Figure 1 Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgement of Paris, c.1638, oil on canvas, 199 x 381 cm. Prado Museum, Madrid. Hermes holds up the golden apple, while Paris surveys the beauty of the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite.
The catalyst for the Trojan War occurred when, at the wedding of the hero Peleus and the immortal nymph Thetis, Eris, the goddess of strife, rolled an apple marked ‘for the fairest’ down the aisle. In the resulting fallout – as the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite quarrelled over who should receive this title – Zeus entrusted the decision to the judgement of a mortal, Paris, a prince of Troy. All three goddesses attempted to influence Paris: Hera offered him political dominion, Athena strategic success in war; but Paris chose Aphrodite, who offered him the most beautiful of all women, Helen. Unfortunately, Helen was already married to a Greek hero by the name of Menelaus: when she eloped with Paris to Troy, Menelaus’ brother, Agamemnon, raised a coalition of Greek forces to besiege Troy and secure Helen’s return. For ten years the two sides fought at Troy, along with their allies – the Trojans were supported at various times by Amazons (a mythical tribe of warrior women) and Ethiopians, making this something of an ancient world war. Achilles defeated all the main heroes, including the Amazon Penthesilea, the Ethiopian Memnon, and Troilus, the youngest son of the elderly king Priam, as well as the Trojan champion, Hector, whose body he dragged behind his chariot around the walls of Troy three times. Achilles too died, killed at the hands of Paris, who brought him low with an arrow through his heel. His body was rescued for burial by Ajax. Eventually, the city fell to Odysseus’ ruse of the Trojan Horse. Once inside the city, the Greeks massacred the population (except for some women and children whom they enslaved), and committed numerous atrocities, notorious among which was Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, killing Priam at the altar of Athena. With these actions the Greeks incurred the wrath of the gods, and few returned safely to their homelands: many were lost at sea, others founded colonies in distant lands, and those that did make it back found trouble waiting for them at home (Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra and her lover; Odysseus found his palace overrun with suitors for his wife). 1.2 Sources for the Trojan WarIt’s important to remember that there are variations on this story, and that the narrative is not fixed in one version; for example, some ancient authors wrote that Helen did not actually go to Troy, but rather a ‘phantom’ version of her created by Aphrodite did, while the real Helen was concealed in Egypt. The Iliad, too, is only a version of the story. We can see multiple versions in a variety of sources – and, crucially, not all of these sources are textual.Activity 1Another source for the Trojan story is Greek pottery. Look at the images below. Can you identify from the summary of the Trojan War which part of the story each of the images relates to?
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 2 depicts Achilles tying the body of Hector onto his chariot, in order to drag it around the walls of Troy three times in revenge for the killing of Patroclus. Figure 3 depicts the Trojan Horse, the famous ruse by which the Greeks were able to enter Troy and bring about the sack of the city. Figure 4 depicts Achilles and the Amazon Queen Penthesilea. Achilles is portrayed as obviously dominant, towering over Penthesilea, seemingly about to deliver the deathblow. We know that the figure of Penthesilea is female because she is painted in white and depicted with fewer muscles than Achilles. Figure 5 is from another ancient Greek pot that depicts Ajax rescuing the body of Achilles from the battlefield for burial. Two inscriptions (in Greek) mark the characters involved. Out of these four images, only that in Figure 2 is narrated by the Iliad. From this fact, we can learn two things. Firstly, the narrative of the Iliad is only one part of a much wider mythical tapestry of the Troy story. The story extends on either side of the narrative, and even events that do occur in the poem could be told in different ways: for example, the scene in Figure 2 is not exactly what we ‘see’ in Homer, though it addresses the same moment in the narrative. Secondly, the numerous scenes from the Troy story that appear on Greek ceramics and other visual sources from the Greek world are almost certainly not illustrations of the Iliad itself, but rather of the wider myth. Homer’s Iliad, then, is simply one version of a part of the Troy story.You now have a sense of the Trojan War and what happened in it. In this next activity you will learn about Homer’s take on the tradition.Activity 2Watch this short animation, ‘Troy Story I’, which summarises the narrative of Homer’s Iliad. Then reread the summary of the Trojan War story in Section 1. How does the plot of the animation compare to it?
Video 1 Troy Story I: the Iliad
[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATORThe Iliad, an epic tale of gods and heroes set at Troy over 3,000 years ago. At its heart, the story of a great warrior afflicted by terrible rages-- Achilles, son of the sea nymph Thetis and a mortal named Peleus. The setting-- the war began almost 10 years ago when Helen of Sparta was stolen away by the Trojan prince Paris, a war manipulated by gods who take opposing sides. Total war, ancient style. We begin at Troy, the seize by King Agamemnon and his Greek army. The stubborn king offends Achilles, the Greeks' best warrior, by claiming his spoil of war with the maiden Briseis. Achilles leaves the battlefield, honour affronted. So Achilles's mother, Thetis, asks Zeus to let the Trojans have the upper hand to show the Greeks they need her sign. For now, there's a truce, although Paris-- a lover, not a warrior-- is almost killed in a duel with Helen's husband. Heading into battle, Trojan champion Hector says an emotional goodbye to his wife and child. The fighting resumes, spurred on by the gods, and the Trojans are winning. Achilles still refuses to fight. But the Greeks know their foes fear him. So his best friend Patroclus, tries to fool the Trojans by wearing Achilles's armour. He is killed in battle by Hector. Enraged, Achilles vows revenge. Wearing armour newly fashioned fashioned by Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, he re-enters the battle and slays Hector. Still incensed, Achilles defiles Hector's corpse. This angers Zeus. He helps Hector's father, Priam, find Achilles and beg for Hector's body. Priam reminds Achilles of his own father, and the two weep together, lamenting the vagaries of war. And our story ends with Hector's funeral and mourning at Troy. The main theme of the Iliad is Achilles’ anger. To summarise: The poem begins with Achilles getting angry with Agamemnon, for taking the woman he had been awarded as a prize, Briseis; it ends with the burial of Hector, the Trojans’ greatest fighter, killed by Achilles, angry with Hector for having killed his best friend, Patroclus. Did you notice what the Iliad doesn’t narrate? It doesn’t tell us how the Trojan War started, or how it will end. In fact the whole of the Iliad covers only about 51 days in a 10-year war, and even then the main chunk of the text only really concerns a mere 3 days of fighting!Optional activityAlthough the Odyssey won’t be discussed in detail in this course, you might enjoy watching this second Troy Story animation, which explains the plot of this poem about Odysseus’ arduous journey home from Troy to Ithaca and the problems he encountered once he arrived there. The skills you learn in this OpenLearn course should prepare you to read both poems, as they employ similar techniques of oral poetry.
Video 2 Troy Story II: the Odyssey
[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOROur tale, the Odyssey, starts with a nymph, a king and the aftermath of war at Troy. It's a decade since Odysseus left for his home, Ithaca, after the Trojan War. For seven years, he's been ensnared by the nymph Calypso. But he's pining for his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. The goddess Athena is rather a fan of Odysseus. She persuades her father Zeus to compel Calypso to free him. He's been gone 20 years, feared dead, and Penelope's fending off 108 suitors. She says she'll marry one when she finishes her weaving. Sneaky. Telemachus searches for news. But meanwhile, a higher power plots his father's downfall. The sea god Poseidon really dislikes Odysseus. Well, he did blind his cyclops son. On a Mediterranean cruise, that's unfortunate, and Odysseus is left stranded once more. But Odysseus entrances his hosts, the Phaeacians, with tales of his odyssey and his many escapes from, among others, the cyclops, Polyphemus, the sorceress, Circe, the sirens, the supernatural Scylla, and the whirlpool of Charybdis. His reward for this stirring story? Home. But Odysseus needs to stay incognito. Ever helpful Athena turns him into a beggar. And reunited with his son, they celebrate by agreeing Penelope's suitors must die. The fair Penelope arranges a competition. She'll marry whoever can string Odysseus's huge bow. The suitors lose more than the contest. Odysseus is home, and Ithaca's his again. Athena celebrates. Poseidon doesn't. The suitors families are angry, too. But they'll get over it with Athena's help. Odysseus is in the clear and ready for life with Penelope, or another adventure. [MUSIC PLAYING] Despite the fact that the Iliad is a (very) long poem, Homer is remarkably concentrated on a single, fleeting episode in a much longer conflict. At the same time, he still manages to evoke the war as a whole. To take one example: Homer relates that, when news of the Trojan hero Hector’s death reached the Trojans holed up in the city, they wailed ‘as if the whole of jutting Ilium was now smouldering / with fire all the way from its top to its bottom’ (Iliad 22.410–411). Homer doesn’t need to narrate the fall of Troy because: (i) his ancient audience knew the broader outline of the Troy story; and (ii) he has shown by this point in the narrative that, with the death of Hector, Troy is doomed to fall. It’s clear already, then, that the Iliad doesn’t tell the whole story of the Trojan War. In what follows you’ll start to think about what Homer does focus on.2 Homer’s <i>Iliad</i>In the last section you discovered how the Trojan War begins and ends in the mythical narratives, and you learned that the Iliad doesn’t deal directly with either: in spite of its length, its story is focused on a handful of days in a 10-year conflict. In this section and the next, you will spend most of your time looking at the opening, or proem, of the poem – more specifically, the first seven lines. Although this is a very short extract of the text, it actually contains a large amount of useful material that you can tease out for thinking about the Iliad as a whole. You might be surprised to see how much you can learn from just these few lines! You’ll start by finding out how the poet signals his version of the narrative for an audience who knew (at least roughly) the basic trajectory of the war and the key characters involved.Activity 3The first seven lines of the Iliad function in some ways like the preface to a novel or a trailer for a film in that it gives the audience an insight into what is to come in the rest of the poem. In this version, translated by Anthony Verity, some words and phrases that may be unfamiliar to you have been glossed underneath the text. Read this text now.Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus’ son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.GlossaryAchaeans: one of the words used by Homer to describe the Greeks.Hades: the Underworld; also used of the god of the Underworld.Atreus’ son: Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans.What information can you identify that relates to the story of the Trojan War outlined in my synopsis in the previous section? What is the audience not told? Does it seem like the poet is assuming anything of his audience? Homer mentions four characters: an unnamed goddess, Achilles, Zeus, and ‘Atreus’ son’. But he doesn’t introduce them as characters: or, at any rate, he only provides the most minimal of details. Agamemnon isn’t even named: he’s ‘Atreus’ son’ and ‘lord of men’ (Iliad 1.7). (You probably found that you needed to use the glossary in order to understand that these phrases referred to Agamemnon.) Note, we’re also not told that Achilles and Agamemnon are Greeks (or Achaeans) or that they’re at Troy. Homer seems to assume that his audience will know who and where these characters are and what they’re doing there already.You’ll come back to the unnamed goddess, Zeus, and ‘Atreus’ son’ shortly. Before doing so, read the passage again, focusing on Achilles, the central character of the epic. What do we learn about him? Does anything seem surprising?Rather than saying that his poem will sing of the Trojan War, Homer chooses to focus on a specific episode within the Trojan War: the anger of Achilles. Given this background information about Achilles being an Achaean, did you notice something striking about his anger? Homer tells us that Achilles’ anger ‘brought the Achaeans countless / agonies’ (Iliad1.2–3). This Achaean hero causes death and destruction for his own side. Moreover, it comes about because he was ‘divided in strife’ (Iliad1.6) with the ‘lord of men’ (Iliad1.7). Instead of a promise of war between the Achaeans and Trojans, Homer trails a conflict between two of the Achaeans’ primary heroes – the leader of the expedition and their best warrior. This should make us sit up and take notice, even if we are a seasoned audience of epic song.Please note: Homer uses three names for the Greek army: they are Achaeans, Danaans or Argives. Although the term ‘Greeks’ is used in this course, he never uses the term in this collective sense. (In Homer ‘Hellas’ (Greece) denotes a northern region in the Greek mainland.)From this opening, then, you have seen how Homer positions his particular poem about the Trojan War in and against the story tradition relating to this conflict. Why do we talk about ‘Homer’ though, when, as you have seen, no mention of an author is given in the opening lines? The simple truth is that we don’t know anything about Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems that were composed in performance, meaning that they were crafted in the process of being sung, rather than being created in advance and recited or rehearsed as we might expect from a poetic recital. Because of this ‘composition in performance’ element, whoever the poet (poetēs comes from the Greek meaning the ‘one who makes’) was would have been clear for all members of that audience to see. By the same token, since there is no eye-witness account of the Iliad or Odyssey being composed, we have no information about their poet or whether indeed the same poet composed both epics. It was when these two poems came to be written down and re-performed at an Athenian festival held every four years in honour of Athena called the Great Panatheneia, around 550 BCE or so, that the name of ‘Homer’ appeared in conjunction with them. Indeed, at this early point, Homer’s name was also attached to other poems about the Trojan War, as if the name was shorthand to describe the genre of these poems, heroic epic. However, by the time of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), to talk of Homer’s poems meant the Iliad and Odyssey. Only these two orally composed heroic epics have survived the test of time (apparently) complete.Please note: heroic epic is a genre of poetry that focuses on the stories of heroes (as in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) to be distinguished from the epic poetry of Hesiod (in the same hexameter verse) that focuses on gods (Theogony) or men (the Works and Days).3 Homer’s oral art IThe fact that the Iliad was composed orally means that it has a number of features that are specific to this type of poetry. Even though all we have is a written version of the text, we can still identify a number of these oral features.Activity 4Read through the opening seven lines of the Iliad again. What stylistic features of this kind of poetry do you find striking or odd, or would like to know more about?Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus’ son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.There are several features that might have stood out to you. You might have noticed the address to the goddess, the mention of singing, and the way the heroes are described – for example, Achilles as ‘Peleus’ son’ in the first line. The first of these features, the address to the goddess, is not distinctive to oral poetry, but is something that appears in a lot of ancient poetry. The goddess in question is one of the Muses, a group of goddesses who were said to inspire all creative endeavours. So here, the poet is asking the Muse to tell the story of Achilles’ anger through him, suggesting that he is a vessel for divine inspiration.The other two features highlighted – singing and the descriptions of the heroes, which we call ‘epithets’ – are closely linked to the oral nature of the Iliad. While we read Homer in a book, and are able to because of a long manuscript tradition going back centuries of copying his poems (see Figure 6), Homer’s early audiences would have received his poems by listening to them being performed orally. Each of Homer’s poems would take some 3 days to perform, and would likely be performed in a public festival setting, like the Athenian Great Panathenaia festival mentioned above. If we remember that these poems were usually composed in performance, we can begin to understand some of the distinctive features of Homeric poetry, including ones that don’t translate well into English but are very effective in the original ancient Greek.
Figure 6 Iliad 1-1.25, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Venetus A: Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 (= 822), folio 12, recto.
3.1 Meter and word orderThe sung nature of oral poetry is particularly apparent from the fact that there is a strong metrical structure, or rhythm, to the poetry in the ancient Greek. Various metrical structures can be seen in more modern poetry; for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets make use of iambic pentameter (five metrical ‘feet’ of two syllables each, one unstressed and one stressed: da-DUM). The poetic genre of the Iliad – heroic epic – has, in the original Greek text, a very strict metrical structure. For each line of verse, in the Greek there are six metrical feet – hence the full name of Homer’s poetry: hexameter – composed of a combination of short and long syllables. You don’t need to recognise the precise structure of the hexameter metrical line, but it is important to know this is the fundamental basis for how the poetry works. Activity 5Listen to the first audio, which is a recording of the English translation of the first seven lines of the Iliad. Then listen to the second audio, which is a recording of the first seven lines of the Iliad being recited in ancient Greek, in order to hear the rhythm. Finally, listen to the third audio, which discusses the metrical structure of these lines.
Audio 1 Reading of lines 1–7 of the Iliad in translation
Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus' son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus' son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.
Audio 2 Lucy Jackson reads lines 1–7 of the Iliad in Greek
Audio 3 A discussion of meter in these lines
CHRISTINE PLASTOWMeter can be quite a complicated idea to get your head around, especially if you’re not used to reading a lot of poetry. For English speakers, the most familiar meter is probably iambic pentameter. ‘Pentameter’ refers to the number of metrons, more commonly called feet, which are the individual units of the meter; in this case, there are five feet (as the ‘pent’ part of ‘pentameter’ indicates.) ‘Iambic’ refers to the type of foot – in the case of English, an iamb is constructed of one unstressed and one stressed syllable, ‘da-DUM’ as in ‘above’ or ‘delay’. The meter can be noticed particularly clearly in Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? or My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. As I recite those lines, you can hopefully hear that every other syllable is stressed, in a pattern of five feet. This stressed and unstressed form of meter is called accentual meter.Meter in ancient Greek is slightly different, because it uses long and short syllables, rather than stressed and unstressed syllables. So in Greek poetry, an iamb would be one short and one long syllable. This is called quantitative meter. The metrical system of the Iliad, and indeed of all heroic epic poetry, is called dactylic hexameter. You may be able to deduce that the word ‘hexameter’ indicates that there are six feet to a line. ‘Dactylic’ refers to the type of foot, which is constructed of one long and two short syllables, ‘dum-diddle’. The name comes from the Greek word ‘daktylos’, meaning finger, because the finger from the knuckle to the tip is composed of one long and two short bones. Dactylic hexameter is often considered to be the most grandiose and formal type of meter, though its success as a meter for epic is because of the way it seems to drive the narrative along and create a flowing style. In dactylic hexameter, the first five feet are usually dactyls, while the sixth foot has only two syllables, often one long and one short, called a trochee, or two long, called a spondee. Classical dactylic hexameter is quite a flexible meter, though, and any of the first four dactyls can be freely replaced with a spondee. The fifth dactyl can occasionally be replaced with a spondee, though in Homer, the fifth foot remains a dactyl 95% of the time.In Homeric poetry, word breaks often occur in the middle of feet. So the first two words of the Iliad, menin aeide, take up one and a half feet. If I recite the first line of the Iliad slowly, hopefully you can hear the distinction between the feet: ME nin a / EI de the / A PE / LE i a / DEO akh i / LE OS. You might have been able to hear that there was a change in the middle of the line. The third foot has been replaced with a spondee. So in the first line of the Iliad, we have two dactyls: Menin aeide the-. One spondee: -A pe-. Two more dactyls: -leia deo akhi-. And a final spondee: -leos. If you go back and listen to the Greek recording again now, you may be able to begin to hear the meter in the opening of the Iliad.As you heard, the metrical structure of the Iliad is particularly strict. You might expect that this would affect how creative the poet could be in his choice of words and phrases. Although the meter did in some ways constrain the poetry, in fact the poet was able to use the form to great effect by exploiting the flexibility of Greek word order. Activity 6Now return to those first seven lines, but this time you’re going to look at the order of the words in Greek, and how they’ve been translated into English. You are not expected to be able to read the Greek here (though if you’ve studied ancient Greek before, you may be able to recognise some words); a literal translation to illustrate the original word order is provided. For each line, you are given the Greek text, then the transliteration (the Greek text rendered in English letters), then the literal word order in English and finally the good English translation. Take a few minutes to study each line and see how the English translation relates to the original Greek word order. Then look more closely at the Greek word order, and see if you can spot any interesting effects.Line 1μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆοςmenin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileosanger sing goddess son-of-Peleus AchillesSing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus' son,Line 2οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,oulomenen, he myri’ Achaiois alge’ etheke,accursed, that countless to-the-Achaeans agonies broughtthe accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessLine 3πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψενpollas d’ iphthimous psychas Aidi proiapsenmany and mighty shades into-Hades hurledagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,Line 4ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσινheroon, autous de heloria teuche kynessinof-heroes, them and prey causing-them-to-become of-dogscausing them to become the prey of dogs andLine 5οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,oionoisi te pasi, Dios d’ eteleieto boule,of-birds and all-kinds, of-Zeus and was-fulfilled plan.all kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Line 6ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντεex hou de ta prota diasteten erisantefrom when indeed the first in-strife were-dividedSing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Line 7Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.Atreides te anax andron kai dios Achilleus.Son-of-Atreus both lord of-men and glorious Achilles.Atreus' son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.You might have noticed that the translator tries to keep the same words on the same line in his translation, even though he cannot keep the same word order; it appears that the only major deviation is the word ‘agonies’, which he moves from the second line to the third line. Similarly, he tries not to add in any more extra words than are necessary to make sense of the Greek grammar, with the exception of the repetition of the word ‘sing’ on line 6. You might have also noted that the first word in Greek is ‘anger’, which as you saw in the Troy Story I animation is the theme of the whole poem – the anger of Achilles. This is an intentional use of the flexibility of ancient Greek word order, to have the effect of highlighting the theme of the poem from the very beginning for the listening audience. It is difficult, however, to translate this into English in a way that maintains this effect, and so many translators choose to start with the imperative ‘sing’, directed towards the Muse.You might have spotted a similar effect in the Greek on lines two and four, where the first word of each line is part of a phrase that runs over from the previous line: ‘accursed’ on line two, and ‘heroes’ on line four (this poetic technique of running a sentence over two lines to emphasise certain words is called enjambement). Thus, like anger, these words are highlighted and their force emphasised; we learn that Achilles’ anger will be terrible and destructive, and meet for the first time the heroes who will play such major roles in the epic. However, it’s possible to draw out another interesting point from the introduction of the heroes here. You might have been surprised by the fact that the first thing we hear about the heroes is that their souls are being hurled into Hades. This sombre, reflective tone and focus on death contains no suggestion of a celebration of heroic activity. We can see from the very start, then, that the Iliad is not a poem that glorifies war, or even necessarily the heroic way of life; although the heroes are obviously set apart from ‘normal’ people (both at the time of the poem’s original performance and in the present day) by their strength, courage, and honour, they are still victims of the fighting and subject to their own mortality.3.2 EpithetsBesides the creative use of word order, there were other ways for the poet to work with the strict metrical form of heroic epic poetry. One was the regular use of stock phrases, called formulae, which act as ‘ready-made building blocks’ to fit the metrical structure, often finishing off a line. One particular type of formula is the epithet, a way of referring to characters by different attributes. You’ve already encountered one example that occurs in the very first line: Peleus’ son, which is used to refer to Achilles. Activity 7Read the first seven lines again, and see how many more epithets you can spot. Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus’ son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.There are three more epithets used in the passage, all in line 7. ‘Atreus’ son’ and ‘lord of men’ both refer to Agamemnon, and Achilles is called ‘glorious’.Epithets serve as a kind of shorthand to immediately identify the hero or thing being described: so Agamemnon can be described in terms of his birth right (‘son of Atreus’) or his role (‘lord of men’). Other repeated phrases can be longer in form, as in ‘the plan of Zeus was fulfilled’ (Iliad 1.5).
Figure 7 Achilles and Agamemnon arguing; the subject of the first book of the Iliad, and the catalyst for its whole narrative.
You’ve already seen how frequently epithets appear even just in the first few lines. In fact, they occur in almost every line, and are a characteristic feature of Homer’s poems. Importantly, the epithets themselves show both repetition and variation; for example, Achilles is often called ‘swift-footed’, but also ‘glorious’ and ‘glorious swift-footed’. This allows them to fit into different sections of the metrical structure, allowing the poet to compose in performance more easily.Arguably the closest modern comparison for how this poetry works is rap – a musical genre that similarly possesses a similar set of stock scenarios, images and language, with a strong metrical basis (which must aid memory and recall for poet and audience alike).Activity 8The idea that heroic epic poems draw on a vast repertoire of epithets and repeated phrases – and even entire story patterns, like the ‘destruction of a city’ or the ‘homecoming’ – might give the impression of a ‘poetry-by-numbers’ kind of literature. For an example, consider the first instance when Achilles is called ‘swift-footed’ in the Iliad:So when they had assembled and were gathered together,swift-footed Achilles rose and spoke among them.(Homer, Iliad 1.57–8)What’s the problem here with the epithet ‘swift-footed’? With the idea of oral composition in mind, can you explain its use here?There seems to be a disjunction between the act being described and the epithet chosen to describe it. Achilles is standing to speak – but then he's described as ‘swift footed’. Oral theory provides one answer, namely that the use of the epithet ‘swift footed’ is determined by metrical need. That is to say, Homer, who has several other epithets for Achilles such as ‘godlike’ or ‘son of Peleus’, uses ‘swift footed’ here because that phrase fits the metrical demands of the Greek hexameter line.This explanation is fine, but doesn't seem to do justice to the skill of the poet. There is another invaluable function that the epithets provide. As you noted before, well-known characters can be introduced without even being named. This is because the ancient audience would be familiar with both the characters and their epithet descriptions. In turn, this is because they are ‘ready-made building blocks’ that had been used before in other poems and other contexts. That seems to be the point here. The epithet ‘swift-footed’ points to one essential aspect (there are others, such as ‘son of Peleus’) of who Achilles is in the tradition of epic song about the Trojan War. To put that another way: in the tradition Achilles is usually ‘swift-footed’, presumably because this was an important asset in fighting. Here, however, the context is precisely at odds with what Achilles is famed for. Indeed, for the most part of the Iliad, Achilles doesn’t move: he sits out the war in his hut by the ships. This tension between his traditional description and what he actually does draws attention to a disjunction between what is expected of Achilles in traditional storytelling and the (new, perhaps even radical) version that Homer sings.3.3 Homeric musicYou’ve now completed a close reading of the first seven lines of the Iliad, thinking about the effects of metre, word order, epithets, and the audience’s knowledge of the Trojan story. The only thing that is still missing from the whole experience of the Iliad is the music. As you now know, the Iliad would not have simply been recited, but sung with instrumental accompaniment. This may be one of the most difficult aspects of the original performance context to recreate, but it’s not impossible. A researcher named Stefan Hagel has been working for 35 years on creating a reconstruction of Homeric singing and music.Activity 9First, read this explanation of Stefan Hagel’s research method in recreating Homeric music:Most scholars are convinced that Homer stood in a tradition of lyre-accompanied epic song, just as depicted in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The melodies, which would have been improvised along with the text, are of course lost, the first Greek notated musical documents surviving only from about 400 years later. However, computer-aided statistics of word accents in the epics have shown that these were not distributed randomly; especially word-final accents accumulate in certain places, in a way that can only be explained as governed by melodic preferences. Patterns emerge that align melodic contours with metrical and grammatical units, even across verses.On the basis of these patterns and the conventions of Homeric versification it becomes possible to improvise a melody for any piece of archaic hexameter poetry, adjusting the broader contours to the demands of individual word accents, so that the melody becomes a stylised representation of Greek speech – just as it is observed in notated music from the Hellenistic period (after 323 BCE) on. In the audio example below, the re-envisaged Homeric melody is accompanied on a seven-stringed lyre, the typical instrument of the early poets, tuned to what may have been the archaic version of ‘Aeolian’ – probably the closest we may get to a seventh-century BCE tuning, and in good geographic accord with the history of the epic language.Now listen to this audio, in which Stefan Hagel performs an improvisation on the lyre and sings the opening lines of the Iliad.Audio 4 A performance by Stefan Hagel4 Homer’s oral art IIAnother characteristic feature of Homer’s oral poetry is the simile. In similes, the poet compares one thing to another: so and so is ‘like’ x. For example, at Iliad 21.461–7, Apollo backs out of fighting with his uncle Poseidon, the earth-shaker, ‘for the sake of mortals’ because they are:wretched creatures, who like leaves at one time flourish in a blaze of glory, feeding on the fruits of the tilled earth, andat another wither spiritlessly away.Apollo’s contention is that the gods should not fight among themselves on behalf of men, because men die. He compares mortals to leaves on a tree, since, in comparison to the gods, mortals live their lives in the seasonal cycle of one year, flourishing at one moment, at the next withering and dying away. In this way, similes are exemplary for demonstrating the ways in which Homer relates his story of an epic universe of heroes to the people of his day.Homer’s similes most often use scenes from nature or domestic life in their imagery. These would have had various powerful effects on the audience listening to the poem, which we can explore by looking at some of the similes more closely.Activity 10Read the two sections of similes below, and look at the images that accompany them. Then, list 3–5 adjectives that describe the scenes in these two similes. Can you guess what they might be comparing the scene to?
Figure 8 Cranes flying
[they] advanced, screeching and shouting like birds;as when the screech of cranes is heard in the high sky,when they have fled from winter’s onset and prodigious rain,and screaming fly towards the streams of Ocean… (Iliad 3.2–5)