44 See Jasper Griffin, “Homeric Words and Speakers,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986), 36-57; the quote appears on p. 53.
45 On phthíō, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979), 185ff.
46 For the geographical kingdom of Peleus and Achilles, see R. Hope Simpson and J. F. Lazenby, “The Kingdom of Peleus and Achilles,” Antiquity 33 (1959), 102-5.
In God We Trust
1 Following the Embassy of Book Nine is Book Ten, by convention called “the Doloneia,” which was widely held even in antiquity to represent a very skillful non-Iliadic (but possibly Homeric) addition to the Iliad. Its subject is a nocturnal, covert mission by Odysseus and Diomedes to the Trojan camp to gain information on the disposition of the enemy, who intercept a Trojan spy, Dolon, on his way to spy out the Greek camp. The night ambush; the “weapons of fear” carried by the two Greeks; the cold-blooded murder of Dolon, whom they had tricked into believing he could save his life by cooperating with them; and the subsequent slaughter of newly arrived Trojan allies under King Rhesos, whose fabulous horses Diomedes drives back to the Achaean camp, conjure a decidedly nonheroic sequence of events, more characteristic of the Odyssey than the Iliad. Much has been written about this episode; see, for example, Georg Danek, Studien zur Dolonie (Vienna, 1988); and Bernard Fenik, “Iliad X” and the “Rhesus”: The Myth (Brussels, 1964). For the escapade’s resemblance to certain warrior and initiation rites, see Olga Merck Davidson, “Dolon and Rhesus in the Iliad,” Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 30 (1979), 61-66; and for the episode as an echo of Odysseus’ role in the sack of Troy, see Adele J. Haft, “ ‘The City-Sacker Odysseus’ in Iliad 2 and 10,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 120 (1990), 37-56.
2 For the identification of the tribes, see Richard Janko, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16 (Cambridge, 1992), sub. vv. 4-7, 42f.
3 As was done by Mary Lefkowitz, Greek Gods, Human Lives (New Haven, CT, 2003), 53ff.
4 Histories, 2. 53, Aubrey de Sélincourt, trans., Herodotus: The Histories (London, 2003), 117.
5 For the evidence of the Linear B tablets, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, John Raffan, trans. (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 43ff. On the offerings to Poseidon, see John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World (Cambridge, 1976), 96ff.
6 On Hera and her association with cows, by way of Zeus, see M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 184f.; also Simon Pulleyn, Homer: “Iliad” I (Oxford, 2000), sub. v. 551, 260.
7 West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 136.
8 Burkert, 140; for parallels with the Ugaritic/West Semitic war goddess Anat, see Bruce Louden, The “Iliad”: Structure, Myth, and Meaning (Baltimore, 2006), 245-85.
9 Athene’s skinning of a man named Pallas, in some traditions her father, and wearing of his skin is rare evidence of her darker nature: Burkert, 140, and note 21 on p. 404, for citation of (obscure) sources.
10 For the birth of Athene, see Hesiod, Theogony, 886ff., in Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans., Hesiod: Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 75ff.; “Homeric Hymn to Athena” (28 in West), 4f.; and Pindar, Olympian 7.35ff., in C. M. Bowra, trans., The Odes of Pindar (London, 1969), 165.
11 Athene’s other common epithet, Tritogéneia, remains obscure. See G. S. Kirk, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume I: Books 1-4 (Cambridge, 1985), sub. vv. 513-16, 394, for a review of attempted explanations.
12 Burkert, Greek Religion, 17.
13 West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 166ff.
14 For the tension between Zeus’ original character and the assumed functions of a storm god, see M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997), 114ff.
15 For Ugaritic origin, see Janko, sub. vv. 292-93, 198; and M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988), 170.
16 Plato, The Republic, 378b7ff.; C.D.C. Reeve, trans. (Indianapolis, 2004), 58f.
17 “Longinus,” On the Sublime, 9.7, in Stephen Halliwell, ed. and trans., Aristotle “Poetics”; W. H. Fyfe, trans., rev. by Donald Russell, Longinus “On the Sublime”; Doreen C. Innes, ed. and trans., based on W. Rhys Roberts, Demetrius “On Style” (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 189.
18 Diòs is the genitive, or possessive, form of the noun “Zeus”—i.e., “of Zeus.”
19 Hera’s adornment, like the armor of the Homeric heroes, is inspired by styles of different epochs. Her dress would seem to be the peplos, a kind of draped and folded length of fabric held by pins, of post-Mycenaean date. Similarly, her mulberry-cluster earrings have a counterpart in finds from an early Dark Age tomb; there is no evidence that the Bronze Age Mycenaeans wore earrings. On the other hand, her zone, or elaborate belt, resembles the gold-edged girdle hung with thirty-five golden pendants discovered in the tomb of a Mycenaean princess. The details of Hera’s finery are examined by Janko, sub. vv. 180-85, 176ff.
20 Hera’s evocation of Okeanos and Tethus/Tethys is a reference to a theogony in which “Okeanos and Tethus are the primeval parents, not merely the parents of all waters,” a theogony whose origin can be traced to Babylonian creation epic; Janko, sub. vv. 200-207, 180ff.
21 Other examples of divine deceptions are found, for example, in Hesiod, Theogony, 535ff., relating Prometheus’ trick on Zeus; and the “Hymn to Hermes,” which relates the many crafty exploits of the newborn god. For Demodokos’ song, see Odyssey 8.266ff. Aphrodite’s determined seduction of the mortal Anchises, related in the “Hymn to Aphrodite,” has many undoubtedly conscious resemblances to Hera’s seduction of Zeus.
22 Raffaele Pettazzoni, The All-Knowing God: Researches into Early Religion and Culture, H. J. Rose, trans. (London, 1956), 145-52; and Jasper Griffin, “The Divine Audience and the Religion of the Iliad,” Classical Quarterly, n.s. 28 no. 1 (1978), 1-22.
23 See, for example, Odysseus Tsagarakis, Nature and Background of Major Concepts of Divine Power in Homer (Amsterdam, 1977), 19ff.
24 My account is taken from David Clarke, The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians (Chichester, 2005); the quotation appears on p. 52 and is based on the account of Private John Ewings, Second Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, then a thirty-five-year-old private from County Tyrone, who recalled the events at the age of 101, in an interview for the BBC in 1980 (cited in Clarke’s book as an interview by Helen Madden, BBC Northern Ireland, May 22, 1980).
25 The poem was in turn rebutted by Hugh MacDiarmid, in “Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”:It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
Man Down
1 The list of duties, as well as characterization, of the therápōn follows that of P.A.L. Greenhalgh, “The Homeric Therapon and Opaon and Their Historical Implications,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 29 (1982), 81-90. The list appears on p. 82.
2 Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary, Robert P. Keep, trans. (Piscataway, NJ, 2002), 150.
3 The term hetaros, “companion” or “comrade-in-arms,” can refer to “a close comradeship between or among equals or a relationship resembling that of knight and squire to mere common participation in warfare”: Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (Norman, OK, 1963), 164; see also P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, vol. 1 (Paris, 1968), 380f. It can also, apparently, refer to more formal, institutionalized relationships, as is hinted at in a scene in Book Twenty-two, when Androm ache imagines Astyanax, orphaned “among his father’s hetaroi ... but one whose parents are living beats him out of the banquet / hitting him with his fists and in words a
lso abuses him: / ‘Get out, you! Your father is not dining with us’ ” (22.492ff.). Collectively, Achilles’ Myrmidon hetaroi form a loyal “band” bound to their king, of which Patroklos as an individual hetaros is also a friend and companion; see George John Stagakis, “Therapontes and Hetairoi, in the Iliad, as Symbols of the Political Structure of the Homeric State,” Historia 15 (1966), 408-19.
4 Hesiod, Catalogue of Women or EHOIAI, fragment 147, in Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans., Hesiod: The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 213ff. The Cypria makes mention of Patroklos in regard to his capture of a Trojan named Lykaon (West, Cypria fragment 11, 79); this same Lykaon appears toward the end of the Iliad in a famously pathetic scene with Achilles. These two references, then—both enlargements of Iliadic characters and incidents—are all that can be gleaned from the surviving epic tradition about Patroklos. On the other hand, he is casually introduced in the Iliad, in Book One, not by his name, Patroklos, but simply as “the son of Menoitios,” and this has been taken as evidence that his character was already familiar to epic audiences. If so, was he familiar because he had a place in the broader epic tradition or because Homer’s version of the Trojan War had already made the son of Menoitios famous? For the view that his character was not merely developed but created by Homer, see, for example, Hartmut Erbse, “Ilias und ‘Patroklie,’ ” Hermes 111 (1983), 1-15. Janko, on the other hand, points out that Patroklos carries some “old epithets”—i.e., hippeús, “fighting from a chariot,” and hippokéleuthos, “horse-driving”; Richard Janko, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16 (Cambridge, 1992), sub. v. 20, 317f.; likewise, on the antiquity of the phrase “strength of so-and-so,” which extends to Patroklos, see G. S. Kirk, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume I: Books 1-4 (Cambridge, 1985), sub. vv. 658-60, 226.
5 The details of Patroklos’ background are gleaned from 18.325-26 and 23.85-87.
6 For the inspiration for Patroklos’ name, see Hartmut Erbse, “Achilleus, Patroklos und Meleagros,” in Jens Holzhausen, ed., ψυχή—Seele—Anima: Festschrift für Karin Alt Zum 7 Mai 1998 (Stuttgart, 1998), 1-6.
7 Heroic companionship is discussed in C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1961), 65ff. For Peirithoös and Theseus, see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1993), 277ff.
8 A concise overview of the complicated history and different versions of the epic is given in the introduction to Stephen Mitchell’s translation, Gilgamesh (New York, 2004).
9 On the tradition and pattern of such scenes, see Bernard Fenik, Typical Battle Scenes in the “Iliad” (Wiesbaden, 1968), 191; an overview of the compositional function of type scenes is given in Matthew Clark, “Formulas, Metre and Type-Scenes,” in Robert Fowler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004), 117-38, especially 134ff.
10 Cypria, fragment 4, in M. L. West, ed. and trans., Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Century B.C. (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 85.
11 M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 157, note 126; Iliad quotes are at 16. 866f. and 18. 84f. For the gifts to Peleus, see W. R. Paton, “The Armour of Achilles,” Classical Review 26 (1912), 1-4; and Janko, 310ff.
12 For such examples from “shamanistic” heroic saga, see Bowra, 6ff.
13 “In the Iliad an unkillable warrior would be an absurdity; every man must face death, and no magical armour can be allowed to exempt him from that terrible prospect.” Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1983), 167.
14 Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, fragment 145, in Most, 213. The testimony citing Hesiod’s account does not give the name of the island, but it can reasonably be supplied as Aigina; see, for example, Gantz, vol. 1, 220. Elsewhere in the Hesiodic corpus, a snippet of a fragment cites a “Myrmidon” as the father of Aktor, who in the Iliad is in turn the father of Menoitios, Patroklos’ father (fragment 10 [continued]), 61. See also Apollodoros, The Library 1.7.3; and Gantz, vol. 1, 168, 222.
15 Theagenes, fragment 17, in Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker (Leiden, 1998), 4:511.
16 The associations are discussed in Jeffrey S. Carnes, “The Aiginetan Genesis of the Myrmidons: A Note on Nemean 3.13-16,” Classical World 84 (1990-91), 41-44.
17 See Dennis R. MacDonald, “Andrew and the Ant People,” The Second Century 8 (1991), 43-49; it is also possible that the name of Achilles’ famously savage men inspired the name of the cannibal city.
18 For Myrmidons as distinct from Phthians, see Janko, sub. vv. 685-88, 133.
19 Quoted from West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 448 and 450, respectively. Warrior societies associated with wolves and wolfish acts are well attested in ancient Greece, especially in Arcadia. Typically, initiates into such secret societies must undergo ordeals involving the commission of taboo acts, such as cannibalism; a notorious example is the “leopard men” of Africa, who dressed in leopard skins to kill and eat people. See, for example, Walter Burkert, Homo Necans, Peter Bing, trans. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), 83ff. For the wolf both as a model of the outlaw on the fringe of society and as exemplifying the warrior ideal, see Mary R. Gerstein, “Germanic Warg: The Outlaw as Werwolf,” in Gerald James Larson, C. Scott Littleton, and Jaan Puhvel, eds., Myth in Indo-European Antiquity (Berkeley, 1974), 131-56. In Homeric epic, a hero is occasionally overcome with “wolfish rage”; see Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago, 1991), 131-37.
20 The numbers are given in C. B. Armstrong, “The Casualty Lists in the Trojan War,” Greece and Rome, series 2, 16 (1969), 30-31; Patroklos’ tally includes twenty-seven named victims and an anonymous cluster of nine men killed in each of three assaults.
21 The extraordinary transport of Sarpedon in death and in particular Hera’s earlier statement that a “tomb and gravestone” are “the privilege of those who have perished” have suggested to some scholars that reference is made here to Sarpedon’s status as a cult hero; see Gregory Nagy, “On the Death of Sarpedon,” in Carl A. Rubino and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, eds., Approaches to Homer (Austin, TX, 1983), 189-217.
22 “The pair of warriors shares some of the starkest, philosophical moments of reflection in the poem”; Carroll Moulton, “The Speech of Glaukos in Iliad 17,” Hermes 109 (1981), 1-8.
23 For the argument that Glaukos and Sarpedon also mirror aspects of Achilles and foreshadow his return, see ibid.
24 Jasper Griffin, “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977), 39-53, especially 40; see also Janko, sub. vv. 777- 867, 408f., on the stripping of armor as a folklore motif.
25 Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 60; see also Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2004), 203ff.
26 We have seen that the meaning of therápōn, the Greek word describing Patroklos’ relationship to Achilles, is “comrade-in-arms,” “henchman,” or “retainer”; some scholars, however, argue that the word is not Greek in origin, but a Bronze Age adaptation of a Hittite term, *tarpan-, meaning “ritual substitute.” The seminal study of the Hittite word is by Nadia Van Brock, “Substitution rituelle,” Revue Hittite et Asianique 65 (1959), 117-46, especially 125f.; for possible implications of the Greek borrowing in the wider epic context, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979), 292f.; also Dale S. Sinos, Achilles, Patroklos and the Meaning of “Philos” (Innsbruck, 1980), 29ff.
27 The intensification of threats of mutilation after death that follows the death of Patroklos in Book Twenty, is examined by Charles Segal, The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the “Iliad” (Leiden, 1971), 18ff.
28 This striking image of the horses stilled by grief calls to mind familiar but anachronistic images of the quiet stillness of grave stelae of the classical era; counterparts exist on Iron Age pottery used as grave markers and even on shaft-grave s
telae at Mycenae that depict a weathered horse and chariot; Mark W. Edwards, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume V: Books 17-20 (Cambridge, 1991), sub. vv. 434-36, 106.
29 Aethiopis, in West, Greek Epic Fragments, argument 3-4, 113. The many parallels between Achilles and Memnon and their mothers, Thetis and Eos, are discussed by Laura M. Slatkin, “The Wrath of Thetis,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 (1986), 1-24.
30 For the ways in which the death of Patroklos corresponds to the death of Achilles, see Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001), 74ff.; and for a comprehensive bibliography of this question, see his note 98, p. 219.
31 In later eras, the extravagance of Achilles’ grief invited speculation that he and Patroklos had been lovers. This belief was apparently central to a lost trilogy by Aeschylus (the Myrmidons, Nereids, Phrygians) and represented a trend in the fifth century B.C. and later to cast old, established myths in a homosexual light that reflected current social mores. Thus Herakles was made the lover of his companion-in-arms; King Minos became the lover of Theseus; a nephew of Daedalus became the lover of Rhadamanthys, one of the judges of the dead; and so forth. The classic work on the subject is K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1989). A late-fourth-century-B. C. tradition devised a passion on Achilles’ part for Troilos, one of Priam’s sons, who according to authors as early as Ibycus was renowned for his “loveliness of form”; Ibycus, fragment 282.41-46, in David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 224f. The cyclic tradition, significantly, says nothing about this passion, the Cypria noting only that Achilles ambushes Troilos at the shrine of Apollo and slays him; West, Greek Epic Fragments, argument 11, 79. For the evolution of the story of Achilles and Troilos, see Gantz, vol. 2, 597ff.In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.).