Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War
Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception presents scholarly monographs offering new and innovative research and debate to students and scholars in the reception of Classical Studies. Each volume will explore the appropriation, reconceptualization and recontextualization of various aspects of the Graeco-Roman world and its culture, looking at the impact of the ancient world on modernity. Research will also cover reception within antiquity, the theory and practice of translation, and reception theory.
Also available in the Series:
Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Filippo Carlà and Irene Berti
Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989, edited by Justine McConnell and Edith Hall
The Codex Fori Mussolini, Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse
The Gentle, Jealous God, Simon Perris
Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform, edited by Henry Stead and Edith Hall
Imagining Xerxes, Emma Bridges
Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife, Miryana Dimitrova
Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen, Paula James
Victorian Classical Burlesques, Laura Monrós-Gaspar
Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War
Dialogues on Tradition
Jan Haywood and Naoíse Mac Sweeney
Contents
List of Illustrations
Note from the Authors
Introduction: Dialogue
1 Navigating Tradition
Jan: The Iliad’s poets
Poets and poetic practice
The functions of poetry
The Poet(s) of the Iliad
Naoíse: The Erra’s poems
The Narrators of the Erra
Poet and Poem in the Erra
Songs as things
Stories and storytellers
2 Visualizing Society
Naoíse: Euthymides’ pioneer politics
The Euthymides amphora
The politics of the pot
The Pioneer Group
Troy, the Iliad, and the Pioneer Group
Jan: Rossetti’s vulnerable firebrand
Dangerous desirability
The Pre-Raphaelite Helen
Rossetti’s subversive Helen
3 Staging Conflict
Jan: Euripides’ new contests
Cassandra’s sophistry
Novel songs
Agonal conflict
Conflicts old and new
Naoíse: Shakespeare’s empty arguments
Conflict and debate in the Troilus
Shakespeare’s Homer
‘All argument is a whore and a cuckold’
4 Seeking Truth
Jan: Herodotus’ Trojan truths
An historical war
Relocating Helen
Inquiry and the Trojan War
Antique vs. recent pasts
Thinking through Homer
Naoíse: Schliemann’s physical proofs
Schliemann’s Trojan controversy
Autopsy and adventure
Archaeology: An Homeric science
An exclusively Iliadic treasure
The quest for truth
5 Claiming Identities
Naoíse: Godfrey’s hall of mirrors
The heirs of Troy
Rival Trojan genealogies
Godfrey’s Homer
The mirror refracted
Jan: Troy’s Hall of Fame
Remembering Troy
Goodies and baddies
A clash of civilizations
Heroic ambivalence
Conclusion: Memorial
The subject and the process of memorialization
The Iliad and the Trojan War tradition
References
Index
List of Illustrations
2.1 Red-figure amphora signed by Euthymides (Munich, Staatliche Antikenssamlungen Inv. 2307). Side A: Hector arming, flanked by Priam and Hecuba. Drawing by Tina Ross.
2.2 Red-figure amphora signed by Euthymides (Munich, Staatliche Antikenssamlungen Inv. 2307). Side B: Three drunken revellers. Drawing by Tina Ross.
2.3 Table of Pioneer Group vases depicting scenes from the Trojan War myth.
2.4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen of Troy (Hamburg, Kunsthalle Inv. 2469). Image reproduced with the kind permission of Bridgeman Images.
4.1 Sophia Schliemann wearing gold jewellery from the ‘Treasure of Priam’. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Note from the Authors
This book began with a conversation. In 2014, we were both involved in teaching an undergraduate module on ‘Troy and the Trojan War’ at the University of Leicester, which led to friendly debate about what aims such a module might have and what potential material it might cover, given the widespread and multifarious responses that this tradition has generated. This resulted in a broader discussion about the traditions surrounding the Trojan War, and, inevitably, about receptions of the Iliad and Homeric poetry more broadly. Both traditions and reception, we felt, were essentially constructed through engagements, interactions, and, ultimately, dialogue; it was from this point on that the concept of dialogue became core to the project. We hope that the structure of this book goes some way towards capturing this, allowing our individual authorial voices to be heard and retaining something of the fundamental multivocality of classical receptions.
We are very grateful to several people who have read and commented on parts of the book, including: Tom Harrison, Johannes Haubold, Greta Hawes, Fiona Hobden, Gregory Nagy, Robin Osborne, Nicholas Postgate, Seth Schein, and Martin Worthington. Where this book is successful we owe these individuals a great debt; but we claim sole credit for the flaws and weaknesses that remain. Thanks are also due to Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies (in particular to Lanah Koelle and Gregory Nagy); both of us were fortunate to spend some time at the centre during the researching and writing of this book. We are also grateful to the wonderful editorial team at Bloomsbury, including Alice Wright and Clara Herberg, for their patience and good counsel. Finally, we would also like to thank Craig Cipolla and Ollie Harris, who have been both friends and colleagues of ours at the University of Leicester. Craig and Ollie’s new book (Harris and Cipolla 2017) was conceived and written at broadly the same time as our own and also makes use of the dialogic form. We have enjoyed and benefitted from our conversations with them over the years, and from reading their own innovative concluding dialogue.
In the spelling of proper nouns, we have been consistent only in following convention. In the majority of cases, Latin spellings have been used in preference to Greek. All translations are our own, unless specified otherwise.
Jan’s Note:
Many individuals have contributed to this book over the period of its gestation. I am grateful to audiences at the University of Leicester, the University of Manchester, and The Open University, who listened to, and offered a number of instructive comments on, earlier versions of my sections in Chapters 4 and 5, as well as the Conclusion. I am also thankful to numerous friends and colleagues for their encouragement and advice along the way, notably: Tom Harrison, Fiona Hobden, Jason Wickham, Tao Ziyuan, Andy Merrills, Dave Edwards, Neil Christie, Graham Shipley, and Mary Harlow. A special debt of gratitude on my part is also due to Naoíse for initiating the conversation that eventually led to this volume. Lastly, I am indebted above all to my parents and other loved ones for their unfailing support.
Naoíse’s Note:
I am grateful to participants of a res
earch seminar at the Department of Classics in Nottingham in 2016, where an early version of my section in Chapter 2 was presented. Your ideas helped to push the argument in new directions. I also would like to thank Greta Hawes, Virginia Lewis, Nikos Papadimitriou, and Jason Harris for all the straight talking, laughter, perspective, and cake. I also owe a great debt to my husband John, whose support and hard work kept the whole family going while I had my head in this book. Finally, I am grateful to Jan for his patience, good humour, and friendship throughout this process.
Introduction: Dialogue
The Contest of Homer and Hesiod 9
In the second century CE, an unknown writer composed The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, a playful text in which the two poets try to outdo each other in wit and wordcraft. In the section quoted above, Hesiod (on the left) offers his opponent a series of freshly composed lines of hexameter verse, to each of which Homer (on the right) must improvise a continuation. In every case, Homer’s response is robust; his unshakable gravitas counters Hesiod’s snares to comic effect. But it is Hesiod who was eventually judged the victor by the assembled crowd, with his peacetime poetry elevated above Homer’s songs of war. The text has much to teach us concerning ancient ideas about poets, and particularly on later conceptions of Homer and Hesiod at the forefront of the epic tradition.1 But it also reminds us that no poet, poem, or work of literature ever stands alone. Homer here appears in dialogue with Hesiod, and both the composition and the reception of Homeric poetry are represented as embedded within a much wider poetic tradition.
This book is concerned with this idea of Homeric epic as set within a broader tradition – specifically, the place and role of the Iliad within the tradition of myths, stories, and representations of the Trojan War. We have chosen to think about this in terms of ‘dialogue’ because of the way that such traditions work. They are not passively received, or simply handed down from one generation to the next. Rather, they are in a continuous process of construction and development, with each new intervention adding to, but also fundamentally transforming, the tradition itself. Indeed, the dialogue between new and existing elements is what creates a tradition – the engagements, interactions, borrowings, subversions, and transformations. Yet within the Trojan War tradition, the Iliad occupies a central place. For the best part of three millennia, any representation of the tale of Troy entailed some kind of response to Homeric epic. While in some cases this response was direct (i.e. to the text of the Iliad), in others it was indirect (e.g. to expectations and patterns established by the Iliad, through the complex mediations of intermediary texts, or even more loosely to the idea of the Homeric). In this book, we set out to explore more fully the dialogical workings of the Trojan War tradition, but also the place of the Iliad within them.
As dialogue is our subject, it is also our method. The main body of the book consists of paired case studies. Each case study focuses on an individual work (e.g. an Athenian pot, a Hollywood movie), and considers that text’s engagement and dialogue with the Iliad.2 But each pair of examples also constitutes a dialogue. Linked by a common theme and comparable medium, they have been taken from different historical periods and/or cultural contexts, with one analysis undertaken by Jan and the other by Naoíse. We hope that this juxtaposition of examples, time periods, and authorial voices will bring each chapter’s central theme into sharper relief. Over the course of the book, it is intended that the interchange between our two distinct perspectives will lead to a more nuanced appreciation of the Homeric dialogues that we explore. In other words, for us the enactment of a dialogue is a crucial heuristic, and our own dialogue on Homeric dialogues forms a kind of metadialogue on the contexts of Iliadic reception.
We have no pretensions in this volume of charting the totality of Iliadic receptions; nor of covering the range of relevant themes and concepts. Much of this is already discussed in the existing scholarship, which offers many rich insights into Iliadic receptions specifically, Homeric receptions more generally, and the broader Trojan War tradition in both antiquity and the post-classical world.3 This project hopes to add to this existing literature in three distinct ways. First, we aim to shed light on specific case studies from a range of cultural contexts, as well as highlighting several important themes in receptions of the Iliad and the wider Trojan War tradition. Secondly, we hope that our dialogic method – an experiment in historiographical methodology – makes a contribution to the study of classical receptions by capturing something of reception as process. Finally, this book aims to offer new insights on our central subject – the Iliad’s place within the wider Trojan War tradition over the last few millennia.
There are five main chapters in this book, encompassing ten detailed case studies. By way of framing the book as a whole, the first of our chapters focuses on the medium of poetry, and the theme of positioning oneself within a broader poetic and literary tradition. Jan begins, arguing that the Iliad acknowledges the existence of this broader tradition. The poem makes deliberate references to the performance of heroic song, signalling metapoetic consciousness though its reflections on poetic practice. Naoíse then considers contemporary poetry from Mesopotamia, focusing on the depiction of authorship, storytelling, and narration in the poem of Erra and Ishum. The pairing of the Iliad and the Erra brings together two examples from a similar time period (the eighth century BCE), but produced in very different cultural contexts and poetic traditions. And yet, in both we find similar concerns with the practice of poetry and the positioning of each poem within a broader tradition.
Chapter 2 centres on visual culture and a theme that echoes across the Iliad – the construction of social roles. Naoíse begins by discussing a red-figure amphora from c. 510 BCE, which depicts Hector arming for battle on one side, and a group of drunken revellers on the other. The deliberately ‘peri-Iliadic’ nature of the Hector scene and its juxtaposition with the revellers, Naoíse will argue, played with ideas about male social roles and status, and would have been politically subversive in the context of late archaic Athens. Jan then offers a contrast by examining Helen of Troy, a painting created by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1863. In this image, Rossetti confirms Helen’s ambiguous status as a dangerous yet attractive figure, who raises questions concerning female social roles and power. And yet, as Jan argues, Rossetti gives his Helen an unusually Iliadic form of agency. The pairing captures something of the diversity of artistic responses to the Iliad at different stages of its canonical status. During the late sixth century BCE, the Iliad was still newly emerging at the epicentre of the Trojan War tradition, while during Rossetti’s age, the text had long held a central place in that tradition.
Chapter 3 focuses on drama as a medium and considers another theme that characterizes the Iliad: conflict. The examples chosen, however, do not depict martial combat but rather dramatize conflict through words, using the Trojan War as a backdrop for exploring the limits of debate, disagreement, and argument. Jan’s analysis of Euripides’ Troades (‘Trojan Women’) foregrounds this by exploring how the sophistic arts are deployed by Euripides’ characters, and by considering how the power of debate is both celebrated and undermined in the play. Naoíse’s discussion of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida discusses a similar concern with both the power and the weakness of words, highlighting a similar dramatization of failed political dialogue. By bringing these two cases together, we have sought to offer the opposite view from that of the previous chapter. We present an example from an ancient Greek context – Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE – where the Iliad occupied a privileged cultural position. This is presented alongside an example from a post-antique context – Early Modern England – where knowledge of the Iliad was limited, but on the verge of expanding.
In Chapter 4, the two examples chosen are drawn from ‘historiographical’ works, and centre on a theme that runs at the heart of many Iliadic receptions – the question of historical truth and the ‘facts’ concerning the Trojan War. Herodotus
, in Book 2 of his Histories, sought to compare Homer’s version of the Trojan War with that of the Egyptian priests, who shape so much of his narrative on earlier historical traditions. As Jan argues, Herodotus subjects the Homeric poems to an elaborate form of inquiry, not to deny the historicity of the Trojan War, but rather to elevate the distinctiveness and authority of his own chosen genre, historiography. Naoíse argues that the archaeological adventurer Heinrich Schliemann adopted a similar approach in his 1874 book, Trojaner Alterthümer (Trojan Antiquities). In it, he presented a key piece of evidence to support his argument that the site of Hisarlık was the location of ancient Troy – the so-called ‘Treasure of Priam’. Schliemann’s description of the treasure and his account of its discovery were calculated to appeal to both professional and popular audiences, using the authority of Homeric epic as well as that of modern science. Both of these authors claimed to set down the ‘truth’ concerning the Trojan War, acting as a corrective to the poetic inaccuracies of the Iliad. And yet each confirms the absolute centrality of Homer in the Trojan War tradition at their time of writing, further calcifying the Iliad’s canonicity.
Chapter 5 features two works presented in ‘composite’ media. The Speculum Regum (Mirror for Princes), written by Godfrey of Viterbo c. 1183 CE, presented a history of the world that combined both poetry and prose; this is paired with the Hollywood film Troy (first released in 2004) in the composite medium of cinema. Both works deal with another important theme in Iliadic receptions – the cultural ownership of a Trojan War heritage. In the Speculum Regum, this took an explicit form, with the presentation of a genealogy that linked the survivors from Troy to the noble houses of twelfth-century Europe. In the film Troy, as well as in the critical discourse surrounding it, the question of cultural ownership focuses on a more abstract claim concerning the ‘heirs’ of classical antiquity and the perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ between the East and the West. This final pairing consists of two examples from historical contexts where the text of the Iliad was not strictly relevant to the process of reception. In the twelfth century, Godfrey had no access to Homeric poetry and so engaged with his own perception of what was Homeric; and in the case of the film Troy, popular ideas about what was Homeric drove both artistic and marketing choices. This fifth chapter is therefore an inversion of Chapter 4, which presented two cases from periods where the text of the Iliad was central to the tradition. In these cases, by contrast, the concept of the poem was more important than the poem itself.
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