HOMER: THE ILIAD

Classical World Series

Ancient Phoenicia: An Introduction, Mark Woolmer

Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd, Paul Cartledge
Art and the Romans, Anne Haward
Athens and Sparta, S. Todd
Athens under the Tyrants, J. Smith
Athletics in the Ancient World, Zahra Newby
Attic Orators, Michael Edwards
Augustan Rome, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic, Thomas Wiedemann
Cities of Roman Italy, Guy de la Bédoyère
Classical Archaeology in the Field, S.J. Hill, L. Bowkett and K. & D. Wardle
Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil, Richard Jenkyns
Democracy in Classical Athens, Christopher Carey
Early Greek Lawgivers, John Lewis
Environment and the Classical World, Patricia Jeskins
Greece and the Persians, John Sharwood Smith
Greek and Roman Historians, Timothy E. Duff
Greek and Roman Medicine, Helen King
Greek Architecture, R. Tomlinson
Greek Literature in the Roman Empire, Jason König
Greek Sculpture, Georgina Muskett
Greek Tragedy: An Introduction, Marion Baldock
Greek Vases: An Introduction, Elizabeth Moignard
Homer: The Iliad, William Allan
Julio-Claudian Emperors, T. Wiedemann
Lucretius and the Didactic Epic, Monica Gale
Morals and Values in Ancient Greece, John Ferguson
Mycenaean World, K. & D. Wardle
Plays of Aeschylus, A.F. Garvie
Plays of Euripides, James Morwood
Plays of Sophocles, A.F. Garvie
Political Life in the City of Rome, J.R. Patterson
Religion and the Greeks, Robert Garland
Religion and the Romans, Ken Dowden
Roman Architecture, Martin Thorpe
Roman Britain, S.J. Hill and S. Ireland
Roman Egypt, Livia Capponi
Roman Frontiers in Britain, David Breeze
Roman Satirists and Their Masks, Susanna Braund
Slavery in Classical Greece, N. Fisher
Spectacle in the Roman World, Hazel Dodge
Studying Roman Law, Paul J. du Plessis
Women in Classical Athens, Sue Blundell
 Classical World Series

HOMER: THE ILIAD

William Allan

Bristol Classical Press

 First published in 2012 by
Bristol Classical Press
an imprint of
Bloomsbury Academic
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedfprd Square,
London WC1B 3DP, UK

Copyright © 2012 by William Allan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

CIP records for this book are available from the

British Library and the Library of Congress

ISBN 9781849668897

Typeset by Ray Davies

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

www.bloomsburyacademic.com
Contents

Preface 7
Map 8

1. Homer and Early Greek Epic 11

2. Language, Style, and Structure 23
3. The Hero and Homeric Society 35
4. Mortals and Immortals 49
5. War and Family Life 61

Epilogue 71
Suggestions for Further Reading 73
Index 77
For Laura
Preface

In its narrative skill and characterization, its use of language and the
richness of its imaginative world, there is nothing quite like the Iliad in
all of classical literature. Given the circumstances of its composition in
archaic Greece, it is a miracle that the poem has survived; but given the
artistic genius behind it, it is an even greater miracle that it was ever
created at all. We have a lot to thank the Muses for.
This book seeks to offer a clear and stimulating introduction to
Homer’s Iliad, suitable for undergraduate students of Greek or Classical
Civilization, and pupils in the upper forms of schools. It will also be of
interest, I hope, to other students of literature and history, and to the
general reader.
In order to maximize its usefulness to students, the book is organized
around the core topics most regularly covered in courses on the poem
(whether in Greek or in translation): the genre of epic, the style and
structure of the Iliad, the nature of heroism, the role of the gods, and finally
the ethics of war and its impact on family life and gender roles. All
references (e.g. 1.231) are to the Iliad, unless otherwise stated (e.g.
Odyssey 6.180-5). The book contains no plot summary of the Iliad, but
assumes the reader has already read the poem itself; after all, there is
nothing better.
I am grateful to Roger Rees for asking me to contribute to this series,
to Deborah Blake at Bloomsbury Academic for her advice and assistance,
and to Adrian Kelly, Roger Rees, and Laura Swift for their insightful
comments on a draft of the book. The book is dedicated, with love and
homophrosynê, to my wife Laura.

W.R.A.
University College, Oxford
November 2011
Greece and Asia Minor
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1
Homer and Early Greek Epic

As well as outlining the historical background to Homer’s poems, this

chapter will examine early Greek epic as a genre, with particular emphasis
on the Iliad as a traditional oral (or oral-derived) poem. We will therefore
consider some of the most fundamental questions in the study of ancient
Greek literature: What is epic? Who was Homer? And what did Homer
do with the epic tradition that he inherited?
Epic derives from the Greek word epos, meaning ‘word’, and in the
broadest terms refers to any poetry written in dactylic hexameters (for this
metrical scheme see Chapter 2 below). Thus the Works and Days counts
as epic, a poem on self-improvement and honest work written by Hesiod
(a near contemporary of Homer’s) in the early seventh century BC, but it
is usually categorized as ‘didactic epic’ to distinguish it from what became
the canonical form of the genre, that is, hexameter narrative poetry dealing
with divine and heroic myth. The serious subject-matter of such poetry
(war and death, gods and heroes, and so on), combined with Homer’s
unique status as the best of poets, ensured that epic became, within the
ancient hierarchy of genres, the premier literary form. Moreover, the
Homeric epics not only exerted a profound influence on later literature,
myth, and art, but also shaped the ethical and religious beliefs of the
Greeks for many centuries to come, and were the basis of early Greek
education throughout antiquity. The speakers in Plato’s Republic, for
example, take it for granted that Homer is ‘the poet who has educated
Greece’ (606e): his cultural authority was unparalleled.
Most societies have a form of poetry resembling Greek epic, that is,
tales of the gods and of powerful men and women from the past, though
their precise form and expression differ from culture to culture. Greek
epic is defined formally (recited rhythmically by a solo singer) and
thematically (dealing with events from the distant heroic age). The word
used by Homer to describe these heroic stories is oimê, meaning ‘path’,
referring to the ‘path of song’ which the poet (and his audience) would
travel along; in the Odyssey, for example, the bard Demodocus at one
point selects the oimê of the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles (8.73-6),
moving Odysseus himself to tears. In other words, the poet, whose
12 Homer: The Iliad

authority is guaranteed by the Muses (note the invocation of the Muse in

the opening lines of both Iliad and Odyssey), plots his own ‘path’ through
the forests of Greek heroic myth, and his audience admire his skill in doing
so. The raw material or subject-matter of these ‘paths’ is the klea andrôn,
or ‘tales of men’s glory’, whose fame the poet celebrates and continues.
Both Homeric epics show a clear awareness of their place in this tradition
of heroic song: Achilles sings the klea andrôn as he sulks in his hut
(9.189), while Helen laments that she and Paris will be the subject of song
for generations to come (6.357-8). And it is no coincidence that the central
heroes of both epics, Achilles and Odysseus, are compared to bards, as
when, for example, Odysseus stringing his bow is likened to a bard
stringing his lyre (Odyssey 21.406-11). Like any other itinerant poet,
reliant on the financial support of patron and audience, Homer takes care
to advertise his own skill. The bard Phemius in the Odyssey, pleading for
his life, emphasizes that such skill comes through hard practice as well as
divine favour: ‘I am self-taught, and god has put in my mind every
pathway [oimê] of song’ (22.347-8).
There is, at first sight, a remarkable puzzle at the heart of western
literature: Homer is arguably the greatest poet who ever lived and yet we
know nothing about him. It is clear that the ancients knew nothing certain
about him either, although such was his renown that many different places
(several Ionian cities of the Asia Minor coast and east Aegean islands,
especially Chios, Smyrna, Colophon, and Cyme) claimed to be where he
was born, lived, or died, none of them convincingly. However, this
mystery in fact turns out to be entirely deliberate, as there is a very good
reason why the poet avoids connection with any one place: for rather than
being a specific person with a particular biography, the faceless poet
becomes a conduit of divine inspiration whose authority is universal.
Once again, a comparison with Hesiod is helpful, for whereas Hesiod in
the Works and Days emphasizes the value of his poetry by constructing
a particular persona and personal history (namely, a Boeotian farmer with
a wastrel brother who had better listen to his advice), so Homer effaces
his own identity (and even his name) in order to assert his quasi-divine
poetic authority.
But although we do not know who Homer was, it is clear that there is
a single creative intelligence behind each poem. Many modern scholars
believe that the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet are different people (for
a variety of linguistic, theological, and geographical reasons), and this
view was held in antiquity, albeit by a small minority. However, as with
the identity of Homer (whose poems we can enjoy and interpret without
knowing any ‘facts’ about him), the question of whether he is one person
 Homer and Early Greek Epic 13

or two is much less important than it seems. For all that really matters is
the Iliad and Odyssey themselves and their shaping by a master poet or
poets, who (for the sake of convenience) we will call Homer.
In turning to the texts we are faced with the perennial ‘Homeric
question’, that is, the debate over the origins and early transmission of the
poems. The scholarly debates here go around endlessly (fuelled by the
lack of evidence), and one is left feeling at times like Mark Twain’s
schoolboy that ‘Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of
that name.’ In truth, unless we suddenly find an eighth- or seventh-century
BC manuscript of Homer (an unlikely scenario), no definitive answer is
possible, and we have to admit that the precise manner in which the Iliad
was composed and recorded cannot be known for sure. All we can do is
set out some more or less likely scenarios, given what we can reconstruct
about the tradition of epic poetry in archaic Greece. Similarly, we have
only approximate dates for the Homeric epics: they show familiarity with
features such as writing, temples, cult statues, narrative art, and a wide
knowledge of Mediterranean geography, which suggest they cannot be
earlier than the second half of the eighth century BC, while allusions to
Homer in the poet Archilochus (note in particular the new Telephus
fragment of Archilochus, dealing with the Achaeans’ mistaken attack on
Mysia rather than Troy, first published in 2005) suggest that the Iliad was
familiar to audiences by 650 BC at the latest, when Archilochus was
active.
So, assuming that the poems were composed and disseminated some
time between 725 and 650 BC, we must ask when they were first written
down: was this done in the poet’s lifetime or at some point after (perhaps
long after) their composition? While all viable answers to the Homeric
question recognize that the Homeric epics are products of an oral poetic
tradition (see Chapter 2 below for the typical techniques of oral
composition), they differ in the way they integrate writing and literacy
into their account of the poem’s creation and ultimate survival. So let us
consider three of the most plausible scenarios: first, that Homer himself
wrote the poems down; secondly, that he dictated them, being himself
illiterate; and thirdly, that the poems were memorized by bards for several
generations and written down later.
Although Homer uses the compositional techniques developed by
illiterate bards over many centuries, that does not prove he was himself
unable to read or write. The Greeks had adapted their alphabet (with local
variations) from a Phoenician source around 800 BC and the earliest
surviving inscriptions date from roughly 740. So, if he was literate, Homer
would be among the first generations of Greeks to use the new technology
14 Homer: The Iliad

of alphabetic writing. (The poet reflects his largely illiterate audience’s

mixture of wonder at, and suspicion of, this new technology in the Iliad’s
only reference to writing, when the orders to execute the bearer of a
missive are described as ‘deadly signs, many fatal marks written in a
folded tablet’ (6.168-9).) Using a reed pen and a black carbon-based ink,
he could have written his poems on papyrus (more likely than
animal-skins, because cheaper and less bulky; a ship’s cable made of
papyrus is mentioned at Odyssey 21.391), creating a large set of papyrus
rolls (each roll could hold approximately 1500 lines of verse, i.e. two to
three books of the Iliad). In this scenario Homer remains an essentially
oral poet, but one who uses writing to aid the development of his work,
using the time between performances to write down his poem and add to
it over many years.
Scholars sometimes argue that oral poets never write themselves, but
this is dogma rather than fact and is disproved by comparative evidence
from other cultures with oral poetic traditions. The problem with ‘hard’
oralism of this kind is that it sets up too sharp a divide between orality
and literacy, as if Homer’s learning to read and write inevitably obliterated
his chances of picking up the traditional skills of epic composition and
performance. On the contrary, it is possible (and perhaps a more attractive
hypothesis) that an essentially oral poet who had learned to write might
see the creative potential of this new medium, and use it to create
something particularly sophisticated.
An alternative theory is that Homer himself never learned to read and
write, but that he or a wealthy patron recognized the potential of the new
technology, and Homer dictated his poem to a literate scribe in order to
preserve it for posterity. Scholars who support this theory often suggest
that it can account for the unusual length and sophistication of the
Homeric poems, on the grounds that a poet forced to go slowly would be
able to embellish and expand his song in a way that is said to be less likely
in a live performance. However, this is to misunderstand the nature of oral
composition, which allows a bard to develop his material over multiple
performances and which is in fact designed to facilitate such large-scale
pieces (on this issue see Chapter 2 below). Moreover, the dictation theory
has its own problems: most notably, could a poet used to live performance
keep up the flow of his poetry if forced to recite at a snail’s pace?
Finally, let us consider the idea that the poems were memorized and
transmitted orally for several generations until writing became more
established. Here too comparative evidence suggests that bards would
modify the poem in reperformance, introducing their own innovations, so
that the poems would change, often in significant ways. Moreover, the
 Homer and Early Greek Epic 15

language of the poems stops changing in Homer’s time, which suggests

extremely accurate memorization (if not early fixation in written texts).
So we need people capable of memorizing long texts, which in itself is
not a problem in a predominantly oral culture (books were rare and
expensive well into the fifth century BC). And here we may distinguish
between creative oral poets or bards (aoidoi) and rhapsodes
(‘song-stitchers’): the latter memorized poems created by others and
recited them in public performance. Indeed we are told of a guild of
rhapsodes called the Homeridae (‘sons of Homer’) dedicated to the
preservation of the great master’s works. But we cannot be sure that
rhapsodes were not reliant on written texts.
In conclusion, there is not enough evidence to settle the ‘Homeric
question’ decisively, but on balance it seems likely that the poems were
preserved in written form in the poet’s own lifetime. After all, writing did
exist, so why wait several generations to use it? And if we ask what could
have triggered the major decision to preserve such large poems in writing,
the answer is simple: quality. For we have enough fragments of other early
Greek epic (for example, the poems of the so-called Epic Cycle or the
Shield of Heracles attributed to Hesiod) to know that there is a huge gap
in quality between the Homeric epics and those of other poets. (Other
poems originally attributed to Homer were gradually stripped away on the
grounds of quality, so that by the fourth century BC only the Iliad and
Odyssey were believed to be genuine.) The existence and partial survival
of these other works do show that there was a market for other kinds of
poetry (from the episodic, pack-everything-in style of the Epic Cycle to
the macabre ‘pulp’ epic of the Shield of Heracles), but they also underline
how exceptional the Iliad and Odyssey are, and how amazed their first
audiences must have been by them.
The Homeric epics, then, are transitional poems, in the sense that they
are products of an oral tradition, but achieved their final form when
writing was known and spreading. Of course we experience the poems
today as written texts, and their popularity throughout antiquity ensured
that they have come down to us in reasonably good condition. (Book 10
of the Iliad, the so-called Doloneia or ‘killing of Dolon’, and a few other
short passages were inserted later.) But that is not how they were enjoyed
by their original (archaic Greek) audiences: the Homeric epics were
composed for live performance, and even if Homer was literate, he learned
his craft from other performing bards. He will have developed his poems
over many years of performance, usually delivering short episodes rather
than the entire work. The Iliad would take around 26 hours to perform in
its entirety, and although it is quite possible that some patrons and
16 Homer: The Iliad

audiences were willing to set aside several days for such a performance
(after all, fifth-century BC Athenians were happy to sit through three days
of tragedy and satyr play at the city’s main theatrical festival, the Great
Dionysia, and modern Wagner fans spend four nights on the Ring Cycle),
it will have been a less common event in the career of a travelling poet
than shorter one-off shows.
This is reflected in the poems themselves, which lend themselves to
performance in single-session chunks (e.g. the Quarrel in Book 1, the duel
of Paris and Menelaus in 3, the meeting of Hector and Andromache in
Book 6, and so on), which the audience can appreciate in their own right,
especially when they know the general shape of the story from other
performances. We see similar shorter songs performed by Phemius and
Demodocus in the Odyssey. They are court poets, attached to particular
royal families, whereas Homer is likely to have been itinerant, performing
in a variety of contexts: the halls of wealthy chieftains (especially after
feasts, as in the Odyssey), but also at weddings, funerals, and public
festivals of various kinds. As with his own identity, Homer is deliberately
silent about the performance context of his poetry, and for similar reasons:
for he wants his work to be as universal as possible, so that it appeals not
to one specific family, clan, or city but to all Greek-speaking communities.
In that way Homer can perform all over the Greek world, making his
poems more portable, flexible, and profitable. Moreover, the poetic
performances that followed funerals or formed the centrepiece of many
public festivals were contests, and this leads us to a basic feature of early
Greek epic whose importance must not be overlooked: poets were often
competing against one another (whether for prizes or to attract future
patronage). As a result, not only would ‘bard begrudge bard’ (as Hesiod
puts it, Works and Days 26), but there was great pressure on each poet to
continually innovate and improve his song if he was to keep impressing
his audiences.
How was this achieved? After all, the poet would not necessarily know
how long he had to perform or what episode his audience would want to
hear, so he had to be able to tailor his performance to their wishes. Scholars
often speak of the poet ‘improvising’ his song, but this term is misleading
insofar as it suggests a poet who makes up his material anew each time.
The bard will have honed certain scenes and episodes over many
performances in the past, as well as practising and revising them between
performances. Using that material, as well as his memorized store of
formulae and story patterns (see Chapter 2 below), the skilled bard will
create a song which is ‘made new’ each time as he reacts to the needs of
the occasion and his audience. This process of ‘composition in
 Homer and Early Greek Epic 17

performance’ is extemporaneous, but also premeditated, since it is shaped

by the bard’s traditional forms of expression and his adaptation of older
material. So there is no opposition between tradition and invention in
Homeric poetry; both are part of the craft of oral composition, where the
bard needs the tradition to build upon. And the tradition is also central to
the audience’s pleasure in the poetry, since the bard will use their
knowledge of epic themes and characters from previous performances in
order to enrich their appreciation of his work. It is the audience who judge
a bard’s success, and his goal is to induce in them thelxis or kêlêthmos, a
state of spellbound exaltation.
Having considered Homer’s performance context, let us now try to
situate the Iliad within the wider tradition of early Greek epic, showing
how it engages with and transforms both Trojan and other myth. Here too
Homer’s vast inherited tradition, far from being a hindrance, emerges as
the dynamo of his creativity and innovation. It is clear that Homer knew
many other heroic tales beyond the Trojan War. Indeed such wide
knowledge was essential to his craft as a traditional oral poet; we may
recall Phemius’ boast that ‘god has put in my mind every pathway [oimê]
of song’ (Odyssey 22.347-8). Besides the Trojan War the other major war
of the heroic age was that against Thebes, and Homer alludes to it on
several occasions. Diomedes, one of the foremost Achaean warriors at
Troy, had succeeded in sacking Thebes, whereas his father Tydeus had
died during the first campaign. Diomedes’ earlier success is used to rebut
Agamemnon’s charge of cowardice against him (4.370-410), and
throughout the poem Diomedes is keen to live up to his father’s heroic
achievements (5.802-8, 6.222-3, 14.113-14, 126-7). But Theban
references are not limited to Diomedes and Tydeus: the poet recalls, for
example, Funeral Games for Oedipus at Thebes (23.679-80). Another
body of (non-Trojan) heroic myth was centred on Pylos, whose aged king
Nestor is present at Troy and who never misses an opportunity to remind
the Achaeans of his former prowess (e.g. 7.132-56, 11.670-761,
23.629-45). Homer is also familiar with heroic tales relating to Thessaly:
the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (24.59-63), the war of the Lapiths and
Centaurs (1.260-73), and the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts
(7.467-9). Finally, there are numerous references to Heracles, one of the
most famous of heroes, covering his birth (14.323-4), his labours (8.362-9,
15.638-40), and his death (18.117-19). Significantly, the episode in
Heracles’ life most frequently referred to is his sacking of Laomedon’s
Troy after being cheated by the Trojan king (5.638-54, 14.249-51,
20.144-8). This example of earlier Trojan deceit, relevant to the Trojans’
conduct in the Iliad, reminds us that these allusions to other epic tales
18 Homer: The Iliad

always have a point within the Iliad itself: Homer is not simply showing
off his knowledge of Greek myth but using it to enhance his own story.
We see a similar process in the poem’s use of Trojan War myth.
Although the Iliad recounts only four days of actual fighting in the tenth
year of the war, Homer deploys references to the wider Trojan myth
throughout. Thus we are told of various earlier events, including the
Judgement of Paris (24.25-30), the abduction of Helen (e.g. 3.173-5,
442-5), the gathering of forces at Aulis (2.303-29), and the failed embassy
of Menelaus and Odysseus to Troy (3.205-24, 11.123-5, 138-42). From
the period after the Iliad ends the poet alludes to the death of Achilles at
the hands of Paris and Apollo (22.358-60), the arrival of Philoctetes at
Troy (2.724-5), the sack of Troy (12.10-15, 15.69-71), and Aeneas’ rule
over the surviving Trojans (20.302-8). Trojan War myth was also the
subject of six poems in the later Epic Cycle (seventh and sixth centuries
BC); these took care to fit around the Homeric epics, creating a history of
the heroic age from the start of the war to the death of Odysseus, in the
sequence Cypria, Iliad, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, Returns,
Odyssey, Telegony. The surviving fragments and summaries of these
poems, with their inclusion of the more fantastic aspects of myth (magical
armour, monsters, invulnerable and immortal fighters), throw into relief
Homer’s more austere vision of the heroic world, especially in the Iliad.
It is not clear to what extent they embody Trojan material which would
have existed in Homer’s time (rather than being written later under his
influence), but their survival reminds us that it is an essential part of
Homer’s skill as a poet to engage with the other stories that make up the
epic universe known to both him and his audience.
As well as alluding to other stories, Homer can introduce his own
innovations, changing the myths, and even inventing new ones, to suit his
plot and characters. Thus in the first book of the Iliad Achilles reminds
Thetis of an attempt by Hera, Poseidon, and Athena to overthrow Zeus
(1.396-406), a myth not attested elsewhere, but well suited to its context
here, since Zeus’ debt to Thetis (she had loosed the bonds put on him by
the other gods) will persuade him to grant her request to aid the Trojans
until the Achaeans show respect to Achilles. Homer has deliberately
chosen the three gods (Hera, Poseidon, and Athena) who are most likely
to be opposed to Thetis’ request, since they are passionate enemies of the
Trojans; his mythical innovation is thus skilfully interwoven with his plot.
Similarly, in the final book of the Iliad Achilles urges the grieving Priam
to eat, recalling the story of Niobe, who ate despite losing twelve children
(24.601-19). The detail of Niobe’s eating is a new element in the story,
which usually focuses on Niobe’s boasting of her many children, her
 Homer and Early Greek Epic 19

punishment by the gods, and her transformation into a streaming rock on

Mt Sipylus in Magnesia (all details retained by Achilles); once again the
innovation is designed to suit its rhetorical context: like Niobe, Achilles
argues, Priam should stop weeping and eat. Thus, as these examples
(Trojan and non-Trojan) make clear, Homer’s engagement with the larger
story-hoard of Greek myth is a major part of his originality and skill. He
exploits his audience’s awareness of these earlier traditions to expand and
enrich his own epic narrative, and introduces other tales, not willy-nilly,
but always with a clear thematic purpose.
Moreover, despite his adaptation and invention of myth, the poet’s
account of the heroic past has a strong claim to truthfulness. For the
Greeks believed that the heroic age had existed and that epic poets
recorded their national past. An important hallmark of good poetry was
its vividness and authenticity, as if the poet himself had witnessed the
events. Thus Odysseus praises Demodocus ‘above all men’ because he
sings of the Achaeans’ deeds and sufferings ‘as if you had been there
yourself or heard the story from one who was’ (Odyssey 487-9) – a real
compliment, coming from one of those suffering Achaean heroes. The
bard’s superhuman knowledge is guaranteed by the Muses, whose
importance to the Greek epic tradition is profound. Homer invokes the
Muses at key points in his narrative, each time to justify his authority to
sing of the distant past (e.g. 1.1-7, 2.761-2, 11.218-20, 14.508-10,
16.112-13); perhaps the best illustration of their importance comes at the
start of the huge Catalogue of Ships in Book 2, where the poet justifies
his need of them: ‘for you are goddesses and are present and know
everything, while we [mortals] hear only rumour and know nothing’
(2.485-6). The Muses grant the poet’s account the authority of fact and
license his creativity.
But how historical is the poet’s vision of the Trojan War? Did such an
event even take place? When something like the writing of history as we
know it was developed in the fifth century BC by Herodotus and
Thucydides, the historians express doubts about Homer’s reliability, often
as a means of establishing their own historical authority and the superior
interest of the wars they are writing about (whether Persian or
Peloponnesian). Thus Thucydides claims that even if we can trust
Homer’s figures – ‘and it is likely that, being a poet, he would exaggerate
and embellish’ – then the forces involved in the Trojan War were still
smaller than those involved in the conflict recorded by Thucydides
(1.10.3). And he has Pericles declare that the Athenians need no Homer
to celebrate their achievements, the implication being that they now have
Thucydides to do so (2.41.4). Nonetheless, both Herodotus and
20 Homer: The Iliad

Thucydides treat Homer as a valid historical source, albeit a poetic or

mythicized one; and most strikingly, both believe (as did all Greeks) that
the Trojan War actually took place.
Research on contact between Greece and the Near East in the late
Bronze Age (thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BC) has shown that
there is likely to be a historical core to the Greek epic tradition and its
account of the fall of Troy. Surviving records from the Hittite capital of
Hattusas (now Boghazköy in central Turkey) refer to a place called Wilusa
or Wilusiya in north-western Asia Minor, which can be plausibly
identified with Homer’s Troy ((W)Ilios in Greek). These records also
mention a power called Ahhiyawa, which we can recognize as the land of
Homer’s Achaeans (Achai(w)oi). The picture that emerges from the
Hittite documents is one of competition between the Hittite and
Mycenaean kingdoms for control of various settlements on the Asia Minor
coast, including Wilusa/Troy. Archaeology shows that Troy was attacked
and destroyed several times during this period (c. 1270-1180 BC), and it
is likely that Mycenaean Greeks were among the attackers. So there seems
to be a historical kernel to the tale of Troy’s destruction at the hands of
Greeks.
However, despite the Greeks’ belief in the reality of the Trojan War,
when history becomes heroic poetry it inevitably becomes a form of
fiction. And over the many centuries separating the conflicts of the late
Bronze Age and Homer’s own time bards will have continuously
transformed their Trojan material to suit the needs of successive
generations and audiences. Thus a conflict fought (one imagines) for
complex military and political reasons became a war fought for a woman
(Helen of Troy), while poetic exaggeration has left its mark throughout:
10 years of fighting, 1186 Achaean ships, and so on. Most pervasive is
the effect of nostalgia for a bygone Heroic Age, which is a leitmotif of the
Greek epic tradition, as seen, for example, in the Homeric warriors’
physical superiority to men of today: ‘A man could not easily lift that rock
with both hands, even a very strong man, such as mortals now are’
(12.381-3, said of Ajax, son of Telamon). This ‘epic distance’ between
mundane present and heroic past is most explicit in the description of the
destruction of the Achaean defensive wall by Poseidon and Apollo after
the war has ended, where the poet looks back from his own time to the
‘race of men half-divine’ who fought at Troy (12.23). Such awe at the
lineage and strength of the warriors, and at the scale of the expedition and
the length of the war, lent the epic world an archaic grandeur, but also
ensured its transformation of the ‘historical’ Trojan War into something
much larger than life.
 Homer and Early Greek Epic 21

Yet for all its poetic embellishment, the Homeric world is not purely
fiction, but a kind of historical amalgam with its own distinctive patterns
or layers. Of course its primary audience is that of Homer’s day (late
eighth or early seventh century BC), and the story of the Trojan War has
been reshaped to suit their values and beliefs; as such it can tell us nothing
about actual Mycenaean values or society. Nonetheless, it does preserve
a few relics of earlier generations, reaching back to the Mycenaean Age
itself: for example, Ajax’s tower-like shield, the boar’s-tusk helmet worn
by Odysseus (10.261-5), Nestor’s great cup (11.632-7), and the use of
bronze (rather than iron) as the main metal for weapons. Though they are
in a sense mere background to the main narrative and do not greatly affect
its plot or characters, these fossilized memories of an earlier age are an
essential part of the epic tradition’s attempt to create a distinctively heroic
world. Homer and his audiences may have known almost nothing about
Mycenaean palace society or the reasons for its collapse around 1200 BC,
but the period of relative decline which followed (including the loss of
literacy, figurative drawing, and metalworking skills), not to mention the
impressive ruins and tombs at places like Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos,
will have encouraged the poets in their nostalgic evocation of a heroic
past. Strikingly, Hera submits to the future destruction of her favourite
cities, ‘Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae of the wide streets’ (as long as Zeus
agrees to her demand for the destruction of Troy), exploiting the Homeric
audience’s awareness of the end of the Mycenaean world (4.51-3).
The epics also reflect another important feature of the cultural
developments that took place between the late Bronze Age and Homer’s
time, namely, an interaction with Near Eastern story-telling and myth. The
two main periods of cultural exchange were between 1450 and 1200 BC
(during the Mycenaean period), then again in the eighth and seventh
centuries BC. The latter period is sometimes referred to as ‘the
Orientalizing revolution’ in Greek culture, but it is more a matter of
intensity than an outright revolution, since Greeks and their Near Eastern
neighbours were constantly interacting with one another throughout the
so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (twelfth to ninth centuries BC, when literacy was
lost). Eastern and Greek relations were channelled in various directions,
but especially through the Phoenicians (via Cyprus) and through Lydia
(in western Asia Minor). Migrant workers enabled the transference of
stories across national boundaries, not just poets, but merchants,
mercenaries, and craftsmen of all kinds (especially blacksmiths and
jewellers); nor should we forget the countless oriental slaves, prostitutes,
and refugees living in Greece. In the Odyssey the loyal swineherd
Eumaeus speaks of migrants who are valued by their host community:
22 Homer: The Iliad

‘those whose craft is for the public good – a seer, a healer of sickness, a
carpenter, or indeed an inspired bard, who delights with his singing’
(17.383-5). Since Greek was something of a lingua franca in the eastern
Mediterranean from the ninth century BC onwards, travelling bards might
encounter foreigners who knew Greek (or be bilingual themselves) and
would be able to exchange stories from each other’s traditions.
Thus the Greek oral tradition could potentially bring in wide
influences, and some scholars have even argued for influence between
specific oriental texts and Homer. So, for example, some see similarities
between Achilles and Gilgamesh (hero of an eponymous Akkadian epic)
– both have divine mothers and dear comrades (Patroclus, Enkidu) whose
death devastates the hero and sends him on a quest – but the alleged
‘parallels’ are often rather tenuous (Achilles’ quest is to kill Hector,
Gilgamesh travels to the flood survivor Utnapishtim to learn the secret of
eternal life), and they can be explained in terms of story patterns (such as
revenge for the death of a companion) found across several cultures (e.g.
Germanic and Japanese) which have had no significant contact.
Moreover, even if we grant the possibility of specific influences, they are
likely to have begun a long time before Homer and, most importantly,
they will have been thoroughly adapted by generations of Greek bards to
suit their very different context, namely, a Greek society which differed
in numerous respects (moral, political, religious, etc.) from its Near
Eastern neighbours. (The same principle applies to aspects of early Greek
poetry that are shared with other Indo-European cultures, such as the
hero’s desire for fame even at the cost of his own life.) So it is unlikely
that Homer or his audience will have seen Gilgamesh and Enkidu behind
Achilles and Patroclus, since a bard’s priority was to make sense to a
Greek audience. In short, speculation about the distant ‘origins’ of motifs
in Homer’s poetry is much less illuminating than seeing what role these
motifs play within the Greek epic tradition itself.
In conclusion, Homer inherited a rich and dynamic tradition of oral
poetry, whose subjects and techniques he deployed to create the Iliad, the
greatest of epic poems. The precise nature of those traditional oral-derived
techniques will be the subject of our next chapter.
Chapter 2
Language, Style, and Structure

‘Timeless’ classic though it is, the Iliad is a product of a particular time

and poetic culture, and this chapter will aim to illustrate that culture
through specific examples. We shall see how the oral performance context
of early Greek epic informs the style of the poem at every level, from
simple noun-epithet combinations to the overall structure of the work
itself. Features of the oral-derived style which may strike modern readers
as unusual will be shown to aid (re)composition in performance, and
various examples will illustrate the poet’s skill in using repetition and
variation, the basic techniques of oral poetry, to create meaning.
The Greek word for the bard’s performance is aoidê, usually translated
as ‘song’, although ‘chant’ would be more accurate. The ‘singer’
accompanied himself with a lyre (kithara or phorminx), as do Phemius
and Demodocus in the Odyssey and Achilles in the Iliad (9.186-91). His
music or melody (now lost) probably remained the same for each verse,
but monotony was avoided by varying tones of delivery, especially when
the performer ‘acted’ the various characters involved, lending them yet
more vividness and credibility. The same metrical pattern (the dactylic
hexameter) governs every verse, but the verses are not metrically
identical, since the hexameter has a flexible structure, and can run from
twelve to seventeen syllables in each verse. Unlike English verse, which
is based on the pattern of stresses, ancient Greek metre was based on the
opposition of long (marked as ‘–’) and short (‘‰’) syllables. The dactylic
hexameter consists of six dactylic metra or feet. Any of the first five feet
can be a dactyl (– ‰ ‰) or spondee (– –), and the sixth foot a spondee or
trochee (– ‰). So the pattern is

Thus the first line of the Iliad, mênin aeide thea Pêlêïadeô Achilêos (‘Sing,
goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus’), scans as – ‰ ‰ | – ‰ ‰
| – – | – ‰ ‰ | – ‰ ‰ | – ‰. (Note that the two vowels -eô in Pêlêïadeô are
here combined to make one long syllable, a process called synecphonesis
24 Homer: The Iliad

or synizesis.) Spondees can replace dactyls in any of the first five feet,
though this is very rare in the fifth foot (only 5% of verses) so that the end
of the verse has a characteristic cadence (– ‰ ‰ – –). The hexameter also
has a natural pause within each line, which can occur only at the end of a
word. This word-end (or ‘caesura’) comes after the first long syllable of
the third foot (as in the opening line of the Iliad above, after the long -a
of thea), or between the two shorts there, or (much less commonly, around
2% of verses) after the first long syllable of the fourth foot. These regular
word-breaks in the third foot mean that the line falls into two parts (or
‘cola’), and many of the formulaic phrases of epic diction are designed to
fit these cola, making them easier for the poet to combine in performance,
as in ton d’ êmeibet’ epeita + podarkês dios Achilleus, i.e. ‘and then he
answered him’ + ‘swift-footed godlike Achilles’ as the subject of the verb
(1.121, Achilles rebuking Agamemnon). As nursery rhymes show, metre
makes things more memorable, and the regular rhythms of Homeric
formulas exploit that principle to the full.
The need to fit the metre is one of the reasons that Homeric Greek is
an artificial language, with various forms from several different dialects
and periods, which was never spoken by any real-life Greek community.
Thus the word for ‘day’, for example, can be hêmerê (an Ionic form) or
êmar (Arcado-Cypriot); the genitive singular (masculine, second
declension) can end in the contemporary form -ou or the archaic -oio; or
the poet can express ‘to be’ in five different ways (einai, emen, emmen,
emenai, emmenai), all of these options designed to suit different metrical
situations. The epic language, like the material world of the poem, was an
amalgam of old and new, with even some remnants of Mycenaean Greek
(such as first declension genitive plurals in -aôn). But of course the
language could not be too abstruse or archaic since it had to be
comprehensible in performance. The predominant dialect of the poem is
Ionic, with an admixture of Aeolic forms to suit the metre (e.g. ammes for
Ionic hêmeis, ‘we’). This suggests that the most vigorous development of
the epic tradition took place in the Ionic speaking communities of Asia
Minor and the Ionian islands of the Aegean as far west as Euboea, but that
early bards also performed in Aeolic speaking areas such as Boeotia and
Thessaly and parts of Asia Minor including the island of Lesbos.
Nonetheless, Homeric Greek was intelligible throughout the Greek world
and its mixture of different dialects (though geared principally to metrical
variety) added to its Panhellenic appeal. As usually happens in Greek
literature, the dialect used by the best exponent of a genre became the
standard one for it, so that Homer’s basically Ionic diction was used by
all subsequent epic poets regardless of where they came from.
 Language, Style, and Structure 25

As noted above, the metrical rhythm of Greek epic shapes its language,
and the poet was able to deploy a large number of standard phrases to fit
the metre. Such ‘formulas’ are found in all grammatical categories of epic
diction, but the most striking is the combination of noun and epithet(s),
as in ‘swift-footed godlike Achilles’, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, ‘Hector of the
flashing helmet’, and so on. In his pioneering work on Homeric poetry in
the 1920s and 30s, Milman Parry showed that there was a system behind
such expressions, and that this formulaic system was not the creation of
a single poet, but the product of a long tradition of oral (re)composition
in performance. Parry defined a ‘formula’ as ‘a group of words which is
regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given
essential idea’, and he went on to show that there is just one formula for
each particular character or action in any given position in the verse. This
principle, which he called ‘economy’, can be seen, for example, in the
way Hector is described in the nominative case in the second half of a
Homeric verse: depending on how long an expression the poet needs to
complete the line, Hector will be called ‘glorious’ (phaidimos Hektôr) or
‘of the flashing helmet’ (koruthaiolos Hektôr) or ‘great Hector of the
flashing helmet’ (megas koruthaiolos Hektôr), and there is no other way
to name him for each of these metrical units.
However, this does not make such phrases merely ornamental (i.e. with
no more significance than the bare name ‘Hector’, as Parry’s early studies
concluded) since the epithets express important qualities of the characters
concerned: for example, it is essential to Odysseus’ identity and the stories
told of him that he is ‘much enduring’ (polutlas) and ‘of many wiles’
(polumêtis). Moreover, the extent to which the audience’s sensitivity to
an epithet is activated depends on the context, which is shaped by the poet:
thus in the phrase ‘then Agamemnon, lord of men, answered him’ the
epithet ‘lord of men’ is fairly colourless, but in the context of the poem’s
opening lines, where the disastrous quarrel is located between ‘Atreus’
son, lord of men, and godlike Achilles’ (1.7), the same epithet is charged
with meaning, for it is precisely Agamemnon’s fitness for the task of being
‘lord of men’ that will be the issue. A similarly pointed example comes
at the end of the poem, when the epithet ‘man-slaying’ (androphonos),
which is characteristic of Hector, is applied to Achilles at the moment
Priam supplicates him for the return of his son’s body: ‘and he kissed the
terrible, man-slaying hands, which had killed many of his sons’
(24.478-9). Such deliberate and artful use of traditional language is
characteristic of the Iliad.
The terms ‘formula’ or ‘formulaic’, then, should not be taken to imply
something dull and mechanical. No doubt in the hands of inferior bards
26 Homer: The Iliad

the formular style led to predictable and pedestrian poetry, where the
singer struggled to use the epic diction creatively. In Homer, by contrast,
we have a poet who is in complete control of his story and his characters
and able to adapt traditional epic language to express exactly what he
wants to say. With such a poet there is no conflict between tradition and
innovation; on the contrary, it is the traditional style which makes his
individual creativity possible in the first place. Moreover, as the
noun-epithet system makes clear, the poet can create various effects
through his skilled use of repetition, and this principle (repetition with
variation) is in fact the basic building-block of Homer’s oral traditional
style as a whole, which he uses to generate structure and meaning at every
level. We see this process at its best in the poet’s deployment of traditional
story patterns and typical scenes, to which we will now turn.
Just as formulas are based on verbal repetition, so story patterns and
typical scenes are dependent on repeated situations and events. Thus, for
example, the story pattern of ‘the abducted woman’ (Helen, Chryseis,
Briseis) underlies both the origins of the war and the initial quarrel of the
Iliad. Similarly, the story pattern of ‘the angry hero’s withdrawal’ is
applied not only to Achilles to generate the larger plot, but also to Paris
(6.325-36), Aeneas (13.459-61), and Meleager (9.524-99). The last
example, spoken by Phoenix to Achilles, is particularly striking, not only
for the parallels drawn between Meleager and Achilles (will Achilles
make the same mistake as Meleager by refusing to return to battle at the
right time, i.e. when gifts are offered?), but also because Phoenix
identifies the tale of Meleager as a traditional story that Achilles should
learn from (9.524-6):

‘This is what we have heard in the glorious tales

of past heroes too, when furious anger came upon one of them:
that they might be won over by gifts and talked round with words.’

Like the poet himself, Phoenix is here using a traditional narrative pattern
and the audience’s familiarity with it to make his point – but one that
Achilles chooses disastrously to ignore.
As with such story patterns, we see in the poet’s deployment of typical
scenes both his and his audience’s expertise in what we might call the
grammar of epic. It had long been known that Homeric narrative describes
the same action (for example, bathing, eating, sacrificing, receiving a
guest, sleeping, launching and beaching a ship, deliberating in assembly,
taking an oath, donning armour, fighting, dying, lamenting, and so on) in
similar ways and in various levels of detail, but only in the 1930s did
 Language, Style, and Structure 27

Walter Arend show how integral these ‘typical scenes’ were to the poet’s
compositional technique. He demonstrated how each of them could be
expanded or contracted to suit the needs of their context, creating a great
variety of effects. Thus sacrifice scenes alone can be divided into
twenty-one separate elements, with no two sacrifice scenes being the
same, and such variety is found in every kind of typical scene. To see the
structural flexibility of this technique and its effect on meaning, it is best
to consider some examples, so let us start with the poem’s four major
arming scenes: Paris (3.328-38), Agamemnon (11.16-46), Patroclus
(16.130-44), and Achilles (19.364-91).
Each of these follows the same basic sequence (first greaves, followed
by breastplate, sword, shield, helmet, and finally spear), but there are
meaningful differences between them. As Paris prepares for his duel with
Menelaus, we are told that his breastplate was not his but had to be
borrowed from his brother Lycaon, underlining the fact that Paris usually
fights from afar with his bow, and so will be no match for his
battle-hardened opponent. Agamemnon’s breastplate and sword are richly
decorated with precious materials (gold, silver, blue enamel), stressing
his wealth and power as commander of the Achaeans, but also his vanity,
while his shield, crowned with figures (Gorgo, Terror, Panic) elsewhere
found on the aegis of Athena (5.738-42), heralds his initial success in the
fighting, but also emphasizes his tendency to bluster (he is soon wounded
and forced to retreat). When Patroclus dons Achilles’ armour, he is unable
to carry Achilles’ massive spear (no other Achaean can), and thus the poet
underlines the fact that, despite his attempt to play the surrogate, Patroclus
is no Achilles. Finally, Achilles’ arming scene, the most important in the
poem, has already been prefaced by the detailed description of his shield’s
manufacture by Hephaestus in the previous book (18.478-608), so rather
than dwell again on the shield’s decoration, the poet emphasizes its
gleaming with a simile (it is like a fire on land which is out of reach of
sailors caught in a storm), and inserts an element unattested elsewhere
(Achilles checking the armour to see if it fits him) in order to foreground
Achilles’ unique position as the recipient of new armour made by a god.
The concluding reference to the spear repeats the story of its origins
already given in Patroclus’ arming scene (it was a gift from the centaur
Cheiron to Achilles’ father, Peleus), stressing Achilles’ right to wield the
weapon and his ability to succeed where Patroclus failed.
Three of these four arming scenes (Paris excepted) are preludes to the
hero’s aristeia (‘best moment’), a term used to describe the point in the
fighting where the hero sweeps all before him. And in each of the poem’s
five major aristeia (Diomedes in Books 5-6, Agamemnon in 11, Hector
28 Homer: The Iliad

in 15-16, Patroclus in 16, Achilles in 19-22) we see a similarly deliberate

variation in detail to suit the context. Diomedes, for example, does not
strip his enemy’s corpse but is given golden armour in exchange for
bronze by Glaucus, a symbol of his irresistibility in battle. Hector’s glory
in killing Patroclus is undercut by the fact that Patroclus has already been
dazed and wounded by others (Apollo and Euphorbus): as Patroclus
reminds the boasting Hector, ‘you are the third to slay me’ (16.850). As
the central hero of the Iliad, Achilles is given an especially elaborate
aristeia, which includes his being attacked by a god (the river Xanthos),
while the struggle over his victim’s corpse is expanded into the great
encounter with Priam that ends the poem.
Arming scenes and aristeia are subsets of the larger cluster of typical
motifs that make up battle narrative as a whole, which is such a large and
fundamental part of the poem. Homer surveys all the stages of combat,
from the first preparations for fighting to the recovery and burial of the
dead. And here too, despite the repeated narrative patterns, there is no one
battle scene the same as any other, and the poet creates meaning by
variation on the underlying motifs. The poet’s vision is strikingly
cinematic, as he moves the focus from the widescreen scenes of mass
fighting – where ‘shield pressed on shield, helmet on helmet, man on man’
(13.131) – to the individual duels. The fighting is stylized to an extent: it
is much more decisive than actual warfare, since the warrior is killed or
rescued and there are no walking wounded, and the lengthy passages of
flyting (the exchange of abusive speeches before duels) are the stuff of
poetry, but much would be familiar to an archaic-period audience from
their own experience of battle. Aside from repetition, one of the basic
principles of Homeric style is amplification: in other words, the more
important an action or character is, the more elaborated the typical scene
becomes, and thus, for example, more space is given to the fighting and
deaths of major heroes like Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector than to any
of the other 240 named warriors killed in the Iliad.
One of the most characteristic elements of Homer’s style is the use of
similes. Short similes of the type ‘the hero roared like a lion’ are common
in ancient Near Eastern literature (including the Old Testament), but the
long or extended simile which develops the comparison over many verses
is unique to Homeric epic and much imitated by later epic poets (notably
Apollonius and Virgil). There are approximately 1128 lines of simile in
the Iliad (7.2% of its 15693 verses) which comprise some 153 short and
197 long similes. The figures for the Odyssey (87 short and only 45 long
similes) show that the Iliad uses four times as many extended similes. This
does not prove separate authorship of the two poems, but it does point to
 Language, Style, and Structure 29

their different settings: the Iliad is much more concentrated on a particular

location and time than is the Odyssey, and the Iliad’s extended similes
help set the action of the poem within the wider world, as can be seen from
the similes’ most popular subjects (weather and nature, hunting and
herding, human technology). More than three-quarters of the Iliad’s
extended similes occur in battle scenes, but one should beware the
common idea that they serve to provide ‘relief’ from the monotony of
fighting, since most of the similes depict turbulence, hostility, and
suffering of various kinds and thus intensify (rather than negate) the force
and violence of the narrative. Similes have a variety of functions, but one
of the most basic is to focus the audience’s attention on a particular person,
and their frequency in the battle scenes is one way in which the poet
individualizes the deaths of the warriors, whether they are major heroes
or rank-and-file fighters.
Short similes can in themselves be highly effective, as in the
description of Apollo’s attack on the Achaean camp: ‘and his coming was
like nightfall’ (1.47). But the principle of amplification (discussed above)
means that important moments are generally marked by longer or by
multiple similes. Thus Achilles’ return to the fighting is heralded by the
longest lion simile in the poem (20.164-73), while an accumulation of five
extended similes marks the introduction of the Achaean forces (2.455-83)
and the fierce battle to recover Patroclus’ body (17.725-59). Similes often
foreshadow what is to come in the narrative: for example, when Achilles
likens himself and Patroclus to a mother and a crying girl, the parental
imagery foreshadows his intense grief at Patroclus’ death (16.7-11);
similarly, when Achilles grieves for Patroclus like a father wailing for his
dead son (23.222-5), this prepares for the importance of his own father
Peleus’ grief in the compassion he will show to Priam, another bereft
father. Similes can also express the viewpoint of a particular character, as
when Priam sees the advancing Achilles as the baleful star known as
Orion’s Dog: ‘it is the brightest star, but a sign of suffering, bringing much
fever for wretched mortals’ (22.30-1).
The most popular subjects (e.g. lions, boars, birds, cattle, weather, fire)
are likely to be traditional, whereas the unique ones, which are often the
most memorable, will have been composed for their specific context.
Thus, for example, the moment when Athena saves Menelaus from
Pandarus’ truce-breaking arrow is marked by two unique similes: Athena
deflects the missile ‘like a mother brushing a fly from her child as he lies
sweetly sleeping’ (4.130-1), and blood covers Menelaus’ wound ‘as when
a woman stains ivory with crimson dye, a Maionian or Carian woman, to
make a cheek-piece for horses’ (4.141-2). The contrast between human
30 Homer: The Iliad

effort and divine ease evident in Athena’s protection of Menelaus is also

seen in the simile that compares Apollo’s destruction of the Achaean wall
to a little boy’s demolition of sand-castles on the sea-shore (15.363-6):

He builds them up as playthings in his childish way,

and then delights in flattening them with hands and feet.
So did you, lord Apollo, flatten all the work and toil
of the Argives, and stirred up panic among them.

Like multiple similes, these unique images draw the audience’s attention
to crucial phases in the narrative, as when Menelaus relents in his quarrel
with Antilochus and so avoids the kind of disastrous conflict that
Agamemnon had started in Book 1 (23.597-9):

And Menelaus’ heart

was melted, like the dew on the ears of ripening corn,
when the ploughlands are bristling with the crop.

Finally, extended similes do not simply liken one thing to another but
create multiple points of comparison, whose effect is a deepening and
complex resonance: so, for example, when Priam enters Achilles’ hut, he
is compared to an exiled murderer who is seeking asylum at a rich man’s
house in another land and whose arrival causes amazement (24.480-4).
The comparison is arresting in its detail and seeming inappropriateness,
but the audience will recall that the theme of the fleeing migrant is also
attached to two of Achilles’ closest comrades, Phoenix (9.478-84) and
Patroclus, and that Patroclus was forced to leave his native city because
of an involuntary murder (23.85-90). So Priam is likened to two men who
found succour and protection in the house of Achilles’ father, which
encourages the audience to wonder whether the helpless Priam will fare
as well now that Achilles is in charge.
Like similes, metaphors create analogies between separate things, but
do so in a more compressed, and potentially more arresting, manner. The
metaphorical force even of formulaic expressions such as ‘winged words’
and ‘shepherd of the people’ is not completely dulled by repetition: they
mark the ‘words’ as impressive and reinforce the leader’s obligation to
act in the best interests of his followers. But more striking are the
metaphors which blend ideas in unexpected ways, such as when Hector
speaks of the Trojans giving Paris ‘a coat of stones’ (3.57) for all the harm
he has caused them, or when Heracles is said to have ‘widowed the streets’
of Troy in revenge for the treachery of Laomedon (5.642). As with similes,
 Language, Style, and Structure 31

metaphors are frequently used in battle scenes to make the action more
vivid: weapons are ‘eager to glut themselves with flesh’ (e.g. 11.574), a
dead warrior ‘slept the sleep of bronze’ (11.241), and when the Achaeans
return to battle, ‘all the earth around them laughed at the flashing bronze’
(19.362-3).
Perhaps the most striking feature of Homeric style (apart from its use
of formulas) is the great preponderance of direct speech. As Aristotle
observed (Poetics ch. 24):

Homer deserves praise for many other attributes, but especially for
his grasp – unique among epic poets – of his role as a poet. For the
poet should say as little as possible in his own voice, since that is
not mimesis (‘imitation’). Other epic poets act in their own voice
throughout, and engage in mimesis briefly and infrequently. But
Homer, with little prelude, immediately ‘brings on stage’ a man,
woman or some other figure, and they are all fully characterized.

The theatrical term ‘brings on stage’ emphasizes Homer’s proto-dramatic

quality, which is a consequence (as Aristotle explains) of the high
proportion of character speech: 45% of the Iliad is direct speech (the
Odyssey is even higher at 68%, since Odysseus himself narrates Books
9-12), and speeches are integral to many of the most important episodes
in the poem: for example, the quarrel in Book 1, Hector and his family
(Book 6), the embassy to Achilles (9), Hector and the dying Patroclus
(16), Achilles and the dying Hector (22), Achilles’ meeting with Priam
(24). Being a good speaker is in itself part of the heroic ideal: Achilles’
old tutor Phoenix recalls how he was sent by Peleus to ensure that this son
became ‘both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’ (9.443), and it is
no coincidence that the major heroes of the Homeric epics (Achilles and
Odysseus) are also the most eloquent (note the Trojan Antenor’s praise
of Odysseus’ skill as a speaker at 3.216-24).
The style and vocabulary of the speeches are different from the
narrative. They are more personal in the sense of being more emotional
and rhetorical, and they use more superlatives, negatives, and value
judgements: thus the word schetlios (‘cruel’) occurs 29 times in character
speech but only once in the narrator’s voice, hubris (‘insult’) 26 times to
3, aidôs (‘shame’) 24 times to 1, and so on. Moreover, the different styles
and content of particular speeches also serve to characterize the individual
heroes. Thus, for example, each of the three figures who undertake the
embassy in Book 9 delivers a speech to match his character: Odysseus is
rational and calculating, Phoenix affectionate and didactic, Ajax blunt and
32 Homer: The Iliad

bewildered by Achilles’ complexity. Achilles has the most individual

style of all, and his speeches in rejection of the embassy display his
character to the full, using violent and abusive language, exaggeration,
simile, and hapax legomena (words used only once in the poem (80 in
total); he also uses the most words (18) that do not occur anywhere else
in Greek) in order to articulate his idiosyncratic view of his situation.
Finally, let us consider the structure of the poem. The division into 24
books is not original but was probably introduced by Alexandrian scholars
in the third century BC, each book numbered with a letter of the Greek
alphabet (their lengths vary from 424 verses in Book 19 to 909 in Book
5). Before that authors refer only to distinct episodes such as ‘the aristeia
of Diomedes’ (Herodotus 2.116) or ‘the Catalogue of Ships’ (Thucydides
1.10.4). The Alexandrian book divisions occasionally coincide with
particular episodes (e.g. the quarrel in Book 1, the embassy in 9, the
meeting of Achilles and Priam in 24), but often they simply interrupt them,
as with Diomedes’ aristeia which continues from Book 5 into 6. Despite
its great size, the Iliad covers only a short period in the Trojan War,
concentrating on just four days of fighting from the tenth year
(2.1-23.108), flanked by scenes which depict the cause and resolution of
Achilles’ anger (Books 1 and 24). As Aristotle again observed, Homer
did not make the same mistake as the later poets of the Epic Cycle, who
tried to cover everything from start to finish, leading merely to a dull
sequence of events (Poetics ch. 23); rather he chose a single, unified action
within the story of Troy’s fall (the anger of Achilles) and expanded it in
a way that allows his narrative to embrace the entire war.
Thus the poem includes events which would be more appropriate at
the start of the war: the catalogue of ships in Book 2, the duel between
Paris and Menelaus and Helen’s review of the major Achaean heroes for
Priam in Book 3, the building of the Achaean defensive wall and ditch in
Book 7. But each of these ‘logically’ earlier episodes is also adapted to
its place within the Iliad: the catalogue heralds the scale and importance
of the ensuing battle, the duel (and Paris’ unmerited escape) reinforces
the original Trojan crime, while the Achaean defences underline their
vulnerability to Trojan attack once Achilles has withdrawn. And as well
as evoking events earlier in the war, the poem also foreshadows the death
of Achilles (e.g. 18.95-101) and the fall of Troy (12.10-35). The closing
lines of the Iliad look forward to the continuing warfare, as the Trojans
post look-outs during Hector’s funeral in case the Achaeans spring an
early attack (24.799-800), and the poem thus draws attention to the fact
that its end is not an end, and that it is part of a wider epic tradition.
The creative use of time (past and future) is therefore one of the best
 Language, Style, and Structure 33

examples of the Iliad’s careful and sophisticated structure, which in turn

is one of the clearest proofs of the single creative intelligence behind the
work as a whole. And just as the poem’s deliberate planning is evident in
its unity of theme (namely, the cause and consequences of Achilles’
anger), so it also emerges in the long-range preparation of future
developments in the narrative: for example, Zeus saves Sarpedon ‘for the
time being’ (5.662) in preparation for his later killing by Patroclus in Book
16, and Patroclus’ own death soon after is already prophesied by Zeus in
Books 8 and 15 (8.470-7, 15.59-71). Such clear prophecies do not remove
interest: on the contrary, the audience’s knowledge of the outcome creates
its own suspense, as they wonder how the poet will take them there.
It was noted above that repetition is a fundamental principle of
Homeric poetry and this is equally true of its structure, as the number of
similar scenes and the frequency of ring-composition show. There are, for
example, a large number of correspondences between the deaths of
Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector, the only heroes who are given death
speeches; indeed, the same four lines are used to describe the deaths of
Patroclus and Hector (16.855-8 = 22.361-4), each of whom prophesies his
killer’s death, so that the connections between the scenes prepare for the
death of Achilles himself. Ring-composition is a basic technique for
articulating structure in ancient Greek literature (especially for marking
the end of works) and it is used nowhere more impressively than in the
Iliad. Thus in both Book 1 and 24 an old man (Chryses/Priam) supplicates
an Achaean hero and offers a ransom for the release of his child; in both
books Thetis travels to Olympus on behalf of her son; Apollo also plays
a crucial role, inflicting the plague on the Achaeans in Book 1 for ignoring
the ransom offered for Chryseis and haranguing the gods in Book 24 so
that they will support the ransoming of Hector’s corpse; and there is even
an identical period of 22 days covered in each (plague and divine holiday
in 1, mutilation and burial in 24). Further parallels could be added, but the
important point is not mere echoing: for whereas Chryses fails in his
appeal, Priam succeeds in his, creating a powerful and satisfying sense of
resolution and closure.
In conclusion, we have seen how the basic features of oral-derived
poetry (from noun-epithet systems to repeated story patterns and typical
scenes) make it possible for Homer to generate his song and to create
meaning within it. It is important that we try to understand these traditional
techniques, since they show the extent to which Homer was a master of
his tradition and a uniquely gifted poet.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 3
The Hero and Homeric Society

Despite their desire ‘always to be the best and to excel above others’ – so
Hippolochus’ injunction to Glaucus (6.208) and Peleus’ to Achilles
(11.784) – the Iliadic heroes are not rampant individualists, but
fundamentally social heroes; that is, they exist as part of a wider society
whose estimation of them is central to their heroic identity. This chapter
will examine the communal basis of heroism, showing how a hero’s
ability to balance personal concerns (ambitions, grievances, etc.) with the
good of his community is key to the portrayal of the work’s central figures.
As we shall see, the suffering and disorder depicted in the Iliad stem not
from any fundamental failure in Homeric society or ethics per se, but from
the character, emotions, and errors of the heroes themselves, and
especially from their attempts to put personal claims to honour above the
interests of their community.
First, it is important that the word ‘hero’ itself be understood correctly.
Nowadays we reserve the term for people who have done something
unambiguously positive: for example, firemen who rush into a burning
building to save people, or soldiers who fight for their country and to protect
their comrades. In ancient Greek culture, however, the ‘heroes’ are not simply
positive figures. They are men from a distinct period before our own, the
heroic age or ‘race of men half-divine’, as Homer calls them (12.23), who,
far from being simply paragons of virtue, are characterized by their
excessiveness, both for good and for ill. The heroic generation possesses
greater vitality and strength than ours: the heroes are megathumoi, often
translated as ‘great-hearted’, but literally meaning that they are full of
thumos, the spirit of life. One of the key words for this energy or force is
menos (‘strength’), which can propel the heroes to acts of superhuman
and admirable prowess. Yet their heroic power is double-edged, because
it can also lead to less desirable qualities: excessive anger, violence,
cruelty, pride, recklessness, and egotism. So there is a tension within
heroism itself in that the very energy which makes the heroes outstanding
is also the source of their instability and danger (both to themselves and
to others). The Iliad, then, is a sophisticated epic, which not only
celebrates the heroic world but also explores the nature of heroism itself.
36 Homer: The Iliad

Heroes, it should also be stressed, come in a variety of forms: Achilles

is not the same as Odysseus, nor Ajax the same as Hector (let alone Paris).
In other words, the basic drive ‘always to be the best’ does not lead to a
series of identical heroic characters. Diomedes, for example, acts as a foil
for Achilles in the first half of the poem, since he is able to excuse
Agamemnon’s insults in a way that Achilles could not (4.364-418),
highlighting the latter’s anger and resentment. (It is equally true, however,
that well-balanced characters like Diomedes are less dramatic and
interesting than excessive ones like Achilles.) Even if we sum up the
heroic ideal in terms of being outstanding as ‘both a speaker of words and
a doer of deeds’ (9.443), each hero will possess these abilities in his own
individual way. Thus Odysseus and Nestor excel as speakers, Achilles
and Ajax as fighters. To us such a close connection between fighting well
and speaking well seems odd, but from a Homeric perspective they
complement one another perfectly, since the battlefield and the assembly
(agorê) are the foremost arenas in which the hero can excel and thereby
benefit both himself and his community. Moreover, as the lowly Thersites
discovers to his cost, one may acquire respect through speaking but one
also needs some status to speak in the first place: for despite voicing much
the same criticisms of Agamemnon as Achilles had done in Book 1,
Thersites lacks the status to express them and is beaten by Odysseus,
whose action is applauded by the Achaean army (2.211-77).
Yet, for all their variety, the Homeric heroes are united by their focus
on the pursuit of honour (timê), which is the bedrock of the heroic world
and its values. Timê denotes the way one is valued in the eyes of others
and the esteem which they confer. A wide range of qualities create honour
(e.g. age, noble birth), but foremost in the Iliad are one’s status within the
community and one’s prowess in battle, since these lie at the heart of the
tension between Agamemnon and Achilles. Esteem is manifested in many
different ways too, including grants of land, food, and wine (as described
by Sarpedon to Glaucus (12.310-21): on this passage see further below),
and in the form of booty or war-prizes (gera) granted to the foremost
warriors: one such prize (Briseis) is the origin of Achilles’ quarrel with
Agamemnon. All Homeric heroes, not just Achilles, are driven by their
concern for timê. However, since honour is conferred by others, and since
it depends on a complex and subjective interplay of power, status, and
one’s evaluation of other people, it is something that has to be carefully
managed and negotiated (something the heavy-handed Agamemnon is
unable to do), and problems can arise (as with Achilles) if an individual
feels he is being short-changed for his efforts, or as Achilles puts it, when
‘coward and brave are held in equal honour’ (9.319).
 The Hero and Homeric Society 37

Apart from timê, two other concepts are central to a proper

understanding of Homeric heroism, namely aidôs (‘shame’, ‘respect’) and
kleos (‘fame’, ‘reputation’). Having a sense of shame (aidôs) prevents an
individual from doing disgraceful actions (e.g. retreating in battle) that
provoke indignation (nemesis) in others. More positively, aidôs also
expresses an individual’s ‘respect’ for others, and the need to take their
separate claim to honour into account. In other words, the importance of
aidôs shows that the heroic drive ‘always to be the best and to excel above
others’ is not a manifesto for pure self-interest, since success relies on
respecting as well as being respected by others. A hero’s concern for how
he is spoken of (his kleos), both during his lifetime and after his death, is
an extension of his concern for his honour. It is a basic tenet of Homeric
heroism that the fame of great achievements offers a kind of immortality,
so that Hector goes to face Achilles determined either to win or to die with
glorious kleos: ‘May I not die without a fight and ingloriously (akleiôs),
but having done some great deed for men of the future to hear of’
(22.304-5). The fact that death is absolute in the Iliad, with no possibility
of immortality (as in the Odyssey, Hesiod, and the Epic Cycle), gives a
particular urgency to the hero’s desire for honour in his lifetime, especially
when (as with Achilles: 9.410-16) he has given up the chance of a long
life in order to face certain death at Troy.
People often speak of a ‘heroic code’ operating in the Iliad, but the
term is misleading and best avoided, since it suggests a kind of ‘highway
code’ for heroes, a rule book they can look up, which will tell them what
they should do in a particular situation. Heroism, however, is not so
inflexible; on the contrary, it is embodied in human beings with powerful
emotions and competing obligations, so that what the hero chooses to do
(and what it is appropriate for him to do) will depend on a variety of
factors, including his character and particular circumstances.
Nonetheless, the Iliad does endorse some basic principles of human
interaction, which are far from being selfish and individualistic. As we
shall see, the errors made by Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector show the
need to avoid pushing one’s own claim to timê too far, lest it damage both
the agent himself and his community. Once again, self-interest has to be
balanced with regard for others. This is well illustrated by the quarrel
between Menelaus and Antilochus in Book 23, which replays many of the
tensions inherent in the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in
Book 1, but with a less disastrous outcome. Both men declare their right
to the same prize (geras), this time a horse won in a chariot race rather
than a woman won in war, but both also realize that other factors override
their claim to the prize: Antilochus (unlike Achilles) respects Menelaus’
38 Homer: The Iliad

superior status, while Menelaus (unlike Agamemnon) recognizes that he

owes much to his opponent, who is fighting on his behalf (23.586-611).
Neither man allows his desire for honour to go too far, and a potentially
disastrous conflict is averted.
The communal basis of heroism emerges clearly from a
consideration of Homeric society and the structures of authority within
it. Although Homeric society is (like Homeric language) a poetic
composite with details drawn from different historical periods
(including a certain nostalgia for the grand old world of Mycenaean
‘lords of men’), it is nonetheless a coherent and credible world.
Moreover, since oral poetry must constantly develop in order to
address the changing concerns of its audience or risk becoming
irrelevant and obsolete, the fictional society of the Iliad must engage
with the fundamental moral and political concerns of its audience. The
Iliad does so by avoiding a narrow ideological stance (for example, by
being pro- or anti-monarchy or aristocracy), but instead explores broad
themes which are as relevant today as they were in Homer’s time, none
more so perhaps than the relationship between the leader and his
community. The question of how a leader should behave in order to
ensure the well-being of his people is one that is posed on both the
Achaean and the Trojan side. For, as we shall see, not only
Agamemnon and Achilles, but also Paris, Hector, and Priam make
mistakes which damage or destroy their communities.
The symbiosis of leader and led pervades the poem. Both the Achaeans
and the Trojans hold assemblies, where the decisions of the army’s or
community’s leaders are ratified by the rank-and-file (e.g. 1.54-305,
7.345-79). Moreover, the poem’s clearest statement of what it is to be a
hero, in a speech delivered by Sarpedon (a Lycian ally of the Trojans) to
his comrade Glaucus, focuses on the relationship between the hero and
his people (12.310-21)

‘Glaucus, why are we two most held in honour

with the best seats and cuts of meat and full cups
in Lycia, and all look on us like gods?
And we enjoy a large estate by the banks of the Xanthos,
fine land for orchards and wheat-bearing ploughland.
That is why we must take our stand in the first rank of the Lycians
and face the raging heat of battle,
so that among the close-armoured Lycians people may say:
“ Not without glory are those who rule in Lycia,
our leaders, who consume fattened sheep
 The Hero and Homeric Society 39

and choice honey-sweet wine; but they have strength

and courage too, it seems, since they fight in the first ranks of the
Lycians.” ’

The people grant the hero high status and material honours in return for
his acceptance of the responsibility to protect them. This reciprocity
works because both parties benefit from the relationship. Significantly,
where heroes in the Iliad forget they are fighting for the people (as much
as for themselves) and allow their personal concerns to damage the
well-being of the community, disgrace and disaster ensue. Paris, for
example, does not care what the Trojans or their allies think of him – ‘he
was hated by them all like black death’ (3.454) – and refuses to give Helen
back, for purely selfish reasons, when to do so risks destroying his
community (7.345-64).
The social formation of heroism, then, is seen in the conduct of all the
major figures on both sides, especially Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector.
Let us first consider the portrayal of Hector before looking at the Achaean
heroes. Hector is presented as particularly concerned with what other
people think, and he uses the idea of imaginary third-person speech
(‘someone will say }’) much more often than any other hero (e.g.
6.459-62, 479-81, 7.87-91). However, Hector’s fear of disgrace in the
eyes of others turns out to be one of the main factors in his death, and
Andromache’s prediction ‘your own might (menos) will destroy you’
(6.407) proves true. For after rejecting Polydamas’ ‘good advice’ (as the
narrator calls it, 18.313) to shelter within the walls of Troy, Hector, carried
away by his recent success in reaching the Achaean ships and killing
Patroclus, orders the Trojans to stay out on the plain overnight, and so
enables Achilles to inflict huge losses on them when he returns to the
fighting. Hector’s awareness of his mistake and the damage his desire for
glory has done to his people crucially influences his decision to reject the
anguished appeals of his parents and stay to face Achilles (22.98-110):

Then, greatly troubled, he spoke to his own proud heart:

‘What am I to do? If I go back inside the gates and walls,
Polydamas will be the first to lay reproaches on me,
for he urged me to lead the Trojans back into the city
during this last fatal night, when godlike Achilles was roused.
But I did not listen to him – it would have been far better if I had.
So now that I have ruined my people by my own reckless folly,
I feel shame before the Trojan men and the Trojan women with their
trailing robes,
40 Homer: The Iliad

in case someone who is less of a man than I may say:

“ Hector trusted in his own might and ruined his people.”
So they will say; and then it would be far better for me
to go face to face with Achilles and kill him and return home,
or else die gloriously myself in front of the city.’

Hector knows he has failed in his duty of care for his people, and the shame
this entails drives him to face Achilles in the hope of winning his honour
back either by victory or a glorious death. Yet Hector’s death will be even
more ruinous for the Trojans, and so there is a terrible irony in Hector’s
reaction to his dilemma, for the very qualities which make him such a
great hero (his sense of shame and his pride in his status and abilities) lead
him to make a decision which will doom not only himself but also his
family and his city. Homer has deliberately portrayed Hector as the family
and community oriented hero par excellence (especially in Book 6, where
Hector returns to Troy) in order to underline the difficulty of his final
choice, as he puts one aspect of heroism (his honour) above another
(protection of his people). However, Hector’s conflict does not mean that
heroism itself is self-contradictory or doomed to failure. Rather it shows
that in the absence of a simple ‘heroic code’ that spells out which aspect
of heroism should win out in any given situation, it is up to the individual
hero to balance the competing obligations that come with his status. In
Hector we see one man’s perspective on the tension within heroism
between self-assertion and concern for others. Hector’s decision,
awesome yet fatal, to put his personal quest for honour above all other
considerations illuminates the difficulty and complexity of heroism itself.
As with Hector, Agamemnon’s and Achilles’ portrayal throughout the
poem explores the potential conflict within heroism between individual
ambition and collective good, and the dangers of putting personal honour
above all else. The poem begins with Agamemnon rejecting the
unanimous will of the Achaean army, who approve Chryses’ offer of a
ransom for his captured daughter (1.22-5). When Apollo’s plague strikes
the Achaeans as a result, Agamemnon is forced to return his prize
(Chryseis), without gaining the ransom. Agamemnon grudgingly gives up
Chryseis because (as he says) ‘I want the people to survive rather than to
perish’ (1.117), but no sooner is this crisis averted than Agamemnon
sparks another one, for he demands a replacement prize, even though all
the booty has already been divided among the Achaean leaders. Achilles
urges Agamemnon to take a longer view of the matter, as a good leader
would: ‘we Achaeans will compensate you three and four times over, if
ever Zeus grants that we tear apart the well-walled city of Troy’ (1.127-9).
 The Hero and Homeric Society 41

Agamemnon, however, puts the immediate replenishment of his timê

above everything else, with disastrous results for himself and the army.
The quarrel escalates between the two Achaean leaders in a vivid series
of angry speeches, which brilliantly express the sensitivities of each man.
Accusations of ‘you always do x’ and ‘you never do y’ are exchanged:
thus, for example, Achilles complains ‘I never receive a prize equal to
yours’ (1.163), while Agamemnon retorts ‘strife and war and battles are
always dear to you’ (1.177). This kind of talk, so typical of angry
arguments, also creates the sense of a long-standing tension between the
two men, as if this is not the first time they have clashed. When Achilles
criticizes Agamemnon’s demand for a replacement prize, tactlessly
addressing him as ‘most glorious son of Atreus, most rapacious of all men’
(1.122), Agamemnon is unable to cope with the public challenge to his
authority, and so issues a counter-challenge to Achilles, insisting that he
will take away Achilles’ prize (Briseis), ‘so that you may know well how
much more powerful I am than you’ (1.185-6). Agamemnon feels himself
backed into a corner by Achilles and lacks the diplomatic skills (of an
Odysseus, for example) necessary to defuse the situation; instead he falls
back on his status and rank, where he knows he is superior to Achilles,
and insists on an immediate manifestation of his timê (Briseis), even at
the risk of alienating his best fighter.
The errors made by both Agamemnon and Achilles are clearly
expressed in Nestor’s advice to them (1.275-84):

‘You, great man though you are, do not take the girl from this man,
but let her be, since the sons of the Achaeans first gave her to him as
a prize.
And you, son of Peleus, do not seek to strive with a king
by force, since a sceptred king to whom Zeus grants glory
has a greater portion of honour.
You may be stronger and have a goddess for your mother,
but he is greater, because he rules over more people.
Son of Atreus, bring your rage to an end; I beg you
to let go your anger against Achilles, who is a mighty
bulwark for all the Achaeans against the evils of war.’

Nestor rebukes both men, Agamemnon for undoing the original

distribution of prizes and neglecting Achilles’ importance to the
campaign, and Achilles for quarrelling with his superior. He urges them
to respect the other man’s particular excellence and claim to honour,
Achilles’ prowess and Agamemnon’s rank. Nestor does not place one
42 Homer: The Iliad

claim to timê above the other, but insists instead that both deserve respect
and both are crucial to the collective good: Agamemnon must recognize
that ‘the sons of the Achaeans’ gave Briseis to Achilles as a communal
recognition of his efforts and value to the mission, while Achilles must
cease from publicly challenging Agamemnon and thereby threatening the
hierarchy and order of the Achaean army. As Nestor points out, their
quarrel benefits only the Trojans (1.255-8). Both heroes, however, ignore
Nestor’s advice: Agamemnon says he agrees with Nestor, but instead of
taking back his demand for Briseis he continues to insist on his status,
accusing Achilles of wanting to be supreme commander (1.286-9), while
Achilles claims that to submit to Agamemnon would make him ‘a coward
and a nobody’ (1.293). Each hero fails in his obligation to his community:
Agamemnon alienates his best fighter and damages the expedition, while
Achilles not only knows that his withdrawal from battle will doom many
of his comrades (1.240-4), but is prepared to use their deaths to force
Agamemnon to make good his loss of honour (1.408-12).
Both men are also to blame for the failure of the embassy in Book 9.
Agamemnon’s offer of material compensation comes with no apology to
Achilles or any expression of gratitude for his efforts or acknowledgement
of his worth. Achilles, on the other hand, fails to accept that there are other
factors, especially his ties to his fellow Achaeans, which might (and
should) cancel out the perceived shortcomings in Agamemnon’s offer,
and he allows his anger to blind him to all other concerns, so that he rejects
the socially approved process of compensation. Unlike Book 1, however,
where Agamemnon started the crisis and we are led to sympathize with
Achilles, Book 9 shows Achilles to be no less intransigent and
unreasonable in his demand for honour, and equally culpable for
damaging the Achaean army.
Nestor advises Agamemnon to appeal to Achilles ‘with soothing gifts
and flattering words’ (9.113), but the gifts and words deployed by
Agamemnon are problematic. First, Agamemnon engages in competitive
largesse, offering gifts on such a magnificent scale as to underline his
superiority to Achilles (9.121-56); secondly, far from going to Achilles
in person or expressing himself in flattering terms, Agamemnon sends a
message which culminates in a renewed demand that Achilles recognize
his superiority (9.160-1):

‘And let him take his place below me, since I am the more kingly
and can claim to be his senior by birth.’

Wisely, Odysseus omits these closing words when he relates

 The Hero and Homeric Society 43

Agamemnon’s speech to Achilles, but Achilles still senses the

high-handed tone of Agamemnon’s offer. Odysseus replaces the demand
for submission with his own two-fold appeal (9.300-6): first, he entreats
Achilles to pity his Achaean comrades, who are suffering in his absence
– the appeal to pity is also used by the two other members of the embassy,
Phoenix and Ajax (9.494-7, 628-32); and secondly, he entices Achilles
with the prospect of great honour and glory if he returns to the fighting,
especially if he kills Hector, who is now enjoying great success on the
battlefield. Achilles, however, only recognizes, or relearns, the value of
pity much later (when confronted by Priam in Book 24), while the appeal
to honour rings hollow, since Achilles believes Agamemnon has
undermined the entire system that generates and preserves honour in the
first place.
It is sometimes said that Achilles is rejecting the ‘heroic code’ itself in
his response to the embassy. However, what Achilles is criticizing is not
heroism per se, but rather Agamemnon’s perceived abuse of it (and his
fellow Achaeans’ collusion in that abuse). For it makes no sense to risk
one’s life for honour and glory, Achilles argues, if those rewards can be
withheld or taken away, so that ‘coward and brave are held in equal
honour’ (9.319). And the trade-off between the risk of death and the
winning of honour is especially stark for Achilles because, as he reveals
in his rejection of the embassy, he knows from his divine mother Thetis
that, should he choose to stay and fight for glory at Troy, he is doomed to
an early death (9.410-13). Moreover, Achilles thinks there is no guarantee
that Agamemnon will not ‘deceive’ him or some other Achaean hero in
this way again (9.344-5, 371-6). Yet, just as Agamemnon can be faulted
for continuing to indulge his desire for dominance, so Achilles is being
unreasonable in his reaction to Agamemnon’s offer. For not only does
Achilles put an infinite value on his damaged honour (no amount of gifts
will satisfy him, he says (9.379-87), a position that is socially
unacceptable and baffling to all the other Achaeans), but he also tries to
replace the established protocols of compensation with a much more
personal and incalculable demand, saying that he will not change his mind
and return to battle ‘until he [Agamemnon] has paid me back for all this
heart-rending outrage’ (9.387).
In other words, Achilles points to his feelings and Agamemnon’s
failure to assuage them – note his later wish that Agamemnon ‘would treat
me kindly’ (16.72-3). But feelings are hard to account for within the
formal system of compensation, and Achilles’ inability to get over his
anger at the original offence strikes all the other Achaeans as perverse; as
Phoenix succinctly puts it, ‘before now your anger could not be blamed’
44 Homer: The Iliad

(9.523, emphasis added). And when Ajax points out that the anger even
of a murdered man’s relatives is restrained by accepting compensation
from the killer (9.632-6), the excessiveness and selfishness of Achilles’
continuing rage and refusal to accept the compensation are powerfully
underlined. Achilles recognizes the disastrous consequences of his anger
only when it is too late and Patroclus is dead: 18.107-11. To sum up, the
problems with Agamemnon’s offer (its competitiveness and superior
tone) encourage us to understand what still rankles with Achilles;
nonetheless, all the other Achaeans believe Achilles should get over his
anger and hurt feelings – note especially Diomedes’ condemnation of his
‘arrogance’ (9.699-700). Insofar, then, as a hero is measured by his
success in balancing self-assertion against concern for others, Achilles’
rejection of Agamemnon’s offer and his comrades’ advice is seen to be
deeply anti-social. Moreover, it proves to be ultimately self-destructive.
Patroclus dies in an attempt to defend Achilles’ honour (as well as to
aid his fellow Achaeans), promising, as he goes into battle, that he will
make Agamemnon regret his alienation of ‘the best of the Achaeans’
(16.269-74). Patroclus’ death forces Achilles to recognize the duty that a
hero owes his friends, and he regrets his excessive anger and egotism,
albeit too late to save his closest friend (18.98-111). Blaming himself for
his role in Patroclus’ death, Achilles cares now only for the honour that
will come from avenging that death. Though Achilles accepts
Agamemnon’s gifts in Book 19 and their reconciliation is publicly
formalized, it is clear that the gifts mean nothing to him (‘give them or
keep them, I don’t care’ is his startling attitude: 19.145-8) and that his
entire sense of honour is now invested in vengeance. Indeed, when Thetis
reveals that Achilles is doomed to die soon after Hector, Achilles declares
that he will pay any price to wipe out the shame of Patroclus’ death: ‘Then
let me die immediately, since I was not to protect my comrade at his
killing’ (18.98-9). And just as Achilles moves the focus of his honour from
rewards for valour to revenge, so he moves the target of his anger from
Agamemnon to Hector.
Significantly, however, Achilles displays the same excessiveness and
anger in his desire for revenge as he did in his desire to punish
Agamemnon. Odysseus must insist on the needs of others (the soldiers
need to eat before returning to battle), while Achilles can think only of
killing Hector (19.148-72). But he does more than kill Hector, he mutilates
his corpse (or at least attempts to, as the gods keep Hector’s body fresh
and unscathed: 23.184-91, 24.18-21, 410-23), dragging it behind his
chariot (22.395-404). This is a shocking act, which violates a basic taboo
protecting a dead man’s body: though mutilation of a corpse is threatened
 The Hero and Homeric Society 45

elsewhere in the poem, Achilles is the only character to enact it. For while
one may legitimately refuse to ransom a man (alive or dead), it is quite
another thing to mutilate his corpse once the fighting is over, and Achilles’
actions show that while he is right to avenge Hector’s killing of Patroclus,
he goes too far in his attempt to discharge his anger and alleviate his
shame. Indeed, the repeated mutilation of Hector’s body (which he
continues for twelve days: 24.14-18, 31-2), and Achilles’ inability to
escape his grief and self-loathing despite this ultimate humiliation of his
enemy, show that his approach to vengeance is self-defeating. By
dehumanizing his enemy in this way (note that he also sacrifices twelve
Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus: 18.336-7, 23.22-3, 181-2),
Achilles merely extends his grief long after Patroclus has been buried and
lamented, and compounds his inability to return to a balanced state of
mind.
It takes the intervention of the gods to end Achilles’ shameful
disrespect of Hector’s body, which Apollo criticizes as bestial and
sub-human (24.40-5):

‘His wits are out of joint and the mind

in his breast is unbending. His thoughts are savage like a lion’s,
who gives in to his great strength and proud heart
and goes out to feast on the flocks that men keep.
Just so has Achilles murdered pity, and there is no shame in him,
shame that can both greatly harm and greatly benefit a man.’

The gods’ pity leads to the meeting of Priam and Achilles and the
ransoming of Hector’s corpse, where Achilles regains the qualities of
eleos (‘pity’) and aidôs (‘shame’, ‘respect’) which, the Iliad insists, are
essential qualities of the man of honour. On Hermes’ instructions, Priam
appeals to Achilles in the name of his father Peleus, and as Achilles sees
the grief and suffering of his own father mirrored in the Trojan king, the
two men weep together (24.509-12):

So the two remembered, Priam crouched at Achilles’ feet

and weeping loud for man-slaying Hector,
while Achilles wept for his own father, and then again
for Patroclus; and the sound of their groaning filled the hut.

In showing Priam the respect due to him (and, by extension, to Hector),

Achilles emerges from his self-obsession and grief and recognizes the
humanity of others. The key role played here by Achilles’ ability to
46 Homer: The Iliad

generalize moral values and show pity for shared human suffering
suggests that Plato was right to call Homer the first and greatest of the
tragic poets (e.g. Republic 595b, 607a). Indeed, Achilles not only pities
Priam’s suffering, but also tries to console him, telling of the two jars
standing on Zeus’ threshold, one dispensing evils and the other blessings:
one can receive a mixture of good and evil, or undiluted evil, and so
suffering is an inescapable part of being human (24.527-33). The only
defence against suffering, Achilles explains, is endurance (24.549-51).
Achilles here echoes the speech of Apollo at the start of Book 24, who
complained of Achilles’ inability to endure his grief for Patroclus in the
right way (24.46-52). So, in urging Priam to mourn and move on, Achilles
shows that he has not only recognized the universality of suffering, but
has also learned from his own.
It would be a mistake, however, to see Achilles in Book 24 as having
undergone a significant change of character. There are some remarkable
differences, but the continuities are no less striking. Thus while he
previously rejected the Achaean embassy and refused to give up his anger
against Agamemnon, he now accepts Priam’s supplication and
relinquishes his fury against Hector. Yet despite his very different
reaction, both anger and sensitivity to honour remain an essential part of
Achilles’ presentation. Achilles initially agrees to release Hector not out
of selfless magnanimity, but because Thetis tells him that the gods, and
especially Zeus, are angry with him and want him to accept Priam’s
ransom (24.133-40). Of course he still shows compassion for Priam, but
his desire for timê remains fundamental (note how he placates the anger
of Patroclus’ ghost by saying that he too will share in the rich ransom:
24.591-5). Moreover, Achilles had treated the enemy kindly in the past,
burying them with full honours, as he did for Andromache’s father, Eëtion
(6.416-20), or ransoming them (e.g. 21.34-46). So while it is true that
Achilles’ decision to accept Priam’s ransom is a source of ‘glory’ (kudos),
granted by Zeus (24.110), his reasons for doing so indicate not a change
in character but a return to a more balanced state, as shown before his
murderous rage against Hector set in, where respect is given to one’s
enemy. This idea of a return to a more normal life (and reintegration within
the community) is underlined by Achilles once more eating and sleeping
with a woman, as advised by his mother Thetis (24.128-31). For while he
had previously refused to eat because of his grief for Patroclus and his
rage to kill Hector (19.203-14), he now shares food with Priam and tells
him the story of Niobe (who ate despite losing twelve children) to
reinforce the idea that life must go on (24.601-20). And when Achilles
and Priam go to sleep, Achilles goes to bed with Briseis, marking (via
 The Hero and Homeric Society 47

another ring-composition: see Chapter 2) the end of the poet’s theme,

Achilles’ anger, which was sparked by Briseis’ removal in Book 1
(24.675-6).
A similar combination of continuity and change is also seen in the
portrayal of Achilles’ anger itself. Achilles remains deeply sensitive to
violations of his status, and so when Priam initially refuses to be seated
(so eager is he to return to Troy with Hector’s body: 24.552-8), Achilles
takes this as a challenge to his authority, for the protocols of supplication
(hiketeia) and hospitality (xenia) involved in their meeting mean that
Achilles is very much in charge of the situation. Achilles angrily rebukes
Priam and warns him that one more mistake will mean his death, even if
he is a suppliant and supported by Zeus (24.568-70). At the same time,
however, Achilles also shows an awareness of the potential negative
consequences of his anger, and takes measures to guard against it. Thus
he has Hector’s body washed, anointed, and clothed in another room, in
case Priam should see it and get angry, which might prompt Achilles to
kill him (24.582-6). So Achilles is more aware of his anger, and able to
avoid its disastrous consequences in a way impossible earlier in the poem,
but his quick temper and readiness to react decisively in defence of his
honour remain the same. Thus Book 24 does not present a new Achilles,
but sets aspects of his character in a new context, where he is once again
able to control his anger and show compassion. However, his less kind
traits are still present; after all, the audience know that the war will
continue and Achilles will kill more of Priam’s sons (24.664-7).
In conclusion, the Iliad explores the complexity of heroism and shows
the risks of putting personal claims to honour and pre-eminence before
all else. In particular, the errors made by the poem’s central figures, which
lead to the destruction either of themselves or their people, show that
concern for others is an essential part of heroism. The hero, if he is to
flourish, must balance the pursuit of personal honour with the respect due
to others and his obligations to the community as a whole. As we saw
most clearly in Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus, a hero’s honour depends
crucially on his success in protecting his community. So although heroism
relies on competitive masculinity, it is very far from being a form of selfish
individualism. Finally, we may be far removed from the heroic age or
Homer’s own time, but we can still relate intimately and immediately to
the Iliad’s depiction of heroism, since it presents human beings striving
for recognition, and trying to understand their life, in relation to the
demands of family, friends, and society as a whole.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 4
Mortals and Immortals

The gods’ concern for mortals and their constant interference in human
affairs is one of the most striking aspects of the poem (especially to a
modern reader). This chapter will consider the gods both in their own right
and in relation to humans, asking why the gods act as they do. It will also
examine the gods’ relationship to the fall of Troy, showing how the
competing affections and plans of the various deities involved are
subservient to the larger ‘will of Zeus’ (Dios boulê) which shapes the
narrative of the poem. As we shall see, Homer’s gods are not merely figures
of literature, but an expression of a coherent theology. For the Homeric
kosmos provides its audience with a compelling picture of the world, and of
the ways in which gods and humans act and interact within it.
According to the historian Herodotus (2.53), writing in the fifth century
BC, ‘It was Homer and Hesiod who created for the Greeks a genealogy
of the gods, gave the gods their names, assigned their honours and areas
of expertise, and described their appearance.’ Since there was no
established church or priestly caste or sacred book to prescribe religious
beliefs in ancient Greece, poets played a fundamental role in shaping
religious ideas, and none more so than Homer, who was the foundation
of all education, including what the Greeks thought about their gods. It is
a measure of the spell of Homer that when the philosopher Xenophanes
(who was active in the sixth century BC) wishes to criticize conventional
religious belief, he attacks the theology of the great poets (fr. 11):

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods

everything that men find shameful and blameworthy:
stealing, adultery, and deceiving one another.

However, despite such moral and intellectual criticisms (especially by

philosophers such as Plato), the Homeric picture of the gods as powerful
anthropomorphic figures, for good and for ill, remained the basis for
popular religion throughout antiquity. Herodotus may be exaggerating –
Homer and Hesiod did not invent Greek religion, but rather adapted
current religious beliefs to create their own worlds in which the gods play
50 Homer: The Iliad

a part – yet his claim well captures the central role of poets in the
development of Greek religion.
Let us begin by considering who the gods of the Iliad are. In contrast
to the Odyssey, which has a smaller cast of divine characters (Zeus,
Athena, and Poseidon), the Iliad features – in addition to Zeus, father of
the gods – most of the major Olympians: Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes,
and Hephaestus (all supporting the Achaeans); Ares, Apollo, Artemis, and
Aphrodite (supporting the Trojans). Although Dionysus and Demeter are
mentioned (e.g. 6.132, 13.322), they do not feature in the action of the
poem, and their absence may be explained by their status as particular
benefactors of mankind (givers of wine and grain), which makes them less
suitable as partisans of one side. The description of Zeus as ‘the father of
gods and men’ (e.g. 1.544) highlights the particular emphasis in ancient
Greek culture on the family structure of the gods (this idea is found in
other Near Eastern religions, but is nowhere so prominent or developed
as in the Greek pantheon). Moreover, the Greek gods display the same
hierarchies and tensions that mark family dynamics among humans: thus,
for example, Zeus indulges his favourite child, Athena (5.876-9), while
Poseidon resents the power of his elder brother Zeus and is touchy about
his own status (15.184-217). Zeus’ authority over the divine family stems
from his status as father, but it is ultimately bolstered by force: so instead
of reasoning with the rebels Hera, Poseidon, and Athena, Zeus calls on
the hundred-handed Briareos to intimidate them into submission
(1.399-406), and he asserts his superiority by numerous threats of violence
(e.g. 1.565-7, directed at Hera) and even by challenging all the gods to a
massive tug of war (8.18-27).
To understand Greek religion, it is essential that we jettison
inappropriate (especially Christian) conceptions of the divine as
intrinsically kind and caring. For although the gods do care for humans,
they are anything but selfless, and their honour (timê) is every bit as
important to them as it is to the heroes. If a god’s honour is damaged, as
when Paris slights Hera and Athena by choosing Aphrodite as the most
beautiful (24.25-30), they are no less relentless than the angriest of heroes
in their pursuit of revenge, and their greater power means that their
retribution is all the more terrifying. Thus Hera strikes a grim bargain with
Zeus, offering up her three favourite cities for destruction (Argos, Sparta,
and Mycenae) as long as Troy is obliterated (4.50-4), and she states her
hatred of the Trojans in matter-of-fact terms (18.367): ‘How could I not
weave trouble for the Trojans, given my anger against them?’
As in real-life religion, the relationship between gods and humans in
the Iliad is founded on mutual benefit: the gods delight in sacrifice and
 Mortals and Immortals 51

worship – so, for example, Apollo is pleased by the Achaeans’ offerings,

and by their singing and dancing in his honour, as he ends the plague
(1.458-74) – and humans hope that in return their prayers will be heard.
However, a deity is free to decline a prayer if it does not suit his or her
larger purpose: the Trojans pray in vain for Athena’s protection
(6.305-11), and Zeus refuses to grant Achilles’ prayer that Patroclus return
safe from the fighting (16.249-52). Humans communicate with the gods
through prayer, and the gods can respond via dreams, omens, prophecies,
oracles, or direct intervention. The prominence of divine intervention in
the Iliad is partly an indication of the gods’ particular concern for their
favourites: Aphrodite, for example, rescues Paris from the battlefield in a
cloud of mist and deposits him in his bedroom (3.380-2), and Athena’s
care for Odysseus, so central to the Odyssey, is also a feature of the Iliad
(10.245, 23.782-3). In the case of Paris, about to be killed by Menelaus,
the goddess’ interference highlights Paris’ inferiority as a fighter, but
divine involvement on the battlefield more often increases the hero’s
glory, as when Athena supports Achilles in his final duel with Hector
(22.214-99).
Yet for all their exalted status (and at times divine parentage), the
heroes are fundamentally different from the gods, and the most essential
marker of the distance between them is death. Unlike the Odyssey and
the poems of the Epic Cycle, the Iliad makes no mention of hero-cult
(the posthumous worship of heroes as the powerful dead) or the
possibility of immortality, and stresses thereby the absolute finality of
death. The gulf between mortal and immortal is stark: the gods enjoy
eternal vitality, humans face oblivion in Hades (there are no Isles of
the Blessed or Elysium in the Iliad). This essential difference, the
certainty of death for humans, is most powerfully expressed in a simile
by Glaucus (6.146-9):

‘As are the generations of leaves, so also are those of men:

the wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the forest
burgeons and grows others when the season of spring comes round.
So with the generations of men, one grows and another ceases.’

However, it is paradoxically the very mortality of the heroes which gives

them a seriousness and tragic intensity which the gods lack. For
Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus on the nature of heroism (discussed in
Chapter 3 above) argues that it is the prospect of death which gives the
hero a reason to fight as he does (12.322-8):
52 Homer: The Iliad

‘Friend, if we could escape from this war

and were sure to live forever, ageless and immortal,
I would not fight in the front ranks myself,
nor would I send you into battle where men win glory.
But now, since the spectres of death stand over us
in their thousands, which no mortal can flee from or escape,
let us go forward, and either give the glory to another man, or he to us.’

It follows that since the gods are ‘sure to live forever, ageless and
immortal’, they face no risk of serious loss and so cannot be truly heroic.
In other words, the power and immortality of the gods mean that they
cannot display courage and endurance the way humans must, and so they
are diminished in comparison to them. Moreover, because their actions
lack tragic consequences (for themselves if not for humans), it is fitting
that the gods ‘who live at ease’ (6.138 etc.) should themselves be the
source of much humour in the poem, as when Sleep’s qualms about
deceiving Zeus are quickly overcome by Hera’s promising him one of the
Graces (14.270-6), or Athena mocks Aphrodite, who has been stabbed in
the wrist by Diomedes, saying that she must have scratched her hand on
a dress-pin (5.424-5). Indeed, Zeus himself laughs for joy at the sight of
the gods fighting one another (21.389-90). As one ancient critic put it,
‘Homer has done his best to make the men of the Iliad gods and the gods
men’ ([Longinus], On the Sublime 9.7).
From a divine perspective, the ephemerality of mortals makes it even
less likely that any god would put himself or his interests at risk for their
sake. Thus both Hephaestus, speaking to Hera (1.571-6), and Apollo,
addressing Poseidon (21.460-7), argue that humans are not worth fighting
over; Apollo, indeed, uses a similar simile of leaves and mortals to make
his point. Naturally such an attitude can strike the human characters as
aloof and uncaring, but the poem also makes clear the gods’ concern for
mortals despite their mortality: as Zeus says to Poseidon, ‘I care for them,
dying as they are’ (20.21). Moreover, divine pity for human suffering is
an essential part of the poem’s resolution, as (most of) the gods intervene
on behalf of Hector’s helpless corpse, and Hermes tells Priam that ‘Zeus,
though far off, cares greatly and pities you’ (24.174).
The gods pervade the poem to such an extent that they are sometimes
presented as part of the human characters’ decision to act in a particular
way. Thus, for example, Diomedes says that Achilles will return to the
fighting ‘whenever the heart in his breast urges him to and a god incites
him’ (9.702-3). This pattern, often called ‘double motivation’, means that
an action is capable of explanation on both a human and a divine level
 Mortals and Immortals 53

simultaneously. However, any given (human) character cannot know for

sure if, or to what extent, another person is influenced by the gods, and
so the idea of ‘double motivation’ is open to rhetorical manipulation: in
other words, a character may try to exploit the idea of divine participation
in order to escape the blame for a particular action or state of affairs. Thus,
Paris cheekily tells Helen that Menelaus managed to defeat him in combat
only because he had Athena’s aid, when in fact (as we know) Athena did
no such thing and it was Aphrodite who saved Paris (3.439-40). Or
Agamemnon can attempt to save face by claiming that the goddess Atê
(Delusion/Blindness) misled him and so he is not to blame for his
disastrous quarrel with Achilles (19.85-136). However, it is important to
emphasize that ‘double motivation’ never cancels out a human’s
responsibility for their actions or the state of affairs they have brought
about. Thus, even in his brazen attempt to shift the blame, Agamemnon
continues to admit responsibility for what he has done, and reaffirms his
willingness to pay compensation to Achilles (19.137-44; cf. 9.116-20).
What matters is the fact of human action, no matter how much a god was
involved. So, for example, we are told of Patroclus’ decision to press on
towards Troy that ‘it was Zeus who put the spirit to do so in his breast’
(16.691), but it remains Patroclus’ choice to ignore Achilles’ instructions
and he is responsible for his own death.
Just as any given action may be described in terms of human
decision-making or divine involvement (or a combination of both), so it
can also be presented as part of ‘fate’ (moira, kêr, aisa) or ‘what is
ordained’ (thesphaton, morsimon). Homer is not a philosopher and does
not get bogged down in technical debate about free will versus fate or
predetermination. Instead he presents Zeus as having the ultimate control
over what happens, so that in theory he could bring about an event
‘contrary to what is fated’, but only if he is willing to face the
consequences. This is best illustrated by Zeus’ relationship to the ultimate
‘fate’ of all men, namely death. For Zeus twice considers sparing a mortal
from his fated end, Sarpedon in Book 16 and Hector in Book 22. But in
each case he is warned not to do so, since (as Hera argues in the first scene,
endorsed by Athena in the second) human mortality is a basic part of the
cosmic order, and if Zeus upsets this he risks anarchy, as all the gods
would seek to make their children or favourites immortal (16.439-49,
22.177-81). Zeus is not the same thing as Fate, but he is the god with the
power to reveal it, as his major prophecies make clear, encompassing the
deaths of Sarpedon and Patroclus, Achilles’ return to the fighting, the
death of Hector, and the fall of Troy (8.469-77, 15.64-77). Homer creates
a striking visual symbol of Zeus’ peculiarly close relationship to ‘what is
54 Homer: The Iliad

ordained’ when the fates (kêres) of Achilles and Hector are weighed in
‘the scales of Zeus’ and Hector’s sinks down (22.208-13).
Zeus’ unique knowledge of ‘fate’ is part of his wider plan for both gods
and mortals. This plan is encapsulated in the Dios boulê, or ‘plan of Zeus’,
which is expressed in the opening lines of the Iliad, as the poet summarizes
the impact of Achilles’ anger by saying Dios d’eteleieto boulê, ‘and the
plan of Zeus was fulfilled’ (1.5). The phrase sets Achilles’ anger in its
larger cosmic context, since the Dios boulê is not limited to one hero’s
anger or even the story of the Trojan War, but embraces all actions and
events (human and divine). In other words, the plot of the Iliad is merely
one embodiment of Zeus’ overarching will. The expression ‘plan of Zeus’
is intentionally (and usefully) vague, since it sums up Zeus’ ultimate, but
not entirely knowable, power over both gods and mortals, and emphasizes
that Zeus’ plan is only gradually revealed to them (and to us) as the poem
unfolds. In other words, Zeus’ will is always in process, an idea underlined
by the proem’s imperfect tense eteleieto, which strictly means ‘was in the
process of being fulfilled’. In a narrow sense the primary (local) referent
of the Dios boulê in the Iliad proem is Zeus’ plan to bring honour to
Achilles by helping the Trojans (e.g. 1.508-9, 11.79, 16.121, 17.331-2).
But at the same time Zeus has a larger plan for the destruction of Troy,
and must therefore balance his initial promise to Thetis against his desire
to preserve the Achaeans: ‘he [Zeus] did not want the Achaean army to
perish utterly in front of Troy, but was bringing glory to Thetis and her
strong-hearted son’ (13.348-50). Moreover, Zeus’ promise to Thetis is
merely one instance of a much larger phenomenon, namely Zeus’ need to
take into account the wider divine society, where all the gods have their
own favourites and their own plans. It is a mark of Zeus’ success in this
respect that the order which results from the competing wills of the gods
is ultimately identified with the larger ‘plan of Zeus’, which shapes the
narrative of the entire poem.
Zeus (together with the other gods) not only maintains order on a
cosmic level, but also enforces justice among humans. While the gods’
role in the achievement of justice is very clear in the Odyssey (where
Odysseus punishes the suitors with the help of Athena and the approval
of Zeus), its role in the Iliad has not always been appreciated, and many
scholars have even argued that the Iliadic gods are not concerned with
justice. However, the gods’ undoubted selfishness and occasional
frivolity (which so appalled philosophers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus,
and Plato) does not mean that they cannot also act as enforcers of positive
and disinterested moral values such as justice. Thus, for example, Zeus is
said to punish a city whose rulers disregard justice (16.386-8):
 Mortals and Immortals 55

He grows angry with men and is furious with them,

because by violence they give crooked judgements in their assembly,
and drive out justice, with no concern for punishment from the gods.

Far from being amoral powers, the Iliadic gods enforce a basic ethical
system, whose ultimate guarantor is Zeus, and this moral pattern is most
clearly seen in the gods’ relationship to the fall of Troy.
Multiple human decisions contribute to the fall of Troy, ranging from
the initial Judgement of Paris (24.25-30) through to Hector’s failure to
preserve his people (22.99-110), but all involve the gods in some way. If
divine anger against Troy rested solely on Hera and Athena’s defeat in
the Judgement of Paris, we might think the gods rather petty. However,
whatever the sensitivities of individual gods (who, we must remember,
have as much right to avenge their damaged honour as mortals do), the
poem makes it abundantly clear that Trojan suffering stems primarily
from Trojan mistakes rather than divine vindictiveness. In the opening
scene of the Odyssey the same principle is said by Zeus to apply to all
human suffering (1.32-43). In other words, the fall of Troy, which is Zeus’
will too, is shown to embody a basic concept of justice (and one shared
by both Homeric epics).
It is a Trojan, Paris, who begins the war, and his voyage to Sparta is
described as ‘the beginning of misery for all the Trojans and for himself’
(5.63-4). Just after the duel between Paris and Menelaus, as Helen and
Paris go to bed with each other, Paris recalls their first sexual encounter
(3.441-6):

‘But come – let us go to bed and find delight in love;

for never before has desire so enveloped my mind,
not even when I first stole you away from lovely Lacedaemon
and sailed off with you in my seafaring ships,
and on the island of Cranaë took you to bed and made love to you –
that was nothing to how I desire you now and sweet longing seizes
me.’

The original offence, the abduction of Helen, is thus re-enacted within the
narrative of the Iliad itself. Menelaus links this crime to the eventual
destruction of the Trojans (13.622-7):

‘You Trojans cannot get enough of insulting and disgracing others –

as you insulted me, you shameless dogs, with no fear
in your hearts for the harsh anger of loud-thundering Zeus,
56 Homer: The Iliad

god of host and guest, who will one day destroy your lofty city.
For you made off with my wedded wife and many possessions besides,
for no reason at all, since you had been given a friendly welcome by her.’

The added detail that Paris stole Menelaus’ property as well as his wife
underlines the Trojan’s outrageous violation of the protocols of
hospitality. Nor is it only the Greeks who disapprove of Paris’ actions:
Hector describes them as worthy of stoning (3.56-7) and wishes he would
die at once (6.281-2), while the Trojans, so the narrator tells us, all hated
Paris ‘like black death’ (3.454).
The principle of justified Trojan punishment is seen every bit as clearly
in the account of the broken truce in Book 4 and Priam’s disastrous
reaction to it in Book 7. As the head of his community, Priam makes the
truce on the Trojans’ behalf (3.105-10, 250-2). Then, following a solemn
sacrifice, both the Achaeans and the Trojans call upon Zeus to punish the
side that breaks the oaths ratifying the truce (3.298-301). Nonetheless, the
Trojan Pandarus attempts to kill Menelaus, and his crime serves as a
recapitulation of Trojan guilt. Although Athena and Hera promote the
breaking of the truce, with Zeus’ consent (4.64-72), the principle of
‘double motivation’ means that Pandarus’ culpability is not diminished.
Athena tempts Pandarus with the thought of the gifts he might win from
Paris if he kills Menelaus (4.93-103), but she does not compel him to act
as he does. Indeed, Pandarus is described as ‘thoughtless’ (4.104) and so
just the kind of man likely to commit such a foolish act. Moreover, the
blame for Pandarus’ crime extends to the Trojans in general, since
Pandarus’ comrades support him in his attempt to kill Menelaus
(4.113-15):

His noble companions held their shields in front of him,

so that the warrior sons of the Achaeans could not rush him
before he had hit Menelaus, Atreus’ warrior son.

The Trojans thus share collective responsibility for the breaking of the
truce and the violation of their oaths.
The Trojans’ responsibility for the broken truce is compounded by
Priam’s personal failure to return Helen after the duel. The advice given
by ‘wise Antenor’ not only constitutes an admission of Trojan guilt but
also highlights Priam’s imminent misjudgement (7.350-3):

‘Come now, let us give Argive Helen and her possessions with her
back to the sons of Atreus, for them to take away. We are fighting now
 Mortals and Immortals 57

after cheating over our sworn oaths; so I do not think

that any good will come to us, unless we do as I say.’

However, when Paris declares himself willing to return only the goods
taken from Sparta, ‘I will not give the woman back’ (7.362), Priam’s
complicity is clear. The Trojan herald Idaeus, charged by Priam with
relaying the response of the Trojan assembly, underlines the king’s great
error in turning a blind eye to his son’s crime (7.389-93):

‘The possessions that Alexander brought in his hollow ships

to Troy – if only he had died before he did! –
all these he is willing to give back, and to add more from his own stores.
But the wedded wife of glorious Menelaus
he says he will not give back, though the Trojans certainly urge him to.’

It could not be clearer that Priam has made a disastrous mistake, allowing
Paris to defy the oath, and doing so in the face of popular disapproval. No
less than Paris, Priam is responsible for the destruction of Troy, his city.
He acts wrongly, and he – and everyone else who depends on him – must
suffer the consequences.
As the poem progresses there are several more indications of Trojan
wrongdoing. During Agamemnon’s aristeia in Book 11 he comes upon
two sons of Antimachus, a Trojan ‘who in return for gold from Alexander,
a splendid gift, was most opposed to giving Helen back to fair-haired
Menelaus’ (11.123-5). The revelation that Paris has bribed a fellow Trojan
brings disgrace on their whole community, but Antimachus’ own conduct
emerges as particularly blameworthy, for as Agamemnon says
(11.138-42):

‘If you are truly the sons of war-minded Antimachus,

who once in the Trojan assembly urged that Menelaus,
who had come on an embassy with godlike Odysseus,
should be killed on the spot and not be allowed back to the Achaeans,
then now you will pay for your father’s abominable outrage.’

Antimachus’ attempt to have an ambassador killed, though unsuccessful,

reinforces the sense of Trojan treachery calling forth punishment.
Moreover, this pattern is shown to extend back beyond the current
generation. Poseidon, puzzled by Apollo’s continuing support for the
Trojans, reminds him of how Laomedon had cheated them both of proper
payment after they built a wall around Troy and tended the king’s cattle
58 Homer: The Iliad

(21.441-57). When Poseidon sent a sea-monster to punish the Trojans,

Heracles destroyed it, but he in turn was defrauded of his reward by
Laomedon and took his revenge by sacking Troy (5.648-51, 20.144-8).
Nevertheless, Poseidon’s anger against Troy remains unappeased, and so
the Trojans, the descendants of Laomedon, can be seen to be paying for
his crimes as well as their own.
The fall of Troy is thus a manifestation of justice, albeit a harsh kind
of justice, on both the divine and human level. Multiple Trojan mistakes
contribute to the destruction of their community, but none more so than
Paris’ initial offence and Priam’s subsequent failure to undo it. We see
Priam’s inability to face his own responsibilities as leader when he says
to Helen, ‘You are not to blame in my eyes, it is the gods who are to blame,
who roused tear-laden war for me with the Achaeans’ (3.164-5). Priam is
trying here to comfort Helen by blaming the gods for what has happened
(in another rhetorical manipulation of ‘double motivation’), but Helen
rejects his face-saving words and emphasizes her own share of the blame,
insisting that she should have died rather than abandon her family, and
reviling herself as ‘bitch-faced’ (3.171-80). Helen’s vehement acceptance
of her own guilt underlines not only how tendentious Priam’s claim is,
but also (because he is too exculpatory) how much of the blame he must
share himself.
We should beware of not allowing our genuine pity for the Trojans to
obscure the fact of their wrongdoing. For it would be easy to focus on the
men’s fighting in defence of their wives and children, or on the killing
and degradation of the latter as war-captives, and be tempted thereby to
see only ‘the pity of war’. But while the brutality of war is an undeniable
and essential aspect of the Iliad, the poem also presents the Trojans as
both pitiable and culpable. In other words, it is possible for an audience
to feel compassion even for merited suffering, and the Iliad guides its
audience to see not only the Trojans’ faults, but also the gods’ role in
punishing them. The Trojan people pay the ultimate price for the flaws of
their leaders, but this is still (in Greek terms) a manifestation of divine
and human dikê (‘justice’), because crimes such as Paris’ cannot go
unpunished, while failures of leadership such as Priam’s are bound to
damage the community.
Divine justice is eventually served on the Trojans, in accordance with
the ‘plan of Zeus’. Although Hera complains that Zeus ‘takes the Trojans’
side in the fighting’ (1.521), this is a sign of her impatience for the
destruction of her enemies rather than Zeus’ actual viewpoint. As Zeus
makes clear, Troy is ‘fated’ to fall, but Hera and Athena cannot control
that process (e.g. 8.5-40); their personal hatred of Troy has to operate
 Mortals and Immortals 59

within a larger moral framework in which punishment is justified because

of human crimes. As with the human audience, Zeus’ feelings of pity at
Troy’s destruction and his conviction that the fall of Troy is right are not
mutually exclusive. Zeus speaks on one occasion as if he wants to save
Troy, but his real motive is evidently to provoke Hera and Athena and so
bring about the breaking of the truce (4.5-19). He also makes clear his
strong affection for the Trojans, because they offer him lavish sacrifices
(4.44-9), but this does not change the fact that he approves of Troy’s fall,
since Zeus can love Troy and still think it right that the Trojans be
punished. Zeus does not express any happiness at Troy’s fall, but his
approval is not only implicit in the narrative itself but also integral to the
larger moral order of which he is the ultimate enforcer. Zeus’ desire that
Troy should fall (15.69-71) is predicated upon his belief that it is right.
In conclusion, the lives of gods and mortals are intertwined throughout
the Iliad, not least because the gods are essential to the poem’s exploration
of human heroism and suffering. The ‘plan of Zeus’ is realized through
the actions and reactions of others, including other gods. Thus, as Achilles
prepares to re-enter the fighting, Zeus assembles the gods and encourages
them to help the side of their choice, so that Achilles may not sack Troy
‘beyond what is fated’ (20.23-30); but it is clear that the pro-Trojan gods
will eventually have to give way, since Troy must fall. Thus the city’s
demise is presented as part of an impartial system of divinely supported
justice in which both Trojans and Achaeans face the consequences of their
misdeeds.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 5
War and Family Life

This chapter will analyse the Iliad’s presentation of gender roles, showing
how these roles (like all relationships in human society) are tested and
distorted by violence, and will also explore the depiction of war in the
poem. Hector’s reassuring words to Andromache, ‘war will be the concern
of men’ (6.492), will emerge as naïve, since the poem makes clear that
the consequences of men’s defeat in battle wreak their greatest havoc on
the lives of women. As well as illustrating the interdependence of men
and women (in their duties, rights, and responsibilities), this chapter will
consider how the Iliad offers positive and negative paradigms of male and
female behaviour, principally in the contrast between Hector’s
relationship with Andromache and Paris’ with Helen. Finally, although
much scholarly literature continues to focus on women as problematic
figures within the epic’s martial context, we shall see that the Iliad, like
the Odyssey, endorses women’s authority (as much as men’s) and affirms
their value to society.
The Iliad’s focus on warfare, heroism, and comradeship is self-evident,
but it would be a mistake to think that masculinity or the bonds between
men were the be all and end all of the poem. And yet, while the ‘domestic’
side of the Odyssey has long been appreciated, the Iliad’s presentation of
women and the social divisions between male and female has been
relatively neglected, and often reduced to a simple polarization of male =
public space/war versus female = domestic space/peace. So before we
look at the different gender roles and how they relate to one another, let
us begin by considering what the poem has to say about men and women
in their own right, beginning with its depiction of manliness.
The masculine ideal is a blend of strength and intelligence. The poem,
like much Greek art, foregrounds the strength and beauty of the male body.
Thus, for example, when Helen identifies for Priam the leading Achaean
warriors in Book 3, the heroes’ individual physical traits are highlighted:
Agamemnon is ‘handsome and dignified’ and ‘has the look of a king’
(3.169-70), Odysseus is shorter than Agamemnon ‘but broader in his
shoulders and chest to look upon’ (3.194), Menelaus is ‘tall and
broad-shouldered’ (3.210), while Ajax, the ‘bulwark of the Achaeans’, is
62 Homer: The Iliad

simply ‘huge’ (3.229). Achilles boasts of his own outstanding physique

and beauty as he intimidates the terrified Lycaon (21.108): ‘Do you not
see what kind of a man I am, how handsome and mighty?’ However, just
as it is an affliction to lack beauty – the sheer physical repulsiveness of
Thersites, the poem’s only ugly character, is emphatic: he is
bandy-legged, lame, with hunched shoulders, a pointy head and only a
few wisps of hair (2.216-19) – so it is a source of blame to be merely
beautiful (but lack strength) or too concerned with one’s looks: thus
Nireus is described in the Catalogue of Achaean forces as ‘the handsomest
man that came to Ilium of all the Danaans, except for the incomparable
son of Peleus, but he was a weakling, and few people followed him’
(2.673-5), while Hector attacks Paris as a ‘supremely beautiful,
woman-crazy seducer’ whose ‘hair and beauty’ are no replacement for
‘strength and courage’ (3.39-57). The ideal man unites strength and
intelligence, so that he can excel in the two major arenas of heroic
excellence, the battlefield and the assembly, and become, as Phoenix
reminds Achilles (9.443), ‘both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’
(see Chapter 3 above). Different heroes possess these qualities to different
degrees – thus Odysseus acknowledges Achilles’ peerless strength, but
asserts his superior judgement, ‘since I am older than you and know more’
(19.216-19) – but the ideal man will excel both physically and mentally.
Like men, Iliadic women are admired for their beauty and skills, albeit
skills exercised within the limitations of women’s lives, which are largely
connected to the house of their father or husband. When Hector does not
find Andromache at home, he assumes she has gone ‘to the house of one
of my sisters or my brothers’ finely-robed wives, or to Athena’s temple,
where the other lovely-haired women of Troy are seeking to appease the
fearsome goddess’ (6.378-80). The importance of female beauty is
embodied within the formulaic language of the poem, where women are
typically ‘finely-robed’, ‘lovely-haired’, ‘deep-girdled’, ‘fair-cheeked’,
and so on. But even more so than with male attractiveness, female beauty
is double-edged and can be disastrous (as Helen’s experience shows), not
least because it makes a woman prey to sexual subjection if her freedom
is lost. So Agamemnon, harshly rejecting the supplication of Chryses,
speaks of the old man’s daughter ‘going back and forth at the loom and
serving my bed’ (1.31). Nonetheless, as with men, female beauty is ideally
combined with brains and skills, as when Agamemnon (no less crassly)
says he prefers the captive Chryseis to his own wife Clytemnestra, ‘since
she is in no way inferior to her in figure or in beauty, nor in mind or
handicrafts’ (1.114-15).
Mention of Chryseis reminds us that in comparing the gender roles of
 War and Family Life 63

men and women, it is important we compare like with like, e.g. husbands
with wives, rather than free men with female war-captives. This is not to
deny that the role of female captives as symbols of male honour reveals
a significant aspect of women’s experience; however, such captives are
not of the same status as wives, and so to focus on them risks confusing
issues of status with those of gender. So, for example, while the poem’s
initial male contention over Chryseis and Briseis may echo the original
dispute over Helen, only the latter can tell us about the relationships of
men and women in their normative role as wives and husbands. (This
distinction can, however, be blurred by the characters themselves, for
rhetorical reasons, as when Achilles describes Briseis as ‘my wife, my
heart’s love’ (9.336) in order to emphasize the damage to his honour
which her removal represents.) Therefore, since our focus is on gender
dynamics rather than status (or loss of status), we shall look at married
couples like Hector and Andromache rather than enforced unions like
Agamemnon and Chryseis or Achilles and Briseis.
The most famous and revealing passage for the definition of gender
roles comes in Hector’s meeting with Andromache in Book 6. The scene
is prepared for when Sarpedon speaks to Hector of the wife and infant son
he has left behind in Lycia (5.480, 688), so that we think of Hector’s own
family as he returns to Troy to urge the women of the city to appease
Athena. In his meetings with Hecuba, Paris, Helen, and Andromache we
see Hector as son, brother, and (most fully and intensely) as husband and
father. Each meeting emphasizes his commitment to his family and his
people, but also stresses that he must risk his life to protect theirs. Hector
dismisses his wife’s appeal for him to remain safely in Troy, and as he
returns to the battlefield, he sends Andromache back home, with words
that reaffirm the difference between the genders (6.490-3):

‘Go back to the house and see to your own tasks,

the loom and the distaff, and tell your maids
to set about their work as well. War will be the concern of men,
of all those who were born in Ilium, and mine above all.’

On the one hand, Hector’s words endorse an ideal of female behaviour,

focused on the proper running of the household. On the other, they also
respond to Andromache’s offer of military advice (6.433-9) by reminding
her that war is not the concern of women, and she should return to the
proper sphere of female activity and skill. In one sense there is nothing
unusual or controversial about Hector’s advice, since the Iliad, like Greek
culture generally, does operate in terms of separate areas of male
64 Homer: The Iliad

(public/military) and female (private/domestic) activity. However, the

wider context encourages us to see Hector’s rigid division between the
two spheres as too simplistic, since, as we shall see, they are
interconnected in many ways.
This passage is often read as a rebuke, but we are in fact told that
Hector’s intention is to comfort Andromache (484-9). So in saying that
war will be men’s concern, Hector is trying to reassure his wife of his
protective power. But his own speech has already made clear the extent
of female suffering, as he details the traumas and indignities that
Andromache and the other women of Troy will endure when Troy falls
(456-8):

‘You will live in Argos, weaving at the loom at another woman’s

command,
and carrying water from the spring Messeïs or Hypereia,
much against your will; and a harsh compulsion will lie upon you.’

Though Hector cannot bring himself to express it directly, this ‘harsh

compulsion’ will also involve Andromache’s sexual subjugation by
another man. (Women suffer the consequences of war in a particularly
degrading way, as when Nestor urges the Achaeans not to return home
until each of them has raped a Trojan woman to avenge ‘the struggles and
groans of Helen’ (2.354-6).) In other words, Hector himself has already
drawn attention to the ways in which war destroys the lives of women,
and this makes his claim that ‘war will be the concern of men’ seem
hopelessly naïve – he is, to his credit, trying to comfort his wife, but his
words are wishful thinking nonetheless. This is underlined by the scene
in which the news of Hector’s death reaches Andromache: she is weaving
(as he instructed her to) and preparing a bath for his return from the battle
(22.440-6), but the domestic scene is shattered by the loss of her husband.
For all Hector’s good intentions, the world of war cannot be separated
from that of women. Moreover, the defensive spirit of Andromache’s
tactical advice is proven correct, and Hector later regrets his decision not
to stay within the walls of Troy (22.99-110).
The meeting between Andromache and Hector also brings out the
dependence of women on men that is a basic feature of ancient Greek
society. Achilles had killed Andromache’s father and seven brothers, and
enslaved her mother, so that Hector is all she has (6.429-30):

‘Hector, you are my father and honoured mother

and brother, and you are my strong husband.’
 War and Family Life 65

But for all its tragic intensity, Andromache’s reliance on Hector mirrors
the dependence of all ancient women on the men around them. Their world
is dominated by men, upon whose protection they rely. Even Helen, one
of the most powerful of mortal women because of her awesome beauty,
has no say in the Trojan assembly in Book 7 that debates whether to return
her to her husband – like any other woman, her fate is determined by men.
This pattern is also reflected on the divine level, for although goddesses
enjoy a degree of power and independence denied to mortal women, they
too live within a society and family shaped by patriarchal authority. Thus,
Hera is annoyed by Zeus’ extra-marital affairs, but is powerless to stop
him (14.313-28), while Calypso complains of the double standard that
allows gods to have mortal lovers, but criticizes goddesses when they do
the same (Odyssey 5.118-29). Zeus is a man, and his will prevails.
However, despite these fundamental cultural limitations on female
activity and authority, the Iliad also insists on the positive value of
women’s roles. It is easy to bemoan ancient women’s constrained
existence, but such an approach does not help us understand the Iliad (or
any other ancient text), and risks obscuring the important point that
women’s excellence is presented in the Iliad as complementary to men’s
and no less essential to a flourishing human society. A harmonious
marriage is seen as central to a good life. On the shield of Achilles are
depicted two cities, one at peace, the other at war, and the first
characteristic feature of the city at peace is its celebration of marriage
(18.490-6). The cultural ideal of harmony between the sexes is summed
up in the notion of homophrosynê, or ‘like-mindedness’, which Odysseus
hopes the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa will enjoy (Odyssey 6.180-5):

‘May the gods give you all that your heart desires,
a husband and home, and may they bestow harmony (homophrosynê),
which is a noble thing. For nothing is stronger or better than this,
when a man and woman make their home together
in harmony of mind (homophroneonte noêmasin): this is a great grief
to their enemies,
a joy to their friends, and a source of high repute for themselves.’

This ‘harmony of mind’ is best illustrated in the Iliad by the contrasting

marriages of Hector and Andromache on the one hand, and Paris and
Helen or Menelaus and Helen on the other.
As we have seen, Andromache fails in her attempt to persuade Hector
to stay in Troy, but this difference in attitude does not entail that their
relationship lacks ‘harmony’. For homophrosynê does not mean that men
66 Homer: The Iliad

and women must think or behave in the same way; on the contrary, it
consists of men and women working in their own sphere and respecting
the other party’s legitimate claim to authority in their typical roles, so that
their activities and responsibilities interlink and support one another. So
in trying to get Hector to stay in Troy, Andromache is exercising her rights
as a wife and defending the claims of the household. For she is right when
she says to Hector ‘your own heroic spirit (menos) will destroy you’
(6.407), and she knows that his death will destroy her and their son’s life
as well. Thus, it is Andromache’s duty to remind Hector of his
responsibilities towards his family, as his opening words to her
acknowledge, ‘Wife, I too feel concern for these things’ (6.441), even if
her doing so accentuates the difficulty of Hector’s predicament, since he
must decide between his conflicting obligations to his family and his own
heroic values (6.441-3):

‘Wife, I too feel concern for these things. But I would feel terrible
shame before the Trojans and the Trojan women with their trailing
robes
if like a coward I were to skulk away from the fighting.’

In short, Hector and Andromache do what comes ‘naturally’ to them: she

insists on the well-being of their family and tries to delay her husband
from battle, he looks more to the public pressures of male heroism.
Tragically, however, although they complement one another perfectly as
husband and wife, their relationship is threatened by war, which destroys
the conventions of normal life.
By contrast, the relationships Helen has with Paris and Menelaus are
profoundly lacking in ‘harmony’. Whereas Hector and Andromache act
in archetypally male and female ways, the gender roles are reversed in the
preceding scene with Paris and Helen, where instead of restraining Paris
(as a wife normally would), Helen must shame him into fighting
(6.349-51):

‘But since the gods have ordained these evils,

I wish that I was the wife of a better man,
one who understood what disgrace is and the many shaming things that
people say.’

Whereas a proper man (like Hector) is aware of his duty to the wider
community, Paris is not, and has to be reminded of it by a woman. His
deficiency as both a man and a warrior are clear. Thus the failings of Helen
 War and Family Life 67

and Paris’ relationship affirm by contrast both the heroism of Hector and
the ‘harmony’ that exists between him and Andromache. Finally, Helen’s
other relationship is no more exemplary: while Menelaus sees himself as
fighting ‘to avenge Helen’s struggles and groans’ (2.590), we get a far
more ambiguous picture of Helen’s attitude to Paris, especially when,
despite her protestations and self-loathing, she goes to bed with him in a
scene that recalls their initial encounter (3.441-6, quoted in Chapter 3
above).
The fact that we can compare and contrast these Trojan and Achaean
relationships reminds us that the two peoples are presented as
fundamentally alike. With the possible exception of Priam’s ‘polygamy’
(8.302-5, 21.84-5, 24.495-7; he has 50 sons by various gynaikes, but the
word can mean both ‘wives’ and ‘mistresses’, so it is not clear if multiple
marriages are meant), which is in any case hardly prominent, both sides
observe the same basic social customs (oath-swearing, supplication,
guest-friendship, and so on) and worship the same gods. Similarly,
although there are a few references to the fact that the Trojans’ allies
must in reality have spoken a multiplicity of languages (2.804, 867,
4.437-8), the allies and the Trojans themselves are depicted as
speaking Greek, which again stresses the lack of ethnic differentiation.
So instead of demonizing the Trojans as inferior ‘barbarians’, Homer
has chosen to underline their similarity to the Achaeans. (We now say
‘Greeks’, but Homer refers to the whole army using the collective
names Achaeans, Danaans, or Argives, each name referring to a
Panhellenic force united by its mission to punish Trojan crimes.) The
effect of this ethnic assimilation is two-fold: on the one hand, it makes
the Trojans seem all the more sympathetic (to a Greek audience); on
the other hand, the Trojans’ similarity to the Achaeans underlines how
far they have fallen short of shared standards of behaviour in not
opposing Paris’ retention of Helen (for other examples of Trojan
treachery, see Chapter 4 above).
Moreover, the poem as a whole makes clear the fundamental
superiority of the Achaeans in battle, and thus affirms Achaean
‘manliness’. Far more Trojans are killed in the course of the poem, despite
the fact that on the second and third days of battle (Books 8 and 11-18)
the Trojans are in the ascendancy, pushing the Achaeans back into their
camp, breaching their defensive wall, and setting fire to their ships.
Overall there are 189 named Trojans and Trojan allies killed, as against
only 54 Achaeans. Moreover, the Trojans are four times more likely than
the Achaeans to panic and flee (rather than stage a calm retreat), and only
Trojans are taken prisoner or need to be rescued by gods. The Achaeans’
68 Homer: The Iliad

superior discipline is heralded when the two armies are first described
assembling for battle at the start of Book 3: the Trojans are compared to
screeching cranes, ‘but the Achaeans advanced in silence, breathing
valour, their hearts intent on defending one another’ (3.8-9). Whereas the
similes in the battle narratives tend to compare the Trojans to flocks of
sheep and herds of cattle, the Achaeans are likened to fierce fighting
animals such as lions and boars. As soon as the gods leave the battlefield
at the beginning of Book 6, the Achaeans show their military superiority,
breaking the Trojan ranks and driving them back towards the city. By
contrast, the Trojans enjoy major success only when Achilles is
withdrawn from the fighting and Zeus helps them gain the upper hand,
and when the other major Achaean warriors are wounded. Finally, when
the gods clash in Books 20 and 21, it is the pro-Achaean gods who have
the best of the fighting. This pro-Achaean ‘bias’ should not surprise us,
since it is natural for Homer’s Greek audience to enjoy Greek success (and
this aspect of the poem enhances its appeal to a Panhellenic audience).
This does not make the poem anti-Trojan or annul our sympathy for the
Trojans, since they are still presented as brave and committed fighters,
but it is clear the Achaeans are in that respect superior.
The Achaeans’ martial pre-eminence reminds us that to fully
understand the Iliad we must balance the suffering caused by war against
the glory that comes from success in it. The cost of war is most powerfully
encapsulated in its effects on Hector and his family, whose experience is
used to represent the relationship of all warriors to their loved ones and
dependents. Andromache and Astyanax are symbolic of war widows and
orphans everywhere, and Troy’s impending destruction stands as the
prototype of war’s effects on civilized community life. The epithets used
most frequently of war (‘tear-filled’, ‘man-slaying’, ‘painful’, ‘hateful’,
‘evil’) underline the grief it causes, an attitude summed up by the poet
when he says of one violent clash (between the Cretan leader Idomeneus
and the Trojans), ‘it would be a hard-hearted man indeed who could take
pleasure in seeing such toil and not feel grief’ (13.343-4). The obituaries
of dead warriors highlight pathetic details such as bereaved parents and
the loss of youthful beauty and vitality, and the poem ends with an intense
expression of pity, as Achilles identifies with the sufferings of his enemy.
Nonetheless, for all its emphasis on the negative effects of war, the poem
also reflects the Greeks’ admiration for those who are good at it. War is
not only an evil which destroys families and annihilates cities, but also
the supreme test of heroic excellence and the source of ‘deathless glory’
(kleos aphthiton, 9.413). As modern readers, it is tempting to overplay the
poem’s critique of war and see it as a proto-pacifist work, but nothing
 War and Family Life 69

could be more anachronistic or misleading. For the poem delights in and

celebrates battlefield prowess even as it foregrounds the miseries and
losses of war. Homer presents the complexity of war, not a
one-dimensional and lazy critique of it. War’s complex nature is perhaps
best embodied in the shield of Achilles in Book 18, with its two cities (one
at war, the other at peace), a wondrous and divinely wrought object which
reminds us that war is only one aspect of life, that no sane person would
prefer war to peace, but also that war is sometimes necessary. The Iliad’s
balanced presentation of war as a basic part of life, a source of honour,
and a great evil, is neither paradoxical nor a relic of ‘archaic’ thought, but
an attitude that we too can relate to, as we hope that our society will avoid
armed conflict, but still venerate our war dead.
In conclusion, the Iliad shows the interdependence of men and women
in their rights and responsibilities. It also endorses women’s authority (as
much as men’s) and affirms their value to society. This is powerfully
illustrated in a simile used to describe the wounded Agamemnon, where
his sharp pains are compared to those of a woman in childbirth
(11.269-72). While scholars usually see this comparison as undermining
Agamemnon, it is rather, I would argue, a measure of the seriousness with
which women’s contribution to society was regarded. It is a tribute to the
physical endurance of women and an instance of the ‘childbirth is to
women as war is to men’ equivalence that we see most famously deployed
by Euripides’ Medea: ‘I would rather stand three times with a shield in
battle than give birth once’ (Medea 250-1). Positive and negative
paradigms of marriage (Hector and Andromache, Paris/Menelaus and
Helen) illustrate the benefits of homophrosynê, a harmonious partnership
between the sexes. Like the Odyssey, the Iliad shows the legitimacy of
women’s concerns and their spheres of authority. Andromache fails to
persuade Hector to stay in Troy, but her appeal is presented as valid and
in line with the responsibilities of a wife and mother. Ideally men and
women will respect gender boundaries and meet their obligations, which
are mutually supportive: Paris and Helen show what happens when they
fail to do so. The Iliad also shows how gender roles (like all human
relationships) are distorted by war, so that Hector’s adage ‘war will be the
concern of men’ emerges as poignantly naïve, since the consequences of
defeat in the male arena of war wreak their greatest destruction on women
and their families. Finally, by setting the Trojan war within the wider
context of human norms, including those of family life, which the war
itself disrupts, the Iliad underlines the benefits of peace and the values of
civilized life.
This page intentionally left blank
Epilogue

In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, written long after Homer in the early sixth
century BC, the bard urges the girls of Delos to reply, should anyone ask
them who their favourite poet is, ‘It is a blind man, and he lives on rocky
Chios, and all of his songs remain forever the best’ (172-3). Leaving aside
the questionable biographical details (see Chapter 1 above), we can still
agree with the hymn’s estimation of Homer’s success in creating the Iliad,
the greatest poem of Western culture.
This page intentionally left blank
Suggestions for Further Reading

Given the vast amount of scholarship on the Iliad, this section must be
highly selective. It is limited to works in English, with the aim of
expanding on the core topics covered in the book.

Texts, commentaries, and translations

The most widely used text is the Oxford Classical Text, edited by D.B.
Monro and T.W. Allen (Oxford University Press). The best and most
detailed modern edition is that by M.L. West, Homeri Ilias, 2 vols
(Teubner: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1998-2000). The fullest commentary is that
edited in six volumes by G.S. Kirk, J.B. Hainsworth, R. Janko, M.W.
Edwards, and N. Richardson (Cambridge University Press, 1985-93).
Excellent translations are available in the Penguin Classics series by
Martin Hammond (1987) and the Oxford World’s Classics by Anthony
Verity (2011).

General works
D.L. Cairns (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford University
Press, 2001) brings together a collection of classic articles, with a detailed
and wide-ranging Introduction surveying modern Homeric scholarship.
Essays on all aspects of the poem may be found in two major Companions:
I. Morris and B. Powell (eds), A New Companion to Homer (Brill, 1997)
and R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge
University Press, 2004). Entries on a myriad topics are contained in M.
Finkelberg (ed.), The Homer Encyclopedia, 3 vols (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
R.B. Rutherford, Homer (New Surveys in the Classics No. 26: Oxford
University Press, 1996) offers an expert overview of key issues (in both Iliad
and Odyssey). There are many general Introductions to the Iliad; three of the
most readable and rewarding are M.W. Edwards, Homer: Poet of the Iliad
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), M. Mueller, The Iliad, 2nd edn
(Bristol Classical Press, 2009), and O. Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The
Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford University Press, 1992).
74 Homer: The Iliad

Chapter 1. Homer and Early Greek Epic

J. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
A. Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Cornell University Press, 1992)
R. Fowler, ‘The Homeric Question’, in R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Homer (Cambridge University Press, 2004) 220-32
T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
B. Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge
University Press, 2002)
B. Graziosi and J. Haubold, Homer: The Resonance of Epic (Duckworth,
2005)
A. Kelly, A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, Iliad VIII
(Oxford University Press, 2007)
J. Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery, tr. K.
Windle and R. Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2004)
A. Snodgrass, Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art
(Cambridge University Press, 1998)
W.G. Thalmann, Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic
Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek
Poetry and Myth (Oxford University Press, 1997)
M.L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Com-
mentary (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Chapter 2. Language, Style, and Structure

E.J. Bakker, Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in
Homeric Poetics (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005)
B. Fenik, Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad: Studies in the Narrative
Techniques of Homeric Battle Description (Steiner Verlag, 1968)
J.M. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (Penn State University Press, 1999)
J. Griffin, ‘Words and Speakers in Homer’, Journal of Hellenic Studies
106 (1986) 36-57
J.B. Hainsworth, The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1968)
B. Heiden, Homer’s Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad
(Oxford University Press, 2008)
G. Horrocks, ‘Homer’s Dialect’, in I. Morris and B. Powell (eds), A New
Companion to Homer (Brill, 1997) 193-217
 Suggestions for Further Reading 75

R. Janko, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in

Epic Diction (Cambridge University Press, 1982)
B. Louden, The Iliad: Structure, Myth, and Meaning (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006)
R.P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the
Iliad (Cornell University Press, 1989)
M.N. Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer
(University of California Press, 1974)
A. Parry (ed.), The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of
Milman Parry (Oxford University Press, 1971)
A. Parry, The Language of Achilles and Other Papers (Oxford University
Press, 1989)
W.C. Scott, The Artistry of the Homeric Simile (Dartmouth College Press,
2009)

Chapter 3. The Hero and Homeric Society

W. Allan and D.L. Cairns, ‘Conflict and Community in the Iliad’, in N.
Fisher and H. van Wees (eds), Competition in the Ancient World
(Classical Press of Wales, 2011) 113-46
D.L. Cairns, Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in
Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford University Press, 1993)
M. Clarke, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: A Study of Words and
Myths (Oxford University Press, 1999)
N.R.E. Fisher, Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in
Ancient Greece (Aris and Phillips, 1992)
D. Hammer, The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought
(University of Oklahoma Press, 2002)
J. Haubold, Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000)
G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic
Greek Poetry, 2nd edn (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
J. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, 2nd
edn (Duke University Press, 1994)
R. Scodel, Epic Facework: Self-Presentation and Social Interaction in
Homer (Classical Press of Wales, 2008)
S. Scully, Homer and the Sacred City (Cornell University Press, 1990)
H. van Wees, Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and
History (J.C. Gieben, 1992)
B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993)
76 Homer: The Iliad

Chapter 4. Mortals and Immortals

W. Allan, ‘Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic’, Journal
of Hellenic Studies 126 (2006) 1-35
W. Burkert, Greek Religion, tr. J. Raffan (Blackwell, 1985) 119-25
J. Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford University Press, 1980)
E. Kearns, ‘The Gods in the Homeric Epics’, in R. Fowler (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
59-73
H. Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus, 2nd edn (University of California
Press, 1983)
L. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad
(University of California Press, 1992)
M.M. Willcock, ‘Some Aspects of the Gods in the Iliad’, Bulletin of the
Institute of Classical Studies 17 (1970) 1-10

Chapter 5. War and Family Life

M. Arthur, ‘The Divided World of Iliad VI’, in H.P. Foley (ed.), Reflec-
tions of Women in Antiquity (Gordon and Breach, 1981) 19-44
M. Clarke, ‘Manhood and Heroism’, in R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Homer (Cambridge University Press, 2004) 74-90
N. Felson and L. Slatkin, ‘Gender and Homeric Epic’, in R. Fowler (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge University Press,
2004) 91-114
H.P. Foley, ‘Women in Ancient Epic’, in J.M. Foley (ed.), A Companion
to Ancient Epic (Blackwell, 2005) 105-18
B. Graziosi and J. Haubold, ‘Homeric Masculinity: Ênoreê and Agênoriê’,
Journal of Hellenic Studies 123 (2003) 60-76
W. Schadewaldt, ‘Hector and Andromache’, in G.M. Wright and P.V.
Jones (eds), Homer: German Scholarship in Translation (Oxford
University Press, 1997) 124-42
H. van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (Duckworth, 2004)
Index

Achilles 11-12, 18-19, 23-9, 31-3, Epic Cycle 15, 18, 32, 37, 51
36-8, 40-7, 51-4, 59, 62-4, 68-9 Euripides, Medea 69
Aeneas 18, 26
Agamemnon 25, 27, 30, 36-8, 40-4, fame (kleos) 12, 22, 37, 68
53, 57, 61-3 fate 53-4, 58-9
Ajax 20-1, 31, 36, 43, 44, 61 formulas 16, 24-6, 30-1, 62
amplification 28-9
Andromache 16, 39, 46, 61-6 gender 61-9
anger 23, 26, 32-3, 35, 42-7, 54-5 Gilgamesh 22
Aphrodite 50-3 gods 49-59
Apollo 18, 20, 28-30, 33, 40, 45-6,
50-2, 57 Hector 16, 22, 25, 28, 30-3, 37-40,
Archilochus 13 44-5, 47, 51-3, 55-6, 62-6
Ares 50 Hecuba 63
aristeia 27-8, 32, 57 Helen 12, 18, 20, 26, 32, 53, 55, 58,
Aristotle 31-2 61-3, 65-7
arming scenes 27-8 Hephaestus 27, 50, 52
Artemis 50 Hera 18, 21, 50, 52-3, 55-6, 58-9, 65
Athena 18, 27, 29, 50-6, 58-9, 62-3 Heracles 17, 30, 58
Heraclitus 54
battle scenes 28-9, 31, 68 Hermes 45, 50, 52
beauty 61-2, 65, 68 hero-cult 51
Briseis 26, 36, 41-2, 46-7, 63 Herodotus 19, 32, 49
Bronze Age 20-1 heroism 35-47, 51, 59, 61, 66-7
Hesiod 11-12, 15-16, 37, 49
Chryseis 26, 33, 40, 62-3 [Hesiod], Shield of Heracles 15
Chryses 33, 40, 62 Homeric Hymn to Apollo 71
Homeridae 15
Demeter 50 homophrosynê 65-7, 69
dialect 24 honour (timê) 36-47, 49-50, 54-5, 63,
dictation 14 69
Diomedes 17, 27-8, 32, 36, 44, 52 hospitality 47, 56, 67
Dionysus 50
double motivation 52-3, 56, 58 Indo-European 22
innovation 14, 16-19, 26
epic 11-22
78 Index

justice 54-5, 58-9 Poseidon 18, 20, 50, 52, 57-8

Priam 18, 25, 29, 30-3, 38, 43, 45-7,
language 15, 24-6, 32, 38, 62, 67 52, 56-8, 61, 67
literacy 13-15, 21
repetition 23, 26, 28, 30, 33
masculinity 47, 61-2, 67-8 rhapsodes 15
Meleager 26 ring-composition 33, 47
Menelaus 16, 18, 27, 29-30, 32, 37,
51, 53, 55-6, 61, 65 Sarpedon 28, 33, 36, 38, 47, 51, 53,
metaphors 30-1 63
metre 11, 23-5 shame (aidôs) 31, 37, 40, 44-5, 66
Muses 12, 19 similes 27-30, 32, 51-2, 68-9
Mycenae 20-1, 24, 38, 50 speeches 28, 31-3, 38-9, 41, 43, 47,
51, 64
Near East 20-2, 28, 50 story patterns 16, 22, 26, 33
Nestor 17, 21, 36, 41-2, 64 structure 26, 32-3
Niobe 18-19, 46 style 26-32
supplication 25, 33, 46-7, 62, 67
Odysseus 11-12, 18, 21, 25, 31, 36,
41, 43-4, 51, 54, 61-2 Thersites 36, 62
Odyssey 11-19, 21, 23, 28-9, 31, 37, Thetis 17-18, 33, 43-4, 46, 54
50-1, 54-5, 61, 65, 69 Thucydides 19-20, 32
oral poetry 11-17, 22-33, 38 time 32-3
Trojan War 17-21, 32, 54, 69
Pandarus 29, 56 Trojans 17-18, 30, 32, 38-40, 42,
Panhellenism 24, 67-8 50-1, 54-9, 67-8
Paris 12, 16, 18, 26-7, 30, 32, 38-9, Troy 13, 17-18, 20-1, 32, 49-50,
50-1, 53, 55-8, 62-3, 65-7 53-5, 57-9, 62, 64, 68
Patroclus 22, 27-30, 33, 39, 44-6, 51, typical scenes 26-8, 33
53
Peleus 17, 23, 27, 29, 31, 35, 45, 62 war 11, 17, 19, 28, 58, 61-9
performance 15-17, 23-5 women 61-9
Philoctetes 18
Phoenix 26, 30-1, 43, 62 Xenophanes 49, 54
pity 43, 45-6, 52, 58-9, 68
Plato 11, 46, 49, 54 Zeus 18, 21, 33, 46-7, 49-59, 65, 68