Ahuvia Kahane - Homer. A Guide For The Perplexed

Homer
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A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
Homer
AHUVIA KAHANE
L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY
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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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London New York
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www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2012
© Ahuvia Kahane, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
Ahuvia Kahane has asserted his right under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization

acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this
publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-8926-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain
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CONTENTS
Preface vi
1 The figures of Homeric poetry 1

2 Homeric histories 18
3 The poet and the making of the poem 40
4 Homer’s poetic language 60
5 Proems, tales and plots 79
6 The Iliad 99
7 The Odyssey 121
8 Boundaries and social worlds: Men and
women 150
9 Mortality and the divine 168
Envoi 184
Suggestions for further reading 187
Bibliography 193
General Index 203
Index of Homeric Characters 208
Index of Selected Greek words and Homeric
expressions and phrases 210
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PREFACE
This short book appears in the series of Guides for the Perplexed
whose purpose is to introduce major figures and works to
students and general readers and especially, as the series title
suggests, to explain challenging and difficult aspects of those
works. This has particular significance in the case of Homer.
The Iliad and Odyssey are first and foremost stories to be read
(or listened to) for pleasure. They are widely available in print,
in translations into almost every language and in electronic form
too. There are dozens of translations in English alone, in verse
and prose, in versions that follow the original ancient Greek very
closely (e.g. by Richmond Lattimore or Walter Shewring) and
in others that take greater poetic liberties (such as Christopher
Logue’s powerful War Music, Madelein Miller’s Orange Prize
winner, The Song of Achilles’ or Alice Oswald’s haunting
Memorial). Readers who seek short, practical introductions
to Homer and Homeric poetry and answers to basic questions
will likewise find an abundance of informed introductions,
handbooks, companions and encyclopaedias on the subject that
outline important facts, characters, themes and contexts. And yet
Homer, the first poet in the Western literary canon and one of its
mainstays, demands and richly rewards deeper exploration. His
poetry deals with some of the most difficult and long-standing
poetic, historical and ethical questions ever raised.
Homeric questions have of course been perplexing
and fascinating readers, poets, philosophers, politicians,
businessmen (Heinrich Schliemann, the father of Homeric
archaeology, was a banker in California during the Gold Rush),
beginner students and seasoned scholars for over two and a
half millennia – longer than any other literary and historical
questions in the classical tradition. The range of creative and
reflective responses, artistic and learned, to Homer is vast.
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PREFACE vii
Merely in the last 100 years, almost 15,000 (!) specialist books
and articles dedicated to the study of Homer have been written.
The number of literary, dramatic, cinematic works, works in
painting, sculpture and other media, that relate to the Iliad and
Odyssey is hard, if not impossible, to count. With such bewildering
abundance, there is more than one persuasive answer to every
question about Homer. It can be difficult to fi nd one’s way around,
not least since many of the most significant developments in our
understanding of Homer’s poetry and its background are phrased
in a highly technical language. Yet this abundance – perplexing,
difficult, resistant to simple solutions – is also what defi nes the
special richness of Homer and the Homeric tradition. To have put
it aside would have produced a more convenient but less truthful
introduction. What I have therefore tried to do in this book is to
present some of the main facts, features and approaches to Homer
and to characterize them as plainly as I could without masking
the complexity of the questions and the exciting, open, meditative
themes that give the Iliad and Odyssey their beauty and ensure
their continuing resonance.
This book was written during a period of leave from my duties
as a member of the Classics and Philosophy Department and
Directory of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal
Holloway, University of London. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts
for providing additional support and, earlier, to the Department
of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, for providing me with
a Titus Fellowship, during which I had considered some of the
issues of presentation and range of this book. Many friends and
colleagues have provided encouragement and advice as this book
was being written. However, most of all I would like to thank the
many graduate students who had taken my University of London
Inter-Collegiate Homer course, and from whom, over several years,
I had learned a great deal about Homer.
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CHAPTER ONE
The figures of
Homeric poetry
A beginning for all time

The Iliad and Odyssey are among the best known poems in the
West and increasingly in other parts of the world, and they are
widely acknowledged as the beginning of the Western literary
canon. They are good stories, well-loved and deceptively easy
to read. The Iliad is a tale of war; the Odyssey is a tale of the
return from war. The two Homeric poems are very different from
each other, but their narratives, contents, characters, style and
traditions are closely entwined. Together they tell at some length –
conventionally, 27,803 lines – a plot which is the West’s oldest and
most famous point of literary departure. The beginning, we might
say, of a very long line.
The fi rst poem, the Iliad, deals with a confl ict that occupies a
central position in the collective memory of the ancient Classical
world – the Trojan War. It is a story of countless woes, of spears
and shields, chariots and horses, fear and pity, fury and grief,
blood and dust. The fi rst word of the very fi rst line of the Iliad is
mênis, ‘wrath’. It is the theme of the poem and also ‘the fi rst word
of European Literature’. It offers a harsh forewarning of things to
come. The poem makes a rapid start – as one might expect from the
‘fi rst’ poem – launching into extended narratives of violence and
conflict. By the time we have traversed the poem’s 24 books and
reached the last words, the tone has changed to one of mourning,
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2 HOMER
pity and lament – reflections on wrath as a destructive force, on

death and the past. The last line of the poem rounds off the burial
of a hero, Hector, ‘Tamer-of-Horses’, who was a husband, a son, a
friend and the emblem of the city’s defence. Without him, the high
citadel of Troy will fall.
And indeed, beyond the horizon of the Iliad’s last verse lie the
inevitable flames of destruction. Western literature here takes its
fi rst, dark, measured steps. ‘Measured’ not only because Homeric
poetry is composed in formal, repetitive (and technically complex)
metrical verse (each line has the same basic rhythm and involves
intricate ‘formulae’ or set groups of words), but no less because
of Homer’s meticulously crafted thought and poetics, his studied
descriptions of physical violence and extreme emotion and because
of the claims made by the poems themselves, not merely to tell a
story, but to preserve the ‘fame’ (kleos) of fleeting mortal events.
‘Dark’, not simply because death lurks everywhere in the poems’
past, present and future, but because the Iliad is a poem that, above
all, acknowledges mortality, tragedy and loss. Modern culture and
especially modern popular culture (Hollywood fi lm, for example)
sometimes ends its stories with a victory for the ‘right side’ and the
rightful defeat of others, or with a sense of wrong when the ‘right
side’ is defeated. Loss in Homer runs deeper. In the background to
the Iliad lies the abduction of Helen – a basic act of transgression
by a guest (Paris) against a host (Menelaus). It is the cause of the
Greek expedition against Troy, the war, and Troy’s eventual fall. Yet
the poem has no right side, and ultimately, despite many victories
and defeats, has within it more pity and grief than triumph. The
Iliad has many battles and duels in which men kill and are killed.
Violence is meted out and revenge is exacted. The poem sings of
valour, prowess and martial excellence. Heroes sometimes revel
in their strength. Yet the Iliad recognizes the inevitable price of
violence and its irreparable consequences. It looks death, ineluctable
and tragic, straight in the eye, although Homer’s piercing gaze is
neither morbid, on the one hand, nor ‘objective’ or detached, on the
other. This fateful, fi nely wrought, meditation on mortality seems
well-suited to the burden of the Iliad’s place in literary history. The
end of life, reflections on the end of life, are often the beginnings
of a life in words (what the Greeks called a bios and the Romans a
vita), a history, a narrative. This ‘end’ that is the Iliad, a permanent
figure of fragility, is, we might almost say, a natural beginning to
a life of the mind.

THE FIGURES OF HOMERIC POETRY 3
Homer’s second poem, the Odyssey, deals with the aftermath

of the war. The surface of its tale is more varied and colourful. It
follows the homeward path of Odysseus, one of the great heroes
of the Trojan War and the wanderer-figure par excellence in the
literary tradition of the West. During the 10 years of the war, and
10 more years which the journey takes him, tensions mount back
in his palace on the island of Ithaca. His wife is besieged by suitors.
His young son is coming of age but is still helpless on his own. The
Odyssey describes both distant journeys and a painful situation at
home. It is a poem of adventure, of monsters, ghosts and far-away
peoples and lands, of seduction and intrigue, of recklessness and
fidelity, of youth and old age, of memory and elaborate tales, of lies
and truth, and, fi nally, of a homecoming and a reunion.
Compared to the Iliad, the first word of the Odyssey, andra
(man) presents an elusive, almost enigmatic theme. As if the poem
is asking ‘what is a man?’ The name of the poem is Odysseia, ‘the
tale of Odysseus’, and yet, unlike the Iliad, the hero is un-named in
the first line, which simply speaks of ‘the man of many ways’, andra
. . . polytropon (1.1). The hero’s name is later revealed (obliquely,
in 1.21), but we do not actually meet Odysseus until book 5 of the
poem. If one of the Odyssey’s themes is the absence of the hero from
his home, it is also a theme enacted literally in the hero’s absence
from the first, substantial part of the poem. Significantly, even when
Odysseus has come back to occupy the narrative stage, his name
and identity are repeatedly withheld from various characters. The
question of naming and identity is central to this work. Not only
the Odyssey’s first word, but also the poem as a whole, asks ‘who
is this man, Odysseus?’ and ‘what is a man?’ In typical Homeric
fashion, the poem celebrates the multiplicity of possible answers.
The hero of the Odyssey is indeed polytropos, a man of many
‘ways’ or ‘tropes’. Later in the poem, he is also described as
polymêtis, ‘of many schemes’ (2.173, etc.), polyphrôn, ‘of many
minds’ (1.83, etc.), polymêchanos, ‘of many devices’ (5.203, etc.),
polyainos, ‘much sung’ (12.184), and more. He is a compulsive
traveller and teller of tales. He assumes many false identities and
invents histories – a means of survival for him, and perhaps for
the poem at large as it unfolds its story – and he boasts about his
skills of deception. ‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, who is known
to all for his wiles’, he says (9.19. See Pucci 1987). The Odyssey’s
narrative, like its hero, follows many winding paths and it carries
us to the far corners of Homer’s world. The plot takes place on

4 HOMER
the seas, at the edges of the world, on faraway islands, in Sparta,

Ithaca and more. It leaps backwards and forwards in time. We
may well ask who exactly is this ‘man of many ways’ who has
been everywhere and seen so much, and what exactly is his story?
The answer is often in the plural. In fact, as the poem itself tells
us, other journeys await the hero in the future, after he will have
arrived in Ithaca, when his journey and his homecoming are
fulfi lled and the poem itself has ended (see the words of the ghost
of the seer Teiresias to Odysseus in the underworld in the Odyssey
11.111–37). This future which lies beyond Odysseus’ homecoming
and beyond the end of the poem, like the future of Troy which lies
beyond the end of the Iliad, is not an oversight. It does not indicate
the premature ending of the narrative. The ‘untold’ events are not
missing pieces of the poem nor loose strands trailing around the
plots. Rather, they are essential reflections of the way the Homeric
poems relate to the worlds they describe, the way the poems
continue to resonate after the narrative has reached the last line.
Many Homers
The Iliad and the Odyssey, then, are the beginning of a history and
a literary timeline. They have been with the West ‘since birth’ and
are (with some periods away from the limelight, in part, for example,
from the middle ages to the Renaissance) a recurrent feature at the
centre of its literary scene. Translations and adaptations abound –
Homeric poetry is part of the literary furnishings of our world.
The texts bear the marks of our histories, and are, despite the vast
distance that separates them and us and their distinct character,
always familiar somehow. There is, even in today’s rapidly evolving
world, a certain comfortable fit between the Iliad and Odyssey
and many of our sensibilities and historical perceptions. This fit
characterizes some of the ways in which the tradition of the West
and today’s increasingly wider traditions couch their understanding
of song and narrative, as well as of confl ict, gender, subjectivity,
ethnicity, ‘self’ and ‘other’, mortality, heroes, knowledge, survival
and the relation of the present to the past. Homer seems to remain a
figure of significance, sometimes a point of reference, even as these
traditions evolve (in a world of changing values and balances of
power, global telecommunications, social networking and more),

recreate and even more forcefully resist old categories, binary

oppositions, monumental historical narratives and metaphysical
completeness and/or coherence. Yet the ease with which we often
accept Homer also contains deep-seated complexities. When we
look at Homer more closely, we fi nd perplexing features and a
multiform essence.
Homer’s elusive character can be found in both broad and
pointed aspects of the poems. Almost every word in the Iliad and
Odyssey marks it. Thus, to give a brief preliminary example, one
of the best known and most common expressions in Homer is
epea pteroenta which, literally translated, means ‘winged words’.
This expression fi rst appears at the beginning of the Iliad, when
Achilles, the hero of the poem, is about to respond to the insulting
behaviour of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek armies, with
impulsive, violent emotion. The goddess Athena intervenes,
grabbing Achilles by the hair. The hero is amazed, but he instantly
recognizes the goddess and her flashing eyes. Then, we are told
(Iliad 1.201–3),
he uttered winged words [epea pteroenta] and addressed her

‘Why have you come again, daughter of Zeus of the Aegis?
Is it so that you should see the outrageous arrogance (hybris)
of the son of Atreus?’
The flutter of these ‘winged words’ and the image they inspire
seems to anticipate Achilles’ following speech and the wrath which
is the theme and immediate cause of events in the poem (1.1: ‘Of
the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, sing, Muse’). This strange
and distinctive expression, ‘winged words’, has been haunting
readers and scholars for millennia. It ‘haunts’ the text, too, since
it is repeated no less than 114 times throughout the poems, in a
wide range of contexts, by speakers who display a wide range of
emotions and thoughts. Are ‘winged words’ just rapid words? Are
we dealing with one state of mind or with many? Is the essence of
these simple words, epea pteroenta, a visual image of movement
that cannot be grasped? Does Achilles’ verbal response and the
flutter of wings have anything to do with this scene’s rare and
unexpected epiphany – the appearance of a god before a mortal?
Epea, in Greek, means simply ‘words’. But it is also the plural of
epos, which in other contexts can mean ‘epic’. Achilles’ pointed,
situated yet fluttering and elusive response may thus also hint at a

6 HOMER
general quality of ‘epic’ poetry, which is itself a response by mortals

to visions of death and eternity and of things that are beyond
mortality. Homer’s poetry itself, we might say, is a kind of ‘winged
words’ whose resonance is always immediate but difficult to grasp,
always something more than its literal meaning and presence. The
poet Matthew Arnold in his essay ‘On Translating Homer’ (1861)
famously attributed to Homer the qualities of being eminently
rapid, plain, direct and noble. Such qualities may indeed have been
achieved in Homer’s poetry, yet they are achieved by perplexing
and elusive means.
In antiquity, Homer’s reputation and legacy thrived unmatched.
He was celebrated in key canonical works that looked back to the
Iliad and Odyssey in awe and often also with manifest anxiety.
These works included epic poems, for example, Apollonius of
Rhodes’ Argonautica (third century bce), Virgil’s Aeneid (fi rst
century bce), Lucan’s Pharsalia (fi rst century ad) and many others.
They also included major works in almost every other literary
genre including lyric poetry, tragedy, oratory and rhetoric, history
and philosophy. Homer’s poetry continues to resonate throughout
the literary history of the West, not least in contemporary settings,
in key modern works such as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922),
Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott’s long poem Omeros (1990), in
widely acclaimed films like the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where
Art Thou? (2000), Mike Leigh’s Naked (1994), Wolfgang Petersen’s
Troy (2001), Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and more
(see Hardwick 2003, Hardwick and Gillespie 2008, Graziosi
and Greenwood 2007, Hall 2008, also entries on ‘reception’ in
Finkelberg 2010). Yet the continuity of Homer’s legacy and his
enduring attraction today, as in the past, sees no end to change.
There are no rules or set boundaries to Homer’s resonance. In the
third century bce, in the Hellenistic age, the epic poet Apollonius
of Rhodes took Homer’s model and transposed it onto a narrative
about an unfaithful hero (Jason) who is marked surprisingly by
‘helplessness’ (in Greek, amêchaniê) and about a woman’s (Medea’s)
vengeance. Hellenistic culture’s sense of self-identity embraced both
the poetic values and practices of earlier Greek eras and sought
to break away from them. In Rome, Virgil took Homer’s poems
of fighting (the Iliad) and far-ranging journeys (the Odyssey) and
turned their order upside down. In the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas and
his fellow Trojan survivors fi rst journey to a new home (sailing away

from the Greek lands rather than, like Odysseus and the Greeks,
making their way home towards Greece), then fight (founding a
future city rather than razing one to the ground, as in the Iliad).
In fifth century bce Athens, the dramatist Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy
the Oresteia picks up and retells the narratives of Agamemnon,
Clytemnestra and Orestes. Orestes’ story is retold many times in
Homer’s Odyssey, where it is presented as a model for later action.
Aeschylus embraces this ‘Homeric’ model and places it on the stage.
Yet he recreates the tales in the image of his own times, giving it a
distinctly Athenian civic twist instead of the original aristocratic,
heroic colouring. In fi rst century ad Rome, Petronius, ‘Arbiter of
Elegance’ to the emperor Nero, turned Odyssean epic verse and
its tales of wandering, heroic adventure, homecoming and fidelity
into a novel, mostly in prose, which follows the reckless sexual
escapades of a hero named Encolpius, ‘In-Crotch’ (a roundabout
way of saying ‘Penis’), in the settings of imperial decadence.
Homer’s lofty Greek epic verse here plays its part within the pages
of a racy Roman novel’s prose.
Change is no less part of the later Homeric tradition since
the Renaissance, right down to our own times. James Joyce
transported the scene of the Odyssey from Ithaca and antiquity
to early twentieth-century Dublin and canonized Homer within
Western modernism: the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom,
and his wife Molly are as close a continuation and as radical
a break from Homer’s characters Odysseus and Penelope as we
wish, just as Joyce’s free ‘stream of consciousness’ English prose
is both a stranger to the formal, repetitive flow of Homer’s Greek
hexameter verse and a bedfellow to its open-ended flexibility
(for Homer’s language, see further below). At the close of the
twentieth century, Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros took Homer to
the Caribbean island of St Lucia, with St Lucians Achílle, Hector
and Helen in leading roles (Omeros chapter 3, section 1):
. . . Men can kill

their own brothers in rage, but the madman who tore
Achílle’s undershirt from one shoulder also tore
at his heart. The rage that he felt against Hector
was shame. To go crazy for an old bailing tin
crusted with rust! The duel of these fishermen
was over a shadow and its name was Helen.

8 HOMER
Who are Achílle, Hector and Helen in these verses? What is the
rage that drives Achílle here? One cannot read this poem without
remembering that we are in the Caribbean, without confronting
contemporary questions of the relations of these islands and the
colonial empires and cultures that ruled them. One cannot simply
superimpose the heroes of Walcott’s poem on the characters in
Homer’s epic (or vice versa!) any more than one can map modern
culture onto a single source in antiquity. Yet without the Homeric
provenance the powerful modern perspectives and critiques of
Walcott’s Omeros are lost.
The resonance of Homeric poetry effortlessly crosses over to
other forms of art – and life. In O Brother, Where Art Thou?,
film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen famously set the Odyssey’s
scene in ‘musical’ surroundings, and in the American deep south
of the 1930s, following the adventures of escaped convict Ulysses
(as in Joyce’s novel, the Latinized form of the name Odysseus
and the name of a famous American Civil War general) Everett
McGill. British director Mike Leigh placed the Odyssean hero
of his film Naked in the dark (but also hilariously funny) late-
twentieth-century backstreets of London among its subcultures
and underclasses. This Homeric hero is lost in the heart of a
modern metropolis and the ghostly ‘underworlds’ of empty high-
rise office blocks. In Wolfgang Petersen’s Hollywood blockbuster
Troy, Brad Pitt portrays a glamorous, blond-haired, bronzed
Achilles that nevertheless preserves at least some accurate details
(Achilles’ hair in the Iliad is indeed blond; see 1.197). Troy follows
the Homeric story, but shows more, perhaps too much of the events
of the destruction of Ilium (complete with dramatic soundtrack,
panoramic Computer Generated Imagery [CGI] and rapid camera
action) than the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Director Theo
Angelopoulos placed his version, Ulysses’ Gaze, in the Balkans and
created a meditative arthouse film in search of film and about fi lm.
We have not even begun to mention elements of the tradition in
other media and genres.
Homer’s easy fit in his many different contexts, in our
contemporary world and in the past, embodies but perhaps also
masks a bewildering diversity and also a flexible potential which,
in the end, becomes part of the meaning of the poems themselves.
Without this flexibility as somehow inherent to the very idea of
Homer, it hardly seems possible that two poems should fit to so

many different and sometimes incompatible contexts and that the

Homeric poems should have played, and continue to play such
vastly resonant roles in literary and cultural history.
The Iliad and Odyssey themselves seem to bear out this idea.
The longer and closer we look at the poems, the more intricate,
irregular and perplexing are the figures that appear. We begin to
wonder what these poems really are, just as when we stare at a
familiar face for a long time, we may fi nd ourselves wondering
who or what we are looking at. Already the personalized figure
of the poet Homer seems to demonstrate this: His name is known
everywhere, yet nothing certain is known about him. Many
scholars suggest that he is not a historical person at all (see Porter
2004, Kahane 2005; for antiquity, see, e.g. Graziosi 2002). Who,
or what is this ‘Homer’, then? A fiction? A tradition? A word? A
sign? Similar elusive qualities characterize the poems themselves,
even in their concrete, material form. In our hands, we hold the
books that are the Iliad and Odyssey. We read these books and
have been reading them, as books, for thousands of years. Yet,
everything we know about the poems suggests that the Iliad and
Odyssey were not created as texts for reading at all. They are,
strange as it may seem, not silent books but living performances.
The poems, almost all scholars agree, were composed in societies
that knew no writing, or had at least evolved orally for a very
long period (see Foley 1991, Bakker and Kahane 1997) in a
process that eventually led to the texts we have today which are,
undoubtedly written texts. The difference between a performance
and a text is significant, of course, just like the difference, for
example, between a musical performance and sheet music. What,
then, are the Homeric poems? When, and how were the Iliad and
Odyssey written down? How do we even know that the poems
were composed without writing? After all, the living voice of
Homeric bards and rhapsodes has been silent for millennia. How
has the poetry of Homer left the mouths and ears of poets and
audiences and entered the book?
We accept the Iliad and Odyssey as the ‘beginnings’. Yet as
beginnings they begin by raising some perplexing questions.
Other cultural and literary traditions, those that begin with the
Old Testament, for example, take a more intuitive fi rst step. The
book of Genesis, literally ‘The Creation’, proclaims its place by its
contents (before the creation was the void), by its name and its fi rst

10 HOMER
words, ‘in the beginning’ (bereshith in Hebrew). Things are a little

different in Homer. The Iliad opens, as the Roman poet Horace
later observed, in medias res, ‘in the middle of things’ (The Art of
Poetry 148). Indeed, the story of the Iliad only begins towards the
end of the Trojan War around which the poem’s events revolve.
The Iliad’s narrative is followed by the Odyssey, which describes
events that happened after the war. Yet, just as Walcott’s Omeros
or O Brother, Where Art Thou? are not simply continuations of
Homer, so even the Odyssey is not quite a sequel. It is not Iliad II.
The Odyssey is a poem of return. But it is not a poem about ‘the
return of the Iliad’. Rather, the Odyssey is a continuation that
almost seems to make a new beginning and to change (or rewrite)
the poem it follows.
This is more than just a general principle. It touches many of
the basic themes of Homer’s poems. For example, in the Iliad,
heroes die for fame and glory. It is, we might say, part of the
essence of their being. Yet already in the Iliad, in Books 9 and 24
for example, some bold challenges are raised to this purpose of
life. Why, asks Achilles (we shall discuss these matters at length
further below), must heroes fight and die? The Odyssey picks up
these themes of doubt with doubled vigour. For example, in the
underworld of the Odyssey, the world of dead heroes of the Iliad,
Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles. Odysseus consoles and
praises this spectre of the heroic past. Yet in response Achilles
angrily says (Odyssey 11.488–91):
Don’t console me about death, great Odysseus

I would rather be a farm labourer, slaving for another man
who owns no land and has not much wealth
than be king of all the withered dead.
There are, as always in Homer, many ways of interpreting these

verses. But can anyone who knows them read the earlier poem,
the Iliad, and its portrayal of heroism, martial excellence and
death as she or he has before? It does not seem unnatural to us
that the West’s literary history should begin, not with one (as we
might otherwise expect at the point of beginning), but with two
rather different works. Yet, we cannot take this basic plurality
of the Homeric poems for granted. Homer is not a fact of nature
like a tree or a rock, but a constitutive – and telling – cultural

construct. We must thus recognize the unique shapes and figures

of the Homeric tradition.
We do not know precisely what historical circumstances brought
about the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey as two separate
poems. Hard historical evidence about the early stages of Homeric
poetry is hard to come by. To claim that the poems originated in
two different traditions of song as some critics do may be right
(indeed, some have split the poems into many traditions of song),
but in the absence of evidence outside the poems themselves, this
is merely to project the fact that they are two different poems
back into an earlier history. Likewise, to say that the two poems
are inseparable elements of one tradition is merely to rephrase the
fact that they are very similar and have always been associated
with the one name of ‘Homer’. As for the name, we cannot say
with certainty what relation it or the persona of Homer and his
many ancient biographies bear to historical fact. Some ancient
sources claim that the word homeros meant ‘blind’ (see, e.g. the
so-called Herodotean Vita of Homer 165) – Homer is, of course
traditionally portrayed as a blind old bard; others link it with the
meaning of the word homeros, ‘hostage’ in Greek (Contest of
Homer and Hesiod 29). But what does this mean? No satisfactory
answer has been provided. Sometimes the name Homeros was
associated with the verb ‘to follow’ (Pseudo-Plutarchean Life of
Homer 143–4), perhaps as a pun, since Homer is the fi rst poet
in the tradition and followed no one, or perhaps, paradoxically,
in tacit acknowledgement that the essence of Homer is a kind of
traditional ‘following’ of one poet after another. The ancients
linked Homer’s name not to one, but to many birthplaces, including
Smyrna, Chios and more, and to many different ancestors (see
Graziosi 2002, Kahane 2005). Yet, for the most part, the ancients
made no attempt to resolve the question of provenance. Modern
scholarship understands this multiplicity by arguing that the
ancient Lives are narratives that reflect the values and opinions
of their times but tell us nothing about a historical figure Homer.
Homer, from this perspective, is viewed as a famous tradition of
many nameless singers, not as a person. Other modern critics,
who do think of Homer as an individual poet, distinguish purely
on reasons extracted from a reading of the poems between ‘the
Poet of the Iliad’ and ‘the Poet of the Odyssey’. In other words,
the Iliad and Odyssey themselves – by their very relation to each

12 HOMER
other as two separate poems – speak of a multiplicity of figures

of narration. Yet, again, by the position that the poems occupy,
inseparably, in the tradition of the West, they speak of a single,
canonical beginning. How many Homers are there, then? As one
scholar put it recently: ‘Fortunately for us, not less than one’ (Most
2004: 14).
The Iliad and Odyssey clearly stand out as unique poems.
But they do not stand alone. We know of many other ancient
epic poems that describe events before, after or around those
described in the Iliad and Odyssey. Many of these other poems
survive only as summaries and fragments. They were composed
in more or less the same poetic language (which is an artificial
mixture of Ancient Greek dialectal forms) and metre (hexameter
verse), often using similar expressions and phrases. Dating can
be difficult, but it is generally agreed today that these are later
works. Best known among these are the poems in the so-called
Epic Cycle (see Griffi n 1977, Burgess 2001), such as the Nostoi
(‘The Returns of the Heroes’), the Cypria (describing events
that preceded the Iliad, including the Judgement of Paris), the
Aethiopis (describing events after the end of the Iliad, including
the death of Achilles), the Little Iliad (telling of events after
Achilles’ death, and especially the story of the wooden horse), the
Ilioupersis (‘The Sacking of Troy’) and the Telegony (‘The Story
of Telegonus’. Telegonus was Odysseus’ son by Circe. Searching
for his father, he accidentally kills Odysseus). We also possess
various other important related poems such as the Homeric
Hymns, 33 shorter poems that introduce myths surrounding the
Olympic gods. In antiquity, some of the poems of the Epic Cycle
and the Hymns were at times attributed to Homer, but they do
not seem to have ever had quite the same influence or prestige as
the Iliad and Odyssey. The state of the actual text, for example,
of the Epic Cycle, relative to Homer’s poems, illustrates this
well. By and large, cultures preserve (or rediscover, or invent)
those texts that are precious to them. Beginning from the third
century bce , a canonical text of Homer emerged, which marks
the exclusive prominence of the Iliad and Odyssey. There are
important differences between a so-called vulgate or common
text of the Iliad and Odyssey and various scholarly corrections
made already in antiquity. But such differences are the domain
of specialists and text critics. Despite its vast size, the text of

Homer’s poems has been and remains remarkably well-preserved

as a single, authoritative body of work. In contrast, the weaker
status of the poems in the Epic Cycle is indicated by their poorly
preserved remains. Summaries exist, mostly in the work of the
fi fth century ad philosopher Proclus. But of the poems in the Epic
Cycle, we have only fragments. Only ten lines of the Ilioupersis,
for example, survive, in citations in later works. The relatively
low status of these other epic poems and their separation from
Homeric poetry underline the unique status of the Iliad and
Odyssey. It also shows us the diversity and range of heroic epic
narrative, much of it now lost as independent or complete works,
yet some of it, at least, still resonant in the Homeric poems. This
resonance, combined with the authority of the Iliad and Odyssey,
generates a kind of monumental poetic synecdoche, the rhetorical
figure of speech that indicates ‘a part that contains the whole’.
The ‘project’ of Homeric poetry

Multiplicity characterizes the figure of Homer, historical and
poetic, and his relation to the historical and poetic character of
the poems and to the construction and arrangement of the verse.
The question of history itself is of great importance to Homer. The
Greeks considered the Trojan War as a historical event. They could
point to the site of Troy, and thus acknowledged the historicity of at
least the background to Homeric poetry, although they sometimes
also cast doubts on the accuracy of Homer’s version of events and
on occasion, more fundamentally, on the very truth of his poetry.
In modern times, the site of Troy in the northwest of Turkey has
been excavated extensively and has yielded some spectacular fi nds,
some of them so spectacularly off the historical mark that they
cannot be associated with the Homeric Trojan War, if such a war
ever existed. Yet some form of historicity or historical resonance
is almost always attributed to Homer and detected in the Homeric
poems. It seems impossible that the Iliad and Odyssey should
have emerged outside a time, a place and outside historical states
of mind and patterns of language. Of course, the extent, nature
and dating of historical material in the Iliad and Odyssey are the
subjects of many disputes. The very same facts are often seen as

14 HOMER
proof positive of historicity of one kind or another, or as indicating

nothing certain at all. Strangely, this paradoxical state of affairs
makes sense if we consider the purpose of Homeric poetry, as many
readers and scholars interpret it, which is precisely to acknowledge
moments in time yet transcend them. This transcendence can thus
be understood as the essence of Homer’s ‘poetic project’.
Homeric poetry is an extended meditation on the mortal
condition, on the passage of time and on the death of heroes. Yet,
as students of Homer often point out, the raison-d’être of the
poems as it is expressed within the poems themselves lies precisely
in their role as acts of remembrance, as special acts that overcome
transience. Homer’s poetry claims to preserve the memory of past
events in words and in song, and in this way to enact the mortal
hero’s ‘undying/imperishable fame’ (kleos aphthiton, cf. e.g.
Iliad 9.413). Crucially, this contradictory combination of death
and transcendence, of fi nitude and what is beyond fi nitude, also
underlies Homeric poetry’s sense of its own value and place in the
world as more than merely pleasing entertainment. Heroic poetry
is entertaining, of course, and inside the Iliad and especially the
Odyssey, singing is portrayed as the typical entertainment. It is
telling, for example, that the Ithacan singer Phemius (‘The Famous
One’/‘The One Who Gives Men Fame’) has a father whose name is
Terpis (or Terpius, see Odyssey 22.330), ‘The One Giving Pleasure’.
However, far more ambitiously, song in Homer is portrayed as a
response to the precariousness of mortal life, as an act of seeing and
telling of the mortal condition from within the mortal condition
itself, an immanent act that stresses mortality even as it claims to
transcend it and preserve fame beyond the lives of its heroes. It is a
seemingly impossible act of remaining inside of one’s existence yet
looking at one’s self from the outside.
Such poetry, if it is to make good on its claims as a tradition of
‘un-dying’ speech or fame, must on the one hand project an image
of permanence. Yet, on the other hand, it must portray itself not
simply as an inert, inanimate sign or a monument in stone, but
as a living portent, a sign of the past that points to the future.
Not surprisingly, one of the most common words for a sign in the
Iliad and Odyssey is sêma, which is also the word used to denote
a ‘funerary monument’, a ‘tomb’, and, significantly, also a ‘sign of
recognition’, and a ‘divine portent’. A sêma is not only the burial
place of a hero (Iliad 21.322, etc.), a sign of the dead and of the

past, but also, most prominently in the Odyssey, a word denoting

a personal identification mark, such as the scar of Odysseus that
allows the hero to be recognized and enables him to reclaim his
identity, to come back from the dead and resume life at the head of
his household, beside his wife, son and father (e.g. Odyssey 23.73
and discussions further below).
A different, more complicated example of how Homer keeps
fame ‘imperishable’ is his dynamic approach to time and the way
the poems narrate their story. On the one hand, the Iliad and
Odyssey rely on the clearly demarcated movement of linear, and
thus fi nite, mortal time. Yet, as they tell their stories, the poems
also cut, rearrange and extract time from its chronological order.
Of course, every narrative rearranges time by the very act of telling,
which is a kind of ‘going back in time’. But in Homer, narrative
is used, for the fi rst time in Western literature and, what’s more,
expressly as a response to mortality. This, we might say again, is
the ‘project of Homeric poetry’.
The war in Troy lasts for 10 years and concerns events well
before and after this period of time, from the Judgement of Paris
to the fall of Troy. But the Iliad, in fact, describes directly only a
short period – 51 days of events that occur ‘in the middle of things’.
Furthermore, most of the poem’s action occurs over the course of
just 4 days. The Odyssey’s time frame comprises Odysseus’ 10 years
of wandering as well as the 10 years of the war and reaches as far
back as his birth and childhood and as far forward as his death. Yet
the poem describes in ‘live-action’ only 41 days, and it chops and
changes the sequence of its time, for example, in Odysseus’ famous
‘flashback’ stories in Phaiacia. Given the project of Homeric epic
and its goals, such narrative mastery over time takes on its special
meaning. If the poet can translate events into song, if he can stretch
them and compress them in words which, unlike lives and events,
can be ‘handed over’ (in Latin, trado, hence our word ‘tradition’) to
others, if he can change and rearrange the natural order of mortal
time, he will have found, within the conventions of epic poetry, a
stable form of flexibility (the ‘stretching’ and ‘compressing’) and a
route to confronting fi nitude from within the mortal world. Song
thus offers a response – not a solution, of course – to the condition
of mortality.
Following Homer, permutations of this idea become common
literary convention. Horace famously says ‘I have built a monument

16 HOMER
[in words] more durable than bronze’ (Odes 3, 30). However, as

we shall see in our later discussions, Homer’s mechanisms for
achieving transcendence are unique. The principles of flexibility
and transferability are important if the poems are to be what they
clearly have succeeded in becoming: narratives that can be told
again and again.
The materiality of Homer

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), one of the fathers of the modern
study of Homer, had argued that Homer was ‘an idea’, that he was
not a real person, not a single figure but ‘the whole of Greece’. As
we shall see, Homer the poet, singer or author is indeed in many
ways an idea, or at least (as a cultural critic like Michel Foucault
might have put it) a name that we use and around which we
organize and characterize the existence, circulation and operation
of certain texts in society (see Foucault 1977: 123–4). The ‘idea of
Homer’ can be expressed differently in different historical periods
by readers, in the work of poets, dramatists, and fi lm-makers, and
in the work of philosophers and scholars. But Homer is not just an
idea. In antiquity, for example, he always had a face. Homer was
depicted in busts or otherwise conventionally portrayed as a blind,
bearded old man. There were many busts of the poet. The faces
in those that survive today, if compared, are clearly not of the one
same person. We can assume that the ancients realized this, too. Yet,
despite this multiplicity of portrayal, Homer was always thought of,
paradoxically, as a single person. What we call Homer, of course,
is also a text, a body of poetic work. This text conventionally
contains an fi xed number of lines, 27,803, as we noted. Many
of the lines in the Iliad and Odyssey contain elements repeated
elsewhere (‘formulae’, see further below). This repetition creates
what John Foley (1991) once described as ‘vastly echoic’ language,
which is capable of resonating with many voices, representing a
tradition of song that is much larger than the poems as we have
them. Ancient audiences and ancient readers too, will have been
closely familiar with Homer. When the poet spoke, for example,
of ‘winged words’ (epea pteroenta), a whole world, a myriad of
different yet familiar repetitions and echoes will have fluttered, as

it were, in their ears. At the same time, as we have already noted,

the text of the Iliad and Odyssey that has come down to us from
antiquity contains fewer and less significant variations than almost
any other ancient text – far less than those found not only in the
traditions of the Epic Cycle and the Homeric Hymns, but also in
most other ancient canonical traditions. The texts of Greek tragedy,
for example, have been precariously preserved. Most of the known
tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are lost, and there
are significant textual difficulties in the manuscripts of many of
the extant plays. The poems of Homer, we must stress, comprise a
fi xed and stable object. Putting specialist discussions aside, the text
as we read it today is more-or-less the same as it was read when
Homeric scholarship began, in Alexandria in the third century
bce. Likewise, although the language of Homer’s poetry is often
flowing and elusive, it conforms to strict metrical and formulaic
rules and it is closely embedded in the rigid musical and rhythmic
patterns of the hexameter. It is a language that invites formal and
even statistical analysis. In this sense, Homer’s hexameter is not a
free-flowing stream of words. Similarly, we must stress that Homer’s
representation of time is clear and precise. The passage of time is
marked, day by day, using some of Homer’s the most memorable
and frequently repeated verses, like the ones describing the rising of
Dawn: ‘When early-rising rosy-fi ngered Dawn appeared’ (êmos d’
êrigeneia phanê rhododaktylos Eôs. See Iliad 1.477; 6.175; 9.707;
Odyssey 2.1; 3.404; 3.491, etc.; the verse was often imitated in
antiquity, for example, in the lyric poetry of Sappho, 96.8). Epic
time may stretch widely, perhaps even to infi nity, but audiences and
readers know exactly when events in the direct narrative occur.
The point is crucial: The Iliad and Odyssey are vast, monumental
texts. They have come to us from the distant past of archaic
Greece. They are fluid and elusive works of art. Yet the poems are
also with us here today, in stable material form, in their canonical
completeness. They comprise a flexible infi nity that we can, as it
were, hold in our hands, something we have received from our
predecessors and can pass on to those who will come after us.

CHAPTER TWO
Homeric histories
The necessity of history

Poetry is never detached from its historical surroundings, and
Homer’s poetry, which tells the story of heroes and war, standard
topics of historical writing, must also be seen against the
background of historical, social and material contexts. Indeed,
questions about the historicity of the events described in the
poems characterize Homeric tradition from its fi rst moments.
As one recent scholar puts it, ‘throughout Greek History, the
Trojan war figured as a prominent point of reference’ (Grethlein
2010). Homer was the ancients’ prime source of information for
the war. They placed Homer historically and often followed his
lead as a model for recounting the past, but they also argued
with the historical accuracy of many of the details in the Iliad
and Odyssey. Already in the fi fth century bce, Herodotus, ‘The
Father of History’, commented on the date of Homer (about
400 years before his time, Histories 2.53.4–5) and debated
Homer’s account of the Trojan War (2.116–20). Other ancient
historians like Thucydides (The Peloponnesian War 1.1–20) and
Polybius (34.2.1–3, etc.) followed suit in discussing Homer’s
accuracy. Ancient geographers, like Strabo, and generals, like
Alexander the Great, visited the site of Troy.
In the modern age, historical interest in Homer is attested
even more intensively. It was for a long time assumed, on
account of many details, that the events narrated in the poems,
and especially in the Iliad, were to be situated, historically, in

HOMERIC HISTORIES 19
the Bronze Age. Scholars and archaeologists have been searching

for the material remains of Troy and for evidence of the events
of the Trojan War and Homeric cultures, digging in a variety of
Bronze Age sites in Mycenae, Pylos, Crete and most notably at
what is generally accepted as the site of a historical city of Troy at
Hisarlik, a few miles from the coast of the Dardanelles in Anatolia
in the north-west of today’s Turkey. Extensive remains have been
uncovered in many of these sites: palaces, fortifications, domestic
compounds, arms, luxury goods and precious objects. They attest
to highly structured human habitation and often also to intense
confl ict. The site at Hisarlik comprises nine basic archaeological
strata and numerous phases within each level. It was inhabited
from around 3000 bce to 950 bce (broadly, the Bronze Age) and
prior to these dates and in later periods (see Rose 1997). Some
of the layers on the site clearly attest to catastrophic destruction,
notably the level known to archaeologists as Troy VII, which dates
back to the eleventh century bce. Some of the artefacts discovered
at this level in Hisarlik and in similarly dated levels in other sites
have been compared to objects described in the Homeric poems.
This body of evidence is too large and too detailed to ignore, even
though some of the associations are clearly mistaken and many
have been challenged. Hisarlik is one of the most spectacular
Bronze Age sites known, but its direct link to Homer is now
considered highly problematic. Instead, many historical elements
found in Homer are today often associated with a later period,
perhaps in the Iron Age (although greater degrees of overlap and
mixing of ‘ages’ is now generally allowed). There is today much
greater emphasis on the patterns, structures and values of social
and cultural history reflected in the Homeric poems rather than on
their account of events. Homer’s historicity is now seen by many
as a complex mix of eras, contexts, perceptions and imaginations.
The debate is still open, and it is almost as much about history
and archaeology themselves as it is about the historicity of Homer,
Troy and the Trojan War.
Before we can look at some of these controversies, we need to
ask a basic question about Homer and his relation to historical
reality. As historian Kurt Raaflaub puts it,
Why is it important to believe that at the base of Homer

lies a tradition about ‘an actual and real Trojan War’ and

20 HOMER
that Homer describes the world of this Trojan War? Why is

this question so fascinating to scholars and amateurs alike?
(Raafl aub 1997: 77)
The answer, he suggests, has to do, partly with the appeal of

great archaeological discoveries and mysteries, and partly with
the appeal of the Homeric poems. What we need to stress is the
interlinked character of such attractions. One can study Bronze
Age armour, Iron Age artefacts and the remains of buildings,
fortifications and other historical and archaeological materials on
their own. But as one of the cornerstones of the West’s culture,
Homer’s poetry provides, on the one hand, an enticing frame of
reference for interpreting certain sites’ artefacts and, on the other
hand, it calls out for a historical frame to its own interpretation.
The Iliad and Odyssey are great stories ‘in need’ of a historical
site, just as great archaeological sites are in need of a good story.
We want to touch the stones of the past and we want to hear them
speak. This does not mean that words, history and material objects
connect without difficulty or that stones and material objects speak
for themselves. It is one thing to unearth an ancient burial mask,
as Heinrich Schliemann did when digging at the Bronze Age site
in Mycenae in 1876, and another to declare, as Schliemann had,
that he found ‘the mask of Agamemnon’. The mask in question is
a spectacular fi nd, elaborately worked in gold and not unworthy of
the Iliad’s ‘lord of men’. Yet there is an almost general consensus
today that it belongs in an earlier period in the sixteenth century
bce, a date far too early for Homeric poetry. Furthermore, even
if we could associate the chronologies, there is nothing to link the
eerie golden face on the mask to the Greek overlord in the Iliad.
Some historical claims, then, have been unfounded or require great
leaps of faith. Yet a basic fact remains: Homer’s monumental opus
could only have been created in history.
Homeric poetry itself invites a ‘historical’ reading. The past and
its fame are central concerns in the poems. Whatever is our view
of the historicity of the Iliad and Odyssey, the poems inaugurate a
tradition of speaking about the past and, in this sense, a tradition
of historical reflection and enquiry. It is no accident that the ancient
historians, starting with Herodotus and Thucydides, modelled
their own narratives or parts of their narratives on Homer’s
poems. Thucydides’ famous description of the Sicilian expedition,

for example (The Peloponnesian War, Books 6–7), contains many

Homeric references.
The ‘historical’ impulse in Homer is easy to spot. In Book 2 of
the Iliad, for instance, the narrator, appealing to the Muses for
precise information, says (2.484–7), ‘Tell me now . . . who were the
leaders of the Danaans [a name sometimes used in Homer to denote
the Greeks] and their lords?’ A few lines later, as if proving that the
Muses have given him what he has asked for, the narrator says,
‘I will [now] name the lords of the ships, and the ships’ numbers’
(2.493). There follows a long list, in verse, of course, known as
the Catalogue of Ships (2.441–887 – Dickinson 2007, Sammons
2010). Here is the fi rst item to be mentioned (2.494–510):
Of the Boiotians Peneleos and Leïtos were leaders,

and Arkesilaos and Prothoenor and Klonios;
those who lived in Hyria and in craggy Aulis,
in Schoinos and Skolos, and mountainous Eteonos.
Thespeia and Graia, and wide Mykalessos;
and those who dwelt about Harma and Eilesion and Erythrai,
they ruled Eleon and Hyle and Peteon,
with Okalea and Medeon, the well-built citadel,
Kopai, and Eutresis, and Thisbe of the many doves;
and they held Koroneia, and the meadows of Haliartos,
and held Plataia, and they who lived about Glisa
and were masters of the lower Thebes, the well-built citadel,
and holy Onchestos, the shining grove of Poseidon;
and they held Arne of the many vineyards, and Mideia,
with sacred Nisa and distant Anthedon.
Of these there were fifty ships in all, and in each
there were a hundred and twenty sons of the Boiotians.
The Catalogue is densely packed with precise numbers of ships

and men and with the names of leaders and geographic places.
Its character and function as poetry have been the subject of long
debates (see Edwards 1980, Minchin 2001), but it is an obvious
tour de force of memory and performance. As a list, it also
provides a framework of apparent facts for the whole of the Iliad.
Many place names in the Catalogue (there are 29 named Greek
contingents) are indeed historically attested, for example, Athens,
Salamis, Argos, Crete and Rhodes. The abundance of geographic

22 HOMER
and personal details and precise numbers of ships and men invite us
to read Homer historically. In truth, modern scholars have shown
that there are difficulties in matching some of the details in the
Catalogue to material and historical record. For example, several
of the place names seem to refer to landlocked sites. The consensus
today is that the materials of the Catalogue are likely to have been
gleaned from different periods and origins. Yet it is impossible
to read this part of the poem without constantly invoking the
historical imagination and the idea of history.
In the Odyssey, too, geography and history are prominent,
although precise identification is sometimes inherently more
difficult. Homeric Pylos, the hero Nestor’s city (Odyssey Book
3), has been associated with various locations in the west of the
Peloponnese. Homeric Ithaca, Odysseus’ homeland, lies off the
western coast of Greece. Its precise identification and whether it
is identical with the modern Greek island of Thiaki/Ithake is the
topic of debate, although a general geographic resonance is not in
doubt. Trying to identify some of the other places in the Odyssey,
such as the Phaeacian Never-Never-Land (Books 6–12), the nymph
Calypso’s island of Ogygia (Book 5), the witch Circe’s island Aiaia
where Odysseus’ men were magically turned into beasts (Book 10),
the Underworld (Book 11) or the cave of the cannibal Cyclops
(Book 9), can be a little more tricky, although not all scholars have
been daunted by the task. But even putting aside the Odyssey’s
fantastic places, especially those which are contained in speeches
by Odysseus – who is a self-confessed trickster, the teller of typical
sailors’ tales, and sometimes an outright liar – it is clear that
Homer’s world and his geography bear at least some relation to
the named geographic world of historical Greece. Does this mean
that the poem preserves a cartographic image? Clearly not. Is the
Odyssey an amalgam of fantasy and fact, of contemporary and
anachronistic or archaizing features? If so, can these features be
properly disambiguated? Whichever way we choose to answer
these difficult questions, Homeric poetry could not have played its
prominent role in history without in some way itself being closely
associated with historical events.
We need to stress one more general point about Homer’s
historical principle: The Iliad and Odyssey claim to preserve
‘imperishable fame’, to provide a record of mortal heroes and
pasts that would otherwise be lost. The poems underscore their

claim, as Jonas Grethlein, for example, puts it, by ‘juxtaposing’

themselves with ‘the material media of memory’ (2010: 133). Yet
for the poems to have kept a full and accurate record of ancient
historical Troy would have worked against their own purpose.
In today’s world, we often suspect the authenticity of signposted,
perfectly reconstructed and preserved sites and ‘visitor centres’:
We can always catch sight of the gift-shop from the corner of our
eye. In other words, partial erasure, ruin and loss are necessary in
order to create the distancing effect of any past, and of Homer’s
past, too. Without the idea of something that has been and gone,
history itself is not possible. Homer depends on invoking a sense of
history, but, since this history is distant, it cannot be seen as clearly
as the present.
This principle is at work not only in the contents of Homer’s
poems but also in very substance of the poems and, for example,
in the idea of Homer’s oral provenance (which we shall explore in
greater detail in the next chapter). The living voice of song is more
fragile than the written word. Once uttered, voice as such remains
in memory only. It has to be reconstituted afresh every time a song
is performed. Such re-performance opens up a ‘historical’ gap:
the poet is forever creating a ‘new’ version of something ‘lost’,
preserving it on the one hand, but in the process also affi rming the
essential idea of mortality and loss. The historical past thus lives
in the poems, but the poems must live in the present, not in the
historical past.
The Trojan War and the ancients

The most prominent event referred to in Homer’s poetry is the
Trojan War. It is not surprising, then, that this war and the city of
Troy around which it was fought have been the focus of debates
about historicity.
In antiquity, Herodotus (Histories 2.116–20, 2.145) and
Thucydides (The Peloponnesian War 1.9–12; 3.104.4–6) speak of
the Trojan War and of Homer in historical terms, even when they
doubt his account. ‘I asked the priests [in Egypt] if the Greek story
of what happened at Troy had any truth in it’, says Herodotus,
‘and they gave me in reply some information which they claimed to

24 HOMER
have had from Menelaus himself. This was that after the abduction
of Helen . . .’ (2.118). Herodotus proceeds to tell a tale in which
Troy is sacked, yet, in direct contradiction to Homer’s version,
Helen has been kept away from Troy and unharmed in Egypt. The
details, thus, are a matter for debate among historians, even those,
who like Homer, may have got their facts wrong . . .
Time and precise dating are always important in historical
accounts, and for the ancients, they certainly were with regard
to the Trojan War. In the fourth century bce, the historian
Ephorus, for example, provided a precise date, the equivalent of
July 6/7, 1135 bce. In the Hellenistic age, the scholar Eratosthenes
calculated the date of the War to be 1183 bce. The chronological
list known as the Parian Marble gives a date of 1208/9 bce. Other
ancient historians and scholars set the date as late as 910 bce.
They present their conclusions not as poetic musings or as literary
play, but, essentially, as historical fact. The ancient calculations are
sometimes close to modern chronologies dating the destruction of
Troy to the late Bronze Age. Yet scholars generally agree that all
of the ancient arguments are based on speculation. What, then,
are we to make of such historicity? The words of the geographer
Strabo (63 bce to ad 24), a man deeply versed in Homer, are
telling. Strabo’s Troy is a precise point on the map, a real place.
Yet, as he openly says, there is nothing to see on the site, not even
ruined stones (Geography 13.1.38.1–5, cf. Alcock 1993: 207):
No trace of the ancient city [of Troy] has survived. This might
be expected, for the cities around were devastated, but not
entirely destroyed, whereas when Troy was overthrown from
its foundation all the stones were removed for the reparation of
the other cities.
Strabo’s Troy is a Troy of words and narrative which is superimposed

or projected onto the empty but absolutely concrete material reality
of the site. He is looking at stones that are no longer there. Strabo,
in what we could take to be an emblem of Homeric tradition and
the relationship between Homer and history in antiquity, is looking
at a historical city that cannot be seen. As, in our era, archaeologist
Brian Rose says: ‘It should be clear by now that Troy was not just
an ancient city but rather a concept that could be moulded to fit a
variety of times and places’ (Rose 1997: 109).

Troy, the Bronze Age and modern studies

Whatever allowances we make for ancient arguments about the
historicity of Troy and Homer’s relation to history, the debate
has only intensified in modernity. It is perhaps most dramatically
illustrated in the work and in the person of Heinrich Schliemann
(1822–90), the man who is widely credited with the rediscovery of
Troy (1870) in the modern era, at the site of Hisarlik.
Schliemann was not the fi rst modern scholar to point to Hisarlik
as the site of Homeric Troy. The idea was suggested earlier in 1820
by Charles Maclaren. Nor was Schliemann the fi rst to dig on the
spot. Frank Calvert did so in 1863. Schliemann was, however, the
fi rst to set up systematic excavations and to bring to light important
Bronze Age remains. He associated these directly with Homer’s
poetry and with the actual existence of a Bronze Age Trojan War.
There were signs of ash from a fi re, fortifications, a two-handled
cup (see Iliad 1.584, Odyssey 3.63, etc., in Homeric Greek a depas
amphikupellon) and various other artefacts. Most of these were
found by Schliemann in the archaeological level known as Troy II.
However, this level, now dated to 2600–2250 bce, is considered by
almost all scholars to be too early for Homer’s city.
Schliemann was no ordinary scholar. He is a figure of myth and
controversy. He has been described, alternatively, as the ‘father of
scientific archaeology’ and as a fraud. His method of systematically
marking historical levels in excavated trenches has been praised
by some as ahead of its time. But he was also severely criticized
for destroying valuable evidence in his single-minded quest. Some
critics have not minced their words and described him as a man ‘ill,
like an alcoholic, a child-molester or a dope-fiend’ (see Calder 1986:
37). He opened up the field in a manner that has led to important
later views, but his own arguments and conclusions were reached
more on the basis of faith than of fact (see overviews in Allen 1999
and Easton 2002). It has been convincingly argued that he falsified
some information in his notes.
Did Schliemann discover Troy, then, and establish its historicity?
The answer – here the perplexing nature of Homeric questions
becomes evident again – is ‘no’, ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’. There is almost
universal agreement that Schliemann’s Bronze Age Troy II at
the site of Hisarlik cannot be Homer’s Troy. There is, as we said

26 HOMER
earlier, wide agreement that the site itself is the site of a city of Troy
and that this site attests to some catastrophic destruction. Hisarlik
contains other historical strata, earlier than Troy II and, more
importantly, levels dating to later periods which some scholars
do associate with the poetry of Homer. But many other critics
suggest that no literal connection between Hisarlik and Homer’s
descriptions of the Trojan War is possible. There were doubtless
wars on the site, but who exactly fought them and why, remains,
as many insist, unknown. Amidst such diversity of opinion, it is,
nevertheless, certain that Schliemann inaugurated the modern
debate about the historicity of the War and its relation to events
described in Homer.
Schliemann was in many ways an outsider to the world of
professional scholarship and a romantic. He started out as an
entrepreneur and shady businessman. He owned a bank in
California during the gold rush and made a fortune profiteering in
the Crimean War. His figure is therefore a magnet to controversy.
Yet, well after Schliemann, elements of sharp disagreement
continued to characterize the debate even within professional
scholarship.
German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, working fi rst with
Schliemann and later independently, continued the excavations at
Hisarlik and other Bronze Age sites. Dörpfeld expanded the idea of
archaeological stratification and essentially espoused Schliemann’s
belief in the identity between the remains at Hisarlik and Homer’s
Troy. After Dörpfeld, Carl Blegen from the University of Cincinnati
directed excavations on the site (1932–38). He argued that Homer’s
Ilium was not to be located in level II, but in a later Bronze Age level
known as Troy VIIa and dating back to 1300–1180 bce. Summing
up his work and his views, Blegen wrote (Blegen 1963: 20, cited in
Raaflaub 1997: 75):
It can no longer be doubted, when one surveys the state of our

knowledge today, that there really was an actual historical
Trojan War, in which a coalition of Achaeans, or Mycenaeans,
under a king whose overlordship was recognized, fought against
the people of Troy and their allies.
Indeed, looking to the poems, Blegen extended his argument well

beyond archaeology, claiming that:

. . . a good many of the individual heroes [in the Iliad and

Odyssey] . . . were drawn from real personalities as they were
observed by accompanying minstrels at the time of the events.
If we are to believe Blegen, we have, on the site of Troy, found

the literal place of the Homeric poems, although it is not evident
exactly how one leaps from stones to ‘individual heroes’, ‘real
personalities’ and observations by accompanying minstrels, given
that absolutely no evidence for these personalities is available.
In the 1930s, when Blegen was conducting his excavations,
relatively little was known about the Bronze Age, its material
remains, culture and societies. Yet as more information became
available through the work of archaeologists and historians, the
difficulties of associating Homer directly with the Bronze Age and
its material and social contexts at Hisarlik and elsewhere became
clear. In 1950, H. L. Lorimer surveyed cremation methods, burials
and grave goods, shields, helmets, spears, swords, chariots, clothes
and personal apparel and houses. As she, and many others since (see,
e.g. Van Wees 1992) have argued, the material evidence suggested
a great deal less contact between Homer and the Bronze Age than
was previously assumed. Alongside work on the material remains,
studies of the unique language of Homer’s hexameter poetry and
especially that by Milman Parry and his student and successor
Albert Lord had since the 1930s argued persuasively that Homer’s
poetry was the result of a long tradition of oral discourse, despite
the poems’ eventual written form. One of the conclusions emerging
from these researches (see further in the next chapter) was that the
formation of this tradition could not be located in the Bronze Age
and that it was far more suitable to situate the poems at a much later
date, perhaps as late as the eighth or even seventh century bce.
Equally important to the historical placement of Homer and
Troy were thousands of documents composed in Bronze Age scripts
and preserved on seals, stone tablets, items made of precious metal
and above all on clay tablets, that were discovered in excavations
in Minoan Bronze Age sites in Greece, such as Knossos (by Sir
Arthur Evans), Phaistos, Pylos (by Blegen himself and others) and
at Mycenae since the beginning of the twentieth century. Many
of the clay tablets were burned in fi res that accompanied the
violent destruction of their surroundings. The tablets were thus,
paradoxically, hardened and preserved by catastrophe.

28 HOMER
For many years, the scripts in the tablets were undeciphered,

and some scripts (e.g. the one known as Linear A) remain so to
this day. Thus, initially, the texts had little effect on question of
the relation between Homer and the Bronze Age and the debate
over historicity. However, in 1952, a British codebreaker by the
name of Michael Ventris working with classicist John Chadwick
did decipher the script known as Linear B, which proved to be an
early dialect of the Greek language. The texts revealed striking
verbal links to Homer’s poetry. For example, in the tablets, we
fi nd the word wa-na-ka, denoting a distinct position of leadership.
The word is undoubtedly cognate with the word wanax, or, as it
is written in Homeric Greek, anax, meaning ‘leader’. The latter
is a very common Homeric word, often used, for example, in the
expression anax andrôn Agamemnon, ‘Agamemnon, leader of men’
(Iliad 1.7, etc.). Many other echoes of Linear B texts can be found in
Homeric Greek. The wanax was apportioned a plot of land called a
te-me-no, a word we fi nd in Homer in the form temenos (e.g. Iliad
6.194); the term qa-si-re-u in the tablets is, most linguists agree,
basileus, the standard word for ‘king’ in Homer; the word po-ti-
ni-ja is cognate with Homeric Greek potnia, ‘lady’ or ‘powerful
mistress’, as in ‘the lady Hera’ (Iliad 1.551, etc.); we find the word
ti-ri-po-da, a ‘tripod’ or three-legged cauldron which in Homer
has become tripos or, rather, more commonly (in its inflected form)
tripoda (e.g. Odyssey 8.434), and many more analogies.
And yet, crucially, close verbal links between Linear B vocabulary
and Homer also exposed the true differences between the image
of Bronze Age society that emerged from the clay tablets and the
society depicted in Homer. The tablets attested neither to the loose
association of local overlords described in the Iliad, nor to an
Odyssean aristocratic household, but to a highly bureaucratized
society that kept strict records, contracts and accounts, which
defi ned formal officialdom, social roles, institutions and elites;
levied taxes and calculated values; regulated labour; stored
allocated goods centrally and kept track of them (see overview in
Bennet 1998).
In later years, some linguistic arguments linking Linear B texts
to traditions of epic hexameter and, for example, to iconographic
evidence for poetic performance in Minoan and Mycenaean culture
were put forward (see Ruijgh 1985, Younger 1998). There remains,
however, a fundamental difference between the matter-of-fact lists,

inventory records and all other materials in Linear B texts and the
reflective poetic narrative and character speeches of the Iliad and
Odyssey. The tablets attest to interesting and important historical
linguistic developments and to undisputed verbal links with the
language of the Iliad and Odyssey, but they no less prove that
historically speaking, Homer’s world and the world of Mycenaean
Bronze Age cultures are not the same.
Decisive in declaring the split between these worlds was the work
of Moses Finley, who collected and reassembled the evidence and
eventually created a very different picture of Homer’s historicity.
Commenting directly on Carl Blegen’s convictions, Finley writes
(1964):
Whatever ‘the state of our knowledge today’ may be . . . one

must insist that there is nothing in the archaeology of Troy
which gives the slightest warrant for any assertion of that
kind [made by Blegen], let alone for writing ‘it can no longer
be doubted’. Blegen and his colleagues may have settled that
Troy VIIa was destroyed by human violence. However, they
have found nothing, not a scrap, which points to an Achaean
coalition, or to a ‘king whose overlordship was recognized’ or
to Trojan allies; nothing which hints at who destroyed Troy . . .
It needs to be reasserted . . . that statements of the order of
Professor Blegen’s ‘the tradition of the expedition against Troy
must have a basis of historical fact’ are acts of faith not binding
on the historian.
Finley’s unequivocal verdict is that ‘Homer’s Trojan War . . . must

be evicted from the History of the Greek Bronze Age’ (see Raaflaub
1997 and 1998 for discussion).
Finley had persuaded many scholars to abandon the association
between Homer and the Bronze Age, although his own suggestion
of a link to the ninth or tenth century bce was not equally well
received. Archaeologists and historians studying Homer have
since become increasingly aware of the disparities between the
depictions in the poems and Bronze Age Greece, and have begun
to explore links – independent of any one event which we could
call the Trojan War – between Homeric poetry and Greek Iron
Age and periods closer to the eighth century bce in particular (see
further below).

30 HOMER
While changing many of the terms of the debate, arguments by

Finley and his followers certainly did not end it. In the late 1980s and
in the 1990s, Manfred Korfmann from the University of Tübingen
led excavations at Hisarlik. On the site, in the lower city, beneath
and around the old citadel of Troy VII, he discovered a defensive
ditch, the remains of what might once have been a wide gate, and
traces of other fortifications, all dating to the second millennium
bce. This newly discovered lower city was about ten times the size
of the original citadel. It covered an area of about 200,000 square
meters, and, by Korfmann’s estimate, could support a population of
between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants (Korfmann 1997). Here, in
other words, was evidence for a city substantially bigger and more
prominent than any discovered before on the site. Relying on known,
but not uncontroversial arguments, Korfmann identified the name of
the place, Ilios, with the name Wilusa, a city mentioned in documents
of the Hittites, a late Bronze Age eastern people who occupied north-
central Anatolia. These documents also mention a place named
Ahhiyawa, sometimes assumed to refer to Achaea, the land of the
Achaeans, Homer’s collective term for the Greeks. Korfmann pointed
to the evidence of a hieroglyphic seal in Luwian, a Bronze Age
Anatolian language related to Hittite, and to ceremonial stelai, or
columns, found in Troy as proof of Hittite links. Similar stelai were
discovered in the Hittite capital of Hattusa. His conclusion was that
Ilium/Troy was a large Anatolian trading centre surrounded by allies
and part of a Luwian-language territory. Korfmann located these
finding at the level of Troy VII or VIIa, destroyed in about 1180 bce.
So impressive was this large site, Korfmann argued, that the fame of
its destruction could have reached the poet Homer, who, composing
many centuries later in the eighth century bce, immortalized the
event. The eighth century is a date which, by general accord, is too
late for the historical fall of Troy. Korfmann’s argument is thus a
remarkable attempt to reconnect the Bronze Age remains of Troy and
the events of a Trojan War to Homer’s Iron Age poetry while keeping
them chronologically apart.
Korfmann’s trail was picked up in 2004 by another scholar,
Joachim Latacz, who, in a book titled Troy and Homer: Towards
the Solution of an Old Mystery, re-evaluated much of the literary
evidence and argued that indeed, in the eighth century bce, Homer
recorded the destruction of a Bronze Age Troy, 450 years after the
event. The attractions of fi nally solving ‘old mysteries’ are obvious.

But the risks of erecting a new house from stones that are no longer
there (if we think of Strabo’s description) are considerable too. The
argument rests on the suggestion that Troy VIIa was a large and
thus memorable city. Yet even the expanded ‘Anatolian’ Troy was
not large in comparison to the major cities of its day. How big, then,
does a city need to be to be immortalized as the most important
literary city of antiquity? Would the poetry have ‘expanded’
it beyond its material size, and if so, what else could have been
created by the poet? As Kurt Raaflaub and others note, although
the remains identified by Korfmann attest to the destruction of
a city, ‘neither the archaeological evidence nor the contemporary
documents tell us who destroyed Troy and why’ (Raaflaub 1997,
see also Grethlein 2010).
Korfmann and Latacz believe that historical events that
occurred in the Bronze Age have been preserved in discourse
which belongs in the eighth century bce. This brings us to the all
important question of transmission. We would have to assume that
the account of Troy’s destruction remained essentially unchanged
for almost half a millennium – a difficult, though perhaps not
impossible assumption. More significantly, since writing is almost
unattested in the so-called dark ages intervening between the end of
the Bronze Age and the Archaic Age in Greece, the widely accepted
idea is that transmission of the account relied, fundamentally, on
oral traditions of song. Latacz’ argument claims that rigid formulaic
patterns of oral discourse allowed for the precise preservation and
repetition of contents and thus for the carrying over of Bronze
Age narratives into the eighth century. But, in fact, increasingly
since Parry’s and Lord’s initial researches, studies have shown the
opposite. Oral traditions do contain archaic and archaizing phrases
and many repeated expressions, and they are based around the idea
of permanence and the preservation of ‘imperishable fame’. Yet,
in practice, the structure of Homer’s hexameter and its formulaic
diction provide the technical apparatus for affecting what oral-
poetry scholar Paul Zumthor (1990) calls mouvánce, an essential
capacity to recompose and transform words and ideas (see later in
Chapter 4). Just as over centuries and millennia the later reception
of Homer’s poetry changes and reinvents its heritage with every
new historical phase, so, even technically, within the language of
the poems and the process of their early transmission, change is an
essential part of the process.

32 HOMER
The representation of culture and society

‘Homer is not much use as a guide to the history of events [such
as the Trojan War]’, said one commentator recently. The same
scholar nevertheless rightly points out that this in no way isolates
Homer in a timeless bubble. ‘He presents important evidence for
social history . . . social structures of the time when the epics were
composed are inscribed in the text, albeit in poetic transformation’
(Grethlein 2010: 129).
The move away from reading Homer as a direct account of
what happened in history to reading the Iliad and Odyssey as
reflections of the values and practices of historical societies is
partly driven by the specific difficulties of interpretations that focus
on the Bronze Age. The move is also influenced by more general
changes to critical perspectives in cultural, political, social and
economic history, sociology and social anthropology, by reception
theory and reader response criticism, by New Historicism (an
approach to history that stresses the relationship between verbal
representation and the social and historical contexts of ideas) and
by materialist historical theory and hermeneutics. I mention this
background here not in order to introduce theoretical dimensions
into the discussion (theory is important, but belongs elsewhere),
but rather to indicate that, just as poets like Virgil or Walcott,
or fi lm-makers like the Coen brothers or Wolfgang Petersen,
have created their images of Homer within the context of their
times, so do historians and archaeologists interpret Homer and
his relation to history and material remains within the context of
their historical times, critical frameworks and sensibilities. Homer
is not a pickled relic from the past, but the focus of a dynamic
tradition of creative responses and critical analyses that reflect
their contemporary conditions and contexts.
What aspects of social and political structure can we see in
Homer, then? We see, for example, reflections of a commonwealth,
of urbanization, hints of colonization and the components of
incipient city states, or poleis. In the Iliad, we fi nd the city of Troy
and on the Greek side, an association of kings and contingents
under Agamemnon’s strategic command from which individuals
(like Achilles) can nevertheless withdraw at will. In some ways,
this latter association, the Greeks assembled by their ships, is an

abnormal commonwealth, but it can also be seen as a reverse-

image of society. Part of the significance of the Greek camp in the
Iliad is that it lacks many of the ‘normal’ trappings of the city,
the polis, for example, permanent living structures and permanent
social and economic institutions. The Greek camp also lacks many
of the trappings of the household, the oikos, of course, notably
children and family life.
In the Iliad, there are two more important cities, briefly
portrayed in relief on the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles
when the latter decides to return to battle (Iliad 18.483–608). One
city is at peace – we observe a marriage ceremony, the workings
of a lawsuit which concerns the payment of compensation for
homicide (scholars have debated the laws and practices represented
in this scene at length) and surrounding farming scenes. The other
is a walled city at war. The confl ict, like the Trojan War itself, is
between two organized armies (cf. 18.509). On the face of it, these
cities are doubly fictional, poetic imitations within the imitation of
the poem, and thus twice removed from the real world. This would
suggest that Homer’s portrayal of the cities on the shield is less
reliable as a representation of historical practice. Yet if we allow
that Homer’s poetry is, to begin with, not a direct representation of
any single historical event, but words that describe and reconfigure
perceptions, ideas and reactions to historical surroundings, we
have something closer to evidence in these depictions: They show
us how Homer describes a city and its social context. Unlike the
Greek Camp by the shores of Troy, the cities depicted on the shield
of Achilles are permanent habitations. Some scholars associate this
portrayal with the emerging poleis of Archaic Greece.
In the Odyssey, we fi nd two main cities: the one in Ithaca (Books
1–2, 13–24), the other in Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians
(Books 6–12). Homer offers us further images of organized
commonwealth structures when he describes Pylos, home to Nestor,
and Sparta, home to Menelaus and Helen (Odyssey, Books 3–4),
in descriptions in similes (e.g. Iliad 18.207–214) and also, in highly
compressed form, at the very beginning of the Odyssey, where we
are told that Odysseus had ‘seen many cities’ (Odyssey 1.3). This
verse offers no details, but marks, at a crucial moment of ‘global
perspective’, a world full of organized communities. In a violent
but important antithesis to social life in the Odyssey, we also fi nd
a portrayal of the monadic existence of the Cyclopes (9.105–15),

34 HOMER
who have ‘neither advisory councils nor established laws’ and live
in mountaintop wildernesses and hollow caves, ‘each one . . . a
judge of his wives and his children’ (9.114–15). The abnormal,
asocial nature of these solitary beings is epitomized by the Cyclops
Polyphemus’ cannibalism and his total disregard for even the basic
laws of hospitality when he meets Odysseus and his companions.
Not all Homeric commonwealths are the same. The Phaeacians’
Never-Never-Land, for example, has been associated with Near-
Eastern cities. Odysseus’ palace is an aristocratic estate of sorts.
But most communities in Homer are nevertheless characterized by,
for example, public gatherings, assemblies (agorai) and councils
(boulai), institutionalized political spaces for the people (demos –
the word also describes a demarcated territory), who can be
summoned by officials (kêrukes, or ‘heralds’) to public events and
to meetings. There are fortification walls and temples (in Scheria,
around Troy, around the city depicted on Achilles’ shield) shared
by the city’s inhabitants. There are streets (implying organized
dwelling in close proximity rather than, e.g. isolated farmsteads)
and great halls (megara) for gatherings and for holding banquets
where male and female servants provide centrally prepared food
for guests and where singers provide public entertainment. Public
action often involves office holders (basileis, ‘kings’; protoi, archoi,
hêgêtores, ‘leaders’) and at least some formalized procedures, for
example, for speaking and deliberation in public. There are, in
both poems, frameworks for exchange, for example, sea-trade (see
the Lemnians in Iliad 7.467–75), and more prominently for the
exchange of gifts. The latter is commonly seen as representing
an elite code among aristocracies possessing power and wealth.
There are procedures for regulating labour, both indentured (see
Achilles’ speech in the underworld, Odyssey 11.489–91) and
that of craftsmen. There are conventions for the distribution,
redistribution and management of wealth (most prominently, of the
hero’s prize, or geras, in the Iliad) and land ownership, which, it has
been argued, echo real-life polis scenarios and perhaps even reflect
institutionalized features of citizenship. There are social divisions
between persons of higher status (esthloi – the ‘noble’/‘good’) and
lower status (kakoi, ‘bad’), formalized relations between men
and women, servants and slaves and elaborate networks of guest-
friend relationships (xenoi) between individuals and households.
In the Greek camp in the Iliad, the overlord is not a sovereign
monarch, but a leader whose position is more heavily dependent

on other leaders or members of an aristocracy and on consensus.

The leaders command their own men and have their allocated
share in the takings. We must stress, of course, that Homer is not
a documentary amanuensis or a social scientist. His reflections on
and of social life have passed through a poetic prism. Yet Homer’s
portrayal can be usefully considered alongside eighth century bce
social–political developments.
Warfare is another important area of historically resonant
descriptions in Homer. There is much variety and a great deal of
dispute in interpreting the historicity of fighting scenes. These,
especially in the Iliad, not only involve single combat and duels, but
also raids and mass fighting in general melees, as well as chariot
warfare. Some descriptions have been compared to organized
Iron Age and Archaic Age fighting. Homeric heroes are often
described, for example, as bearing two spears (e.g. Iliad 10.76),
which is a late element not attested in Bronze Age cultures. There
are social distinctions between high status warriors, lower status
masses and the common soldier (for the latter, see, e.g. Thersites
in Book 2 and Dolon in Book 10 of the Iliad). The Trojan War,
regardless of whether it happened or not, is a confl ict which
begins with a personal dispute, and with a myth that concerns
individuals – Helen, Menelaus and Paris. But in Homer, this myth
has seamlessly transformed into a war between two organized
commonwealths, in which aspects of the polis may be recognizable.
Some descriptions of warfare in Homer are echoed in other early
Greek poetry of the Archaic Age, but such poetry may itself be
imitating or reflecting epic discourse. Heroes do not, of course,
fight in phalanx formations, that is formations of heavily armoured
hoplite warriors that characterize later warfare in Greece. But some
scholars have suggested that the depictions in Homer represent
proto-hoplite warfare. Weapons in Homer are made primarily
of bronze, but iron is also used in the poems, especially in tools.
Some important items of armament, such as shields made of oxhide
layers (sometimes interlaced with bronze, cf. Iliad 7.219–23), or a
boar’s tusk helmet (cf. Odyssey 10.261–5), are closer to Bronze Age
artefacts, but scholars have argued that the descriptions in Homer
contain significant poetic licence or may be introduced, sometimes
as deliberate archaisms. The archaizing practice, with specific
relation to Homer is attested in real-life evidence from the Iron Age
in Greece. An Iron Age hero-burial at Lefkandi, for example (dated
1000–950 bce), contained much older pieces of jewellery.

36 HOMER
When we look at the historical evidence and its interpretations,

then, we find a complicated picture. It seems difficult to locate the
Iliad and the Odyssey in the Bronze Age. It seems more plausible
to view aspects of the Iliad and Odyssey as reflections of society
and social practice in times closer to the Archaic Age, and perhaps
to the late eighth century bce. Yet it also seems that the poems
are not simply amalgams of different features and characterizations
nor interpenetrating ‘bundles’ of historical reflections, retrojections
of more recent surroundings into a distant past and thus also
projections of past surroundings into a more recent setting of
relevance. There is, as we have noted, an overwhelming sense of
that past in the Iliad and Odyssey. The immediate present of the
Homeric narrator is only minimally and generally attested in the
poems, as Wolfgang Kullmann and others have noted. When this
present is mentioned, the temporal reference is brief and non-
specific. In several verses, for example, a hero in combat picks
up and easily hurls a great boulder which not even two men ‘of
today’ can lift (Iliad 5.305; 12.383, 449; 20.287). Such references
are powerful indexical markers that separate the present from the
past and mark their contrast. Indeed, there is an almost ‘numerical’
ratio between the past and the present expressed when a hero hurls
a large rock. The contrast defines the idea of a past as a time of
greater beings and in this sense as a model for action for the present.
A different type of non-specific but crucial present is attested in
the ‘Pan-Hellenic’ characterization of the poems and the absence
of reference to specific local cults, as Anthony Snodgrass, Gregory
Nagy and others have argued (Snodgrass 1971, Nagy 1979). This
Pan-Hellenic image fits emergent strands of social practice in the
eighth century, yet is not tied down to any particular polis. It thus
allows the poems to resonate widely throughout the worlds of early
Greece. ‘Epic’, as archaeologist and historian Ian Morris says, ‘was
not some kind of bad history. It was a poetic creation that some
eighth-century Greeks thought the heroic world ought to have been
like’ (Morris and Powell 1997: 558).
Homer’s historical voices

Reading Homer’s poetry in relation to his historical pasts is
always a difficult process, fi rst, on account of the scarcity of early

evidence and the difficulty in interpreting such distant material

and, second, on account of the verbal and poetic prisms through
which every description in Homer must pass. But illustrations of
the archaizing mechanism of projection and the relation between
history and poetry which is essential to our view of Homer can also
be observed in other texts whose dating is more easily confi rmed,
and in the relation between the presents of such texts and their
Homeric pasts.
Among the earliest Greek inscriptions we possess is a short but
famous text that appears on the so-called Nestor’s Cup. The cup
itself is a humble two-handled clay drinking vessel from the island
of Pithecusae near the bay of Naples, dated to the late eighth century
bce. The text, written mostly in Homer’s metre, the hexameter,
reads as follows:
I am the cup of Nestor, good for drinking.

Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully
crowned Aphrodite [i.e., for sex] will seize him instantly.
Although there are disputes about the precise meaning and

function of this cup and its text, they are often thought to refer,
perhaps humorously, to the great golden ‘cup of Nestor’ described
in the Iliad (11.632–7). The real-life historical object is a small
clay cup. The poetic version in Homer is a monumental drinking
vessel which, when full, another man could barely lift, but which
the old hero Nestor could lift with ease, somewhat like those great
boulders hurled with ease by other heroes in the Iliad. (There is
also a real-life golden cup, found by Heinrich Schliemann, which
he fancifully named, ‘The Cup of Nestor’; but its dating circa
1600 bce makes it much too early for any historical match with
Homer.) The distance that separates the poetic cup and the real-
life object is clear. But likewise is the link between them. Whoever
raised the clay cup to his lips and read its text was almost certainly
channelling his perceptions of reality through the mirror of Homer,
as if he the drinker – the ordinary man ‘of today’ as Homer would
say – and Nestor, the oldest of the mighty heroes of the past, were
sitting side by side at the moment of the toast, as if the present and
the past were united in the act of raising the cup. Here, then, the
historical reality of the present is lived through the imagination
of the past.

38 HOMER
Less well known, but also useful for our purposes is another early
Greek inscription, a funerary text from the island of Kamyros:
I, Idameneus, made this tomb [sêma], so that I might have fame

[kleos]
Whoever harms <it>, may Zeus make him totally accursed.
The inscription has been dated on the basis of language, the stone
on which it was carved, its context and the lettering to the sixth
century bce, in other words, well after the assumed formative
period of Homeric poetry let alone any possible events surrounding
Troy and the Trojan War. As with the ‘Cup of Nestor’, this text
appears on a real-life object – a simple stone marker which has no
ornate carvings or other decorations. The expression ‘this tomb’
in the fi rst line points to the stone on which this text is inscribed.
The protective spell (an ‘apotropaic’ formula) in the second verse,
‘Whoever harms <it>’, resembles expressions found in other early
funerary inscriptions and is also very similar to the words used in
the second line of the clay ‘Nestor’s cup’, which were themselves
likely to have been used as a kind of spell. And yet the tenor of the
verse is unmistakably Homeric. The fi rst line is written in hexameter
(technically flawed, but hexameter nonetheless). Idameneus is a
variation of Idomeneus, a good Homeric name (Iliad 1.145; 5.43;
Odyssey 19.190, etc.). The idea of a ‘tomb’ or sign (sêma), in the
inscription is, as we have noted, common in the Iliad and Odyssey,
as is the idea of the preservation of ‘fame’ or kleos. What does
Idameneus’ funerary epigram tell us? It is a real-life historical
document that superimposes an idealized image of the past onto
its contemporary settings. Our sixth-century dead man clearly
wished the memory of his real-life existence to be preserved using
the terms of Homer’s heroic poetry of the past – be it the eighth
or even seventh century bce or the more distant Bronze Age. If
we keep Idameneus’ practice of historical projection in mind, it
becomes easier to understand how Homeric poetry itself, although
a vastly more complex undertaking, might superimpose images of
its own pasts on its presents and on its contemporary composition
settings.
It seems, then, that we should not read Homer as a
straightforward record of history. A Bronze Age Trojan War, if
it ever occurred, is not quite the one described by Homer, just

as the Bronze Age Mycenaean official referred to in the Linear B

tablets as wa-na-ka is not Homer’s anax or ‘ruler’ of men. Yet,
paradoxically, despite Moses Finley’s call to ‘evict the Bronze Age’
from Homer, the Bronze Age continues to live in the poems.
The fi rst letter of wa-na-ka, representing the sound ‘w’ is written
ϝ in the original Linear B tablets. This letter is called a ‘digamma’.
It is often found in other early inscriptions, where it marks the
same ‘w’ sound, also found in Wilusa, the Hittite name for Ilios or
[W ]ilios. However, this ‘w’ sound was probably not pronounced in
performances of Homeric poetry later on in time, and the digamma
is not found in any of our written texts of the Iliad and Odyssey
or in any of the sources mentioning or citing Homer. Nor is the
digamma attested in the scripts of the later classical Greek dialects.
Yet critics have proved that traces of this ‘letter from the past’ are
unquestionably present in Homer as ghostly apparitions. In the
eighteenth century, the Cambridge philologist Richard Bentley
showed that several metrical and linguistic phenomena in Homer
(these are too technical to be discussed here. On the metre see,
however, Chapter 4) cannot be explained unless we assume the
hidden presence of the digamma in Homeric Greek. Without the
effects of the digamma, it is almost impossible to understand how
some important features of Homer’s hexameter language work.
When we do assume the effect of a digamma, things seem to fall
into place. Thus, for example, it can be shown that the Homeric
word anax preserves within it the presence of (w)anax; the word
oikos ‘house’ preserves an earlier (w)oikos and indeed the word
epos, which means ‘word’, ‘something said’, ‘speech’ and later
‘epic’ itself, preserves (like Strabo’s stones which are no longer on
site) the invisible and silent trace of (w)epos. Following the lesson
of the digamma, we realize that Homer’s historical past is lost, yet
the echoes of its voice remain.

CHAPTER THREE
The poet and the

making of the poem
The biographical figure in

antiquity and in the poems
The relationship between history and the Homeric poems is
closely linked to questions about who composed them, when
and how. Authorial biographies, the attribution of works to
an author, their dating and contextualization are important
and often problematic topics. Yet the status of many ancient
authors and texts is in principle straightforward. The figures
of Aeschylus or Virgil, to take two examples of canonical poets
in Greco-Roman antiquity, are both deeply embedded in their
historical contexts. Although there are specific difficulties
concerning the authenticity of some of Aeschylus’ extant
plays (e.g. the Prometheus Bound), dates and production, the
tragedian’s historical persona, his authorship of most of the
plays, his dating, 525/524 bce to c. 455/456 bce , and indeed
his historical existence in classical Athens are not in doubt.
Likewise, there are important disputes surrounding Virgil’s
biography and work, but the basic data are widely accepted.
He was born on October 15, 70 bce and died on September
21, 19 bce. He wrote the Bucolics, the Georgics and the
Aeneid. We possess detailed knowledge about his historical
surroundings in Augustan Rome. The question of his historical
identity and the composition of his verse is, relatively speaking,
straightforward. There is no general ‘Virgilian problem’.

THE POET AND THE MAKING OF THE POEM 41
Homer is different. Questions about his historical identity

and the formation of the poems have generated wide debates and
polarized arguments. Information outside of the poems is scarce.
Inside the poems, the difficulties of identifying the Homeric
narrator and defi ning his relation to ‘Homer’ and the poems
emerge already in the fi rst lines and the proems of the Iliad and
Odyssey, when, in each poem, an unnamed narrator calls upon
the Muse for inspiration. Who are these unnamed speakers?
‘Homer’, of course. And who is Homer? The unnamed narrator
at the beginning of each poem! The absence of external evidence
creates many opportunities for interpretation, which we will
explore in detail in Chapter 5.
In addition to the narrators of the poems, many singers (aoidoi)
are depicted inside the world of the heroes in the Iliad and especially
the Odyssey. Foremost among the Odyssey’s singers are Phemius,
the singer at the Ithacan court, and Demodocus, the singer in the
Phaeacians’ fabled land. Both are professionals who earn their
keep by their song. Demodocus is blind (like Homer, traditionally).
Phemius is ‘self taught’ (autodidaktos), although he tells us that
a god has planted the lays in his thoughts (Odyssey 22.347–8).
Odysseus praises Demodocus for having learned his craft from
‘the Muses or Apollo’ (Odyssey 8.488). Phemius and Demodocus
usually sing to an assembled audience after a feast in the hall. They
accompany themselves by a lyre, and get rewards, often food,
for their singing. There are several other singers in the poems,
including a bard left to guard Clytemnestra when Agamemnon
sets off for Troy (Odyssey 3.267; Aegisthus exiles him to a desert
island), a singer at the wedding celebrations in Menelaus’ court
(Odyssey 4.17), singers accompanying a choral dance on the
shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.604) and the singer Thamyris (Iliad
595–600) who vies with the Muses and in punishment is made
to forget his ‘wondrous song’ (aoidên thespesiên) and the ‘art of
his lyre’ (kitharistyn). The Muses and Apollo too know song, and
the Sirens’ song in the Odyssey (12.39–54) is so enchanting that it
draws passing sailors to their death. There are professional singers
of dirges at Hector’s funeral (Iliad 24.720–72), and wives, mothers
and friends, including Helen herself, also mourn those dear to
them – although there are distinct differences between personal
mourning (goös – pronounced go-os) and professional dirge-
singing (threnos). Achilles, having withdrawn from battle, sits in

42 HOMER
his hut, entertaining himself by singing klea andrôn, ‘the fame of

men’ (Iliad 9.89). Odysseus’ long narrative of his past adventures is
compared by the Phaeacian king Alcinoos to poet’s words (Odyssey
9.189). Yet, as Andrew Ford (1992) rightly notes,
. . . the picture [of singers and singing] in Homer cannot be

supposed to reflect directly the practices and circumstances of
early epic poets. His representations of singers are infused with
a mixture of traditional and fictional elements that is not easily
removed. Drawing on internal evidence . . . we have to choose
between clearly depicted poetic constructs inside the narrative
and ambiguous depictions at its edges.
The ancients, we should note, did not see it in quite this way. They
viewed both options, the clear and the ambiguous, as historical.
Just as they upheld the historicity of Troy and the Trojan War,
so did they believe in the existence of Homer the individual,
inside and outside of the poems. Both Aristotle (fourth century
bce) in the Poetics and the treatise On the Sublime (whose date is
uncertain, but much later, perhaps the fi rst century ad) attributed
to Longinus, we fi nd unhesitating reference to ‘Homer’ as the poet
of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Aristotle and Longinus offer
many insights into the poems, but neither is deeply concerned
with historical problems surrounding Homer’s authorship. On
the Sublime does distinguish between the Iliad as a product of
Homer’s ‘maturity’ and the Odyssey as the product of his ‘old age’.
However, this is merely a way of expressing literary judgements
in terms of a personal biography. There is no external support for
Longinus’ assertion.
The practice of extrapolating biographical data from the poems
is frequently attested in antiquity. The so-called Herodotean Life
of Homer (dated to the fi rst or second century ce and certainly
not composed by Herodotus) names the poet’s adoptive father as
Phemius. No external evidence exists to support this suggestion,
but Phemius is, of course, the name of the singer in Odysseus’
house in Ithaca. The Life is creating an historical image which is
free of historical anchors.
The Herodotean Life provides a relatively consistent view of
Homer and his history. Other ancient biographies (whose dating
is uncertain) provide a more typical image comprised of several

alternatives, for example, with regard to Homer’s place of birth.

Similar variety, we noted, is attested among the ancient busts of
Homer that portray the face of a real person with distinct features,
yet each portraying a different face. Such paradoxical ‘multiple
unity’ is, in fact, less exotic than it seems, and is often matched
in depictions of Christ and other religious or revered figures in
Western iconography and art and in many other traditions too.
Herodotus dated Homer’s life to about 400 years before his
own time (Histories 2.53), but left the figure of the poet otherwise
unspecified. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo (172, cited by
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 3.104) speaks of a ‘blind man
from Chios’ without providing any further historical information.
No name is actually given, but it is universally accepted that the
reference in the hymn is to Homer. A Greek epic poem from the
second century ce entitled The Contest of Homer and Hesiod
describes a dispute over poetic supremacy between these two early
poets and portrays certain features of Homer’s life. The poem,
which probably goes back to a fourth century bce work by the
critic and philosopher Alcidamas, contains the usual ambiguous
biographical detail, for example, concerning Homer’s provenance.
Several anonymous but famous epigrams from the ancient collection
of poems known as The Greek Anthology make the problem of
provenance particularly clear. One of the epigrams comprises a list
of the cities vying for the privilege of being known as Homer’s
place of birth. The poem, however, makes no effort to adjudicate
these competing claims. A man can only be born in one place, but
Homer is no ordinary man and the poem betrays no anxiety over
the open-ended character of the problem (16.297):
Seven cities vied to be the place of Homer’s birth,

Cyme, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, Athens.
A second epigram (16.295) turns the absence of a single answer

into a positive argument:
It was not the field of Smyrna that gave birth to divine Homer,
not Colophon, the star of luxurious Ionia,
not Chios, not rich Egypt, not holy Cyprus,
not the rocky island homeland of the Son of Laertes
[Odysseus],

44 HOMER
not the Argos of Danaus or Cyclopian Mycene,

nor the city of the ancient sons of Cecrops [the Athenians].
For he was not born the work of the earth: the Muses sent him
from the heavens,
so that he might bring desired gifts to men who live only a day.
Despite such ‘immortal’ provenance, antiquity generally upheld

the idea of a single Homer. Only a few scholars, known as the
chorizontes, ‘the separators’, advocated separate authorship for
each of the poems. We know the names of some of these ancient
scholars, such as Xenon and Hellanicus, but in fact, only arguments
opposing their views remain. The possibility that some, or all, of
Homer’s poetry was composed not by an individual, but through
the process of a long tradition of singers is not explicitly mentioned
in antiquity, although we do perhaps fi nd reflections of this idea in
the ancient biographies’ multiplicity of detail. There is an ancient
tradition, best attested later in the work of the Roman author and
politician Cicero’s On the Orator (written 55 bce), of a recension
of the text of the Iliad and Odyssey at Athens in the sixth century
bce by the tyrant Pisistratus or by his son Hipparchus. According
to Cicero, Pisistratus ‘is said to have been the fi rst to arrange the
books of Homer, which were previously in a state of confusion,
into the order in which we have them today’ (3.137). Implicitly,
the recension points to a wider process of compilation. Another
ancient tradition, found in ancient comments on the poet Pindar
(sixth/fi fth centuries bce. The comments are on Pindar’s Nemeans
2.1) and in later sources, for example, in Plato’s famous depiction
of the Homeric rhapsode Ion (Ion 530d), suggest the existence of a
body of singers called the Homeridae, or ‘descendents of Homer’,
on the island of Chios, one of Homer’s alleged birthplaces. The
Homeridae were supposed to have picked up the tradition of
Homeric song and were performers and interpreters of his poetry.
There is disagreement about the historicity of the Pisistratean
recension and the characteristics of the Homeridae. These traditions
fi rmly uphold the authority of an original poet ‘Homer’, but they
also suggest the possibility of wider creative processes. Also worth
mentioning but more abstract are ancient ‘allegorical’ approaches
to Homer in antiquity. Such approaches are already associated
with Theagenes of Rhegium, a critic who lived in the sixth century
bce, but they are more prominent later, in Middle-Platonist and

Neoplatonist philosophical traditions (especially from the third

century ce and on). Allegorical readings remain, for the most part,
committed to the idea of single authorship, but they allow for a
certain plurality of interpretation.
The argument in favour of a tradition that comprised not one
but many singers and spanned several generations was not found
in antiquity, although it did take centre stage in the modern study
of Homer (see further below). Likewise, the modern association
of Homeric tradition with oral composition is not attested by
ancient discussions, except in a few occasional comments, most
prominently in the work of the Jewish author Josephus (fi rst
century ad. See Against Apion 1.2.12). Josephus’ view, however,
seems to have been guided by motives that did not concern Homer
directly. He wanted to prove the superiority of the written Jewish
Bible and its laws over the early unwritten and thus ‘oral’ codes
of the Greeks. There are one or two other ancient sources that
may hint at Homer’s oral provenance (e.g. a brief statement by
the second/third-century author Julius Africanus in an anecdotal
work called The Magic Girdles), but no discussion of any
implication this may have for our understanding of the historical
figure of Homer.
Particularly important views of Homer in antiquity were
developed in the Hellenistic era (third to fi rst century bce), with the
emergence of highly institutionalized scholarship. The centres of
learned activity were the great Library and Museum (not a modern
museum, but a ‘house of the Muses’ – a place for knowledge and
learning) in Alexandria in the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt and
in the Library in Pergamum, the capital of the Attalid kingdom
in Asia Minor. Some of the prominent intellectual figures of the
period, most of them Librarians in Alexandria or Pergamum, were
also among the greatest Homer scholars: Zenodotus of Ephesus
(born c. 325 bce), Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–180 bce),
Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 216–144 bce) and Crates of Mallus
(a contemporary of Aristarchus). Many of their comments are
preserved in the scholia, the ancient commentaries in the margins
of manuscripts. Nevertheless, the focus of Alexandrian and
Pergamene scholarship was not the person Homer, but the text.
The text was a material object which the Hellenistic successors
of Alexander the Great could physically import from Greece to
their own libraries in Egypt and Syria. It could thus embody the

46 HOMER
Hellenistic kings’ claims as heirs to the tradition and authority

of their Greek pasts and was an important part of their symbolic
‘cultural capital’. Hellenistic scholars introduced new ways of
studying the text, and in this sense of claiming a stake in Homer
and appropriating him for themselves. It is generally accepted
that our current division of the Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books
each (from Alpha to Omega, the letters of the Greek alphabet)
originates in this period. The division allowed for analysis and easy
reference to the otherwise large and unwieldy poems. Hellenistic
scholars also separated the poems into individual lays, which could
be discussed in detail and compared. They considered alternative
versions (‘variants’) of particular verses and passages in the text,
thus de facto acknowledging multiplicity while always striving to
determine which, in their view, was the single best reading.
What we fi nd, then, in antiquity in different forms, are images
of Homer and the Homeric poems that, although never openly
challenging a personalized figure of the poet Homer and the idea of
single-authored texts, hint at a wider and more complex conception
of the process of composition and the nature of the poems. This
conception was developed and expanded in modern discussions to
create a new view of Homer, his poetry and the process by which
archaic heroic epic came to be.
Homer and the moderns: The first steps

For a long time in the history of Western literature, it was Latin
and Virgil, the epic poet at the centre of the Roman literary canon,
that were the focus of poetic traditions and the backward gaze
towards antiquity. But from the early Renaissance, with the gradual
reacquisition of the knowledge of ancient Greek in Europe, Homer’s
place as a central text in the West’s literary canon was greatly
strengthened. Modernity’s evolving narratives of self-definition in
relation to antiquity (the idea of ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’) and later
the development of professional scholarship produced important
revisions of the image of Homer and reformulated the arguments
about his historical existence. In the seventeenth century, the Abbé
d’Aubignac in France, and after him in the eighteenth century, Richard
Bentley in England, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others in France and
elsewhere had been forming their views of the poems, either as the

work of an early bard who possessed raw, powerful poetic ability, or

as a collection of rhapsodies. In Italy, Giambattista Vico in his New
Science (1744) read many of Homer’s fantastic details with reference
to some historical reality. The Odyssey’s Lotus Eaters were a people
‘who ate the bark of a plant called lotus’ and they were situated
geographically only ‘nine days journey’ from Maleia, as the Odyssey
says. The Odyssey’s Cimmerians, Vico thought, must have been
situated ‘in the most northerly part’ of Greece, since they had the
longest nights (sections 756–7). Yet Vico also noted the incongruent
diversity of detail in relation to Homer. The contest among the Greek
cities for claiming Homer to themselves came about, he says ‘because
almost all of them observed in his poems words and phrases and
dialectical locutions that belonged to their own vernacular’. Vico
assumes – this is simply a more extreme version of what is already
implied in the Hellenistic efforts to correct the text – that ‘the two
poems were composed and compiled by various hands through
successive ages’ (sections 790; 804). Vico rejected the historicity
of the Trojan War. Fables created at the time of the heroic age, he
thought, reached Homer in corrupted state. In his view, the materials
originated in ‘vulgar rhapsodes, each preserving a memory of part
of the Homeric poems’ (section 849). Significantly, on the sparse
evidence of Josephus (Against Apion, 1.2.12), Vico thought of Homer
as a sublime poet who knew no writing, who possessed imaginative
and turbulent vigour but lacked the force of philosophical reflection.
Equally important, despite assuming the existence of the bard, Vico
concluded that Homer was, in the wider historical perspective, ‘an
idea or a heroic character of Greek men insofar as they told their
history in song’, in other words, Homer was a reflection of the Greeks
as a whole over an extended period of time in their early history.
The Greeks vied with each other, each city claiming Homer for itself
because, Vico says, ‘the Greek peoples were themselves Homer’
(sections 873–5).
Vico’s argument was an important fi rst step in the formation
of a modern view of Homer and of Homer’s traditionality and
its paradoxes. His line of thought was followed by professional
scholars, especially in Germany, who shifted the discussion onto
more technical ‘scientific’ grounds, retaining and developing
ideas about the cumulative character of monumental epic poems.
These discussions eventually formed the debate over what in the
nineteenth century became known as the ‘Homeric Question’.

48 HOMER
In 1795, Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena to

Homer. This was a path-breaking work. Wolf accepted that the
poems were composed of many parts, but he could see no reliable
way of clearly separating these. He was, as he put it, less concerned
with ‘elegance’, and more with the ‘historical facts’ surrounding
the making of the Iliad and Odyssey (1985: 69–70). His most
important arguments explore the relation between spoken words
and written texts – a relation that defi nes much of the modern
view of Homer. Wolf argued that the long poems as we have them
could not have been composed without the use of writing and its
equipment, but, that, at the time of the early composition of the
poems, writing could not have been available to the poet. Thus
(1985: 16),
If as the only man of his time to have such equipment, he [Homer]

had completed the Iliad and the Odyssey in their uninterrupted
sequence, they would in their want of all other suitable
contrivances have resembled an enormous ship, constructed
somewhere inland in the fi rst beginnings of navigation: its
maker would have had no access to winches and wooden rollers
to push it forward, and thereof no access to the sea itself in
which he could make some trial of his skill.
The poems could not, therefore, have ‘burst forth suddenly from
the darkness in all their brilliance, with both the splendour of
their parts and the many great virtues of the connected whole’
(1985: 148). According to Wolf, what we know as ‘Homer’ is only
a tradition of poetry that begins without the use of writing, and
which was slowly transferred into written form and transformed
by writing in a long editorial process. Only with the Alexandrians
and through the energies of several generations did the great epics
that we know as Homer’s poetry come about.
Analysts and Unitarians

In typical Homeric diversity, Wolf’s work provided the impetus
for two opposing later views. He was, as one scholar put it, the
‘ambivalent patron saint’ of both Analyst and Unitarian critics

(Porter 2010: 939). Both groups attempted to characterize the

structure of Homeric narrative. Each, however, tried to do so in a
different way (see Turner 1997).
The Analysts set out to identify the separate components or
lays woven into the text of Homer, for instance, the aristeiai or
‘narratives of excellence’ describing individual heroes’ martial
exploits. Another example which has generated Analyst arguments
and long debates is the scene describing the Greek embassy to
Achilles in Book 9 of the Iliad. In the Embassy, Nestor proposes
to Agamemnon to send the heroes Phoenix (Iliad 9.168), Ajax and
Odysseus (9.169) on a mission to plead with Achilles, who has
withdrawn from battle, to come back and help the Greek armies. It
makes sense for wise Odysseus and mighty Ajax to undertake this
task. They are well-known heroes. But readers have always felt that
the figure of Phoenix, Achilles’ old tutor, presents some difficulties.
Part of the problem here is also that three heroes set out on their
mission, yet strangely Homer says: ‘So these two walked along the
strand of the far-resounding sea’ (Iliad 9.182). The text continues
to refer to two emissaries (using a special Greek linguistic form
known as a ‘dual’, referring to two persons). Not all translations
preserve this discrepancy, but classical scholars have over puzzled
how three could have turned into two. Some Analyst critics of
Homer argue that in this scene we can observe the open stitches of
composition, whereby the original tradition of a two-man embassy
by Odysseus and Ajax suffered the imperfect addition of Phoenix,
a third member of the team.
Among the best known early Analysts was a German scholar
by the name of Karl Lachmann, who is also often regarded as
the father of the scientific analysis of manuscript traditions and
especially modern textual criticism. Through minute comparative
analysis of textual variants among different sources, Lachmann tried
to trace a genealogy or family tree (a ‘stemma’) of manuscripts and
manuscript traditions and, stepping backwards up this genealogy,
to reconstruct an ‘archetype’ or original manuscript. A similar
method was applied in an attempt to trace different narrative
strands in the poems of Homer. In 1847, Lachmann, comparing the
composition of the Iliad to the composition of the early German
Nibelungenlied saga, identified 18 individual original lays in the
poem, the weaving together of which he attributed to Pisistratus
(Lachmann 1847, in German).

50 HOMER
Many Analysts, among them some great scholars of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Gottfried Hermann, George
Grote, Maurice Croiset, Richard Jebb and especially Ulrich von
Wilamowiz-Moellendorff), relying in part on what they felt the
story of the poems should be like, attempted to identify the core
material and later additions or interpolations. In the Iliad, they
questioned, for example, how a back-handed nightly ambush
scene describing the capture of the Trojan Dolon by Diomedes
and Odysseus in Book 10 could fit into the heroic fighting ethos
of the poem. In the Odyssey, picking up on a brief comment in the
scholia, Analysts sometimes argued that the last book of the poem
was an extraneous addition to the ‘natural’ ending, once Odysseus
and Penelope are united.
Although the Analyst’s approach had forceful supporters in
the past (and more recently, for example, Denys Page and Helmut
Van Thiel), it is less widely practised today. One of the important
causes for this was the rising influence, since the fi rst half of the
twentieth century, of Milman Parry’s arguments about traditional
oral poetry, which reformulated the relationship between the text
as a whole and its parts (see our discussion further below). And yet,
both Analyst and Parryan approaches, each in its different way,
resonated well with idea of multiplicity within the single object
that we call Homer. In antiquity, multiplicity was characterized
by means of biographical narratives and through the competing
claims of different cities to have been the birthplace of Homer.
Among Analysts, this is reflected by means of nineteenth-century
humanist and scientific practice and by marking out separately
composed lays and thematic traditions. In Parryan criticism, this
image of Homer is achieved using statistical, ethnographic and
anthropological approaches that made it possible to divide and
unite elements of the text in new ways.
August Wolf focused his enquiry on historical questions. It
was arguably his views of the process of the making of Homeric
verse and the manner by which the poems were put together over
generations that influenced Analyst arguments. In contrast, it was
Wolf’s views about the poems in their final form that helped develop
Unitarian positions. These latter positions, like Analysis, concern
the question of authorship and of composition by one, two or more
authors or by groups of singers and editors over time, as well as the
literary – aesthetic question of poetic and thematic coherence in

the poems. As the name suggests, Unitarians tend to acknowledge

elements of unity. The poet Goethe, for example, despite his
espousal of ideas of personalized genius that prevailed in German
Romanticism of the period, accepted Wolf’s arguments against the
existence of a Homer as an individual who was accountable for the
poems as a whole. This helped characterize Homer as an ‘early’,
rather than as a ‘modern’ phenomenon. Goethe did, however,
strongly believe in the unity and genius of the Iliad and Odyssey
as poems. Other critics, especially in Germany and England, for
example, G. W. Nitzsch, Andrew Lang, J. A. Scott, E. Drerup,
Wolfgang Schadewaldt and Karl Reinhardt, argued for unity of
both poem and poet and provided overall readings of the poems and
integrative explanations of their parts. Archaeology and material
arguments were also invoked by those who believed in single
Homer (or at least in a single poet for each poem), although, as we
have seen, Homer’s representation of material culture cannot be
located exclusively in any single historical period. In the twentieth
century, beginning with the works of Johannes Kakridis (Kakridis
1949), Wolfgang Schadewaldt (Schadewaldt 1965) and his student
Wolfgang Kullmann (Kulmann 1984), some scholars developed
an approach known as Neoanalysis that stands midway between
Analysis and Unitarianism. Neoanalysis regards the poems as
wholes which were nevertheless created through the adaptation
and incorporation of diverse but specific strands, themes and
poetic traditions.
No fi nal consensus about Homer exists, of course. But as a
historical phenomenon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
scholarship, the Homeric Question has today lost much of its
intensity. The substantive question reaches much further back in
time and the underlying historical, cultural and poetic problems
remain. These problems, in their openness and persistence, are,
one might say, also answers of sorts inasmuch as they characterize
the poetry and the tradition we associate with Homer as a dynamic
concern. What marked the decline of the specific historical Homeric
Question and carried the substantive questions forward to their
next phase was, again, research which began with the work of the
American scholar Milman Parry (1902–35) concerning the unique
nature of Homer’s language. In the absence of clear external
information about Homer and his times, this language is the most
important evidence available to us.

52 HOMER
Milman Parry and oral-formulaic theory

What, then, did Parryan scholarship achieve that others before
it had not? How did he change our understanding of Homeric
language? And how did his new perspective on language change
our wider understanding of Homer? Parry (who died aged 33
years from an accidental, self-infl icted gunshot wound1) is a
singular fi gure in the history of Homer studies and a scholar
whose influence on contemporary views of Homer is decisive,
although we need to stress that (like Homer . . .) he was not
working alone, but within a tradition and along established
lines of critical thought.
Parry placed orality, the idea of composition without the use
of writing, fi rmly at the centre of our understanding of Homer.
Yet the idea of orality was hinted at even in antiquity, and it
certainly played an important role in modern studies by the Abbé
d’Aubignac in 1715, by Vico and Wolf, as well as in the work of
Analysts and Unitarians too sometimes. Parry stressed the idea of
poetic traditions and traditional language. But this too, was not
new. Already the ancient Pisistratean recension and the Homeridae
embodied the idea of a long tradition. Parry drew attention to the
repetitive nature of Homer’s language more prominently than ever
before. But in itself, Homeric repetition was not a new discovery.
Anyone hearing or reading Homer in its original Greek hexameters
will immediately notice its repetitive qualities. The ancients too
were aware of this. When a character speaks, for instance, the most
common introductory line in Homer is ‘Then in response said . . .’
followed by the name of the hero or speaker (ton d’apameibomenos
prosephpê . . .). This line appears (with minor variations) over
100 times in the Iliad and Odyssey.
What, then, was Parry’s achievement? In the early twentieth
century, against the background of rapid development in the
sciences, Homer’s repetitive qualities readily attracted scholarly
attention and invited new explanations. Parry’s focus was on the
process of the composition of the poems. Using formal analysis and
often quantitative methods, he argued for the unique, interconnected
1
I owe this detail to Mary Sale, in a personal communication, reporting on a
conversation with Adam Parry.

structure of Homeric repetition and, especially for its systematic

nature as a tool for traditional oral composition and a consequence
of this process. Parry claimed he could prove, from the language
itself, that Homeric poetry was traditional and oral in character. At
the core of Parry’s argument was the idea of the ‘formula’. This idea
bound together orality, the traditional nature of Homeric poetry
and its repetitive qualities as never before in what is commonly
known as oral-formulaic theory.
The fine-points of the theory and the debates around it are highly
technical and their discussion belongs in specialist work (see, e.g.
Finkelberg 2004). The basics, however, are not hard to describe.
Yet, in order to do so, we must first note what is perhaps the most
immediate quality of Homeric poetry: It is composed in verse and
follows a strict rhythmical pattern. This is the metrical structure
called the hexameter. It comprises a sequence of syllables (e.g. the
syllables ‘Ho’ and ‘mer’ in the word ‘Homer’), some of which have
a longer duration and are thus ‘long’, while others are ‘short’. The
abstract pattern of the hexameter comprises six sections or units (each
called a mêtron or ‘foot’), each made up of a combination of long
and short syllables having the rhythm dum-da-da (i.e. long–short–
short). Each of these units is called a ‘dactyl’. Combined, six-dactyl
units create the sequence dum-da-da-dum-da-da-dum-da-da-dum-
da-da-dum-da-da-dum-dah as follows (where the symbol ‘-’ = long,
the symbol ‘˘’ = short and the symbol ‘x’= either long or short):
-˘˘–˘˘–˘˘–˘˘–˘˘–x
Although some variations are allowed (e.g. a single long syllable

can replace two short ones), each line of epic is metrically the
same as every other. The fi rst line of the Odyssey provides a good
example:
An-dra moi en-ne-pe Mou-sa po-ly-tro-pon, hos ma-la pol-la,

– ˘ ˘ – ˘ ˘ – ˘ ˘ – ˘ ˘ – ˘ ˘ – x
(The man, to me tell, Muse, of many ways, who very much,)
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways who wandered very far,
The top line above is a transliteration of the original Greek. Long

syllables are marked in bold, the others are short. The line below

54 HOMER
it describes the abstract pattern. The third line, in brackets, is a

word-for-word translation that preserves the exact original order
of words. The fourth line is a conventional translation. Parry’s
theory, as we shall see, depends heavily on metrical arguments.
The second thing we must stress before we describe Parry’s
theory is Homer’s repetitive character. Such repetition involves
many ordinary expressions and not just prominent speech
introductions and poetic phrases like the rise of ‘rosy fi ngered
dawn’ or ‘winged words’ (see above). Almost every Homeric line
contains repeated expressions, word groups and other kinds of
patterns. Indeed, repetition is more frequent and far-reaching in
Homer than in almost any other text we know. It is important
to make this point, since the full extent of Homeric repetition is
almost impossible to preserve in translation. Thus, when heroes
are named in the poems, they are usually described by means of
fi xed, recognizable phrases, each of which is repeated, dozens,
in some cases hundreds, of times. Achilles, for instance, is dios
Achilleus, ‘divine/bright Achilles’, or podas ôkus Achilleus,
‘swift-footed Achilles’. Odysseus is dios Odysseus, ‘divine/bright
Odysseus’, or polymêtis Odysseus, ‘many-minded Odysseus’.
Athena is glaukôpis Athênê, ‘grey-eyed/owl-eyed Athena’, or thea
glaukôpis Athênê, ‘the grey-eyed goddess Athena’, and more.
Similarly, many important words like ‘ship’ and ‘spear’ often
appear in preset combinations such as nea thoên, ‘swift ship’ or
dolichoskion enchos, ‘long-shadowed spear’. These combinations
of the name of a person or a thing to which a particular adjective
or ‘epithet’ is added are very common indeed. Verbs like ‘to throw’
or ‘to fall’ are often used with preset added descriptions, as are
expressions describing the casting of spears, eating, running,
sitting, falling, dying, bathing and more.
And now to the argument. What Parry pointed out (see Parry
1971) was that this vast collection of repeated expressions was
almost invariably arranged in larger systematic, recognizable
patterns. For example, the words dios Odysseus, ‘divine/bright
Odysseus’, are not simply repeated at random. They appear in
exactly the same place in the line, at the very end (other, more
technical conditions apply) in each and every one of the 102
repeated instances in the Iliad and Odyssey, albeit preceded by
many different words and expressions, as required by the context.
We find, for example, the line hê Aias hê Idomeneus hê dios

Odysseus // (where ‘//’ indicates the end of the line), ‘Ajax, or

Idomeneus, or bright Odysseus’ (Iliad 1.145); ou gar pô tethnêken
epi chthoni dios Odysseus //, ‘not yet has he died upon the earth,
bright Odysseus’ (Odyssey 1.195); or ton d’ êmeibet epeita polytlas
dios Odysseus //, ‘to him replied much suffering bright Odysseus’
(Odyssey 17.280), and more. Parry called the element of recurrent
words (in our case ‘bright Odysseus’) ‘formulas’. He famously
defined the formula as ‘a group of words regularly employed
under the same metrical conditions to express an essential idea’
(Parry 1971: 11).
Having defi ned the formula, Parry also described some more
general features of groups of formulas, or ‘formula types’ and
‘formula systems’. He noted, for example, that there were sets of
expressions that described different heroes and gods, yet which
could all fit conveniently into the same part of the line (what he
called ‘metrical conditions’). Thus, a poet could, for example,
begin the line by saying ‘to him replied . . .’ (ton d’êmeibet’ epeita
. . .). If the hero making the reply was Odysseus, the poet could
then elegantly end the line with the expression ‘much suffering
Odysseus’ (polytlas dios Odysseus). If Achilles was making the
reply, the poet could use another frequently repeated formula,
‘swift footed Achilles’ ( podarkês dios Achilleus). If Agamemnon
was to speak the expression ‘Agamemnon lord of men’ (anax
andrôn Agamemnon). The poet could similarly use the words ‘the
cow-eyed lady Hera’ (boöpis potnia Hêra), ‘the owl-eyed goddess
Athena’ (thea glaukôpis Athênê) and so on, as required by the
context. These sets of formulas provided ready-made systems for
composing well-formed verses, on the spot, as it were.
Parry further noted that for each ‘essential idea’, such as
‘Odysseus’ or ‘Achilles’, one could find in Homer a range of several
distinct formulas, each slightly different in length or ‘shape’ from the
other. Thus, for example, one could express the idea of ‘Odysseus’
by means of the short expression dios Odysseus (– ˘ ˘ – x), the
slightly longer expression polymêtis Odysseus (˘ ˘ – ˘ ˘ – x), the
yet longer phrase polytlas dios Odysseus (˘ – – – ˘ ˘ – x) and so on.
Parry called this feature ‘extent’. The resulting sets of expressions
meant that one could construct a line of epic poetry more or less in
the way one puts together a row of children’s ‘Lego’ blocks (Parry
did not himself use the Lego-block analogy). Wherever needed, a
singer could slot the same idea into different parts of the verse.

56 HOMER
If the singer wanted to say ‘Odysseus’, he had at his disposal a

range of preset expressions of different sizes to fit the exact ‘space’
required and complete a well-formed verse. The poet could use the
same principle to name other heroes and gods and to express other
‘essential’ ideas.
Parry pointed to one more important feature of systems of
formulas. They were, he suggested, also characterized by ‘thrift’
or ‘economy’. This meant that in principle, within each group of
formulas expressing an essential idea (the idea of ‘Odysseus’ or
of ‘Achilles’), each individual expression would fit one particular
‘space’ (what Parry called ‘metrical conditions’). Crucially, the
number of phrases that could fit into exactly the same space
but which expressed the same idea was kept to a minimum.
The system was ‘economical’: It created the smallest number of
preset expressions that could perform the task of making verse
effectively.
Parry’s argument, then, was that the system as a whole was
extensive, yet economical; it was fl exible, yet easy to use; it
comprised a repository of stock expressions which was available
to poets at a time when writing was still not used as a means of
composition. As Parry and especially his student and colleague
Albert Lord argued, a poet who trained in this special language
of formulas from childhood could simply speak in epic verse
as one would any other language. The system of Homeric
formulas made possible a rapid, smooth, yet extensive process
of composition-in-performance. The formulaic mechanism
explained how traditions of such vast poems as the Iliad and
Odyssey could be formed without the use of writing and without
the need for prodigious feats of verbatim memory (modern studies
have shown that such feats of memory are highly uncommon). At
every performance, a poem will have been recreated from ready
ingredients. And yet, Parry argued, this stock of formulas was
too large and too highly evolved to have been invented all at once
by a single individual over one lifetime. Parry thus concluded
that it was created by many singers over several generations
working within a tradition of song. This was the idea underlying
‘oral-traditional poetry’ and what is sometimes also known as oral-
formulaic theory or the Parry–Lord theory. It has been revised,
modified, adapted, challenged and disputed over many years, but it
still reverberates today, among followers and opponents, in the field

of Homer studies and beyond, wherever questions of orality and

large poetic compositions are raised.
We need to stress one further important point. According to
some versions of oral-formulaic theory (sometimes known as
‘Hard Parrysm’), the purpose of formula systems was strictly to
provide different sized expressions for a single essential idea, so
as to keep the rapid flow of verse in performance. It was therefore
argued by Parry and some other scholars that ‘traditional’
formulas were used primarily for their technical utility (i.e., to
fi ll ‘spaces’ in the line) and not on account of their fi ner shades of
meaning. Thus, for example, the formula podas ôkys Achilleus,
‘swift footed Achilles’, could be a way of expressing no more than
the essential idea ‘Achilles’ and of completing the rhythm at the
end of the verse.
This kind of argument provided a compelling, systematic
description of Homer’s traditional language, but it also stripped
the words of much of their poetic resonance. There is some
indication that Parry himself was aware of this and, had he not
died so young, may have modified some of his earlier views (see
Russo 1997, Kahane 2005). Indeed, there are many other scholars
who believe that Homer’s formulas carry deeply resonant, intricate
meaning, even if utility is an important force in their development.
Achilles, for instance, is ‘swift footed’ because the chase on foot
in which he captures and kills Hector is a fateful element of his
actions in the Iliad. Numerous critics argued for specific meaning
in other formulas, too. At a more basic level, some scholars have
suggested that when considering the development of Homer’s
poetry (‘diachronically’) over time, metrical form, the ‘shape’ of
formulas and the hexameter itself, was the result of traditional
phraseology. Words were not shaped to fit the meter, but the metre
evolved out of the way traditional words were shaped (see in Clark
2004 with reference to the work of Gregory Nagy). Thus, formulas,
even when they acted as metrical building blocks, could retain the
rich detail of traditional meaning.
In the absence of comparative ancient material with which to
test their ideas (and in the spirit of scientific ‘experimentalism’),
Parry and Lord sought evidence in the contemporary world. In the
early 1930s, they conducted extensive fieldwork in what was then
Yugoslavia, paying special attention to living Serbo-Croat traditions
of oral poetry which they recorded, documented and analysed.

58 HOMER
This material is now archived in Harvard University’s South-

Slavic collections and much of it is available online (http://chs119.
chs.harvard.edu/mpc). The South Slavic tradition (sadly limited
as a living tradition today) of guslars, singers who accompanied
themselves with a stringed instrument called the gusle, provided
many analogous illustrations of the process of composition and
performance as well as the thematic structuring and formulaic
arrangement of epic song (see, esp. Lord 1960).
Parry’s studies formed the beginning of an intensive debate.
Scholars, including Brian Hainsworth, Arie Hoekstra, Joseph
Russo, Michael Nagler and others, showed that the Homeric
formula could be modified, made more flexible, reconfigured and
expanded in a variety of ways. Also, important objections to the
neat completeness of formulaic systems were put forward. David
Shive, for example, in a technical but important work (1987),
showed that even the most prominent formulaic systems in Homer,
for example, those naming Achilles, were less than perfectly
economical. Other scholars have sensibly argued for a more
nuanced approach to the semantics of Homeric language, defi ning,
for example, fi xed ‘core’ and more flexible ‘peripheral’ elements
which possess stronger or weaker functions of both metrics and
meaning in the formulas. Ultimately, as one important survey by
Joseph Russo (1997: 259) points out, ‘the word formula proved
to be a poor thing, hopelessly inadequate to cover the different
kinds of formulaic realities in Homeric diction’. Nevertheless, the
idea of ‘formulaic realities’ remains. It is today almost universally
accepted that the process of the making of Homeric verse involved
elements of orality, that these elements can be observed in the
many repetitive phenomena manifest in the Iliad and Odyssey,
and that they are essential for our understanding of the poems.
We need to stress, however, that all we have possessed for at
least two or two and a half millennia are written texts. A crucial
question, then, is how the poems were transferred from voice to
writing. Parry’s and Lord’s work on the South Slavic tradition put
forward the argument that the oral poems were dictated, and thus
written down, a suggestion which was later accepted, with various
adjustments by many, but not all other scholars. Barry Powell (1991)
argued that the Greek alphabet, and in this sense Greek writing
itself, were fi rst adopted (from Semitic scripts) and developed for
the express purpose of recording Homeric verse. Some scholars,

especially Unitarians and Neoanalysts, prefer to associate Homer

more closely with written culture. Milman Parry’s son, Adam,
himself a prominent Homer scholar (who, like his father, died young,
in a motorcycle accident with his young wife Anne Amory Parry,
who was also an important Homer scholar), argued forcefully for
a literate poet at the end of a long tradition, and other important
Homer scholars, such as Martin West, have made similar or variant
claims. Could an oral poet have acquired the skill of writing and
used it to record his own poems or adapt the poems of others,
then? Did one or more transcribers write down the poetry of one
or more non-literate singers? Was the process rapid and dependent
on a single person of genius, or was it, as hinted by the Pisistratean
recension and suggested by Vico, Wolf and others, a slow process
involving many individuals? In recent years, Gregory Nagy (1979,
1990, etc.) has argued for gradual ‘crystallization’ and a transition
from fluid oral tradition to canonical text over centuries, a process
that ends only in the Hellenistic era with the canonization of the
written text of the Homeric poems. Amidst a wide range of views,
what is almost universally agreed is that the Iliad and Odyssey are,
as John Foley usefully suggests (e.g. 1991), ‘orally-derived’ texts.
What wider conclusion does the history of the Homeric
Question, of Homeric scholarship and of Homeric tradition offer
us as readers of Homer? To the ancients, as we have seen, Homer
was the figure of a real person who nevertheless possessed multiple
characterizations. The Homers (note the plural!) that emerge
from oral-formulaic theories are altogether more scientific, yet
they too preserve, indeed enhance the element of plurality and
tradition. Using contemporary discourses of science, anthropology,
anthropological fieldwork and linguistics, the modern history of
Homeric scholarship preserves a continuity of characterization in
the very process of change. Here too, we fi nd in Homer a single
tradition of multiplicity.

CHAPTER FOUR
Homer’s poetic language
Poetic style and oral style

We have just seen some of the more technical aspects
of Homer’s text and its style and the possible implications of
formulaic language for our understanding of the process of
the composition of the verse. But how do such repetitions
and formulaic language operate at the level style, poetry and
meaning? A generation ago, an important student of Homer,
Jasper Griffi n, in his influential Homer on Life and Death
(1980: xiii–xiv) wrote:
It has been claimed that ‘at a deeper level, all literary criticism
of the Homeric poems must be radically altered by the
Parry-Lord hypothesis’, and even that a new ‘oral poetics’
must come into existence before we can, without absurdity,
presume to tackle the poems at all. But the production of a
new ‘poetics’ has proved difficult, and some recent writing
on formulaic utterance has contributed less to our aesthetic
understanding than might have been hoped.
Can we, then, speak of Homeric ‘oral poetics’? Do Homer’s

technical patterns of repetition change the poetry of the verse?
If the range of phenomena which are involved in formulaic
style is as wide as many scholars suggest, there can be no single
answer to the question. Some prominent features are, however,
worthy of note.

HOMER’S POETIC LANGUAGE 61
Rhythm and music

Let us fi rst, very briefly, note again the rhythmic and metrical
framework of Homer’s verse and consider its stylistic consequences.
As we have already seen, each of the lines that make up the Iliad
and Odyssey is composed in the same formal rhythm. This rhythm,
the hexameter, is uncommon in some modern languages such as
English. We can, however, grasp its flow in a poem such as Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Arcadie (1847; see
Longfellow 1992). Here are the last three lines of the poem (the
stress is marked in bold):
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline’s story,

While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring
ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the
forest.
Here, and in much modern poetry, the rhythm is created by

stressing certain syllables and words (‘And by the . . .’ stressed –
unstressed–unstressed). Ancient Greek, as we noted in the previous
chapter, creates the rhythm by different means, distinguishing
between ‘long’ and ‘short’ syllables. To study this rhythm today
may require technical analysis, but we must remember that
originally this system was created, not by scholars and not for
scholars. It was song, a form of music in words, created by singers
for the pleasure of listeners. Early Greek and even later classical
audiences would have been exposed to public performances
of epic verse at regular events, such as the great festival of the
Panathenaia in Athens, and to shorter performances in public and
perhaps even in the home. The physical beat of the poetry would
have had immediate impact on listeners, all the more so when it
was performed to the accompaniment of a musical instrument.
Rhythm, then, is the musical container of Homer’s poetry. The
flow of the verse is rapid and effortless. The meaning of the words
and of units of meaning fall smoothly into the line and its parts, just
as the meaning of the words falls into form in popular songs or in
opera and is parsed by the rhythm and the tune. This is something
we can find in almost every line of the Iliad and Odyssey, for
example, in the following lines from the beginning of the Iliad, just

62 HOMER
after Apollo shoots his arrows and spreads a plague in the Greek
camp (1.53–6. The long syllables are again highlighted in bold):
Ennêmar men ana straton ôicheto kêla theoio,

têi dekatêi d’Agorên de kalessato laon Achilleus.
Tôi gar epi phresi thêke thea leukôlenos Hêrê.
Kêdeto gar Danaôn, hoti ‘ra thnêskontas horato.
Nine days the god’s arrows fell among the host,
but on the tenth Achilles called the army to an assembly.
Hera, the goddess of the white arms, put this into his mind.
She pitied the Danaans when she saw them dying.
Apart from changes to word order (to retain the flow in English),
the phrases in each line of translation above match those in the
Greek original. We can see how each line encloses a single sentence
and a well-rounded idea: ‘The arrows fell for nine days’ // ‘on the
tenth Achilles called a meeting’ // ‘this was Hera’s idea’ // ‘she pitied
the Greeks’. The singer will have performed each verse, perhaps
paused for an instant, and resumed the flow of song, accompanying
himself on the lyre. Apart from these pauses, there are also often
shorter ‘pauses’ inside each line (called caesurae and diareses –
these too are arranged in highly formal patterns). Such pauses
mark off smaller units of meaning and allow for fi ner gradation
of the rhythmical movement and the music. For example, the last
line above (Iliad 1.53) begins kêdeto gar Danaôn, ‘She pitied the
Danaans’, and concludes, hoti ‘ra thnêskontas horato, ‘when she
saw them dying’. In performance, a short pause or a plucking of the
lyre between these phrases has the power to stress Hera’s pity in a
manner that is entirely traditional (since such pauses are found at
fi xed points in the line), and yet entirely of the moment. The epic
bard is thus a musical interpreter, like a modern pianist, violinist
or opera singer in concert.
Music and meaning neatly overlap in many of the lines in the
Iliad and the Odyssey. But many verses also demonstrate another
simple, yet effective rhythmical feature, known as ‘enjambment’ or
a kind of verbal dovetailing, whereby the sentence in one line spills
over into another, as in the following verses (Iliad 1.68–9):
ê toi ho g’ hôs eipôn kat’ ar’ hezeto: toisi d’ anestê

Calchas Thestoridês oiônopolôn och’ aristos,

He [Achilles] spoke thus and sat down again, and among them
stood up
Calchas, Thestor’s son, by far the best of the bird interpreters,
The fi rst line contains two parts and two ideas, ‘Achilles spoke
and sat down’, and ‘another got up [to speak]’. The person who
has risen is the seer Calchas. Yet his name is held back for a brief
moment, and only ‘dovetailed’ onto the sentence in the next line.
The result offers the possibility of dramatic silences, emphasis,
characterization and contrast between the mighty and impulsive
hero Achilles and the old seer Calchas.
A few lines later, Calchas says in an even more startling example
(Iliad 1.74–5):
ô Achileu keleai me Diï phile muthêsasthai

mênin Apollônos hekatêbeletao anaktos:
O Achilles beloved of Zeus, you ask me to speak of
the wrath [mênin] of Apollo the far-shooting lord.
Here too, enjambment separates two important parts of the idea

between the two lines. It provides the singer with the opportunity
to ‘punctuate’ his song and create emphasis and surprise. ‘You ask
me to speak of . . .’ says the seer. Speak of what? We the audience
are waiting to hear. The fi rst word of the next line gives us the
answer, of ‘Wrath’ (mênin).
Repetition and poetic style

Words, sentences and countless other elements of Homeric
formulaic language fit smoothly into Homer’s lines. ‘The easiest
and best ways of showing the place the formula holds in Homeric
style’, says Milman Parry, ‘will be to point out all the expressions
occurring in a given passage which are found elsewhere in the Iliad
or in the Odyssey’ (1971: 301). Parry provided a detailed example
of two short sections of the poems – the fi rst 25 lines of the Iliad
and of the Odyssey, respectively, in which he marked repeated
phrases. Today, computers and the internet provide readers with
freely accessible, extended analyses of every single one of the

64 HOMER
poems’ 27,803 verses as well as in the Homeric hymns and the

poems of Hesiod (see the Chicago Homer project at http://digital.
library.northwestern.edu/homer/ – texts can be read in parallel
transliterations, translations and the original Greek). Parry’s
analysis was very technical, but it is important to stress that, in
fact, we are dealing with a vibrant poetic phenomenon. Repeated
elements in the lines above and in almost every line in all other parts
of Homer resonate (intratextually) with other parts of the verse
and (intertextually) with occurrences in other epic poems. Such
repetitions have the capacity to recall for accustomed audiences
and readers the inherent multiplicity of Homer, the resonance of
what John Foley (1991) has called ‘traditional referentiality’ of epic
words and the vast, open-ended tradition of epic.
No two repetitions have exactly the same effect. But to
demonstrate the effect of Homeric repetition, we can choose
examples from almost any part of Homer’s poems. For instance, in
the verses cited above from the Iliad, in line 53, we fi nd the words
kêla theoio, ‘the god’s arrows’. These words recur a little later in
the poem, in line 1.383, as Achilles, complaining to his mother, the
nymph Thetis, retells the story of the quarrel. The words ‘the god’s
arrows’, and the whole of Achilles’ speech, which contain many
other repetitions (see further below), echo the poet’s description
of the opening scene of the poem. Through such repetitions, the
troubled Achilles becomes a surrogate narrator of the poem while
we, the audience, are provided with another perspective on the
Iliad’s catastrophic opening events.
In the next line in the opening of the Iliad (54), we fi nd Achilles
calling the Greeks together and the formula agorên de kalessato,
‘called . . . to the assembly’. With small variations, these words
are often repeated elsewhere in the poem. Calling an assembly
thus becomes, not simply an ad hoc practical event, but an act that
resonates with the tradition as a whole, one of the conventional,
almost ritual actions of the heroic world that defi nes the range of
a hero’s activities.
In the following verse (55), the formula thea leukôlenos Hêrê,
‘the goddess of the white-arms, Hera’, is an often-used regular
expression for Zeus’ sister and wife (the phrase always appears
in exactly the same position, at the end of the line). The epithet
leukôlenos, ‘white-armed’, like many other epithets in other name
formulas, creates an idealized image of this important member

of the cast of characters in the Iliad and paints a little recurring

(visual) vignette of the goddess. If this were a modern fi lm, we
might expect to recognize the goddess by an iconic close-up of
her lovely arms. As we already know, similar, frequently repeated
expressions naming other gods abound in the poems, for instance,
‘cloud-gathering Zeus’, ‘high-thundering Zeus’, ‘Zeus, whose
might is greatest’, ‘grey-eyed Athena’, ‘far-shooting Apollo’.
Heroes too are characterized in this way: ‘Odysseus of the many
stratagems’, ‘bright Odysseus’, ‘bright Achilles’, ‘Hector, tamer
of horses’ and more. Common expressions such as ‘Achilles son
of Peleus’ or ‘Odysseus son of Laertes’ combining the name of a
hero and the name of his father (the latter element is known as a
patronymic) are, on the one hand, a means of reference, in this
case, Homer’s way of identifying a hero by his ‘surname’. But,
on the other hand, they provide us with a constant background
reminder, here of the theme of fathers-and-sons, which is a central
epic theme.
The number of repeated elements in Homer and their varied
resonance, even if we restrict ourselves to the few lines cited
above, is too long to list in full. Let us, however, briefly turn
again to just one more echo which concerns the word mênin in
Iliad 1.74–5, the verses we have just considered in the previous
section. I will, for convenience, repeat both lines. Calchas says:
ô Achileu keleai me Diï phile muthêsasthai

mênin Apollônos hekatêbeletao anaktos:
O Achilles, beloved of Zeus, you ask me to speak of
the wrath [mênin] of Apollo the far-shooting lord.
Any hearer or reader familiar with the Iliad will of course at this
point recall the very fi rst word and the fi rst line of the poem, which
is perhaps the single most famous verse in the whole of Greek
literature, where the word, ‘wrath’, the theme of the poem, appears
in exactly the same place, at the very beginning of the line (Iliad
1.1. The translation below retains the exact word order of the
Greek original):
mênin aeide thea Pêlêïadeô Achilêos

The wrath [mênin] sing Goddess Son-of-Peleus, Achilles

66 HOMER
In line 75, then, Calchas is not merely proposing to speak of the

wrath. Using this vastly resonant word, he and the singer of the Iliad
are invoking the whole of the poetic and thematic tradition of the
poem and almost ‘compressing’ the whole of the epic tradition into
this one single word. This example may have particularly strong
resonance, but the essential mechanism is operative in almost every
verse of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Although far less frequent than the repetition of smaller units,
we sometimes also fi nd whole passages recurring in the poems. Just
now, we have pointed out that line 1.53 is part of a larger narrative
repeated later in Book 1 in Achilles’ speech to his mother Thetis.
When Achilles tells Thetis about the priest Chryses’ visit to the
Greek camp and the beginning of the quarrel, he retells the earlier
narrative by the poet. Achilles’ words in 1.376–9, for example, are
a word-for-word repetition of the narrator’s original description
(Iliad 1.22–5):
Then all the rest of the Achaeans agreed and called out
to respect the priest and to accept the shining ransom;
This, however, did not please the heart of Atreus’ son
Agamemnon,
But he drove the priest away, harshly, hurling strong words
at him.
Does such long, exact repetition facilitate the composition of the

verse in performance? Is the repetition in some way related to an
editorial process and to the process of writing down sung verse?
As a poetic device, it underscores the association between Achilles,
the greatest warrior, and the narrator, ‘Homer’, the greatest poet.
Here they speak, quite literally, the exact same words. Repetition
also has an important truth function: Having heard the story
only a few hundred lines before from the poet, we the audience/
readers know that Achilles’ words are a true rendition of events.
Repetition may suggest to us that this is a story told again and
again – in this sense, a traditional story which may yet be retold
in the future, too.
Furthermore, inside longer repeated passages, we can fi nd
shorter phrases each of which recurs either fully nested or partially
overlapping in yet other contexts. Each individual expression may
have its own patterns of repetition and may appear more frequently
than the longer units and thus in more diverse contexts. The fi rst

words, in lines 22 and 376, ‘Then all the rest . . .’ (enth alloi men
pantes) are repeated more widely in other contexts in Homer.
Their contents may not be dramatic, but the very act of repetition
creates a highly traditional pattern for resuming a heroic narrative.
Another phrase, ‘and to accept the shining ransom’ (kai aglaa
dechthai apoina), which appears in the two contexts above, in lines
23 and 377, is also repeated outside of the Iliad and Odyssey, in
the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (140); an even smaller part of this
group of words, ‘to accept the ransom’ (dechthai apoina), appears
with a minor variation in other places in the Iliad (6.46; 11.131;
24.137; 25.555), especially in the context of Priam’s ransoming
of Hector at the end of the poem. The Iliad, as we have noted,
begins and ends with acts of ransom, the fi rst of a living captive
woman (Chryseis), the last of a dead warrior (Hector). These
and other repetitions create a world of dense echoes, both direct
and ghostly, each one connecting to others, each one having the
potential to recall other parts of the narrative, other contexts and
other meanings.
Typical scenes
Repetitive echoic structure is common in Homeric verse at yet
higher levels of theme and content, and its presence is often
associated with the oral provenance of Homeric poetry. When, for
example, we look at the description of scenes of battle and fighting,
speaking in the assembly, scenes of feasting and hospitality, arming,
supplication, bathing scenes and more, we fi nd sets of highly
organized recurring motifs.
In Iliad Book 5, one of the great fighting books (describing
Diomedes’ aristeia) of the poem, we fi nd a scene in which Diomedes
faces two Trojans, Phegeus and Idaeus, who are the sons of Dares,
a priest of Hephaestus (5.9–26). Bernard Fenik has analysed this
and other fighting scenes in the Iliad. He outlines the action of the
passage as follows (1968: 13–14):
1 Diomedes, on foot, is attacked by two Trojans in a chariot.

2 The fi rst Trojan’s spear-cast fails.
3 He is then killed by Diomedes.
4 The second Trojan turns to flee.

68 HOMER
5 He is rescued y Hephaestus.
6 Diomedes captures the Trojan’s horses.
As Fenik points out, a later scene describing Diomedes’ fight against

Aeneas and his charioteer Sthenelus (5.275ff.) is structured using
the same motifs. Fenik outlines this second scene as follows:
1 Diomedes, on foot, is attacked by two Trojans in a chariot.

2 The fi rst Trojan’s spearcast fails.
3 He is then killed by Diomedes.
4 The second Trojan leaps down to defend the body of the first.
5 In the ensuing fight, he is wounded, but then rescued by
Aphrodite and Apollo.
6 Sthenelus captures the Trojan horses according to
Diomedes’ instructions.
These two sets of events contain distinct elements of parity and

divergence. In both cases, Diomedes is first attacked by two enemies;
in the first scene, the surviving Trojan turns to flee, in the second,
he turns to fight and so on. We are dealing with an elaborate set of
typical narrative units, which can be identified in many other fighting
scenes in both the Iliad and Odyssey (see, e.g. Edwards 1992).
The fi rst to point to such ‘typical scenes’ was Walter Arend
(1933). Shortly afterwards, Milman Parry reviewed Arend’s work
and suggested that the phenomenon could be explained in the
context of oral composition and traditional discourse. Somewhat
like shorter formulas, the recurrent motifs provided structural
building blocks for the narrative – a modular system for putting
together traditional scenes. As Parry suggested, an oral singer,
having to compose his poem swiftly and without pausing, could
do so by ‘telling each action as it comes up in more or less the
usual way, and in more or less the usual verses which go with that
way’ (Parry 1971: 406). As with formulas, Parry’s view stressed
the advantages of this practice in the process of composition, and
he played down aesthetic functions. Thematic variations, Parry
suggested, were not a question of fi nding ‘falsely subtle meanings
in the repetitions, as meant to recall an earlier scene where the
same words are used’ (1971: 407).
By the time Parry’s review was published, in 1936, he himself
was no longer alive. As with formulas, there is some evidence to

suggest that, had he lived, he might have eventually allowed more

flexibility in his arguments. Parry’s student and successor Albert
Lord moved in exactly this direction. Lord describes, for example,
an instance where the famous Serbo-Croat guslar Avdo Međedović
(1875–1953) was invited to sit in on a performance by another
singer, Mumin Vlahovljak, of a long song which Avdo himself did
not know. Afterwards and without forewarning, Avdo was asked
to perform the song. Lord (1960: 78) reports that:
Avdo began, and as he sang the song lengthened, the

ornamentation and richness accumulated, and the human
touches of character, touches that distinguished Avdo from
other singers, imparted a depth of feeling that had been missing
in Mumin’s versions.
The analysis of the fi rst major theme in Mumin’s and in Avdo’s
text . . . illustrates how well Avdo had followed his original and
yet how superbly he was able to expand it and make it his own.
On the evidence of the living tradition, thematic patterns provide

a framing structure that facilitates the composition; they reflect
the ‘traditional’ portrayal of action, but are also a means of
introducing variations, tailoring the composition to the moment
and enriching it.
Ring composition
Another notable feature of Homeric poetry is ‘ring composition’.
There are many types of ring structures in discourse but, as
anthropologist Mary Douglass notes, the most fundamental feature
of this form is the ending which comes back to the beginning and
thus signals completion (2007: 31–2). Ring composition often also
involves the arrangement of words or themes in a ‘Russian doll’
structure on either side of a central element or in mirror formation
(‘chiasmus’). Whether ring composition originates in pre-literate
oral cultures, or with early literacy and memorization, as Jack
Goody, another famous anthropologist, suggests, with ‘natural’
ways of organizing materials, as some literary scholars and linguists
have claimed, or is simply a generic social construct, it is, Douglass
stresses, a way of controlling meaning, placing emphasis and

70 HOMER
defining relations between ideas. In Homer, in the Iliad, for example,

we find Nestor describing the battle between his own people, the
Pylians, and their enemies the Epeans. The narrative is arranged as
a structured set of themes:
(732–36) A – Battle begins; prayers to Zeus and Athena.

(737–46) B – Nestor kills his fi rst victim, the Epean Moulion.
He captures the horses.
(747–49) C – Nestor pursues and captures 50 Epean chariots.
He kills two men in each.
(750–52) D – Only the two Epeans escape. They are
rescued by Poseidon.
(735–38) C’ – The Pylians pursue and massacre the Epeans.
(759–60) B’ – Nestor kills his last victim. The Pylians capture
the horses.
(761) A’ – The Pylians give glory to the gods and to Nestor.
In the scene, then, prayer (A) is matched by prayer, killing (B) by

killing and capture of horses and by (C) pursuit and massacre.
Some of these recurring elements, the killing, the capture of the
horses or the rescue by a god, are familiar from our discussion,
above, of aspects of typical scenes in Homer. Homer’s style is not a
series of isolated tropes, but an integrated phenomenon.
Ring composition characterizes larger segments of narrative but it
can also be detected in the arrangement of smaller units of Homeric
poetry. When Patroclus appeals to Achilles to help the Greeks, the
angry Achilles first responds with pitying words (Iliad 16.7–11):
(7) A – Why are you crying

B – Patroclus
C – like a little girl?
(8) D – A foolish one, who runs after her mother
and begs to be picked up and carried
(9) E – And clings to her dress and holds her
back when she tries to hurry
(10) D’ – And gazes tearfully into her face, until she is
picked up?
(11) C’ – You are like her,
B’ – Patroclus,
A’ – dropping these soft tears.

The words ‘like a little girl’ in line 7 are matched by ‘like her’
in line 11; likewise, in the same line, the calling of Patroclus’
name, and the reference to crying/tears; in line 8, the request to
be picked up (in Greek, anelesthai) is matched by the exact same
request in line 10 (anelêtai); the focus of the speech is the image of
a clinging child (Patroclus) and a hurrying mother (Achilles), which
is perhaps a little ironic, since it is Achilles who sits fast in his hut
while Patroclus is the one in a hurry to go and help the Greeks.
Ring composition is not a mechanical opening-and-closing
movement, but rather an organic compositional structure. The
emotions are immediate, the scene homely, but the arrangement
is meticulous, stately and formal. This is one of the ways in which
Homeric poetry stands back and reflects on its themes.
Metaphor and simile

Our last example is a rhetorical comparison between two completely
different objects or descriptions, the hero Patroclus in his agitated
state over the suffering of the Greeks and a weeping little girl. Such
comparisons, both metaphors and similes, sometimes brief, at
other times extending over several verses, are not exclusive to oral
poetry, but they are a noticeable feature of Homer’s poetic style.
Metaphors, mostly brief, comprise some of the most famous
expressions in Homer’s language, such as the ‘wine-dark sea’,
‘winged words’, ‘honeyed words’, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, ‘ships, horses
of the sea’, the ‘watery ways’, ‘the sleek veil of Troy’ and the ‘black
cloud of death’. Metaphors are part of the names of many gods and
heroes, for example, ‘owl-eyed Athena’ or ‘Agamemnon, shepherd of
the people’. As with ‘winged words’, the force of many metaphors is
immediate. Words with wings are rapid and agitated words. A sea
dark as wine is an unknown, threatening but also an intoxicating
and attractive place. The complex nature of metaphor forces us to
reflect on both the thing described and the description in new ways.
Many Homeric metaphors, especially those that comprise a noun or
a name and an epithet (or epithets) are, technically speaking, also
formulas. Parry was of the view that they were used because of their
‘metrical utility’: ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ is simply a convenient means of
expressing the essential idea of dawn. ‘The sleek veil of Troy’ would
thus mean simply ‘Troy’. Many translations simplify metaphors,

72 HOMER
for example, rendering this latter expression ‘the sleek battlements

of Troy’. Yet, as Michael Nagler (1974) has shown, formulaic
expressions describing the loosening of a woman’s headdress and
the destruction of the walls of Troy are associated by a kind of
‘family resemblance’ (a distinct resemblance which nevertheless
does not depend on any single common feature. Nagler borrowed
this important term from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein).
Traditional phraseology, in this case as in many others, amplifies
and enriches the poetic resonance of Homer’s words.
Like metaphors, similes are also a common means of poetic
comparison in Homer. In the simile, of course, comparison is openly
acknowledged by such words as ‘like’, ‘as’ or ‘as when . . .’. Some
Homeric similes are short and frequently repeated, as, for instance,
when heroes are compared to gods in the phrase ‘godlike Achilles’
(theoeikel’ Achilleu. Iliad 1.131, etc.) or ‘equal to a god’ (daimoni
isos. Iliad 5.438). Such comparisons work partly as standard means
of reference. Achilles is a great hero. He is almost like a god. Yet
closer scrutiny of both specific contexts and more general patterns of
Homer’s repetitive language often reveals more interesting nuances.
In Iliad (1.131), for example, we find Agamemnon saying: ‘Do not
thus, mighty though you are, godlike Achilles, seek to deceive me
with your wit.’ This is the moment when the dispute between the
two heroes over honour, which is the theme of the Iliad, comes
to a head. ‘Godlike’ is a generic term of praise, yet in this verse,
it underscores Agamemnon’s very particular resentment and
contributes to one of the most forceful displays of contempt in Greek
literature. Similarly, in Iliad 5.438, the expression daimoni isos,
‘equal to a god’, is used to describe Diomedes, a hero well deserving
of praise. He is, as some scholars have suggested, a younger version
of Achilles himself. Yet, in Book 5, Diomedes reaches the limits of
heroism. Having killed a series of Trojan enemies, he directs his fury
at the immortals. He charges so vehemently, so ‘like a god’, that
Apollo must in the following verses check him, brusquely warning
(5.440–2), ‘take care, Son of Tydeus, and give way, and do not strive
to make yourself like the gods in mind, since the race of the gods,
who are immortal, and of men who walk the earth is not the same’.
Heroes are indeed ‘equal to the gods’ but the more Homeric poetry
stresses the comparison, the more it also underscores the disparity,
the essential condition of mortality, and the glory and tragedy of
heroic death.

It is, however, the longer and more formal similes that are most
distinct in Homer’s style. The similes describe a wide range of
scenes and activities, but the majority are drawn from the world
of nature, agriculture, hunting and craftsmanship. As a whole,
they represent a world more ‘ordinary’ and familiar than the past
world of heroes and heroic exploits. We fi nd themes of wild beasts,
wolves, boars, fawns and lions in the wilderness and alongside
men, for example, in hunting scenes (see a listing in Scott 2009:
193–7). Menelaus meeting Paris is compared to a lion who fi nds
the carcass of a stag or a goat and is hunted by young men (Iliad
3.23–7). The two Ajaxes carry off the Trojan Imbrius like lions
snatching a goat from the hounds (Iliad 13.197–201). Odysseus
emerges from the thicket to face Nausicaa and her handmaids,
like a hungry mountain-raised lion (Odyssey 6.130–5). We fi nd
similes describing sea eagles and hawks; insects including bees,
wasps, fl ies and locusts; domestic animals like bulls and oxen,
donkeys and goats, mice and more; as well as natural phenomena
and the elements, such as wind, fi re, the stars and the moon (e.g.
Iliad 8.555–61). We fi nd similes describing smoke, rocks and trees,
towers and walls. In Book II of the Iliad, following Agamemnon’s
proposal of abandoning the campaign (a test that nearly ends in
disaster for Agamemnon), the Greek assembly stirs like waves on
the Icarian sea (Iliad 2.144–6), and a line later like tall sheaves of
grain shaken by the Western wind (Iliad 2.147–52). Nature and
the elements appear again as Odysseus is carried into the sea by
a wave, like thistles blown over the plain by the northern wind
in late summer (Odyssey 5.328–30). We also fi nd descriptions of
weeping women, of a sausage turning on the spit and other varied
scenes of domestic life.
Of the total number of longer similes, about 200 (the exact
count depends on our defi nition) are found in the Iliad. The rest,
about 40, appear in the Odyssey (Edwards 1991: 24 [volume V
of Kirk 1985–93]). This is a notable disparity in number between
the two poems. Some scholars have suggested that the difference
reflects deeper thematic and tonal distinctions. The world of
the Iliad is essentially one. The poem is an austere image of war
focused on heroic combat and the siege of Troy. The changes in
pace and perspective affected by the simile offer welcome variety
and make better sense in the narrative of the Iliad. In contrast,
the Odyssey depicts a wider range of worlds, many of which

74 HOMER
(notwithstanding the fantastic parts of the apologue) are closer

to the realities depicted in the similes. The Odyssey, it is argued,
is less accommodating to similes, or perhaps, being varied itself,
has less need of them. This is a compelling explanation of an
undeniable statistical difference between the Iliad and Odyssey,
which does not, however, alter the basic ways in which similes
work in both poems.
As in metaphors and short similes, many of the images and scenes
in the longer similes can be read as straightforward extensions,
expansions, contrasts, intensifications or illustrations of the object,
action or idea at hand. But there are always also more resonant and
more complex elements in the similes that alter our perspectives,
temporarily freeze the rapid pace of events and force us, for a
moment, to reflect on heroes and heroic epic.
In Book 4 of the Iliad, for instance, the Trojan Pandarus breaks
the truce agreed between the warring sides, shooting Menelaus
with an arrow (an unheroic weapon, in the world of the Iliad).
The shot is not lethal, but the arrow grazes Menelaus’ thigh and
draws blood. There follows one of the most famous similes in the
poem (Iliad 4.141–7):
As when a woman colours ivory with purple

A Maeonian or a Carian, making it a cheek-piece for horses;
And it is kept in an inner room, and many riders
long to have it, but it is kept as a king’s treasure,
both an adornment for the horse, and a prize for the horseman:
So, Menelaus, your shapely thighs were stained with the colour
of blood, and your legs also and your ankles below them.
Some of the effects of the simile and its meanings are

straightforward. Stained ivory is an inanimate, ‘deathless’ object.
It is a prized thing of beauty, the product of valued skill, an object
that belongs in ordered and essentially peaceful life. In contrast,
Menelaus is a mortal whose life could be extinguished by an arrow.
His injury marks the chaotic breaking of order by a perfidious and
unheroic act and the essential turbulence of the war. Agamemnon’s
concerned speech later in the book reminds us how much is at stake
here: if Menelaus dies, the Trojan expedition loses its purpose.
Only minimal slowing of the pace of the narrative is affected
here. We are in the midst of a story and the simile, although it

extracts us from the linear progression of events and their time

and place, allows for smooth alignment between the new image
and its surrounding context. Indeed, this simile, like many others,
is based on a direct visual analogy between the red blood and red
or purple-stained ivory (Greek colour terminology is notoriously
flexible). Early scholarship on the simile sometimes speaks of the
tertium comparationis, the ‘third element of comparison’, in our
case, the colouring – which is neither the thing compared nor
the comparator. In this sense, the simile provides what we could
describe as a ‘parallax’ effect. We see the same image from two
different positions and thus (as in stereoscopic vision) gain a sense
of depth.
The resonance of the comparison is, however, a little more
complex. The stained ivory simile does not fully overlap the
context. Many of its details remain outside the analogy and the
contrastive framework. A complete comparison is difficult, if not
impossible. Why is the maker of the ivory cheekpiece in our simile
from Maionia or Caria? Why is the maker a woman (and not a
man)? Ivory may resemble (white) human flesh in colour, but why
specifically a cheekpiece for horses? Why is it important that this
is a high-status item (some similes describe perfectly pedestrian
objects or scenes)? What is the analogue or the contrast in the world
of the warring Greeks and Trojans of the keeping of the stained
cheekpiece in an inner room? What is the relevance of the fact
that the cheekpiece adds beauty to both the horse and the horse’s
rider? The problem of the relevance of the details in the simile is
an old chestnut. Some of the details of this simile and many other
similes remain outside of any relation of comparison. The similes,
we should add, sometimes also use a language which is distinct
from other parts of the narrative and which, on the whole contains
less ‘traditional’ repetition than elsewhere in Homer.
Viewed on their own, that is, not as analogies, many of the
similes describe perfectly plausible worlds. For instance, actual
carved ivory objects like those described in Iliad Book 4 have
been found in early Iron Age Mycenaean graves. H. L. Lorimer
in her study of material objects associated with Homer (1950:
508), records various equestrian decorations from Nimrod. In
other words, some of the simile’s details seem to strengthen the
impression of an independent world that is closer to later historical
reality, perhaps the Iron Age, and is at some remove from the

76 HOMER
martial activities of the heroic world. These details can contribute

to the characterization of the heroic activities and put them into
relief, but they resist complete incorporation/interpretation within
the terms of the world of the epic past. Similes embedded in the
narrative thus present us with an amalgam of poetic and historical
presents and pasts.
In the Odyssey, when Odysseus and his men blind the Cyclops,
we are told that they thrust a great sharpened stake into the
monster’s eye and press and twist ‘as when some man bores the
beam of a ship with an auger, while others below rotate it with a
strap, grasping at both ends, and it turns continuously’ (Odyssey
9.384–6). Immediately after this description, we find another simile
that makes reference to iron and metalworking (Odyssey 9.391–4):
As when a blacksmith plunges a great axe or an adze

in cold water and it hisses loudly as he tempers it,
for this is how the iron gains its strength,
so his [the Cyclops’] eye sizzled around the olive-wood stake.
Mention of iron, clearly important to the broad dating of the poems

(see above discussions of history), is not exclusive to the similes.
However, iron does appear in several other interesting domestic
contexts, in important similes which sharply contrast with the
surrounding heroic settings. In Iliad (4.482–9), for example, the
death of the Trojan Simoeisius is compared to the felling of a tree:
He fell down in the dust, like a black poplar,

that grows in the land that lies by a great marsh,
a smooth-barked tree, yet with branches growing at its very
top:
One whom a man, a wheelwright, cuts down with the shining
iron, to bend it into a wheel for a well-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies growing hard and dry by the river banks.
Such was Anthemion’s son Simoeisius whom godly
Aias killed.
The effect of the simile is powerful and immediate. Yet some

details of the scene seem independent of their surrounding
context. It would require heavy-handed interpretation to fit the
great marsh, the tree’s smooth trim or the chariot wheel precisely

into the heroic battle scene and the death of Simoeisius. The
simile conjures up a partly self-sustained world, closer to the Iron
Age and, in principle, to the world of the poem’s performance
(in general, the fitting of wheels has sometimes been associated
with the name Homer and with the making or fitting together of
poetry).
In some cases, the links between the similes and the performance
world are even closer. Consider again the simile of the stained ivory.
As the singer’s comparison is brought home, in Iliad 4.146–7, he
says:
So, Menelaus, your shapely thighs were stained with the colour
of blood, and your legs also and your ankles below them.
These lines employ a unique rhetorical/poetic trope. The singer

in the world and time of the performance (cf. the contrastive
expression ‘the men of today’, e.g. in Iliad 5.304; 12.383; 12.449;
29.287) is directly addressing Menelaus, a character whose time is
in the distant past inside the poem. This powerful appeal, known
as apostrophe or ‘direct address’, is only rarely used in Homer,
here directed at Menelaus, elsewhere only in addresses to Patroclus
(in the Iliad) and Eumaius (in the Odyssey). Homeric apostrophes
usually occur in moments of crisis. Significantly, the great heroes
Agamemnon, Achilles and Odysseus are never addressed in this
extraordinary manner by Homer. Why are Menelaus, Patroclus
and Eumaius approached in this way? Some critics have suggested
that they represent weaker, more fallible and more ‘ordinary’
doublets of the greater heroes, and are thus closer to the non-heroic
world of poetic performances (Menelaus/Agamemnon; Patroclus/
Achilles; Eumaius/Odysseus). If this is true, then the apostrophe
in the simile of the stained ivory, which itself establishes a world
more ordinary, provides yet another point of contact between the
present and the world of the heroic past. Homer seems to bring
these worlds together, yet he keeps them apart. Such paradoxical
encounters are one way of keeping the fame (kleos) of the past
alive, in other words ‘imperishable’ (aphthiton).
One simile makes this connection between worlds and times,
between song and performance and the world of heroes clearer
than the rest. Consider these lines from the Odyssey, describing
Odysseus’ actions in the decisive contest of the bow (21.406–9).

78 HOMER
Odysseus picks up the weapon and is about to prove both his

strength and his identity:
As when a man who has mastered the lyre and song

easily stretches a new string around a peg
grasping the well-twisted sheep’s gut at both ends
so Odysseus effortlessly strung the great bow.
The link between this climactic moment in the plot of the Odyssey
and an ordinary moment in the world of the performance is
decisive and telling. What is particularly interesting is that here
there is a strong overlap between the details in the simile and the
details of Odysseus’ actions in the heroic world (lyre = bow; lyre-
string = bow-string; peg = nocks [the nocks are the notched ends
of the bow], the twisted sheep’s gut, stringing ‘at both ends’, etc.).
It is, precisely at the moment of the greatest apparent disparity
between heroic feats of the past and epic performance in the
present (presumably by a feeble, perhaps blind bard . . .), that these
two worlds come most closely together. But then, by successfully
shooting the arrow in the contest of the Bow Odysseus affects
his homecoming to the ‘ordinary’ domestic world of Ithaca. His
triumph, his return and his fame are also the present return of the
past and the triumph of epic song.

CHAPTER FIVE
Proems, tales and plots
The proems
Homer’s poetry and art have many other stylistic, thematic and
poetic features, some of which we will consider in the subsequent
chapters in our ‘commentary’, as we consider aspects of the
poems in their narrative order. Before we do so, we need to reflect
on a few of Homer’s important principles of storytelling. I want
to look at how the poems are introduced; at the manner of the
telling of tales from the past; at the relation between event, word
and truth and at the general outlines of the plots of the Iliad and
Odyssey. My purpose is not to provide a complete survey of
approaches to these weighty and complicated questions (which
would require a very long book), but to expose something of the
underlying premises of the narrative.
First words are always important, and the fi rst words of
the Iliad and Odyssey, which are, after all, the fi rst words in
Western literature, are particularly so. How, then, does the
singer introduce his tale? Where does the song come from? How
does the poet know what he knows? Can we the audiences and
readers trust the poet and his songs?
Homer’s traditional epics do not simply begin to tell a story
(compare, e.g. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge:
‘One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had
reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the
latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of
Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot’ Hardy 1886 [1998]).
Both poems open with formal introductions or proems (for the

80 HOMER
Iliad, cf. Redfield 1979; for the Odyssey, in Pucci 1987 and 1998:
11–29). As we have already seen, the fi rst things stated are the
poems’ themes, condensed into a single word. This is followed by
brief outlines of the plots, or part of the plots of the poems. The
Iliad begins (1.1–6) as follows:
Of the wrath [mênin] sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles,

that destructive wrath which brought countless woes upon the
Achaeans,
and sent down to Hades many valiant souls of heroes,
and made them their bodies spoil for dogs and every bird;
Thus the plan of Zeus was fulfilled,
from the time when first they parted in strife,
Atreus’ son, the king of men, and great Achilles.
The Odyssey’s proem follows a similar pattern (1.1–10):
Of the man [andra], tell me, Muse, the man of many ways
who wandered much after he had sacked the sacred citadel of
Troy.
Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he
learned,
and many were the pains he suffered in his heart at sea,
yearning to preserve his life and the return of his companions.
Yet even so he did not save his companions, much though he
strove,
for they perished by their very own folly,
the fools, they feasted on the cattle of Helios Hyperion;
but the god took from them their day of their return.
Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where
you will, tell us too.
By the time we reach the actual story, we have, in a manner of

speaking, already heard the tale. The proems’ summaries are not,
however, as plain as they seem. For example, what exactly is the
will of Zeus in the Iliad’s proem? Is it the destruction of Troy,
which, although briefly noted, is never described in the poem?
Or does the plan of Zeus refer more specifically to the wrath of
Achilles? To the killing of Hector? What relation does Zeus’ will
have to the vast tale of the Trojan saga, which, as other poems in

PROEMS, TALES AND PLOTS 81
the Epic Cycle show, begins much earlier, with the abduction of
Helen, and extends well past the fall of Troy? Why, in the proem
of the Odyssey, are Odysseus’ adventures in Ithaca, his dealing
with the suitors and especially his relation to his wife Penelope,
his son Telemachus and his father Laertes barely noted? These
‘unaccounted’ events occupy the latter half the Odyssey. They
are neither brief nor incidental to the plot. Although the names of
the poems, the themes and the summaries in the proems provide
us with some indication of what we might expect to find in the
following long poems, the fi rst few lines of the Iliad and Odyssey
are both less than and more than proper summaries.
The proems of the Iliad and Odyssey introduce not only the
narrative but the narrator, too. Homer, as Marcel Detienne says,
is one of the ‘masters of truth’ of ancient Greece (Detienne 1996).
Telling a traditional story like Homer’s requires the assertion of
both authority and a certain kind of continuity; it raises questions
about transmission and sources of knowledge. And indeed, both
the Iliad and the Odyssey begin by addressing these issues,
making special invocations by the narrator to the Muse, goddess
of poetry, asking her to sing of past events. These are, however,
rather special acts.
Many authors and texts in antiquity begin with some form of
appeal or special address which stakes their claim to knowledge
and sets the scene for what is to follow. In the fi fth century bce ,
Herodotus begins his narrative of the wars between the Greeks
and the Persians with the words ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus,
his researches [“researches” in Greek – historiai ] are here set
down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the
astonishing achievements of both our own and of other peoples’
(Histories 1.1). Herodotus fi rst describes the events surrounding
the Trojan War and there is important shared ground between
his work and Homer’s. The Histories’ narrative, exploring the
identity of Greek ‘self’ versus Persian ‘others’ can be seen as a
continuation of the Homeric narrative about a Pan-Hellenic army
of Greeks fighting non-Greek ‘barbarians’. Yet we must appreciate
how different Homer’s introductory manner is from Herodotus’.
Herodotus begins by stating his name, ‘Herodotus’, and his
provenance, ‘Halicarnassus’ (a famous centre of learning in Ionia –
now the western coast of Turkey), and by laying claim to his own
work. When we the readers ascribe the Histories to Herodotus, we

82 HOMER
are, in an immediate sense, simply agreeing with the text. Homer

does things otherwise. On the one hand, the Homeric narrators
clearly mark their presence. The Iliad and Odyssey are not stories
that ‘tell themselves’. On the other hand, both the narrator of the
Iliad and the narrator of the Odyssey remain anonymous. Apart
from the bare marking of his existence, neither narrator discloses
any detail of identity in the proems nor anywhere else in Homer’s
poems (see Richardson 1990). Many other poets are mentioned
by name in the Iliad and Odyssey: Phemius, Demodocus and
Thamyris, Achilles himself, who sings in the Iliad, and Odysseus
who tells his tales like a poet in the Odyssey. Yet it is entirely up
to us, the audiences and readers, to make the association between
the unidentified but distinctly present narrators of the poems at
large and the name Homer. To ascribe the Iliad and Odyssey to
Homer, therefore, is not to agree with anything the poems openly
tell us. We ourselves must play an active part in the tradition. We
must ‘accept’ the poet’s identity on trust from the past and ‘pass it
on’. In general, tradition claims for itself the status of truth, but it
is not empirical truth. Whether a tradition is actually transmitted
from the distant past or ‘invented’ and retrojected into that past (as
Eric Hobsbawm [Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992] and others have
argued), it and its source are by defi nition removed from immediate
experience. However, the essential element in traditions is not quite
their ‘inventedness’ or the occlusion of an invented source, or even
their real sources in the past that underpins the truth of traditions,
but commonly the acts of trust which accompany them. Traditions
are social performances in which we accept something as having
been handed over from a distant past which we ourselves cannot
access, or visit, or see directly. We carry this sense of past with
us to the future without quite knowing what it is. Looking back
to Homer’s elusive introduction, our point is this: The fi rst lines
of the poems pull us in, demand and affi rm ‘traditionality’. They
affect the presence of an unknown but ‘certain’ original speaker.
We may think of our Homer as a historical figure (as the ancients
did), or we may argue that he is a cultural construct (as modern
critics have suggested). Yet, precisely, in such acts of interpretation
and acceptance, we defi ne the traditional elements of Homer and
Homeric poetry.
In the Histories, Herodotus takes ownership of his own work.
Many other texts in antiquity begin with such acts of possession.

Virgil’s Aeneid begins ‘I sing of arms and the man’ (1.1). In a gesture
of homage to Homer and Homeric tradition, Virgil too does not
name himself – although in his case, there exists ample external
historical information to link him to his poem. In a further gesture
towards Homeric tradition, Virgil appeals to the assistance of the
Muse in following verses. Yet in stark contrast to Homer, Virgil
speaks as the one who is doing the singing: ‘I sing’, he says and
claims the poem for himself. At the beginning of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, neither of the unnamed yet-present narrators makes
a claim to sing or speak himself. Instead, each asks the goddess
of song to tell the story. The narrators thus seem to ‘transfer
ownership’ of the content of the poems to another, or rather to
never take possession of it in the fi rst place: These songs belong to
the Muse. To themselves the narrators of the poem paradoxically
assign merely the role of hearers.
Needless to say, the same person making these introductory
appeals to the Muse is the person who sings the rest of the poems.
One of epic’s distinct generic features is that, despite its large cast
of characters and frequent direct speeches by characters, it was
performed by one singer, who sometimes narrates the story in his
own persona and sometimes imitates his characters and speaks in
their voice. Yet through the special act of an appeal to the Muse,
the singer eschews possession not only of the fi rst line, but of
everything that follows. He may be the one who speaks, but within
the conventions of epic, it is the Muse who animates his voice
and whose knowledge is responsible for the words. The narrator,
who portrays himself as the hearer, is merely a mouthpiece, an
instrument for the handing-over and passing-on, a link in the
chain of tradition.
At any individual performance of these poems, there will have
been a particular singer, bard or rhapsode performing the song.
He may have been called Homer, he may have been another singer,
such as Ion – the professional performer of Homeric poetry in
Plato’s dialogue by the same name. Or indeed, the singer may have
been one of the Homeridae. Yet the force of the invocations at the
beginning of the Iliad and Odyssey defi nes the Homeric narrator
only as the voice of the Muse. The singer is listening, as it were, to
his own voice speaking words whose origin he himself claims to
be elsewhere. The fi rst lines of the poems implicitly suggest that
different singers can perform the ‘same’ song.

84 HOMER
It is significant that this act of handing-over is portrayed in almost

exactly the same manner in the fi rst lines of both the Iliad and the
Odyssey, suggesting that this is a deliberate feature of Homeric
poetry. As if to affi rm the importance of the act of withdrawal and
transference, we fi nd similar ideas also expressed in several other
places in the Homeric poems (Iliad 11.218; 14.508; 16.112). Most
prominent among them is an invocation in the second book of the
Iliad, just before the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (for the Catalogue, see
Chapter 2). The narrator, unnamed as before, calls upon the Muses
for assistance (Iliad 4.484–93):
Tell me now, Muses who have their dwellings on Olympus,

for you are goddesses, and are everywhere, and know
everything,
while we hear only rumour and know nothing:
Who were the leaders of the Danaans and their lords.
Their multitude I cannot speak nor name,
not if I had ten tongues, and ten mouths
or an unbreakable voice and a bronze heart within me,
unless you Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus
Master of the Aegis, call to my mind all those who came to
Ilios.
But I will now tell of the leaders of the ships and all the ships.
Here, in even greater detail than at the beginning of the poems, the
singer has through his own words become an anonymous listener.
As a mortal, he ‘hears rumour’ and himself ‘knows nothing’. The
narrator is without doubt the one who speaks and will continue to
speak (‘I will now tell of the leaders of the ships . . .’). But he has
eschewed his own powers of knowledge, and thus also possession
of the song and the words – as if he were merely the means of
transfer, a vehicle for the voice of the Muses who are ‘everywhere’
and ‘know everything’.
The importance of these lines, then, is in the principles of poetic
transmission they embody. If the words that preserve the deeds
of great heroes are to remain ‘undying’, they must be presented
in the poems as truth that can be transferred from one poet to
another, from one performance to another, from one generation
to another. The narrator’s paradoxical declaration (‘I know
nothing’) carries the force of these lines. Resisting possession by

‘mere mortals’, the poems offer themselves to all those who would
pass them on. The performance of the poem at any one time and
place by any one singer and the text of the poems are aligned, in
principle, with the words of the Muses who ‘know everything’.
Reading these verses, we are now better equipped to understand
claims such as those made by the Greek Anthology’s epigram
(16.295, discussed above). Homer may have a single name, but he
is not one person. ‘Not the field of Smyrna gave birth to divine
Homer, not Colophon, the star of luxurious Ionia, not Chios,
not rich Egypt, not holy Cyprus, not the rocky island homeland
of Ulysses . . .’ Homer is not one person, not a man born of the
earth. He has come to embody the whole of Greece.
Retelling the story of the past

But what, in fact, happens in Homeric epic when an event from
the past is converted into words, told and retold? In addition to
the poems at large – which are repeated ‘traditional’ stories – there
are, inside the Iliad and Odyssey, countless other stories of many
different kinds. Some are presented as hearsay, others as eyewitness
accounts, some as truth, others as obvious lies. We can illustrate
something of the essential qualities of Homeric storytelling by
considering one such tale: the ‘imperishable’ story of the fate of
Agamemnon. The events of this tale lie midway between the two
Homeric poems, in the Iliad’s future, after the sack of Troy, and in
the Odyssey’s past, before the return of Odysseus. Agamemnon’s
fate is not mentioned in the Iliad, but the story is repeatedly retold,
by several different narrators, in the Odyssey (1.29–30, 35–43,
298–300; 3.193–8, 234–5; 255–77; 4.91–2, 514–37; 11.409–34,
452–3; 13.383–4; 19.96–7, 199–200. See also 1.46–7, 326–7;
4.546–7; 10.387–9 = 24.20–2). Indeed, in the Odyssey, the narrative
is offered as an exemplum, a salutary tale from the past that serves
as a model for future action. More importantly, Agamemnon’s
story is told as a model for events that will be retold. By looking at
it closely, we can understand something of epic poetry and the way
it creates repetition and continuity.
The core of the tale is well known (to later audiences, above
all through Aeschylus’ fi fth century bce dramatic trilogy, the

86 HOMER
Oresteia): Upon his return from Troy, Agamemnon is killed at the

hands of his treacherous wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus,
and is avenged by his son, Orestes, who kills both his mother and
her accomplice. Already in the Odyssey, this story is presented as
a famous tale. In Book 1, Athena, speaking to Telemachus, says
(298–300):
Have you not heard what fame [kleos] great Orestes won
among all mankind, when he killed his father’s murderer
the guileful Aegisthus, who killed his illustrious father?
A little later in the Odyssey, the old hero Nestor says to Odysseus’
son and the assembled company (3.193–4):
Even you yourselves, although your live far away, heard

of the Son of Atreus,
how he came back and how Aegisthus planned his bitter
destruction.
One critic rightly points out that the tale ‘must have been the
rumour par excellence in Achaean society’ (Olson 1995: 24).
Yet, as he stresses (1995: 27),
the story of Agamemnon’s death is not the same each time

it is told . . . individual narrators routinely adapt it to their
own purposes, while the characters who listen to these tales
understand and interpret them in accord with their own plans
and preoccupations. The poet himself, meanwhile, uses the
accumulating force of these various Oresteias to deceive,
mislead, frighten and intrigue his audience.
What is important for our general understanding of the use of

stories in Homer is that although each version or telling of the tale
functions within its context, they are not quite made-up stories or
variants in opposition to a single truth.
Let us briefly see how versions of the same tale change and how
each fits in its context. In Book 1 of the Odyssey, Athena offers
advice to Telemachus. She presents the tale of Agamemnon’s
death as an example everyone should know, as recollected truth
that should guide Telemachus’ future behaviour (‘you too, be

valiant’, 1.301–2). While Agamemnon is away, Aegisthus devises

‘woeful/bitter work’ (3.303) and slays him upon his return, but
after 8 years, Orestes appears and slays his father’s killer (3.307).
The analogy between Orestes’ story in the past and Telemachus’
situation in the present is useful. In both cases, outsiders pose
a threat to the father’s rightful place within the marital union
and they must be stopped. But the analogy has to be managed
carefully. Athena must fashion her tale with only specific
goals in mind. Unlike Agamemnon’s wife and Orestes’ mother
Clytemnestra, Penelope, Odysseus’ wife and Telemachus’ mother,
is a paragon of fidelity and faithfulness. If Athena, speaking to
Telemachus, were to lay the blame of Agamemnon’s death on
Clytemnestra, the mother of the ‘avenger’, and if this story were
to serve as the model for action and to be repeated in Odysseus’
house, Telemachus might get the wrong idea. Would he then try
to kill his mother Penelope? It is hardly surprising that in this
version, Athena places the blame of Agamemnon’s death squarely
on Aegisthus and leaves Clytemnestra entirely out of the tale.
A different version of this narrative appears later in the Odyssey
(11.409–34), when the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus how he
died. Here blame is placed a little more clearly with Clytemnestra.
Agamemnon says (409–10):
Aegisthus planned death and doom for me

He, with my destructive [oulomenêi] wife, called me to his
house and killed me.
Clytemnestra is described as ‘destructive/accursed’. The poet uses

exactly the same word which also describes the wrath of Achilles
at the beginning of the Iliad (1.2). Clytemnestra, like the wrath, is
a ‘thematic’ cause of events of epic proportions.
The ghost of Agamemnon adds (421–2):
I heard the most piteous cry of Priam’s daughter,

Cassandra, whom scheming Clytemnestra killed.
In this version, Clytemnestra is a murderous villain. The story’s

moral emphasis has changed for the benefit of its immediate
situation and also in order to build up tension for future action
within the plot of the Odyssey. Odysseus must reach the shores of

88 HOMER
his home in Ithaca not knowing if, like Agamemnon, he too will die
at the hands of a destructive wife. The Odyssey, let us add, takes
a particularly complex view of a wife’s fidelity and more generally
of the question of scheming, truth and survival. Like her husband,
Penelope is a wily character. Like Odysseus, she uses her tricks in
order overcome the many perils of her world. Yet her cunningness
also gives her a potentially dangerous power. The whole point,
however, is that, unlike Clytemnestra, Penelope remains true to
the hero of the Odyssey.
The message of these and other changing versions of the narrative
is that stories belong in the moment of the telling, where they must
be managed carefully. Repetition is a useful device, but what in a
scientific world we would call ‘exact repetition’, a reappearance
of the past, could, in the world of traditional heroic epic, lead to
disaster and to consequences that are ‘untrue’ to the ethical values
of the narrative and to the events of the plot at large. Each moment
of acting and telling is informed by the models of the past, but is
also unique because, paradoxically, only in such uniqueness can
fidelity to the stories of the past be maintained. The Odyssey, and
the Iliad too, as poems that effect the fame of their characters are
dependent on this idea for their successful preservation of memory.
Continuity through change is an important principle of traditional
narrative in Homer.
Stories like the death of Agamemnon are often described in
Homer as muthos. The Greek word is the origin of our modern
word ‘myth’, but there are important differences between the two.
As Richard Martin has shown in his influential work The Language
of Heroes, in Homer, muthos denotes a unique type of ‘speech-act’,
an utterance closely associated with the speaker of the words and
‘indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with
a focus on full attention to every detail’ (1989: 12). Muthos in
Homer refers to various types or genres of speech, but especially to
stories recollected from memory – in other words, to stories from
the past. Such muthos implies authority and power by the speaker
(it is opposed, as Martin argues, to epos, which implies shorter,
more ‘ordinary’ utterances, often accompanied by gestures. The
emphasis in epos is on how it is perceived by the addressee. See
1989, esp. pp. 12, 21). Picking up on this discussion, Gregory Nagy
has suggested that indeed in Homer’s time, the word muthos carried
a unique sense of authority. This earlier kind of Homeric ‘myth’ is,

as Nagy says, ‘special speech’ in that it is ‘a given society’s way of

affi rming its own reality’ (1996: 130). It is the myth of stories which
Homeric characters tell each other and no less the myth of the Iliad
and Odyssey which the singers of epic enact in performances that
are precisely tailored to present moment, yet retain the truth and
fidelity of the tradition as a whole.
Outlines and plot structures

The story of Orestes and other stories from the past of the Homeric
heroes reveal important principles of truth and narration, but they
are dotted elements within the larger narrative design of the Iliad
and Odyssey. What, then, is that larger design? Each poem describes
well-defi ned events along a distinct timeline: a dispute between
kings, the deaths of heroes, adventures at sea, a journey home. Yet,
the closer we look at the plots of Iliad and Odyssey, the more we
realize that although they tell a simple tale, the figures of their long
narratives refract in exuberant and not always fully controllable
ways. As one recent scholar speaking of the Iliad rightly says, the
poem is ‘so vast as to defy ready comprehension’ (Powell 2007:
65). The Odyssey is almost as large as the Iliad, and arguably the
strands of its plot are more numerous and more diverse.
We begin, however, with the ‘simple tale’. Formally speaking,
the Iliad has not infrequently been seen as a well-structured
narrative. It can be divided into three essential, interlocking
sections, each comprising eight of the poem’s 24 books. According
to this division, the fi rst section, Books 1–8, lays out the great
themes of the poem against the backdrop of the Trojan War.
These include the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles, Achilles’
wrath and withdrawal from battle, the actions of Achilles’ mother
Thetis, themes of supplication and pity and Achilles’ fate. The plot
begins with Chryses, the Trojan priest of Apollo, who comes as
a suppliant to the Greek camp, begging to ransom his daughter
Chryseis. Chryseis is Agamemnon’s captive prize, and he refuses
to hand her over. Later, he is forced to do so, but seizes Achilles’
captive and prize, Briseis, in her stead. The quarrel between these
two heroes ensues, and Achilles, on advice from his divine mother
Thetis (1.421–2), withdraws from the battlefield. Achilles’ decision

90 HOMER
will mark his path between a long but unremarkable life and a
short life of excellence that will carry with it imperishable fame.
This fi rst part of the poem introduces the main Greek heroes,
Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Ajax, Diomedes and
the main character on the Trojan side including Menelaus’ wife
Helen and her abductor Paris, king Priam, the hero Aeneas and
Hector, Priam’s son and defender of Troy. The section contains
important assembly scenes, broken truces and long descriptions of
fighting between both mortal heroes and gods.
The middle part of the poem, Books 9–16, focuses on the
immediate effects of the quarrel and on Achilles’ wrath and
withdrawal. This section deepens the resonance of major themes.
Book 9 describes the ‘Embassy’, the long scene describing the
meeting between Achilles and three comrades who have come to
see him in his self-imposed seclusion and attempt to entice him
to rejoin the fighting. Achilles refuses, but the speeches in this
book outline important values, perspectives and states of mind.
They not only lay out the codes of heroic action and thought in
Homer but also challenge them. In the ‘fighting books’ that follow,
the drama of Achilles’ absence unfolds and the Greeks’ position
becomes more and more difficult. With Achilles refusing to fight,
his comrade Patroclus sets out to help the Greeks, and heads for
battle wearing Achilles’ armour. Despite initial success, Patroclus
is killed by Hector in Book 16.
The third and fi nal part of the Iliad, containing Books 17–24,
explores the fateful consequences of the previous sections and
brings the Iliad to its climax and close. With Patroclus dead,
Achilles must put aside is wrath and return to battle. He and
Agamemnon are reconciled; their quarrel is resolved. Yet, seeking
to avenge Patroclus, a new kind of frenzy takes hold of Achilles,
and he is forced to re-confront his fate. His choice is precipitous
death, which, however, is to occur beyond the end of the narrative
of the Iliad. Much fighting among both heroes and gods follows
Achilles’ return to battle. The Homeric gods, often deeply affected
by the death of their mortal favourites, cannot themselves die. For
gods, the consequences of heroic excellence are limited. The brevity
and fragility of mortal life, highlighted by the constant interaction
between men and the immortal gods, as well as by the semi-divine
parentage of heroes, is a constant background to all action in the
poem. Achilles pursues Hector and, with the help of the gods, slays

him. The Iliad concludes, as it begins, with a scene of supplication.

Priam, Hector’s father, comes to the Greek camp, meets Achilles,
offers ransom and begs for the return of his son’s corpse. A brief
moment of communion passes between Achilles and Priam, and
Achilles grants the suppliant’s wish. Hector’s mother Hecuba, his
wife Andromache and Helen each offers a speech of mourning as
the Trojans bury Hector.
The arrangement of events is the essence of the plot. It was,
of course, also the main concern for Aristotle in the Poetics,
antiquity’s most prominent work of literary criticism. Well-
constructed plots, Aristotle argued, contained a sequence of a
beginning, middle and end linked by relations of cause and effect.
A beginning is that ‘which does not itself follow anything by
causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes
to be’. An end is that ‘which itself naturally follows some other
thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following
it’. A middle is that ‘which follows something as some other thing
follows it’ (Poetics section VII, 1450b.26–31).1 In the Poetics,
Aristotle describes the overall movement of such plots in terms
of ‘complication’ (or ‘binding’, in Greek dêsis) of the themes,
followed by their ‘resolution’ (in Greek lysis; 1455b.24–32).
And indeed, it is not difficult to describe the Iliad ’s plot in this
manner. The poem fi rst ‘complicates’ emotions, social relations
and hierarchies as well as conceptions of the self and the world.
It brings these themes to a point (or points) of crisis, and fi nally
winds its way towards a resolution. We can speak of the quarrel
that begins and ends, of the rise and subsidence of wrath, of a
pattern of ‘withdrawal and return’ in Achilles’ actions or, with
a change of perspective, for example, of the tragedy of Hector
or indeed of the tragedy of Achilles, which can be understood in
Aristotelian terms. We can point to the correspondences between
Agamemnon’s rejection of Chryses’ supplication in the fi rst book
of the poem and Achilles acceptance of Priam’s supplication in
the last book, and so on.
Yet the plot of the Iliad cannot simply be reduced to such an
elegant form. Aristotle himself was among the fi rst to draw our
attention to the complexity of epic plots.
1
The letters which follow the section numbers refer to the standard pagination
(‘Bekker numbers’, following this scholar’s edition) for the works of Aristotle.

92 HOMER
He famously says (Poetics, 1450b.34–51a.6):
A beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole

composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement
of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty
depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal
organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused,
the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of
time. Nor again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye
cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is
lost for the spectator . . . As, therefore, in the case of animate
bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary . . . so
in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can
be easily embraced by the memory.
Proper magnitude is a central concern for Aristotle. Of course,

his main object of study in the Poetics is tragedy. Epic poetry,
he realized, could not be judged by the same standards, if only
because of its greater length. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for
example, is a long play, but at 1,530 verses, it is only one-tenth the
size of the Iliad, which contains 15,693 verses (and almost one-
twentieth the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined!). Equally
important is the inherent arrangement of events within the plot.
Tragedy, Aristotle suggested, should have a single action and it
should confi ne its action, as much as possible, to a single revolution
of the sun. The Iliad and epic, he knew, extended over many days
and in a deeper sense were ‘not bound by limits of time’ (Poetics
1449b.14). And ‘epic structure’ as he says, contains ‘a multiplicity
of plots’ (1456a.10–19).
Is the Iliad really ‘not bound by limits of time’? As we have already
noted briefly, counting each rise of day and each sunset marked in
the text and paying close attention to the passage of ‘real time’ in
the plot, we find that the poem’s events cover just 51 days of action
during the final year of a war that lasted (as Homeric poetry itself
tells us) 10 whole years. The Odyssey’s time counted in a similar
way spans just 41 days in a period that covers 10 years of war and
10 years of wandering. Furthermore, the beginning of the Iliad is
not independent of events that precede it. It certainly follows the
Judgement of Paris and the abduction of Helen by ‘causal necessity’,
as Aristotle would say. These earlier events are not told in the poem,

but without them, the plot of the Iliad and the Trojan War would not
exist. The beginning of the Iliad, then, is not quite an Aristotelian
beginning, but rather, as Horace noted, a beginning in medias res,
‘in the midst of things’ (Ars Poetica 148). One modern critic extends
this idea: ‘the epic has no simple beginning; there is a range of
possibilities which remain problematic’ (Lynn-Georg 1988: 39).
The end of the Iliad is likewise ‘un-Aristotelian’ and occurs in
the midst of things. The name Iliad suggests that this is the story
of Ilium, the city of Troy, but the poem concludes well before the
fall of Troy, an event which is not narrated in the Iliad. And even
though it focuses on the wrath of the Achilles, the poem is not
called the Achilleid.
The Odyssey, which is named after its hero, displays the
comparable discrepancies. It too is not simply a snapshot of 41 days
in the life of one man. Despite their immense size on the one hand,
and the limited ‘real-time’ span of their plots on the other, both the
Iliad and Odyssey are just parts of larger stories. These are stories
which other, later and often shorter epic poems like the Cypria, the
Thebais, the Little Iliad, the Returns, and perhaps even such poems
as Virgil’s Aeneid try to complete. Aristotle’s suggestion that epic
is ‘not bound by time’ and contains ‘a multiplicity’ of plots is not
wrong.
Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is, in essence, a simple tale: As
already Aristotle says, it can ‘be stated briefly’ (Poetics XVII,
1455b.17–23):
A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously

watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home
is in a wretched plight – suitors are wasting his substance and
plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tossed, he himself
arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he
attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved
while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest
is episode.
This summary may be the essence of the plot, but it is not how
events are presented in the actual narrative of the Odyssey, which
is far more fractured and complex.
The Odyssey, as Longinus says, is ‘a sort of epilogue to the Iliad’.
Yet, if in this poem, we were expecting to go back and tie up all Iliad’s

94 HOMER
‘loose ends’, we will, for the most part, be disappointed. The events
of the Odyssey do occur after the events of the Iliad, of course, and
knowledge of the fall of Troy constantly resonates in the background
of the Odyssey. Indeed, even some events not told in the Iliad are not
forgotten. Yet the Odyssey brings about a great change. At the end
of the Iliad, Menelaus and Helen are still separated, he in the Greek
camp, she behind the walls of Troy. When we reach the Odyssey,
the two are back in Sparta, reunited in apparent conjugal harmony.
At the end of the Iliad, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax and many other
heroes are still alive and fighting. When they appear in the Odyssey,
they are dead spirits in the underworld. We the audience/readers
have only ‘blinked’ for an instant as we move from the last line of
the Iliad to the first line of the Odyssey. Yet, in this brief moment of
transition, the scene, the tone, the flow of time, the characters, some
of their values and even some facts of life and death have changed.
The main figures of the Odyssey are neither Iliadic warriors like
Achilles, Patroclus, Hector or Agamemnon, nor are they quite ‘dead-
men-walking’. The Odyssey’s heroes are survivors. Odysseus suffers,
but he is alive. The hero Nestor, already an old man in the Iliad, lives
on happily. Menelaus and Helen live in Sparta and are busy with
the marriage of their children – the next generation. Odysseus’ son
Telemachus escapes a plot by the suitors to kill him and comes of
age. Laertes, Odysseus’ old father, lives to see the return of his son
from the war. The women of the Odyssey, Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa,
queen Arete, Helen and above all Penelope, are likewise different
from the women of the Iliad. Although many of them experience
loss, they are much more active and self-willed (see further below,
Chapter 8).
Comparing the two poems, Longinus (On the Sublime 9.13–14)
says:
. . . whereas in the Iliad which was written when [Homer’s]

genius was in its prime the whole structure of the poem is
founded on action and struggle, in the Odyssey he [Homer]
generally prefers the narrative style, which is proper to old age.
He explains:
. . . Homer in his Odyssey may be compared to the setting sun:

he is still as great as ever, but he has lost his fervent heat. The

strain is now pitched to a lower key than in the ‘Tale of Troy

divine’: we begin to miss that high and equable sublimity which
never flags or sinks . . . In saying this I am not forgetting the fi ne
storm-pieces in the Odyssey, the story of the Cyclops, and other
striking passages.
Whether the Odyssey really is a less sublime output of Homer’s old

age as Longinus suggests, On the Sublime rightly notes the more-
complex nature and indeed the episodic structure of the Odyssey.
The fi rst four books of the poem, traditionally known as the
Telemachy, describe ‘Odysseus’ absence’ and focus on Telemachus
and Penelope. Books 1 and 2 describe how, with the assistance
of Athena in disguise, Telemachus – seeking news of his father –
prepares for a sea voyage. Over the next two books, he visits Nestor
in Pylos and, joined by Nestor’s son Pisistratus, visits Menelaus
and Helen in Sparta. In Book 4, the last book of this section, the
scene shifts back to Ithaca, to Penelope and to the suitors, who
are planning to ambush Telemachus upon his return. The scene
changes again in Book 5 where, for the first time, we meet Odysseus,
who is stranded in the island of the Nymph Calypso, pining for
his home and his wife. Towards the end of the book, he sets sail
and is shipwrecked on the shores of the mythical Phaeacians. He
meets the young princess Nausicaa and seeks the Phaeacians’ help
in getting home. Before they do so, however, the Odyssey takes
a large detour into the past. In Books 9–12, known collectively
as the Apologue, Odysseus tells the Phaeacians of his adventures
over the 10 years of his wanderings – his encounters with the
Cyclops, his stay in the island of the witch Circe, his visit to the
underworld, the loss at sea of all of his companions and fi nally, his
arrival on Calypso’s island. The Phaeacians ferry Odysseus home
and he reaches Ithaca in Book 13. He meets Athena, who will help
him disguise himself and plan his revenge, and is reunited, fi rst
with his loyal swineherd Eumaius in Book 14, then with his son
Telemachus, who has managed to avoid the suitor’s ambush. In
Book 17, Odysseus arrives in the town. He meets the suitors, and,
while in disguise, encounters their arrogance. He meets Penelope,
but does not disclose his identity. The decisive scene comes in Book
21, during the archery contest set up by Penelope to determine who
of the suitors shall marry her. Odysseus picks up the bow, proves
himself in the contest, casts off the rags of his disguise, slaughters

96 HOMER
the suitors and, in an interview which some see as the climax of

the poem in Book 23, is fi nally recognized by Penelope as the two
are reunited. The fi nal book of the poem describes the ghosts of
the suitors in the underworld and the reunion of Odysseus with his
father Laertes.
What, then, is the design of this complex and varied narrative? A
balanced tripartite division like the Iliad’s does not fit the Odyssey.
One suggestion has been to view the poem in tetrads or groups of
four books (see, e.g. Tracy 1990): the Telemachy in Books 1–4;
Odysseus’ adventures in Books 6–8; his stories to the Phaeacians in
the Apologue in Books 9–12; Odysseus in Ithaca in Books 13–16;
events in the palace – Books 17–20 and fi nally, Odysseus’ triumph,
his reunion with Penelope, and the conclusion of the poem in Books
21–24. This division works well in some tetrads, but not in all. For
example, grouping Books 5–8 together can seem a little forced.
These books bind Odysseus’ last experience of wandering and
wilderness on the island of Calypso and his fi rst experience within
the world of mortal civilization among the Phaeacians. Cutting
into the middle of this section, then, is nothing less than Odysseus’
symbolic rebirth (see 6.1ff.), a movement from death to life, from a
timeless divine existence to mortal existence, and the re-emergence
of an isolated individual into the social sphere. If these four books
form a unit, they are a unit made of two diametrically opposite
worlds.
Some attempts to trace the design of the Odyssey sensibly do
away with the formal symmetry of parts with equal numbers of
books (book divisions in Homer are in any case a relatively late
phenomenon, dating probably not earlier than the Hellenistic
period). Instead, we fi nd suggestions of more organic ordering:
Events in Ithaca before Odysseus’ return form one part of the
narrative (Books 1–2); Telemachus’ journey another (Books 3–4);
Odysseus and Calypso are described in the next section (Book 5);
Odysseus and the Phaeacians (Books 6–12) and fi nally, Odysseus
in Ithaca (Books 13–24) conclude the arrangement (Latacz 1998).
Perhaps the only balanced structural division in the poem is the
one that splits the poem more or less down the middle. As Oliver
Taplin, for example, suggests (1992: 19):
. . . the Odyssey is, at a fundamental level, divided into two

parts. Until 13.92 the poem has told of the adventures of many

years and all of the ‘real’ and ‘fantasy’ world. From 13.93 it is
set on Ithaca, mostly in Odysseus’ house, and it takes up only
six days of narrative time.
Whichever way we divide the Odyssey, its overall design is clearly of

a different type from the Iliad’s. Likewise, the end of the Odyssey,
in contrast to the end of the Iliad, which leaves the crucial event
of the fall of Troy unspoken, provides us with a strong sense of
closure. By the last words of the poem, Odysseus’ homecoming is
complete. He is back as the king of the island of Ithaca, husband
to Penelope, father to Telemachus and son to Laertes. The end of
the poem binds together the poem’s many common themes: the
return, both ‘outer’, as Odysseus traverses geographic boundaries,
and ‘inner’, as Odysseus regains his identity and place at home
and in society; further themes include survival, the one against the
many, recognition and reunion, wit, truth and lies, and storytelling
and song. And yet, as the poem’s complex arrangement and its
essential theme of ‘return’ suggest, Odysseus’ tale, especially its
end, which is so complete, also seems to ‘go back’ (return . . .) to
a beginning. The Odyssey promises more journeys for its hero.
This promise is expressed in Teiresias’ words to Odysseus in the
underworld in Book 11; and at least one verse from those prophetic
words (11.134), while predicting Odysseus’ death (the ‘real end’),
also seems to allude to another epic poem, the Telegony, and to
Odysseus’ accidental demise at the hands of his own son Telegonus.
Indeed, already at the beginning of the Odyssey, the narrator
concludes his proem by saying ‘Of these things, goddess, daughter
of Zeus, beginning where you will [tôn hamothen g’ 1.10], tell us
too.’
In antiquity, Aristotle suggested that many episodic elements in
epic are ‘inherent to their nature’ (Poetics 1455b.13 – the Greek
word used is oikeia), but he ultimately suggests that the structure
of epic plots is too diverse to be judged by the standards of unity in
tragedy (which he prefers of course). Modern critic Joachim Latacz,
although he sees deep meaning in the Odyssey, says of its composer
(1998: 35): ‘It seems as though this poet has no defi nite plan.’
Some modern scholars have argued that the Odyssey’s looseness of
structure should be corrected, that elements which offend the unity
of the plot should be erased from the text as inorganic intrusions.
Others, however, have suggested that digressive material embodies

98 HOMER
precisely ‘the substance of the narrative’ and have stressed the

differences between, for example, oral poetics and literate unity,
between cumulative and hierarchical stylistic and linguistic
principles: digressions and other features closely associated with
oral culture, on their own or in conjunction with elements of
formal order, are, in fact ‘rich with meaning’ (Martin 2000: 49).
Whichever way we look at the structure of the Odyssey, whether as
an accident of historical accumulation or as the result of a principle
of poetics, we are faced with a diversity that marks both the poem
as we have it and its poetic tradition.

CHAPTER SIX
The Iliad
The withdrawal of Achilles, prizes and

fame
Having briefly looked at the overall structure of the poems,
we need to consider some details of their themes and qualities
as they appear, as the narrator wished them to be told, in the
order of the plot. What follows, we must stress, is not a detailed
commentary, but a discussion of key points and ideas as they
appear in their traditional sequence.
The fi rst third of the Iliad, Books 1–8, covers a period of
25 days in the ninth and penultimate year of the Trojan War
(cf. 2.295). Following the proem, events begin, we recall, as
Chryses, the Trojan priest of Apollo, comes to the Greek camp
to plead for the return of his daughter, Chryseis (1.12ff.), who
is Agamemnon’s captive and his share in the spoils of war.
Agamemnon, a harsh and inflexible leader, refuses to give her
back and Apollo sends upon the Greeks a plague (1.44ff.) that
rages for nine days. On the tenth day (1.54), Achilles summons
the assembly. He and Agamemnon exchange heated words, but
Agamemnon is eventually forced to release Chryseis (1.116ff).
Unable to lose face, he seeks a replacement: ‘prepare another
prize for me, so that I should not be the only one among
the Argives who is without a prize, for that would not be
appropriate’ (1.118–19), and takes Briseis, Achilles’ prize and
captive woman. The outraged Achilles decides to withdraw
from battle and the Iliad’s thematic quarrel is launched.

100 HOMER
There is a skilful build-up of emotion here, as the two heroes ratchet

up their hostility towards each other. Achilles calls Agamemnon
‘a man clothed in shamelessness, of a crafty and covetous mind’
(1.149). Agamemnon returns the favour and says ‘by all means, run
away if your heart bids you so, I will not plead with you to stay for
my sake. I have with me others who will do me honour’ (1.173–5).
Yet we are also dealing with a larger moment of crisis of values
and the questioning of a world system. Prizes, and captive women
in particular, are essential ‘capital’ in Homer’s symbolic economy
and world order: The prize is a material reflection of the hero’s
valour among his peers and, in a sense, it also embodies the status
of the hero. We are dealing, in other words, with the basic codes of
exchange, reciprocity, hierarchy and social order.
The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is a single
event, triggered by specific actions. Yet it is also an expression of
persistent personal and social tensions and it is, in this sense, a
confl ict built into the structure of Homeric society. Agamemnon
is a stern leader and the Greek overlord. Achilles is a hero whose
individual excellence singles him out. He is aristos Achaeôn, ‘the
best of the Achaeans’. One hero holds the greatest power by virtue
of his social standing. The other’s source of power is his own
superior martial prowess. Competition and eventual clash are part
of their relative characterizations in a world in which the absence
of equilibrium and the pursuit of excellence (arêtê) are a constant.
The importance of the prize goes further still. Without the
symbols of status, a hero would not be singled out among his peers
and he may thus also not become the subject of song. Without song,
the mortal hero’s fame would be lost in time after his death, and the
hero himself would be condemned to remain one of the ‘wretched
mortals’. The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is thus
over the body of a woman, over a powerful symbol of exchange
and social hierarchy, over inherent tensions in the social structure
of the world of the Iliad and ultimately also about existential and
poetic fi rst principles. This, then, is the inaugural moment of the
quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon.
Although the indignant Achilles at first thinks of killing his
opponent, Athena intervenes (1.194ff., see our comments earlier,
too) and Achilles eventually allows Agamemnon to take Briseis
(1.318ff.). He then meets his mother, the nymph Thetis, and tells
her of his grief (1.384ff.), and she advises him to stay by the ships

THE ILIAD 101
and withdraw from battle (1.421–2). Since the beginning of the

quarrel, 11 days have now passed (1.477). Several more days pass
rapidly in only a few verses, as Chryseis is taken back to her father
and Achilles’ anger mounts. Here, we see the fluidity of Homer’s
time. It is not homogenous empty time, but a flexible narrative
element that contracts and stretches according to need and helps
the narrator assert his response to mortal finitude.
On the twelfth day (1.493, since the meeting of Achilles
and Thetis, cf. 1.425), 21 days into the narrative events, Thetis
pleads with Zeus to strengthen the Trojans, so that they have the
upper hand and the Achaians give honour to her son. The poem
weaves an intricate relationship between Achilles and Thetis – a
combination of intimate fi lial and maternal emotions, powerful
anger and, especially on the divine Thetis’ part, a sense of ultimate
helplessness in the face of her mortal son’s fate (on Thetis, see
especially Slatkin 1991). Zeus agrees to Thetis’ request (1.518ff.),
although it brings him into confl ict with his wife, Hera (1.536ff.).
There is an important point here. The Iliad, and epic in general, are
large poetic creations that bear public, indeed ‘cosmic’ meanings,
yet their narratives are often carried forward through intimate
personal relations: a husband and wife, not only Zeus and Hera,
but of course Menelaus and Helen too, a mother and son, and
elsewhere fathers and sons, and individual enemies, allies and
friends, such as Achilles and Patroclus.
In Book 2, the Greeks hold another assembly. The Iliad ’s martial
narrative is studded throughout with assembly scenes, and more
generally, with verbal exchanges and speeches, which take up
about half of the total number of lines in the poem. Talking is
a surprisingly frequent activity in the Iliad, considering that the
poem is at heart a narrative of fighting. The emphasis on speech
nevertheless makes sense as a central element in a poem that, as
we keep stressing, self-consciously styles itself as a mechanism
for preserving fleeting mortal action in words. To the Greeks,
the divide between ‘word’ (logos) and ‘deed’ (ergon) has always
been important. In the Iliad, the two domains are inextricable.
Heroes, and above all Achilles, are not only great warriors, but
great speakers too. Social status is not only manifest in leadership
in battle, but also in summoning assemblies and in leadership in
speech. Such speech is often prominently marked. Some of the
most distinct phrases in both the Iliad and Odyssey are the lines

102 HOMER
introducing a character’s speech, such as ‘And to him/her said

in reply . . .’ (ton’ d’apameibomenos prosephê . . .), followed by
the name of a hero or a god – Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon,
Diomedes, Hector, Ajax, Menelaus, Eumaius, Zeus, Athena,
Iris, Aphrodite and more (for speech introductions, see Holoka
1983, Edwards 1987 and 1992, Beck 2005).
Zeus, acting on Thetis’ pleas, sends a dream to Agamemnon,
which prompts him to test the Greeks in a section of the narrative
suitably called the ‘testing’ or diapeira: On the twenty-second day
(2.48) of the Iliad’s plot events, Agamemnon summons the Greek
host and, hoping to spur them on by negative suggestion, proposes
that the armies go home. Catastrophe nearly strikes. Thersites, a
man whose words have no ‘structure and order’ (akosma 2.213), ‘the
ugliest/most shameful [aischistos] man who came to Troy’ (1.216),
and an antithesis to the great heroes, incites the armies against
Agamemnon. Alarmingly, his words, set in hexameters that are as
structured and elegant as those of Achilles and the narrator himself,
nearly take effect. Thersites is nevertheless subdued by a sharp
response and a blow from Odysseus (2.243ff.). Aristocratic order
is restored to the Greek camp, after which the leaders, ships and
contingents of the Greeks are named and counted in the Catalogue
of Ships (2.484–877), followed by a shorter Catalogue of Trojans.
The violent action and powerful emotions that characterize the
rest of the poem are not present in this ‘factual’ poetic list, but
we must remember that for the ancients, Homer was rarely mere
entertainment. We have already seen how the Catalogue, with its
many named references creates the expectation of historical and
geographic reality. We have also seen how, through the appeal to
the Muses in the invocation that proceeds the Catalogue, Homer’s
unique ‘truthfulness’ and authority are invoked. The Catalogue,
whatever its independent poetic merits, projects its ‘facticity’ onto
the rest of the poem. The truth of the Catalogue is the truth of
the wrath of Achilles and the Iliad as a whole (for the Catalogue,
see Simpson and Lazenby 1970, Kirk 1985–1993, Latacz 2004,
Dickinson 2007).
In Book 3 of the Iliad, a possible solution to the conflict over
Troy and Helen seems to emerge, prematurely, of course. It is
merely one of the foils of the plot. A truce is agreed between the
Greeks and the Trojans. Menelaus, Helen’s husband, and Paris,
her abductor, are to fight in single combat which will determine

THE ILIAD 103
the outcome of the war. We, the readers of the book, like modern
cinema audiences, know that this will come to no effect – 21 books
of the Iliad are yet to unfold. Ancient audiences of the poem also
knew that this is not how the story ends. Yet in oral-traditional
performances, the question is not ‘what will happen in the end?’
In the end, Troy must fall. Oral tradition, inherently fluid as it is,
contains absolute narrative certainties, indeed so certain that they
are left almost entirely unsung in both the Iliad and Odyssey. The
question, rather, is ‘what will happen before we get to the end, and
how will we get there?’
Just before the duel between Menelaus and Paris, Helen and
Priam view the Greek heroes from the walls of Troy in a scene
known as the Teichoskopia (literally, ‘the observation from the
walls’, 3.121ff.). Helen names the heroes for king Priam, and of
course for us, the audience and readers. Shortly afterwards, the
duel takes place (3.324ff.). It is an unequal match and Paris has to
be rescued by Aphrodite (and whisked away to Helen’s bedroom).
Menelaus, the cuckold husband, is frustrated in his hope of revenge,
the truce is broken and battle begins (Book 4). These events, and
broadly the whole of this fi rst section of the Iliad, provide a mapping
of the heroes and heroic sensibilities as the main figures are pitched
one against the other, placed side by side, and identified.
The most explicit measure of a hero is his martial excellence.
We get a detailed view in Book 5, a major fighting book which
highlights the exploits of the Greek hero Diomedes. The book
begins ‘Now Pallas Athena gave Diomedes son of Tydeus // courage
and daring, so that he might distinguish himself among all // the
Argives, and win great fame [kleos]’ (5.1–3). As often in Homer,
simple words like the ones in these opening lines also embody
essential principles of heroic epic. Gods and mortals often interact
in Homer. Some, like Achilles or Aeneas, boast divine parentage.
Others like Diomedes, Paris (rescued by Aphrodite in Book 3) or
Odysseus (helped by Athena) enjoy the patronage of gods, who
often influence mortals and incite them to action. The nature of
these relationships and their implication has always intrigued
students of Homer. Earlier scholars such as Bruno Snell, Arthur
Adkins and others had argued that representations of divine
influence attest to an early ‘underdeveloped’ stage in the history
of human consciousness, subjectivity and society in general (Snell’s
book is called, not surprisingly, The Discovery of the Mind), when

104 HOMER
motivation was not yet individualized and internalized and was

thus represented in the form of external agency and influence of
the divine (see Snell 1953, Adkins 1960). More recent scholars like
Bernard Williams have argued against such ‘progressivist’ claims
and have shown that aspects of the self we associate with modernity
can also be identified in the Homeric poems. These scholars
refused to reduce Homeric heroes to the state of passive actors
and have shown how decisions, choices and responsibility can, in
fact, be actively associated with the hero’s cognition and thought
(Williams 1993, Gill 1996). Whatever our view of the question of
historical consciousness and the representation of subjectivity and
the self, what is beyond doubt is that gods and ‘godlike’ heroes
inhabit Homer’s world together. The two groups maintain strong
links and many similarities. These similarities, however, only
underscore the essential difference between the immortal gods and
heroes’ condition of mortality (see further in Chapter 9, below).
In the opening line of Book 5, Athena gives Diomedes courage,
not merely so that he should distinguish himself in battle, but,
significantly, that he should win fame (kleos). The importance of
fame is by now familiar to us as one of Homer’s basic poetic themes.
By performing great martial deeds, by gaining fame and, ultimately,
through a narrative in poetry, Diomedes will draw nearer to
immortality which he cannot otherwise obtain. The literal words
of the Iliad, for example, the line we are discussing, since they are
precisely words of fame that celebrate a hero’s martial excellence
and are available for audiences and readers, provide ‘performative’
validation (i.e. validation that occurs through the utterance or
‘performance’ of the words) of the poem’s stated principles.
Book 5 is a long book that extends for more than 900 lines
and describes heroic combat in detail. We see many heroes, but
above all Diomedes, who fights, sometimes from his chariot, but
often in single combat, the most common mode of warfare for epic
heroes. Here violence and death, through precisely chosen words,
are elevated to the level of sublime poetry. A spear strikes one hero
‘in the chest between the nipples’ (5.19), another ‘between the
shoulders’ and rushes right through his body (5.41); one man is
struck ‘through the right buttock’ and the spearhead drives ‘under
the bone and into the bladder’ (5.66–7) and another is struck
‘behind the head at the tendon . . . straight through the teeth and
under the tongue’ (5.73–4) while yet another’s arm is cut clean

THE ILIAD 105
off and ‘falls bleeding to the ground’ (5.82). As in the Catalogue,

these dense, almost clinical descriptions, although they are not
always anatomically correct, serve to underscore the facticity of
the poems, as if confi rming that Muses really ‘were there’, that
they do ‘know everything’ and have passed it on to the singer. It is,
as the text says, the ‘right buttock’ that was hit. This detail creates
a meticulously precise image. And yet, these verses are not acts of
factual reportage or detached aestheticism. They do not gloss over
human suffering and the horrors of death. Often, even otherwise
obscure victims, who seem to be included in the poem only so that
we can witness the moment of their death, are given brief, pathetic
‘biographies’ (see Griffi n 1980): Hypsenor, killed by Eurypilus,
was, we are told, the son of ‘high-hearted Dolopion, who was
made Skamandros’ priest and was honoured throughout the land
like a god’ (5.77). The dead warrior is the son of a father who will
grieve for him. The Iliad is a poem of heroes and of war, but the
‘non-combatants’, their pain and their loss are also present in the
narrative. The father–son relationship is of particular importance
to the thematics of the Iliad. An old father mourning the death of
a young son is one of the pivotal and most poignant images of the
poem. Such mourning, like the act of war itself, turns the natural
order of human life on its head.
All of the Iliad’s battles so far take place on the twenty-second
day of the plot. It is the fi rst day of fighting and a very long day.
It begins in Book 2 and runs on to the middle of Book 7. In the
midst of this fighting sequence, in Book 6, we see one particularly
interesting encounter, between Diomedes and the Trojan hero
Glaucus (6.1–236). The two are enemies fighting on opposite
sides. Yet, when they meet, through stories of the past which
they tell each other, they learn that they are also bound by ties of
guest-friendship (xenia – one of the most fundamental ritualized
relationships in Greek antiquity. The word xenos means ‘guest’,
‘host’ and ‘stranger’. See Herman 1987). Glaucus tells Diomedes
about his ancestor Bellerophon, how through spiteful intrigue
Bellerophon was made to carry with him secret ‘painful/destructive
signs’ (sêmata lygra 6.168 – the only reference in Homer to visual
signs that may be a form of writing) that order his own death,
and how he only narrowly escapes. Diomedes realizes that his
own ancestor had once entertained Bellerophon as a host. The
two heroes do not fight, and instead exchange armour as a sign

106 HOMER
of friendship. Strangely, Glaucus hands over his gold armour in

return for Diomedes’ bronze armour. It is an unequal exchange:
‘Zeus’, says the poet, ‘took away Glaucus’ wits’ (6.234). Elsewhere,
the Homeric world seems to rest on relations of reciprocity and
symmetrical exchange. Yet, as in this scene, as indeed in a much
larger sense in the opening quarrel of the poem, we realize that good
order and social equilibrium are precarious states, underneath
whose surface potential violence always lurks.
The day’s fighting continues in Book 6, yet in this book, we are
also offered a glimpse of domestic life. We see Hector, before he
heads into battle, in a scene with his mother Hecuba (237–311),
with his brother Paris and with Helen (312–69), and fi nally, with his
wife Andromache and young son Astyanax (370–502). Domestic
narratives involving mortals are rare in the Iliad (see, e.g. the scene
between Achilles and Thetis – Thetis herself is an immortal, of
course). When they do occur, they are marked by sombre tones
and a sense of urgency and commitment which contrasts sharply
with domestic scenes among the gods. The gods cannot die. Their
actions bear no fi nal consequence and their interactions among
themselves are often tinged with comic streaks.
In the last of Hector’s domestic vignettes, Andromache begs her
husband not to leave the city walls and not to make her a widow
(6.429–31). Hector tries to comfort and reassure her and, shortly
afterwards, attempts to embrace his son. The boy, however, recoils
in fear at his father’s bronze helmet and its terrible horse-hair
crest (6.466–70). It is a singular light-hearted moment that also
highlights the mournful underlying tones of the scene and its tragic
forebodings. Hector will die. Andromache will become a widow.
Astyanax, as Andromache herself presages, will be thrown from
the top of Troy’s walls and killed after the fall of the city (Iliad
24.726–38, also mentioned in an extant fragment from the Little
Iliad).
These and many other narrative sequences carry with them
the poem’s preoccupation with mortality, with the fate of Troy
and with other important themes. However, as Joachim Latacz,
for example, in his useful introduction to Homer observes, they
seem only indirectly associated with the story of the ‘wrath of
Achilles’. Latacz rightly points out that the story of Achilles does
not encompass the entire Iliad (1998: 121). The poem as we have it
is ‘larger’ than its theme, just as the poem’s title, Iliad, ‘the song of

THE ILIAD 107
Ilium’, is ‘larger’ than the poem itself. Homeric tradition thus seems
to declare that the monumental Iliad as we have it, canonical and
vast, intact and complete, is still only a ‘fragment’, a part of the true
larger whole. To cover the story in its entirety, we must turn back
to such events as the ‘Judgement of Paris’ (only briefly mentioned at
the very end of the Iliad. See 24.25–30), to the story of the sacrifice
of Iphigenia, of which there is no mention in the Iliad (in 9.145, a
living daughter named Iphianassa is mentioned. We have discussed
the relation between myth and variant above), to mythological
traditions about the birth of Achilles and more. To fi nd versions of
these narratives, we must look, in our extant tradition, into a wide
range of post-Homeric sources, to the Epic Cycle, to Herodotus
and Pindar, to Greek tragedy and to various later summaries such
as Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca, Proclus’ Chrestomathia and more.
Audiences and readers of the Iliad at various stages of the poem’s
long history will have been familiar with some versions or variants
of these tales, some of which digress from the central theme of
Achilles’ wrath. Which? When? Where? We do not know what
precise historical circumstances led to the Iliad being preserved
as the particular segment of the larger narrative that it is. Even
putting aside questions of the oral tradition, the digressive elements
suggest to us that the Iliad is a poem that is only part of its own
story, a story that cannot be described within the confi nes of strict
thematic unity. The fact is that the poem’s diverse narratives, even
those that were suspected or rejected by scholars in antiquity
and in modern times, have been passed on by the tradition (on
‘digressions’ in Homer, see Austin 1966, Scodel 2008). One critic
recently described the Iliad as the ‘eccentric centre of Western
consciousness’ (Lateiner 2004: 27). We, reading the basic lessons of
the poem’s plot, can perhaps use this paradoxical characterization
more literally and extend its meaning: the compact narrative centre
of ‘wrath’ in the Iliad aspires outwards, towards Ilium, and more
generally, towards many other types of narrative and towards both
the past and the future.
Book 6 ends with the parting of Andromache and Hector, as
Hector and Paris head for the battlefield (503–529). Despite so many
events and changes of scene, the twenty-second day of the plot, the
fi rst day of battle, has not yet come to an end. Battle narratives spill
over to the beginning of Book 7 and continue until another truce
between the warring sides is sought. It is only halfway through

108 HOMER
the book that we see the rise of a new dawn (7.381). Essential
as this fluid approach to time is to the idea of ancient epic, it is
also one of Homer’s most ‘modern’ qualities. We often associate
the flexible manipulation of time with contemporary literature
such as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Marcel Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time and with the fragmented experience of modernity.
Many influential twentieth-century literary scholars (including
Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács and others) have
attempted to contrast the dynamic modern experience of time,
change and historical movement with what they regarded as the
static perception of time in Homer and other early works. But as
we have seen, and as many readers of Homer (including Bernard
Williams, Michael Lynn-George, John Peradotto, Gregory Nagy
and others) have shown, such exclusive historical characterizations
are not supported by a close look at the text.
With the rise of a new dawn in Book 7, the previous day’s dead
are buried and the Greeks build a protective wall around their ships
(7.433ff.). Following this, we see much fighting, which extends to
Book 8. Midway through the book (8.470–6) Zeus fi nally decides
to act on his promise to Thetis and to make the Greeks pay for
Achilles’ pain. Hector drives the Greeks further and further back.
As the day ends and ‘the bright light of the sun fell into Ocean
drawing black night over the face of the earth’ (8.485), the Greeks’
difficult position becomes clear.
Achilles’ dilemma and the death of

Patroclus
From Book 2 of the fi rst part of the Iliad to Book 9, Achilles is
largely absent from the narrative. His withdrawal from battle puts
the whole Trojan expedition in jeopardy and casts a dark shadow
over the plot. Achilles’ isolation and absence from action also
bring the hero to reflection and eventually to a questioning of the
very reasons for fighting and of the basic social and moral bonds
of heroic society. The epic hero reflecting on his situation is also
a means for the epic poem itself to look at its own position and
values. Taking the principles of heroic action and fame to their

THE ILIAD 109
limits, perhaps to excess, Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, learns

what the hero can and cannot achieve.
The setting for this important reflection is the Embassy scene
in Book 9. As we noted earlier, the Greeks decide to send three
heroes, Achilles’ old tutor Phoenix, the great warrior Ajax and the
cunning Odysseus to plead with Achilles (the three, we noted in
Chapter 3, are repeatedly referred to in the ‘dual’ form – a persistent
critical problem of special significance for our understanding of
traditional Homeric language). Various arguments are put forward
by the ambassadors: The Argives are suffering, Hector’s violence is
raging, and Agamemnon, as Odysseus explains, has agreed to offer
compensation several times over, to give back Briseis (9.273–4)
and to give Achilles one of his daughters (Chrysothemis, Laodice
or Iphianassa, 9.287) in marriage. Achilles’ response is one of the
key moments in the Iliad. His wrath and Thetis’ advice have forced
him out of the social sphere of his peers and into confrontation
with everything he has known. In a famous passage, he points out
that (Iliad 9.318–20)
Fate is the same for a man who remains behind and even for
one who fights with great force.
We are all held in a single honour, the coward and the brave
man.
A man who has achieved nothing dies just like the one
who has done much.
These are strong and puzzling words. If they express disappointment

at a lack of past recognition – they also express complete and
perhaps irrational disdain for Agamemnon’s abundant current offer,
which should make good precisely this lack. From this perspective,
Achilles’ response can only be explained as the mark of complete,
blind fury which has broken the boundaries of sociality. Yet the
exact words are also strangely ‘rational’. They acknowledge that
death is common to all and that life, once lost, cannot be regained.
This leads Achilles with iron-clad reasoning to a startling thought:
‘Why must Argives fight with Trojans? And why did the son of
Atreus assemble the host and led it here? . . . Are the sons of Atreus
alone among mortal men who love their wives?’ (9.337ff.). Here we
have a fundamental premise of social life – Achilles acknowledges a

110 HOMER
shared condition among men – but no less a radical challenge to the

basic group identity of the Greeks, as distinguished from another
group, the Trojans, without which the opposing camps described
in the Iliad would not exist. Indeed, without discernible opposition
between Greeks/Argives and Trojans, there would be no Trojan
War and no Iliad. Achilles thus formulates some of the poem’s
fundamental dilemmas. He has been forced to consider the shared
experience of all men and perhaps a deep truth about the value of
human life. Paradoxically, these words also seem to suspend the
foundations of his social (‘shared’) existence and his own position
among his peers.
Achilles’ speech is an extraordinary moment of recognition
in Greek thought. It is the linchpin of his personal fate. He says
(9.412–1):
If I remain here and fight over the city of the Trojans,

my homecoming [nostos] will be lost, but my fame [kleos]
shall be
imperishable [aphthiton estai]
but if I return to my beloved homeland
my noble fame shall be lost, but my life shall be long
and the end of my days shall not come to me quickly.
Here too, Achilles’ choice between noble fame and long life is
more than a dilemma for heroes. At stake is kleos as the principle
of epic song, which is placed in an opposite relation to life. Epic
stipulates that the only mortal response to mortal fi nitude lies
in an extension of life through fame, which is, however, only
acquired in death, the very element of mortal fi nitude.
Achilles refuses to rejoin the Greek host and to fight. At
first, he indicates his intention to go back home to Phthia.
Towards the end of the Embassy scene, he relents, though only
slightly. In response to Ajax’ appeal, Achilles says he will fight,
but only if Hector should reach the Greek ships and set fire to
them (9.653). Within the Iliad’s own terms of reference, there
seems to be no real solution to the basic dilemmas posed in
this scene. If the Iliad were to endorse the views expressed by
its greatest hero and his actions, which challenge some of the
basic reasons for fighting, the poem would be suspending, not
only many of practical codes of Homeric societal action, but

THE ILIAD 111
more radically the poetic principle which underlines its claim

to transcend mortality, its own raison d’être as song and thus
its own ‘voice’. If it were to reject Achilles’ words and support
the principles of martial excellence which brings fame, it would
again be rejecting the voice of the greatest figure of its own
creation, seemingly advocating its ‘own’ glory at the cost of a
rapid lunge towards the death of its heroes. The poem, and we,
its audience, would seem to be enjoying death for sport, like
spectators in a gladiatorial show, like the Homeric gods watching
their favourite heroes in battle. A poem like the Iliad, whose
action culminates in profound scenes of pity, whose actions are
an acknowledgement of human fragility, cannot choose this
route. This dilemma comes to a head in the literal words of
Achilles which, as influential studies have shown, overlap the
language of the Homeric narrator (see Martin 1989: 223). How,
then, can the narrator of the poem speak against ‘himself’? The
contradiction forces epic to reflection that has no easy solution.
The result, we might say, is painful self-consciousness.
If there was a simple way to resolve this contradiction, the
Iliad would not be the poem that it is. It would not have been
an ‘undying’ formulation of conditions of being, but a statement
of just one point of view. Part of the greatness of the Iliad is that
although it offers a striking portrayal of the values of heroic life,
it also always seems to offer more. Homer may be ‘the Bible of the
Greeks’, but his views are not pronouncements of a closed set of
beliefs (indeed, the Bible’s pronouncements too are more than a
closed set of beliefs). We are dealing with a poem that responds
to the condition of mortality by creating a setting in which we as
spectators can reflect on this condition and its values again and
again.
Book 10 of the Iliad is dedicated to night-time reconnaissance
missions by Diomedes and Odysseus on the Greek side, and by
the Trojan Dolon, who is eventually captured and killed by the
former two (hence, the scene is traditionally called the Doloneia).
Dealing with ‘unheroic’ ambush scenes and nigh-time hostilities,
this book has sometimes been regarded by critics with suspicion:
Does it accord with the heroic ethos? Yet, as recent studies have
convincingly shown, within the Iliad, a poem of frontal heroic
confrontation, one can also trace an indirect ‘poetics of ambush’
(Dué and Ebbott 2010).

112 HOMER
Sunrise in Book 11 (line 1), on the twenty-sixth day of events

and what is only the third day of fighting, sees preparations for
battle and a revival in the fortunes of the Greeks, including an
aristeia of Agamemnon. But the Trojans and Hector in his own
aristeia eventually have the upper hand and succeed in pushing
the battle right up to the Greek ships (in Books 11–14, leading up
to Book 15). This day too is a long fighting day which lasts for
eight books, to Book 18. The Greeks get some respite in Book 14,
when Hera seduces her husband Zeus and thus draws him away
from the fighting. Here, as throughout the Iliad, gods’ actions
are inseparable from mortals’. But the contrast between the fatal
consequences of heroic combat and the casual, sometimes comic
everyday domesticity of divine actions, in this case of Hera and
Zeus (Zeus falls asleep after lovemaking), underscores the tragedy
of mortal confl ict. In Book 15, Zeus awakes and, true to his role
as the god ‘whose strength is the greatest’ (hou te kratos esti
megiston) and whose ‘will’ is fulfi lled through the poem’s plot, he
takes charge of events again and – as if he were the singer himself –
plots out the narrative course of the Iliad and beyond: Hector will
drive ‘strengthless panic’ into the Greeks and push them back;
Patroclus will rise to their aid, but will be cut down by Hector;
Achilles will kill Hector and the Greeks will fight on, ‘until they
capture tall Ilion, through the schemes of Athena’ (15.71 – the
‘schemes’ are the wooden horse – not mentioned in the Iliad but
described in the Odyssey).
This, indeed, is what happens. Hector’s success, Achilles’
withdrawal, and the plight of the Greeks at this midpoint in the
Iliad’s plot prompt Patroclus to take pity on the Greeks and to
ask Achilles to help (Book 16.1–45). Achilles refuses, but with
Achilles’ permission, Patroclus dons his companion’s armour
and heads for the fray. The poet now, at this fateful moment,
calls upon the Muses to tell ‘how fi re fi rst fell upon the Achaians’
ships’ (16.112–13). Advancing, Hector and the Trojans do indeed
set one of the ships on fi re, but after a long battle, Patroclus and
the Myrmidons drive them back and scatter them. Following an
aristeia (Book 16) in which Patroclus demonstrates his prowess
and kills Zeus’ son, Sarpedon, Patroclus is slain by Hector, with
Apollo’s help. As he breathes his last, Patroclus foretells Hector’s
death at Achilles’ hands (16.818–67).

THE ILIAD 113
The end of the quarrel, the death of

Hector, the ransom of his body and
the end of the poem
The third and fi nal part of the Iliad is a narrative in which the
main characters must face the consequences of their past actions
and the burden of their destiny. Patroclus has fallen, but his death
does not escape Menelaus’ attention (17.1). Hector strips Patroclus
of Achilles’ armour, and a fierce battle over the body ensues. By
the end of Book 17, Menelaus and Ajax demonstrate great valour
and eventually take back the corpse. The death of his companion,
a surrogate wearing his armour, offers Achilles, yet again, a setting
for contemplating his own death. Grief stricken and besides himself,
Achilles must now ‘come back to himself’, rejoin the fighting, and
avenge his friend, even as he is reminded again by his mother that
this choice will doom him to a ‘swift death’ (ôkumoros, 18.95).
Swift-footed (podas ôkus 18.97) Achilles is greatly agitated by
Thetis’ words, but he does not relent. ‘May I straight away die,
since I did not help my companion at his death’ (18.98). As we
noted, throughout the Iliad, he is named ‘swift’ and ‘swift footed’
because, in the fi nal showdown, he pursues his opponent Hector
and kills him (on the epithets, see Vivante 1982). Yet this simple,
often-repeated idea foreshadows Achilles’ future in more ways than
one. The verbal preponderance of ‘swiftness’, in this passage and
elsewhere, associated with the Iliad’s greatest hero, brings to our
eyes a man who, as he will chase his enemy, will also be running
towards his own death. Swiftness, we realize, denotes a concrete
attribute of bodily excellence that allows heroes to aspire beyond
the condition of mortality and defi nes Achilles at a specific moment
in the plot, but it also represents the fleeting existence of a man and
the fragile condition of heroic bodies.
Making his decision, Achilles has not forgotten his anger
towards Agamemnon. Yet now, under compulsion (anankê) and
for Patroclus’ sake, he must leave behind wrath and the loss it
represents (18.111–12). He chooses to die, but in the glorious
deeds of his death, he will ‘gain great fame’: Both Trojan and
Greek women will shed tears for him (18.120–4). Nevertheless,
Hector is now in possession of Achilles’ armour, and Hephaestus,

114 HOMER
the blacksmith of the gods, must make a replacement for the hero.
In the scene known as ‘the Shield of Achilles’, Homer offers us an
elaborate description of its artwork (18.462–617. This elaborate
verbal description of a visual object is technically known as an
ecphrasis. See Stanley 1993, Becker 1995). The shield is a well-
wrought Homeric mise- en-abyme, a compressed means of
reflecting the Iliad’s world from within the Iliad. It depicts a city
at peace and a city at war, agricultural scenes, dancing and more.
What is extraordinary about this verbal description of an inanimate
object is its integrated depiction of living movement and action
in time (e.g. ‘young men were whirling in the dance’, 18.494).
In his famous work Laocoon (1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
discussed the virtues of the ‘Shield’ and the ‘beauty in motion’
it embodies, beauty which transcends the normal conventions of
visual art and its temporality.
Twenty-seven days after Achilles and Agamemnon part in anger
(Dawn rises again in 19.1), on the fourth day of combat, after 18
books of the Iliad, which by some estimates would have taken over
2 days to perform (if there ever was a complete performance of the
Iliad in antiquity), a formal reconciliation takes place. Achilles and
Agamemnon abandon their previously held positions and end the
quarrel between them. Achilles declares the folly of ‘raging in soul-
destroying strife over a girl’ (19.58); Agamemnon offers Achilles
many gifts and admits to the blindness of mind (atê) cast upon
him by Zeus. With these events, social order seems to have been
restored in the Greek camp and the Iliadic theme of the quarrel of
Agamemnon and Achilles concludes. This element of the plot has
been developed, brought to its climax and resolved. Yet this is not
the end of the Iliad. Five books of song, more than a sixth of the
poem, and many fateful events, indeed the poem’s most important
and decisive actions, remain to be told. The poem ‘itself’ thus seems
to tell us yet again that important matters lie beyond the end of its
formal stated theme. Achilles, and perhaps even Agamemnon, are
no longer fighting over prizes as they have before. Precisely in their
reconciliation, in rejecting ‘strife over a girl’ and backing down
from some of their competitive stances, they raise questions over the
regulatory system of symbolic investment and exchange that seems
to be the basis of their social world. This world is whole again, yet
the harmony between the hero and the values of this world can no
longer be taken for granted, as other forms of wrath – Achilles’

THE ILIAD 115
wrath towards Hector and the wrath of the Greeks towards the
city – are yet to be sung.
More fighting follows. The gods themselves fight each other
(Books 20–21) amidst accounts of great martial feats by Achilles
who in his own aristeia slays many heroes. Eventually, Achilles and
Hector fight, and, with intervention from Apollo, Zeus and Athena,
Hector is slain (Book 22). Achilles will earn great fame for his actions
and he knows it. As in Diomedes’ case, this fame is quite literally
the Iliad’s narrative which we encounter as audiences and readers.
Yet Achilles’ wrath yet again seems to exceed all boundaries. As
Hector is breathing his last, he begs Achilles to allow his body to
be ransomed (22.338). In other words, if we momentarily put aside
the powerful emotions and sublime effect of the words, Hector
begs Achilles to treat his death and his body in accordance with the
normative system of exchange, material and symbolic, that governs
heroic society. Achilles angrily refuses. His wrath has taken him
beyond the social, to the borders between human and animal. At
the beginning of the scene, the poet likens Achilles chasing Hector
to a hunting dog chasing a fawn (22.189–93). Achilles now moves
a step further away from the realm of humanity, adopting for
himself the identity of a wild beast. He says to Hector, ‘Just as
between lions and men there are no oaths of faith, nor do wolves
and lambs share an understanding . . . so there will be no oaths
between me and you’ (22.262–6). A little later, he adds, ‘I would
cut out your flesh and eat it raw’ (22.347), and eventually, Achilles
devises ‘shameful plans’ for Hector (22.395) – he will deny his
enemy a proper burial. The whole point, which eventually Achilles
too will recognize, is that neither Hector nor indeed he himself
are wild animals. In life, as in death, they are men. The tragedy of
this moment is the crossing of the boundary between the human
and the inhuman, a crossing which is born, paradoxically, not
of insanity, but of human emotions such as care, guilt, grief and
anger. Achilles ties Hector’s feet to his chariot and drags his body
round with Trojan’s head trailing in the dust.
Patroclus is dead and the Greeks bury his body and hold
funeral games in his honour (Book 23, days 28 and 29 of the plot
events – see 23.109, 226). But Achilles persists – he drags Hector’s
corpse around Patroclus’ tomb with unabated, helpless fury for 11
days, as if Hector’s death has robbed him of revenge. He is now
as incapable of killing his enemy (again) as he is of averting his

116 HOMER
own death. The poem makes it clear that the reasoned framework
of exchange between deeds and prizes and perhaps even between
death and fame has changed.
The Iliad’s plot is not a set of open possibilities. Events within
the poem’s narrative world are governed by an elaborate notion of
fate (in Greek moira, a man’s allotted share in life) and by mortality.
Outside of these events, at the level of the narration, the plot is
governed in the most practical sense by the end of the poem and
by the familiarity of the audiences with the tradition of the Trojan
War. Patroclus and Hector must die. Achilles himself is still alive
by the final lines of the Iliad. Yet he, and we, and even his horses
know he must die (see Book 19.404–24). He is a man whose actions
have simply not yet caught up with his fate and in this sense a man
for whom time brings no real change. Achilles is doomed because
of the hand which he has been dealt by the fates and because he
has been told so by his mother and by the dying Hector. He is also
doomed because the conventions of his world have been shaken
and cannot be restored to their original state: Achilles’ rightful prize
Briseis was seized and, in the course of events, his friend Patroclus
has died; the prize has been returned, but nothing can bring back
Patroclus from the dead. Achilles’ place in the world and perhaps
the underlying logic of his world too have been challenged, and,
once challenged, cannot be as they were before, even when Achilles
rejoins his comrades and is again fighting on the Greek side. Achilles
offers us a uniquely Greek ‘heroic’ (and perhaps tragic) variation on
the religious theme of the Adamic fall, one that looks less to man’s
relation with the divine and more to his relation with fate, mortality
and himself. The Iliad’s world order, once challenged, can no longer
remain as it was. The Iliad has turned Achilles’ fated time, a time
without change, a time in which each man has his own set future,
into a time of absolute change, in which the moment of ‘before’,
and the moment of ‘after’, even though they are moments in the
life of a single man and are contained within one orderly poem, are
separate moments of absolute contingency – each different from
the other. It is the representation of the complete loss of the past, a
loss which is keenly felt but which is perfectly preserved in sublime
and ‘imperishable’ poetry, the fame and glory of Achilles, that is the
Iliad’s and Homer’s achievement.
Achilles is one of the pivotal figures in the West’s canon of
literary heroes, and its oldest (perhaps not the fi rst, but the fi rst

THE ILIAD 117
recorded). As the hero at the centre of a poem that presages the

tragic loss of a heroic world (a change from better to worse, as
Aristotle, describing the best plots of tragedy, says in the Poetics),
he is a very ancient figure. Yet he also cuts a strangely modern
figure of change. Cultural critics and literary scholars like Erich
Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács as well as important
classical scholars of the twentieth century, such as Bruno Snell,
Arthur Adkins, Werner Jaeger and others, have forcefully argued
that the Homeric heroes like Achilles are essentially ‘at one
with their world’. Heroes live and die, but their existence, so
this tradition of criticism argued, is contained within a world
of unchanging values. Fate as the embodiment of continuity
between one moment in time (‘a hero’s birth’) and another (‘his
death’) predominates in Achilles’ history and almost everywhere
in the Homeric poems. Yet we have just seen that lines of fate that
so clearly connect the past and the future in Homer also seem to
separate these moments in time. Achilles has achieved great deeds.
His fate is to die. His fame will be imperishable. In this regard,
he is the hero of an ancient epic. But can we understand all of
his actions within the fi xed existential framework of exchange of
prizes and fame with which the Iliad begins? The Iliad which we
ourselves read today is proof of Achilles’ fame. Can we, however,
understand his actions and response after the death of Patroclus,
his anguish and his fury (and, as we shall see, his acceptance of
Priam’s supplication at the end of the Iliad) simply in terms of the
heroic framework? The question has no simple, single answer.
Achilles’ actions as described in the Iliad seem to suggest, at
least in part, a hero who lives in a world of essential change,
one who can no longer live by his own ordered principles, a hero
who can never go back to a previous harmonious existence and
must, perhaps for this essential reason, die a ‘second’ death which
compounds the biological death. This aspect of the hero of the
Iliad, if we accept it, suggests an existential state of separation,
a kind ‘homelessness’ (as the Romantic German philosopher
Novalis [1772–1801] and others after him have called it) and a
sense of melancholy which is often used to characterize, not the
ancient past, but a specifically modern subjectivity, a modern
historical consciousness and the condition of modernity itself.
Here, it seems to me, we can detect Homer’s capacity to preserve,
precisely through change and multiplicity, a vibrant sense of

118 HOMER
existence and thus, paradoxically, also a continuity from past to

present.
What remains of the plot of the Iliad, in the fi nal book of the
poem, describes the events surrounding Hector’s ransom and
burial. Zeus guides the events. He sends Thetis to tell Achilles to
release Hector’s body for burial and Iris to tell Priam to go to the
Greek camp to take the body back. Priam meets with Achilles (in
the night between day 41 and day 42 of the plot. See 24.31, 351).
He offers ransom and begs for the return of his son’s body (24.468–
676) in a scene which we can only describe as the enactment of an
impossible relation of kinship.
Priam is Hector’s father – Hector is often called Priamidês, ‘the
Son of Priam’ in the Iliad (e.g. 2.817). Achilles is ‘the son of Peleus’,
Pêleidês. This too is a common patronymic, which appears already
in the first line of the poem and is used throughout the Iliad (indeed,
over 50 times). Here, as earlier in the case of ôkus, ‘swift’ or the
word sêma, ‘sign’, ‘tomb’, ‘portent’, we can catch another glimpse of
the Iliad’s intricate verbal texture, which marks both plain fact and
the poem’s deepest themes in the same expression. Achilles, Hector
and many other Homeric heroes are described by means of their
father’s name. It is a practical denomination. A Homeric surname.
Yet naming heroes in this manner constantly reminds us of the
absent presence of the father in a hero’s life and of the epic theme
of fathers and sons (also noted, for example, in the brief ‘obituaries’
Homer gives to many otherwise anonymous fallen heroes). This is
the theme that crowns the closing scenes of the Iliad and, in the final
book, marks a climactic point of ‘jarring symmetry’, a moment of
direct emotion but also of paradoxical reflection.
Fathers and sons are related by blood. Nothing could be more
true in this scene. Yet the blood that unites Priam and Achilles
is not the blood of life, but the blood of death. Priam embraces
Achilles’ feet and kisses the hands that killed his son (24.478–79).
Achilles sees before him the father of the man who was his enemy
and killed his friend Patroclus. If we think of Patroclus in Achilles’
armour as Achilles’ surrogate and of Achilles’ conscious choice
of fate, then Priam is the father of the man who, in a manner of
speaking, killed Achilles himself and deprived Achilles’ father,
Peleus, of a son (24.503ff.). Thus, Priam and Achilles, ‘father’
and ‘son’, meet in an almost unimaginable relation. They are both
bereft of the persons they love. They are completely bound to each

THE ILIAD 119
other by their loss, separated and joined at the same time. Yet
Priam, looking at Achilles, sees his own son, and Achilles, looking
at Priam, sees his own father (24.507–12 ). On the one hand, there
is between Achilles and Priam a relation of kinship which cannot
exist in any society, time or place – such relations between ‘killers’
and ‘victims’ undermine every principle of social stability and
continuity. On the other hand, Achilles and Priam are bound by an
intensely and genuinely social relation, a moment of recognition of
the true force and meaning of kinship, precisely because of who the
two are. They realize what it truly means to be a father and a son.
The bond between Achilles and Priam exists in an singular point
in time, dependent entirely on the circumstances of the moment,
yet it also exists outside of time. It is an event, a relationship, that
appears in an instant and which instantly dissipates (a moment
like the ‘now’ time of the present itself, which, as Aristotle and
other philosophers recognize, is gone the instant we try to grasp
it). This moment and the relation between the two characters is not
an abstract or transcendental moment, nor is it an idea free from
material or temporal constraints or from the persons involved.
Achilles and Priam have not ceased to be who they are. One is a
Greek hero, the other is the king of Troy. There is no peace between
them. The narrative of the Iliad makes this emphatically clear.
Priam asks for the return of the body of his son. Achilles receives
him kindly and consents. But then (24.559–70),
looking darkly, swift footed Achilles spoke to him:

‘Do not provoke me any more, old man; I myself am minded
to give Hector back to you . . .
Therefore do not stir my heart amidst my sorrows,
old man, lest I should not spare you in my hut,
suppliant as you are. . . .’
Priam, so brave in coming to the camp, fears and obeys (24.571.

In a later tradition in the Ilioupersis, Achilles’ son Neoptolemus
eventually kills Priam during the sack of Troy). Achilles, who has
earlier mistreated Hector’s corpse now has it washed and anointed
and gives it back. The Greek hero and the Trojan king share a
meal and one last important moment. Priam marvels at Achilles’
divine aspect and Achilles wonders at Priam’s noble figure and
words (24.629–32). This is not so much a moment of recognition

120 HOMER
of shared humanity as a recognition of the marvel and fragility of

an ‘other’, of someone who is not of one’s own blood and who is
thus not one’s self. It is a human moment which depends (in the
scene) on specific bodily and material presence in a time and a
place, but which can nevertheless only exist at ‘absolute’ points of
observation (see the expression ‘gazing at each other’, es alhêlous
oroöntes in 24.632). Achilles declares a 10-day truce, but this is not
a treaty of peace. It is a fi nite period of respite, a social extension of
the instant of recognition between Priam and Achilles. The truce
is applicable to all, but it leaves the enmity between Greeks and
Trojans intact and the downfall of Troy as certain as ever.
The next day (24.695), Priam brings Hector’s body Home. Yet
even this homecoming is not the end of the poem. Like opera,
the Iliad’s war music subsides very slowly. At the beginning of the
poem, we saw that the narrator handed over his fi rst words to the
Muse, the goddess of song. Now, at the end, he seems to hand over
his last words to other female speaking figures, this time to the
mortal women of Troy and their lament.
The women of Troy have a particular affi nity to loss. They
are doubly disenfranchised: fi rst, because they are women in a
world of men and of sharply demarcated gender boundaries, and
second, because they are on the side of the vanquished. They will
not be killed, but will be taken captive and become the ‘prizes’
and possessions of men. First speaks Andromache, Hector’s
wife and the mother of their son Astyanax (Iliad 24.718–45);
Hecuba, Hector’s mother, the woman who gave him life, speaks
next (Iliad 24.746–59); the last, unique speech of the poem is by
Helen (24.760–75), Hector’s kinswoman (as the consort of Paris,
Hector’s brother) and friend, and also the woman over whom the
war is fought, who has indirectly brought about Hector’s death.
The Iliad ’s fi nal speeches are thus not words of praise for the
great deeds of the dead, but those voices that bear the painful
burden of staying alive.
The Iliad concludes after 9 days of mourning (24.784) with
Hector’s funeral. Fifty-one days have passed since the action of the
Iliad has begun (24.785). The very last line of the poem (804) says:
‘So they were busy with the burial of Hector, Tamer of Horses’,
almost as if there should be more to come. We know, of course,
that this is not the end and that the greatest suffering is yet to
unfold.

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Odyssey
The opening books of the Odyssey and

the Telemachy
As with the Iliad, it is important to look at the main themes
and events of the Odyssey in context and in the sequence of
the verse. The proem has offered us a brief partial summary of
the poem’s action: Odysseus’ wandering, how he lost his men
and how, fi nally, he came home. The verses that follow develop
the poem’s themes of homecoming and return, Wanderlüst
and domestic life, family, fidelity, identity, coming of age, the
passage of generations and time, the telling of stories, the power
of song, disguise, recognition, lying and truth. Characters
in the Odyssey tell many stories – for example, as we have
seen, the story of Agamemnon, or indeed Odysseus’ extended
tales of his own adventures. These stories take us backwards
and sometimes forwards in time in great jagged leaps over a
long overall period from the narrative of Odysseus’ birth and
childhood (19.393–466) to a foretelling of his death (11.134).
Like Odysseus himself, the narrative goes ‘island-hopping’.
It oscillates between Ithaca, Olympus, Calypso’s island, the
Cyclops’ island, Circe’s island and other islands and the land
of the Phaeacians. Judging by the Odyssey, the Muses really do
seem to be everywhere, as the invocation in Iliad 2.485 suggests.
Yet when the plot’s main events are unfolding in one location,
time keeps moving, by and large uneventfully, in others (see
de Jong 2001: 589–90, appendix B). The ‘real time’ of the

122 HOMER
Odyssey’s plot events moves, like the Iliad’s events, more or less
in a straight line, following what is sometimes known as Homer’s
principle of continuity of time or ‘Zielinski’s law’. With very few
exceptions – outside of tales told by characters in the poem – the
event-time in the plot always moves ahead in sequence (rather than
simultaneously – see, however, Scodel 2008).
As in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, linear time, spanning 41 days, is
prominently marked, often by references to the rising and setting of
the sun (2.1; 3.404; 4.306, etc.). Such natural time – natural both
because it is marked by events of nature and because this is how we
often intuitively grasp the ‘nature’ of time – is particularly important
given what we have earlier described as the capacity and purpose of
epic words as a response to the constraints of mortality and as words
that aspire to reach beyond mortal lifespans. The Odyssey, even
more than the Iliad, inspires a malleable sense of time. But without
the backbone of a linear day-to-day temporal movement, we would
have been dealing with a work of art much closer to hallucinatory
fantasy. Part of the strength of the Odyssey is that it can be read as a
‘simple’ traveller’s account. The contents of this account incorporate
many fantastic elements: the enchanting and luscious island of the
nymph Calypso, the mythical Phaeacians, the world of the dead,
encounters with the man-eating Cyclops, the six-headed monster
Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. But the most extravagant of
these tales are contained within the stories told by Odysseus (the self-
confessed trickster. See 9.19) and by other characters. Responsibility
for fantastic accounts is thus partly shifted onto the main characters,
their minds, their schemes, their words and their strategies for survival.
The narrator’s plot and its discourse seem to keep a firmer foothold
in the real world. Keeping this world moving along a linear timeline
in which the sun rises and sets as it does in our own world helps
couch the poem in everyday experience. In other words, although the
Odyssey contains many fantastic elements, it is not a fairy tale but an
extraordinary poem for ordinary audiences.
As with the Iliad, the plot of the Odyssey begins well after the
beginning of the larger story, not only of Troy, but also of the
return of Odysseus, who has been wandering for 10 years. After
the proem, the poem seems to pick up on the tale (1.11–21):
All the other heroes who had escaped sheer destruction

were by now at home, saved from both war and the sea.

THE ODYSSEY 123
But him alone [Odysseus, still un-named!], longing for a home-

coming
[nostos] and for his wife,
a powerful nymph, Calypso, bright among the goddesses
kept in the hollow of her cave, hoping he would become her
husband.
But as the years revolved, there came at last the year
in which the gods had ordained that he should return home
to Ithaca, though even there he could not escape from his trials,
among his own. All the gods took pity on him,
except Poseidon, who continued to rage unceasingly
against godlike Odysseus until he reached his own land.
Following this introduction, we might have expected to hear about

the adventures of Odysseus and Calypso. Yet we fi nd that, like
the fi rst introduction in the proem, this ‘second introduction’ is
followed by another change in narrative tack (we must wait until
Book 5 of the poem to meet Odysseus and the nymph, while the
plot moves to a different location and a different part of the tale).
Poseidon, we learn, has gone off to visit the remote Ethiopians,
while all the other gods were assembled together in the halls of
Olympian Zeus (1.26–7). Only here, as we enter a divine assembly,
does day 1 of the plot begin.
The setting is significant. Just like the Iliad ’s narrative of
heroic fighting, which begins with an exchange of words, so does
the Odyssey’s narrative of heroic adventure begin with speeches
and stories. First to speak is Zeus, who complains about the folly
of mankind and their self-infl icted pains, invoking the story of
Agamemnon’s death and the destruction which Aegisthus brought
upon himself by his reckless actions. The precise ethical import
of this speech and its implication for the conception of justice in
Homer is a matter of heated dispute, but its thematics are beyond
doubt: Old scores are settled in the end, just as return in the
Odyssey is indeed a reckoning, a reconciliation of the past, the
present and the future. The goddess Athena, Odysseus’ protector
(44ff.), now pleads with Zeus and reminds him of the hero’s
plight: ‘My heart is torn’, she says, ‘because of wise Odysseus,
ill fated man, who has long been suffering woes, far from his
friends, in a sea-girt island at the navel of the sea’ (1.48–50).
She tells Odysseus’ story: how he is held captive by the nymph

124 HOMER
Calypso. We have heard all this before only a few lines earlier.
As we keep stressing, the ‘facts’ of epic are known. What keeps
changing are the contexts of the telling. Zeus, who (like us) has
not forgotten (64ff.), now explains some of the background:
The god Poseidon is angry with Odysseus, who had blinded the
Cyclops, Poseidon’s son. The blinding of the Cyclops is a story
which, of course, the Odyssey will repeat in detail later on in
the poem, narrated by Odysseus himself. Zeus now agrees that
Odysseus should be allowed to go home. The will of Zeus (cf.
Iliad 1.5), uncertain at times and susceptible to the wily influence
of the women around him, Hera, Thetis and Athena, nevertheless
guides the Homeric poems and their plots. Athena proposes that
Zeus send a messenger, Hermes, to tell the nymph Calypso of the
decision to bring the hero home (1.80ff.). She herself heads for the
palace in Ithaca to meet Odysseus’ son, Telemachus.
In the spate of less than 100 verses, the story which is yet to
unfold seems to have backed up and rolled into itself. We have
revisited stories we have heard before, we are told stories we will
hear again and we are promised stories we have not yet heard,
but which we may know through the tradition. Such back and
forth movement embodies an important Odyssean principle: The
same story in Homer is repeated and yet is somehow ‘always new’
(1.352, see further below). The Odyssey is a poem about return,
fidelity and the reassertion of identity. But the closer we look at it,
the more we realize that this identity, both of Odysseus, and of the
Odyssey, is never simply a repetition of things past.
The divine assembly scene in Book 1 sets the trajectory of
Odysseus’ homecoming. Yet, as in the Iliad, the fi rst part of
the Odyssey is marked by the resounding absence of the poem’s
protagonist. These opening four books, aptly known as the
Telemachy, focus on Telemachus, Odysseus’ son. The fi rst two
books are set in the palace in Ithaca. Here, several important figures
are introduced: Telemachus, who is no longer a child yet is also not
yet a man nor yet capable of fending for himself; Penelope, beset by
the suitors who seek her hand in marriage, a woman alone without
a husband to protect her; the suitors, reckless and irreverent, are
consuming the wealth of another man’s house (1.160, 248), each
praying to be the one lying by Penelope’s side (see also in the
fi nal books of the poem, 18.212–13). These characters, linked by
Odysseus’ absence, are all set in a situation that teeters on the verge
of change.

THE ODYSSEY 125
One of the main agents driving the Odyssey ’s plot is Odysseus’

patron, the goddess Athena. She not only endeavours to bring
Odysseus home but also encourages his son, Telemachus, to set
out on journeys of his own, thus enacting a kind of continuity of
patronage across generations. Approaching Odysseus’ palace in
the guise of Mentes, king of the Taphians (1.105), Athena advises
Telemachus to call an assembly, to bid the suitors to leave, and
to sail to Pylos and to Sparta to seek news of his father. She
departs, and we, the audience/readers, are left in the palace,
where the suitors are making merry, entertained by the singer
Phemius, who sings of the ‘return of the Achaeans’ (Achaeôn
noston 1.326).
Phemius’ performance is the first of many singing scenes in the
Odyssey. It is a lively vignette which carries great significance. The
contents of Phemius’ song are not described, although they clearly
relate to the contents of the Odyssey, which is itself the song of the
return of one particular Achaean, Odysseus. Of special importance is
the response of the singer’s audience. His words bring pleasure to the
suitors. To them, in their reckless state of mirth, songs of return are
merely a diversion. We, the audience and readers, know better: For
the suitors, ‘songs of return’ will eventually spell death. In contrast
to the suitors, when Penelope hears Phemius’ song from her room
upstairs, she complains that it ‘brings distress to her heart’. She bears
‘unforgettable pains’, always longing for Odysseus, ‘whose fame [the
word kleos again] has spread throughout Hellas and Argos’ (1.344).
We, the audience and readers, again know differently. ‘Songs of
return’ will in the end bring happiness and solace to Penelope. In
this scene, then, song is described as having the power to enhance
in its hearers the emotions of the moment and to presage the future.
It can underscore a false sense of security as well as real pain. It can
carry with it passing pleasure or, indeed, a deeper truth.
It is tempting to see scenes of singing such as this as
representations of the performance epic poetry itself. Yet we
cannot assume that poetic descriptions provide direct evidence
of actual practice. Poetry inevitably takes certain liberties. More
fundamentally, poetry is speech, and speech is generally not identical
to action. A verbal description of the plucking of the lyre may be
beautiful, but it is not the sound of the lyre being plucked. And yet
it is possible to describe the event of singing and its surroundings
in words that, in themselves, are a song. This ‘literal’ parallel is
important. In Homer, the overlap between song as described inside

126 HOMER
the Odyssey and the Odyssey itself as song, while not a reliable index
of historical performance, gives the details of the singing scenes
particular resonance (see, e.g. Mackie 1997: 77, Segal 1994: 126).
Phemius’ song provides a good example. In response to Penelope’s
complaint about the painful effects of song, Telemachus leaps to
the singer’s defence. Zeus, he says, not the singer, is responsible
for the doom of the Danaans (the Greeks). Telemachus adds:
‘for the newest (neôtatê) song is always the one which audiences
praise the most’ (1.351–2). This generalizing statement about the
nature of poetry and its relation to the audience has often puzzled
commentators of Homer’s traditional song. Is Telemachus simply
being naïve, as William Thalmann (1992: 126) thinks? Or is this
an ironic comment? Homeric verse is the poetry of the past, yet
here, as Andrew Ford (1992: 109) suggests, the audiences within
the poem seem to prefer accounts of more-recent events. Is it simply
that Odyssean audiences, in contrast to the audiences of the Iliad,
have a particular preference for newer stories, as Hilary Mackie
(1997: 81) argues? The Odyssey is the later poem, an ‘epilogue’ (as
Longinus says) to the Iliad. Do audiences within the Odyssey have
self-conscious preference for ‘late’ work?
There may be yet another option for interpreting this
difficult verse and Telemachus’ statement, related to our earlier
suggestions about storytelling in general and to the conception of
time in Homeric epic. Considering the link between contingent
performance and general truth in Homer, Gregory Nagy cites
the work of anthropologist Edmund Leach, who has argued that
(Leach 1982: 5 in Nagy 1996: 130–1)
The various stories [GN: i.e., the myths of a given society] form
a corpus. They lock in together to form a single theological-
cosmological [GN: juridical] whole. Stories from one part of the
corpus presuppose a knowledge of stories from all other parts.
There is implicit cross-reference from one part to another. It is
an unavoidable feature of storytelling that events are made to
happen one after another, but in cross-reference, such sequence
is ignored. It is as if the whole corpus referred to a single instant
of time, namely, the present moment. [my emphasis]
Social anthropology has heavily influenced the study of oral

traditions and our understanding of early poetry. If we accept

THE ODYSSEY 127
Leach’s view above, we must allow that all pasts, once sung,
are compressed by traditional narrative into a single moment in
time, into ‘the present moment’. This present is the time of the
performance, which, of course, is always ‘new’. Phemius’ song
about the return and doom of the Greeks is a more-recent story
relative to other narratives from the past, but we must view this
past from the perspective of a performance that always makes
things new.
The Iliad and Odyssey themselves, as poems, seem to provide
unmediated illustration of this principle. They are the oldest poems
in the literary tradition of the West and their themes are older still.
Yet Homeric poetry continues to draw ‘praise’ from audiences and
readers in the present and to serve as a model for ‘new’ literary,
cinematic, dramatic and other versions of the tale. In this sense,
Homeric poetry, like Phemius’ song, possesses the quality of
‘newness’, which does not describe contents never heard before nor
the age of their composition, but enacts a renewed existence in the
‘new’ moment of their (re)performance in the present. This quality
meshes well with the idea of epic as a tool of memory that preserves
the past in an imperishable state through flexible performance
practices.
Book 2 of the Odyssey begins with the rise of a new dawn
and the usual formula: hêmos d’ êrigeneia phanê rhododaktylos
Êôs, ‘When rosy-fi ngered, early-rising Dawn appeared . . .’ (2.1).
Complementing the sunrises at the beginning of narrative action,
we often fi nd in both the Iliad and Odyssey phrases that close
off narrative sections by describing the setting of the sun. In the
Odyssey, one of the most common is duseto t’ hêelios, skioonto
te pasai aguiai, ‘The sun set down, and shadows covered all the
paths’ (e.g. 2.388). As in the Iliad, in addition to ‘punctuating’
the flow of events and matching them to our ordinary temporal
experience, these verses give the movement of time an explicit
visual quality. Epic action normally occurs when we can ‘see’ it,
in the light. Darkness and the end of the day indicate a pause
in action (the night-time ambush scenes in the Doloneia in
Book 10 of the Iliad are a notable exception and, as we noted,
were sometimes suspected of being external additions). The
visual element is important, since seeing in Homer implies that
the observer is immediately present at an event and thus (like
the Muses, for example) possesses unmediated true knowledge.

128 HOMER
Knowledge is, of course, transferrable only by means of words –

hence the importance of words for Homer in regard to memory
and recollection and their power over the condition of mortality.
Such recollection, however, often occurs away from the light: It is
telling that poetic performance in the Odyssey often takes place in
the ‘shadowy halls’ (ana megara skioenta, 1.365, etc.).
Telemachus summons the assembly (Book 2), but is mocked by
the suitors and their leaders, Antinoos and Eurymachus. Antinoos
complains that Penelope had raised the suitors’ hopes in vain –
she set up a great web in the hall, promising to marry when she
completes her task of weaving a shroud for Laertes. But after
4 years, he says, her secret was betrayed by one of her maidens:
she was weaving by day and unravelling by night (2.87–110). The
practicalities of this story are odd (weaving one web over 4 years,
whether unravelled or not, is plainly slow work!) and its historicity
is problematic (there seems to be no evidence for shrouds in early
Greek historical traditions). Yet it provides an effective introduction
to Penelope’s character, her wisdom (mêtis) and her capacity for
intricate and deceptive action. This story, noted twice elsewhere in
the poem (19.137–56; 24.129–48, with some variations), is also one
of the useful emblems of the Odyssey’s plot: both a literal device
for developing tension and a metaphor for the manner in which
events are ‘woven’ backwards and forwards, as Odysseus comes
closer to home, but is blown off course, reaches Ithaca, assumes his
many disguises and narrates both fictional events and events from
the past (see further, e.g. in Lowenstam 2000).
In Book 2, in preparation for his journey, Telemachus asks
the suitors for use of a ship (2.212), but his request is ignored.
Nevertheless, Athena, who assumes many guises in the Odyssey,
has other plans. She obtains a ship and a crew and, disguised as
Mentor, an old friend of Odysseus, sails away with Telemachus
that night. On the morning of the third day (3.1 – the rise of
dawn), the ship reaches Pylos. Here Telemachus meets Nestor,
‘the Gerenian Horseman’ (Gerênios hippota Nestôr, 3.102, etc.),
the oldest of the Greek heroes who had been to Troy and an
eloquent speaker (cf. Iliad 1.247–52), who tells him of the return
of heroes from the war. Yet of Odysseus’ fate Nestor knows
nothing. The next day (3.404), Telemachus, joined by Nestor’s
son Pisistratus, sails on to Pherae, and a day later (3.491), these
two young sons of Iliadic heroes reach Sparta, where (in Book 4)

THE ODYSSEY 129
they meet Menelaus and Helen, the husband and wife whose
former separation looms painfully over the Iliad. Menelaus and
Helen are celebrating the wedding of their son and daughter, an
event that emphasizes the peaceful normalcy of their own union
in the Odyssean present. They live in apparent domestic harmony,
with nothing but feasting and the telling of tales from the past to
distract them.
As elsewhere in the Odyssey, when stories are told, the poem
stresses the powerful effect of words which can bring pleasure,
cast a spell of silence on the hearers, or enhance the effects of
real-life pain. In Book 1, Phemius’ song is distressing to Penelope,
stirring memories of Odysseus. The scene in Sparta provides
another perspective. Menelaus and Helen are their own narrators.
Menelaus tells of his adventures with Odysseus, and speculates
on the loss of his companion’s homecoming (4.182). Menelaus,
of course, is not a singer like Phemius, but an artless participant
in the action he describes. His stories are presented as a report
on direct experience – things he has seen himself – and thus bear
the aura of truth. Yet in theme and substance, in language and
style, Menelaus’ words are, of course, very similar to poetry as it is
portrayed both inside the Odyssey and in the form of the Odyssey
itself. His narrative is like the words of the poets of the Odyssey,
Phemius and Demodocus, and like the words used by the Homeric
narrator, and, if we allow for the conventions of the prologue and
the invocations, even like the words of the Muse. Not surprisingly,
Menelaus’ ‘real’ account pains his hearers and brings everyone to
tears, including, on this occasion, Pisistratus.
Pisistratus is only a supporting member of the cast of the
Odyssey, but his response is worth noting. Like Penelope in Book 1
and like Telemachus, he has a personal relation to the people in the
story. Menelaus’ words about Odysseus and about Troy bring the
‘yearning for tears’ (himeros goöio) to everyone’s eyes, including
Menelaus himself, and they do not fail to affect Pisistratus, too
(4.184–8):
Argive Helen wept, the daughter of Zeus,

Telemachus wept, and Menelaus, son of Atreus,
nor were the eyes of the son of Nestor tearless.
For he recalled peerless Antilochus in his heart,
The one whom the glorious son of the bright Dawn had killed.

130 HOMER
Like Telemachus, but unlike Penelope and Menelaus, for example,

Pisistratus has no memories of Odysseus, nor even any direct
recollection of Antilochus who was his own brother. ‘I myself
never met him, I never saw him, but they say he was above
all others’, Pisistratus notes (4.200–1). Our text thus seems to
indicate that narrative has the power to invoke in the hearers
the memory of true experience which they have never had. The
words may even imply that memory itself is not the event as it
occurred, but the words men say. Such words stir in Pisistratus
genuine emotion and what we can only describe, paradoxically,
as ‘new emotions and new memories of the past’. Mourning
and weeping, as he adds ‘are the only due we pay to miserable
mortals’.
If Homeric words claim to preserve mortal fame, then here
Menelaus’ words come close to achieving this goal, re-enacting
a painful, mortal past so vividly that they draw real tears, even
when no originary memory exists in those who weep. Aristotle, in
the Poetics (1449b), famously speaks of the power of poetry and
imitation (mimêsis) to induce emotion, ‘pity and fear’. In Homer too,
it seems, words have strong emotive power. We may, however, be
left wondering if Menelaus’ ‘imitation’ and perhaps more generally
Homeric words contain an even greater, uncanny ‘performative’
quality which approaches the affective force of reality itself.
In response to everyone’s pained reaction, Menelaus sensibly
suggests that they turn to their supper and leave the stories for the
morning. In famous lines that follow (4.219ff.), Helen rapidly acts
to further sooth the emotions of her guests. She casts ‘a drug to quiet
all pain and strife and bring forgetfulness to every ill’ into their wine
(4.221). Helen’s drug is clearly meant to take away the painful effect
of words. Yet, disconcertingly, it also has the power to counteract
experience and life as a social relationship of precisely the kind that
has just been invoked in Pisistratus’ thoughts (4.222–226):
whoever should drink it [Helen’s drug], when he had

mixed it in his cup,
would not let a tear fall down his cheeks that day,
not even if his father and mother should lie dead before him
or if his brother or beloved son should be slain
with the sword and he were to see it with his own eyes. [my
emphasis]

THE ODYSSEY 131
The Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch (c. 46–120 ce) thought
that Helen’s drug represented her powerful eloquence (Moralia
614.b). He is at least right in suggesting that words can have a
strong, enchanting effect. Elsewhere in the Odyssey, the effect of
poetry and its pleasures are likened to a magical charm. Pleasing
though such charms may be, we here also observe something of the
dangerous power of words.
Having administered her philtre, Helen herself begins to speak
and to tell stories of the war . . . She is of course the woman on
whose account the Greeks went to war against Troy and suffered
so much. She speaks ‘of what is fitting’ (4.239) and declares that
she cannot speak of everything – in words that closely resemble
those of the narrator of the Iliad when he claims that he cannot
speak without knowledge from the Muses (Iliad 4.484ff.). Yet,
if anyone should know about Troy, that person is Helen. She is a
deadly source of inspiration for both action and words, a mortal
Muse. She tells of Odysseus’ secret foray into Troy, and of how
she herself had treated Odysseus kindly and aided his task. Is
Helen now, from her retrospective position in the Odyssey and
aided by the effect of her powerful drug, trying to redraw a more
favourable image of herself? Should we compare the effect of her
actions and words to the effects of poetry? The scene brings to
the surface the double-edged relation of pleasure and pain which
is part of the transition from a world of deadly action and fi nite
consequence to the sublimated world of imperishable words (the
literature on Helen’s drug is extensive. See, e.g. Bergren 1981).
The scene in Sparta ends at sundown. On the following morning
(the sixth day – 4.306 – again we see ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’), we are
back in Ithaca, where the suitors hatch a plot to ambush Telemachus
and kill him upon his return (4.663ff.).
Odysseus’ journeys: Calypso,

the Phaeacians and the Apologue.
Books 5–12 of the poem, or to be precise, Book 5 and up to
Book 13.93, describe Odysseus’ last 22 days away from Ithaca
and the beginning of the end of his journey. As we noted earlier,
views among scholars differ about boundaries and the division of

132 HOMER
narrative units. The division into 24 books is probably no earlier

than the Hellenistic period. And, more fundamentally, behind our
fi xed texts lie the fluid and resonant traditions of song. It is almost
by defi nition difficult to parse these traditions within absolute
boundaries.
Book 5 begins, as usual, with the rising of dawn (5.1), which is,
however, described by a unique formula occurring nowhere else in
the Odyssey (but see Iliad 11.1): ‘Dawn rose from her bed beside
illustrious Tithonus.’ The goddess Eôs leaves her mortal lover. It is
a fitting opening that encapsulates the theme of the book in which
the mortal Odysseus is to part with his beautiful divine captor,
the ‘fair tressed’ (eüplokamos) nymph Calypso (her name means
‘the hider’). Calypso lives in a lush, fragrant cave full of clusters
of grapes and chattering birds (5.59–74). She would have made
Odysseus her husband, kept him with her and given him eternal
life. Now Hermes, under orders from Zeus, visits her island and
instructs her to send Odysseus on his way. She complains bitterly,
but must comply with the order to release Odysseus, who has been
in her island for 7 years (see 7.259), and is tearfully pining for his
home and for his wife: ‘the nymph was no longer pleasing to him’,
we are told (5.153).
Calypso is one of several exotic women whom Odysseus
encounters on his journey home to Penelope. In Book 6, we meet
the young princess Nausicaa and indeed her formidable mother,
Queen Arêtê (‘virtue’). Later we meet the sensuous witch Circe,
the ghosts of infamous women in the underworld, the Sirens whose
song is enticing but deadly, and more. Gender is a fundamental
component of social meaning both in antiquity (Aristotle begins
the Politics with a discussion of the structural unit of the family
and the ‘natural’ division of roles between males and females)
and among modern critics (from anthropologist Claud Lévi-
Strauss’ work on women and exchange and in its many readings,
for example, by Gayle Rubin, to Judith Butler on performative
gender and kinship, and more. See further below). In the fi rst part
of the Odyssey, we have already met two key female characters
who defi ne the narrative, and, we might say, also illustrate the
effects of the absence of the Odyssey’s protagonist: Penelope, who
steadfastly resists the suitor’s onslaught and holds the dangers of
the future at bay, as it were, and Helen, who represents the burden
of the Odyssey’s Iliadic past. The women who occupy Books 5–12

THE ODYSSEY 133
of the poem are different. Their worlds are separated, thematically

and geographically, from both Troy and Ithaca, from the world
of Odysseus’ past and from the world of his future. They are,
nevertheless, each in her own way, partners to Odysseus, and they
play important roles in his journey, at times as obstacle to his
return, at others providing assistance. All possess strong sexual
resonance that combines both attraction and threat (see further
discussion in Chapter 8).
Odysseus builds a raft, and sails away from Calypso’s island
(5.228–389), giving up the nymph’s offer of immortality, but
gaining the hope of fame and renown among mortals. After 19
days at sea (5.269–87), Odysseus is shipwrecked on the shores
of Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. He lies overwhelmed with
fatigue (6.1ff.), caked in brine and naked. At this point in the
narrative, he has been stripped of all but bare life. But Athena,
always thinking ahead, has made other plans for his return to
the world. Disguised as a young girl, she appears in a dream to
the young Phaeacian princess Nausicaa and reminds her that her
‘bright clothes are lying unwashed’ and her ‘wedding day is soon to
come’ (6.26–7). Athena urges Nausicaa to go out to the shore with
her handmaids to wash the laundry. On the beach, Odysseus hears
the girls at play. Holding a leafy branch to cover his nakedness,
he emerges from the thicket ‘like a lion raised in the mountains,
brimming with strength, lashed by the rains and the wind, his eyes
blazing’ and seeking his prey (6.130–4).
There is a great deal of innocent charm in the scene that
follows, but equally, not far from the surface, the tension of sexual
threat and excitement, a mix of the forces of nature and culture, of
animal instinct and social constraint. Odysseus is an experienced
man, Nausicaa is a young girl/woman entering sexual awareness.
At this point, he is alone and has no place in the social world. She
is an eligible young woman of high status who is constrained by
the obligations of her position. Their meeting is a crucial moment
in Odysseus’ ‘re-birth’ and his return to civilization.
The lion simile describing Odysseus, let us note, characterizes not
only the scene and its actors Odysseus, Nausicaa and her maidens,
but also a much wider narrative theme that spans the whole of
Homer’s poetry. Naked, isolated and wild, Odysseus is on the
border of animal and man, in touch with an intense ferocity. As we
have seen, in the Iliad too the hero is compared to a lion. Indeed, in

134 HOMER
Achilles’ crucial encounter with Hector, Achilles likens himself to

such a beast. He too has reached the limits of the human. Yet the
protagonists of the Iliad and Odyssey are as different in their animal
ferocity as are the two poems that preserve their fame. Achilles
is a paragon of martial excellence and a man of quick and fierce
emotion. In the course of the narrative of the Iliad, he becomes who
he is through the tragic event of his being, we might say, through
the boundless wrath that defines his existence and through his anger
towards Agamemnon, Hector, the social world surrounding him and
perhaps even towards life and death and himself. He wilfully chooses
his fate. Wrath and animal ferocity are within the hero, inseparable
from his innermost being. In the Odyssey, fierce emotion and wrath
also form a ‘crucial arena’, as one critic has put it (Clay 1997: 68),
but they are more the setting for action than an essential force from
within. At the very start of the Odyssey, we are told that Poseidon
‘was ever wrathful’ (1.20, asperchês meneainen) at Odysseus for
blinding his son the Cyclops. The Sea God’s wrath is one of the
main driving forces of Odysseus’ long absence from home, but it
acts on the hero from outside. Anger is, it is true, also found closer
to Odysseus himself. His name, as the Odyssey later explains, means
‘the man of suffering/wrath’ (in Greek, odyssamenos. See 19.407
and comments further below). But although Odysseus is often in
conflict with his surroundings, his emotions are always purposeful.
Like the lion in the simile, he seeks his prey in the pursuit of survival
and life. His anger is only rarely separate from rational thought and
the cunning use of words. In the Iliad, man looks into the abyss of
death and is tragically drawn towards it. In the Odyssey, man stands
on the edge of darkness, he has seen the borders of the human, but
his gaze is to the light and to life.
Meeting Nausicaa, Odysseus utters cautious and flattering
words: ‘Are you a goddess or a mortal woman?’ he asks, ‘You seem
like Artemis to me’ (6.149ff.). He wishes her ‘all that your heart
desires . . . a husband [literally “a man” – the same word used to
describe Odysseus himself in the all important fi rst line of the poem]
and a home’ (6.181). Nausicaa instructs her handmaids to give him
a bath and to clothe him. Athena makes her own contribution to
Odysseus’ appearance, giving him stature and adding the colour
of hyacinth to his hair. Thus restored, he does not fail to affect
the ‘white armed’ (leukôlenos) princess, and she, cautious (he must
follow at a distance behind her, she says) yet excited, takes him to

THE ODYSSEY 135
the palace to meet her parents, Alcinoos and Arêtê. Despite some
initial suspicion (‘Who gave you these clothes?’ asks Nausicaa’s
mother in 7.238), Odysseus wins over the royal couple. He tells
them of his 7-year sojourn in Calypso’s island, his departure and
shipwreck, yet makes no mention of his wife, nor, indeed, reveals his
name. Impressed, Alcinoos, whose open enthusiasm is the inverse
of Odysseus’ wary reserve, says, ‘I wish I had a son-in-law like you.’
Here, and throughout his stay with the Phaeacians, Odysseus must
use all his cunningness to attract sympathy but avoid a union with
Nausicaa that will again prevent his homecoming. And, indeed,
he deftly secures from Alcinoos the promise to send him, the very
next day, back home.
Counting bedtimes (7.343ff.; 13.17) and ‘rosy-fingered dawns’
(8.1; 13.18), we can calculate that Odysseus is detained a day
longer than promised (his ship sails off for Ithaca on day 34 of the
plot). This one day nevertheless stretches over five books, as time is
whiled away in the telling of stories which themselves span many
past years, from the fall of Troy 10 years earlier (the Wooden Horse)
to Odysseus’ arrival in Scheria. These stories comprise songs by the
blind Phaeacian singer Demodocus, and, above all, the tales told by
Odysseus himself, who, Alcinoos says, describes his story, his mythos,
skilfully and truthfully ‘like a singer’ (11.368). Thematically, these
books are the most colourful in the poem, ranging from a comic tale
of domestic infidelity among the gods to accounts of cannibalism
and descriptions of other man-eating monsters. In a more abstract
sense, this section is a particularly important discussion of general
Odyssean themes such as poetry and discourse and the relation
between words, memory, identity and truth. A prominent role
among these is played by the theme of names and naming. Odysseus
tells many tales, but does not disclose his name to the Phaeacians
until Book 9, when he feels he has secured their sympathy. When he
finally asserts ‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes’, he also proudly adds
‘I am of interest to all men because of my wiles [doloisi – ‘cunning
tricks’], and my fame reaches heaven’ (9.19–20). Through his
stories, Odysseus, an unabashed master of deception, re-establishes
elaborate links with persons, places and ideas (‘chains of reference’,
as philosopher Saul Kripke calls them in his discussion of identity
and the act of naming). These stories constitute Odysseus’ personal
identity which, like poetry itself, is a complex web of past events
and performance in its present contexts.

136 HOMER
To describe in detail the many fantastic episodes in the Apologue

would require a separate book and can provide only a dim reflection
of the Homeric narrative itself. I will therefore merely outline these in
the briefest way possible as I contextualize more general comments.
In Book 8, before Odysseus begins his tales, Demodocus sings of
the ‘quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles’ (8.73–82), an episode not
attested elsewhere in extant Greek literature but clearly a kind of
compact echo of the Iliad, which shifts the focus of attention to
the hero of the Odyssey. Demodocus also sings of the adulterous
affair of Ares and Aphrodite (8.266–366), a comic interlude that
nevertheless highlights the question of conjugal fidelity and reminds
us of the threat posed by Penelope’s predicament: Among the gods,
infidelity is a laughing matter. Among mortals, as we know from
the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, it is a matter of life and
death. Finally, Demodocus sings of Odysseus’ ingenious strategy of
the Trojan Horse (8.499–520) that leads to triumph in the siege
of Troy. It is a fitting introduction for a man who is about to tell
his story and reveal his identity. Each of these songs establishes
multiple temporal and thematic continuities and tensions with both
Odysseus’ Iliadic past and his forthcoming trials on Ithaca. The
narratives underline the relation between Odysseus and Achilles
as protagonists of their respective poems; they highlight Odysseus’
quarrel with the suitors, the question of Penelope’s fidelity, of
Odysseus’ trickery and the reclaiming of his palace.
Odysseus’ stories in Books 9–13 of his own adventures begin
when he tells the Phaeacians his name and the name of his homeland
(9.19ff.), and immediately move on to the description of an ill-fated
raid on the Cicones (9.39ff.) which results in the loss of many of his
men. Odysseus next describes a visit to the land of Lotus Eaters.
The Lotus is a plant that brings ‘forgetfulness’ (9.84ff.). For those
who eat it, it bears the threat of a loss of fame and thus of a social
death – comparable to Odysseus’ fate on the island of Calypso, the
‘hider’, and to the effect of Helen’s drug. The consequences of this
kind of ‘second’ death are even more disastrous for heroes than
those of the end of their biological life. As he recounts his trials,
Odysseus loses his ships and his men one by one. By the end of his
narrative, no one but himself will remain.
Odysseus’ next adventure is one of the best known scenes in the
Odyssey: his encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus (9.105–566),
a one-eyed cave-dwelling cannibal. Each one of the Cyclopes, we

THE ODYSSEY 137
are told, lives by the laws he makes for himself and his family,
almost outside of any social sphere. The story is a Homeric variant
on a common folk tale, and is also widely depicted in ancient art –
for example, in vase painting (see, e.g. Glenn 1971). The Cyclops
has no respect for the primordial codes of hospitality. He greedily
devours Odysseus’ men, who are his guests. Yet even the Cyclops
is not merely an animal in human form. Perverse as his behaviour
is, he wants to know the identity of his guests. ‘Who are you?’ he
asks Odysseus. The obliging reply is antiquity’s most famous pun.
My ‘famous name’, says Odysseus, ‘is No-One’ (in Greek outis –
9.364–6). When Odysseus succeeds in blinding Polyphemus, the
Cyclops cries out to his neighbours for help. ‘No one is trying to
kill me by trickery or force!’ he says (9.408. See de Jong 2001:
239–49) thereby contradicting himself.
To have a name is to be a ‘man’. The Odyssey’s preoccupation
with Odysseus’ name is a complement to its interest in ‘the man
of many ways’ who has many identities and indeed assumes more
than one name. Calling himself ‘no one’ is Odysseus’ strategy for
survival in a deadly world of monsters. Yet as he re-enters the
sphere of civilization and attempts to regain his former self, he will
have to slowly, warily, give up such tricks.
Having escaped from the Cyclops, Odysseus and his ships reach
the island of Aeolus, master of the winds (10.1ff.). Aeolus offers the
fleet the favourable West Wind and places all other winds in a bag
which he gives to Odysseus. The ships sail for 9 days and on the
tenth come within sight of Ithaca (10.28–29), but Odysseus’ men,
through greed and curiosity, open the bag and release the wrong
winds. The ships are blown off course and back to Aeolus, who
this time sends them away with nothing but words of contempt.
Human folly is always a force driving the plot of the Odyssey,
setting it ‘off course’ and, as already Zeus in the opening assembly
in Book 1 says, bringing destruction to men through their own
devices.
Odysseus sails on to the land of the Laestrygonian cannibals,
where all but one of his ships are lost (10.80–132). From there, he
and his remaining companions sail to the island of Aiaia, home of
the witch Circe. She is another powerful woman who threatens to
take away Odysseus’ homecoming but ultimately offers assistance.
At fi rst, she turns all his men into swine, and indeed would do so
to Odysseus, too. But with the help of Hermes and a magical herb

138 HOMER
called Moly (10.304) he prevails, restores his men to their human

form, and, after a year’s stay, is sent with instructions from Circe
on to Hades and the Land of the Dead to consult the ghost of the
seer Teiresias.
Book 11 is the Odyssey’s nekuia or ‘song of the dead’. It
describes an underworld of sombre rituals and doleful spirits. It is
also an important component in the story of Odysseus’ ‘rebirth’.
Here narrative visions of the past and future – the very idea of
Homeric epic – prevail. Odysseus meets Teiresias’ ghost as well
as the ghosts of his mother Anticleia, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax
and many other heroes and of famous heroines, too. Teiresias
speaks of Odysseus’ future, of the end of his journeys at a moment
of mistaken identification, when, far inland, the oar on Odysseus’
shoulder, the mark of a wandering sailor, will be thought of as
a winnowing fan, the sign of a sedentary tiller of the land. And
indeed, Teiresias also tells Odysseus of his (Odysseus’) death
(11.134). Odysseus’ encounter with the ghost of Achilles is another
seminal moment in the underworld. We get a glimpse of how the
Odyssey interrogates and interprets the Iliad. ‘Don’t console me
about death, brilliant Odysseus’, says Achilles, ‘I would rather
be a farm labourer, slaving for another man who owns no land
and has not much wealth than be king of all the withered dead’
(11.488–91). As we noted already in the fi rst chapter, these words
pose a challenge to the basic values of Homeric, and especially
Iliadic poetry. They point to inevitable change and to the end of
the heroic age, or rather, to the end of the consciousness and value
systems of the heroic world. Yet Achilles’ statement is not an elision
of the past. It is, rather, a mark of its ‘pastness’ and its glory as
past. Both Achilles and Odysseus, different as they are, have, in
fact, made their choice as heroes and have opted for fame.
Leaving the underworld, Odysseus describes to the Phaeacians
how he sailed back to Circe’s island – where he is told of the further
trials that await him on the sea. He and his men will sail past the
island of the Sirens, deadly creatures, half bird and half woman,
who beguile and charm (thelgousin) unsuspecting sailors with their
song and lure them to their deaths. Whoever hears their song never
returns: ‘his wife and little children don’t ever stand beside him or
rejoice when he comes home’ (12.42–3). The Sirens’ sweet song is a
magical rout to oblivion that underscores the dangerous power of
words, especially in the hands of female singers. In order to listen

THE ODYSSEY 139
to the song but avoid death, Odysseus must stop his companions’
ears with wax and lash himself to the mast as his ship sails past
the Siren’s rock. The bleached bones of other sailors that surround
the Sirens tell us that they have sung their song before. Yet they
tailor their song (always a ‘new’ song) to the moment and the man
(12.184–191):
Come over here, much-praised Odysseus, great glory of

Achaeans,
and beach your ship so you can listen to our voice.
For no man ever sails by our island in his black ship
before he hears the voice of our honeyed mouths.
He takes pleasure in it, then departs, knowing more.
For we know everything, how in wide Troy
Argives and Trojans toiled and suffered by the will of the gods.
And we know everything that happens upon the fertile earth.
Odysseus survives. Sitting comfortably in the Phaeacians’ shady

halls, he has lived to tell the tale. Yet his story stakes a claim for
the power of epic song (the Sirens sing of Troy!) over life, which is
essential if poetry is to be portrayed as more than entertainment.
Odysseus tells his hosts of yet further adventures, of more
monsters, of the man-eating Scylla and her six deadly puppy-heads
perched on a rock face, of the whirlpool Charybdis (12.235ff.) and
of the affair on the island of Thrinacia, where Helios, the sun,
keeps his oxen (12.260ff.), and where, again, through their own
folly, his men perish. By the end of Book 12, Odysseus has lost
all his comrades and his one remaining ship has been smashed to
pieces. Clinging to the ship’s keel, he drifts for 9 days (12.447, here,
as before, even the fantastic narratives retain a clear counting of
time. See, e.g. 7.253; 9.82; 10.28 and 14.314) until he reaches the
island of Calypso. Odysseus’ narrative of adventure now comes to
an end and returns full circle to the place where his journey to the
Phaeacians began. This section of the Odyssey is thus an elaborate
repetition. Yet it repeats stories that neither the Phaeacians nor we
as members of the audience or as readers have heard before in this
performance.
Are the stories Odysseus tells the Phaeacians ‘true’? Alcinoos
and Arêtê do not challenge them: ‘you don’t seem like a cheat and
a dissembler’, says Alcinoos, ‘your words have form [morphê] and

140 HOMER
good sense. You speak knowingly, like a singer’ (11.362–69). To us

too, the words of Odysseus and Homer ring true, at least in the sense
that they are masterful and well-formed (they have ‘form’, morphê)
examples of storytelling and song, part of the canonical tradition
of the Odyssey. Yet, quite apart from their fantastic content, these
are the words of a trickster, who later invents what are patently
false identities for himself (e.g. as a Cretan – an inaugural moment
for the tradition of ‘Cretan lies’ in the West). Furthermore, given
that Odysseus is compared by Alcinoos to a singer, are we to trust
singers like Demodocus, or even ‘Homer’ himself? Could they too
be masters of wiles? The structure of the narrative blurs the line
between reality and the description of reality in words. Unstable
and potentially bewildering as this move may be, it is also a strategic
element in Homeric poetry’s claim to enact ‘imperishable’ and in
this sense ‘living’ fame. This requires a brief explanation.
The Odyssey is not a nihilistic poem, nor is it a poem of relative
identities. The return of Odysseus raises basic ontological (‘what
exists?’ ‘Is this the real Odysseus?’) and epistemological (‘what is
knowledge?’ ‘how do we know that this is the real Odysseus?’)
challenges. But the poem is unambiguous about the values of the
social bonds of kinship, love and above all trust that link Odysseus,
Penelope, Telemachus and Laertes when they are physically
separated, bonds that are asserted again at the end of the poem.
The Odyssey has a purpose, an end point, what Aristotle calls a
telos. Nevertheless, the poem establishes the stability of its values
precisely through emphasis on the fragility or precariousness of
existence and knowledge and on the essential plurality of discourse,
and, more practically, especially in the second half of the poem,
through Odysseus’ and Penelope’s constant wariness of deception.
In the end, as we shall see, the Odyssey seems to suggest that we
possess, not certain knowledge, but rather trust. Trust as a force
does not rely on absolute fact, but, in the Odyssey, we fi nd that it
can create the facts of human social bonds: relationships between
a husband and a wife, a father and a son, a son and a father and,
in the wider sense, our relationship, as audiences and readers,
with memory, tradition and the past. Indeed, the lack of absolute
knowledge is inherent to the idea of trust. In a world of absolute
truth, when, like the Muses (Iliad 2.484ff. again), we have ‘been
everywhere and know everything’, trust and mortal agency and,
paradoxically, song, are unnecessary. This perspective ultimately

THE ODYSSEY 141
provides a foundation for the positive claims of the Odyssey and

perhaps of Homeric poetry too: Like Odysseus, mortals who possess
mind (mêtis – a quality that marks both Odysseus and Penelope)
and discourse (mythos – Odysseus is the essential man of words
and Penelope is the one who is the ultimate judge of their truth)
have the creative power to establish and preserve real, meaningful
identities, relationships and traditions.
The return to Ithaca

Odysseus’ stay with the Phaeacians ends with the rise of day 34
of the narrative (see 13.18), as his seafaring hosts ferry him back
in their ship to Ithaca and set him down on its shore, asleep, in
the Cave of the Nymphs. Numerous attempts have been made
to identify this cave and indeed other locations in the Odyssey’s
landscapes (see, e.g. Bittlestone 2005). The temptation of
following in Odysseus’ footsteps, like the attraction of fi nding
Troy, is obvious. The ancient seafaring world and its geography
have, beyond doubt, formed the backdrop to the Odyssey. And
yet already in antiquity, the Cave of the Nymphs, like the cave
in Socratic thought for example (see at the beginning of Plato’s
Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a), have marked precisely the limits
of human knowledge (see comments by Hoekstra in Heubeck et
al. 1988–92 [vol. II, 1989]: 171). It hardly seems worthwhile to try
to reduce them to literal holes in the rock-face.
With the arrival in Ithaca, Odysseus’ ‘outer’ homecoming
comes to an end and a second, ‘inner’ homecoming begins. One
homecoming, it seems, is not enough for a poem whose essential
figure is the figure of repetition. Odysseus must now reclaim his
position as king, recover his identity and reaffi rm his social and
personal ties with members of his household and his family, with
his swineherd Eumaius and with the dog Argos, with his old
nursemaid Eurycleia, his son, Telemachus, his wife, Penelope, and
fi nally Laertes, his father. To do so, he must, paradoxically, assume
many disguises and tell stories of his past, sometimes constructing
elaborate false identities for himself. As a corollary of his words, he
also displays several signs (sêmata) to his doubting interlocutors: He
reveals a scar etched on his body; he strings a bow and completes

142 HOMER
the feat of shooting an arrow through 12 axe-heads; he describes a

tree trunk that is the secret bedpost of the marriage bed he himself
has made many years earlier; and he recounts the layout of an
orchard which his father gave him when he was a boy.
In Book 13, on the Ithacan shore, Odysseus fi rst meets Athena,
who appears before him in disguise, this time as a youth (222).
Odysseus too assumes a disguise in the encounter. He invents
for himself the identity of a Cretan wanderer. Goddess and hero
share a predilection for ruse. Athena reveals her true person and
she and Odysseus together plan his comeback and the downfall of
the suitors. Transformed by Athena into an old beggar, Odysseus
reaches the farmstead of his faithful swineherd Eumaius, where
he tells more of his Cretan tales (14.191–359). He will continue
to do so right up to the end of the poem, promising Eumaius (and
later Penelope, too) on oath that ‘Odysseus shall return’ (14.152).
In spite of himself, he is speaking the truth and foretelling (almost
‘like a poet’) the plot of the Odyssey.
Throughout the course of these events, Telemachus has been
staying with Menelaus in Sparta. In Book 15, he is brought back
to Ithaca with Athena’s help. Telemachus negotiates delicate
diplomatic situations, offers help to a suppliant (15.22–5), and,
sailing home, successfully evades the suitors’ ambush. By the end of
the poem, he will take his place in the battle against the suitors next
to his father (cf. 24.514–15). Yet Telemachus will not replicate his
father’s character and actions. He is not a teller of his own stories.
His journeys are not the existential wanderings of a restless man of
many minds nor the quest for a homecoming. Telemachus’ coming
of age will come to mark, as one critic suggests, the end of a poetic
tradition of Homeric song (Martin 1993). It is precisely the end
of the heroic race, its ‘pastness’, that is the necessary precondition
to the beginning of the tradition of the songs of the heroic past.
This is not a play on words. The Odyssey itself as poetry of the
past and its illustrious tradition of reception in the literary history
of the West, the Odyssey’s pastness in relation to Virgil’s Aeneid,
to James Joyce’s Ulysses and to the many recent Odyssey-inspired
films, are an example of how this idea of a mortal past survives
when it is no longer a living body.
Odysseus and Telemachus meet in Eumaius’ hut and Odysseus
reveals his identity to his son (Book 16). The two are now united
against the suitors and head for the palace in Ithaca. The scenes

THE ODYSSEY 143
that follow focus on the suitors’ reckless behaviour and the

mistreatment (by the goatherd Melanthius in 7.215ff.; by the suitor
Antinoos, who throws a footstool at Odysseus – 17.462ff.; in a
comic but gruesome fist fight with the beggar Iros – 18ff.) of the
stranger, the disguised Odysseus. Penelope’s predicament too is
highlighted (e.g. 17.492–606).
Disguise and recognition are central themes in this part of
the poem, as Odysseus withholds his identity from the suitors
(with much dramatic irony) and reveals it to other characters.
A well-known pathetic vignette describes Odysseus’ recognition
by Argos, his dog (17.290–327). Argos (‘Swift’), once a light-
footed hunter, now lies neglected in the dung. Yet with his animal
instincts, he sees through Odysseus’ disguise. The dog feebly
wags his tail in recognition of his master. ‘Then the fate [moira]
of black death grasped Argos, as soon as he saw Odysseus, in
the twentieth year’, says the narrator. Here again we see the
Odyssey’s underlying sense of ending. It is a homecoming, not to
the house in a time gone by, but to a place that has changed with
time. Return in the poem and in the Homeric tradition at large
would be meaningless if epic time stood still, if Odysseus could
simply re-enter the palace he had left 20 years earlier, if the world
of the Odyssey and the Iliad were not affected by mortality and
irrevocable change.
In Book 18, Penelope appears before the suitors. ‘Their knees
were loosened and their hearts were enchanted with desire’
(18.212). They bring her gifts under the approving gaze of the
disguised Odysseus. They dance and sing and dally with the maids
in Odysseus’ house while the beggar suffers further indignities (by
the servant maid Melantho, 18.321ff.; by the suitor Eurymachus,
18.349). But now, practical preparations for the suitors’ destruction
begin. While the suitors are away from the hall, Odysseus and
Telemachus with help from Athena remove their weapons and lock
the doors (19.1–51). The suitors return and Penelope observes their
continuing mistreatment of the stranger. A long interview between
Odysseus, still disguised as the beggar, and his wife follows. ‘What
man are you, and from where? Where are your city and parents?’
asks Penelope (19.105 – the line is repeated several times in the
Odyssey, e.g. 1.170; 10.325, etc.). The right moment has, however,
not yet come. Odysseus is too cautious to reveal himself so soon,
although he repeatedly addresses his wife with the words ô gynai,

144 HOMER
which can be playfully translated both as ‘O lady’, a formal address

to a superior woman, and more intimately as ‘O wife’. Penelope too
is cautious. She is not yet ready to accept (or at least, according
to some critics, openly acknowledge) news that her husband is
back. Likewise, the Odyssey’s narrative is not yet ready to end,
and we ourselves are not yet ready to give up the Odyssey’s sweet
ironies. Odysseus spins off another Cretan story, making ‘the
many falsehoods of his tale seem like truth’ (203, like the Muses
in Hesiod’s Theogony 27). He describes the clothes which, he says,
Odysseus was wearing on his departure (19.225–43), and promises
Penelope that Odysseus will return (19.306).
At Penelope’s behest, the old nursemaid Eurycleia now washes
the stranger’s feet. Eurycleia recognizes the fi rst of several distinct
signs (sêmata) of identity – the scar left on his leg as a boy by a wild
boar (19.392–468) during a visit to his maternal uncle Autolycus.
We are taken back to a scene describing Odysseus’ ‘baptismal’
moment of naming and thus to the moment that originally
marks his identity. He is Odysseus, ‘the man of suffering/wrath’
(odyssamenos, 19.407. See discussion above and Dimock 1963).
But this recognition too is premature. Eurycleia is silenced by
Odysseus on pain of death.
Washed and dressed, the beggar is given another audience with
Penelope. She tells him of her sorrows and asks him to interpret a
dream which she has had: an eagle with a crooked beak has come
down from the mountain and has broken the necks of her favoured
geese. In her dream, says Penelope, she wept bitterly for her loss.
The eagle then speaks to her in human voice and tells her that he
is her husband, Odysseus, who has come back (19.535–53). The
disguised Odysseus sitting in front of Penelope assures his wife of
the truth of her dream. ‘Odysseus himself’, he says, has shown her
this sign. She, however, remains sceptical. We are dealing with a
complex scene that, on the one hand, confi rms its own meaning,
not once, but twice (internally – when the dream-eagle explains
that he himself is Odysseus; externally – when Odysseus affi rms
that interpretation). Yet, on the other hand, the scene also generates
new difficulties. Readers have found it puzzling, in part because
of Penelope’s sympathy for her geese, which seems to suggest
sympathy for the suitors. But a sense of lingering doubt may be the
verses’ desired effect: At this point in the narrative, trust has not
yet been re-established between the husband and the wife. In its

THE ODYSSEY 145
elusive way, the scene helps to highlight the tensions, fears, risks
and the hopes that a reunion carries with it.
The Odyssey’s plot must nevertheless move forward to a
conclusion. Shortly after her interview with Odysseus, Penelope
announces a contest that will decide her future and accelerate the
closure of the poem. Whoever of the suitors will string Odysseus’
bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axe-heads will win her hand
in marriage (19.572–81). Omens which throughout the Odyssey
foreshadow the future and foretell the events of the plot increasingly
populate the latter parts of the Odyssey. They presage Odysseus’
victory, for example, at the beginning of Book 20, as Zeus thunders
from Olympus (102–4). Odysseus often understands these signs (in
Greek, sêmata again – the same word that designates his scar and
other signs of recognition). In contrast, the suitors fail to read them
(e.g. a bird omen in 20.242–43). We, the audience/readers, too, are
given a message through such omens: Those who can read the signs
of epic will triumph, and those who cannot are destined for death
and a loss of their fame.
The end of the poem

What remain of the Odyssey, Books 20–24, describes the
climactic events of the last 2 days of the plot (days 40 and 41.
The sun rises at 20.91 and 23.347): the contest of the bow (Book
21), the killing of the suitors (Book 22), the reunion of Odysseus
and Penelope (Book 23) and, fi nally, the reunion of Odysseus and
Laertes and scenes from the underworld (Book 24). The archery
contest takes the narrative a step further towards the confi rmation
of Odysseus’ identity. As the contest begins, Telemachus asks
to try to string the bow (21.101–39). Three times he fails. On
the fourth attempt, we are told, he would have succeeded, but
is checked by a nod from his father (21.129). Odysseus and
Telemachus here enact performative statements of their proper
kinship roles, the former with a nod of paternal authority, the
latter acknowledging the sign, in a gesture of fi lial obedience
(In other words, Odysseus’ and Telemachus’ roles as father and
son are not simply given. The text says that Telemachus could
have strung the bow, and we may be left wondering, what would

146 HOMER
have happened had he succeeded? According to the terms of the

contest, Telemachus would have won his own mother’s hand
in marriage. Fortunately, the Odyssey never pursues this route
and its potentially tragic consequences). The suitors Leodes and
Antinoos try to string the bow, but they too fail (21.140–87).
Antinoos and Eurymachus, the leaders of the suitors, now try to
postpone the contest to the next day, but the beggar asks to try
his hand. He picks up the bow, strings it, ‘as a man strings a lyre’
(21.406–8 – see our discussion of this simile, above), and easily
shoots the arrow through the axe-heads.
There follows the poetry of revelation and violent revenge.
Odysseus casts off his beggar’s rags and ‘pours forth swift arrows’.
‘Now, at last’, he declares, ‘this insatiate contest has come to an
end’ (22.5). The Odyssey’s plot, however, is not yet complete. Even
now, the poem is not ready to give up its ruse or to reveal Odysseus’
identity to everyone. Odysseus shoots and kills Antinoos as the
narrative reverts to anatomical observations worthy of the Iliad: The
arrow cuts ‘clean through the soft neck . . . up through his nostrils
came the thick jet of a man’s blood’. Yet the suitors imagine it is
all a terrible mistake by the stranger (22.31–2). Odysseus sets them
right ‘Dogs! You thought I would never come back to my home’
(22.35). They try to protest and to defend themselves, but with the
aid of Telemachus, Eumaius and Laertes, Odysseus kills them all.
He then turns to the servant maids who have been sleeping with
the suitors and hangs them one by one (‘they writhed a little while
with their feet, but not long’, 22.473). The insolent and faithless
goatherd Melanthius is given special treatment. Odysseus cuts off
his nose and ears, rips out his genitals and throws them to the
dogs, and severs his hands and feet (22.474–7). These are scenes
of extreme violence by any standard. Only Phemius the singer and
Medon the herald are spared. Some critics note defensively that
Odysseus does not actually order Melanthius’ savage treatment
(the text simply says ‘they’ did it). It is rather a weak attempt at an
explanation. Others have expressed the hope that Telemachus, at
least, is not among the perpetrators. Some identify traces of ritual
sacrifice in these descriptions. Others still have tried to excise these
offensive bits from the text of the Odyssey. Notwithstanding, it is
hard to deny the fact that Homeric tradition has accepted, preserved
and transmitted these verses and their violence. We must remember
that Homeric poetry, and even the Odyssey and its upbeat end of

THE ODYSSEY 147
homecoming and reunion, is poetry of gravity and substance. It is

not an ‘. . . and they lived happily ever after’ fairy tale.
In Book 23, we fi nally witness Penelope’s acceptance of her
husband’s return. She is, however, in every way a match for her
wily husband, and indeed, plays an active role in restoring his
identity (there is a large body of learned literature on Penelope.
Has she recognized Odysseus? How much, exactly, does she know,
and when? See, e.g. Murnaghan 1986, Katz 1991, Felson 1994,
Clayton 2004). Eurycleia offers Penelope the sign of the scar as
proof of Odysseus’ return, but Penelope, as always, speaks in
sceptical tones ‘It’s hard for you to comprehend the counsels of
the everlasting gods’ (23.81–2), she says to the old nursemaid. One
commentator adds ‘Penelope suggests that gods can manage scars
too’ (Tracy 1990: 135). She and we audiences and readers need
more proof. Precisely because of the poem’s playful nature, the
prospect of ending on a false note is too bewildering to contemplate.
Odysseus must come home as surely as, for example, Hector and
Achilles are fated to die.
The climax of recognition is reached by means of a cunning and
powerful sign (a sêma). Penelope sets a trap for Odysseus, asking
Eurycleia to move the bed ‘which he himself made’ (23.178) and set
it for him outside the marital chamber. Odysseus is fi nally outwitted
by this ruse. He is angrily forced to reveal the secret of the bed –
against his will and thus more reliably – and to confi rm his identity
to Penelope with a true sign. He himself, he says, fashioned one of
the bedposts from the trunk of an olive tree (23.183–230) which
is rooted in the ground and which is thus immovable. ‘No other
mortal has seen our bed’, he adds, ‘except you [Penelope] and I
alone’ (23.226–7), and ‘one handmaid . . . who guarded the doors
of this protected chamber for us’ (23.227–9). If the bed can now
be removed from its guarded inner space and placed outdoors, the
implication is that Penelope’s marital fidelity has been compromised
(for a discussion, see Zeitlin 1995). It is now Penelope’s turn to lose
her balance. The marital bed and her fidelity are intact, of course.
The sign of the bed has confi rmed both Odysseus’ identity and
Penelope’s powers of mind (we shall come back to this important
topic in the next chapter). She tearfully throws herself into her
husband’s arms.
Penelope and Odysseus happily enjoy the pleasures of reunion
(23.296). We too, as audiences and readers, enjoy the satisfaction

148 HOMER
of this moment. At least some critics have been of the view that this,
quite literally, was the end of the poem. The ancient commentaries
known as the ‘scholia’, in a note on verse 296, state that two of
the most influential Homeric scholars of antiquity, both keepers
of the great Library of Alexandria, ‘Aristophanes [of Byzantium]
and Aristarchus [of Samothrace] marked this as the end [in Greek
the telos] of the Odyssey’. These views are also echoed later in
the critical tradition by another illustrious Homer commentator,
Eustathius of Thessalonica (twelfth century ad).
Is 23.296 really the end of the poem? Can we, for example,
ever be completely certain about the identity of a trickster like the
man just united with Penelope and say that his homecoming is
now complete? Is the secret of the bed secure beyond the shadow
of a doubt? Odysseus and Penelope may guard it jealously, but is
it also safe in the hands of a handmaid (whose appearance here
and nowhere else has puzzled commentators)? The end of the
Odyssey’s plot and the reunion of Penelope are complete, even as
the potential of the poem to ‘exceed its own boundaries’ remains.
The epistemology of the Odyssey (in other words, its position
towards the question of true knowledge), the identity of Odysseus
and the essential plotline of the Odyssey were not challenged in
antiquity (with a few exceptions, notably; traditions begun with
Xenophanes of Colophon in the sixth century bce have also cast
doubt on Homer’s description of the gods). But the poem, whose
whole purpose, after all, is to resist the fi nality of life, may here
implicitly acknowledge that happiness is not a matter of absolute,
fi nal knowledge, but of ongoing, living relationships. And of
course, in terms of the received text, line 296 in Book 23 is not the
end of the poem.
Three important scenes follow the reunion of Odysseus and
Penelope. First, a description of the souls of the dead suitors
(24.1ff.). Next comes a reunion between Odysseus and his father
(another aspect of the past, 24.205ff.), in which the hero cruelly
withholds his true identity from an old and downcast Laertes, and
only reveals it later on by displaying a further sign of identity as
he recounts the precise number of trees in an orchard that Laertes
gave him as a child (24.336–42). Last, but not least, rumour of
the killing of the suitors spreads through the city and the Ithacans
assemble angrily to avenge their kin (24.412ff.). A swift battle
ensues in which Odysseus has the upper hand. As the text says, he

THE ODYSSEY 149
would have killed them all (24.528), but he is fi nally checked by

Athena, who in the form of Mentor imposes a truce and brings the
Odyssey to a close.
Where, then, does the poem conclude? One modern scholar
quite rightly focuses the problem by asking ‘In what sense did the
Alexandrian scholars use [the word] telos [“end”]?’ (Heubeck in
Heubeck et al. 1988–92 [vol. III, 1992]: 343). Are we looking to the
closure of major themes? To a rounding off of narrative structure?
Are we simply recording a historical fact of the tradition? For some
scholars, the debate has not yet ended. Yet epic tradition itself
offers a clear answer. Although doubts about the end were never
out of the sight of critics, the tradition never dropped Book 24 of
the Odyssey from the canon. The ‘true’ answer, then, is simply
that Homeric tradition, whose main concerns are precisely fi nality,
the necessity of an end and the possible means of transcending it,
here reflects its thematic question in the literal problem of ‘what
is the last line of the poem?’ Homer leaves that question in the
hands of all those who would perform, read and interpret the poem
afterwards.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Boundaries and social

worlds: Men and women
Gender divisions
Homer’s world, like epic itself, its stories, and even the technical
composition of its formulaic verse, is defi ned by boundaries
that are at once clearly marked and yet movable. We have just
seen how this affects the end of the Odyssey. We have also
noted, for example, that the plots of the Iliad and Odyssey are
confi ned to relatively short periods of ‘real time’, just 51 and
41 days respectively, yet both extend many years forwards and
backwards to past events and to events not told in the poems.
Similarly, in terms of geographic boundaries, the events of the
Iliad are contained within a small space – the Greek camp by
the sea, the Trojan plain and the city of Troy. Yet the Trojan
War, the confl ict of Greeks and barbarians, is an ancient
‘world war’. If we recall the Greek contingents and the host
of the Trojans and their allies listed in the Catalogues in Book
2 of the Iliad, we realize that the poem compresses the whole
archaic world into a single ‘geographic’ site. In the Odyssey,
narrative traverses the ‘many cities’ which Odysseus has seen
in his wandering. It spans the island of Calypso, Phaiacia, the
Cyclops and Circe, and gradually moves from the very end
of the world, the river Oceanus, and Hades, the world of the
dead, to Ithaca, to Odysseus palace, to the bedchamber he
shares with Penelope and indeed, to their marital bed. For all
its expansive breadth, it focuses on just one man.

BOUNDARIES AND SOCIAL WORLDS: MEN AND WOMEN 151
Homer’s social world is similarly marked by boundaries which

structure the meaning of the verse, but which are nevertheless
challenged and traversed. One of the most vivid and telling of
these concerns images, groupings, roles, institutions and relations
which separate the bodies, practices and identities of men and
women respectively. Gender relations are, of course, essential to
the regulation and structuring of behaviour, not merely sexual
or domestic, but for the organization of society at large. In both
ancient and modern thought, these relations have been viewed
as basic elements of sociality. One of the fathers of modern
anthropology and social thinking, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his
seminal work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, argued
that the exchange (or ‘traffic’) in women, by men, within and
among social groups, constituted a basic human communicative
medium or ‘language’ (Lévi-Strauss 1969). But already Aristotle,
for example, in the Politics, began his discussion of social order
and the state (the polis – for Aristotle, the most highly evolved
form of a commonwealth), by describing the basic relations
between males and females and the nuclear unit of the household
(the oikos). Aristotle’s world is a world with sharply distinguished
roles (Politics 1252a.26–31):
The fi rst coupling together of persons . . . to which necessity

gives rise is that between those who are unable to exist without
one another, namely the union of female and male for the
continuance of the species . . . and the union of natural ruler
and natural subject for the sake of security.
Aristotle stresses the difference between the sexes (Politics

1254b.13–16):
. . . the male is superior and the female inferior, the male ruler
and the female subject.
Many of us today will, of course, vehemently object to such views,

but they express a prominent ancient bias which is also significantly
reflected in Homeric poetry. Yet the Iliad and Odyssey also contain
other, more complex images of the relations between the sexes and,
by extension, of the order of society at large.
Aristotle was of the view that the relations between men and
women, as indeed more generally the relations between masters

152 HOMER
and subjects, are fi xed and determined ‘by nature’. Modern

views allow, in greater or lesser degrees, that gender differences
(and according to some views even sexual difference) are a social
construct and depend heavily on historical, economic and political
circumstances, despite the obvious bodily/biological element. True
to the plurality we have been stressing throughout this book, there
may therefore be in Homer, right at the ‘heart’ of antiquity, many
elements that allow for a multiplicity of perspectives.
Despite the martial and heroic content of Homer’s poetry,
despite the fact that the Iliad is a poem about men’s fighting and
the Odyssey is a poem about a singular man, the most prominent
actions and plot movements in both the Iliad and Odyssey, are
motivated by women and are centred on the relations between
men and women and on what the ancients called conjugal homilia
(see, e.g. Maronitis 2004). These relations also underpin both
the order and cohesion of predominantly male or overtly male-
controlled societies and also the threats these societies face. The
two poems do, however, differ considerably with regard to the
portrayal of such relations. The Iliad places greater emphasis on
the destructive consequences of men’s disputes over women and of
states of separation between men and women. The Odyssey is more
optimistic and gives more weight to a positive and harmonious
potential of reunion. Although an underlying hierarchy of gender
relations is maintained in the transition from one poem to the
other, the Odyssey provides stronger challenges to this hierarchy in
a manner that is perhaps comparable to the challenge to the heroic
code voiced by Achilles in the Embassy scene in Iliad Book 9 and
in the world of the dead in the Odyssey Book 11.
The abduction of Helen by Paris from Sparta and from her
husband Menelaus, the larger story underlying the Iliad (not openly
mentioned, but see Iliad 24.25–30), is a story about the transgression
of the socially sanctioned union of a man and a woman. Such
unions establish basic patterns of social behaviour: the legitimacy
of offspring, the rules of inheritance, social continuity and the
division and transfer of wealth. The abduction (whether Helen
was a willing partner or acting under duress) replaces a legitimized
public framework with illicit association. It generates not merely
personal, but above all political enmity between Greeks and Trojans
and leads to the war and ultimately to the destruction of Troy. This
point needs to be stressed: Antiquity’s most famous (one might say

‘foundational’) war as it is portrayed in Homer is not fought over

the control of territory or natural resources, over trade, security
or the exploitation of populations and labour. It is fought by men
over a woman. Furthermore, when the war is won, the Greeks take
Helen and leave. They do take booty, prizes and women slaves with
them, but do not attempt to control Troy and its territory.
It is also important to note that the epic confl ict over Helen
is a strong social binding force that brings men together. The
Trojan expedition is the basis of an alliance – which did not
exist before the war – between the many Greek contingents
under Agamemnon’s leadership. It is almost only Menelaus who
is personally affected by Helen’s abduction. The other Greeks
may be fighting for their own share in prizes and glory. Yet, at
least formally, their common objective is to bring back Helen,
to punish the offending city and in this sense to reassert both
normative practice and a general symbolic social order which
is perhaps emblematic of their future (‘Panhellenic’, see further
below) identity later in Greek antiquity.
The events that form the immediate plot of the Iliad can likewise
be viewed as a narrative of the transgression and restoration of
social order against the background of relationships between men
and women. Achilles’ wrath and the quarrel between the heroes
are events framed by the seizing and return of Chryseis on the one
hand and Briseis on the other. Chryses’ daughter has been taken
by Agamemnon as part of one kind of social order that involves
the distribution of women (and other prizes) among the Greek
heroes in accordance with the laws of war. Chryses’ appeal to the
sons of Atreus to return his daughter and accept the ransom and
his prayer to Aollo afterwards, when he is rebuffed, are attempts
to restore another, domestic order that belongs outside of war.
When Agamemnon is forced to give back Chryseis, this second
social order is asserted, while the social hierarchy represented
through prizes in the Greek camp is challenged. Agamemnon, as
we have seen, stresses that his status depends on the possession
of a war prize: ‘Prepare another prize for me, so that I should not
be the only one among the Argives who is without a prize, for
that would not be appropriate’ (Iliad 1.118–19). When he seizes
Briseis, Agamemnon upsets another component of social order.
The poem’s many cycles of disruptions and restorations of social
orders and codes begin . . .

154 HOMER
Possession of the female prize is in part a practical concern, but

the woman as prize is above all a powerful symbol within the social
structure of the Greek camp and the world of the Iliad. Agamemnon’s
speech protesting the loss of Chryseis is coy and dissimulating.
Yet there is truth to his words. As we have already seen (above,
Chapter 6), the so-called heroic code and the hierarchy of heroic
society depend on socially sanctioned allocation and exchange of
symbolic goods and prizes, and above all women, between men.
It would thus indeed be inappropriate, as Agamemnon suggests,
for the leader of the host to be without a prize. We can now see
how a localized dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon over
the possession of women becomes the thematic focal point of the
Iliad, which is, after all, an epic representing wide political and
social identities.
Gender is not merely a key thematic element of the Iliad. As
a symbol, it is also an important vehicle for thought. Achilles’
recognition of the limits of the heroic code and the framework of
the exchange of mortal life for imperishable fame is set off by the
seizing of Briseis. But his very reasoning, just like Agamemnon’s
initial complaint, is articulated, not simply in political or moral
terms, but in terms of gender (9.334–6):
To the nobles and the kings he [Agamemnon] gave prizes.

They have kept their prizes. But from me alone of the
Achaeans,
he has taken and keeps for himself the consort of my heart.
The object of Achilles’ words is Briseis. Yet the consort of

Achilles’ heart (alochon thymarea) is used to state a general
principle: Agamemnon has transgressed the underlying codes of
a heroic honour system and has arbitrarily singled an individual
for unfair treatment. Achilles thus adds (9.337–9. See also above,
Chapter 6):
. . . Why must Argives fight with Trojans?

And why did the son of Atreus assemble the host and let it
here?
Was it not for the sake of fair-haired Helen?
The words ‘for the sake of fair-haired Helen’ are eroticized

shorthand for a whole series of social obligations that involve

Agamemnon’s fraternal commitment to Menelaus, the legitimate

position of women (and ultimately royal marriage) as a symbol of
political stability, and much more.
When Achilles fi nally asks (9.340–3),
Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones
who love their wives? Since any man who is good and wise
loves his own woman and honours her, as I too loved Briseis
with my heart, although she was only a captive of my spear.
he is exploring abstract principles of epic social order through the

applied notion of men’s love for their wives and indeed his own
personal emotion. Looking back to Aristotle’s characterization
in the Politics of the male as ‘natural’ ‘master’ and the female as
‘subject’, provides us with one way of politically unpacking this
reasoning (there may be other ways, of course – there is, for instance,
no reason to assume that Achilles’ emotions in this passage are not
genuine, but even emotions are not universal – they are generated
and felt within the conventions of specific historical contexts). In
caring for his wife or female war-prize, a man is also asserting
mastery over what is effectively his own proprietary domain. To
separate the hero from his rightful female consort – whether we are
thinking of Achilles, or Agamemnon, of Menelaus, or indeed in the
Odyssey, of Odysseus – is, from this perspective, also to upset the
hierarchy of the world.
Actions and roles

Violent martial action is the essence of the Iliad’s war poetry and
of both its destructive and creative forces. As Seth Schein (1984:
71) puts it,
The very activity – killing – that confers honour and glory

necessarily involves the death not only of other warriors who live
and die by the same values as their conquerors, but eventually,
in most cases, also of the conquerors themselves. Thus, the
same action is creative or fruitful and at the same time both
destructive and self-destructive.

156 HOMER
These activities are arenas of competition and are in Homer widely

portrayed as exclusive to men. Indeed, in the Iliad, competition itself
is male practice, through which men exercise, assert and compare
their excellence (arêtê) and ultimately acquire ‘imperishable fame’.
In contrast, mortal women in the Iliad are neither combatants nor
competitors. They do not engage in men’s ‘zero sum’ competitions
(i.e. competitions where one man’s triumph is another man’s
defeat). Iliadic women do not kill enemies in battle, nor are killed
by them. After the war, most of the women in the Iliad (with
some prominent exceptions, for example, Cassandra) will remain
alive, suffering captivity. They do not rescue companions nor are
they rescued by allies or gods. Goddesses such as Athena, Hera,
Leto, Aphrodite and Artemis, apart, only the Amazons, daughters
of Ares, engage in fighting. (See brief mention in Iliad 3.189 and
6.186. There was, however, an aristeia of the Amazon queen
Penthesilea in one of the poems in the Epic Cycle, the Aethiopis.)
Competitive action and indeed competitive speech too provide
the context for a range of emotions such as anger, fear, bravery
and friendship – which lead to further action. These are almost
exclusively in the male domain. Achilles’ stance towards Briseis
motivates his response to Agamemnon and his wrath. Patroclus’
feelings for his comrades drive him to put on Achilles’ armour and
eventually lead to his death. Achilles’ emotions after Patroclus’
death guide his return to battle and the killing of Hector, and his
pity in response to Priam’s pleas is the focus of the ransoming of
Hector’s body which brings the Iliad to a close. In contrast, women’s
emotional responses when portrayed in the Iliad, for example, in
Andromache’s complaint to Hector in Book 6, in Briseis’ lament
for Patroclus, or in the laments by Hecuba, Andromache and
Helen over Hector’s corpse at the end of the poem, have little or no
consequence in action.
Aspects of Homeric poetry’s male bias are openly stated
throughout the poems and we have already seen some instances. In
the meeting between Hector and Andromache in Book 6 of the Iliad,
Andromache begs her husband not to head for the battlefield. It is,
we noted, a unique moment of intimacy. Hector anticipates the fall
of Troy, ‘there will come a day when sacred Ilion will be destroyed
and Priam and the people of Priam the master of the ash spear’
(6.448–9). However, what troubles Hector more than the destruction
of the city or the death of his bothers is the thought of ‘an Achaean in

bronze armour’ leading Andromache off and ‘taking away her days
of liberty’ and that she, unwilling but under compulsion, will have
‘to work at the loom of another and carry water from the spring
Messeis or Hyperia’ (6.455–9). There is genuine emotion in these
words, but Hector’s speech remain centred on his male perspective
as a hero. Andromache’s future captor will one day say ‘This is the
wife of Hector who was best in warfare among the Trojans, the
masters of horses.’ Hector concludes (464–5):
May I be dead and may earth piled high hide me

before I hear you crying as you are dragged to captivity.
Despite his emotional concern, it seems Hector cannot quite bring

himself to recognize a woman’s pain. Shortly afterwards, Hector
attempts to embrace his young son Astyanax. The fear he inspires
in the boy (6.466–81) brings both a smile to Andromache’s face
and tears to her eyes. But Hector’s response is quickly contained
by his own assertion of gender boundaries (6.486–93):
Strange woman [daimoniê], why do you ache in your

heart so much for me?
No one will hurl me to Hades unless it is fated
...
Go back home, inside, and get to your own work,
the loom and the distaff, and order your handmaidens
to take up their work. War is a concern for men [polemos
andressi melêsei]
all those who are the people of Ilion, but mostly for me.
Weaving may be the duty of a captive woman who works under

compulsion (anankê). But as these and other lines stress, it is also
the proper work of a wife who must obey her husband’s fi rm
instruction and leave all concern for fighting to men (on weaving,
see Lyons 2003: 100).
Being excluded from martial activity, Iliadic women are
by default left with roles as observers and to some degree as
commentators. Paradoxically, but in a typical Homeric manner,
the women of the Iliad thus possess a certain degree of power.
As observers of heroic action, they share at least some qualities
with audiences and perhaps even with poets and gods. The

158 HOMER
Teichoskopia, the ‘Observation from the Walls’ is a notable

example (3.161–244). Helen and Priam look on the duel between
Paris and Menelaus, a duel which is emblematic of the Trojan
War as a whole. She is the one who, not unlike a poet, introduces
Agamemnon (3.178), Odysseus (3.200) and Ajax (3.229) to the
Trojans and indeed to us.
More complicated in this regard is women’s role in mourning and
lament. Non-verbal response apart, words of lament commemorate
the dead and keep the ‘fame’ of the past alive. They thus perform
a function that is in part similar to epic poetry (see also discussion
in Chapter 2 of the funerary inscription from Kamyros) and endow
their speakers with important powers of expression. Some scenes
of lament in Homer describe the performance of ‘funeral dirges’
(threnoi). These seem to be more-formal occasions at which the song
is performed by professional male singers (aoidoi – at the funeral
of Hector, Iliad 24.720–2), by Achilles (lamenting Patroclus, Iliad
18.324–42) or by the Muses themselves (at the funeral of Achilles,
Odyssey 24.60–1. There is an obvious analogue between the
Muses singing such a funerary song and Muses’ epic songs about
heroes of the past who die for glory). Yet, as we noted, in Homer,
we also fi nd occasions of more intimate mourning, weeping and
lamentation, denoted by the term goös, which is given over to
mortal women, prominently, for example, in the speeches over
Hector’s corpse by Hecuba, Andromache and Helen at the end of
the Iliad. Paradoxically, such words both affi rm women’s subject
position and provide them with their own voice. Andromache, for
example, in her lament for Hector, complains: ‘You did not die in
bed reaching your arms out to me, nor speak any close-set word
[epos] to me, one that I could remember always, by nights and by
day as I weep for you’ (24.743–5). The implication is, on the one
hand, that even in death, Hector exerts authority over Andromache.
Yet Andromache is the one speaking. In the absence of words from
her husband, she is, we assume, by necessity speaking her own
words, and may also do so in the future.
Shifting borders
The relations between the Iliad and Odyssey reveal both
considerable continuity and significant change, a unity in multiple

form. The basic gender boundaries attested in the Iliad can also
be observed in the Odyssey, and yet the latter poem introduces
important modifications. During the fi rst gathering in Odysseus’
palace in Book 1, when Penelope speaks, Telemachus orders her
to go back into the house. ‘Attend to your work, the loom and
the distaff’, he says. These words are identical to the ones used
by Hector when he addresses Andromache in Iliad Book 6. In the
Iliad, however, Hector explains that ‘war [ polemos] is a concern
for men, all of them, and mostly for me’. Telemachus uses the same
formula, but with an important change. ‘Speaking [muthos]’, he
says, is a concern for men, all of them, and mostly for me, who
holds power in this house’ (1.358–9). On a second occasion,
towards the end of the Odyssey, when Penelope speaks to complain
about the suitors during the contest of the bow, Telemachus again
intervenes, claiming authority for himself. Again he sends off his
mother to her work at the loom and the distaff (21.350–1) using
similar formulaic language, but again with a slight change. ‘The
bow [toxon]’, he says in this version, ‘is a concern for men, all of
them, and mostly for me, who holds power in this house’ (352–3).
The change of terms in this repeated formula is indicative of
the different boundaries in each of the poems. The crucial word
‘war’ used in the Iliad is replaced in the Odyssey by the ‘speech’
and the ‘bow’. By the time the Odyssey’s plot begins, the Trojan
War (an emblem of all wars) has ended and its disputes have been
resolved. Hector, Achilles and Agamemnon, the quintessential
Iliadic heroes, are dead. Women are no longer allocated as war-
prizes. Helen has been restored to Menelaus and Troy has been
sacked. The quarrel over Briseis, the struggle between Achilles and
Hector and even the Trojan War are now only a song. Needless to
say, in the Odyssey, the characterization and allocation of power
is a little different relative to the Iliad. Telemachus may be using a
formulaic variation of the words used by Hector in the Iliad, but
he is not a second Trojan prince. Hector’s use of the expression
‘war is a concern for men . . . and mostly for me’ is precise and
unambiguous. He really is the man to whom war (polemos)
and Troy’s defence are entrusted. In contrast, Telemachus at the
beginning of the Odyssey is still a helpless young man who, even
in the assembly, is not yet treated with the respect he deserves.
The claim that words (muthos) are his concern since he ‘holds
power in the house’ is unexpected. It must be read either as an

160 HOMER
ironic emphasis of his present predicament or proleptically, as a

foreshadowing of his future. Telemachus’ claim about the bow in
Book 19 is similarly ambiguous. The bow, inasmuch as only one
man, Odysseus, can rightly possess it, is not Telemachus’ concern.
In both cases, the differences should indicate to us that Telemachus
and the Odyssey may speak with the Iliad’s (formulaic) language
of heroic authority, but that verbal repetition is not necessarily a
repetition of function, and that the orders of that past world and
its values may have changed.
One of the features that characterizes the Odyssey, already in the
fi rst lines that follow the proem, is its emphasis on the individual
(1.11–15):
All the other heroes who had escaped sheer destruction

were by now at home, saved from both war and the sea.
But him alone, longing for a homecoming and for his wife,
a powerful nymph, Calypso, bright among the goddesses,
kept in the hollow of her cave, wishing him to be her husband.
[my emphasis]
The Odyssey is not a story about the suffering of ‘countless’ heroes

(Iliad 1.2). It has more to do with the struggles of a single man
and it gives greater prominence to more-private worlds, including,
for example, aspects of domestic life – not only in the scenes in
the palace in Ithaca, but also in the narratives describing Calypso,
Circe and Nausicaa and her parents. In domestic spaces, in the
household (the oikos, contrasting with the commonwealth, the
polis), relationships between men and women are different from
those that characterize public spaces and the battlefield. In these
domestic spaces (within the conventions of Homer’s world),
women play more-active roles which help defi ne the Odyssey’s
social spheres.
The actions of the Odyssey are motivated by the idea of
return to the ‘inner’ space, by Odysseus’ travels to Ithaca, by the
reassertion of identity and of ties with members of the household
(Eumaius, Eurycleia and Philoitius), by Odysseus’ reunion with
Telemachus and Laertes. Reassertion of control in the palace in
Ithaca and the reaffi rmation of a natural sequence of generations
is a crucial aspect of social order. (In the Iliad, we stressed, sons
often die, unnaturally and tragically, before their fathers.) Yet

more prominent than all of these returns and reaffi rmations is,
of course, Odysseus’ reunion with Penelope, a union of male and
female, which combines elements of identity, sexuality, economic
well-being and social functions. At the beginning of the poem, we
are told that Odysseus is fi lled with ‘longing for his return and
his wife’ (1.13). And, as we noted earlier, the Hellenistic critics
Aristophanes and Aristarchus marked the end of the Odyssey at
the point (23.296) when that longing is satisfied and Odysseus
and Penelope consummate their reunion. In other words, some of
Homer’s most important critics regarded the re-establishment of
order between man and woman, husband and wife, as the moment
at which general order of the Odyssey’s world is reasserted in the
poem and ‘return’ becomes closure, the point beyond which the
poem needs no other words. This suggests that we should look
a little closer at the relations of men and women and especially
at Odysseus’ encounters with women, Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa
(and her mother, Arêtê), and consider their place in the Odyssey’s
world view. Each fi rst poses an obstacle then provides assistance
to the return of order. Their stories are part of the background of
traditional picaresque narratives, but also constitute a series of
instructive variations that structure a Homeric idea of a legitimate
and socially productive union between a man and a woman and
the foundations of social order in the Odyssey.
The nymph Calypso offers Odysseus everything – marriage,
luxurious surroundings and immortality. Odysseus, of course,
is always after gain (see Athena’s comment in Odyssey 13.299).
Why, then, does he prefer the mortal Penelope who, as he openly
admits, is inferior to Calypso (Odyssey 5.215–20)? The Odyssey
is a story of longing, fidelity and return. Had Odysseus accepted
Calypso’s offer, we would have had a different poem, perhaps a
story of how one man becomes immortal and enters the realm
of the gods. Furthermore, in a world that revolves so completely
around the idea of fame, Calypso, ‘the hider’, offers immortal
oblivion. Yet what Odysseus and Homeric poetry seek is not
the overcoming of death, but rather a transcendence of mortal
existence that comes precisely through being mortal. Calypso is
an unsuitable consort for a hero like Odysseus. She offers death by
exclusion from memory. If Odysseus’ fame is hidden (cf. Odyssey
9.19), he might just as well have never lived. Furthermore, to have
stayed with Calypso would have meant life without a kingdom,

162 HOMER
outside of a day-to-day social hierarchy. Odysseus would have

lived, not as a master and king but as the lesser partner and subject
of Calypso, a powerful divine mistress (dia theaôn, see 5.78, etc.).
Indeed, Odysseus, who is often described as a kind ‘father’ to his
people (e.g. Odyssey 2.234), would have become a disempowered
and politically ‘childless’ man. Within the framework of Homeric
poetry and its values, this is an unacceptable position.
Odysseus’ other female associations, we could argue, similarly
help shape aspects of the hero and the social order of his world.
Nausicaa is young, resourceful and mortal. She does not live in
isolation, like Calypso, but in an orderly social world. Yet the
Phaeacians inhabit a distant ‘fairy land’, away from ordinary
human society. Remaining in Scheria, Odysseus’ renown would be
confi ned within his immediate surroundings and would again not
reach ‘all men’. More importantly, when we meet young Nausicaa in
Book 6 of the Odyssey, she experiences the very fi rst awakening of
sexuality. Her innocent youth may make her an unsuitable partner
in a poem whose main theme is the hero’s return to something
he has known before, in other words, the essential epic theme of
establishing a ‘continuity’ with the past. Without a return, away
from home, from the past and from memory, Odysseus risks
being reduced to the state of an animal, as indeed the lion simile
describing his state at the beginning of Book 6 (130–6) suggests.
He risks becoming a ‘nobody’ (outis, like the name he gives himself
when he speaks to the Cyclops. See 9.366). Odysseus only becomes
the man he was when he is in society, and he can only properly do
so when he is back in his rightful place as the king of Ithaca.
Encountering Nausicaa, Odysseus offers her a blessing
(6.180–5):
May the gods give you such things as you wish in your heart,
A husband and a home and may they provide noble
like-mindedness [homophrosynê] too, for nothing is better or
stronger
than when two, like-minded in thoughts [homophroneonte
noêmasin], keep a house,
a husband and wife. [This shall bring] many sorrows to their
enemies,
and joys to those who wish them well. And they themselves
know it best.

As this idealized portrayal makes clear, conjugal harmony is

primarily about ‘keeping a house’ and about fi nding a place within
the general social order. It is, in fact, a gendered version of one of
the most basic political principles of Greek thought, the idea that
one should help friends and harm enemies (see Blundell 1991).
Given the importance of conjugal unions as refl ections and
embodiments of Homeric social order, we may ask, exactly what
kind of ‘like-mindedness’ does the Odyssey here have in mind?
Nausicaa and her father Alcinoos are heavily in favour of a
matrimonial union between Nausicaa and Odysseus. The hero
himself wants to gain the princess’s help, but not to marry her.
‘Like-mindedness’ is thus here discussed in a situation where, in
fact, speaker and hearer are thinking wholly different thoughts.
Let us also bear in mind that this scene depicts Odysseus, a crafty
master of words, and Nausicaa, an inexperienced young woman
who has only now been subject to manipulative suggestions by
Athena in her dreams. Somewhere in the background to Odysseus’
eloquent rhetoric of harmony and ‘like-mindedness’, there seems
to resonate, not a relationship between equals, but rather – to go
back to the Aristotelian idea of a ‘natural’ union – a harmonious
agreement of purpose between a ‘master’ and a ‘subject’, perhaps
a like-mindedness that might form the basis of a relationship of
the kind we see between Hector and Andromache in the Iliad
Book 6.
Yet the Odyssey’s Nausicaa is not a passive subject figure. When
the naked Odysseus emerges like an animal from the thicket, she
does not flee, but stands her ground. The scene maintains high
decorum, but is sexually charged. Nausicaa herself notes that any
help she offers the stranger may trigger unkind rumours among
the people (6.273–83). Yet Nausicaa controls both her meeting
with Odysseus and later the scene in the palace with masterful
confidence. She shows the promise of great mêtis, wisdom that is
likely to lead her eventually to an empowered position, like her
mother Arêtê, both in matrimony, and as a decision-maker in the
royal court. Nausicaa’s emerging mêtis also hints at the Odyssey’s
prime example of a confident woman, Penelope, of course, whose
wiles, wisdom and presence of mind, her mêtis, are a worthy (if
‘un-Aristotelian’) match for any husband. Penelope’s most common
epithet in the Odyssey is polyphrôn, ‘of many thoughts’, ‘ingenious’,
stressing the ability of her mind and, of course, echoing the most

164 HOMER
common element poly-, ‘many’, in Odysseus’ epithets. Together

with Odysseus, Penelope will re-establish a house (oikos), and their
‘like-mindedness’ will indeed bring ‘many sorrows to their enemies
and joys to those who wish them well’ (see Felson 1994: 18–19).
To what degree, then, do Odyssean female figures like
Nausicaa or indeed Penelope move away from the Iliadic gender
biases and types? Opinions vary, but their roles as women, their
relationships and consequently something in the underlying
conception of social structure and balance of power in the oikos
and in the world of the Odyssey at large do clearly differ from the
structures and relationships portrayed in the Iliad – for example,
from the relationships between Agamemnon and the women close
to him, Chryseis, Briseis and Clytemnestra, between Achilles and
Briseis, Paris and Helen, or even Hector and Andromache.
The story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, an emblem of
violent gender relations and of the destructive potential of a strong
woman in the Iliadic world, is, as we have seen, a constant backdrop
to relations between Odysseus and Penelope and to the world order
of the Odyssey. ‘There is nothing trustworthy in women’, the ghost
of Agamemnon tells Odysseus in the underworld (Odyssey 11.456.
Cf. Zeitlin 1995: 48). That other emblematic Iliadic couple who
appear in the Odyssey, Menelaus and Helen, in their re-established
‘pre-Iliadic’ state, are also part of the Odyssey’s perspective on
social order. Part of the force of the Odyssey relies on its attempts
to re-establish an image of peaceful social life in full view of
the dangerous potential of domestic order (Aristotle, Poetics
1453b.19–22, says that domestic plots make the best tragedies),
but – amazingly for a poem that places so much emphasis on fame
and the past – without quite seeking to preserve the former values
of such life.
Penelope, as Froma Zeitlin points out (1995: 44), is characterized
by two contradictory positions:
The poem presents her in such a way as to assure us of her

fidelity. At the same time, it endows her actions with sufficient
ambiguity to arouse the need for interpretation, often with
diametrically different readings.
Penelope has been steadfastly waiting for Odysseus for 20

years. While she waits, she must apply her wits to survive and

to resist her suitors (108 in number), using, for example, the

ruse of the shroud she prepares for Laertes, weaving by day
and unravelling by night (Odyssey 2.87–110. Cf. 19.138–56;
24.125–90). The ultimate proof of her mêtis and the seal of
the Odyssey ’s return to its proper, former social order, is, of
course, Penelope’s other ruse, the secret of the bed in Book
23 (see our discussion in Chapter 7). Against the background
of the suitors’ increasing frustration at her obstinacy, Penelope
assures Telemachus that she and Odysseus have ‘secret signs’
(sêmath’ . . . kerummena . . . ap’ allôn , 23.110). Suspicious
almost to the end, when she does meet Odysseus, Penelope duly
asks Eurycleia to move the marriage bed to the porch, outside
the bed chamber ‘making a trial of her husband’ (23.181). The
point, as we have already explained, is that the bed itself, set
within the protected surroundings, is the hidden sign – since
one of its feet is the immovable stump of an olive tree. Penelope
is testing Odysseus, but is also herself being tested. To have
moved the bed is to suggest, symbolically, that she has betrayed
the secret of the bed and has thus been potentially unfaithful.
It all ends well. Odysseus remonstrates, his identity is proven,
the bed has not moved and Penelope’s fidelity is asserted. Yet
through her crafty test, Penelope has also demonstrated that
she is more than an obedient subject to Odysseus’ mastery. She
has reaffirmed the order of her old world and Odysseus, but
that order is not quite the social and gendered order of their
Iliadic past.
Nowhere is this better expressed than in the moment of reunion,
in one of Homer’s fi nest similes (Odyssey 23.232–39).
He [Odysseus] wept as he held his beloved wife, whose heart

was true.
And as when the land appears welcome to men who are
swimming
after Poseidon has smashed their fine ship on the open
water, pounding it with wind and heavy waves
and only a few escape the gray sea landward
by swimming, with a thick scurf of salt upon them,
and gladly they set foot on dry land, escaping their ills;
So welcome was her [Penelope’s] husband to her as she
looked upon him.

166 HOMER
The verses begin by speaking of Odysseus. By the fi nal verse,

however, we realize that in fact the simile itself describes Penelope.
This ‘reverse simile’ and several others like it (especially Odyssey
19.108–14, comparing Penelope to a king) match Penelope to
Odysseus and
seem to suggest both a sense of identity between people in different

social and sexual roles and a loss of stability, an inversion of
the normal . . . Penelope does not take inappropriate advantage
of her opportunity to wield power in Odysseus absence, yet to
maintain his kingship she must come close as a woman can to
doing so. (Foley 1978: 60)
Penelope and Odysseus live within a world ruled by men and kings
not by women and queens, but their relationship attests to other
possibilities. A further glimpse of the potential for ‘alternative
orders’ within the Odyssey can be seen, for example, by looking
not at those powers gained by Penelope as a woman, but at those
powers ceded by Odysseus, by Homer and by the Odyssey in the
course of the narrative. In the Phaeacian court, Odysseus asks the
singer Demodocus to sing of the war in Troy, and of the Trojan
Horse. Odysseus’ response to the song is captured in another
famous ‘reverse simile’ (Odyssey 8.522–31). Odysseus
melted away, as tears from under his eyelids washed his cheeks.
As a woman weeps, when she flings herself at her dear
husband,
who has fallen in front of his city and people,
warding off the pitiless day from his town and his children,
and she, when she sees him at his death, gasping his last,
throws her arms around him, and wails loudly, but men
behind her
strike her back and shoulders with their spears
and lead her to captivity, to bear hard labour and misery,
and her cheeks waste away with the most piteous grief,
so Odysseus shed a piteous tear from his brows.
What’s striking about this description is not simply that it turns

gender positions upside down, illustrating Odysseus through the
image of a weeping woman whose warrior husband has died.

Equally important are the affi nities and contrasts which the simile
invokes between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Odysseus is here
responding to Demodocus’ (epic) song retelling Odysseus’ greatest
moment as an Iliadic hero of the past, a moment which itself is
untold in the Iliad. Yet the Odyssean simile recalls at least one
famous moment that is described in the earlier poem, the encounter
between Hector and Andromache, and their anticipation of Troy’s
(fated) future scenario: Hector will die, precisely as the Odyssean
simile suggests, ‘warding off the pitiless day from his city and his
children’. He imagines his wife weeping, again as the simile would
say, and ‘being led into captivity to bear labour and misery’ (cf. the
description in Iliad 6.459). As we have seen, in the Iliad, Hector’s
words are heavily inflected by his male perspective. Yet the very
same image and the very same gendered relationship, once they
are placed in the hands of the poet of the Odyssey and used to
describe the response of the hero of the later poem to an ‘Iliadic’
past and the order of that past’s world, have turned gendered roles
and positions of power around. Andromache, as a woman, will
live past the destruction of Troy as a captive and will become the
tearful survivor of the Iliad. In the Odyssey, Odysseus, a man, is
in the future of the Iliad. He is the tearful survivor who is listening
to an account of the past. Yet by the time we have reached the
Odyssey, the age of Iliadic heroes and Odysseus’ own time as a
hero of the Iliad have ended. With them, a certain world order has
ended too. All that remains are the songs, the words of Homeric
poetry, which, as the Odyssean simile comparing Odysseus to a
weeping hero’s wife powerfully demonstrates, allows us to revisit
the past.

CHAPTER NINE
Mortality and the divine
Gods
Death is an essential presence in Homer’s poetry. It is a
boundary which even the greatest of Homer’s heroes cannot
cross, separating ‘men who live by toil’ (andrôn alphestaôn,
Odyssey 1.349, etc.) and the ‘blessed gods who are forever’
(theoi makares aien eontes, Iliad 24.99, etc.). Yet in many ways,
Homer’s mortals and immortals are in close contact. Outwardly,
they look the same and are often portrayed as acting, feeling
and speaking in similar ways. Gods and men thus provide both
important mirror images of each other and sharply contrastive
reflections that ultimately illustrate the human condition as it is
perceived in Homer’s poetry.
Homer’s world is populated by both the major Olympian gods
and lesser deities, almost all of whom possess individualized
personalities. As Herodotus says, Homer and Hesiod ‘. . .
were the ones who created a theogony for the Hellenes, who
gave epithets to the gods, who distinguished their merits and
influence, their arts and abilities and described their forms’
(Histories 2.53.5–8). Zeus in Homer is the ‘father of men and
gods’ (patêr andrôn te theôn te, Iliad 1.544, etc.) and the one
‘whose power is the greatest’ (hou te kratos esti megiston,
Odyssey 5.4, etc.). ‘Far shooting’ Apollo (hekêbolos, Iliad 1.43,
etc.) is the god who, true to his epithet, strikes the Greek camp
with his arrows, setting off the plague in the beginning of the
Iliad. ‘Grey-eyed’ or ‘owl eyed’ (glaukôpis, Odyssey 1.44, etc.)
Athena is a patron of Odysseus in the Odyssey and of Diomedes

MORTALITY AND THE DIVINE 169
in the Iliad. She is a key agent of plot action in both poems. The
wrath of Poseidon, the ‘earth-shaker’ (enosichthôn, Odyssey 1.74,
etc.), over the blinding of his son the Cyclops is the underlying
force that hinders Odysseus’ homecoming. Hermes, Argeïphontes
(argeïphontês, Iliad 2.103, etc.), is the messenger of the gods.
His epithet is sometimes translated as ‘the Slayer of Argus’, but
its precise meaning was obscure already in antiquity. Aristotle
(Poetics 1458a.21) speaks of this obscurity as creating a numinous
‘estrangement effect’. Artemis, who supports the Trojans, is, like
her brother Apollo, an archer, the ‘shedder of arrows’ (iocheaira,
Iliad 5.53, etc.). ‘Man-slaughtering’ Ares (brotoloigos Arês, Iliad
5.31, etc.) is the god of war. Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith of
the gods, is ‘famed for his skill’ (klytotechnês, Iliad 1.571, etc.).
‘Laughter loving’ (philommeidês, Iliad 3.424), ‘golden’ (chryseê,
Iliad 3.64, etc.) Aphrodite, and ‘white-armed’ (leukôlenos, Iliad
1.55 – the epithet is applied to mortal women, too, such as Helen
and Nausicaa) Hera, Zeus’ sister and wife, are important goddesses
who use the power of sex to seduce men and influence the course
of events. Demeter and Dionysus make brief appearances in the
poems, although neither actually takes part in the action. These
major divine figures appear in Homer in many settings, including
assemblies, domestic scenes and battle scenes. They are portrayed
as conversing and acting among themselves and also in contact
with mortals. The gods’ actions, although often terrifying and
sometimes deadly, are also frequently tinged with humour and
are on occasion overtly comical (as in Demodocus’ song of the
adulterous affair of Ares and Aphrodite – Odyssey 8.266–343)
or even undignified, as some early critics such as Xenophanes of
Colophon thought (see further below).
The Iliad and Odyssey portray many lesser deities too, such as
the Muses, who live on Olympus, the nymph Calypso or the witch
Circe, each of whom lives in her own island, or Thetis, Achilles’
divine mother, wife of the mortal Peleus and sometime consort of
Zeus. Thetis, despite being a ‘second tier’ divinity, has the power
to appeal to Zeus and she thus exerts considerable power over the
plot of the Iliad (see Slatkin 2009).
The world of the gods in Homer is centred around a structured
and seemingly well-ordered family, Zeus the father, Hera
his wife, Athena his daughter (who was born of Zeus alone,
without a mother), Poseidon his brother and so on (see Griffi n

170 HOMER
1980: 186). The Homeric gods inhabit a ‘Panhellenic’ (as it has

been called) world: They comprise a unified reflection of wider
cultural perceptions (see Snodgrass 1971, Nagy 1979) that are
more an indication of Homer’s place in the cultural and political
ideology of Greece than a reflection of actual religion. In real
life, Greek religion was often more localized and fragmented,
not always as consistent and well rounded as in Homer. In the
Iliad, the deathless (athanatoi) and ageless gods are common to
both Greeks and Trojans (Greeks and Trojans share many other
beliefs, values and practices), although, significantly, the gods do
often take sides. Athena supports the Greeks, Apollo supports
the Trojans, Hera seduces Zeus (Iliad Book 14) so as to distract
him and help the Trojans gain the upper hand. Many gods have
their personal favourites among the heroes or otherwise take
action which helps one side or the other: Athena has a preference
for Diomedes and Odysseus; in battle, Aphrodite rescues Aeneas,
her son.
The abodes of the gods in the Iliad and Odyssey seem secure,
calm places compared to the violent spaces of the mortal world.
Calypso’s island (Odyssey Book 5) is a distant, exotic paradise.
Olympus is far removed from the mortal sphere and isolated from
the elements. At one point in the Odyssey (6.42–5), Olympus is
described as
. . . eternally safe.
It’s not battered by the winds, nor drenched
by rain, snow does not fall near it, but always clear air,
cloudless, spreads over it, and bright sunlight plays upon it.
Yet beneath the calm facade, more troubling realities lurk.

Certainly for mortals, divine space is almost always a place of
danger and pain. Calypso’s island paradise is also a world of
tensions. The union which she hopes for is unwanted by Odysseus,
her would-be mortal husband. Odysseus is constantly in tears,
pining for a homecoming and for his wife. To Calypso’s bitter
disappointment, her mortal marriage is also forbidden by Zeus.
The island of Circe, the ‘fair-tressed’ (eüplokamos, Odyssey
10.136, etc.), likewise seems pleasant at fi rst, but it hides grave
dangers for mortals like Odysseus and for his men, whom she
turns into pigs. Mortals do not visit Olympus, but its serenity too

masks the memory of past hostilities and the potential for future
confl ict among the gods. Zeus is the ‘son of Cronus’ (cf. Iliad
14.203–4) and heir to a violent dynasty (Cronus usurped and
castrated his father Ouranus and swallowed his own children.
Cronus is called ankylomêtis, ‘of the crooked counsel’, in the
poems. Divine father-and-son relations are thus radically different
from their mortal counterparts). Although the gods cannot die,
the threat of upheaval lurks in the very narratives that establish
the divine order. Zeus is the god ‘whose power is the greatest’
and thus the one who imposes order on the divine world. Yet
the Homeric word for power in this denomination, kratos, can
equally be translated as ‘violence’. Indeed, Zeus sometimes has
to threaten the other gods with extreme violence to enforce peace
(see, e.g. Iliad 1.396–406; 8.2–52; 15.18–24) in his world.
Belief and religion

The Homeric gods do not inspire in mortals quite the kind of
reverence, internalized notions of faith or love that characterize
attitudes towards the deity in, for example, Abrahamic religions
(the act of faith in the Old Testament emerges out of Abraham’s
commitment to the word of god and his willingness to sacrifice
his son). Divine parents and their mortal children do sometimes
have a close relationship, as in the case of Thetis and Achilles,
and the gods do have their personal favourites who engender
stronger sympathy, most prominently Athena in her attitude
towards Odysseus. More generally, however, the gods in Homer
command a mix of obedient submission, fear and gratitude among
mortals, depending on individual circumstances. When, in the fi rst
scene in the Iliad, Agamemnon scornfully dismisses Chryses, the
priest, pacing bitterly by the shore of the ‘much-resounding sea’
(noisy surroundings for private prayer . . .), appeals to Apollo for
help. Chryses invokes his past reverence and a sense of reciprocity
between men and gods, which is often manifest elsewhere in the
Homeric poems and elsewhere in antiquity (1.37–42):
Hear me, Lord of the Silver Bow, protector of Chryse

and sacred Killa, who rules with strength over Tenedos,

172 HOMER
Smintheus; if I ever built a temple that has pleased you,

if ever I burned rich thigh pieces for you,
of bulls and rams, then accomplish for me this thing I pray for:
Let the Danaans pay the debt of my tears with your arrows.
As Chryses says and as we often see in both poems (e.g. Iliad

1.437ff.; Odyssey 3.5ff.), mortals offer sacrifi ces (of rich fat,
meat and hecatombs or ‘sacrifi ces of a hundred oxen’ – but the
word can mean simply an elaborate offering) and libations (often
wine or milk) to the gods within a system of exchange.
Apart from prayers, mortals also swear oaths by the gods
(see, e.g. Odyssey 14.158–9), observe and interpret dreams (e.g.
Odyssey 19.535–53) and omens (Odyssey 20.103) sent by the
gods, and through these omens, sometimes deliver prophecies.
Such prophecies can be spoken by a professional seer or soothsayer
(a mantis or theopropos) or interpreter of dreams (an oneiropolos),
or interpreter of bird omens (an oiônopolos) or, on occasion,
perhaps with less conviction, also by ‘lay’ individuals such as
Odysseus himself, when he interprets Penelope’s dream of the geese
(Odyssey 19.555–8). Mortals tend to heed the gods, as one would
obey a person of overwhelming power. There are, however, also
cases where mortals act against divine will or contest the gods’
authority, or fail to show the gods due reverence. Such acts are often
described as ‘recklessness’ (atasthalia), and those who commit them
often end up paying a heavy price of their transgressions. This, for
example, is the case with Odysseus’ men who slaughter the cattle of
Hyperion and whose ‘day of return’ is thus taken away from them
or, most famously, on a grand narrative scale in the Odyssey, with
Penelope’s suitors who pay, through Odysseus’ actions for their
irreverence, their disrespect for the laws of hospitality and their
arrogance. In the Iliad (2.594–600), the singer Thamyris dares to
challenge the Muses’ superiority in singing. As punishment, his
song and skill in playing the lyre are taken away.
Some important aspects of real-life ancient Greek religion,
such as hero-cult practice, are by and large missing from Homer.
However, generally Homer’s descriptions of mortal attitudes to the
divine and especially aspects of prayer and sacrifice accord with
‘real life’ beliefs and attitudes towards the gods and with religious
and cultic practice in ancient Greece (see Dietrich 1979, Burkert
1985, Hitch 2009). The description of such religious practice helps

flesh out a semblance of reality in Homer’s world, even though, as

we repeatedly stress, the poems are not a depiction of real worlds.
Just as the ancient busts of Homer portray the realistic face of an
old man (even though that face is different in individual busts),
so we can identify an image of religious experience in Homer’s
portrayal of mortals’ relations with the divine.
Contact with ‘real world’ attitudes to the divine is attested in
a different way in the invocations, the appeals by the mortal poet
for the Muses’ divine help in singing. Although invocations are an
integral part of the poems and are composed in the same metre
and language, they are set in the present of the performance,
indeed, in the present moment of any performance, and they are
uttered by a poet who is, we might say, one of the ‘men of today’
and who is thus sharply distinguished from the heroes of the past.
The invocations thus constitute ‘non-fictional’ yet quintessentially
Homeric appeals. Whether such appeals are conventional poetic
acknowledgement of the divinity or reflect a deeper sensibility
towards the divine, they are situated both inside the poems of the
past and outside the world of the heroes, and are, in this sense,
emblematic of Homeric epic’s ‘liminal’ temporal and existential
status between past and present.
Divine action
As in other aspects of Homer, in the portrayal of the gods, we
often fi nd contradictory practices and characterizations that add
up to more than a single picture. Alongside the absolute superiority
of immortals, Homer also describes a close, at times irreverent
proximity between gods and men. Longinus suggests that ‘unless it
is to be taken allegorically’, Homer’s characterization of the gods
seems ‘downright impious and overstepping the bounds of decency’.
Homer, he says, offers us the gods’ wounds, their quarrels, acts of
revenge, tears, bonds and several other woes so as ‘to make the
men of the Trojan War, inasmuch as possible, into gods and the
gods into men men’ (On the Sublime 9.7).
Among themselves, the gods do indeed often behave like
the ordinary men and women, although such behaviour is not
invariably undignified. Like mortals, Gods sit down in the assembly

174 HOMER
to debate and discuss important issues, as for example, in scenes at

the beginning of the Iliad and Odyssey. When Thetis approaches
Zeus on behalf of Achilles in Book 1 of the Iliad, her supplication
partly resembles, for example, Chryses’ plea to Apollo earlier in
the book: ‘If ever before in word or deed I did you favour among
the immortals, now grant me this thing I wish’ (Iliad 1.503–4).
Furthermore, Thetis’ supplication relies on physical contact. She
embraces Zeus’ knees and places her right hand under his chin
(1.500–1) using a bodily gesture which a mortal subject might
use to approach a mortal king in antiquity. This establishes a
clear hierarchy between Thetis and Zeus, but it is not in any way
a degrading portrayal. Rather, here, for a brief moment, Homer
extracts divine behaviour, social relations and emotion from the
otherwise inescapable dichotomy between men and gods, allowing
us to escape into a world in which gods and mortals really do share
cares and practices.
Nevertheless, Longinus is not entirely mistaken in his
judgement. There are many less-dignified and sometimes comical
scenes describing divine action in both the Iliad and Odyssey. We
have earlier mentioned Book 14 of the Iliad, where the ‘wily and
scheming’ (dolophroneousa 14.187) Hera attempts to seduce her
husband and brother Zeus (there is no incest taboo on Olympus!),
so as to distract him and allow the Trojans to gain ground. Hera
asks Aphrodite for the love and desire with which the goddess
subdues ‘all immortals and mortal men’ (14.198–100 – the realm
of love is common to all) and borrows Aphrodite’s enchanted
girdle. Wearing this magical item of clothing, Hera proceeds to
seduce her husband. To ensure the success of her plan, she secures
the support of Hypnos, Sleep, by means of a bribe. Post-coitum,
Zeus falls asleep and, with his watchful eyes shut, the Trojans can
advance. The scene as a whole is full of domestic humour as well
as irony because Hera, the wife who must put up with Zeus’ many
infidelities (indeed, he woos her with a catalogue of his conquests.
See Iliad 14.315–28), here, with a bit of outside help, plays the role
of an overpowering seductress.
Another prominent example is Demodocus’ song in Odyssey
Book 8, describing the adulterous love affair of Ares and Aphrodite.
The song begins as a performance by the Phaeacian bard, but after
only a few lines, blends imperceptibly into the main narrative of
the poem and takes on what is de facto Homer’s voice (8.266–71):

Then, playing the lyre, Demodocus began to sing beautifully

about the love-affair of Ares and the fair-crowned Aphrodite,
how they first lay together in Hephaestus’ house,
secretly. Ares gave many gifts, and shamed the bed
of Lord Hephaestus. But straightaway a message came to the
husband,
from Helios, who recognized the two as they mingled in love.
The cuckold husband Hephaestus, lame craftsman of the gods,

builds a trap of ‘unbreakable bonds’ for his wife and her lover and
pretends to leave the house. Ares sees him departing and calls out
to Aphrodite, ‘Come here, my dear, to bed. Let’s lie down and take
our pleasure’ (8.295). Hephaestus returns unobserved and ensnares
the adulterers in fl agrante delictu. The assembled gods witness
the bound lovers and are consumed by ‘unquenchable laughter’
(asbestos . . . gelôs, 8.326). Apollo banters Hermes, asking if he
too would agree to be bound in return for the pleasure of sleeping
with Golden Aphrodite, and Hermes vigorously asserts that he
would indeed do so. The song is a suitable light-hearted antithesis
to narratives of adventure, martial action and heroic ‘imperishable
fame’, although it also carries with it sinister overtones. An illicit
amorous affair underpins the plot of the Iliad, and the integrity
of marital order is a matter of life and death in the Odyssey. The
song of Ares and Aphrodite also contains a kernel of serious
grievance. Hephaestus’ complaint to father Zeus rings of legal
argument and raises the question of formal compensation for his
insult (8.317–19):
. . . my trap and its bonds will hold them fast

until her father will repay me each and every bridal gift
I gave him for the sake of his dog-faced [‘shameless’] daughter.
There is, furthermore, evidence that a narrative of this kind is not

entirely outside the realm of historical religion. A painting on a
vase fragment from the eighth to seventh century bce found in the
sanctuary of Hephaestus in Lemnos shows a nude goddess and
a male figure in bonds. Nevertheless, the legal reference, while
introducing a serious practical echo, is itself not entirely free from
humour, since Aphrodite’s father in Homer is none other than Zeus
(Iliad 5.131), who is also Hephaestus’ father.

176 HOMER
The gods, both male and female, often take part in fighting,
especially in the Iliad, for example, in the section of the poem known
as the Theomachy, ‘the battle of the Gods’ (Iliad 21.331–513), and
also in many other pointed scenes (the term theomachy can refer
to any setting of battle among gods). Gods fight against each other
as well as against mortals. In fighting, the boundaries between
men and gods are often simultaneously blurred and emphasized.
When, in Book 5 of the Iliad, Diomedes rushes at Aeneas, Apollo
checks him, saying ‘take care, son of Tydeus, and stand down. Do
not strive to be like the gods in your thoughts, since the race of
immortal gods and that of men who walk upon the earth are not
the same’ (5.440–2; see also comments in Chapter 4, above). It is
nevertheless significant that Apollo does not use his superior force
but mere words to stop Diomedes. Furthermore, from Apollo’s
words, it seems that Diomedes aspires, not to the physical state of
divinity or immortality, but to make himself ‘like the gods in your
thoughts’, as if what separates gods and men is not physical nature,
but their consciousness. It is, of course, precisely in valour and
‘thoughts’ as opposed to bodily strength and fragility that gods
and heroes can be the same. As one scholar commenting on the
general portrayal of the gods in Homer says, ‘Homeric theology
obviously wanted and got it both ways even at the cost of creating
new contradictions’ (Dietrich 1979: 136).
Later on in the same book of the Iliad, Ares, the god of war,
catches sight of Diomedes and casts his spear at the hero. Diomedes
is saved by Athena who deflects the missile. Diomedes then casts
his own spear at Ares (5.856–7),
. . . and Pallas Athena pushed it on

into Ares’ lower flank, where he was girt by a waist-band
The wounded god of war bellows with the sound of 9,000 men. He
flees to his father, Zeus, shows him the wound and his ‘immortal
blood’ (ambroton haima – this divine bodily fluid is elsewhere also
called ichor) and complains that Zeus always gives his daughter
Athena preferential treatment (Iliad 5.872–80):
Father Zeus, when you see these harsh acts, are you not angry?
We gods always have to bear the most terrible pains
by each other’s will, when we give favour to men.

Because of you we all fight, for you begot this reckless and
destructive
daughter, who is always intent on wicked deeds.
All the rest of us gods on Olympus,
pay heed and submit to you.
Yet you say nothing and do nothing to stop her
Instead, you impel her, since yourself you begot this pestilent
child.
Ares’ pride is injured, but his wounds are mere play and his words
are childish – he is a little boy complaining about his sister to
their father. Such levity provides a strong contrast: ‘the free and
irresponsible behaviour of the gods in the Iliad may have been
the poet’s way of throwing the more serious consequences of
comparable human action into stronger relief’ (Dietrich 1979:
136). Nevertheless, divine existence in Homer is not without pains.
Thetis’ sorrow over Achilles’ fate is as deep as that of any mother.
Longinus has a point when he says that the gods are worse off than
mortals since ‘when we are unhappy, we have death as a haven from
ills’, while the gods Homer portrayed as having ‘not the nature of
immortality but eternal misery’ (On the Sublime 9.7).
Several other domains of activity characterize the interaction
of gods and men in Homer, among them sexual congress. Many
heroes are the issue of mixed divine and mortal provenance.
Sarpedon is the son of Zeus and Laodamia (Iliad 6.198–9);
Helen is the daughter of Zeus and Leda (cf. Odyssey 11.298–
300); Achilles, of course, is the son of Thetis and Peleus (Iliad
18.432–41) and Aeneas is the son of Aphrodite and the Trojan
Anchises (cf. Iliad 2.819–21). Significantly, amatory relationships
between gods and mortals are normally restricted to a single
erotic or procreative contact rather than a lasting union (see,
for example, the list of Zeus’ lovers in Iliad 14.315–28; affairs
by Poseidon, Odyssey 11.235–52; Ares, Iliad 2.511–15; Apollo,
Iliad 9.559–64). Odysseus’ relationship with Calypso lasts for 7
years, but it is a coercive, and, of course, doomed liaison. We
have already seen that normative gender relations in Homer
are structured around the idea of male mastery over the female
subject. A permanent, stable union between a mortal man and a
goddess would have suggested mastery by a mortal, a being ‘by
nature’ inferior to the gods, over a divine being who is ‘by nature’

178 HOMER
superior – an intolerable situation. A one-time union between a

male god and a mortal woman is in principle easier to accept
and stresses the power of divine male beings. But a permanent
relationship risks normalizing contact between domains which
in essence must be kept apart. The principle that preserves the
‘purity’ of divine blood is telling: Semi-divine parentage does not
endow a hero with immortality nor save the likes of Achilles or
Sarpedon from death. Helen’s brothers, Castor and Polydeuces
(the Dioscuri or ‘sons of Zeus’) are an unusual exception. They
die, but are allowed a curious existence afterwards, alternating
between life and death every other day and ‘having honour like
the gods’ (Odyssey 11.303–4).
Gods are anthropomorphic. In essential bodily form, they
look like men and women, but they are generally bigger and more
beautiful than mortals. The gods eat and drink like mortals, but
their drink is immortal nectar (Iliad 1.598, etc.) and their food is
ambrosia (Odyssey 5.199, etc.). With partial exceptions during
sex and sometimes in battle, gods are often invisible to mortals, or
appear in disguise (e.g. Iliad 24.349–469), or in dreams (6.21–4)
to mortal eyes, sometimes in a deliberately misleading form. In the
lead-up to Hector’s death, Athena takes on the semblance of his
brother, Deïphobus (Iliad 22.225–47). Athena in particular is a
goddess who revels in disguise. It is one of the character traits that
she shares with her favourite hero, Odysseus. A few heroes and
heroines (Achilles, Helen, Odysseus) sometimes recognize gods
facing them, but these are exceptional encounters, reserved for
exceptional situations and characters.
Divine guidance, moral

responsibility and fate
Whether seen or unseen, the gods play an active, complex and
sometimes paradoxical role in guiding the plots of both the Iliad
and the Odyssey. The beginning of the Iliad points to the poem
as the completion of the will of Zeus (1.5), who, at the end of the
poem, also initiates Priam’s visit to the Greek camp to ransom
Hector’s body and sends the message that Achilles should accept
Priam’s supplication. The Odyssey paints a more ambiguous

picture of the relation between Zeus’ will and the events of the
plot. In the assembly of the gods at the beginning of the poem,
Zeus complains, saying ‘How mortals blame the gods! We, they
say, are the source of their ills, while it is by their own recklessness
that they suffer sorrows beyond the measure’ (Odyssey 1.32–4).
Yet Zeus goes on to decree that Odysseus should now return
home. At the end of the Odyssey, Zeus seems to have it both
ways in a different manner. He addresses Athena, seemingly
giving her strategic control of the plot, yet asserting his own will
(24.479–86):
Did you not yourself devise this plan,

that Odysseus should take vengeance on these men when he
comes home?
Do as you will. But I will tell you what is fitting.
Now that bright Odysseus has taken vengeance on the suitors,
let the people swear a solemn oath, and let him be king always
and we shall bring about a forgetting of the killing
of their sons and brothers and let them love each other
as before, and let there be great wealth and peace.
Such divinely ordained agreement stands in direct contradiction to

the actions of the Odyssey’s mortal hero who, shouting horribly,
sweeps upon the men of Ithaca ‘like an eagle’ (24.538 – the eagle
is Zeus’ bird!). Happily, Zeus sends a thunderbolt and Athena
delivers her message of peace, preventing Odysseus from bringing
destruction upon his own kingdom and, perhaps with a twist of
irony, saving the man who ‘was always merciful like a father to
the people over whom he ruled’ (5.12, etc.) from merciless, self-
inflicted bereavement.
Looking at the overall picture, then, it seems difficult to provide
a single characterization of the relation between divine will and
the action of the poems. The question does not simply concern
the control of plot development here or elsewhere in the Iliad and
Odyssey, but also the moral fabric of the Homeric world and the
relations between divine will and mortal responsibility. Are men to
be held morally accountable for their actions? If so, by what code?
The gods are often portrayed as putting ideas in mortal characters’
thoughts (Iliad 2.5–34, Odyssey 21.1–4), as making them aware or
unaware of events around them (Iliad 19.476–79), or as prompting

180 HOMER
their decisions. Divine intervention can help or hinder the heroes

on the battlefield (Iliad 22.273–77; 16.700–12) and in other
critical situations. Does Zeus or some other god or divine agency
administer justice in Homer? In the last book of the Iliad, Achilles
speaks of Zeus’ two urns, ‘an urn of evils and an urn of blessings’
(24.528), from which Zeus bestows good fortune and sorrows on
mortal. Precisely how the allocation of such gifts is determined,
and by what, if any higher principles, is a matter of considerable
disagreement that requires long (and often inconclusive) discussion
(see Long 1970, Lloyd-Jones 1971, Gagarin 1974, Allan and Cairns
2010). Nor can a single overall picture be drawn of what is ‘the
right way’ (themis), ‘the right manner of things’ (dikê), ‘the proper
measure’ (moros) or the right action and response to ‘wrongful
deeds’ (kaka erga) in Homer. What is, however, beyond doubt is
that in both poems there is deep concern for such matters, although
by and large, critics agree that these concerns are more pronounced
in the Odyssey, which also focuses on the actions of fewer gods
(Athena, Zeus, Poseidon) who sometimes act more decisively than
in the Iliad.
As we just noted, Zeus opens the assembly in the fi rst book of
the Odyssey by claiming that men bring sorrows upon themselves.
They suffer, he says, ‘beyond measure’ (hyper moron, 1.34), by
their own reckless folly, himself apparently abdicating both control
of the plot and his own moral responsibility. He offers the example
of Aegisthus (often cited elsewhere in the poem, as we have seen),
who went ‘beyond measure’ (1.35), when he married Agamemnon’s
wife and killed the Son of Atreus. Aegisthus, of course, prominently
pays for his transgression. We may ask, what this ‘measure’ is and
who exactly is responsible for determining it?
The gods at times seem to behave no differently, or at least
without any apparent higher guiding principles than mortals: Gods
have their favourites and they often intervene and act on a personal
basis. Poseidon at the beginning of the Odyssey seems to pursue
Odysseus and prevent his homecoming simply because the latter
has blinded his son, the Cyclops. The Cyclops’ disregard for the
laws of hospitality, his cannibalism and asocial existence are not
mentioned. The element of personal motivation nevertheless at least
sometimes seems to give way to more structured considerations
of what should be done (for example, when Zeus decrees that
Poseidon shall have to check his wrath and Odysseus will come

home, 1.77). Certainly some moments seem to embody more

significant principles. Commenting on the end of the Odyssey and
on Zeus’ decision to stop the violence in Ithaca in the passage we
have just discussed, one critic suggests that Zeus’ action is
. . . of the greatest importance in the history of ideas: it means

nothing less than the abolition of the law of blood-feud, which
had hitherto prevailed without qualification; in its place is
established a new political order based on justice and law,
and validated by the gods, in which a just and benevolent king
ensures wealth and freedom. (Heubeck 1992: 412)
Read in this way, the end of the Odyssey suggests that the portrayal
of divine order and of the behaviour of the gods and of Zeus, pace
Longinus, is not quite ‘impious’. However, if we do follow readings
of this type and allow for a principled new order as Zeus decrees,
we may need to reframe and reconsider many other scenes in the
poems. Does Achilles avenge Patroclus and kill Hector because
of a higher moral principle? Does his relentless mistreatment of
Hector’s corpse operate, perhaps as a negative example, within a
principled moral universe? Does Achilles eventually take pity on
Priam because he has recognized what is just? Zeus’ inauguration
of a new age of wealth and peace at the end of the Odyssey
and a ‘forgetting of the killing’ of the suitors (24.484–85) may
force us to remember and contemplate many earlier killings in
Homer and more generally the ‘countless woes’ (Iliad 1.2) of the
heroic past. There is no open-and-shut way to read the poems as
moral paradigms, and it is precisely the remembering and not-
forgetting of the killing and pain preserved in the poems and the
acknowledgement of ‘imperishable fame’ that accompanies death
that are the essence of heroic poetry.
No matter how exactly we interpret elements of justice and moral
and legal principles in the Homeric poems, we must always allow
for the possibility that such elements are not evenly or consistently
distributed. Furthermore, there remains, in both the Iliad and the
Odyssey, the inevitability of fate, marked by the words moira, one’s
‘share’, ‘portion’, or ‘lot’, and aisa, one’s ‘dispensation’, or ‘share’.
Fate brings death to all mortals (see, e.g. Iliad 16.849; 18.119–21
and elsewhere). Even Zeus cannot ultimately save a hero from
death, not even when the hero is his own mortal son Sarpedon

182 HOMER
(see Iliad 16.431–61). In the Odyssey, because it is a poem of

human survival, a man’s fate or ‘share’ is seen to affect not only
his death but also his life. Hermes tells Calypso that ‘it is not his
[Odysseus’] aisa to perish far away from his loved ones, but it is
still his moira to see his loved ones and reach his high-roofed house
and fatherland’ (5.113–15). In later Greek literature, fate, or rather
the Fates, are often personified. In Homer, the personification is
weaker, although sometimes we do fi nd ‘harsh Moira’ spinning the
thread, for example, of Hector’s life (in Hecuba’s words, see Iliad
24.209–10).
Being immortal and deathless, the Homeric gods are not subject
to fate in the manner of men, and, paradoxically, they seem to have
little to look forward to in their lives, relative to mortals. They
suffer their light wounds, take part in petty quarrels, trick and
seduce each other, choose their mortal favourites and put ideas into
their heads, help them in battle or doom them and grieve for their
favoured heroes when these heroes die. Yet, although the gods are
central to the action and thought of the poems, although we cannot
imagine Homeric epic without the gods, immortal beings are, we
might almost say, ‘outsiders’ to the poems. When Achilles and
Hector in their fi nal, mortal combat circle the walls of Troy, ‘all the
gods gazed upon them’ (Iliad 22.166). The gods, as Jasper Griffi n
points out, are like spectators at a sporting event. Unlike most
spectators (but like spectators in a gladiatorial show – the analogy
and its cruelty are significant), they do have some power to affect
the outcome of the spectacle. As the two tragic heroes of the Iliad
fight, Zeus proposes to the gods that they should take counsel and
consider ‘whether to save Hector or to slay him at Achilles’ hands’.
Yet, because of their freedom from death, the gods can never fully
enter the realm of mortal action or motivation, even when they
guide it. The Greeks and the Trojans, Achilles, Agamemnon and
Odysseus do not fight, live or die for the glory of Zeus, Athena or
Apollo – certainly not in the same way that, for example, major
figures in the Old Testament such as Joshua, Saul or David fight
for Yahweh (and for what we might perhaps call Yahweh’s ‘plan’),
not in the way that the Knights of the Round Table fight for the
Holy Grail or in the way St Joan fights for God. In the end, the
mortal heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey fight, struggle and strive
for mortal women, for prizes and for recognition and glory among
their peers and among the men and women of the future. Heroes

are motivated, above all, by the knowledge that death is fated

and certain. Inasmuch as the centre of Homeric experience is the
mortal condition, a condition outside of the realm of immortal
experience, the gods must live ‘vicariously’ through the fortunes
of heroes. We, the audiences and readers of the Homeric poems,
are mortal, yet we too, like the gods, can live vicariously through
the poems. Our vicarious experience may thus, to give Longinus’
words a different twist, not merely bring gods closer to ourselves
but perhaps allow ourselves to look upon the world of the heroic
past from the perspective of the gods.

Envoi
In a book about Homer, perhaps the most difficult part to write is the
end. Homer, as we have been trying to show throughout this book,
and as many scholars have argued, resists the kind of closure that
allows us, for example, to sum up his two poems as a simple unity,
his relation to history and historical eras as a simple association
with the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, his identity as a poet simply
as a genius individual or even as a straightforward tradition, be
it ‘oral’ or written, or somewhere in-between. The transmission
of the Homeric poems is likewise not a simple act of memory or
committal to script. In terms of contents, the poems celebrate the
hero and martial achievements, and the preservation of past glory.
They bring together lament, an awareness of irretrievable loss,
of the fleeting moment and of the relentless passage of time, but
equally of an exuberant sense of being, a recognition of otherness,
an optimism of the will and a portrayal of the true force of human
emotion and trust. The Iliad and Odyssey are poems by a man
(or what seems to be a tradition of male singers), about men, and
perhaps, for men, but we have seen that women play key and often
leading roles in both the Iliad and the Odyssey in every sense, and
the characterization of gender and other basic dividing categories
cannot be confi ned within a simple relationship of those who hold
power and exercise control and those who do not. Homeric poetry
is, without doubt, poetry that portrays the close interaction of
gods and men, and the poems, both in their detailed language and
in their broader themes, take mortal heroes almost to the point
of immortality, yet the gulf between gods and men, the fi nitude
of the mortal condition and the centrality of the fact of death are
never clearer anywhere than in the Iliad and in the Odyssey. We
have suggested, at the beginning of this short book, that Homer
and Homeric poetry continue to live through their receptions, not

least in modern traditions. We have also seen that such traditions

change the poems, their settings, their themes and concerns almost
beyond recognition. Yet the links between such changed versions
of the Iliad and Odyssey and the Homeric ‘source’ remain as close
and as distinct as ever. There are, it is true, no absolute beginnings
(with the exception, perhaps, of a Biblical fi at! [‘Let there be
light!’] in religious narratives or the so-called Big Bang in scientific
histories of the universe), but even Aristotle, when he says that a
beginning is that before which there is nothing, knows that this is
not a literal, material fact, but rather a ‘phenomenological’ element
of the truth of our understanding and perception: A ‘beginning’ is
that which we acknowledge, within a certain set of conventions,
contexts and beliefs, before which there is nothing that ‘belongs’
to our plot. In this sense, Homer is indeed, the beginning of the
literary tradition of the West, a tradition that is always changing,
adapting and in various ways acknowledging other traditions and
ways of looking at the world. Homer, being, as we might say, one
of the continuing elements of change, is an important part of this
process, and it is for this reason, as we have tried to suggest, that
he remains a vital, vibrant part of our cultural consciousness.
The title of the series within which this book is published, Guides
for the Perplexed, is drawn, in fact, from a tradition which has
sometimes been seen as contrastive, perhaps even antagonistic to
the culture of the Greeks and of Greco-Roman classical antiquity.
Guide for the Perplexed, Dalalatul Hairin (the original title in
Arabic), the Moreh Nevuchim (its translation in Hebrew), is
originally the name of an important critical-philosophical work
by the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides
(‘the Son of Maimon’) who was born in Spain and who was active
mainly in Egypt and in Morocco. Have we, then, stretched our
links too far when we called our book ‘Homer’? Should this
title be read without any of its historical and cultural resonance?
Is it merely a pretty catchphrase? Maimonides, let us not forget,
was a scholar of Judaic and Rabbinic thought. Yet he was equally
well-versed in the Greek philosophical tradition, and especially
Aristotelian scholarship, as it came to him through its great
medieval Arabic commentators. The main effort of Maimonides’
Guide for the Perplexed was to build a meaningful dialogue
between these two ancient rival traditions, Judaic and Hellenic.
In this cross-cultural dialogue, Arabic culture and traditions

186 HOMER
played the role of a moderator. Together, all three traditions

(interspersed with many other elements woven into the ‘text’
with the benefit of Maimonides’ enormous erudition) were drawn
in, not in a homogenous mix, but working together to provide,
precisely, a ‘guide’ for the ‘perplexed’. A book on Homer, then,
in a series that borrows its title from a source of this type, may
have some hope of offering the reader at least the beginning of
a many-voiced conversation. Beyond which, of course, it is up
to the reader to ask the questions and to seek answers in greater
depth.

Suggestions for
further reading
The bibliography on Homer ranges from general studies for

the absolute beginner to more advanced overviews (like the
present volume) and extends to numerous specialized studies
of every aspect of Homeric poetry. Wherever possible, studies
that are more accessible to the general engaged reader are listed
below, but a few specialized studies are also cited (including
works noted in the main text, particularly where no more-
general work is available. Full publication details are given in
the bibliography).
Translations
Among the most widely read translations of Homer are those
in verse by Richmond Lattimore (originally 1951, 1965),
which follow the original closely, and by Robert Fitzgerald
(1961, 1974), which claim greater poetic freedoms. Robert
Fagles’ version (1990, 1996) is also noteworthy, as is Stanley
Lombardo’s verse translation (1997, 2000), which are both
resonant and attentive to the original. More recent (2011) is
Verity’s translation of the Iliad. E. V. Rieu’s prose translations
for Penguin Classics (originally 1946, 1950) have been a
favourite for many years. More recent is W. Shewring’s
prose version of the Odyssey (1980). There are many other
classic translations, in both verse and prose. Perhaps, the best
known is Alexander Pope’s poetic version (1715, 1725), but
others that merit mention include those by George Chapman
(1611, 1615), Thomas Hobbs (1616, 1675), John Dryden
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188 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
(1700), Matthew Arnold (1861), Samuel Butcher and Andrew

Lang (1879) all available in numerous reprints and editions, and
T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’, 1932). A bilingual ancient
Greek and English text with prose translations by A. T. Murray
(1919, 1924–5) can be found in the Loeb Classical Library series.
George Steiner’s Homer in English (1996) provides a useful survey.
Many translations contain helpful introductory comments. The
Chicago Homer (http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/homer/)
is an online text with the original Greek and English and German
translations, as well as Latin-character transliterations of the Greek
and various analysis and study tools and commentaries. A basic
online text of Homer (and most other major other classical and
other texts, in translation and in the original languages) can also
be found at the Perseus Digital Library site (http://perseus.tufts
.edu/hopper/). Translations of Homer are also available as electronic
fi les and in many e-reader formats. There are countless more-free
adaptations of Homer, for example, by poets Christopher Logue
(2001), Simon Armitage (2006), Alice Oswald (2011) and Miller
(2012).
General reference books on Homer

See The Homer Encyclopedia (Finkelberg 2010), a three-volume
compendium containing short entries on all major topics in Homer.
Three general handbooks, Fowler (2004), Morris and Powell (1997)
and Wace and Stubbings (1963, older, but still useful), provide essays
on main themes in Homer. Basic introductions can be found in Silk
(2004), Griffin (1987), Mueller (2009) and elsewhere. Edwards
(1987) is a little more detailed. Many online resources are excellent
(especially those within the university domains ‘.edu’ and ‘.ac’), but
the quality of online material is not uniform and caution is still
sometimes required (especially in more-commercial sites).
Detailed commentaries on Homer

For comments on specific passages, see Willcock (1976) and
Pothlethwaite (2002) on the Iliad, and Jones (1990) on the

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 189
Odyssey, all based on Richmond Lattimore’s translation. See also

commentaries based on Fitzgerald’s translation by Hogan (1979)
for the Iliad and Hexter (1993) for the Odyssey, and further
commentaries on the Iliad in translation in Jones (2003) and
Graziosi (in Verity 2011, based on a new translation by Verity).
The standard commentaries for specialists in English are the
ones on the Iliad under the general editorship of Geoffrey Kirk
(with contributions by several other scholars. In six volumes,
1985–93), and on the Odyssey, by Alfred Heubeck and others
(in three volumes, 1988–92). These works contain much valuable
information, as do several volumes in the ‘Cambridge Greek and
Latin Classics’ commentary series covering some, but not all books
of the Iliad and Odyssey. There is a ‘narratological’ commentary on
the Odyssey by de Jong (2001) which places emphasis on questions
of narrative and narration in the poem, but which covers many other
major topics. Advanced commentaries and other studies generally
assume knowledge of the original Greek and can be difficult for
general readers. The Chicago Homer is a comprehensive online
resource that contains some commentary materials, translations
and transliterations that allow both readers with no knowledge of
the language or of Homer and advanced researchers access to many
aspects of Homer and Homeric poetry.
Chapter 1
On the reception of Homer, see Graziosi and Greenwood (2007),
the section ‘Homeric Receptions’ in Fowler (2004), Hall (2008)
and Finkelberg (2010, under several headings that deal with
‘Reception’). For the idea of ‘many Homers’, see Porter (2004) and
Nagy (1996). For the Epic Cycle, see Burgess (2001). Many of the
specific issues mentioned in this introductory chapter are discussed
in greater detail in the following chapters.
Chapter 2
For Homer and the ancient historians, see Rengakos (2005). For
the question of Homer and History in general, see, for example,
Raaflaub (2005) and Grethlein (2010). On Homeric geography

(real and imagined), see Luce (1998) and Dickinson (2007). On

the historical aspects of Homer, there is much useful material in
Morris and Powell (1997). For Troy and Homer, see Latacz (2004)
and, from an archaeological point of view, Korfmann (2004), as
well as significant reservations and opposition by Raaflaub (1998,
where much other work is cited, too). More generally on Troy, see
Michael Wood (1987). For the remains on the site of Troy, see Rose
(1997). Allen (1999) is useful on the work of Heinrich Schliemann.
On the Archaic Age, see Raaflaub and van Wees (2009). On the
eighth century specifically, see Morris in the same. For Linear B,
see Chadwick (1958). On the representation of social reality in
Homer, see Osborne (2004).
Chapter 3
For the figure of the poet in antiquity, see Graziosi (2002). For
poets and poetry in Homer, see Ford (1992) and McLeod (1983).
For Homer in ancient scholarship, see Pfeiffer (1968). For Homer
in modernity since Vico and for the so-called Homeric Question,
see Turner (1997). Milman Parry’s work, collected after his death
by his son Adam, who was also a prominent Homer scholar
(Parry 1971), is of fundamental importance. Albert Lord’s work
(Lord 1960) provides a wider sweep and is accessible to general
readerships. Paul Zumthor (1990) offers a good introduction to
oral poetry, and John Foley’s studies of orality (e.g. 1991) are also
very useful. An excellent (but difficult) summary of the question of
the formula can be found in Russo (1997).
Chapter 4
The details of Homeric poetic form, their effects and their
relations to orality and to the creation of the poems are highly
technical matters. Readers at all levels, including those with no
prior knowledge whatsoever, can read the text in English with
direct and easy access to many features of Homeric language and
its unique repetitions using the Chicago Homer (http://digital
.library.northwestern.edu/homer/). In English, the classic early
study of the arrangement of motifs and of typical scenes in Homeric

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 191
narrative is by Fenik (1968). Edwards (1992) is also helpful.

Mary Douglas’ recent general work (2007) on ring composition
is important for an overall understanding of this key feature
of literature in general; in the context of Homer and Homeric
orality, see Nimis (1998). More detailed references can be found
in Edwards (1987). For accessible information on metaphor and
simile, see Scott (2009), Lonsdale (1990), Minchin (2001) and
Edwards (1987).
Chapter 5
For the narrator in Homer, see Richardson (1990). There are many
specialized studies of the proems of the Iliad (e.g. Redfield [1979])
and the Odyssey (e.g. in Pucci [1998] and in de Jong [2001]). For
the Muses, see Ford (1992) and in general Spentzou and Fowler
(2002). For Homer and Aristotle, see Halliwell (1986). For plot
structures, see Schein (1997) and Latacz (1998) for the Iliad and
Tracy (1997) for the Odyssey.
Chapters 6 and 7
For pointed issues, see references in the chapters themselves and
also in the translation-based commentaries listed above (Willcock
[1976], Jones [1990, 2003], Hogan [1979] and Hexter [1993]).
For some influential and eloquent overall studies, see, among the
very many worthy books, Whitman (1958), Austin (1975), Nagy
(1979), Griffi n (1980), Schein (1984), Pucci (1987), Peradotto
(1990), Scodel (2008) and Burgess (2009).
Chapter 8
Gender has been one of the most productive topics of study in
Homer in recent decades. For general questions, see essays in
Arthur (1973), Halperin et al. (1990), also McLure (2002). For
gender in Homer, and for such figures as Penelope and Helen,
see, for example, Foley (1978), Katz (1991), Felson (1994), Zeitlin
(1995) and Cohen (1995). Said (2011) is a general survey, but it has
a useful new long survey chapter on women in the Odyssey.

Chapter 9
For Greek religion in general, see Burkert (1985). For the gods in
Homer, see Emlyn-Jones (1992). Griffi n (1980) offers a perspective
with powerful literary intuitions. See also Dietrich (1979) and
Hitch (2009). For questions of morality and ethics in Homer, see
Adkins (1960), an incisive and influential work whose premises
about historical development are now challenged, for example, in
Williams (1993). On the question of justice and law in Homer, see
(among many important works) Long (1970), Lloyd-Jones (1971),
Gagarin (1986) and Allan and Cairns (2010).

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GENERAL INDEX
Adkins, A. 117 bed, of Odysseus 147

Aeschylus 7, 40, 85 beginnings 9–10, 122–3
Ahhiyawa 30 Bentley, R. 39
Alcidamas 43 Bible 9, 111
Alexander the Great 18 biography 40–6, 105
Alexandrian scholarship 17, 45, Blegen, C. 26–7, 29
149 book division, in Homer 46
allegory 44–5 bow, of Odysseus see contest of
Amazons 156 the bow
Analysts 48–51 Bronze Age 18–39
Angelopoulos, T. 6, 8 burial 35
animal/man see human/animal
Apollodorus 107 Calvert, F. 25
Apollonius of Rhodes 6 capital, symbolic 100
Apologue 95, 136–8 Catalogue of Ships 21–2 , 84–5,
apostrophe (‘direct address’) 77 102
Archaic Age 35 Chadwick, J. 28
archeology 18–39 Chicago Homer 64
archaism 35 chorizontes 44
Ares and Aphrodite, song Cicero 44
of 174–5 cinema 7
Aristarchus of Samothrace 45, 148 Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) 6, 8
aristeia 112 competition 156
Aristophanes of Byzanium 45, 148 conjugal harmony 163
Aristotle 42 , 91–3, 97, 130, 132 , Contest of Homer and Hesiod 43
151, 169 contest of the bow 145–6
Arnold, M. 6 Crates of Mallus 45
assemblies 101 ‘Cretan tales’ 140, 142
Aubignac, Abbé de 46, 52 cult practice 172
Auerbach, E. 108, 117 ‘Cup of Nestor’ 37
Bakhtin, M. 108, 117 death 1, 108–12 , 113, 117, 155,

bard see singer 168 and passim
9781441179463_Index01_Final_txt_print.indd 203 8/28/2012 6:55:41 PM

204 GENERAL INDEX
Detienne, M. 81 gods 168–86

digamma 39 anthropomorphism 178
disguise 125, 133, 141–2 , 143 epithets of 168–9
Dörpfeld, W. 26 as family 169–70
Douglass, M. 69 like mortals 172–8
dovetailing 62–3 like spectators 182
dream 144, 172 outside of core heroic
duals 49 values 182–3
duel 35, 103 Goethe, W. von 51
Goody, J. 69
ecphrasis 114 Greek Anthology 43–4, 85
Embassy scene 49, 109 Grethlein, J. 18
emotion 130, 156 Griffi n, J. 60, 182
endings 50, 120, 144, 146, 147–8 guslars 58
enjambment 62–3
Epic Cycle 12 , 17, 107 Hardy, T. 79–85
epithets 54, 168–9 and passim Herodotus 18, 23, 42 , 81–2
Eustathius of Thessalonica 148 heroism 1, 99–100, 108–12 ,
Evans, A. 27 153–7 and passim
excess 108 end of 142 , 158–9
exchange 99 Hesiod 43
Heubeck, A. 181
fame 22–3, 31 hexameter 31, 52–3, 61–3
see also kleos pauses in 62
family resemblance 72 Hisarlik 19, 30
fate 109, 116, 181 historicity 18–39
fathers and sons 118–19 Hittites 30
Felson, N. 147 Hobsbawm, E. 82
fidelity 136, 147, 165–6 homecoming 141, 142–3, 160–1
Finley, M. 29 Homer, name of 11
Foley, J. 59 Homeric Hymns 12 , 17
Ford, A. 42 , 126 Homeric Question 47–51
forgetfulness 130–1, 136 Homeridae 44
forgetting 179–81 hoplites 35
formulas (and oral forumulaic Horace 10, 15–16, 93
composition) 31, 52–9, 159 human/animal 5, 133–4
Foucault, M. 16
funerary inscription 38 Idameneus 38
Iliad/Odyssey differences 114–15,
gender 150–67 157–60
and thought 154–5 individuals 160
geography 21–2 , 121, 141 invocations 81, 173
ghosts 14 Iron Age 18–39, 75–6

GENERAL INDEX 205
Iphigenia 107 mimêsis (‘imitation’) 130

modernity 6, 7, 108, 117
Jaeger, W. 117 Morris, I. 36
Josephus 45, 47 mourning see lament
Judgement of Paris 107 multiplicity (of Homer) 13, 59
Julius Africanus 45 and passim
Joyce, J. 6–7, 108 Murnaghan, S. 147
Muses 21, 80–5
Katz, M. 147 muthos 88–9
kinship 118–19, 145–6 Mycenae 22 , 75
Knossos 27
knowledge 79–85, 148 Nagler, M. N. 58, 72
and vision 127–8 Nagy, G. 57, 59, 88, 126
Korfmann, M. 30 naming 3, 135, 144
Kripke, S. 135 narrator 36, 40–6, 82
Kullmann, W. 36 Nekuia 138
Neoanalysis 51
Lachmann, K. 49 Neoplatonism 45
lament 158 Nibelungenlied 49
Latacz, J. 30–1, 96, 97 ‘No-One’ (Odysseus’ invented
laughter 136 name) 137
Leach, E. 126 Novalis 117
Leigh, M. 6, 8
Lessing, G. E. 114 oaths 172
Lévi-Strauss, C. 122 oikos 33, 151
library of Alexandria Olson, D. 86
see Alexandrian scholarship Olympus 169–70
Linear A 28 orality 31, 43, 46–59, 103
Linear B 28–9, 39 oral-traditional poetry
Longfellow, H. W. 61 see orality
Longinus 42 , 93, 173–7
Lord, A. 27 Pan-Hellenism 24
Lorimer, H. 27, 75 Parry, A. 59
Lucan 6 Parry, A. A. 59
Lukács, G. 108, 117 Parry, M. 52–9
Lynn-George, M. 108 Parry-Lord theory 56
see also formulas
Mackie, H. 126 Peradotto, J. 108
Maclaren, C. 25 performance 125–6
Maimonides, M. 185–6 see also orality
Martin, R. 88, 98 Petersen, W. 6, 8
memory 58–9, 130, 135 Petronius 7
metaphor 71 Pindar 44

206 GENERAL INDEX
Pisistratean recension 44 simile 72–8, 115–16, 133–4, 146

pity 156 ‘reverse’ similes 166
Plato 44 singer 41–4
plot Snell, B. 103–4, 117
episodic 97 social order 151–3
magnitude 92 songs of return 125
moved by women 151–2 Sophocles 92
structure 89–98 speech introductions 54, 55
time 92 and passim stories, effect of 129
variants 85–9 and passim Strabo 18, 24
Plutarch 131 supplication 118–20, 174
polis 33, 151
Powell, B. 58 Taplin, O. 96
prayer 171 Teichoskopia 103
prizes 99–100, 153 Telemachy 95, 124–31
Proclus 107 text and manuscript
proem 79–85 tradition, 16–17
Proust, M. 108 Thalmann, W. 126
Theagenes of Rhegium 44
quarrell 99–100, 113–14 Thucydides 18, 20, 23, 43
time 15, 92 , 100, 116–17, 121–2
Raaflaub, K. 19, 26, 29 and passim
ransom 67, 99, 115, 156 Tracy, S. 96
re-birth 133 traditional referentiality 64
recognition 144, 147 tragedy 17
Reinhardt, K. 51 trickery 137
religion 168–83 Trojan War 23–39 and passim
repetition 16, 54, 63–7, 124 and dating of 24
passim Troy 13, 18–39 and passim
responsibility and trust 140, 144
morality 178–83 truth 85–9, 139–40 and passim
return see homecoming typical scenes 67–9
reunion 147–8, 160–1
ring composition 69–71 Unitarians 48–51
Russo, J. 58
Ventris, M. 28
Scar, of Odysseus, 144 Vico, G. 13, 38–9
Schadewaldt, W. 51 violence, narratives of 104, 146,
Schliemann, H. 20, 25–6, 37 155, 171
scholia 45 Virgil 6, 40, 83
sexuality and sex 133, 174–5, 177 vitae (‘Lives’) of Homer 11, 42
Shield of Achilles 33, 114
Shive, D. 58 Walcott, D. 6–10

GENERAL INDEX 207
warfare 35 wrath 63–6, 134

weapons 35 see also mênis
West, M. 59
will of Zeus 178–9 Xenophanes of Colophon 148,
Williams, B. 104 169
Wilusa 30
withdrawal 108, 112 Zeitlin, F. 147
Wolf, F. A. 48 Zenodotus of Ephesus 45
women 131, 150–67 Zielinski’s law 122
word/deed 101 Zumthor, P. 31

INDEX OF HOMERIC
CHARACTERS
Achilles 5, 108–12 , 114–16, Eumaius 142

118–19 and passim Eurycleia 141, 144
Aegisthus 85–9
Aeolus 137 Glaucus 105
Agamemnon 85–9, 99, 136, 164
and passim Hector 106, 115–16, 118–19,
Andromache 106, 120, 156–7, 167 156–7, 167
Antinoos 143, 146 Hecuba 120
Aphrodite 136, 174–5 Helen 2 , 102 , 120, 129, 130–1
Apollo 72 and passim
Ares 136, 174–7 Hephaestus 113, 169
Arêtê 135 Hera 112 , 174
Argos 141
Astyanax 106 Iphianassa 107
Athena 5, 104, 125 and passim
Laertes 148
Bellerophon 105 Laestrygonians 137
Calchas 63 Melanthius 143, 146

Calypso 22 , 131–2 , 161 Menelaus 74, 104 and passim
Charybdis 139 Muse see General Index, above
Cicones 136
Circe 22 , 137 Nausicaa 132–5, 161–2
Clytemnestra 85–9, 136, 164 Nestor 33, 37, 128
Cyclops 22 , 33–4, 76, 136–7
Odysseus 2 and passim
Dawn (Eôs) 132 Orestes 86–7
Demodocus, 41, 82 , 135, 136
Diomedes 72 , 103, 105, 176 Pandarus 74
Dolon 35, 50, 111 Patroclus 70–1, 112–13

INDEX OF HOMERIC CHARACTERS 209
Penelope 7, 128, 143, 147, 163–5 suitors 142 , 146

and passim
Phaeacians 22 , 33, 132–40 Teiresias 138
Phemius 14, 41, 125 Telemachus 81, 86, 128, 142 ,
Phoenix 49 145–6, 159–60 and passim
Pisistratus 128–9 Thamyris 41, 82
Priam 118–19 Thersites 35, 102
Thetis 100–1, 118, 174
Sarpedon 112 Tithonus 132
Scylla 139
Sirens 138 Zeus 80, 178–9 and passim

INDEX OF SELECTED
GREEK WORDS
AND HOMERIC
EXPRESSIONS AND
PHRASES
Achilleus, various expressions dolichoskion enchos

for 54, 59, 113 (‘long-shadowed spear’) 54
Agorê (‘assembly’) 34
Aisa (‘dispensation’, ‘share’) 181 êmos d’ êrigeneia phanê
anax (‘leader’) 28, 39 rhododaktylos Eôs (‘when
anax andrôn Agamemnon early-rising rosy-fi ngered
(‘Agamemnon lord of Dawn appeared 17, 54, 127
men’) 28 epea pteroenta (‘winged
andra (‘man’, fi rst word words’) 5, 16, 54
of Odyssey) 3 epos (‘word’, ‘epic’) 5–6, 39
aoidên thespesiên (‘wonderous
song’) 41 goös (‘lament’, ‘mourning’) 41
aoidos (‘singer’) 41 see also threnos
arêtê (‘virtue’) 100
Athênê, various expressions hamothen (‘where you will’) 97
for 54 homophrosynê (‘like-mindedness’)
162–3
basileus (‘king’, ‘leader’) 28
boulê (‘council’) 34 kaka erga (‘wrongful deeds’) 180
kêla theoio (‘the god’s arrows) 64
daimoni isos (‘equal to a god’) 72 kleos (‘fame’) 2 , 38 and passim
dikê (‘the right manner of klea andrôn (‘the fame of
things’) 180 men’) 42

INDEX OF GREEK WORDS AND HOMERIC EXPRESSIONS 211
kleos aphthiton (‘imperishable potnia (‘lady’, ‘powerfull

fame’) 14–15, 77, 110 and mistress’) 28
passim
qa-si-re-u see basileus
mênis (‘wrath’, fi rst word of
Iliad) 1, 63, 65–6 sêma (‘funerary monument’,
mêtis (‘wisdom’) 128 ‘tomb’, ‘sign’) 14–15, 38, 105,
moira (‘share’, ‘portion’, 141, 147, 165
‘fate’) 181
moros (‘the proper measure’) 180 te-me-no see temenos
morphê (‘form’) 139–40 temenos (‘apportioned plot of
land’) 28
nea thoên (‘swift ship’) 54 themis (‘the right way’) 180
nostos (‘return’) 110 threnos (‘dirge’) 41 see also goös
ti-ri-po-da see tripos
Odysseus, various expressions ton d’apameibomenos prosephê
for 54–5 (‘Then in response said
polyainos (‘much sung’) 3 . . .’) 52 , 102
polymêchanos (‘of many tripos (‘tripod’, ‘cauldron’) 28
devices’) 3
polymêtis (‘of many schemes’) 3 wa-na-ka see anax
polyphrôn (‘of many minds’) 3
polytropos (‘of many ways’) 3 xenos (‘guest’, ‘host’,
po-ti-ni-ja see potnia ‘stranger’) 105


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Homer

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50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue

First published 2012

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1 The figures of Homeric poetry 1

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A beginning for all time

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pity and lament – reflections on wrath as a destructive force, on

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Homer’s second poem, the Odyssey, deals with the aftermath

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the seas, at the edges of the world, on faraway islands, in Sparta,

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recreate and even more forcefully resist old categories, binary

he uttered winged words [epea pteroenta] and addressed her

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general quality of ‘epic’ poetry, which is itself a response by mortals

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. . . Men can kill

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many different and sometimes incompatible contexts and that the

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words, ‘in the beginning’ (bereshith in Hebrew). Things are a little

Don’t console me about death, great Odysseus

There are, as always in Homer, many ways of interpreting these

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construct. We must thus recognize the unique shapes and figures

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other as two separate poems – speak of a multiplicity of figures

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Homer’s poems has been and remains remarkably well-preserved

The ‘project’ of Homeric poetry

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proof positive of historicity of one kind or another, or as indicating

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past, but also, most prominently in the Odyssey, a word denoting

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[in words] more durable than bronze’ (Odes 3, 30). However, as

The materiality of Homer

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it were, in their ears. At the same time, as we have already noted,

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The necessity of history

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the Bronze Age. Scholars and archaeologists have been searching

Why is it important to believe that at the base of Homer