of

Homeric epic and Serbo-Croatian heroic song made it possible ‘to see
and to feel’, to ‘live . . . with’, not only the poetry but the norms and
values of the cultures in which the poetry was created and which it
embodied and transmitted. In this respect, Parry resembles the
anthropological fieldworkers of earlier generations who optimistically
thought that their ‘participant observation’ of traditional cultures not
their own enabled them to understand—objectively and without
distortion—the institutions, social structures, and values of these
cultures. It is clear that Parry, like many of these social and cultural
anthropologists, derived profound satisfaction both from life in the
‘field’ (a ‘field’ that included both the Homeric texts and the Yugoslav
society in which he worked) and from his rather romantic identifi-
cation with his ‘people’ (both Homeric and Yugoslav) and their way
of life. Like many of the older anthropologists, he probably under-
estimated, in the case of the Yugoslavs, how his own physical and
professional presence affected the performances and compositions of
the singers with whom he worked. In addition, he perhaps took too
little account both of his own assumptions about traditional Homeric
and Yugoslav cultures (and about heroes and heroism generally) and
of how these assumptions skewed his interpretations of what he
observed. Of course, much of the compelling strength of his insights
into, and descriptions of, oral composition and performance springs
from these assumptions, but his preconceptions led him, I think, to
construct ideal types of stylistic and performative behaviour into
which he fitted or assimilated the textual and social practices he
observed. Nowadays, anthropologists are less naively optimistic
about their ability to observe and interpret cultures objectively, and
less inclined to organize data into ideal types. Correlatively, their
writings rarely express enthusiastic identification with, or advocacy
of, the ‘moral and intimate life’ of the people with whom they live
during the course of their field studies, and these writings generally
Milman Parry and the Literary Interpretation 119

lack the attractiveness and persuasive charm, for professional col-
leagues and general readers alike, of earlier, now classic ethnograph-
ies. Parry’s writings, it is fair to say, even in their most technical and
relentlessly logical passages, are grounded in emotional enthusiasm
for what he considered the heroic style and mood of oral epic, and
this makes them far more readable and more compelling than the
writings of many of his students and followers.
There is, however, one important way in which Parry’s views in ‘The
Historical Method in Literary Criticism’ differ fundamentally from
those of most romanticizing anthropologists. He follows his quotation
from Renan with the statement ‘that the remarkable thing about
[Renan’s] point of view is that it is one which can never reach com-
pletely, but only come nearer to its attainment. The work upon it will
never be done. The students of each generation, approaching the
literature of some past period with the clearer sight which has been
won for them by the earlier generation, will . . . in their turn give a truer
picture’ (p. 409). In other words, unlike the anthropologist who thinks
that his or her ethnographic writing can give a definitive account of the
present way of life of the people and culture he or she has studied, Parry
claims that each scholarly generation, building on the work of prede-
cessors, will reach a better—because truer—understanding both of
literature and of the people and culture for whom that literature was
created and whose way of life it represents. In this claim, Parry is clearly
influenced by the goals and assumptions of the historical Wissenschaft
in which, like all classical scholars of his generation, he had been
trained. He differs, however, from scholars such as Wilamowitz and
his students, who, in the tradition of their nineteenth-century fore-
bears, seem to have conceived of classical scholarship as a series of tasks
already done or still to be accomplished, tasks that will not need to be
done again once they have been adequately completed. Parry also
differs from most classical scholars of his epoch by seeing classical
literary studies as one among ‘all the other fields of learning which
concern themselves with man as he lived in the past, or lives in forms of
society other than our own—history itself, anthropology, sociology,
philosophy, the study of the plastic arts, of music, indeed, every field of
learning right down to the physical sciences’ (p. 409). This sense of
Classics as one of the ‘human sciences’ rather than the ‘humanities’
(and of the comparative study of ‘forms of society other than our own’
as a legitimate ‘field of learning’) is perhaps a product of Parry’s
graduate study in France rather than in Germany, to which many

American classicists from Gildersleeve on gravitated. I think it is also
related to Parry’s rather confused and confusing notion of the goals and
results of ‘the historical method’ in ‘the critical study of literature’
(p. 410).
As trained scholars, Parry argues, ‘gradually, we learn to keep
ourselves out of the past, or rather, we learn to go into it . . . and
sometimes—when we are concerned with a writer in that whereby he
differs from his fellow men—we must not only enter into the place,
the time, the class—we must become the man himself, even more, we
must become the man at the very moment at which he writes a certain
poem’ (pp. 409–10). Yet the trained scholar who has [really] under-
stood traditional poetry, Parry continues, is concerned not only with
‘the past as the past’—with the creator and the moment of creation—
but also, like the members of the society that produced this poetry,
with the relation of the past—or at least the literature of the past—to
the present. This really is a question of moral commitment. Merely
historical scholars, Parry argues, transform their present selves into
what he calls ‘ghost[s] in the past’ by identification with the values
and way of life represented in traditional literature; they do not,
however, like his ideal ‘trained scholar’, resemble ‘men of the past’
who ‘turn the past into the present, making it the mirror for them-
selves . . .’ (p. 410). The historical method leads most scholars only to
analyse and ‘picture [in] great detail’ (p. 411) the social structures and
values depicted in Homeric or South-Slavic poetry, but the audiences
of these poems, Parry argues, saw in them ‘the statement in heroic
terms of their own way of life. More than that, it was a sanction and
an ideal for that way of life. There was no separation between what
Sarpedon [in Iliad 12.310–28] said [to Glaukos] and what they did
and saw and admired every day. . . . [H]ow few now [read Homer in
this way]!’ Parry exclaims, ‘[and] of those few who do, certainly the
smallest part are the scholars’ (p. 411). And of this smallest part, only
the ideal ‘trained scholar’ whom Parry describes might truly be said
to do so.
Parry seems caught between the values of scientific scholarship,
informed by ‘the historical method’ and the ‘concern with the past as
past’, expressed in the quotation from Renan, and the notion of
poetry as providing ‘a sanction and an ideal’ for a way of life. This
conflict is never resolved in Parry’s writings, although, as Adam Parry
observes in his ‘Introduction’ to The Making of Homeric Verse (p. lix),
‘Possibly there was a quality in Parry’s own life . . . which goes some

way toward’ resolving this dilemma. This ‘quality’ can be seen partly
in how he united in his own person the training and abilities of a
classical philologist with the practical experience of an ethnographer.
It also can be seen, as Adam Parry points out, in his emphasis on the
political and social value of the historical method and of historically
trained scholars in the contemporary world—their responsibility to
oppose ‘the propagandistic treatment of past literature by the political
extremists of the 1930s’ (p. lix). This formulation shows that Parry
attached real moral significance to the historical study of literature. As
he insists towards the end of the essay, ‘In the field with which I have
been particularly concerned here, that of the literatures of the past,
unless we can show not only a few students, but all those people
whose action will determine the course of a whole nation, that, by
identifying one’s self with the past, with the men, or with the man of
another time, one gains an understanding of men and of life and a
power for effective and noble action for human welfare, we must see
literary study and its method destroy itself ’ (pp. 412–13). Parry goes
on to say, ‘I have seen myself, only too often and too clearly, how,
because those who teach and study Greek and Latin literature have
lost the sense of its importance for humanity, the study of those
literatures has declined, and will decline until they quit their philo-
logical isolation and join in the movement of current human thought’
(p. 413). Parry concludes his essay by emphasizing that he in no way
advocates ‘sacrificing the search for a fuller knowledge of the past’ or
‘compromis[ing] with the truth’, and he urges scholars to ‘see that
they must impose their truths before others impose their fictions’
(p. 413). This final, hortatory return to the value of the historical
method and historical scholarship cannot, however, efface or mitigate
his powerfully expressed sense of the failure of that scholarship to
matter morally, and to make the literature it studies matter morally,
in students’ and readers’ lives. Undoubtedly, Parry’s own sense of the
educational and moral value of literature and literary study attracted
him to Homeric epic, which is so concerned with value and how to
live life, and helped to shape his discovery of its oral, performative
basis and his interpretation of its social and cultural significance.
Parry’s essay is idealistic in another, problematic way. When he is
discussing ‘truth’ as the goal of ‘the historical method’ and its instru-
ment against those who would distort the past for propagandistic
purposes, he cites ‘Plato’s belief that there is nothing at the same time
finer or more practical than the truth’ (p. 412). He does not, however,

mention that, in the Republic, at least, Platonic idealism works hand
in hand with mystification and propaganda and rests on the essential
basis of the gennaion pseudos—the big lie. Parry mentions Plato also
in the context of his view that the past, as represented in the Homeric
epics, was ‘the heroically magnified reflection’ of the real life of
Homer’s audiences, ‘a very part of their being’; he comments, ‘In
one of the dialogues of Plato we find the Iliad praised because of the
pointers it gives for chariot racing’ (p. 411). But this allusion to Plato’s
Ion completely misses the tone and point of that dialogue, its ironical
qualification and problematization of the moral and practical author-
ity of Homeric epic and its singers—or at least its later rhapsodes—to
teach audiences how to live their lives. In both these instances, the
uncritical, idealizing nature of Parry’s allusions to Plato seems to me
analogous to his overly simplistic conception of the ‘truth’ to be found
in Homeric epic and in the relationship of the poet and poetry to
listeners and later readers.
Thanks to narratological and reader-response theory, we have
learned to distinguish at least five audiences of Homeric poetry:
internal audiences of creative singers performing within the epics;
the earliest external audiences of oral performances by singers who
were composing as they performed; later audiences of performances
by rhapsodes, who performed what these audiences knew were estab-
lished texts; the earliest readers (including Plato); later readers
(including ourselves). Each of these audiences has its own possibilities
and kinds of interpretive response, in accordance with its closeness to
or distance from actual composition in performance by creative
singers. Parry, however, for all his understanding of the differences
between oral and written poetry, was unable to recognize clearly the
differences among these audiences and to negotiate between their
varying interpretive responses. His notion that the speech of Sarpedon
at Iliad 12.310–28, and Homeric poetry generally, was ‘the statement
in heroic terms of [the audience’s] own way of life’ (p. 411), effaces
the distance and differences between the characters in the poetry, on
the one hand, and these audiences, on the other, and his reference
to the Ion ignores the varying capacities of each kind of audience to
respond interpretively.
Both oral audiences and readers are free to reflect critically, though
to different degrees, on what they hear or read and to evaluate for
themselves the conflicts and contradictions that are part of the epic’s
representation of the heroic past, as well as the differences (to which

the poet repeatedly calls explicit or implicit attention) between the
capabilities, relations with divinity, morality, and behaviour of the
characters in the poems and of those living in a later age. Parry well
understood that there are as many Iliads as there are performers; he
did not understand that there also are as many Iliads as there are
audiences. In fact, he had a far more restricted and restrictive sense of
how both ancient and modern audiences and readers are to interpret
Homeric epic. This can be seen especially clearly in his paper on ‘The
Traditional Metaphor in Homer’,2 which anticipates some of the
arguments and formulations found in ‘The Historical Method in
Literary Criticism.’ In this paper, Parry argues that Homeric epic,
like English Augustan verse (only more so), uses metaphors as it uses
other formulaic diction: not because of their ‘active force’ or ‘mean-
ing’, of which they have been ‘emptied’, but because they are metric-
ally ‘helpful’ and simplify the process of verse-making (pp. 372–3,
374). ‘As the fixed diction of the Augustan age can only be under-
stood as the expression of a whole way of life which we may call the
proper, so Homer’s traditional diction is the work of a way of life
which we may call the heroic, if one will give that word all the
meaning it had for the men of Homer’s time. It is a term which can
only be understood in the measure that one can think and feel as they
did, for the heroic was to them no more or less than the statement of
all that they would be or would do if they could’ (p. 374). Here again
Parry equates the heroic way of life represented in Homeric epic with
that of ‘the men of Homer’s time’ and claims that a modern reader
can understand it only by sympathetically entering into their trad-
itional ways of thinking and feeling and by understanding the trad-
itional basis of Homeric verse. ‘If we do this,’ he says, ‘we have found
a charm far beyond any which can be found by men who willfully
wish to read Homer as they would poetry of their own day. . . . This
way lies all true criticism and liking of his poems’ (p. 375).
For Parry, here and elsewhere, there is only one right and true way
to read and criticize Homer–a way, he emphasizes, that has become
available in ‘our own days . . . through a study of the oral poetries of
peoples outside our own civilization’ and that is not a product of—or
limited by—‘the historical method of criticism’ (p. 375).3 There also is
2
Parry 1933, in A. Parry (ed.) 1971b: 365–75.
3
This is a peculiar claim, considering that Parry first reached his conclusions about
traditional oral style, composition, and performance from his studies of the Homeric

only one reader, whom Parry anonymously calls ‘the reader’, but who
really is an idealized version of himself and his own reading habits.
This is clear, for example, when he says, ‘[T]here is nothing . . . to
show the reader that Homer had the notion of metaphor in mind . . . ’,
so ‘he [sc. the reader] soon ceases in reading Homer to seek for any
active force in single words . . .’ (p. 373); or when, apropos of the
formulaic phrase hugra keleutha (‘watery waves’), he states, ‘[T]he
reader would think of the meaning of the metaphor only if he stopped
and tried to’ (p. 371). In a similar way, Parry repeatedly uses the
pronoun ‘we’ not only to refer formally to himself as author of the
essay and its ideas, and not only as a rhetorical means of persuading
readers to share his own views, but to denote an ideal community of
like-minded readers of Homer, whose way of reading and under-
standing resemble his own.
It seems to me ‘willful’, to use Parry’s word, and unduly restrictive
to claim that there is only one correct way of reading and under-
standing Homeric verse. Granted, Parry was arguing for his still new
and revolutionary conception of the traditional oral style of Homeric
epic against the established way of reading it as one would read a
poem ‘literarily’. Nevertheless, there is no obvious reason why ‘a
phrase which is used because it is helpful’ cannot also, at the same
time, be used because of its meaning (p. 373). Yet such multiple
usefulness is ruled out by Parry’s characteristic either/or logic—a
logic of economy analogous to the economy he found in the systems
of formulaic epithets. Just as later scholars have demonstrated that
the principle of economy is not as absolute as Parry thought, that the
exceptions to it may be meaningful, and that the significance of
epithets is related to, or can be triggered by, their poetic contexts, so
readers can legitimately differ in their interpretations of specific
metaphors as meaningful in particular contexts rather than ‘emptied
of their meaning’ (p. 374) in all circumstances. Furthermore, it is
possible (with Parry) to see the Homeric epics as representing a
traditional heroic mood and values, and also (against Parry) to see
them as calling into question, and inviting audiences to call into
question, this mood and these values, not merely as holding them
up to audiences as a mirror and model of their own lives.
texts, and only then went to Yugoslavia to confirm these conclusions. Perhaps he has
in mind the work of M. Murko and others cited in Parry 1932: 6–19 (= A. Parry (ed.)
1971b: 329–38).

Apart from Adam Parry in his ‘Introduction’ to The Making of
Homeric Verse, few, if any, Homerists have paid much attention to
‘The Historical Method in Literary Criticism’. Yet this humane essay
shows that Milman Parry was not only an exceptional scholar, but
one who had begun, through his understanding of Homeric style and
the history of its reception, to think his way beyond the methodo-
logical limitations of historical scholarship to a conception of classical
studies as one of the ‘human sciences’ and to the view that the true
goal of literary study should be ‘effective and noble action for human
welfare’ (p. 413). Had Parry lived to ‘fulfill his stated wish to articulate
a distinct aesthetics of improvising poetry’,4 he would eventually have
had to address the tension within himself between the romanticizing
anthropologist and the historical philologist. I think that he would
have profited from recent theoretical developments in both anthropo-
logical and literary theory that have made it easier to understand the
various roles of audiences, readers, and scholars in constituting
meaning. On the other hand, he certainly would have had—as his
writings still have—much to teach recent theorists and critics about
how to read morally and the importance of doing so.
4
A. Parry (ed.) 1971a: lix.
Ioannis Kakridis and Neoanalysis
Ioannis Kakridis (1901–1992) was one of the foremost scholars of

Homeric poetry in the twentieth century. He achieved what very few
scholars in Classics or any humanistic discipline have been able to
accomplish: he invented a new method of research and interpretation,
Neoanalysis, and his method became highly influential in his lifetime
and remains one of the most fruitful scholarly approaches to the
study of Homeric epic. Kakridis first expressed part of what would
come to be seen as his distinctive interpretive approach in 1929,1 and
developed this approach in a series of seminal essays in German and
Greek during the 1930s and early 1940s. He republished some of
these essays in 1944 in ˇÅæØŒ¯æı, and in 1949 most of them
appeared in revised form as Homeric Researches. Kakridis produced
three other volumes of scholarly essays on Homeric epic, based
mainly on his Neoanalytical approach: Homer Revisited (1971),
—æÅæØŒ, ˇÅæØŒ, ˙ Ø
ØÆ (1980), and ıÆ ı ˇæı
(1985). He also published ˇÅæØŒ ¨ÆÆ (1954), a collection of
twenty brief, highly engaging essays on Homeric characters, objects,
scenes, episodes, linguistic and stylistic phenomena, heroism, and the
relations between ancient and modern Greek popular song and
Homeric epic. These essays, which first appeared in newspapers and
popular magazines, were addressed to educated, non-specialist
readers, but have much to say to classical scholars, even specialists
on Homer.
As Malcolm Willcock notes in his chapter on Neoanalysis in A
New Companion to Homer, ‘Neoanalysis is consciously and explicitly
unitarian, starting from the belief that the Iliad, virtually as we have it,
1
Kakridis 1929: 111–12.
128 Ioannis Kakridis and Neoanalysis

is the work of one great poet’.2 Yet Kakridis, who in the 1920s had
studied with Wilamowitz and other analysts, followed the analytical
method of trying to distinguish Homer’s ‘sources and models’. He did
so, however, ‘not to disintegrate the Homeric epic into so many small
pieces’ but ‘to understand Homer himself better’, to ‘appreciate the
art and technique of our Iliad and our Odyssey’.3 Where the analysts
detected a clumsy combination of pre-existing poems, Kakridis saw,
as it were, the work of a creative artist adapting traditional mytho-
logy, folklore, and epic poetry for his own poetic purposes. Kakridis
built on the detailed observations of analytical scholars, but he inter-
preted these observations in accordance with what he called ‘respect’
for the ‘laws of poetic composition, and with a mind free from the
rationalism of the older scholars’. He spoke of ‘appreciat[ing]
[Homer’s] personality’, by which he meant his transformation of
his ‘immediate . . . sources’, ‘how he re-created his material, stamping
it with his own genius’.4
Kakridis hoped that Neoanalysis would reconcile the work of ana-
lysts and unitarians, ‘bridging the chasm which separated them and
created such violent disputes’.5 He considered that the analysts’ method
of dissecting the Homeric poems—by noting supposed inconsistencies
and contradictions between specific scenes, linguistic differences, dif-
ferences in material and intellectual culture, and repeated verses—was
‘bankrupt’, that their interpretive methods had no ‘demonstrative value’
and could never ‘lead to any positive conclusions’. The unitarians, on
the other hand, ‘naïve[ly] . . . [found] everything straightforward and
easy in Homer, thus reminding us of the historically unfounded
methods of the Alexandrian scholars’. For Kakridis, the main achieve-
ment of unitarian scholarship was ‘not so much a positive contribution
to the understanding of Homeric art as an untiring and an absolutely
justified criticism of the methods and the conclusions’ of the analytical
school.6 In seeing his own method as ‘bridging the chasm’ between the
analysts and unitarians, Kakridis resembled, mutatis mutandis, Milman
Parry, whose demonstration of the traditional oral nature of Homeric
epic made the analyst–unitarian dispute irrelevant.7 In 1971, however,
2 3
Willcock 1997: 174. Kakridis 1949: 8.
4
Kakridis 1949: 7, 10. Cf. Nietzsche 1966: 166–9 on Homer’s ‘personality’ (‘Per-
sönlichkeit’) as an ‘aesthetic judgement’ of the artistic quality of the Iliad and Odyssey
as ‘Individualsdichtung’ (or ‘Kunstdichtung’), and of Homer’s individual ‘Genius’.
5 6
Kakridis 1949: 8. Ibid. 1–2.
7
A. Parry (ed.) 1971a: li with n. 1.
Ioannis Kakridis and Neoanalysis 129

Kakridis admitted that his work of several decades had not in fact
successfully bridged the chasm between analysts and unitarians. He
quoted Albin Lesky, from his magisterial Pauly-Wissowa article of
1967, ‘Die Fronten stehen sich mit der gleichen Schärfe gegenüber wie
ehemals’.8 It took another decade or two, until most of the older,
dogmatic analytical and unitarian scholars were no longer active, for
Neoanalysis and Parryist oral poetics to be recognized as the two most
fruitful scholarly approaches to the interpretation of Homeric epic.
Kakridis thought that the main fault of older analytical scholarship
was its reliance on ‘logical contradiction’ as a criterion for analysis.
This criterion was bound up with the naive and erroneous assump-
tion that what is significant about a Homeric scene or passage is, first
of all, whether it is natural or unnatural, whether it could possibly
occur in ‘real life’, and second, whether it contradicts some other
scene or passage.9 To this principle of ‘logical contradiction’ Kakridis
opposed the notion of ‘poetic contradiction’, which he saw as the
main criterion for Neoanalysis. In his view, provided that a scene or
passage fulfils its ‘poetic purpose’, it makes no difference whether it is
natural or unnatural, whether it could possibly occur in real life, or
whether it contradicts some other scene or passage. Should there be such
a contradiction, or if some element of a scene or passage clashes with the
‘poetic plan’ of the entire scene, that is a sign of Homer’s reworking of
traditional material, which he did not assimilate completely to its new
poetic surroundings.10 Unlike the analysts, however, who took these
unassimilated elements as signs of inartistic clumsiness and multiple
authorship, Kakridis saw them as indications of poetic creativity and
clues to Homer’s artistry in borrowing ‘motifs, actions, speeches, [and]
scenes’ from his ‘models’, in ‘remoulding’ and re-creating them and in
this way deepening the ‘moral background’ of this ‘rich material’ and
‘exploit[ing] hidden and unused possibilities’ to ‘give the material for the
first time a more dramatic character’.11 In particular, he anticipated
Laura Slatkin’s The Power of Thetis in his emphasis on how Homer
sometimes achieves poetic meaning by transferring mythical material
from one character or myth to another.12
Kakridis understood this ‘mythical material’ to have been present
in pre-Homeric epic poetry, folklore, and popular song, but since
none of these were extant, he had to search for it, and Neoanalysis
8 9
Kakridis 1971: 12, quoting Lesky 1967: 78. Kakridis 1949: 3.
10 11 12
Ibid. 8–9. Ibid. Slatkin 1991 (= 2011a: 17–95).

was, in effect, his way of doing so. There were two main components
of his method: (1) the analysis of the Iliad and Odyssey to discover
linguistic, stylistic, and narrative inconsistencies and incongruities,
which, as elements of the older epic tradition that were not com-
pletely integrated and harmonized with their new poetic ‘environ-
ment’, bore witness to Homer’s adaptation and transformation of the
motifs, verses, and episodes of traditional poetry for his own artistic
purposes; (2) the discovery in the Iliad and Odyssey of structural
motifs and narrative techniques also found in medieval and modern
Greek folktales and popular songs, which suggested that there had
been analogous folktales and songs before the time of Homer on
which he drew, again for his own poetic ends.
Kakridis was an exceptionally alert and sensitive student of Hom-
eric poetry; many of his observations and interpretations have
become standard and proved fruitful even for scholars who would
not consider themselves Neoanalysts. For example, Kakridis was the
first to argue in detail that the treatment of Patroklos in the Iliad is
modelled on the treatment of Achilles in earlier mythology and epic
poetry that also were sources for the later Cyclic epic, the Aithiopis.13
Kakridis was almost certainly wrong to think of this earlier poetry as
written rather than oral, but he was right to argue that the Iliad was
not based solely and directly on the Aithiopis (or on an Achilleis,
which came to be the view of other Neoanalysts). Kakridis considered
that the Aithiopis, like the rest of the Epic Cycle, is later than the Iliad
(and Odyssey), and that the Iliad transforms mythology that already
existed in the poetic tradition and also served as the basis for the
Aithiopis and the other Cyclic epics.14
Kakridis’ fundamental insight was that the Iliad, in its representa-
tion of Patroklos, reworks for its own poetic purposes ‘mythological
motifs, actions, speeches, [and] scenes’ that were associated with
Achilles in earlier epic poetry.15 His pioneering approach anticipated
that of Heinrich Pestalozzi in Die Achilleis als Quelle der Ilias, who
made similar arguments without knowledge of Kakridis’ work, but
who insisted that a single poem, which he called the Achilleis and for
all intents and purposes identified with the Cyclic Aithiopis, was the
13
Kakridis 1949: 65–95.
14
Cf. Burgess 2001: 157. Burgess demonstrates the difficulty of trying to date the
Epic Cycle absolutely or in relation to the Homeric epics (pp. 10–12, 149–57).
15
Kakridis 1949: 10

model for the Iliad as a whole.16 Pestalozzi strongly influenced the
interpretations of Wolfgang Schadewaldt (with whom Kakridis had
been exchanging ideas since the 1930s17) and Alfred Heubeck,18
though unlike Schadewaldt, who followed Pestalozzi closely in under-
standing the Aithiopis as the sole and direct source of the Iliad,
Heubeck sided with Kakridis in more cautiously referring to the
poetic phenomena studied by Neoanalysts as ‘narrative elements in
Homeric poetry that were previously used in other contexts and only
later were adapted by Homer for his own narrative’,19 and he did not
consider the Iliad to be based on a single work.
In addition to his studies of Homeric transformations of earlier
epic motifs and scenes, Kakridis, as I have mentioned, emphasized the
importance of ‘popular style’ in Homeric poetry and argued that the
study of modern Greek folklore and popular song is fundamental to
understanding Homeric art and poetic technique.20 The ideal student
of Homer, he claimed, ‘must have a profound knowledge of Hellenism
and its long history of three thousand years; in fact, he must be a
Hellenologist, and not a mere classical philologist’.21 Kakridis argued
that specific elements of rhetoric and style, as well as narrative patterns
and motifs found in medieval and modern Greek folktales and eight-
eenth and nineteenth-century popular songs (ºÆœŒ æÆªØÆ), must
have had analogues in pre-Homeric popular culture, and that specific
features of Homeric epic can only be explained as adaptations and
transformations of earlier analogues. For example, at the level of style,
on the basis of a motif found in modern Greek popular song, he
hypothesized that an analogous pre-Homeric motif must be the
model for ‘the repeated appearance in Homeric poetry of questions
and answers’, when a character ‘wishing to clear away his [or her]
doubts makes various surmises, all of which the answerer refutes as
mistaken before giving . . . the correct solution’.22 A good example is
the scene in Od. 11 where Odysseus questions the ‘soul’ (łıå) of his
mother in the Land of the Dead about how she came to die: ‘What
doom of woeful death subdued you? / Was it a long drawn out disease,
or did Artemis who showers arrows / come and kill you with her gentle
16 17
Pestalozzi 1945. Kakridis 1949: 29 n. 38.
18
Schadewaldt 1965 [1951]: 155–202; Heubeck 1950.
19
Heubeck 1978: 9, quoted by Willcock 1997: 187 n. 27.
20 21
Kakridis 1949: 106–26. Ibid. 107.
22
Ibid. 107–20. The words quoted appear on p. 109.

shafts?’ (171–3). To which his mother’s soul, after answering additional
questions about Laertes, Telemachos, and Penelope, responds,
‘. . . I perished and met my destiny in this way:
neither did she who aims well and showers arrows
come and kill me with her gentle shafts,
nor did any disease come upon me, which most especially
takes the spirit from the limbs with a hateful wasting away,
but longing for you and your counsels, glorious Odysseus,
and your gentle disposition robbed (me) of my sweet spirit.’
(11.197–203)
At the level of narrative, Kakridis argued that pre-Homeric popular

song was the source, for example, of ‘freely conceived descriptions of
works of art’, which he termed ‘imagined ecphrases’, and of the motif
of ‘the god-sent mist’, when, for example, a god wraps a human being
or human beings in a cloud or Thetis rises from the sea M’ ›åºÅ.23
He analysed thirteen variants of the Meleager story in modern Greek
folktales to support his claim that the Iliad must have adapted the
story from a pre-Homeric variant of that tale.24 Most influentially,
Kakridis discovered ‘the ascending scale of affection’ motif, involving
a fixed gradation of blood relatives and friends,25 and argued that it
too originated in popular poetry before the time of Homer.26 He
showed how the story of Hektor’s visit to Troy in Book 6 of the
Iliad, like Phoenix’s narrative of Meleager’s wrath and refusal to fight
in defence of his city in Book 9, plays against this traditional motif by
showing the solidarity between husband and wife to be greater than
the solidarity felt by the husband for his friends (or compatriots), his
parents, and his brothers, and also greater than that felt by the wife for
her own people, friends, parents, and brothers. Moreover, Kakridis
argued that in Book 6 the ‘whole course of Hektor inside Ilium’—his
successive meetings with Hekabe, Paris and Helen, and Andromache—
‘is bound up with the threefold repetition of the ascending scale of
affection motif ’.27
Kakridis had studied in Vienna with Ludwig Radermacher, who
argued in his 1915 monograph on narratives in the Odyssey that
Homer had adapted and reworked motifs from folktales and popular
23 24
Cf. Kakridis 1971: 89–124, 1949: 159–64. Kakridis 1949: 127–48.
25 26
Ibid. 24, 49–51. Kakridis 1949: 152–64, esp. pp. 160, 162.
27
Kakridis 1949: 58.

stories.28 Radermacher’s influence is nowhere more evident than in
Kakridis’ analysis of the recognition of Odysseus by Penelope in light
of the modern Greek ballad of the ‘Return of the Long Absent
Husband’. Through this analysis, Kakridis again concludes that
Homer ‘borrow[ed] the motif from the folk poetry of his time’ and
adapted it twice in the Odyssey, in accordance with the distinctive plot
and themes of his poem,29 in the scenes in which Penelope recognizes
Odysseus in Book 23 and Laertes recognizes him in Book 24.
Kakridis’ emphasis on the presence of pre-Homeric folktales and
motifs of popular song in the Homeric epics and their importance for
understanding Homeric artistry was related to a less scholarly project:
his co-translation, with Nikos Kazantzakis, of the Iliad and Odyssey in
the demotic language, metre, and style of modern Greek.30 Kakridis
and Kazantzakis use ancient, medieval, and modern words and idioms
from various regions of Greece and diverse local dialects in their
attempt to make the epics both temporally and spatially Panhellenic
(though they did not use that term). Nowadays, their distinctive,
sometimes archaizing linguistic amalgam, their Kunstsprache, can
make the translations difficult even for educated readers, who happen
not to be in touch with the history of the Greek language and literature
through the ages. On the other hand, the Kazantzakis–Kakridis trans-
lations have a special kind of ‘soul’ that can sometimes make them
attractive even to readers who do not understand every word, but find
the heroic mood and style of the translations engaging.31
Kakridis’ emphasis on continuities between ancient and modern
folktale and popular song and his argument that pre-Homeric folk-
tales and popular songs were sources or models in the composition of
the Iliad and Odyssey have not been as widely accepted as the rest of
his Neoanalytic interpretations, perhaps because this emphasis has
seemed naively Hellenocentric or even nationalistic to many non-
Greek scholars of Homeric epic, who have had little knowledge of,
or interest in, medieval and modern Greek literature and popular
28 29
Radermacher: 1915. Kakridis 1971: 151–63.
30
Kazantzakis and Kakridis 1955, 1965.
31
On the genesis of the Iliad translation and some details of how the two
translators worked together (and separately), see Kakridis 1959. On the diction of
the translation, see Kakridis 1956. On the ‘male’ and ‘female’ rhetoric of the translation
in its historical and socio-cultural contexts, in relation to its intended audience, and in
comparison with Alexander Pope’s translation, see Antonopoulou 2010.

culture.32 At least one recent critic of Neoanalysis, however, considers
Kakridis’ reconstruction of the pre-Homeric folktales and popular
culture on which Homer drew to be the only achievement of Neo-
analysis that remains important for contemporary Homeric studies.33
Within Greece, until a few decades ago, some classical scholars felt
that Kakridis lowered the dignity of Homeric poetry by trying to
explain certain of its features in terms of medieval and modern Greek
folktales and popular culture. Outside Greece, those scholars who paid
serious attention to folktales in Homeric epic, such as Radermacher,
Rhys Carpenter, Denys Page, Karl Reinhardt, and Uvo Hölscher,
usually did so in a comparative perspective that emphasized Welt-
märchen or folktales gathered from many cultures rather than specif-
ically Greek material.34 Yet Kakridis’ findings seem no less fruitful than
the work of these scholars or the comparative study of narrative motifs
and style in Homeric and Serbo-Croatian poetry by Albert Lord and
others.35
In fifty-five years of active publication, Kakridis contributed as
much to the understanding of Homeric epic as any scholar in the
twentieth century. Neoanalysis, as he conceived it, remains one of the
two most productive approaches to Homeric poetry. The other is
the study of the epics as oral poetry, which goes back to the work of
Milman Parry in the 1920s and of Parry and Albert Lord in the 1930s.
These two approaches need not be thought of as opposed to one
another, but should be considered complementary.36 While Parry
and post-Parryan oralists have achieved insight into Homeric cre-
ativity at the level of style by clarifying how Homer and other poets
could transform and exploit traditional formulas and themes, Kakri-
dis and other Neoanalysts have provided similar insights at the levels
of myth and narrative, where such reworking is equally important.
It is regrettable that Neoanalysts and Oralists often seem to talk past
one another rather than make the effort to benefit from one another’s
32
Cf. Willcock 1997: 183.
33
Martin 2013: final paragraph. Cf. the scepticism about the methods and achieve-
ments of Neoanalysis in Kelly 2012a, 2012b, 2013.
34
Radermacher 1915, Carpenter 1946, Page 1955, 1973, Reinhardt 1948: 52–162
(= Reinhardt 1960: 47–124; English translation in Schein (ed.) 1996b: 63–132),
Hölscher 1989.
35
e.g. Lord 1960, Foley 1990, 1991, Danek 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, 2010.
36
See Burgess 2006, Montanari 2012.

insights and arguments.37 Neoanalysts, for example, sometimes refuse
a priori to believe, or even consider the possibility, that the Iliad and
Odyssey could be oral compositions, owing to their artistic complexity
(though Kakridis certainly understood that the tradition behind them
was one of oral poetry and thought that ‘the opinion that Homer made
use of writing for his compositions presents no fewer difficulties [than
the opinion that he did not do so]’).38 Oralists, on the other hand,
simply dismiss the (sometimes dogmatically expressed) view of
scholars committed to Neoanalysis, such as Pestalozzi, Schadewaldt,
and especially Wolfgang Kullman and Georg Schoeck, that the Iliad as
a whole is based on a single, pre-existing poem, a hypothetical Achilleis
(Pestalozzi) or a Memnonis or Aithiopis (Schadewaldt, Kullmann,
Schoeck), and takes over material directly from that work.39 This
view runs counter to the Oralist axiom that in the realm of oral poetry,
there are no definitive versions of particular poems.40 It is worth noting
that this was not the view of Kakridis, who suggested only that what he
called the Patroclea, the Hectorea, and the Meleagrea within the Iliad
adopt and adapt specific motifs and verses from earlier epic poetry, but
never argued that these motifs must come from a single work. Instead,
he emphasized the poetically motivated process of remoulding these
and other motifs and verses in accordance with the distinctive themes
and values of the Iliad.
Both Parry and Kakridis, through their innovative approaches, made
the longstanding conflict between Analysts and Unitarians irrelevant
(this chapter, n. 7) and opened up the Homeric epics to new kinds of
literary interpretation based on the poet’s ability to generate, and his
audience’s ability to appreciate, meaningful departures from norms of
language, style, narrative, and characterization. In addition, Kakridis
shared with Parry a sense of poetic tradition grounded not only in
philology but in a somewhat romanticizing approach to the heroic
world of Homeric epic—in the case of Kakridis, through the study
of Greek folktales and popular culture (ºÆªæÆçÆ), and in the case of
37
For a recent example, see the papers in Montanari, Rengakos, and Tsagalis (eds.)
2012.
38
Kakridis 1971: 19–20. The words quoted appear on p. 20. For examples of work
that fruitfully combines Oralist and Neoanalytical approaches to generate insightful
literary interpretations, see Slatkin 1991, 2011a and Danek 1998.
39
Pestalozzi 1945; Schadewaldt 1965 [1951]: 155–202, Kullmann 1960, Schoeck
1961.
40
See Willcock 1997: 186.

Parry, through an anthropological approach to the heroic mood and
values of traditional heroic epic and of the culture in which it was
simultaneously created and performed.41
APPENDIX
One reason for the negative judgements of Neoanalysis by some students of

Homeric poetry is the frequent use by Kullman, generally recognized since the
death of Kakridis as the foremost spokesman for the Neoanalytical approach,
and by his followers of the terms ‘Motivübertragung’ (‘the taking over of
motifs’) and the adjective ‘motivgeschichtlich’ (‘having to do with the history
of motifs’) rather than Kakridis’ ‘Neoanalysis’ and ‘Neoanalytical’.42 This
changed language can make the process of ‘taking over motifs’ seem somewhat
mechanical or schematic, rather than the result of Homer’s specific poetic aims
and artistry, on which Kakridis focused. Kakridis emphasized the meaningful
echoing or transformation in the Iliad of non-Iliadic situations or events having
to do with the Trojan War, but the term Motivübertragung seems to imply a
less focused, less artistic appropriation of a much broader range of mytho-
logical material having to do, for example, with Thebes or with the adventures
of Herakles, not only with Troy and the Trojan War.43 Only rarely does one
find in studies of ‘the taking over of motifs’ the kind of poetic sensibility that
informs Kakridis’ nuanced Neoanalytical interpretations. For example, Kull-
mann describes Neoanalysis as ‘a motif-critical method which deals with the
taking over of motifs from older poetry in the Homeric poems and tries to
reconstruct prototypes of motifs from unassimilated motif-elements’.44 This
formulation differs radically from Kakridis’ emphasis on the artistic motivation
for taking over a particular motif or for a specific mythological allusion and on
Homer’s poetic skill in doing so. For Kakridis, as Willcock put it, ‘Neoanalysis
is an attitude of mind. What makes it exciting is that it brings us close to the
thought processes of the poet Homer himself.’45 It is as if we are catching him
in the act of artistic creation, just as we do when we recognize the artistic reason
for a particular metrical or stylistic anomaly or innovation or for the adaptation
or transformation of traditional formulas or themes.46
41 42
See Chapter 8 this volume. See Willcock 1997: 186–7.
43
Kullmann has even treated literary and religious parallels in, and similarities
between, the Iliad and ancient Near Eastern texts in Neoanalytical terms. Cf.
Kullmann 1991.
44 45
Kullmann 1994: 82. Cf. Willock 1997: 175.
46
I am grateful to Jonathan Burgess for helpful comments on an early draft of this
essay and to Sophia Papaioannou for copies of Kakridis 1956 and Kakridis 1959.
10
Cavafy and Iliad 24: A Modern Alexandrian

Interprets Homer
‘—æØı ˝ıŒæÆ’ (‘Priam’s Night-Journey’), an early poem by

the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933), was composed in
1893 but never published in Cavafy’s lifetime; it first appeared in print
only in 1968.1 The poem is interesting both as an example of Cavafy’s
work from a time when, partly through adaptation of Homeric and
other ancient mythological ‘sources’, he was just finding his distinct-
ive voice, and partly for the interpretive light its deviations from the
Homeric text can throw on relevant passages from the Iliad.2
@ºª K
B
fi ºø
fi Œ’ Nøª .
˙ ªB
B æÆ K
IºØfiH ØŒæfiH ŒÆd Ø
e
ªÆ
‚ŒæÆ e
—æØÆÅ
ŒºÆØ.
› ŁæB
æ , Ææf MåE. 5
ıåc
b

Ø K
B
fi æÆ
fi c
ŁFÆ,
F ‚Œæ c

Å
IºFÆ.
ºº’ r
ÆØ ÆØ , I
øçºc
ºf 10
ŁæB
K
ºØ ÆºÆØøæÅ
fiÅ·
ı
c ŒøçØ ƒÆæ
Å.
1
On Cavafy’s unusual way of publishing (or not publishing) his poems, see Savidis
1966; Keeley and Savidis 1971: ix–xiii; Jusdanis 1987: 58–63.
2
I print and translate the text of “—æØı ˝ıŒæÆ” in Savidis (ed.) 1968:
51–3. My translation aims to be literal and to preserve as far as possible Cavafy’s word
order, though not his rhyme scheme (aa bb in each stanza). For more artistic versions,
see Dalven 1976: 232–3, Mendelsohn 2009: 270–1.
138 Cavafy and Iliad 24

’ I
øçºB › —æÆ ØH
,
åæıe
KªØ KŒ F ŁÅÆıæF· æŁØ 15

ºÅÆ , ÅÆ , ŒÆd åºÆ
Æ · Œ’ Ø
åØH
Æ , æÆ , ºø
øæe
ºÆæ
,
ŒÆd ‹, Ø ¼ºº æçæ
NŒÇØ,
Œ’ Kd F –æÆ ı a ØÇØ. 20
¨ºØ b ºæÆ Ie e
ææe
KåŁæe
F Œ
ı ı e HÆ
’ I
ÆŒ fiÅ,
ŒÆd b c
ŒÅÆ

Æ Ø fiÅ.
ªØ K
B
fi
ıŒd B fi .
fi ØªÅºB 25
¸ÆºE
OºªÆ.
Å
ŒłØ
æÆ åØ
Æå, Æåf e –æÆ ı
a æåfiÅ.
¯Œ
ÆØ › æ Ççæ .
ˇNŒæH 30
› ¼
OæÆØ Œ’ NÇØ.
˚æÆ IÆØ ÆŒæŁ
ŒæÇØ.
¯H, Œı
e IŒ’ "ºÆŒ ·
KŒE
‰ łŁıæ ºÆªg æ
fi A Æåı . 35
› ÆØºf Œ
fi A, Œ
fi A f ¥ı .
B Ø Kı
F
ŒØÆd
ºÆØÆ,
ŒÆd IæF
æe K
fiÅ Æ
fi
fi A › ˜ÆæÆ
Å æe a ºEÆ 40
æªø
ç
ØŒH
, ŒÆd åÆØH
ŒÆØH
.
`ººa › ÆØºf ÆPa b
a æåØ·
çŁ
Ø e –æÆ ı Æå, Æåf
a æåØ.
Pain in Ilion and wailing.

The land
of Troy in bitter despair and fear
weeps for great Hektor, the son of Priam.
The dirge resounds, loud, heavy. 5
No soul
Cavafy and Iliad 24 139
remains without grief in Troy,

neglecting the memory of Hektor.
But it is futile, useless,
the great 10
lamentation in the suffering city;
hostile destiny turns a deaf ear.
Hating the uselessness, Priam
brings out
gold from the storehouse; he adds 15
cauldrons, rugs, and cloaks, and in addition
tunics, tripods, a pile of robes,
shining,
and whatever else seems suitable,
and heaps them up on his chariot. 20
He wishes with ransom, from the terrifying
enemy,
to regain his son’s body.
and with a reverent funeral to do it honour.
He departs in the silent night. 25
He says
little. The only thought he has now
is that his chariot should run fast, fast.
The road stretches out in gloom.
Pitifully 30
the wind laments and wails.
A raven croaks from afar, repulsive, ill-omened.
Here, a dog’s barking is heard;
there,
a hare passes swift-footed, like a whisper. 35
The king goads, he goads his horses.
On the plain shadows awaken,
inauspicious,
and wonder why, in so great a hurry,
the son of Dardanos flies toward the ships 40
of the murderous Argives and the rude
Achaeans.
But the king ignores these things;
it’s enough that his chariot runs fast, fast.

‘Priam’s Night-Journey’ is the earliest of only ten surviving poems
by Cavafy on ancient mythological subjects—a small portion of his
153 published and 154 unpublished or ‘renounced’ poems. The others
are ‘Oedipus’ (1895), ‘The Horses of Achilles’ (1896), ‘The Funeral of
Sarpedon’ (renounced version, 1896; published version, 1908), ‘When
the Watchman Saw the Light’ (1900), ‘Interruption’ (1900), ‘Trojans’
(1900), ‘Disbelief ’ (1903), and ‘Ithaca’ (1910).3 These poems appear
to have been composed ‘not only with the intermediacy of a transla-
tion but after careful reading of the original’,4 and the title of my
chapter, with its reference to Cavafy as a ‘modern Alexandrian’, calls
attention to this ‘careful reading’. Cavafy’s relation to the Iliad in
‘Priam’s Night-Journey’ resembles that of the Alexandrian scholar-
poets of the Hellenistic Age. Like these ancient Alexandrians, his
versions of, and allusions to, Iliadic scenes, with their shifts of per-
spective, focus, characterization, and emphasis, show him to have
been an attentive reader and creative reinterpreter of Homeric
poetry.5 Cavafy’s Iliadic poems, in particular, cannot be adequately
understood unless a reader bears in mind the relevant passages of the
Iliad and can recognize Cavafy’s overall recasting of Homeric scenes,
as well as the details he omits, alters, or adds.
Perhaps the best word for Cavafy’s artistic enterprise is ‘imitation’,
if by this one means not a translation or an attempt to copy the
Homeric original, but something like Robert Lowell’s Imitations—
new poems that take off from earlier poetic texts with which they
maintain a palimpsestuous relation that colours their identity as
independent works of art.6 Though many of Cavafy’s poems through-
out his career are inspired by and represent events, people, and art
from various stages of ancient, medieval, and modern Greek
3
Maronitis 1986: 40 n. 4.
4
Ibid. 62 n. 6. Ricks 1989: 86–7 denies the direct influence of the Homeric text,
arguing that ‘[f]rom childhood Cavafy . . . was rather more familiar with English than
with Greek poetry, ancient or modern’ (p. 87), and that his Homeric poems, including
‘Priam’s Night-Journey’, were influenced in their tone and diction by Pope’s transla-
tion of the Iliad, a copy of which Cavafy is known to have owned. Yet Ricks himself
notes (90 n. 21) that ‘some words from Homer are repeated verbatim in “Priam’s
Night-Journey” ’, which he considers to be ‘essentially an unfinished poem’.
5
I am here less concerned with other ways in which Cavafy can be seen as a ‘modern
Alexandrian’: he was born in the city and lived there for most of his life, many of his
poems are set in the city’s streets, shops, and buildings, and others refer explicitly to, or
evoke, its distinctive style, culture, values, and almost mythical status. See Keeley 1976.
6
Lowell 1961.

civilization, his early Homeric imitations are in a class by themselves
as readerly reworkings of poetic texts that demand simultaneous
attention to themselves and to those texts, in order to be understood.7
‘Priam’s Night-Journey’ does not revise or subvert its ‘source’ quite as
radically as some of Cavafy’s other Homeric poems, such as the well-
known ‘Ithaca’. Rather, it departs from the earlier text to concentrate
on a particular character and state of mind and to develop in detail
feelings that are merely mentioned in the ‘source’.
For example, in ‘Priam’s Night-Journey’ Cavafy simply leaves out
everyone and everything mentioned by Homer in Book 24 of the Iliad,
except for Priam himself and the dead Hektor, and focuses on the king,
his actions, and his thoughts.8 There is no mention of sleepless Achilles
dragging Hektor’s corpse around the tomb of Patroklos, no gods on
Olympos, no Iris visiting Priam or Hermes assisting Priam on his way,
no Thetis urging Achilles to return the corpse and restore himself to
human life, and no transcendent meeting between Priam and Achilles,
not even the actual ransoming of Hektor’s body and its return to Troy
for the lamentation and burial with which the Iliad closes. Instead, the
desperate and futile sorrow of the city at Hektor’s death is a foil for
Priam’s urgent activity, his ‘night-journey’ into the darkness not only
of the Trojan plain, but of his own mind. His interior thoughts and
wishes are the real subject of the second half of Cavafy’s poem.9
In focusing his poem on Priam alone, Cavafy eliminates other
details of Homeric action. At Il. 24.248–64, for instance, after bring-
ing the ransom from his storeroom, Priam rebukes his nine surviving
sons as good-for-nothing ‘disgraces’ (ŒÆÅç
, 24.253), ‘objects and
causes of blame and shame’ (KºªåÆ, 24.260), ‘liars, dancers who
excel at beating rhythm in the dance’ but plunder their own commu-
nity (24.261–2); then he orders them to prepare his chariot so that he
can be on his way to Achilles (24.263–4). In Cavafy’s poem, however,
Priam simply ‘hates the uselessness’ (’ I
øçºB › —æÆ ØH
,
13) of the Trojan grief and the dirge for Hektor, and he takes action in
the face of this ‘uselessness’, bringing out the ransom and piling it on
his chariot (14–20). Cavafy mentions almost all the same components
7
Cf. Maronitis 1985: 451: ‘reading perhaps constitutes Cavafy’s constantly devel-
oping poetic method from his first to his last moment’.
8
See Maronitis 1986: 45–9.
9
Contrast Malouf 2009, whose fictional narrative combines the representation of
mental interiority with much more ‘external’ dramatic action than Cavafy offers.

of the ransom that Homer mentions: gold, cauldrons, rugs, cloaks,
tunics, tripods, and robes, but he omits the ‘very beautiful drinking
cup that Thracian men gave [Priam], / when he came on an embassy,
a great possession’ (24.234–5). Mention of this cup is the climax of
Homer’s catalogue of Priam’s ransom; Cavafy, however, eliminates
both the cup and the distracting reference to Priam’s having gone on
an embassy to Thracians sometime in the past, in order not to distract
from his emphasis on Priam’s current emotion and action.
For Cavafy, this distraction would exist even at the level of gram-
mar: from line 13 to line 27 he concentrates attention on Priam by
making him the subject of every verb, until, in the subordinate clause
constituting line 28, his chariot is the subject of
a æåfi Å (‘that it
should run’). On the other hand, Homer makes ‘Thracian men’ the
subject of ‘gave’ in 24.234, and the mention of Priam’s embassy, an
occasion on which he received the ‘very beautiful’, valuable cup,
heightens by contrast the representation of the present embassy to
Achilles, an occasion on which the king will not spare even that cup
(24.235–6) in his effort to retrieve his son’s corpse.
Homer’s contrast between past and present, former prosperity and
current misery, is intensified by the reference in 24.236 to Priam as
‘the old man’ (› ªæø
), who is the subject of the verbs P . . .
çÆ (‘he didn’t spare’) and XŁº (‘he wished’) in 24.235–6.
Cavafy, on the other hand, never refers to ‘the old man’, only to
‘Priam’: the pathos of Homer’s › ªæø
—noted in his Commentary
by Macleod, who points out that —æÆ would have been metrically
possible10—would draw attention away from the king’s desperate
burst of activity, which is the main poetic focus in this part of Cavafy’s
poem. The nature of this activity is suggested by Cavafy’s making the
‘twelve very beautiful robes’ (24.229), which are the first item in
Homer’s list of the items Priam takes from his coffers for the ransom,
into a ‘pile of robes, / shining’ (17–18), which is the final item
specified in Cavafy’s list (apart from ‘whatever else seems suitable’,
19) and which, like the rest of the ransom, ‘Priam heaps up on his
chariot’ (20). Here ‘pile’ (øæ
) and ‘heaps up’ (ØÇØ) suggest a
desperate, indiscriminate piling on rather than the measured activity
of Homer’s king.
10
Macleod 1982: 108.

Both Homer and Cavafy conclude their catalogues of items in the
ransom by saying that Priam wished to ransom Hektor’s corpse, but
they express this desire differently. Homer says, plainly but with
understated depth, ‘He wanted very much in his heart / to ransom
his dear son’ (24.236–7), while Cavafy offers more vivid detail: ‘he
wishes with ransom from the terrifying / enemy /to regain his son’s
body, / and with a reverent funeral to do it honour’ (21–4). Here,
‘from the terrifying enemy’ (Ie e
ææ
/ KåŁæ
) and ‘with a
reverent funeral’ (b c
ŒÅÆ
) admit a reader into Priam’s
thoughts: these phrases are to be understood as his own formulations
and show how he carries the city’s fear with him (cf. Ø, 3; ææ
,
21). In the same way the verbs ‘regain’ (I
ÆŒ fi Å) and ‘do honour’
(Ø fi Å), each governing as object ‘his son’s body’, make Priam’s
motivation more explicit than does Homer’s ‘to ransom his dear son’
(ºÆŁÆØ çº
ıƒ
, 24.237), which does not, for all its understated
depth, provide full access to the king’s thoughts and desires.
Despite these differences between the two poems, up to this point
Cavafy’s poem has more or less followed the story as told in Iliad
24.228–64, though Cavafy borrows certain details from elsewhere in
the book: for example, lines 6–8, ‘No soul / remains without grief in
Troy, / neglecting the memory of Hektor’, are adapted from 24.707–8,
which describe the Trojans flocking around Priam and Idaios as they
return with the corpse of Hektor.11 Nevertheless, as I have said,
Cavafy has eliminated all other characters, their speeches and actions,
in order to concentrate on Priam and the dead Hektor, the only two
figures mentioned by name. When, however, Priam ‘departs in the
silent night’ (25), ‘Priam’s Night-Journey’ leaves Book 24 behind,
even as it evokes other Iliadic passages.12 Cavafy’s lyric endows the
night and the night-journeying with symbolic meaning and psycho-
logical depth in a way that seems strikingly modern, in contrast to
Homer’s traditional epic tone and style.
11
See Maronitis 1986: 50.
12
Perhaps, though, as Maronitis 1986: 51 suggests, Cavafy derived the division of
his poem into what takes place in light and what in darkness from Iliad 24: there, all
the action, from the assembly of the gods to the departure of Priam and Idaios,
apparently takes place on the twelfth day after the death of Hektor (cf. 24.31);
darkness falls (24.351) just before the herald notices Hermes; then it is night until
Hermes departs for Olympos, and dawn breaks (24.695) just as Priam and Idaios
return to the city.

In line 29 there is an obvious shift from the series of active verbs in
13–28, mostly transitive, with Priam (and then his chariot) as subject,
to KŒ
ÆØ (‘stretches out’) in 29 and IŒÆØ (‘is heard’) in 33.
Lines 29–32 in effect take place in Priam’s mind: though the subjects
of these verbs—‘the road’ and ‘the wind’—are not human, the actions
they describe are imagined, so to speak, from the king’s viewpoint.
KŒ
ÆØ is ambiguous: it suggests something that occurs both
outside and within Priam’s mind, the road ‘stretching out’ and the
king straining with tension. Similarly, the wind, a force of nature,
‘laments and wails’ (OæÆØ Œ’ NÇØ, 31), actions that recall the
city and the land of Troy weeping and lamenting in the opening three
stanzas and depict Priam as taking with him the feelings he tries to
leave behind.
From line 32 through to the end of the poem, most of what is
described as occurring on the plain, as Priam passes by, refers not to
the earlier stanzas but, by intertextual echoes, to the Iliad. Thus, the
raven that ‘croaks from afar’ (32) is ‘repulsive and ill-omened’
(IÆØ , 32), because its sound is that of the birds of prey that in
the Iliad are said to scavenge like dogs on the unburied corpses of the
dead warriors (e.g. 1.4–5, 13.831–2), including the dogs which Achil-
les threatens will feed on Hektor’s body (22.354–5). The barking
heard by Priam (33) suggests his son’s potential mutilation.13
The ‘hare [that] passes swift-footed like a whisper’ (35) recalls the
Iliad in a more complicated way. Æåı (‘swift-footed’) is a rare
word in modern Greek; it occurs only here in the entire corpus of
Cavafy’s poetry, and in this context it must recall the Homeric
Achilles who is repeatedly described as ‘swift-footed’ (Æ TŒ ,
Æ Æå , etc.). Yet mention of the hare does not recall Achilles in
a straightforward way. Rather, it evokes the scene of Hektor’s death at
his hands in Iliad 22, where, in a curious ‘reverse simile’, Hektor,
sword drawn, charges Achilles ‘like a high-flying eagle’, which
‘plunges (rØ
) toward the plain through dark clouds / to snatch a
tender lamb or cowering hare’ (22.308–10). On the one hand, the
effect of the Homeric simile is to make Hektor’s death more glorious:
he dies charging forward like an aggressive bird of prey rather than
shrinking from his opponent like the ‘cowering hare’ he resembled in
his earlier flight (22.136–75, 188–207), though there he was actually
13
On dogs and birds in the Iliad, see Redfield 1975: 168–9, 184–6, 199, 200.

compared not to a hare but to a dove fleeing a hawk (22.139–44) and
a fawn unable to elude the pursuit and tracking of a hunting dog
(22.188–93). On the other hand, Hektor’s charge at Achilles is, as he
realizes, doomed from the start, merely a last-ditch effort to ‘do
something great for those in the future to learn of ’ (22.305). His
comparison to an eagle helps to make his death exemplify an import-
ant aspect of the tragically self-destructive nature of the heroic enter-
prise in the Iliad: that the very activity—aggressive killing—that leads
to honour and glory necessarily involves the death not only of other
warriors but eventually, in most cases, of the killer himself.
All this, I suggest, is latent in Cavafy’s line, ‘A hare passes swift-
footed like a whisper’ (35). I also suggest that the words ‘like a
whisper’ (‰ łŁıæ ) should be understood as inside Priam’s mind:
he imagines the whisper he hears, as he imagines the wind’s lamen-
tation and wailing in line 31. Through an unusual kind of intertextual
empowerment, by which a character in one text is familiar with the
details of another text, he draws the image of ‘a hare pass[ing] swift-
footed’ (ºÆªg æ
fi A Æåı ) from Il. 17.676, where, in a simile like
that of 22.308–10, Menelaos is compared to an eagle ‘whose notice,
even when he is aloft, a swift-footed hare does not escape’. Cavafy,
however, makes Priam recall this image and hear sounds in the night
in language that brings to mind not Book 17, but the death of Hector
in Book 22, along with the entire meditation on heroism of which this
death is a part. It is characteristic of Cavafy’s poem that unlike
Homer’s epic, which represents Hektor’s death and the contradic-
tions of mortal heroism objectively, it subjectifies these matters by
making the intertextual allusion a product of Priam’s mind.
This interpretation may seem problematic, for how is one to know
that Priam is making a subjective, intertextual allusion, or even that
he is in any way aware of the sounds and movements that take place
as he rushes toward the ships? I read line 36, ‘The king goads, he
goads his horses’ ( ˇ ÆØºf Œ
fi A, Œ
fi A f ¥ı ), as Priam’s
urgent response to his own association of the night-sound with his
son’s death. This line, with its repeated Œ
A, Œ
fi A, structurally
echoes 27–8: ‘The only thought he now has / is that his chariot should
run fast, fast’ (
Å
ŒłØ
æÆ åØ / Æå, Æåf e –æÆ ı

æåØ). Yet in both these places there is no explicit indication that the
king is aware of the sights and sounds mentioned by the poem’s
speaker. Indeed, ‘The only thought he now has’ and ‘It’s enough
that’ may be thought to rule out such awareness and to suggest,

instead, a figure so entirely absorbed in his own despair and in the
pain and lamentation he brings with him from Troy that he is, so to
speak, impervious or immune to other stimuli and in no way able to
associate them with Hektor’s death.
Verses 37–41 are similarly problematic. ‘On the plain shadows
awaken, / inauspicious, / and wonder why, in so great a hurry, / the
son of Dardanos flies toward the ships / of the murderous Argives and
the rude Achaeans.’ It seems likely that these awakening shadows
(ŒØÆ) are the ghosts of the dead warriors lying on the plain of
battle—their łıåÆ, to use the Homeric term. Neither Iliad 24 nor
Cavafy’s text explicitly mentions these corpses in the description of
Priam’s journey, but Homer’s account of Hermes preparing, at Zeus’
command, to escort Priam, mentions that ‘he [sc. Hermes] took the
wand with which he charms the eyes of men / whom he wishes [to
charm], and in turn awakens those too who are sleeping’ (24.343–4).
I suggest that ‘awakens those . . . who are sleeping’ ("

Æ
KªæØ) is the source of Cavafy’s Kı
F
ŒØÆ (‘shadows awaken’,
37). Kı
F
corresponds intransitively to KªæØ, and the use of
ŒØÆ to describe łıåÆ in Hades at Od. 10.495, like that of ŒØ in a
simile speaking of an insubstantial corpse at Od. 11.207, might
similarly have prompted Cavafy’s use of the word in line 37.14
Maronitis suggests that ‘the aporia in [these lines], which Cavafy
attributes to the inauspicious, spectral shadows’, transcribes the
equivalent aporia of Hermes in Iliad 24, when he encounters Priam
‘with amazement’ (B b Æç
, 24.360) and inquires ‘where [he] is
directing [his] mules and horses /through the divine night, when
other mortals are sleeping’ (24.362–3).15 Maronitis is wrong to
speak of Hermes’ aporia: in Il. 24.360 the subject of B b Æç
is
Priam, not Hermes, and these words come as the climax of the
description of the king’s response to Idaios’ pointing out the approach
of a man who turns out to be the god: ‘The old man’s mind was
14
In Il. 24, Priam’s family and friends (çºØ) escort him out of the city, ‘as if he
were going to his death’ (24.328). As Whitman 1958: 217–18 suggests, Hermes
meeting Priam ‘in the darkness, by the tomb of Ilus, a sort of terminus between the
two worlds [sc. of the living and the dead]’, and escorting him across the river to
the shelter of Achilles, suggests a journey to the Land of the Dead, where Achilles
symbolically ‘fills the role of the king [sc. Hades] . . .’. On such a journey it would be
appropriate for Priam to encounter ‘souls’ in the form of the uncomprehending
‘shadows’ that, in Cavafy’s poem, wonder why he is hurrying toward the Greek ships.
15
Maronitis 1986: 53.

confused, and he was deeply afraid, / and the hairs stood straight on
his bent limbs, / and he stood amazed’ (24.358–60). But Maronitis is
correct in drawing attention to this part of Iliad 24 as the text Cavafy
has in mind in 37–42, although the Alexandrian poet has, character-
istically, switched almost every textual echo, so that it refers to a
different character: (1) as I have pointed out, the awakening shadows
of line 37 derive from 24.343–4, where Hermes is said to awaken
sleepers with his wand (though in the Iliad, as Hermes himself points
out, it is Priam and Idaios, not ‘inauspicious shadows’, who are awake
while other mortals sleep); (2) Hermes, who comes out of the night, is
at first feared as ‘threatening’ (24.355) but eventually welcomed by
Priam as an ‘auspicious . . . wayfarer’ (›Øæ
. . . ÆYØ
, 24.375–6),
unlike Cavafy’s ‘repulsive and inauspicious raven’ (ŒæÆ IÆØ ,
32); (3) Hermes, not the ‘shadows’, pretends to wonder where Priam
is going and asks if he is not afraid of the ‘Achaeans who breathe
fury’ (24.364), whom he characterizes as ‘hostile and unfriendly’
(ı
ŒÆd I
æØØ, 24.365). Together, these phrases are the
source of Cavafy’s ‘the murderous Argives, and the rude / Achaeans’
(41–2); (4) when in 39–42 the inauspicious shadows ‘wonder why, in
so great a hurry, / the son of Dardanos flies toward the ships / of the
murderous Argives and the rude /Achaeans’, Cavafy once again calls
attention to Priam’s urgency. This is signalled by the striking enjamb-
ment between 40 and 41—an enjambment bridging the poem’s two
final stanzas and paralleled in the poem only at 16–17, where along
with Œ’ Ø (16) the enjambment imitates stylistically Priam’s indis-
criminate piling up of the ransom.
Priam’s urgency may arise from the perceived threat by the night to
block or distract his focused mind through its movements and noises,
or he may be totally unaware of the movements and noises, owing to
his desperate concentration on his own feelings. In either case the
effect is strengthened in the poem’s final lines: ‘But the king pays no
attention to these things; / it’s enough that his chariot runs fast, fast’
(Iººa › ÆØºf ÆPa b
a æåØ· / çŁ
Ø e –æÆ ı Æå,
Æåf
æåØ, 43–4). Here the word çŁ
Ø, ‘it’s enough’, is slightly
ambiguous. The normal meaning of this verb in modern Greek is
‘arrive’, and it seems in the first half of 44 that Priam’s chariot ‘is
arriving’, as in the Iliad, at the Greek camp and the shelter of Achilles.
But the final words of the line and the poem,
æåØ, indicate that
çŁ
Ø is part of a special idiom (‘it’s enough’) and, in light of the
foreclosed meaning ‘arrive’, that Cavafy’s poem, unlike the Iliad,

provides no closural ‘arrival’, no resolution of Priam’s agony and of
the action to which it prompts him.
In this way, ‘Priam’s Night-Journey’ reverses the poetic thrust of
the text in reference to which, and against which, it was composed.
This intertextual effect is Callimachean, almost Vergilian, in its
demand on a reader to have in mind the relevant passages from
Homer, but Cavafy’s mode is modern rather than ancient in its
symbolist evocation of lamentation and sorrow, of night-terrors and
night-distractions.16 These, like the ‘walls’ (åÅ) and ‘windows’
(ÆæŁıæÆ) of Cavafy’s poems by those names—also early poems,
dating from 1896 and 1897, respectively—constitute barriers of enclos-
ure or resistance, against which, as Maronitis comments, every move-
ment is futile because the barrier moves with the one trying to move
beyond it, just as Priam actually brings his despair and lamentation
with him from Troy.17 Cavafy’s Priam is a figure of futility; he fails to
break through the night, despite the hatred for the uselessness of
lamentation that impels him to try to do so. The end of the poem
leaves him, as it were, vainly trying to run away from himself. As far as
we know from this poem, Hektor may never be ransomed: ‘It’s
enough’, for the king, ‘that his chariot runs fast, fast’.18
16
Cf. M. Pieris 1985b: 458 on ‘the symbolist objective and intention of the poem’.
17
Maronitis 1986: 55. Jusdanis 1987: 71 discusses the symbolist qualities of
‘Windows’ and refers to a letter from Cavafy to his brother John in which he says,
in Jusdanis’ words, that in composing this poem, ‘he sought a vague, enigmatic mode
so as to create an effect rather than to describe concrete objects. The aim of the poem
was to evoke a mood of pessimism and desperation . . .’. A similar mood is evident in
‘Priam’s Night-Journey’.
18
This essay derives from a paper presented in the early 1990s at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and The Graduate School of the City University of New York.
I am grateful to Mary Depew and Michele Hannoosh at UCLA and Constance
Tagopoulos and Marina Kotzamani at CUNY for their helpful criticism and sugges-
tions. I am especially grateful to Katherine C. King for improvements of both style and
substance.
11
‘War—What is it Good For?’ in Homer’s

Iliad and Four Receptions
Some of you may recognize that my title comes from the Motown
soul song, ‘War’, by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, originally
sung in 1969 by The Temptations but best known in the intense
version recorded a year later by Edwin Starr, which channelled and
gave voice to the sentiments of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
‘War’ is also familiar from the live recording by Bruce Springsteen
and the E Street band in the mid-1980s; they performed it again in
2003, before, during, and after the US invasion of Iraq, when it again
served to express popular, antiwar feelings. ‘War’ repeatedly and
insistently asks the question, ‘War, what is it good for?’ and provides
the immediate response, ‘Absolutely nothing’. It speaks of the
‘destruction of innocent lives’, evokes the ‘tears . . . of thousands of
mothers’ eyes / when their sons go to fight / and lose their lives’, and
calls war the ‘enemy of mankind’ and friend ‘only to the undertaker’.
When I think about the Iliad, as I frequently do, in relation to war,
the song ‘War’ often comes to mind, because the sentiments it
expresses recall a central theme in some of the most compelling
twentieth-and twenty-first-century receptions of the epic. These
receptions, however, rarely do justice to the complexity of the
poem’s representation and descriptions of war, and in this chapter
I focus on some of the differences between that complexity and the
more one-dimensional receptions. I shall first sketch the distinctive
ethical and existential features of the representation of war in the
Iliad; next I shall revisit Simone Weil’s well-known essay, ‘The Iliad,
or the Poem of Force’, and Rachel Bespaloff ’s short book, On the Iliad;
then I’ll discuss two of the most compelling artistic responses to
the Iliad in recent decades: Alice Oswald’s Memorial: An Excavation
150 ‘War—What is it Good For?’

of the Iliad and Christopher Logue’s WAR MUSIC;1 finally, I’ll suggest
what engaging with (and responding to) the representation of war in
the Iliad and these four receptions might be ‘good for’ today.
In the Iliad, human mortality and the prevailing social value
system simultaneously challenge and enable warriors to give meaning
to their lives by winning honour and glory through killing and dying.
The poem, however, does not celebrate warrior-heroism and the
honour and glory to which it can lead, without also calling attention
to the cost of this heroism in human terms, a cost that includes not
only the deaths of individual warriors and their victims, but the effect
of these deaths on families and communities. Homer’s narrative
balances the heroic achievements of the slayers and the pathos of
the slain, and he avoids both naive sentimentality and thoughtless
brutality in his descriptions of killing and dying.
In one sense, war in the Iliad, which constitutes the medium of
existence in a poem whose narrative is so claustrophobically restricted
to the plain of Troy, the city, and the Greek camp, is a fundamentally
antisocial and self-defeating activity: the Greeks aim to destroy human
families and a human community not unlike the families and commu-
nities they themselves left behind when they came to Troy. On the
other hand, war in the poem is a profoundly social activity: within both
the Greek and the Trojan armies, the shame and mutual respect
(ÆN) felt by warriors keep them in solidarity with one another and
impel them to stand their ground in the face of the enemy.2 In addition,
the fighters in the opposing armies rely on one another, virtually as
partners, in a quest for honour and glory that joins them in a different
kind of solidarity, one grounded in their shared mortality and recip-
rocal killing and dying. What they have in common as ‘amis mortels’
(‘mortal friends’), to use Laura Slatkin’s term,3 often outweighs what
they do and feel as mortal enemies fighting to sack or to preserve Troy.
Most receptions of the Iliad, whether poetic or interpretative, do
not do justice to the poem’s representation of the reciprocal partner-
ship of deadly enemies who are ‘mortal friends’, or to the balance
between war as a productive and war as a destructive activity. These
receptions respond to the poem’s sense of the physical and psycho-
logical harshness of war and the pathos of its victims, but they rarely
capture either the ‘joy of battle’ (åæÅ), that warriors ‘remember’
1
Weil: 1940–1 [2005]; Bespaloff 1943 [2005]; Oswald: 2011; Logue 1997.
2 3
Redfield 1975: 119. Slatkin 2011b.
‘War—What is it Good For?’ 151

and call on their comrades to ‘remember’ in the midst of the fighting,
or the economic, social, and almost metaphysical fruitfulness of war
as a means of winning honour and glory that will allow an individual
warrior to transcend the limits imposed by mortality and the human
condition.
I sometimes think that this failure of most Iliad receptions is a
function of genre. The conventions of traditional oral epic—perhaps
of all epic—involve both the transmission and the affirmation of
traditional institutions and values, mainly in a poem’s narrative,
and the calling into question or challenging of these institutions
and values, mainly in the poem’s figurative language, especially its
similes, but also in the speeches of its characters. This process of
simultaneous affirmation and calling into question may itself have
been traditional, but it also is possible, as Susanne Wofford has
suggested, that the Iliad is innovative and distinctive precisely because
of the way in which it combines narrative and figuration to generate
ethical complexity.4 This is certainly true, as Wofford has shown, of
later epics such as the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, which look back to
the Iliad as a generic source and model.5 If the ethical complexity that
characterizes the Iliad is conspicuously missing in many modern
artistic and interpretative receptions of the poem, this may be, at
least in part, because these receptions are, for the most part, not epic
but novelistic or lyric, and therefore less self-consciously concerned
with the interplay between tradition and innovation.
The best known and most influential ethical reception of the Iliad
in the past century is undoubtedly Simone Weil’s essay, ‘The Iliad, or
the Poem of Force’, which was written in 1939 and 1940, before and
after the German conquest of France, and first published in two parts
under the pseudonym Émile Novis (an anagram of Simone Weil) in
the December 1940 and January 1941 issues of the Marseille review,
Les Cahiers du Sud, which reprinted it under Weil’s name in 1947. In
1945, two years after Weil’s death, an English translation by the
novelist and critic Mary McCarthy appeared in the pacifist, quasi-
anarchist journal Politics.6 I emphasize these dates and venues
4
Wofford 1992: 29–96; cf. Finkelberg 2003.
5
Wofford 1992: 97–211, 372–91.
6
Ironically enough, this publication in a pacifist journal took place well after Weil
had renounced her pacifism (at the latest in March, 1939, after Hitler and the German
army entered Prague); see her letter of 1942 to Jean Wahl (Rees 1965: 158); cf.
Pétrement 1976: 337–52, Summers 1981: 91–2, Fraisse 1989: 333, and Benfey 2005:
x–xi. Weil’s perceived pacifism led to the republication of the McCarthy translation by

because Weil clearly reads the Iliad in light of her impassioned moral
abhorrence of the violence that Nazi Germany and its military and
political allies had been inflicting on their victims since the mid-
1930s, most conspicuously in the Spanish Civil War, the campaign
of hatred and aggression against Jews, especially after Kristallnacht
(9–10 November 1938), and the invasion of Poland on 1 September
1939, that touched off World War II. Weil assumes in her readers a
familiarity with the historical context in which she writes and of the
moral values, mainly Christian, in which she grounds her discussion.7
Weil famously asserts that ‘the true hero, the true subject, the center
of the Iliad is force’, and that ‘the human spirit is shown as modified
by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded . . . deformed by the
weight of the force it submits to’. ‘Force’ is Weil’s name for ‘that x that
turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’, that, for example,
makes a corpse out of a man (p. 3). Weil is sensitive to the sheer
physicality of the poem’s descriptions of killing and dying and its
scenes of supplication in which, according to her interpretation, a
human being in the power of another and begging for mercy is turned
into a thing even before he is killed. Weil eloquently evokes the pathos
and poignancy with which the Iliad portrays action and suffering, war
and death, the individual and the social cost of heroism. But her
interpretation is one-sided, first, because it nowhere acknowledges
the Iliad’s descriptions and representations of the ‘joy of battle’ and
the nobility and glory of the killers, as well as the humanity and pathos
of the killed; second, because Weil tendentiously (though perhaps
unconsciously) misreports or mistranslates crucial details in some of
the scenes she so eloquently discusses, including the death of Lykaon in
Book 21 and Achilles’ conversation with Priam and surrender of
Hektor’s corpse in Book 24;8 third, because Weil focuses only on
isolated scenes and moments in the poem and totally ignores its
narrative arc.
Christopher Benfey, in his introduction to a recent reprint of
Weil’s essay, suggests that this focus on individual scenes may reflect
the Quaker community at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, in 1956, which

has often been reprinted. In what follows , all references are to the reprint of Weil’s
essay in Benfey 2005.
7
Cf. Ferber 1981: 66, Summers 1981: 87–9, Fraisse 1989: 304–9, Benfey 2005:
vii–xi, xv–xvi.
8
See Ferber 1981: 70–2, Benfey 2005: xiii–xv. See the Appendix to this chapter.

her engagement, in 1938, with a recent edition of Goya’s series of
etchings entitled ‘The Disasters of War’. In a letter of 1938 she speaks
of Goya as a ‘new love’ and a painter with whom she ‘feel[s] a sort of
immediate spiritual contact . . .’, and she mentions a recent edition of
The Disasters of War that ‘arouses an equal degree of horror and
admiration’.9 She saw some of these works in person in 1939, while
writing her essay, as part of the famous exhibition at the Musée d’Art
et Histoire in Geneva of 174 ‘Masterpieces from the Prado Museum’
that had been sent there for safe keeping during the Spanish Civil
War.10 These etchings present graphic scenes of torture, rape, muti-
lation and other horrors inflicted by Napoleon’s army in Spain
between 1808 and 1814, and each etching stands on its own and
independent of the others, not as part of an overall narrative, which is
precisely the way in which Weil reads individual scenes in the Iliad.11
Perhaps the main reason why Weil reads the Iliad as exclusively an
antiwar poem is that she substitutes her own spiritual categories and
values for those of the epic, which she views through highly idiosyn-
cratic and anachronistic Platonic and Christian lenses. She says that
‘force’ in the poem exercises tyranny ‘over the soul’ (p. 11), which
‘enslaved to war cries out for deliverance’, even though, clearly, no
such notion of ‘soul’ or of ‘deliverance’ exists in the world of the
Iliad.12 She sees the epic as permeated by bitterness ‘spring[ing] from
the subjection of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis,
to matter’ (p. 33). She compares the poem, in this respect, to the
Gospels: each work, she claims (taking the Gospels as a single work),
reflects what she calls the ‘spiritual force’ that ‘allowed [the Greeks] to
avoid self-deception’ (Weil p. 35) and ‘the sense of human misery’
that gives the Gospels [their] accent of simplicity . . . [and] endows
Greek tragedy and the Iliad with all their value (p. 34). ‘All their value’
is, to put it mildly, an overstatement, and the assimilation of the Iliad
(and Greek tragedy!) to Christianity is one-sided, idealizing, and, as
I have said, anachronistic in its understanding of the ‘soul’ and
9
Letter to Jean Posternak, in Rees 1965: 63. The edition to which Weil refers is
probably Goya 1937.
10
Russell 1989 called this exhibition ‘each for each and canvas for canvas, the
single greatest loan exhibition of European painting that there has ever been’.
11
Cf. Sontag 2003: 44, quoted by Benfey 2005: xi: ‘Each image, captioned with a
brief phrase lamenting the wickedness of the invaders and the monstrous suffering
they inflicted, stands independently of the others.’
12
Cf. Ferber 1981: 75–6, Schein 1984: 68–9, 83.

arbitrary in its assumption of a single ‘human spirit’. Nevertheless,
Weil’s interpretation of the Iliad expresses eloquently her own view of
life and makes sense in the context of Nazi violence in which she was
writing and in light of her own spirituality and ‘her nightmare vision
of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost’.13
Despite the extensive work that has been done over the years on
Weil and her essay, and its appreciation by, and influence on, both
classical scholars and non-specialist readers,14 I think the best
response to ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’ is not any work of
scholarship, which might justly claim to situate Weil’s interpretation
historically or to present a more accurate reading of the Homeric text
in its historical and cultural contexts, but the work of Weil’s contem-
porary, Rachel Bespaloff, who in some ways shared her background,
though not her distinctive spirituality and moral values. Both Weil
and Bespaloff were Jewish refugees who escaped from occupied
France to Marseilles in 1940 and arrived in New York via Casablanca
within weeks of one another in 1942. Weil, however, in the course of
the 1930s, had developed her distinctive spirituality, grounded in the
Gospels, while participating in leftist politics, working in an auto
factory and a factory that generated electricity, serving on the Repub-
lican side in the Spanish Civil War, and then undergoing a mystical
vision in which she was addressed by the Holy Spirit. Bespaloff, by
contrast, seems to have been apolitical: she had a diploma from the
Geneva Conservatory as a pianist and was active in the 1920s at the
Paris Opera as a choreographer influenced by the principles of Dal-
croze Eurhythmics. In the 1930s, after she stopped performing and
choreographing, she became one of the leading French philosophers
in the area of phenomenology and existentialism. Far from develop-
ing a Christian spirituality, influenced by the New Testament, she
turned to the Hebrew Bible for ethical parallels to what she saw in
the Iliad, and she interpreted that epic and other literary texts in the
context of the contemporary tragedy of the Jewish people.15
Her short book, On the Iliad, first published in French in 1943 in New
York, then in an English translation by Mary McCarthy four years later,
is continuous with her philosophical writing. Its main themes are
13
Benfey 2005: back cover.
14
e.g. Taplin 1980: 17, Ferber 1981, Macleod 1982: 1, Schein 1984: 82–3, Holoka
2002, 2003, Baracchi 2011.
15
Cf. Jutrin 2010: 203.

subjectivity and transcendence; human freedom and ethical choice in a
universe from which a morally relevant God is absent; poetry as bearing
witness for both contemporary and future readers to the truth of
experience and to actions that would otherwise be forgotten; and
‘instants’ or ‘moments’ of clarity and contemplation, ‘pauses in the
flux of Becoming’, as she puts it, ‘when the spell of Becoming ceases,
when the world of violent passion sinks in peacefulness’, and existence
seems to turn in upon itself and time and eternity seem to be in
contact.16 For Bespaloff, the scenes in Book 24, where Achilles and
Priam gaze at one another with wonder (24.628–33); in Book 3, where
Priam asks Helen to name the leading Greek warriors and she does so
(3.161–243), and in Book 6, where Hektor and Andromache converse at
the Skaian Gate, are such existential moments.
Bespaloff began to reread the Iliad in 1938, when her daughter
studied it in school, and she had drafted at least some pages of her
book several months before the fall of France, in May–June, 1940,
apparently without knowledge of Weil’s essay. When she became
aware of it in December, 1941, through the philosopher Jean Grenier,
she wrote to Grenier that ‘there are whole pages of my notes that look
like plagiarism’.17 Her own work, perhaps because she wrote and
revised at least parts of it with Weil’s essay in mind, has rightly
seemed to some readers a response to ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of
Force’.18 In my view, Bespaloff ’s book is more accurately attuned to
the complex representation of warfare in the Iliad than is Weil’s essay.
If the latter, in the words of Marina Warner, is a ‘ferocious lament’,
Bespaloff ’s rejoinder is an ‘antiphonal meditation on conflict, paci-
fism and justice’.19
‘[I]n the Iliad’, Bespaloff writes, ‘force appears as both the supreme
reality and the supreme illusion of life. Force, for Homer, is divine
insofar as it represents a superabundance of life that flashes out in the
contempt of death . . . ; it is detestable insofar as it contains . . . a blind
drive that is always pushing it on to the very end of its course, on to its
own abolition and the obliteration of the very values it engendered’
(Bespaloff 2005: 47). Mutatis mutandis, this seems to me a fair
16
All quotations from Bespaloff ’s book are taken (and sometimes adapted) from
the reprint of McCarthy’s translation in Benfey (ed.) 2005: 83, 62. Jutrin 2010: 201,
205 observes that Bespaloff derived her conception of the ‘moment’ from Kierkegaard.
17
Bespaloff, Letter to Jean Grenier, 23 December 1941, quoted by M. Jutrin in
Jutrin (ed.) 2003: 24.
18 19
Cf. Ferber 1981: 66, Benfey 2005: vii–xix. Warner 2006.

statement of the Homeric ‘joy of battle’ qualified by the equally
Homeric sense of the self-defeating nature of war and of the contra-
dictions in the Iliad that make human life both joyful and tragic.
*
Alice Oswald’s long poem, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, is a
different kind of work from Weil’s essay, but shares with it a focus on
the pathos of death and human loss in the epic, rather than on the
greatness and glory of its warrior heroes. Oswald describes Memorial
as a ‘translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story’; she omits
about seven-eighths of the poem, including most of its narrative and
dramatic action; paraphrases some of the brief ‘obituaries’ of warriors
and vignettes of their lives that the poem offers at the moments of
their deaths; and provides somewhat more accurate translations of
some of the poem’s similes (or parts of similes), though specific
similes do not always occur in the same contexts as in the Iliad itself.
Memorial resembles an actual war memorial that presents the names
of those who have been killed in action. This is especially clear in the
opening pages, which list the names of all 243 warriors on both sides who
perish in the poem, in the order in which their deaths are mentioned—a
list that gains strength and becomes more moving, as one progresses
through it, not unlike, for example, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
in Washington, DC.
Yet unlike many war memorials, in which all the dead speak to us
in the same way,20 Oswald personalizes the slain warriors and enables
a reader to enter into their particular thoughts and experiences at the
point of death, sometimes even more vividly than Homer does. For
example, ‘DEICOON the Trojan / Was too eager, too heroic / He
found praise yes / But also death’ (p. 23); or ‘ADRESTUS almost
survived it was horrible / To hear the hoof-kicking struggle of his
horses/ Tangled on a tamarisk branch’ (pp. 28–9); or ‘SOCUS who
was running by now / Felt the rude punch of a spear in his back / Push
through his heart and out the other side poor Socus / Trying to get
away from his own ending / Ran out his last moments in fear of the
next ones’ (pp. 42–3); or ‘Oh ASIUS Asius how has he done this /
Now he bangs down his knuckles on his knees / He feels so luminous
stupid / Sitting in the god’s headlights trembling / In the narrow
opening to the grave’ (p. 48). At other times, instead of letting a reader
20
Tatum 2003.

enter into the dying warrior’s mind, Oswald focalizes the death from
some other viewpoint: for example, in lines that could almost have
been written by Weil, ‘Poor ARCHEPTOLEMOS / Someone was
there / And the next moment no one’ (p. 31); or
In this love-story there was a man
Who wanted to marry Cassandra
And she was Priam’s bright-eyed neurotic
Most beautiful daughter
And he was OTHRYON the dreamer
Who came from Cabesus with no money
When he offered his life for her hand
Her father accepted
And so the dreamer went blushing into battle and died
And everyone laughed and laughed
Except Cassandra (p. 47);
or,
Laothoe, one of Priam’s wives
Never saw her son again he was washed away
Now she can’t look at the sea she can’t think about
The bits unburied being eaten by fishes
He was the tall one the conscientious one
Who stayed out late pruning his father’s fig trees
Who was kidnapped who was ransomed
Who walked home barefoot from Arisbe
And rested for twelve days and was killed
LYCAON killed Lycaon unkilled Lycaon
Bending down branches to make wheels
Lycaon kidnapped Lycaon pruning by moonlight
Lycaon naked in a river pleading for his life
being answered by Achilles No. (p. 69)
This passage about Lycaon, based on Iliad 21.34–135, is a good

example of how Oswald adapts Homer for her own poetic purposes.
For example, at Iliad 21.122–7, Achilles, when he has taken Lycaon’s
corpse by the foot and thrown it into the river Skamandros to be
carried to the sea, calls out to it:
Now lie there with the fishes, who will carelessly
lick the blood from your wound; and your mother
will not place you on a bier and mourn you, but swirling
Skamandros will carry you to the sea’s broad bosom. 125

Some fish, darting beneath the ripple of the dark wave,
will break the surface to feed on the white fat of Lycaon.
In Oswald’s description, Achilles’ contrast between the mother not

being able to lament and bury her son and the careless fishes who will
eat his unburied corpse is condensed and focalized by Laothoe herself.
The emphasis in ‘Never saw her son again he was washed away’
suggests that the real horror for the mother is not her son’s death at
the hands of Achilles, but the irrecoverableness of his corpse. Perhaps
one should imagine Laothoe watching the whole event from the city
wall, with the sea in the distance, as the corpse is carried downstream.
Oswald also has Laothoe, in a kind of interior monologue, think of
Lycaon as ‘the tall one the conscientious one / Who stayed out late
pruning his father’s fig trees / . . . / Bending down branches to make
wheels’. In Homer, the poem’s narrator says nothing about pruning
or Lycaon being conscientious, at least in his mother’s eyes. He
merely tells how Achilles once caught’ Lycaon by surprise at night,
when he was cutting the branches of a fig tree, ‘so they might be the
rounded rims (¼ıª ) of a chariot’ (Il. 21.37–8). Oswald, however,
makes Lycaon a son appreciated by his mother, because he labours for
his father. It is striking that in Memorial, Laothoe thinks of ‘wheels’,
not ‘rims’ as in the corresponding passage from Iliad 21. Oswald is
apparently drawing on a similar passage in Book 4 describing the
death of the Trojan youth Simoeisios, whose corpse is compared (by
the poem’s narrator) to a poplar that ‘a chariot maker . . . cut down
with shining iron, / so he might bend it into the wheel of a very
beautiful chariot’ (Il. 4.485–6). In this same passage, the narrator says
that Simoeisios ‘did not repay his dear parents for bringing him up’
(
Pb
Œ FØ / Łæ æÆ çº
Ø I øŒ , 4.477–8),21 which in effect is
what Oswald’s Lycaon is trying to do when he cares for his father’s fig
trees. It is not necessary to know the Homeric passages in order to be
moved by Oswald’s narrative of the death of Lycaon, but knowing
them increases one’s admiration for the way she transmutes Homer
into something new and distinctive.
The effect is similar when she follows her Lycaon narrative with a
simile that has no counterpart in the original at that point in the
poem, but is adapted from a simile in Book 18.318–22:
21
See p. 7.

Like when a lion comes back to a forest’s secret rooms
Too late
The hunter has taken her children
She follows the tracks of that man
Into every valley
With her heart’s darkness
Growing darker
The mother lion’s loss is analogous to that of Laothoe, and the

analogy is made clearer both by the word ‘rooms’, which would
normally refer to a constructed human residence, not to the hidden
heart of the forest, and by the word ‘children’, which would normally
suggest human offspring, as opposed to ‘whelps’ or ‘cubs’, the normal
words for the young of a lion.22 On the other hand, the helplessness of
Laothoe, in contrast to the mother lion, is clear and moving: she
cannot track her children’s abductor, and while the darkness in the
mother lion’s heart expresses her intended vengeance, for Laothoe
there is no such possibility. All she can do is not look at the sea and try
not to think of her son’s ‘bits unburied being eaten by fishes’.
For a reader familiar with the Iliad, this simile has a special
poignancy, because the simile at 18.318–22, on which it is based,
compares Achilles, weeping and groaning intensely as he places his
‘man-slaughtering hands on the breast of his (slain) comrade
(Patroklos)’, to
a thickly bearded lion
whose whelps a hunter has secretly stolen away
out of the dense forest. Returning too late, (the lion) grieves
and goes over many valleys seeking the tracks of the man,
if he can discover (him) somewhere, and a bitter anger has hold
(of him).
u ºd Mßª Ø
,
zØ Þ Ł’ e Œ
ı KºÆçÅº
±æ ÅØ Icæ
oºÅ KŒ ıŒØB· › ’ ¼åıÆØ o æ
KºŁ,
22
Homer has Œı
(18.319), which occurs only here in the Iliad and Odyssey,
but elsewhere in Greek literature typically refers to the young of animals. For language
appropriate to humans used of animals, see 24.41–3, where Æ, which normally
denotes a human meal, is used in a simile comparing Achilles to ‘a lion that, yielding
to great violence and his proud spirit, will go after the flocks of mortals to take a meal’
(¥Æ ÆEÆ ºÅØØ). Here ÆEÆ makes Achilles, who is compared to the lion, seem
even more savage. Cf. p. 106.

ººa ’ ¼ªŒ ’ K BºŁ ’ Iæ
YåØ’ Kæ ıH,
Y
Ł K æ
Ø· ºÆ ªaæ æØf åº
Æƒæ E.
In this Homeric passage, Achilles is compared to a lion overcome by

emotion when he comes too late and his cubs have been stolen away,
just as Achilles has come too late to save Patroklos. In Memorial,
however, Achilles himself is the ‘thief ’ who has robbed Laothoe of her
son. Oswald reworks the simile, reversing Achilles’ place in the
comparison; this makes his killing of Lycaon affect Laothoe as Achil-
les himself is affected, in Book 18, by the death of Patroklos.23
Frequently in Memorial, a ‘biographical’ paraphrase is followed by
a simile that is immediately repeated verbatim, as if it were part of an
antiphonal lament for the fallen warrior. The last eleven pages of the
poem, however, consist exclusively of similes out of context and not
repeated, which somehow illuminate all the deaths that Oswald
memorializes: for example,
Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves.24
Or, as an image of brilliant, transient mortality, the final lines of

Memorial: ‘Like when god throws a star / And everyone looks up / to
see that whip of sparks / and then it’s gone.’
Oswald observes that one fundamental feature of the Iliad to which
Memorial, in its own way, tries to be faithful, is its orality. She speaks
23
Edwards 1991: 184 on line 318, assumes that the lion in the simile is female,
citing the AT scholia which say that a lioness has a ‘most beautiful’ (ŒººØ
) beard
and a lion, a mane. Edwards, on 18.318–22 generally, notes that ‘the parent–child
theme is often used in similes to illustrate the Akhilleus–Patroklos relationship’; cf.
23.222–5, Mirto 1997: 1323. On the psychological dimension of 18.318–22, which,
unlike most lion similes in the Iliad, has nothing to do with combat and, like
20.164–74, sets Achilles apart from other Greek warriors, see Schnapp-Gourbeillon
1981: 87–8. Moulton 1977: 106 contrasts 18.318–22 to the simile at 17.132–7 compar-
ing Ajax protecting Patroklos’ corpse to a lion who successfully protects his offspring
from hunters in the forest; cf. Mirto 1997: 1323, Edwards 1991: 75 on 17.133–6.
24
Here the word ‘ghosts’ heightens the leaves’ resemblance to dead humans in
Homer, whose ‘images’ ( YøºÆ) are all that is left of them in the land of the dead (Od.
11.83, 213, 476, 602, Il. 23.72, 104).

of her translation as ‘a kind of oral cemetery—in the aftermath of the
Trojan War, an attempt to remember people’s names and lives
without the use of writing’ (p. 2). Memorial is highly effective in
this way, and reading the cemetery aloud is truly moving: for me it
evoked long-dormant memories of two friends who died in the
Vietnam War. Oswald claims that her ‘dismissal of seven-eighths of
the poem . . . is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was
never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its
language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking’ (p. 2).
I do not agree with the implication of these words, that written
language is somehow dead and passive, but to read Memorial aloud
or hear it read is a reminder of the power of oral poetry to affect an
audience by making reality clear and vivid and by helping (or forcing)
a reader to see war at least partly as the poet sees it. Oswald (p. 1) says
that she was aiming at the Kæª ØÆ (‘something like “bright unbear-
able reality”’) that ancient readers found in Homer, and I think she
hit her mark.
*
In contrast to Memorial, Christopher Logue’s WAR MUSIC for the
most part avoids the pathos in Homeric descriptions and represen-
tations of war and cultivates the harshness. WAR MUSIC was pub-
lished in seven instalments over 45 years, beginning with Patrocleia in
1962; continuing with Pax (1967), War Music (1981), Kings (1991),
and Husbands (1994); and ending with All Day Permanent Red
(2003) and Cold Calls (2005). (Logue died in December 2011, and
the continuation of Cold Calls on which he was working never
appeared.25) Some critics speak of WAR MUSIC as a translation,
others as an adaptation; Logue himself called his work an ‘account’
of Homer’s Iliad. Because, unlike Weil, Bespaloff, and Oswald, he did
not know Greek and based his ‘account’ on multiple translations,
perhaps it is best to think of his project as pieces of an original epic
grounded in the characters and events in the Iliad, but standing on its
own as an English poem.
Some of Logue’s most effective poetry of killing and dying is found
in his version of Iliad 17 and 18 in the 1981 volume, WAR MUSIC.
This version is titled GBH, a British legal abbreviation for Grievous
25
On the complicated publication history of WAR MUSIC, see Greenwood 2007:
175–6.

Bodily Harm caused by various forms of criminal assault and vio-
lence. A good example of this violence, and also of the Homeric
combination, in this instance, of ‘joy of battle’, on the one hand,
and pathos, on the other, can be seen in Logue’s description of the
Cretan warrior Merionez (sic) killing the Trojan youth Thackta.
Thackta corresponds to Euphorbos in the Iliad, the first man to
wound Patroklos before retreating into the battle-throng and leaving
him to be finished off by Hector (Il. 16.804–15). In Logue’s account,
Hector has left Thackta to guard the body of Patroclus while he goes
in pursuit of Achilles’ horses, but the young and inexperienced
Thackta is no match for a real warrior. As Merionez approaches the
corpse, Thackta thinks to himself:26
Thackta, get lost: he has not seen you—yet;
A child beheading parsley grass
Is all you’ll be to him, who knows—
If he can get it out—Patroclus’ corpse
Will break Achilles’ strike. . . .
So run!
But he does not. Prince Hector is his god.
Instead:
‘Cretan, get off my meat.
I got him first’ (a lie) ‘his flesh is mine . . . ’.
Merionez’ face swings up.
‘Dear God’, he thinks,
‘Who is this lily-wristed titch’?
Picking a blob of dried froth from his lips,
Locking his mud-green eyes on Thackta’s blue,
And saying: ‘Boy,
I can hear your heart.
Who hopes to hold your children on her knee?’
. . . . . . . . .
Whenever Thackta fought he wore
Slung from an oiled tendon around his neck
A cleverly articulated fish;
Each jacinth scale a moving part, each eye, a pearl.
His luck; his glittering christopher; a gift.
‘My name is Thackta, Crete’, he said,
And fingered it. (pp. 176–7)
26
Quotations of GBH are taken from Logue 1997.

In his representation of the killing of Thackta, Logue adapts Il.
17.1–60, in which Menelaos stands over the dead Patroklos to prevent
the Trojans from stripping off his armour and dragging away his
corpse, then kills Euphorbos when he tries to do so. Logue transforms
the Homeric passage to make it part of his own poem, and it is
illuminating to consider just how he does this. First of all, he replaces
Menelaos with Merionez, whose Homeric namesake, Meriones, helps
Menelaos later in Iliad 17 to carry Patroklos’ body—naked, now that
Hektor has stripped off his armour—to the ships, while the two
Ajaxes fight off the Trojans (17.722–53). The main effects of this
substitution are (1) on the Trojan side, to replace Euphorbos, an
experienced warrior who ‘had surpassed those his age / with the
spear and in horsemanship and with his swift feet; / for he actually
toppled twenty men from their chariots . . .’ (17.808–10), with
Thackta, a weak and inexperienced warrior who seems to fight less
for his own glory than as a favour to Hektor, whom he idolizes; (2) on
the Greek side, to replace Menelaos, a character known in the Iliad for
his relatively weak war-craft and a mildness almost rivalling that of
Patroklos, with a figure who fights unsentimentally and ruthlessly.
When Thackta identifies himself to Merionez, Merionez casually
informs him that he killed his brother Midon earlier in the day.
Logue is here following Homer, but with a difference: Menelaos, in
typical Homeric fashion, proudly boasts in eight lines of having killed
Euphorbos’ brother Hyperenor and thus inflicted pain on his wife
and parents (17.21–8), but Merionez speaks merely to provoke
Thackta. Thackta knows that he should wait for Hector to return
before fighting Merionez, but he is inexperienced and because of this
provocation, cannot stop himself from ineffectually hurling his only
spear. Merionez watches it approach,
Then sheared it skyward with his own.

And as that often polished leaf nosed out
Offhandedly the Cretan hero reached
For the tendon around Thackta’s neck
Then smashed his downward moving cry against his knee
And poached his eyes, and smashed and smashed
That baby face loose as a bag of nuts, and when
Young Thackta’s whimpering gained that fine, high scream
Dear to a mind inspired by fearlessness, the Cretan duke
Posted his blade between the runny lips,
Increased the number of the dead by one,

Eased his malignant vigour with a sigh,
And scratched; then snapped the thong
And wiggled Thackta’s jacinth fish
Between the sun and his heroic eye. (pp. 177–8)
Thackta’s earlier, realistic estimate of his own weakness and sense

of what Patroclus’ corpse will mean to Merionez do not overcome his
personal loyalty to Hector and sense of the role he should play as what
the Iliad might call æH
NÆ, ‘a man who goes in the front rank’
(Il. 4.480). Thackta may speak the language of Homeric flyting,27 but
he cannot back it up. Merionez’ question, ‘Who hopes to hold your
children on her knee’? and Thackta’s good luck charm, ‘a gift’, evoke
(much more briefly than Menelaos’ words at 17.21–8) a social context
in which Thackta will be missed and his death mourned (though
when Hector returns, he never even mentions it). Merionez’ casual
brutality and easy professionalism remind a reader that in the world
of war, real heroes win their glory (Œº
) by, as it were, having
Thacktas for breakfast, and the whole vignette recalls the deaths, at
the hands of greater heroes, of the Iliad’s so-called ‘little warriors’,
such as Simoeisios (4.473–89), Gorgythion (8.302–8), and Imbrios
13.170–81).28
It is interesting to compare Logue’s account of the death of Thackta
with Oswald’s treatment of the death of Euphorbas (sic), which
consists of only two lines (reduced from 45 in the Greek text):
Euphorbas died
Leaving his silver hairclip on the battlefield. (p. 64)
The silver hairclip (like Thackta’s fish) is clearly inspired by the detail
in Il. 17.52 that Euphorbos’ hair, once like that of the graces but now
bloodied, had been ‘pinched in like a wasp’s waist’ (KçŒ

) with
gold and silver, a reference, it seems, to a kind of gold spiral, used for
binding hair, that has been found in graves dating from the sub-
Mycenaean and Geometric eras (c.1125–c.1050, c.900–c.700 BCE).29
The detail is both striking and unusual (çÅŒø is found only here in
Homeric epic), and it is easy to see why it inspired both Oswald and
27
Cf. Martin 1989: 47, 68–75.
28
See Strasburger 1954, Schein 1984: 73–5, 86 nn. 18–19, Chapter 1 of this volume.
29
See Edwards 1991: 67–8 on 17.51–2.

Logue, since it is part of what makes Euphorbos and his death
distinctive. Neither poet, however, reproduces the famous simile
that follows immediately at Il. 17.53–60, which compares Euphorbos’
fall to that of an olive shoot nurtured and watered by a man, which
blossoms beautifully until a storm blows it down and it lies stretched
out on the ground—just as, in an action typical of the representation
of war in the Iliad, Menelaos kills Euphorbos who, we imagine, lies
stretched out on the Trojan plain like the tree.30 Perhaps Oswald and
Logue felt that in their short lyric lines the simile, which works so well
in Homer’s leisurely narrative, was otiose—that an extended focus on
the hair-spiral or good luck charm, evoking the cost of Euphorbas’/
Thackta’s death in human terms, would only have weakened their
poetry by gilding the lily.
*
So then, what is war, as represented in the Iliad and the Iliadic
receptions I have been discussing, good for today? Apart from the
obvious desirability of understanding the poems as well and as fully as
possible, I think that for those in the US, or any nation in which war is
a default condition of imperial self-assertion, close attention to the
personal specificity of killing and dying in the Iliad can heighten
their—our—sensitivity to, and understanding of, the human conse-
quences of the violence that we as a nation routinely inflict and suffer.
Similarly, for those who see themselves as belonging to the western
cultural tradition in which the Iliad is a foundational work and has
been paradigmatic, to think about war in the poem is to hold a kind of
ethical mirror up to our own practices and values, explicitly, as Weil
and Bespaloff do, or implicitly, in the manner of Oswald and Logue.
In a way, for English-language readers, Logue’s and Oswald’s recep-
tions can sometimes be more useful than the Iliad itself: the language
of these receptions is, mutatis mutandis, our language; the imagery,
our imagery; the killing and dying, our killing and dying. As Chris-
topher Benfey has pointed out, one ‘striking feature’ of Logue’s WAR
MUSIC is that, like Weil and Bespaloff, he refers unmistakably to
World War II, which was their war, drawing implicit parallels be-
tween that war and the Trojan War, adapting authors of that period
such as Céline, and referring to places known for exceptionally heavy
fighting in both World War I and World War II, such as ‘Fricourt,
30
Cf. Simoesios’ corpse at 4.487 (pp. 7–8).

Okinawa, Stalingrad West’, and events such as the advance of the
Russian army on Berlin.31 Similarly, Oswald’s Memorial resonates
with memorials to soldiers killed in recent and contemporary wars
and with the experience of those who mourn and remember them.
War may well, in Whitfield and Strong’s words, be ‘good for’
‘absolutely nothing’. But the Iliadic representation of war, and its recent
receptions, can have the advantage—if that is the right word—of
helping us to reflect on a war that is distant enough for us to regard it
with a kind of detachment, but close enough for us to associate it with
our own wars and ourselves. In so doing, we can, perhaps, achieve a
kind of self-recognition—a self-knowledge—that might, without these
works, never be ours.
APPENDIX
In a footnote to the first translated passage from the Iliad in Weil’s essay, a
footnote omitted by her three English translators (though it appears in
French reprints of the essay), Weil says, ‘The translation of the passages is
new. Each line translates a Greek verse, the various enjambments are scru-
pulously reproduced; the order of the Greek words within each verse is
respected as far as possible.’32 Weil’s claim of fidelity to the form and
structure of the Greek text is for the most part valid, but in at least two
crucial instances her translations are (perhaps unconsciously) tendentious
and seriously misleading. As Michael Ferber pointed out over thirty years
ago in his outstanding chapter on Weil’s essay, she makes two basic errors in
translating and discussing the scene in which Priam visits Achilles in Book 24
to ransom the corpse of Hector, a scene she discusses in connection with her
definition of the suppliant as ‘one whose life hangs entirely at the whim of
another and who for that reason is no different from a thing or a corpse’.33
Second, she omits fifteen lines from her translation of the encounter between
Achilles and Lycaon in Book 21, without indicating any ellipsis.
Weil says that when Priam appears suddenly in Achilles’ shelter, he makes
an impression on Achilles and the Myrmidons who are with him ‘like that of
a dead body’, and ‘a shudder seizes those who see him’ (pp. 6–7). Yet there is
31
Logue 2005: 10, 2003: 39–40, 45. Cf. Benfey 2005: xiii n. 5.
32
‘La traduction des passages cités est nouvelle. Chaque ligne traduit un vers grec,
les rejets et enjambements sont scrupuleusement reproduits; l’ordre des mots grecs à
l’intérieur de chaque vers est respecté autant que possible.’
33
Ferber 1981: 70.

no mention of a dead body in Homer, and ‘shudder’ (frisson) is not in the
Greek, which says, rather, that Achilles and the Myrmidons ‘were struck with
astonishment’ when they gazed at Priam (24.483 ŁÅ , 484 ŁÅÆ).
In Homer, Priam kneels at Achilles’ feet, kisses his hands, and asks for pity
and the return of Hector’s body, reminding Achilles that his own father,
Peleus, must feel his absence greatly, and that he himself is in an even worse
condition than Peleus, owing to the deaths of Hector and so many of his
other sons (24.485–506). Achilles gently pushes Priam away from him, and
with Priam huddled at Achilles’ feet, the two men weep together—Priam for
Hector, and Achilles for his father and Patroklos. Despite the tenderness of
this shared lamentation, Weil insists that Achilles treats Priam as a corpse, a
thing of no significance, and asserts that Achilles ‘with a single movement of
his hand push[es] away the old man’, as if he were an inconsequential thing
rather than a human being, because Priam lacks ‘this indefinable influence
that the presence of another human being has on us’ (p. 7). She translates
24.508, ±ł
’ ¼æÆ å Øæe I Æ
XŒÆ ªæ
Æ, as ‘Taking the old
man’s arm, he pushed him away a little’, substituting ‘a little’ (‘un peu’) for
the crucial adverb XŒÆ (‘gently’), which actually suggests that Achilles has
been moved by Priam’s appeal in the name of their shared, human fragility
and loss.34 Weil continues, ‘Achilles did not push the old man to the ground
through insensitivity (‘insensibilité’), but because he was ‘as free in his
attitudes or movements as if, clasping his knees, there were not a suppliant
but an inert object’ (p. 7). Yet there is nothing in the Greek about Achilles
pushing Priam to the ground.35 Furthermore, Weil seems to be so carried
away by her sense of the ‘thingness’ of a suppliant that she utterly ignores the
rest of the scene, in which Achilles consoles Priam for his loss, persuades him
to eat with him, and shares with him a sublime moment of mutual admir-
ation, as the two gaze in wonder at one another, before Achilles personally
lifts the corpse of Hector onto a bier and helps to place the bier on the wagon
that will carry it home to Troy (Il. 24.589–90).36
When Weil discusses the extended scene (Il. 21.34–135) in which the
Trojan prince, Lykaon, supplicates Achilles on the battlefield, and Achilles
rejects the supplication and slaughters his helpless victim (pp. 5–6), her
translation is misleading in a different way. She quotes a few lines describing
Lykaon’s fearful, hopeful supplication (21.64–6 . . . 71–2), then a few lines
describing how Lykaon heard Achilles’ ‘harsh reply’, before meeting his
34
McCarthy, as Ferber points out (71 n. 3), omits even ‘un peu’ from her
translation; Holoka translates it, and Geissbuhler silently restores the word ‘gently’,
in effect translating Homer rather than Weil.
35
Cf. Ferber 1981: 71 n. 10.
36
For a biographical explanation of Weil’s mistranslation and misreading of the
scene in terms of her own experience as a kind of (rejected) suppliant for legal
assistance on behalf of her imprisoned brother, see Rybakova 2007: 34–5.

death at the hands of his ruthless slayer (21.97–8, 114–19). Weil, however,
does not indicate the ellipsis of lines 99–113, including the crucial line,
21.106, in which Achilles responds to Lykaon’s supplication and plea to be
spared by calling him ‘friend’ (çº ) and thus acknowledging their shared
humanity and reciprocal obligations. Though Achilles goes on to slaughter
the Trojan prince, he does so not because he considers him a thing or already
a corpse, but because at this point in the poem, after the death of Patroklos,
death and mortality are all that Achilles can see in the human condition, and
the only thing that he can humanly do for Lykaon, in response to his
supplication, is to kill him, just as Patroklos was killed and as Achilles himself
will one day be cut down (21.107–13). Weil does not realize (or does not
mention) that Achilles is actually inviting Lykaon to join him in the only
human solidarity that now means anything to him, the solidarity of shared
mortality. In effect he is saying, ‘You appeal to me as a suppliant, as one with
whom you have broken bread (cf. 21.76), to show you mercy. I will do what
I can for you, I will show you the only mercy I know, I will treat you, friend,
as I treat myself: I will kill you.’ Weil quotes the lines in which Lykaon
accepts this solidarity by releasing his grip on Achilles’ spear that has stuck in
the ground, sitting back, and spreading both of his hands, before Achilles’
sword cuts through his collar bone and is buried in his body. I think that
Lykaon’s ‘spreading wide both his hands’ (å Eæ Æ / Iç
æÆ,
21.115–16), which Weil translates as ‘holding out his hands’ (‘les mains
tendus’), is best understood as a sign of acceptance (or possibly, of helpless-
ness), but Weil considers it the gesture of one who ‘is simply matter’ (‘il n’est
plus que matière’), who ‘becomes a corpse before anyone or anything touches
him’ (‘devient cadavre avant d’être touché’).37
After translating and discussing the scene between Priam and Achilles and
that between Achilles and Lykaon in the first few pages of ‘The Iliad , or the
Poem of Force’, Weil returns to both scenes later in the essay, and in each
case she partly contradicts her earlier discussion. She returns to the scene
between Priam and Achilles, when she is discussing ‘the friendship between
37
Weil, pp. 7–8. Weil may be influenced in her translation and interpretation by
the descriptions of the deaths at 4.523 and 13.549 of Diores and Thoon, each of whom
is said to ‘spread wide both hands to his dear comrades’ (¼çø å Eæ çº
Ø æ
ØØ
Æ) as he falls back from the force of a wound inflicted by an enemy who then
rushes forward and finishes him off. Cf. 14.495–6, where Ilioneus sinks to the ground,
fatally wounded by Peneleos, who proceeds to cut off his head—helmet and all. In all
four cases the warrior’s gesture of ‘spreading wide’ both hands, expressed by
Æ, immediately precedes a fatal blow, but only Lykaon is unwounded when
he makes this gesture: unlike Diores and Thoon, Lykaon has no comrades present,
and unlike Ilioneus, he ‘sits back’ and ‘spreads wide both his hands’ voluntarily, not as
the result of his injury. Richardson 1993: 63 notes that Lykaon, unlike Diores and
Thoon, has not yet been struck and interprets his gesture as one of despair.

enemies’ as ‘the purest triumph of love, the crowning grace of war’ (p. 29).
This time she quotes the lines that she omitted in her first discussion, in
which Achilles and Priam gaze admiringly at one another and ‘the distance
between benefactor and suppliant, victor and vanquished, shrinks to noth-
ing’ (p. 29). Yet even so, she still does not recognize that Priam is not
represented as a passive suppliant helplessly pleading for his life, like Lykaon
and other warriors on the field of battle, but as a father and king who may
put himself in Achilles’ power, like a suppliant, but also has much to offer
Achilles both tangibly (the ransom) and emotionally. Nor does Weil
acknowledge that she is contradicting her earlier interpretation, according
to which Priam remains a ‘thing’ ‘and the distance between him and Achilles
remains infinite’.38 She merely observes that such ‘moments of grace are rare
in the Iliad, but . . . make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has
killed and will kill again’, and she ignores the crucial, closural importance for
the entire poem of Priam and Achilles virtually adopting one another as
father and son and of Achilles’ restoration to the characteristic humanity
from which he had been dislocated in Book 1—a humanity that he expresses
by making possible the ritual lamentation and burial of Hector with which
the poem concludes.
When Weil returns to the encounter of Achilles and Lykaon (pp. 25–6),
she again quotes lines that she had previously omitted, in which Lykaon
appeals to Achilles in the name of their shared personal history, and Achilles
responds that he will kill him in acknowledgement of their human solidarity.
Nevertheless, Weil’s focus is still on Achilles’ supposed inability to respect
life in others because he has ‘castrate[d] [him]self (sic) of all yearning for it’,
unlike the gentle Patroklos, ‘who’, Weil exaggeratedly claims, ‘throughout
the Iliad commits no cruel or brutal act’ (p. 26). The scene with Lykaon, in
her view, merely shows that Achilles’ lack of generosity is a product of war
having made him into a ‘scourge of nature’ (p. 26).
Weil began to translate her favourite scenes of the Iliad a year or two
before she began to write her essay, including Hektor’s farewell to Androm-
ache in Book 6, the meeting of Achilles and Thetis in Book 18, Briseis
weeping over the corpse of Patroklos in Book 19, Achilles’ slaughter of
Lykaon in Book 21, Priam’s visit to Achilles in Book 24, and Andromache’s
lament for Hektor later in the final Book (24.723–45).39 Weil returned over
and over to translating these scenes, especially Priam’s visit to Achilles and
Achilles’ slaughter of Lykaon. No fewer than eight versions of the Lykaon
scene are extant in Weil’s dossier at the Bibliothèque Nationale, each with
minor changes intended to improve the accuracy or rhythm of the transla-
tion.40 When Jean Paulhan, the editor of Nouvelle Revue Française, in which
38 39 40
Ferber 1981: 72. Fraisse 1989: 306. Ibid.

Weil’s essay was first supposed to be published, told her that the consensus
of his advisors was that it was ‘a bit long and self-indulgent’ (‘un peu longue
et complaisante’) and would only be publishable with extensive cuts, among
the passages he marked for omission were those involving Lykaon.41 Weil,
predictably, refused to accept the proposed cuts, and the essay was published
in its entirety some months later in Les Cahiers du Sud.42
41
Ibid. 309.
42
Ibid 309. Drafts of some translations seem to date from 1937–8; the essay was
written in 1939–40. Cf. Fraisse: 306, 334–5. Holoka 2003: 107–18 gives the Greek texts
of the 78 passages from the Iliad that Weil cites or translates, with Book and line
numbers, in the order she cites them. I hope in the future to compare systematically
and in detail Weil’s draft-translations with those published in her essay, and all her
published and unpublished versions with the Greek texts and the English translations
by McCarthy, Geissbuhler, and Holoka.
I would like to thank participants and audiences at the Our Ancient Wars conference
at the University of Michigan in 2012, where I presented an initial version of this paper,
and audiences at Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Queens College (C.U.N.Y.),
UCLA, and Wesleyan University for helpful questions and suggestions. I am also
grateful to Alyssa Danigelis and Monique Jutrin for material on the life and writings
of Rachel Bespaloff and to Katherine C. King, Alex Purves, Lauri Reitzammer, and Silke-
Maria Weineck for encouragement and constructive criticism.
12
An American Homer for the

Twentieth Century
Readers of the Iliad and Odyssey in undergraduate humanities and

great books courses in the United States since the 1920s probably
outnumber all other readers since the appearance of the first printed
editions of the Homeric epics in 1488—perhaps all other readers since
the time of the Alexandrian editors. Well over a hundred thousand
students take such courses annually, and the significance of these
courses as an institutional and social context in which to read Hom-
eric poetry is the main factor in the American reception of Homer
during the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century.1 The only
rival of great books courses is in the realm of popular culture, where
films and TV ‘specials’ loosely based on (parts of) the Iliad and
Odyssey attract even larger audiences (e.g. Ulysses, Contempt, O
Brother, Where Art Thou?, Troy, The Odyssey). Other films seem to
assume some degree of familiarity with or interest in Homeric epic,
for example, The Human Stain, in which a professor is shown
discussing the Iliad with undergraduates.2 These popular receptions,
however, do not involve the same kind of engagement with the epics
themselves as do the humanities and great books courses that are the
subject of this chapter.
1
Each year perhaps another 150,000 or 200,000 undergraduates read all or parts of
the Iliad, the Odyssey, or both epics in Western literature survey courses, Classics
courses, Comparative Literature courses, and themed courses (e.g. ‘the hero’ or ‘the
epic tradition’), according to the estimate of the Executive Editor for Literature and
Director of Sales at a major American publishing house, and thousands of students in
secondary school read all or parts of these same texts annually.
2
On the politics of classical receptions in film, see Goldhill 2007.
172 An American Homer for the Twentieth Century

The great books courses I have in mind are usually taught not only
by classicists but by instructors from various humanities disciplines as
a historical sequence of texts read in translation, reflecting the ‘rise’ or
‘progress’ of Western civilization. At the same time, even the oldest of
these texts, which tend to be the Iliad and Odyssey, are considered to
embody fundamental and persisting values, not only of Western civil-
ization, but sometimes of human civilization generally. Great books
courses are usually housed institutionally outside of Classics and other
literature departments, and they are relatively unconstrained by dis-
ciplinary knowledge or developments in specialized scholarship—a
distinctively American arrangement. In British, French, German, and
Italian universities, for example, there traditionally have been no such
courses, and Homer and other classical authors have been taught, in
the original and in translation, under the auspices of Classics depart-
ments or faculties.3
In this chapter I first trace the background and history of the great
books courses, in an effort to situate the reading of the Homeric epics in
the United States during the twentieth century in a broad historical
context. Then I consider briefly the remarkable number of translations
these courses have elicited, especially since the Second World War.
Finally, I attempt to show how reading Homer in translation in these
courses, often in snippets and usually in light of such national values as
‘rugged individualism’, has affected the ways in which the Iliad and
Odyssey have been interpreted and understood by twentieth-century
American readers.
There were three main causes of the development of great books
courses in the 1920s and 1930s: first, the desire to resist the German
university model, with its specialization and professional emphasis,
that had become dominant in the United States in the final quarter of
the nineteenth century;4 second, the quest in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries to replace both ‘a sterile classicism symbol-
ized by . . . [Greek and] Latin entrance requirement[s]’5 and a major
part of the undergraduate curriculum with more vital offerings in the
‘humanities’;6 third, the changing character of the student body,
3
Cf. Stray 1998 for the history of classical curricula in British universities and
schools, 1830–1960.
4 5
Levine 1996: 45–7, Winterer 2002: 153–6, 174–8. Bell 1966: 13.
6
Winterer 2002: 118–32.
An American Homer for the Twentieth Century 173

especially at elite institutions, as the children of Catholic and Jewish
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe grew more numerous
and began to dominate intellectually.7
Until the early nineteenth century, the Iliad and Odyssey had been
read in American colleges in Greek, in selections chosen mainly for
the examples they provided of grammar and syntax, the study of
which was considered to train the mind in desirable ways. The
influential Yale University report of 1828 defended the traditional
classical curriculum against proposals for change that emphasized the
importance of scientific knowledge and the charge that a classical
education did not adequately serve the needs of students:
familiarity with the Greek and Roman writers is especially adapted to
form the taste and to discipline the mind, both in thought and diction,
to the relish of what is elevated, chaste, and simple . . . Every faculty of
the mind is employed: not only the memory, judgment, and reasoning
powers, but the taste and fancy are occupied and improved.8
By the 1820s and 1830s, however, a new generation of classical
language professors had already begun to change the way in which
Greek and Latin, especially Greek, were taught and the reasons for
which Greek authors were studied. This was the first generation to
bring the values of contemporary German scholarship to the United
States and to incorporate modern historicism into the curriculum.
Such figures as Edward Everett and Curtis Conway Felton, at Har-
vard, and Charles Anthon, at Columbia, produced numerous editions
of Greek authors, lexicons, and grammars based closely on German
models, to be used as undergraduate textbooks.9 Under the influence
of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and August Wilhelm von Schlegel,
in particular, they also infused their writings and teaching with
aesthetic appreciations of Greek literature and art. Unlike Winck-
elmann, however, who saw Greek art, especially classical Greek
sculpture, as expressing timeless, transcendent, and universal beauty
that could be known, enjoyed, and virtually worshipped, the Ameri-
can Hellenists preferred to situate works of Greek literature and art in
their historical and social contexts.10
7
See Bell 1966: 3, 19–21, 25; Glazer 1988: 271–2; Shils 1988: 228–9; Levine 1996:
57–60, 133–9.
8
Day and Kingsley 1829: 328–30, cf. Stevenson 1988: 161–2.
9 10
e.g. Everett 1826, Felton 1833, Anthon 1838. Winterer 2002: 52–7.

From the 1830s on, most students read Homer in Felton’s edition
of selected books of the Iliad, the text of which was based on that of
Friedrich August Wolf.11 Felton stated in his introduction that he
wished to ‘lead the young student to read the poem, not in the spirit of
a school boy conning a lesson to be “construed” and “parsed” . . . but
in delightful consciousness that he is employing his mind upon one of
the noblest monuments of the genius of man’. He went on, however,
to say that he hoped to ‘promote’ in his students ‘a habit of analytical
criticism’,12 and in a revised edition,13 influenced by the first volume
of Grote’s History of Greece,14 Felton devoted more attention to the
Homeric Question and the effort to place Homer in a historical
context, on the grounds that studying Homer historically helped
students to understand the poems as literature. To assist students in
cultivating their literary sensibilities, Felton included in his edition
many of Flaxman’s illustrations, which, he argued, though modern,
represented the spirit of the Homeric age and showed artistically what
Homer’s language revealed literarily. The study of art and literature
together, he claimed, would help students to understand Homer ‘in a
liberal way’.15
In the last half of the nineteenth century, the traditional undergradu-
ate liberal arts colleges, in which Felton’s approach to Homer and
Greek literature generally had flourished, were transformed by the
rise in importance of the sciences and social sciences. This transform-
ation probably originated in the ever-expanding industrialization of
the age and its concomitant utilitarianism and scientism. It was cata-
lysed from 1876 on by the founding and increasing importance of
graduate schools, with specialized doctoral programmes modelled on
and imbued with the scholarly values of German universities, including
the importance of research rather than pedagogy as the chief goal
of the university. (The first such doctoral programme was in Classics
at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University (1876), with Basil
L. Gildersleeve as Professor of Greek.) The organization of knowledge
into autonomous disciplines, organized along professional lines, was
complemented by a new system of ‘majors’ and elective courses aimed
at producing specialists even at the undergraduate level.16
11
Felton 1833 and 1848.
12
Felton 1833: iii–iv, quoted by Winterer 2002: 88–9.
13 14 15
Felton 1848. Grote 1846–9. Felton 1833: vii.
16
Levine 1996: 46–7; Winterer 2002: 152–7, 175–8; Bell 1966: 16–18.

In response to these developments, in the final quarter of the
nineteenth century the ‘humanities’ came into being as a significant
intellectual domain within the modern American college. These
‘humanities’ were no longer the traditional studia humanitatis, with
their emphasis on the Greek and Latin languages and literatures.
Rather, in the context of college curricula, the ‘humanities’ came to
mean ‘the elevating, holistic study of literature, music, and art’.17
They were distinguished from studies in the sciences and social
sciences by a categorical refusal of economic and social utility;
instead, the humanities emphasized knowledge for the sake of know-
ledge and learning as a path to inward reflection and self-cultivation.
By the turn of the century, the academic study of the humanities,
especially of Classics and even more especially of Homer, Sophocles,
and Plato now read in translation, was an important part of this
process of self-cultivation, which came to be seen as an antidote for
scientism and modernity.18
The rise of the humanities within the academy was parallel to
similar developments in American society generally. For example,
‘one of the great democratic movements of the nineteenth century’
was the development of the ‘parlor’ (living room) as a standard
feature of the middle-class American home. The parlor was ‘a testa-
ment of the family’s refinement [and] proof that they understood
how to be polite’; ‘its furnishings stood for repose, polish, economic-
ally useless knowledge, beauty, and decorative activity’ and almost
always included ‘a book-case filled with well selected and well bound
volumes’ reflecting the family’s ‘mental culture’.19 It is no accident
that Thomas Bulfinch, in The Age of Fable: or, Stories of Gods and
Heroes (1855), frequently reprinted as part 1 of Bulfinch’s Mythology
and still in print, referred to his work as ‘not . . . a study but a
relaxation from study’, ‘a Classical dictionary for the parlor . . . that
will impart a knowledge of an important branch of education’ to ‘the
reader of either sex’ who had not studied the classical languages.20 In
effect, Bulfinch aimed to democratize mythology by opening up its
mysteries to working-class and middle-class people of both sexes who
did not attend secondary schools or colleges where Greek and Latin
were studied.21 His effort to make classical mythology available to
17 18
Winterer 2002: 117. Ibid. 118–19.
19 20
Bushman 1992: 273, 251, 264, 280. Bulfinch 1979: vi, vii, viii.
21
Cleary 1993.

readers who would previously not have had access to it both parallels
the development of the parlor as an architectural and social phenom-
enon, and anticipates the general education and great books courses
of the twentieth century.
The second main reason for the rise of great books courses was not
so much academic as ideological. The earliest such course originated
at Columbia University during the First World War as a ‘war issues’
or ‘war aims’ course, and the idea spread to many other undergradu-
ate institutions. This course was actually more historical and political
than literary, more a civilization than a humanities offering. It was
sponsored by the Student Army Training Corps, a branch of the federal
government’s Committee on Education and Special Training, and it
aimed to explain to soldiers and to the general population both the
immediate and the underlying causes of the war.22 The ‘war issues’ or
‘war aims’ course reflected the Wilsonian notion of a struggle between
enlightenment and barbarism, democracy and autocracy, in which
the United States, Britain, and France were on one side and Germany
on the other, with the future of civilization itself hanging in the balance.
In The Opening of the American Mind, Leo Levine quotes from a
representative lecture by Professor Edward R. Turner: ‘the English,
more than any other people in the world, except the French and
ourselves . . . , have the humanitarian spirit, a desire for fair play and
to do what is right, to help people who are weaker than themselves, not
to take advantage of weaker people, in other words to do to others as
they would be done by’. The Germans, on the other hand, ‘carry on war
as they have in France and Belgium because the German people do not
have the humanitarian spirit of fair play, which the English, Americans,
and French do have’.23 The values of the civilization for which the
Americans, English, and French supposedly were fighting were traced
back to the Greeks, though there was an effort to avoid the German
New Humanism with which the study of Greek literature, especially
the Homeric epics, had come to be associated.24
At the end of the war, Columbia renamed its course ‘Contempor-
ary Civilization’ and added a ‘General Honors’ course, developed by
John Erskine, which began with the Iliad and Odyssey and was
primarily literary. These courses continued to serve patriotic pur-
poses, presenting Western civilization, especially the civilization of
22 23
Heckel 1919; Bell 1966: 14–15; Levine 1996: 54–7. Levine 1996: 55.
24
Gruber 1975: 214–19, 238–42.

the United States and Western Europe, as in effect the telos of world
history, or at least of all world history that counted. (Neither Con-
temporary Civilization nor General Honors included any text from an
Asian or African culture.) They blended these patriotic purposes with
the undergraduate college’s goal of combating the elective system,
which Columbia’s President, Nicholas Murray Butler, once its ardent
supporter, now accused of destroying ‘that common body of know-
ledge and sympathy which held men together in sympathetic under-
standing’. They also aimed to shape the curriculum in response to what
was, even by 1920, an increasingly diverse student population.25
This ‘diverse student population’ is the third main reason for the
development of the great books courses. There was a perceived need
to employ a revamped conception of the ‘classical’ in the effort to
acculturate the new multitudes of students, many the children of
Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe,
who owing to their low status and exclusion from ‘humanistic’
education in the countries from which they had emigrated, could
not be expected to be familiar with traditions and values that classical
literature had historically transmitted. The aim, though, was not
simply to introduce new kinds of students to texts, values, and
traditions with which they were unfamiliar, but to make these stu-
dents sufficiently Western and acculturated to take their place in at
least the lowest level of the social elite, the middle class, to which their
college educations were bound to admit them. One result was that
classical culture increasingly came to be seen by the students them-
selves as a commodity, the consumption and conspicuous display of
which could promote their upward social mobility. The power and
function of classical culture, as transmitted in great books courses, are
analogous to the role of classical curricula in social stratification in
Germany, France, and especially Britain in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.26
It is no accident that the development in the 1920s and 1930s of
great books courses, featuring classical literature and almost always
beginning with the Iliad or Odyssey, was contemporaneous with the
rise of another institution aimed at awakening, and then satisfying, a
desire for the classics and for books generally as a marker of middle
class culture and social status. I refer to the ‘sets’ of classics sold to the
25 26
Levine 1996: 58, 184 n. 6. Stray 1998: 30–45.

general public and to the book clubs that sprang up in the 1920s and
1930s, with the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Readers’ Guild
leading the way. As Janice Radway has pointed out, the classics
were classics because their legitimacy and, as it were, their educational
and moral use value had been established by accepted educational
and religious authorities. They gained additional ‘symbolic weight’
not only from their connection with these same authorities, but
because they ‘came to be associated conceptually with the sort of
people who could afford to buy them’ and to attend the colleges
where they were read.27 This ‘sort of people’ used the classics in
their homes virtually as a component of interior decoration, to
demonstrate to themselves and others their status as well educated,
economically well off, and socially well placed. They displayed them
in attractive, uniformly bound sets that could be shelved conspicu-
ously in a place of honour in their living rooms,28 like Bulfinch’s
‘Classical Dictionary for the parlor’. The prototype of such sets was
the Harvard Classics, the famous ‘five-foot shelf ’ of books first sold by
Harvard University in 1909, with a general introduction by Harvard’s
President, Charles W. Eliot, one of the country’s leading cultural
critics. Early advertisements for this set emphasized not only the
educational but the economic advantages of reading the classics for
even fifteen minutes a day: ‘Do you know how much more you could
do and earn if you gave yourself a real chance? . . . You can get from
these “Harvard Classics” the culture, the knowledge of men and life,
and the broad viewpoint that can alone win for you an outstanding
and solid success.’29 The actual content of this ‘knowledge’ and ‘broad
viewpoint’ that could lead to upward mobility were not specified but
taken for granted, in the same way it was taken for granted in great
books courses that one should read the Iliad and Odyssey through the
lenses of contemporary American values. In both cases, the classics
were mass-marketed as fetishized commodities whose inherent
power, mystique, or ‘aura’, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, could
help readers fulfil their most ardent individual and social desires.30
Many book clubs, including the Book-of-the-Month Club and the
Readers’ Guild, were less interested in marketing the classics, which
27 28
Radway 1997: 163. Ibid. 147–51.
29
Ibid. 146. Radway quoting from the advertisement in American Magazine,
February 1926: 195.
30
Benjamin 1969: 221–3, 245 n. 5; Radway 1997: 166, 376 n. 42.

after all were finite in number, especially when sold in sets, than in
arousing and satisfying a desire in their subscribers for new books, of
which there was a potentially endless quantity. Nevertheless, a sur-
prising number of book clubs did emphasize the classics, including
the top of the line Heritage Book Club and the somewhat less showy
Walter J. Black Classics Book Club and Carleton Book Club (to both
of which my own parents subscribed and whose books they displayed
on our shelves as a marker of their hard-won status as members of the
first college-educated, middle-class generation in their families).
These books were certainly intended for display as much as for
reading. They often were gilt-edged, with gold-tooled leather boards
and gilt lettering on the spine, though sometimes there was a budget
version in cloth; the books of the Heritage Book Club also came in
distinctive slip cases.
The Iliad and Odyssey were always among the earliest offerings of
these classically oriented book clubs. They also were featured in
Mortimer Adler’s and Robert M. Hutchins’s Great Books of the
Western World, which included 443 individual works by 74 authors
in 54 large, double-columned volumes. This canonical set was pub-
lished by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and sold door-to-door like the
encyclopaedia, along with Adler’s Syntopicon, an index and guide to
the main philosophical and moral ideas in the Great Books.31 It is no
accident that this collection was a by-product of the institution of
great books courses by Hutchins, Adler, and Richard McKeon at the
University of Chicago and by Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan at
St. Johns College, Annapolis, in 1937—courses that were based on
Columbia’s General Honors course. Like the ‘Humanities A’ course
instituted at Columbia in 1937, these great books offerings were year-
long general education courses required of all first-year students. (At
St. Johns a canonical set of great books, of Western classics, was, and
still is, prescribed for all students for all four years.)32 These general
education courses were widely copied and, like the Harvard Classics
and the sets of books sold by classically oriented book clubs, they
appealed to the middle-class desire for culture both for its own sake
and for the sake of the status to which it contributed and testified.
Perhaps this is why at Columbia, Humanities A came to be known as
31 32
Adler 1952. Bell 1966: 14–15, 26–7; Levine 1996: 47–53.

Literature Humanities, abbreviated Lit. Hum, thus suggesting Oxford
University’s Literae Humaniores.33
The translations of the Iliad and Odyssey offered by these book
clubs, perhaps because they required no permission fees, were almost
invariably the Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers or the
Samuel Butler Iliad and the Andrew Lang and Samuel H. Butcher, the
Samuel Butler, or the George H. Palmer Odyssey. Random House’s
Modern Library, not actually a book club but a budget-priced series of
literary and philosophical classics aimed at a working- and middle-
class audience, was exceptional because it included not only the Lang,
Leaf, and Myers Iliad and the Lang and Butcher Odyssey, available in
individual volumes and in one Modern Library ‘Giant’ with an
introduction by Gilbert Highet, but also the verse translations by
the South Carolinian poet and classicist Ennis Rees.
In the United States in the twentieth century, the production of
new translations of Homer was largely a by-product of the continuing
popularity of great books courses in undergraduate colleges, either as
required components of general education curricula or as a common
means by which students could satisfy ‘distribution’ or ‘breadth’
requirements intended to guarantee that even if they specialized in
areas outside the humanities, they would have some ‘exposure’ to the
so-called ‘masterpieces’ of Western literature, culture, and thought.
Given the large number of students reading the Homeric epics in
these courses, the sufficiently widespread adoption of a particular
translation as a textbook can be responsible for sales of many thou-
sands of copies per year. Since the end of the Second World War, no
fewer than ten new translations of the Iliad and fifteen of the Odyssey
have been published in the United States, most of them conceived,
commissioned, and marketed at least partly with sales to undergradu-
ate readers in mind. These translations include versions of both
poems by Ennis Rees, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert
Fagles, Stanley Lombardo, Rodney Merrill, Edward McCrorie, Barry
Powell, and Stephen Mitchell, as well as versions of the Odyssey alone
by Albert Cook and Alan Mandelbaum. The introductions to these
translations and the notes, glossaries, and indexes are addressed
primarily to student readers. In addition, since the publication in
1976 of Malcolm Willcock’s Companion to Lattimore’s translation
33
Wilson 2005.

of the Iliad,34 it is not unusual for other translations to be accompan-
ied by similar student aids; there also are a variety of ‘course notes’ or
‘study guides’ intended to help students pass examinations and write
papers on the poems (without necessarily reading them). Some of
these translations, such as those of Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and Fagles,
have also been marketed to non-academic general readers in trade
editions, but I suspect that, at least from a publisher’s viewpoint, they
were meant in the first place for undergraduates.
It is striking that almost all the American translations of the
Homeric epics have been in verse, while most British versions since
the Victorian period, including those of Lang et al., Butler, T. E. Shaw,
William Rouse, Emile Rieu, Walter Shewring, and Martin Hammond,
have been in prose. This may have something to do with the fact that
the majority of British translations are aimed mainly at non-academic
general readers, whose familiarity with the novel may have been
thought to make a prose translation of the Iliad or Odyssey more
accessible and satisfying than one in verse.35 On the other hand,
most American translations since the Second World War have
been intended primarily for students in humanities and great books
courses, where epic as a genre is clearly distinguished from the novel,
of which prose is a major defining characteristic. Furthermore, in the
United States, poetry in and of itself is a sign of high culture and helps
to confer the status that great books courses aim to provide.
When the Iliad and Odyssey are read in great books courses, they
are all too often decontextualized and de-historicized. Except when
classical scholars teach these courses—and not always then—there is
little or no attempt to understand the poems as end products of a long
oral tradition or to situate them in a late eighth- to early seventh-
century historical and cultural context. Instead, they are taught in
relation to other books in these courses, as if they possessed, in
common with these texts, timeless literary and ethical qualities that
make them examples and expressions of the enduring values of
Western culture and civilization. Perhaps the element of the poems
most distorted by such decontextualizing is the Olympian gods, who
are rarely considered in light of a ‘cosmic history’ recoverable from
the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and the
34
Willcock 1976.
35
But cf. Verity 2011, a verse translation intended for general readers.

fragments of the epic cycle.36 As a result, relations between divinity
and humanity in the Iliad and Odyssey tend to be interpreted ana-
chronistically, for example in terms of fate and free will, and the
actual connections between divinity, fate, nature, and poetic narrative
are obscured.
As John Guillory says, ‘By suppressing the context of a cultural
work’s production and consumption’, the great books courses create
‘the illusion that [a] culture . . . is transmitted simply by contact with
the works themselves’.37 A Homeric epic, however, as taught in these
courses, does not primarily express ‘a culture of Western civilization’ or
even what might be considered ‘Homeric values’. Rather, it expresses
the culture and values of the educational institutions that offer the
courses—institutions that, like similar institutions at least since ancient
Rome, have endowed certain works with canonical status and their
readers with social power by including them in their curricula.38 The
student who, through the nineteenth century, read Homer in Greek
garnered a particular kind of cultural capital, which was one marker of
upper-class status. Nowadays, the great books courses, where the
reading is done in translation, provide a watered-down version of
such cultural capital for a far larger number of middle-class and
would-be middle-class readers.
It is not surprising, given the origins of great books courses as
courses in ‘War Aims’ or ‘War Issues’, that even while they express
the culture of the educational institutions in which they are offered,
they also have been taught in ways that help to construct or reinforce
a national culture and national ideology. In part this mode of inter-
pretation springs from the assumption that the United States in the
twentieth century was, as it were, the goal towards which Western
civilization had been tending. Given this assumption, it makes sense
that American ‘core values’, especially those having to do with indi-
vidual rights and freedoms, should be identified with or projected
onto the values in the books taken to be the ‘core’ of Western culture.
Therefore, in reading and teaching these works in great books or
‘core’ courses, students and teachers all too often find themselves
discovering and affirming supposed national values and the actions
that follow from them.
36
See Graziosi and Haubold 2005: 35–93.
37 38
Guillory 1994: 43. Ibid. 51.

For example, there is frequently a tendency, when teaching the
Iliad, to see the individual warrior vs. the community or society as
the main theme of the poem and to privilege the individual over the
community or society. This is a projection of the ‘rugged individual-
ism’ that is supposed to be a distinctively American value (though the
focus of Western liberal culture has always been on the individual). In
any case, the privileging of the individual distorts the Homeric epics,
in which the values and actions of individual heroes are not only, or
not so much, in opposition to those of the community as they are the
community’s values and actions taken to an extreme. In other words,
individual heroic values are social values. Even when Achilles in Book
9 of the Iliad calls some of them into question and in so doing seems
to stand against the ‘community’ or ‘society’ of the Greek army, he
does so because, as the warrior-hero par excellence, he paradoxically
takes social and communal values more seriously than do others in
the army, and in that way he is more, not less, social. To put it in
Greek terms, Achilles is characterized as much by philotês (‘friend-
ship’, ‘social solidarity’) as by mênis (‘wrath’), and it is simplistic to
view him one-dimensionally as an individual hatefully opposed to the
community. Rather, his hatred of Agamemnon and intense solidarity
with Patroklos are expressions of his philotês manquée. Nevertheless,
especially because in great books courses lengthy works like the Iliad
are often read in selections, the emphasis is frequently placed on
Achilles’ individual emotions and actions in Books 1, 9, and 24,
with the result that the community to which he belongs is relatively
neglected.
The ideological and institutional assumptions of great books
courses invite this kind of simplification, as they invite the ‘timeless’
approach of which I spoke earlier. In both cases students are invited
or taught to read with complacency grounded in the assumption that
the poem and its values are transparently familiar and recognizably
contemporary. The problem is especially acute, because many
teachers of great books courses are not classicists and find it difficult
to historicize their treatment of Homeric epic.
If an emphasis on contemporaneity and on the individual leads to
one kind of simplification and misunderstanding of Homeric epic,
another quite different way of simplifying the Iliad and Odyssey in
great books courses springs from the desire of many instructors,
especially non-classicists from modern literature departments, for a
single, progressive narrative that will unify the course and help it

make sense to themselves and their students. They yearn for a story of
successive shifts in themes, values, and narrative modes, for example
from Homer (honour and shame) to Vergil (empire and colonization)
to Dante (Christianity) to the novel (modernity, economics, social
stratification). Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Epic
and Novel’ are favourite sources for such unifying narratives. As a
result, generations of students have been told, wrongly, that in Homeric
epic ‘nothing is left in darkness or unexternalized’, there is no narrative
perspective or depth, and all phenomena take place in ‘a brightly and
uniformly illuminated’ foreground, an ‘exclusive present’;39 or that epic,
in contrast to the novel, is too unsophisticated a genre to ‘incorporate
extraliterary heteroglossia’, to be ‘critical and self-critical’, to expose
the dichotomy between ‘man[‘s] . . . surface and his center, between his
potential and his reality’.40 The urge for a historical narrative in which
to situate the various texts in a great books course, including the Iliad
and Odyssey, can generate just as simplistic a misunderstanding of
Homeric poetry as a presumption of the supposedly timeless qualities
of the poems or an over-emphasis on the individual.
The Iliad and Odyssey, like almost every book read in a typical great
books course, in their own time called into question, or problem-
atized, the institutions and values of the cultures they represented and
those in which they were created, whether to subvert or, in the end, to
reaffirm and reinforce them. When, however, these works are
absorbed into a tradition and established as part of a canon, they
lose their critical edge, in part because their value now seems self-
evident. In the United States, at least in great books courses in which
they are usually read in only a week or two, the Homeric epics are
typically transformed into documents at the beginning of a progress
toward (and justification of) ‘our’ own supposed Western values and
selves, especially when, as all too often happens, they are studied as
part of a series of texts in relation to one another, with insufficient
attention to the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they
were produced. Thus, at the most simple-minded level, students may
be invited to view Achilles in the Iliad as ‘selfish’, unpatriotic, and
therefore in the wrong, without considering what selfishness or
patriotism might and might not mean in the world of the poem, or
whether the epic represents or implies different notions of right and
39 40
Auerbach 1953: 2, 3, 5. Bakhtin 1981: 7, 10, 34–5.

wrong from the students’ own, or whether right and wrong are even
relevant categories of analysis and interpretation.
The Odyssey as taught in great books courses can be subject to
similar ideological or self-serving interpretations. For example, Odys-
seus’ destruction of the Suitors is seen as indicating not only his
individual prowess but also a conception of social justice that allows
so massive an assault by a heroic individual on a community, when it
is done in defence of the hero’s own property—his wife, his home, his
herds, and his kingdom. It is not too far-fetched to say that the
Odyssey, as taught in the typical great books or Western humanities
course, is the earliest extant work in support of private property as an
institution and of heroism as intimately bound up with the defence of
this institution.41 In such a reading, Penelope’s loyalty to Odysseus
and resourceful protection of his property and Telemachos’ inherit-
ance, along with Telemachos’ own growing awareness within the
poem of the need to defend his right to this inheritance, are further
expressions of the principle of private property. In a great books
course, Book 24 is an appropriate ending of the poem mainly because
it is necessary to establish that the gods really do endorse Odysseus’
unprecedented defiance of communal norms in the interest of a
(higher?) justice that allows him to get away with killing 108 Suitors,
although, as he tells Telemachos at 23.117–22, usually when someone
kills even a single man, he must go into exile.42
It would be possible to interpret Odysseus’ slaying of the Suitors
differently, for example, by foregrounding Athene as an instrument of
Zeus (as in the Oresteia), who helps Odysseus to take vengeance in
order to establish a new kind of justice. In a great books course,
however, such a reading, which subordinates the individual to the
purposes of divinity, would be putting the cart before the horse.
The poem is never more American than when Odysseus inflicts on
the Suitors ‘frontier justice’ and shows by successful defence of his
private interests that he has god on his side. In an essay first published
in 1956, reprinted several times, and frequently drawn on by
teachers of great books courses, George E. Dimock, Jr., elucidates
the meaning of Odysseus’ name by comparing him to ‘a character in
a[n American] western movie’ who introduces himself by saying, ‘Just
call me Trouble, stranger’, identifying himself as ‘a hostile type who
41 42
Porter 1962: 15–16. Ibid. 18.

makes trouble for other people, and so presumably for himself also’.43
Similarly, Howard Porter in his Introduction to a 1962 paperback
reprint of the George H. Palmer translation, compares the Ionian
society represented in the poem to that of the ‘Wild West’, presum-
ably with Odysseus as the ‘fastest gun’, and says of Homer, ‘The
experience of his own people worked on him—as the frontier on
the American writers of the nineteenth century.’44
In Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and
Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, David Denby
quotes Columbia Professor Edward Tayler as asking the students
(both male and female) in his section of the Literature Humanities
course, ‘You are all Telemachus, aren’t you’?45 Denby’s book is a
paean to great books courses as featuring works whose power sup-
posedly exists and makes itself felt independent of any ideology or
interpretation. Yet Denby himself proudly asserts that ‘[t]he great
thing about Western culture is that any American’—and here he
actually is speaking of African-Americans!—‘can stand on it, or on
some small part of it. In this country we take what we want and mix it
with our own composition.’46
As typically taught, great books courses are both democratic and
undemocratic: they are free from the constraints and technical know-
ledge of any particular discipline and reflect an ideology of ‘liberal
education’, of knowledge and culture that are open and accessible to
all; at the same time, they take for granted, as pre-texts, traditional
American myths and (supposed) Western values, and in this way they
are highly constrained and illiberal.47 Great books courses transform
the Homeric epics (and other required texts) from works that in their
own historical and cultural contexts had problematized or challenged
traditional institutions and values, into ‘masterpieces’ that, as part of a
tradition, all too easily lose their edge and become simplistically
affirmative expressions of ‘our’ ‘Western’ cultural heritage. All too
often this transformation mystifies the role of the educational insti-
tution in which a given course is taught (and often required) in the
production and consumption of cultural capital and encourages
students to read complacently and uncritically.
43 44
Dimock 1956: 57, cf. 67–8, 70. Porter 1962: 17, 19.
45 46
Denby 1996: 76. Ibid. 462.
47
I owe this insight and wording to Emily Greenwood.

Great books courses continue to flourish in American colleges and
universities. At Columbia, where it all started, the Columbia Univer-
sity Bulletin, the official voice of the university, on the seventy-fifth
anniversary of the General Honors course referred to its great books
courses as its ‘signature, its intellectual coat of arms’.48 A Google
search for ‘great books courses’ yielded 106,000,000 ‘hits’, including
the Great Books Foundation, the electronic journal Teaching Great
Books, and the Top 100 Books Club. There also is an Association for
Core Texts and Courses, which, like academic disciplinary associ-
ations, holds annual meetings with a programme spread over several
days and is devoted to the pedagogy of the great books.
Given the continuing popularity and prevalence of great books
courses in American undergraduate education, what can be done to
improve the teaching of the Homeric epics? One answer is that teachers
should take time, even when there are only a few classes in which to
‘cover’ the Iliad or Odyssey, to help students understand historically
how and why it and the other texts in the course became ‘great books’.
This might productively involve a discussion of Aulus Gellius’ well-
known appropriation of the socioeconomic term classicus for the best
kind of writer—classicus adsiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius
(‘some first-class, land-owning writer, not a proletarian one’, Noctes
Atticae 19.8.15). It also would touch on the subsequent history of the
words ‘classic’ and ‘classical’ in relation to educational institutions.49
A historically informed discussion of the words ‘class’ and ‘culture’,
along the lines sketched by Raymond Williams in Keywords, also
would be productive.50 Even brief consideration of the meanings and
histories of these words might help students to read with historical
awareness and critical engagement. Finally, an emphasis on the con-
flicting values and discourses within the Iliad and Odyssey would help
both teachers and students to resist the simplistic, one-dimensional
interpretations often fostered by great books courses, and to engage
with the complex, challenging poems whose meanings are not simply
given but historically contingent and constructed, the poems that in
different ways belong to many cultural heritages.51
48
Columbia University Bulletin 1996–7: 46, quoted in Eng 1998: 21 n. 1.
49 50
See Schein 2007: 76–81. Williams 1983: 60–9, 87–93.
51
I would like to thank Emily Greenwood for detailed comments and criticism
that improved this essay. I also am grateful to Caesar Adams, Penelope Adams, Nancy
Felson, Barbara Graziosi, and Emily Wilson for their encouragement and suggestions.
Bibliography of Works Cited and Consulted
Abbreviations
AJPh American Journal of Philology
BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
BMCRev Bryn Mawr Classical Review
CCJ Cambridge Classical Journal
CJ Classical Journal
ClAnt Classical Antiquity
CPh Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity
G&R Greece & Rome
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HSPh Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
PP La Parola del passato
TAPhA Transactions of the American Philological Association
TLS Times Literary Supplement
WHB Wiener humanistische Blätter
WS Wiener Studien
YClS Yale Classical Studies
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Index of Passages
Aeschylos/Aischylos Euripides
Prometheus Bound Medea
755–70 109 450 71 n.41
907–27 109 ‘fragmentum dubium’ (Bernabé 1996:
947–59 109 85–6)
Apollodoros 11 99 n.14, 115
The Library Hesiod
2.6.1 48 Catalogue of Women
2.7.7 48, 48 n.12 fr. 43(a).87 102 n.17
3.13.5 108 fr. 204.98–103 58–9
Apollonios of Rhodes Theogony
Argonautika 23 99 n.14, 115
4.790–8 108 76 69 n.32
200 67 n.30
Archilochos 205–6 67 n.28
fr. 175.2 106 n.26 319 99 n.14, 101–2, 102 n.17, 102
fr. 179 106 n.26 n.18, 115
Aulus Gellius 322 102 n.18
Noctes Atticae 19.8.15 187 572–84 61 n.19
Cavafy, Constantine 897–900 109 n.30
‘Priam’s Night Journey’ Works and Days
1–44 137–9 148 44
3 143 158–9 44
6–8 143 159–60 59
13 141 159–73 59
13–27 142 161–5 59
13–28 144 167–8 59
14–20 141 192–3 106 n.27
16–17 147 276–80 106
17–18 142, 147 751 99 n.14, 115
19 142, 145 Homer
20 142, 145 Iliad
21–4 143 Book 1
25 143 1 112
27–28 145 2 113 n.38
28 142 4–5 144
29 144 5 106 n.26
31 144 7 100
32 144 48 53
33 144 49 53
35 144 54–5 110
36 145 168 114
37 146 387 104
37–41 146 396–406 43, 60, 109
37–42 147 414 71
39–42 147 417 18–19, 19 n.20
43–4 147 555–9 108
208 Index of Passages

Homer (cont.) 382–415 72
590–4 69 n.35 427–8 14
603 53 n.22 437–8 14
Book 2 441–7 14
246 99, 114 504 14
266 7 n.4, 16 559–60 9 n.7
475 114 571 114
548 69 n.32 642 46
764 18 800–8 90 n.15
764–6 16 n.12 820 69 n.32
Book 3 884–7 72, 74
26 7 n.4, 16 Book 6
39–57 83 2 102, 114
45 77 3 102
53 7 n.4, 16 45–65 62
54 77 179 102 n.17
64 77 182 102 n.17
71 83, 84 n.2 430 7 n.4, 16
71–5 83 496 7 n.4, 16
92 83 Book 7
92–4 83 86 15 n.10
142 17 n.16 178–80 13 n.5
161–243 155 201–5 13 n.5
186 69 n.33 Book 8
97–301 13 n.5 80–8 20 n.25
319–23 13 n.5 156 7 n.4, 16
374 69 n.32 185–97 18
424 67 190 7 n.4, 16
Book 4 214 12
34–6 29 302–8 164
107–8 70 350 105 n.24
128 69 n.32 Book 9
237 17 n.16 258 87
384–98 90 n.15 261 87
473–489 5–9, 164 297 87
474 16 303 87
477–8 158 379–87 87–8, 87 n.12, 88 n.13
477–9 7 n.5 380 87 n.12
480 165 394 99, 114
485–6 158 482 114
515 69 n.32 523 87 n.12
523 168 n.37 Book 10
Book 5 259 7 n.4, 16
1–2 40, 41 n.5 285–90 90 n.15
49 8 n.6 314 24, 24 n.32
115–20 62 317 114
131 69 n.32 338 12
234 18 402–4 16 n.12
234–5 30 437 16 n.12, 18
265–6 77 n.53 549 114
266–7 16 n.12 Book 11
312 69 n.32 1–2 41 n.5
376–80 72 16–45 61

130–47 62 115–18 73 n.44
161 18 187–99 60
269–73 37 383 44 n.10
336 12 413 12
371–2 16 585 114
414 7 n.3, 16 Book 16
531–7 25 3 17
564 90 11 17 n.16
Book 12 17–18 88 n.13
23 59, 59 n.12 21–2 56 n.4
310–28 5 n.2,120, 122 140–4 42 n.7
436 12 143–4 21 n.26
Book 13 150 16 n.12
8–19 66 154 16 n.12
15–16 105 n.24 154 19
27–9 66 329 102 n.17
29–30 25 381 22 n.26
170–81 164 431 105 n.24
178–81 9 n.7 431–3 19 n.22
180 17 n.16 450 19 n.22
206–7 74 n.46 457 16
358–60 11 n.2 459–61 19 n.22
359 2 467–71 19
389–93 9 n.7 476 19
434–9 15 482ff. 9 n.7
436–44 9 n.7 627 114
442–4 15 662 12
481–2 56 n.4 675 16
549 168 n.37 791–2 23
553 17 n.16 793–9 24
831–2 144 804–15 162
Book 14 867 21 n. 26
4 7 n.4, 16 Book 17
170–87 61 1–60 163
190 69 21–8 163, 164
193 69 n.32 52 164
194 69 53–8 9 n.7
198–9 61 53–60 165
211 67 132–7 160 n.23
212–13 69 194–6 21
214–15 61 213–14 62
214–17 67 n.28 270–80 11
224 69 n.32 282 7 n.4, 16
251 46 301–3 7 n.5
359 12 316–32 11
406 17 n.16 342–3 11
414–20 9 n.7 384–422 11
442–8 8 n.6 400–1 11, 12, 12 n.3
489–93 8 n.6 401–11 12–13, 13 n.4
495–6 168 n.37 413 13
Book 15 416–19 13
12 105 n.24 419 13
113 7 n.4, 16, 17 420–2 13–14

Homer (cont.) 82 99, 114
424–5 14 91 69 n.32
426 17, 20 n.25 175 104
426–55 11, 12, 23 n.29 321 17
426–53 23 n. 29 323 17 n.16
429–33 20 369–83 62
432 15 n.10 388–91 42 n.7
432–40 14–15 390–1 21 n.26
437–40 17 n.17, 18 399–403 18
437–8 17 405–6 20, 23, 24
438–9 24 409 20, 20 n.25, 23
439 16, 17, 18 416–17 20, 20 n.25, 23
439–40 20 421–2 23
441 22 Book 20
441–7 17 101 12
443–4 21, 21 n.26 164–74 160 n.23
443–7 18–19, 19 n.21 303–6 75 n.50
444 16 n.12 308 75 n.50
446 19 n.20 463 8 n.6
446–7 19 n.22 495–502 18, 24–5
456 20 502–3 25, 25 n.34
457–8 20 Book 21
543 12 16 12
670 18 34–135 25 n.34, 57, 167
676 145 21.37–8 158
695–6 17 64–6 167
696 7 n.3, 16 71–2 167
722–53 163 76 168
736 12 97–8 168
739 44 n.10 99–113 168
740 12 106 168
808–10 163 107–13 168
Book 18 114–19 168
17 17 115–16 68
23–4 17 122–7 157–8
54 18, 22–3 308–15 8 n.6
54–60 74 356 44 n.10
59–62 23 416 69 n.32
83–5 21 441–57 110
84–5 71 483 114
85 71 n.41, 107 575 99, 100, 101, 114
88–90 107 Book 22
104 25, 74 n.48 136–75 144
117–19 46 139–44 145
235 17 147ff. 9
318–22 158–160, 160 n.23 155–6 9
319 159 n.22 169–76 19 n.22
429–41 21–22 188–207 144
430–4 107–8 188–93 145
432–4 70–71 305 145
609 61 308–10 144, 145
Book 19 340–1 87
77 104 345–54 88–9

346 87 n.11 112–16 110
346–7 106 133–7 13
346–8 29 139 89
348–53 87, 89 147 89
354–5 144 176 89
357 14 196 89
359 23 n.31 205 14
395 104 n.23 212–14 29
410–11 9 228–64 143
431 18 229 142
431–2 71 234–5 142
464–5 20 235–6 142
481 71 236–7 143
Book 23 248–64 141, 143
65 18 25–50 110
72 160 n.24 328 146 n.14
76 101, 114 343–4 146, 147
104 160 n.24 351 143 n.12
105 18 355 147
185 69 n.32 358–60 147
221 18 360 146
222–5 160 n.23 362–3 146
277 16 n.12 364 147
277–8 21 n.26 365 147
280–2 17 n.17 375–6 147
283–4 18, 20, 423 101, 114
20 n.25, 24 483 167
306 99, 101, 114 484 167
307 21 n.26 485–506 167
397 7 n.4, 16 508 167
402–17 18 521 14
542 104 555–6 90
582–5 21 n.26 560–1 90
720 44 n.10 568–70 90
760 101, 101 n.15, 114 572 90
Book 24 579 89
1–21 103–5 583–6 90
6 17 589–90 167
9 16 594 89
221 104 n.23 628–33 155
24–6 110 695 143 n.12
25–30 110 707–8 143
31 104, 143 n.12 709 7 n.4
33–5 105 723–45 169
34–54 105 728ff. 9
35 101, 103, 106, 114 753 101, 103 n.20,
41–3 159 n.22 114, 115
42–5 105–6 794 7 n.4, 16
44–5 106 Odyssey
54 104 n.23 Book 1
58–63 107, 108–9, 111 1–2 113
60 101, 103, 107, 111, 114 3 36 n.19
74–6 110 7 37

Odyssey (cont.) 559 36 n.19
10 69 n.32 Book 9
18 46 71 44 n.10
62 37 n.22, 56 n.4 105–15 28 n.4
71–2 35 n.18 107–11 31
100 61 n.18 110–11 33
203–4 87 n.10 112–15 31
241 101, 115 125–30 31
261–64 50 161–8 33
262 53 175–6 28, 49
262–3 51 196–211 33
390 115 234 31 n.9
Book 2 251 31 n.9
409 44 n.10 270–1 36
445 30 n.6 275–8 28 n.4
Book 3 281–6 32
113–7 87 n.10 292–3 29
337 69 n.32 296–8 32
378 69 n.32 297 33, 87
Book 4 302 32, 32 n.13
227 69 n.32 319–20 30 n.7
343 104 347–62 32
508 70 n.36 357–8 33
556 16 363–7 32
684 115 366 33
705 16 382–3 30 n.7
Book 5 382–94 31
1–2 40, 41 n.5 403–14 34
50 70 n.36 405–6 34
191 14 408 34
234–5 30 410–11 34
236 30 n.7 412 35
5.272 115 414 34
318 70 n.36 415 37
340 37 n.22 449 17 n.16
400 114 473 114
476–8 30 n.7 475–9 36
477 30, 30 n.6 478 36
Book 6 478–9 36
66 16 502–5 37, 38
120–1 28, 49 Book 10
229–37 47 116–24 29 n.5
294 114 201 17
Book 7 409 17
192 115 415 115
216–21 47 457 17
Book 8 495 146
219–20 50 521 74
223–8 47 536 74
308 69 n.32 570 17
362 67 Book 11
554 115 5 17

29 74 378 104
49 74 476 44 n.10
83 160 n.24 Book 17
121–37 35 n.18 134 104
171–3 131–2 381 101, 115
197–203 132 399 101, 115
207 146 473–6 47
213 160 n.24 565 14
217 69 n.32 Book 18
238–52 64–5 2 47
391 17 7 84
466 17 34–41 84
476 160 n.24 44–9 81–2
601–2 44, 45 46 82–3, 84 n.2, 85
602 160 n.24 53–4 47
602–3 46 60 44 n.10
602–4 46 83 82–3, 85
618–21 45 83–7 82
622–6 45 100 84, 84 n.6
Book 12 105 114
12 17 105–50 101, 114
14–15 16 130–1 19 n.22
28 14 140 115
47 115 150 115
181 114 235–42 84
280 14 282 86
265–6 70 n.36 405 44 n.10
357 17 n.16 Book 19
Book 13 186 44 n.10
96 35 n.18 253 114
102 30 n.7 282–6 86
102–4 31 n.8 293–5 86
116–23 30 406–9 56 n.4
201–2 28, 49 407–9 37 n.22
215 86 413–66 51
276 44 n.10 472 16
296–302 35 518–22 40
355–60 31 n.8 Book 20
359 69 n.32 42 114
372–3 30, 30 n.7 61 69 n.32
Book 14 74 16
138–41 87 n.10 77 101, 115
323–5 86 274 114
371 101, 115 277–8 52
Book 15 344 115
195–7 52 Book 21
277 115 1–4 41
329 14 4 52
Book 16 9 51
16 17 11–41 41
172–6 47 21 51
332 17 n.16 22 48, 48 n.12

Odyssey (cont.) 45–6 67
24 52 47–52 68
27–9 49 49 67
32 48 53 58
35 52 56 67
35–6 49 65 67
55–6 41 69–74 66
130 44 n.10 73 58
135 46 80 77
258–9 52 81 69
295–304 40 81–3 69
410–11 53 86 61
428–30 50 88–90 61
Book 22 107 69
5 46 107–11 69
19–20 50 117 69 n.34
45–59 86 121 69 n.34
48–9 86 130–40 62
56–9 86 139–42 63
57 87 143 58, 62
59 87 n.12, 90 143–4 63
60–7 90 155 67
61–4 86, 87–8, 87 n.11 158–9 63
61–7 85–6 162–5 62–3
62 87 n.12 164 64
205 69 n.32 166–7 76
354 44 n.10 170 65
447 17 175 69 n.34
Book 23 187–90 74
101 44 n.10 188 73
117–22 185 189 74
133–51 85 191 69
156–62 47 196–7 75, 77
173–204 30 198–9 56, 71, 75
190–1 30 n.7 199 70
195 30 n.7 200 56 n.4
204 30 n.7 202–17 76
248 46 218–38 41, 76
295–6 30 213 69 n.34
350–1 46 247–55 65
Book 24 249–51 70
82 15 n.10 252–3 68, 68 n.31
316–7 17 n.17 252–5 70
502 69 n.32 254 66 n.27
Homeric Hymns 256–85 65
To Aphrodite 286–8 68
1 69 n.34 288–90 56
2 58 290 65
2–6 65 To Apollo
9 69 n.34 2–13 53 n.23
16–17 61 n.18 36 99 n.14, 103 n.20,
17 67 114, 115
45 58 195 69 n.32

To Demeter Oswald, Alice
17 99 n.14, 103, 115 Memorial 156–60
67 14 n.7
Pindar
231–74 73
Isthmian 8
349–55 72–73
26–48 21 n.26, 22
452 99 n.14, 102–3, 115
27–38 109
457 14 n.7
8.36a 22
476 56
8.37 74 n.47
484 56
Olympian 13
485–6 56
90 102 n.17
486–7 56
HH 1.5 99 n.14, 100, 115 Pythian 6
HH 6 28–42 20 n.25
5–12 61 n.19 Plato
15–18 61 n.19 Laws 943e1–2 106 n.27
18 69 n.34 Protagoras 322c2-d5 106 n.27
HH 10.2–3 67
HH 14.2 69 n.32 Sappho
fr. 1.14 67
Hyginus fr. 58.19–22 41, 41 n.5
Fabula 94 57 n.5
Servius
Kypria on Aeneid 1.67 57 n.5
fr. 2 108 on Aeneid 2.649 57 n.5.
Logue, Christopher Sophokles
WAR MUSIC 62–4 fr. 373.1–3 57 n.5
Mimnermos Theognis
fr. 4 41 291–2 106 n.27
Moschos Tyrtaios
Europa fr. 9.40 106 n.27
154–61 64 n.24 fr. 12.40 106 n.27
General Index
‘Achilleis’ (hypothetical) 130, 135 as Dios thugatêr 68–9, 69 n.32

Achilles 9, 12–13, 17, 20, 21, 29, 40, 43, as philommeidês 67, 67 n.30, 68, 69,
44, 46, 60, 71, 75, 83, 87, 88–90, 69 n.31
103–4, 107, 108, 109, 110, 141, belt of (zônê) 61, 62, 64
142, 144–5, 152, 155, 157–8, power of 65–6, 67–71, 61 n.18, 67
159–60, 166–9, 183, 184 n.28, 75, 76–7
armor of 42 n.7, 61–2 grief of 71–2, 74–5, 74 n.46
as dustênos 18 humiliation of 64–5, 66–7
death of 11, 20, 20 n.25, 23, 23 n.29, pregnancy of 57, 65, 66, 68, 70
74, 99 n.14 seduction of Anchises by 60–3
heroism of 81, 86 undressing of 63, 63 n.22, 64
horses of, see horses: of Achilles Apollo 23, 23 n.31, 47–8, 52–3, 53 n.23,
in early mythology 130 57, 103, 104–6, 107
inhumanity of 25.34, 105–6 Apollodoros 48, 48 n.12, 108
mortality of 22, 23, 24, 25, 43, 46, 60 Apollonios of Rhodes 108
power of 25 aporia 146
wrath of 88–90 approaches , Analytical and Unitarian
Adler, Mortimer 179 2, 127–9, 135
Aeschylus/Aischylos 95, 109 Ares 15, 16–7, 67, 72, 73 n.44, 74
Oresteia 185 aretê 8
aethlon /aethlos 45–6 Aristarchus 99
Aeneid 151 aristeia 61, 65
Agamemnon 25 n.34, 43–4, 53, 60, 61, arrows, poisoned 49–50, 51, 53
87–8, 89, 183 ‘ascending scale of affection’, motif
agency 64, 66, 109 of 132
aidôs 106, 106 n.27, 150 Association of Core Texts and
Aineias 56, 56 n.4, 57, 57 n.5, 72, 75, Courses 187
75 n.49, 75 n.50 asyndeton 105
ainos 71–5, 74 n.46 Athene 31 n.8, 41, 43, 61 n.18, 62,
Aithiopis 20 n.25, 99 n.14, 130, 131, 135 75 n.50, 109, 110
Ajax, Telamonian 6–7, 7 n.3, 8, 44, as Mentes 49–50, 51, 53
83, 163 helper of Odysseus 30, 35, 45, 47,
allusion, to Iliad, by Cavafy 140, 143–6 49, 82, 90 n.15, 185
analytical scholarship 128, 129 audiences 54, 69, 125, 161
Anchises 56 n.4, 58, 62, 65, 66–7, 69, 70, modern 161, 171, 180
73, 75, 75 n.50 Homer’s 47, 50, 120, 122–3, 124, 135
boasting of 56–7, 57 n.5, 65, 68, 76 patterns of expectancy of 94–5, 101
legacy of 76–7 shared familiarity of, with poetic and
seduction of 59, 60–1, 62, 64, 65 mythological traditions 16, 39,
symbolic defeat and triumph of 63–4 43–4, 48, 49–50, 57–8, 62–3, 91,
Andromache 9, 71, 132, 155 109, 110
Anthon, Charles 173 Auerbach, Erich 184
anthropology 117, 118–19, 125, 136 Austin, Norman 38
Antinoos 40, 53, 81–2, 85, 86 Autolykos 48 n.12, 51
Aphrodite 41, 56–7, 58–9, 73 Automedon 19, 20
General Index 217

Bakhtin, Mikhail 184 deviations from the Iliad
barbarism 176 in 141–3
of Polyphemos 28 Priam’s ‘intertextual empowerment’
Barr, Stringfellow 179 in 145
Basel Gesamtkommentar 4 text of 137–9
Benfey, Christopher 152–3 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 165
Benjamin, Walter 178 Chantraine, Paul
Bespaloff, Rachel 2, 149, 154–5, Chicago Homer 4
161, 165 Christianity 152, 153
and Dalcroze Eurhythmics 155 Gospels 153
and the Hebrew bible 154 Chryses 53
On the Iliad 149, 154–5 civilization 31, 36
biê 14, 34–5 Greek 140–1
of Herakles 44, 45 n.11 western 172, 176–7, 181–2
boasting 59, 65, 68 class, social 175, 177–8, 179, 180,
book clubs 178–80 182, 187
Book-of-the-Month Club 178–9 classical scholarship 38, 117, 119, 125,
Carleton 179 172, 173, 175
Heritage 179 Clay, Jenny Strauss 58
Modern Library 180 cognitive science (neuro-linguistics) 93,
Readers Guild 178 95, 96–7
Walter J. Black 179 cola, metrical 94, 112, 113
books, as marker of middle class culture Columbia University 179–80,
and special status 177–8 186, 187
Braswell, B. K. 108–9 combat between men, over a
Briareos 43, 109 woman 83–4, 85
bride-contest 48–9, 48 n.12, 84 comparative study 119, 134
Brillet-Dubois, Pascale 78, 78 n.59 comparison, of Odysseus and
Brügger, Claude 108 Achilles 81, 87, 90–1
Buchanan, Scott 179 conditional sentences 82, 87, 89
bucolic diaeresis 98, 103 Contempt (film) 171
Bulfinch, Thomas and The Age of contrast,
Fable 175–6, 178 between descriptions of Odysseus'
Butcher, Samuel H. 180 body 47
Butler, Nicholas Murray 177 between divinity and humanity 1,
Butler, Samuel 180, 181 11, 24, 25–6, 55, 57, 60, 67, 69,
73–4, 75, 76, 78, 79
caesura 102, 112, 113 between Hymn to Demeter and Hymn
‘A’ 82, 100, 112, 113 to Aphrodite 56–7
‘B’ 82, 82 n.1, 83, 112, 113 between male and female 55,
‘B1’ 24 63–4, 65
‘C’ 112 between mental and physical 35
hephthemimeral 82 between modern and traditional
cannibalism 29, 106 styles 143, 147–8
Carpenter, Rhys 134 between mortality and
Cavafy, Constantine 2, 137, 140–8, immortality 17, 19, 19 n.22, 21,
140 n.4 22, 40–1
‘Ithaca’ 140, 141 between Odysseus and Achilles 47
poems of, on mythological between Odysseus and
subjects 140 Herakles 49–50
‘Priam's Night Journey’ 137, 140–8, between primitiveness and
140 n.4 technological skill 31
218 General Index

Cook, Albert 180 encephalography, electric (EEG) 96–7
cosmic history 57–8, 59–60, 76, 79, enclitics 94, 99–101, 103
111, 181 per 99
cosmic order 22, 43, 55, 59, 60, 76 enjambment 103, 147
cultural capital 186, 182 Epigonoi 42
culture, Homeric 131, 133–4, 135–6, epithets, formulaic, 17, 42, 67, 68, 69,
181–2, 184, 186, 31, 65 69 n.34, 124
cultures, traditional 117, 118 Erbse, Hartmut 4
Cyclic epics 58, 94, 108, 130 Erskine, John 176
ethics 28, 40, 44, 78, 104 n.23, 105,
Danek, Georg 38, 43 154–5, 165, 181
Dante 184 ethical complexity 40, 50–1, 52, 54, 151
Dawn (goddess) 40–1 ethical language 104 n.23
death ethnography 119, 121
in the Iliad 5, 7–8, 8–9, 62–3, 145, etymology 56 n.4
150, 152, 156–7, 158, 164–5, 168 of 'Odysseus' 37, 37 n.22
in the Odyssey 46–7 , 48 Euphorbas (Memorial) 164–5
symbolic 70 Euphorbos 162, 163, 164–5
deceit 32, 67 Eurymachos 53, 86–7, 90
defamiliarization 95, 98, 103, 108, 111 Eurytos 41, 42, 47–9, 48 n.12, 50, 53
defeat Event-Related Brain Potentials
in battle 17, 35, 84 (ERPs), 93, 97, 102, 111
sexual 55, 56–7, 62, 63–4, 65 Everett, Edward 173
defilement 24–5 existentialism 154–5
deilos 18–19, 22
Demeter 56, 73–4, 102–3 Fagles, Robert 180–1
demigods 58–9 Faulkner, Andrew 78
Denby, David 186 Felton, Curtis Conway 173, 174
diction, unique 12, 14, 14 n.7, 72–3, Ferber, Michael 166
104–5 fertility 8, 16, 25, 74–5
dikê 106, 106 n.27 Finkelberg, Margalit, The Homer
Dimock, Jr., George E. 37, 185 Encyclopedia 4
Diomedes 16, 62, 72, 74 Fitzgerald, Robert 180–1
Dione 72 Flaxman, John 174
Dionysos 67 folk-tale motifs (folk-motifs) 27, 42 n.7,
Dios thugatêr (of Aphrodite) 68–9, 84, 132–3, 134
69 n.32 deviation from 27–8, 29, 31–2, 33,
discourse, 35–6, 38, 43
direct 13 folk-tales, universal (Weltmärchen)
indirect 13 28, 134
diversity, of student populations 177 force 14, 34–5, 44, 152, 153, 155
dressing and undressing 61, 61 n.19, 62–3 literary 98, 100, 113, 123–4
drinking 31–2, 32 n.12, 33 formulas, deviation from 12, 104
Dunbar, H. 4 ‘Fragmentum dubium’ 99 n.14
dustênos 18–19 line 11: 15
Fränkel, Hermann 2, 3, 94, 112–13
eating 32, 36–7
of raw human flesh 27, 28–9, 31, Ganymede 16 n.12, 76, 77 n.53
33, 106 Gellius, Aulus 187
ecphrases, imagined 132 German scholarship 173, 174, 176, 177
Eliot, Charles W. 178 Gildersleeve, Basil L. 174
empiptô 70, 70 n.36, 71 n.41 Glaukos 120
General Index 219

Glenn, Justin 38 Hera 29, 43, 60, 61, 62, 67, 69, 72, 103,
Goya, Francisco, The Disasters of War 153 105 n.24, 106–11
Graziosi, Barbara 57 Herakleis (hypothetical) 42
gods and mortals, separation of 58 Herakles 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47–9, 48 n.12
great books courses 171–2, 176–8, as heroic antitype to Odysseus 39
179–82, 186–7 as parallel to Odysseus 45–6, 47,
decontextualization of texts in 49–50, 50–1, 52–53
181, 184 deification of 46
desire for a historical narrative Hermann, Gottfried 77–8, 98–9
in 183–184 Hermann's Bridge 93, 94, 98–9, 113
reasons for the development violations of 94, 99–103, 99 n.14, 105,
of 172–3, 176–7 106–7, 111, 114–15
the Iliad in 183–5 Hermes 45, 49, 62, 66, 73, 141, 146–7,
the Odyssey in 185–6 143 n.12, 146 n.1
pedagogy of the Iliad and Odyssey heroism 7, 8, 91, 123, 135–6
in 181–7 human cost of 5, 9, 8, 145, 150,
Great Books of the Western World 179 152, 165
Greek popular song, modern 183, 185
modern 131, 133, mortal 41, 46, 54, 75, 75 n.50
pre-Homeic 127, 129, 130, 133 of Odysseus 81, 86, 90 n.15
Greeks, in the Iliad 13, 14, 17, 20, 25, Hesiod 57, 181
50, 53, 60, 102, 109–10, 133, 150, Catalogue of Women 55 n.1, 58
155, 183 Theogony 55, 58, 76, 78 n.56
Grenier, Jean 155 Works and Days 55
Grote, George (History of Greece) 174 Heubeck, Alfred 4, 131
guests hexameter
guest-friendship 37, 41, 48–9, 50, position 7.5 in 93, 98–101, 103, 107
51 n.17, 52 position 8 in 98, 99, 103
guest-gifts 36–7, 48–9, 52 Hermann’s Bridge in, see Hermann’s
guest-host relationship 37, 49 Bridge
Guillory, John 182 Highet, Gilbert 180
historical method, in literary
Hades criticism 120–1
god: 72, 73, 103 Hoekstra, Arie 78
Land of the Dead: 45, 146 Hölscher, Uvo 38, 134
Hammond, Martin 181 Homer Multitext Project 4
Harvard Classics 178, 179 Homeric Hymns
Haubold, Johannes 57 To Aphrodite 1, 55–79
Hebe 46 To Apollo 53 n.23
Hector, in WAR MUSIC 162–4 To Demeter 55–57
Hekabe 29, 71, 132, 18 Homeric poems,
Hektor 9, 14, 20, 29, 46, 62, 77, 83, historical context of 174, 181–2, 186
88–9, 107, 108, 109, 132, 155, inconsistencies in 2, 128, 130
162–3, 169 honor 8, 60, 63, 74, 86–8, 91, 108, 109,
body of 20, 40, 89–90, 103, 104–5, 143, 145, 150–1
106, 110, 141, 143, 144, 152, horses 11, 15 n.10, 17–18, 104
166–7 manes of 16–17, 17 n.17, 20, 24
death of 5, 9, 71, 87, 141, 144–6 of Achilles 5, 11–12, 14–15, 16–20,
ransom of corpse of 40, 88–9, 141–3, 16 n.12, 20 n.25, 21, 22–5,
147, 148, 166, 169 23 n.29, 162
Helen 43, 67, 77, 83, 85, 132, 155 of Hektor 25
Hephaistos 21, 61–2, 67, 69 n.35, 70, 107 tears of 16, 17
220 General Index

humanities, in American college of Achilles’ horses 16, 16 n.12, 17,
curricula 171–2, 175, 180, 185 18–20, 25
humiliation 64–5, 66–7 immortals 40–1, 55, 60, 70, 73, 76,
hunting 63–4 77 n.53
husband and wife, relationship of 41, 64, individual (vs. community) 183
83, 84, 85, 132 interpretation 42–3, 78, 109–10, 118,
Hutchins, Robert M. 179 121–4, 127–9, 130–1, 140, 152–4
Hyginus 57 anachronistic 153, 181–2, 183,
Hymn to Aphrodite, 185, 186
as religious poetry 56, 57, 79 linguistic 37, 91, 95, 108, 111
parody of battle scenes in 61–2 literary 1, 3, 4, 38, 44, 46–7, 52, 53–4,
poet of 77–8 93–4, 135
thematic 21, 28
Idaios 143, 143 n.12, 146–7 intertextuality 1, 3, 53, 57–8, 81, 85–6,
Iliad 1–4, 5, 38, 39–40, 42, 43, 44, 91, 109–10, 130–1, 140–1, 144,
46, 47, 53–4, 55, 57, 59, 60–3, 145, 148
69, 75–9, 81–91, 94, 99–101, Iole 48, 48 n.12
110–11, 120, 122, 130–5, 137, Iphitos 41, 41 n.7, 42, 48, 48 n.12, 49,
140, 149–69, 171–4, 50, 51, 52
176–84, 187 Iros 81–2, 84–5
themes in 11, 26, 40, 46, 54, 75, Ithaca 30, 46, 51–2, 84
135, 183
Book 1: 23, 60, 109–10, 169 Jakobson, Roman 94
Book 3: 85 Janko, Richard 78, 78 n.56
Book 6: 9, 132, 155, 169 ‘joy of battle’ (charmê) 150, 152,
Book 7: 83 156, 162
Book 9: 40, 88, 132, 183 Judaism 154
Book 13: 16 juxtaposition
Book 15: 6 of adjectives 7
Book 16: 23 of images and scenes of war and
Book 17: 11–26, 145, 161 peace 9
Book 18: 23, 161, 169
Book 19: 88, 169 Kakridis, Ioannis 1, 2, 3, 38, 43,
Book 21: 8 n.6, 60, 152, 166, 169 127–136
Book 22: 23 n.34, 83, 88, 145 Kalypso 30, 41, 46
Book 24: 23, 40, 94, 108, 109–10, 141, Kazantzakis, Nikos 133
152, 166, 169, 183 Kirk, Geoffrey 4, 113
Iliad and Odyssey: kleos poetry 47, 53
adaptations of in popular culture Klutaimestra 43–4
in 171 Kristallnacht 152
ideological assumptions of Kronos 22, 59–60
pedagogy of 172, 173, 176, 181–7 Kullman, Wolfgang 43, 135, 136
recent translations of, American and Kyklopes 31, 34
British 180–1 Kypria, allusions to, in Iliad 24: 108–10
Ilias Parva (Little Iliad) 99 n.14
Iliou Persis (Sack of Ilium) 57 n.5 Laertes 46, 49, 50, 132, 133
Ilos 16, 50–1 Lang, Andrew 180, 181
imagery language 1, 2
domestic 9 demotic 133
vegetal 7–8, 16 choice of (diction) 1, 11, 26, 38, 57,
immortality 17, 19, 25, 46, 62, 72–3, 87 n.12, 91, 123, 46, 105
90 n.15 describing animals 159 n.22
General Index 221

ethical 104 n.23 amphibrach 99
formulaic 7 n.3, 62, 68–9, 75 n.50, anomalous and atypical
81, 84 n.2, 91, 84–5, 104, 123–4 features 82–3, 94, 95–6, 102,
of war 61–2 105, 106, 114–15, 136
traditional formulaic 62 feet 112, 112 n.37, 113 n.38
Laothoe (Memorial) 157–160 hexameter 1, 2, 16, 42, 44, 93, 98, 103,
Lateiner, Donald 84 112, 113, 113 n.39
Lattimore, Richmond 180–1 trochee 93, 98
law 28, 29 Midon (WAR MUSIC) 163
Leaf, Walter 180 mimesis 101, 103, 103 n.20
van Leeuwen, Jan 99 Minchin, Elizabeth 104
Les Cahiers du Sud 151, 170 Mirto, Maria Serena 108
Lesky, Albin 129 misery, human 18, 19, 24, 153
Levine, Leo 176 mistranslation 152, 166–9, 167, 167 n.36
Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos 4 Mitchell, Stephen 180
liberal arts education 174, 186 monosyllables 98, 100, 102–103,
literary criticism 117, 174 103 n.19
literature, moral value of 121–2, 125 monstrousness 29, 101
Logue, Christopher 2, 150, 161–5 mood
WAR MUSIC 150, 161–5 optative 89, 103
Lombardo, Stanley 180 subjunctive 89
Lord, Albert 134 morality 36–7, 123
Lowell, Robert 140 ‘mortal friends’ 150
Imitations 140 mortality 18–19, 22, 43, 46, 72, 74,
luô 62 74 n.46, 75 n.50, 150, 160, 168
Lycaon (Lykaon) 157–8, 160, 167–70 mortals 21–2, 24, 40–1, 55, 56–7,
58–9, 64–5, 67–8, 69–71, 71–4,
Macleod, Colin 108, 142 76, 107, 108
Magneto-encephalography (Magnetic motifs
Resonance Imaging) 96–7 adaptation of 2, 130, 135, 136,
Mandelbaum, Alan 180 158, 160
marked and unmarked 95, 98, 106, 108, adoption of 136
109, 110, 111 ascending scale of affection 132
Maronitis, Dimitrios 146–7, 148, folktale, see folk-tale motifs
148 n.17 narrative 132, 134
marriage 16, 22, 40, 48, 55, 64, 66, 85, remoulding of 130, 135
107–8 stylistic 131
Marzullo, Benedetto 4 mourning 20, 23, 24, 164, 166
masculinity 63–4 Myers, Ernest 180
McCarthy, Mary 152, 154 mythological allusion 1, 3, 20 n.25, 22,
McCrorie, Edward 180 38, 39–54, 57–8, 58 n.9, 60, 70,
McKeon, Richard 179 94, 109, 109 n.30, 110, 111, 130
Meleager 40, 132
‘Memnonis’ (hypothetical) 135 narrative 57, 59, 64, 81, 85, 101, 110, 152
Menelaos 43, 77, 83–4, 145, 163–5 Nausikaa 84
mênis 72, 183 Neoanalysis 38, 127–136, 136 n.42
Meriones 163 Nereus 43
Merionez (WAR MUSIC) 162–4 Niobe 40
Merrill, Rodney 180 nostos poetry 47, 53
metaphor 14, 37, 123–4 Nouvelle Revue Française 169
mêtis 34–5, 35 n.17 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (film) 171
metrics 1, 2, 91, 93–115 objectification 152, 166, 167
222 General Index

Odysseus 27–38, 39–53, 52 n.17, 81–2, Parry, Milman 1, 2, 3, 69, 117–25, 128,
84, 85, 86–8, 90–1, 90 n.15, 134, 135–6
131–3, 185–6 Platonic idealism of 122
as inflicter of pain 37–8 ‘The Historical Method in Literary
bow of 39, 41, 41 n.7, 44, 48–9, Criticism’ 117–8, 119–23, 125
48 n.12, 50, 51–2, 51 n.16 ‘The Traditional Epithet in
identification of, with Apollo 53 Homer’ 117, 125
identity of 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 51 ‘The Traditional Metaphor in
mother of (Antikleia) 131–2 Homer’ 123–4
scar of 51, 51 n.17 Parry, Adam 120–1, 125
complexity of 42, 47, 52, 81, 85 pathos, of war and death 17, 62, 150,
Odyssey 1–4, 27–28, 30, 38, 39–40, 42, 152, 156, 161, 162
43, 44, 47, 53–4, 55, 59, 76, Patroclus (WAR MUSIC) 162, 164
81–91, 94, 99–101, 130, 132–3, Patroklos 11, 12, 15, 17, 19–20, 23,
135, 171–3, 176–85, 187 42 n.7, 62, 130, 141, 159,
themes in 28 31, 35, 36–7, 38, 160 n.23, 162, 164, 167, 169, 183
81, 133 corpse of 11, 13, 163, 169
Book 1: 45 death of 15, 17, 20, 20 n.25, 24, 46,
Book 9: 27–38 160, 168
Book 11: 86 Paulhan, Jean 169–70
Book 18: 81–5 Pedasos (horse) 19
Book 20: 101 Peisistratos 52
Book 21: 39–54 Peleus 18, 19, 21, 21 n.26, 22, 71, 107–8,
Book 22: 53, 85 111, 167
Book 23: 52 n.17, 133 Penelope 30, 40, 41, 43, 46, 48, 52 n.17,
Book 24: 185 84–5, 132, 133, 185
Ogygia 30 per (Greek particle) 99
oïzuros 18–19 Peradotto, John 38
olive-wood 29–30, 30 n.7, 33 Perithoos 40
as symbol of Odysseus' Persephone 56, 73
salvation 30–1, 31 n.8 Perseus Project 4
Olympus 56 Pestalozzi, Heinrich 130, 135
O'Neill, Jr., Eugene 112, 113 petannumi 168, 168 n.37
oral poetry 2, 39, 48, 118–19, 124, Phaeacians 30, 35 n.18,
134–5, 160–1, 181 36, 44, 47
Orestes 43, 44 Phemios 85
Oswald, Alice 2, 149, 156–8, 160–1, Philoktetes 47, 50
164–5, 166 philommeidês (of Aphrodite) See
Memorial: An Excavation of the Aphrodite, as philommeidês
Iliad 149–50, 156–61 Phoinix 40, 87 n.12, 132
Otreus 69, 69 n.33 Phorkys 30, 35 n.18
Outis 31, 33–5, 35 n.17, 37 Phrygians 62
pity 13, 17, 18–9, 19 n.22, 62, 104–5,
Page, Denys 27–28, 33, 36, 38, 134 105 n.24, 106, 110, 167
pain, inflicted by Odysseus 37–8 Plato 121, 153, 175
Palmer, George H. 180, 186 Ion 122
Pandaros 70 Republic 122
Paradise Lost 151 poetry of death (Todesdichtung) 9
Paris 16, 50, 77, 83–4, 132 Politics (magazine) 151
Judgement of 110 Polyphemos 27–38, 49
Parlor, development of, and rise of the Pöppel, Ernst 95–6
humanities: 175 popular style 131–4, 135
General Index 223

Porter, Howard 76, 77, 94, 112–13, 186 Scheria (Scherie) 30, 84
Poseidon 15, 22, 35, 43, 52 n.20, 60, Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 173
64–5, 66, 74 n.46, 75 n.50, Schoeck, Georg 135
105 n.24, 109, 110 seduction,
and horses 21 n.26, 25 Aphrodite as goddess of 67
post-positives 82, 99–100 of Anchises by Aphrodite 56, 59, 60,
pothos 18 61, 62, 64
Powell, Barry 180 of Zeus by Hera 61, 67, 67 n.28, 76
Prendergast, Guy 4 semantics 94, 97–8, 111, 112, 113
pre-positives 99–100 sense breaks (in hexameter) 100, 103
Priam 40, 89–90, 141–8, 155, 157, Servius 57
166–9 sexuality 55, 61, 61 n.18, 67, 75
primitiveness, technological 31 Shaw, T. E. (Lawrence, Thomas
proclitics 98–9, 98 n.10 Edward) 181
profit 13, 86, 87, 90 Shewring, Walter 181
pronouns, personal 100, 124 similes 101, 151, 156, 160
property 50, 185 animals in 18, 105–6, 144–5,
prophecy 22, 23, 109 158–159, 159 n.22, 160 n.23
prosody 97, 111 hunting in 145, 159, 160 n.23
language of threshing in 25
Radermacher, Ludwig 132–3, 134 sounds in 53
Radway, Janice 178 stelai in 15–16
ransom 88, 89 trees in 7–8, 9 n.7, 74, 165
of Hektor’s corpse, see Hektor, Simoeis River 6, 8, 8 n.6
ransom of corpse of Simoeisios 5–9, 158, 164, 165 n.30
reader-response theory 122 birth of 7–8
readers 122, 123–4, 125 death of 5–9
realism 36 mother of 6, 7–8
receptions 2, 125, 151 150 Skamandros River 8, 9, 157
American (in the 20th Slatkin, Laura 22, 22 n.27, 40 n.4, 43, 60,
century) 149–50, 165–6, 171 109, 129, 150
and genre 151 social mobility, through great books
of Iliad 2, 137–48, 149–70 courses 178, 181, 182
Rees, Ennis 180 social status, great books courses as
Reinhardt, Karl 57, 60, 77–8, 110, 134 markers of 179, 181, 182
religion 56, 56 n.3, 57, 79 Socus (Memorial) 156
Renan, Ernest 117, 119, 120 Sophocles 57, 95, 175
resonance, sorrow 15, 22–3, 56, 107, 141, 146, 148
of diction 73, 91 of horses 15, 17–19, 20
of epic 57, 111 n.35 Springsteen, Bruce, and the E Street
rhetoric 100, 103, 104, 131 Band 149
Richardson, Nicholas 108 stelai 15, 16
Rieu, Emile 181 strengthlessness 74
rituals, of coming of age 40, 51–2, 64 structuralism 94–5, 98
Rouse, William 181 style 1, 2, 3, 11, 26, 42, 78, 91, 95, 130,
Russian formalism 94–5, 98 131, 133–5, 143, 147
anomalous 12–3, 102, 105, 136
Sack of Oichalia 42, 48 ring-compositional 6
Sappho 41, 62, 67 ‘sublime frivolity’ (‘erhabener
Sarpedon 16, 19–20, 105 n.24, 120, 122 Unernst’) 60
savagery 25, 29, 49, 87, 105–6 suffering, human 11, 17, 18–19, 22, 60
Schadewaldt, Wolfgang 131, 135 of mothers 71–2, 74, 107
224 General Index

Suitors 14, 30, 36, 41, 48–9, 52–3, 81, for the public 181
84–5, 86, 90, 90 n.15, 185 for students and teachers 180
supplication 32, 62, 87, 167–9, 167 n.36 triumph 13, 25, 55, 57, 58, 63–4, 65, 75,
syntax 11, 87, 87 n.12, 91, 97–8, 100, 77, 85, 88
111, 173 trochee 98
Trojans 88, 143, 150, 163
tachupous 144 Trojan War 42, 58, 59, 108, 111, 136,
Tayler, Edward 186 161, 165
tears, heat of 17; Troy 8, 41, 44, 46, 50–1, 59, 66, 83, 132,
see also horses, tears of 141, 144, 146, 148, 150
Tebben, Joseph 4 fall of 8, 5, 8 n.6
Telemachos 40, 43, 44 n.10, 46, 52, 53, Troy (film) 171
132, 185 Turner, Edward 176
tense, imperfect 103 Turner, Fredrick 95
Thackta (WAR MUSIC) 162–5 Tyro 64–5
thaleros 7, 7 n.4, 16
used of horses’ manes 16–7 Ulysses (film) 171
used of tears 16, 17, 17 n.14 usage, anomalous 24
Thebais 42
Thebes 59, 88, 136 values,
The Human Stain (film) 171 American 182, 183
theios 24, 24 n.32 conflicting 187
thematic resonance 1, 11, 26, 51 of educational institutions 182
theme(s) 11, 38, 43, 52, 60, 62, 83, 103, traditional 120, 151, 177
104, 136, 149, 154–5, 184 western 181, 183, 184, 187
in the Iliad, see Iliad, themes in vengeance 29, 44, 46, 50, 53, 84, 86,
in the Odyssey, see Odyssey, themes in. 88, 159, 185
Themis 109 verbs and subjects 142, 143, 146, 144
The Odyssey (television ‘special’) 171 Vergil 184
The Sack of Oichalia 4 Aeneid 151
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae 4 verse, formulaic, see language, formulaic.
Thetis 13, 18, 21–3, 43, 60, 70–71, 74, 89, Vietnam War 149, 161
107, 108, 109–10, 111, 132, 141 violence 14, 35, 44, 84, 152, 154, 162,
and childbirth 71, 74, 109 165, 169
cosmic power of 22, 60, 71, 109, 110 violence, heroic 48
marriage of, to Peleus 21–2, 24, 70–1,
107–8, 111 war 5, 8, 9, 150
van Thiel, Helmut 4 complexity of, in the Iliad 5, 8–9,
thumos 32, 32 n.13 149–51, 155–6, 165–6
Tithonos 40–1, 41 n.5, 76 contemporary 165–6, 176
tradition, mythological and poetic 2, 3, harshness of 150, 161
38, 43–4, 46, 50, 55, 57, 60, 71, as means of winning glory and
75 n.50, 78 n.59, 81, 83, 85, 91, overcoming mortality 151, 164
108, 110, 123, 151 ‘War’ (song) 149, 166
deviations from 3, 111,129, 130 ‘war issues' courses 176, 182
transformation, literary (of traditional war memorials 156
mythology and poetry) 2, 43, 95, Vietnam Veterans' Memorial 156
110, 128, 130, 131, 134, 136, 163, Warner, Marina 155
184, 186 weeping, of horses 14, 16, 17
translation 133, 133 n.30, 137 n.2, 140, Weil, Simone 2, 149, 151–4, 151 n.6,
156, 161, 166–70, 168 n. 37, 155, 156, 157, 161, 165, 166–70
170 n.42, 180–1 and the Gospels 153
General Index 225

and the Spanish Civil War 152, Wolf, Friedrich August 174
153, 154 word-play 34, 34 n.16, 53
Christian values of 152, 153 World War I 165, 176
‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’ 149, World War II 151–2, 165
151–4, 155, 156, 166–70
translation of Homeric passages Xanthos (horse) 20, 23
by 166–70
West, Martin 4, 78, 102, 113 Yale University report (1828) 173
western civilization, see civilization,
western Zeus 6, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,
western institutions and values 177, 181, 29, 34–5, 43, 52 n.20, 53–4, 55,
182, 186 56–7, 64, 65, 66, 67–8, 69 n.32,
Whitfield, Norman and Barrett 70, 71, 72, 73, 75 n.50, 77, 89, 105
Strong 149, 166 n.24, 108, 109, 110–11, 146, 185
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich as god of guests, hosts, and
von 102, 119, 128 hospitality 36
Willcock, Malcolm 127, 136, 180 as ruler of the Olympians and the
Williams, Raymond 187 cosmos 22, 43, 58–9, 59–60, 64,
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 173 67–8, 69 n.32, 69 n.35, 71, 110, 111
wine 27, 31, 33 pity of 14, 17, 18–19, 19 n.22,
Wofford, Susanne 151 105 n.24

Schein - Homeric Epic and Its Reception. Interpretive Essays (2016)

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/11/2015, SPi

HOMERIC EPIC AND ITS RECEPTION

Homeric Epic and its

To Sherry and Daniel

THIS volume is addressed primarily to scholars and students of

Acknowledgements and Details

Chapter 1. ‘The Death of Simoeisios: Iliad 4.473–489’, lightly revised

x Acknowledgements and Original Publications

Cunliffe R. J. Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, new edn.,

The Death of Simoeisios: Iliad 4.473–489

The description of the death of Simoeisios at 4.473–89, which has

6 The Death of Simoeisios

qºŁ· › ’ K Œ ÅØØ åÆÆd  ÆYªØæ

Then Ajax, son of Telamon, killed the son of Anthemion,

This seventeen-line passage is framed in normal ring-compositional

(‘son of Telamon’) in 473 and merely by Ø ª

The Death of Simoeisios 7

8 The Death of Simoeisios

The Death of Simoeisios 9

The Horses of Achilles in Book 17

12 The Horses of Achilles

The Horses of Achilles 13

who would report to him the intention of great Zeus.

It is relatively rare in Iliadic narrative to be told at such length what

14 The Horses of Achilles

g ’ h’ ił Kd BÆ Kd ºÆf  Eºº 

The Horses of Achilles 15

The main point of comparison in this beautiful simile is between

16 The Horses of Achilles

The Horses of Achilles 17

18 The Horses of Achilles

The Horses of Achilles 19

20 The Horses of Achilles

The Horses of Achilles 21

22 The Horses of Achilles

as many sorrows as Zeus, son of Kronos, gave to me, out of

The Horses of Achilles 23

24 The Horses of Achilles

. . . ‰ ’ ‹ Ø Ç ÅØ Æ ¼æ Æ Pæı

The Horses of Achilles 25

This vision of Achilles’ overwhelming power, impressive in itself, is all

26 The Horses of Achilles

Odysseus and Polyphemos in the Odyssey

In the ﬁrst chapter of The Homeric Odyssey, Denys Page analyses

28 Odysseus and Polyphemos

X Þ’ ¥ ª’ æØÆ  ŒÆd ¼ªæØØ, ı b ŒÆØØ,

Polyphemos, whom Odysseus calls ¼ªæØ , h ŒÆ s N

Odysseus and Polyphemos 29

30 Odysseus and Polyphemos

Odysseus and Polyphemos 31

32 Odysseus and Polyphemos

ÆPaæ Kd ˚Œºøł ªºÅ KºÆ Å f

Odysseus and Polyphemos 33

34 Odysseus and Polyphemos

Polyphemos replies (9.408),

and Odysseus’ heart laughs (9.414) at

This use of the word BØ (‘cunning intelligence’) suggests that in

Odysseus and Polyphemos 35

36 Odysseus and Polyphemos

Zeus in the Odyssey represents moral right, and hospitality is a mark of

Odysseus and Polyphemos 37

38 Odysseus and Polyphemos

Postscript (2014): of the many discussions of Odysseus and Polyphe-

Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey:

qºŁ· › ’ K Œ ÅØØ åÆÆd ÆYªØæ

(‘son of Telamon’) in 473 and merely by Ø ª

g ’ h’ ił Kd BÆ Kd ºÆf Eºº

. . . ‰ ’ ‹ Ø Ç ÅØ Æ ¼æÆ Pæı

X Þ’ ¥ ª’ æØÆ ŒÆd ¼ªæØØ, ı b ŒÆØØ,

Polyphemos, whom Odysseus calls ¼ªæØ, h ŒÆ s N

ÆPaæ Kd ˚Œºøł ªºÅ KºÆ Å f

This use of the word BØ (‘cunning intelligence’) suggests that in

ØŁø E / þæıŁ’, ¥’ IŁÆ Ø Ø çø çæ Ø Mb æ E Ø, Od.

p º’, q Øa ŒÆd f ŒÆŒe æ ªÅºÇØ,

› Ø åÆº f Kºº’ IŁº ı.

Iæ Ø b æ æ Ø Ø KæØÇ PŒ KŁº ø,

. . . çæÆŒ Iæ ç ØÇ , ZçæÆ ƒ YÅ

XÅ b ª æø IŁæø

l ŁEØ Kd ªºıŒf ¥æ tæ

Hermes’s use of ÆNB to describe Demeter’s BØ and åº is

ªÆæ Æ¥’ ÆNªH ŒÆ’ K ıæ