The Iliad of Homer

by Richmond Lattimore

  As Aristotle recognized, Homeric technique is that of the dramatist. This is what makes the highly concentrated Iliad, in which four days of fighting and two days of truce occupy all of books 2 through 22, so powerful. And yet a drama would have been only one-tenth as long. What makes the epic monumental is a further basic principle of retardation. The plots of both the Iliad and the Odyssey involve suspense. Will Odysseus make it home to Ithaca? Will Achilleus rejoin the battle in time? (One might wonder, in fact, whether it was the demand for long compositions that created such plots in the first place.) There are several ways of achieving the necessary delay. Given the plot of the Iliad (Zeus’ promise to honor Achilleus by letting the Trojans succeed until the need for the hero’s aid is desperate), a recurrent trick is to have the Greeks actually succeed, either through the valor of other warriors (Diomedes and the chieftains in book 11) or by the machinations of meddling gods (Poseidon and Hera in books 13 and 14). Another strategy is to repeat scenarios: the duel between Menelaos and Paris in book 3 is echoed by that between Aias and Hektor in book 7. Battle descriptions operate with an elaborate set of conventions, which produce gripping close-ups while actually delaying the major plot events in the story of Achilleus’ wrath. The heroic aristeia (performance of prowess) is a primary poetic device. Five such displays support the middle arc of the poem: those of Diomedes (book 5), Agamemnon (11), Hektor (15), Patroklos (16), and Achilleus (19 through 22). The catalogic technique—listing the named victims of a warrior, with kaleidoscopic variations on their deaths—is closely related (e.g., the lists starting at 5.35 and 5.703).

  The most obvious example of diversifying the narrative, noted already by Aristotle, is the Catalogue of Ships (2.494–759), which even some critics thought to be separable from the main composition. Nearly four hundred lines long (including the Trojan catalogue), it fulfilled many functions by presenting a vivid sense of the sheer numbers of fighters, recording for posterity the Greek city-states involved (and thus no doubt propping up local pride), increasing suspense before the long-awaited meeting of Paris and Menelaos, and displaying the powers of the poet and his Muse. Helen’s miniature Catalogue of Greeks (in the “wall-viewing” or teikhoskopia scene of book 3) has a similar role, while characterizing her and her father-in-law Priam. Just as the Catalogue of book 2 comes one book in from the start of the poem, the funeral games of book 23 hold a symmetrical place in terms of the overarching poetic structure, one from the end. This episode too, though sometimes seen as a digression, can better be understood as a vital part of the compositional dynamic, a cooling-down diversion that in turn prepares an audience for Achilleus’ quiet, tearful meeting with Priam in the final book. The finale, meanwhile, mirrors the opening of the poem: an aged father, in each, comes at great risk to the Greek camp to ransom a child (Chryseis/Hektor) and is met by a chieftain—though with opposite results. Such large-scale patterning suggests that the Iliad has been planned and plotted as an organic and rounded whole. This holds true even for the apparent digressions—a better word would be “elaborations”—in the epic. Foreshadowing (as in Zeus’ predictions at 8.470 and 15.62, and the dying words of Hektor and Patroklos) reinforces the tightness of the composition.

  Sixty percent of the Iliad is character speech. Here, too, one can see how a retarding, elaboration strategy becomes multifunctional, providing characterization and interest, color, exposition, and variation in voice and tone. Such matters must have been particularly entertaining to an audience listening to a rhapsode do all the voices. Like everything in the Iliad, speeches follow some basic templates, but no two patterns are ever exactly the same. Unless one appreciates Greek culture’s powerful and persistent assertion that artful language deeply matters—that one must become, as Achilleus was, a “speaker of words and one accomplished in action” (9.443)—the obsession of Homeric poetry with the representation of every speech may remain puzzling. (Plato, on the other hand, pinpointed this mimetic technique as the central danger emanating from Homeric epic when he banned it from the ideal city-state of The Republic.)

  Homeric poetry calls its most powerful utterances muthoi (the word which gives us, after several semantic shifts, “myth”). Such speeches have their own internal poetics in Homer. Moreover, comparative work shows that the types of speeches designated muthoi in Homer are in other living oral cultures social, nonpoetic yet formal genres of self-presentation: insults, commands, and memorializations of the past. When Agamemnon makes his powerful speech against Chryses (1.26) and Achilleus his splendid speech of rejection (9.307), they employ this “genre” of speaking, which always asserts the authority of the speaker. Nestor is best known for mastery of the art. He specializes in idiosyncratic renditions of martial glories in which he participated but that are almost mythical to his younger audiences (e.g., 11.669). Other subgenres of speech in the poem include prayers, laments, supplications, boasts, rebukes, public addresses to assemblies, advice-giving, and monologues addressed to one’s own heart (e.g., 11.404, 17.91, 21.553, 22.99). The varied ways in which individual figures deploy these rhetorical resources tell us—without the narrator having to be explicit—much about their characters.

  An essential aspect of the style of Homeric speeches—their pointedness—emerges from the way they are paired and linked. In this the Iliad displays a fine consciousness that speech events do not take place in isolation but confront unpredictable hearers, with the concurrent complications of switched addressees, failures to respond, and interruptions. The buildup of drama in book 1, for example, has much to do with the poet’s artful blocking out of a five-person speech exchange, a turbulent stream of talk flowing from lines 59 through 305, but divided into five distinct and symmetrical smaller movements, that can be graphed like this:

  Achilleus-Kalchas-Achilleus-Kalchas;

  Agamemnon-Achilleus-Agamemnon-Achilleus;

  Achilleus-Athene-Achilleus;

  Achilleus to Agamemnon (no response)

  Nestor-Agamemnon-Achilleus

  The effect is operatic, creating emotional intensity through impassioned response but within a measured, circular structure that returns continually to the voice of the protagonist. Similar structures can be found in every book of the poem.

  If the voices of Homeric characters are so prominent, that of the narrator, by contrast, is barely heard. The poet rarely intervenes to comment on the action, a restraint that makes such moments as his observation about Achilleus’ summoning Patroklos (11.603: “the beginning of his evil”) all the more ominous, like the voice of omniscient Zeus. A few times, he expresses dismay at witless behavior, as when Glaukos makes a bad exchange of armor (6.234) or the Trojans fail to heed the good advice of Poulydamas (18.311). To a few characters, at some times, the narrator speaks directly, as to Patroklos nearing his death (16.787). But there is another well-known device whereby an audience does hear, implicitly but more frequently, a narrator’s individual voice and whereby, furthermore, the plotline gets elaborated and delayed: the simile.

  Approximately 180 developed similes (that is, more than a phrase “like a lion” or “like fire”) punctuate the Iliad. The technique is, again, multifunctional. Like movie theme music, it has a rhythmic as well as an emotional role. Increasing the frequency of similes enables the poet to emphasize the most dramatic portions of the action. Thus, as the troops of Greeks advance in the first mass-movement scene of the poem, an upswell of no fewer than six similes marks the moment (2.459). In battle scenes, the simile acts like a freeze-frame or a cutaway shot, allowing us to achieve a species of double vision. A dying warrior’s head becomes, briefly, a garden poppy bowed down by rain (8.305). A god’s healing wound switches, for an instant, to a dish of curdling milk (5.901). Similes are both musical and visual in their ability to counterpoint. Most often, the agony of battle is momentarily transmuted by them into familiar or affecting domestic scenes—a poor widow weighing wool (12.433), flies around a milk pail (16.641), a boy building sandcastles (15.362). Through detailed comparisons, the p
oet introduces worlds apart from the hot field at Troy, whether wild nature (forest fires, roaming carnivorous beasts) or humans at peace (harvesters and woodsmen, women washing clothes). Through creating the sense of alternative side-spaces, the poem concentrates attention on what is distinctive about the main action on which it dwells.

  The art of the simile, with vivid immediacy, makes tangible the most difficult of ideas—the action of gods. Imagine the way Iris, the divine messenger, drops to earth (like the weight on a fishing line: 24.80), and the swift movement of Hera (like the thoughts of a traveler: 15.82). A simile can evoke terrified flight from approaching death by recalling a much more common experience, the way in which, in a bad dream, one cannot run fast enough to catch up (22.199). In short, similes work like miniature lyric poems enabling a narrator to express a range of attitudes toward the story being told. They are the link to the consciousness of the poet; through them an audience, almost unconsciously, takes on his panoramic view.

  For all their stupendous variety (rarely being repeated exactly), similes are still remarkably formulaic. The work of Carroll Moulton and William Scott on their “oral” nature shows how a small number of elements can be almost infinitely combined to produce remarkable images. Compare, for example, the similes that occur near the start of two adjacent sections, books 9 and 10. Both revolve around a single phrase “in the breast” (en[i] stêthessin: 9.8, 10.9), and describe, respectively, the turbulent emotions of the Greek troops in general and of their leader, Agamemnon. The shared simile template is a description of weather effects seen from above in relation to a flat surface beneath. In the first instance, it is winds that suddenly clash on the sea, causing waves to crest and “far across the salt water scatters the seaweed.” In the second vignette, the tense beating of the commander’s heart is compared to unrelenting rain, hail, or a blizzard “when the snowfall scatters on ploughlands.” Uniting these images are the juxtapositions of internal human emotional states with wide-screen meteorological views, a painterly contrast of darkness with white flecks (wave crests, snowflakes) and finally, shared diction.

  Such simile-generated associations also play a larger role, structuring the poem. In the case just mentioned, upon hearing of Agamemnon’s emotional condition as book 10 opens, the audience is prompted through imagery to recall the disturbed state of his troops seven hundred lines earlier: their leader feels as they do (but the poet shows this rather than says it). An exact repetition of similes, at a much greater distance from one another, constructs another striking analogy of character and situation. Agamemnon, in distress at Greek losses, stands up to address the assembled fighters “shedding tears like a spring dark-running” (9.14). The only other occurrence of this image, in very similar wording, comes when Patroklos beseeches Achilleus to take pity on the losing Greek forces (16.3). The dark spring simile thus precisely pinpoints two structurally cognate moments in the narrative, the embassy that will fail to sway the withdrawn hero (book 9) and the companion’s plea that will inevitably trigger his return. Furthermore, it contrasts the ethos and rhetoric of Agamemnon and Patroklos: one helpless in the face of the crushing Trojan advance, the other hopeful that he himself can help; the commander proposing that the Greeks leave (9.27), and the subordinate warrior urging intervention in battle (16.38).

  Even when similes are not themselves repeated, the poet of the Iliad manages to insinuate within the narrative itself their distinctive language, creating further rich resonances between the “real” plot and imaginary, peripheral views. This occurs particularly in the last half of the poem, when image-dense descriptive passages follow upon, or foreshadow, the formal similes with increasing frequency. A number of imagistic strands can be traced. For example, Achilleus’ return to the field of battle, clad in divine armor, is celebrated with an elaborate simile comparing him to the moon, to a star, and to the gleam of fire, blazing on a distant mountain, as seen from the sea by sailors whom winds are bearing away from land-bound friends (19.374–81). When he speeds in his gleaming bronze and gold toward Troy, Achilleus is first espied by Priam, to whom he seems like a star—specifically, like Orion’s Dog (Sirius), most prominent in autumn and a sign of distress and fever. Focalization through the eyes of the father of Hektor, whom Achilleus will soon slay, invests the shining description of the hero with darker meaning, while picking up on the minor note of loss in the earlier simile (sailors leaving friends). Wind, fire, and loss are subsequently all combined in the actual narrative of book 23, when Achilleus bids Boreas and Zephyros (the same winds as in the simile at 9.5) to blow aflame the pyre of his dead friend (23.194–218). All night Achilleus makes continual libations, calling on his lost companion (23.218–21). The poet switches to a simile (23.222–25) comparing Achilleus to a father who mourns while burning his son’s bones—but this combination of act and image in turn echoes the actual prayer and libation of “shining wine” to “Zeus father” made by Achilleus at the moment Patroklos set out to imitate him and turn the battle (16.229–48). The entire, tightly arranged crescendo of evocative representations concludes with another star, the one that heralds Dawn’s light about to spread over the sea (23.226–28).

  The formulas permeating Homeric poetry may not be immediately obvious precisely because, as with similes, the master poets of this tradition learned so well how to vary and redeploy familiar phrases and runs of lines. The general principle of repetition with variation is most visible in two further techniques, type-scenes and epithets. But these are only individual points along a spectrum of adjacent poetic patterns that includes repeated single words in one metrical slot, whole lines, speech-framing devices, and stereotyped descriptions of motions and gestures. Once recognized by readers, these strategies can lead to fruitful comparisons of scenes and characters, providing a key to deeper meaning.

  “Type-scenes” are repeated sequences of actions, employing similar language each time. Arming, supplication, assembling, and hospitality are prominent among the ready-made sequences. Unlike the similes, the variation in type-scenes comes through expansion or contraction. Thus, an ideally full sacrifice scene contains twenty-one elements, but reduced versions may have only half this many features. Within the first two books of the Iliad, one finds typically varied scenarios. When the Greeks return Chryseis to her father they offer an animal sacrifice. After washing of hands and scattering of barley, there is a prayer (adapted to the circumstances); the victims are slaughtered and skinned; thigh meat is cut and wrapped in fat, with shreds of flesh placed on the lumps. These are burnt, vitals are tasted, and better cuts of meat are then grilled and consumed (1.447–66). By contrast, at 2.402–429 a single ox is slain; no altar or handwashing is mentioned; the prayer is not fulfilled; wine is not poured on the offerings; and there is no mention of men standing around prepared for a meal. There are minor additions, however: the skewers of wood are leafless, the fire is that of Hephaistos. Such small variations cannot in themselves signify large differences. But what does emerge from the juxtaposition is the brusque, war-hastened quality of Agamemnon’s camp sacrifice, as opposed to the leisurely homecoming celebration conducted by Chryses.

  Other close comparisons of type-scenes yield similar suggestive differences. While with similes it was frequency that signaled dramatic spikes in the plot, the poet uses expansion to indicate important moments in type-scenes. The typical arming process, for instance, can be accomplished in nine lines (e.g., 3.330): greaves, corselet, sword, shield, helmet. But the entry of the great king Agamemnon into battle calls for a type-scene three times as long. The history and splendor of each piece is highlighted (the corselet a gift from Kinyras, the shield a tenfold construction of bronze). It is precisely because the audience knows the simplex form of the scene that they can appreciate and marvel all the more at the elaborated complex form. The same goes for brief battle clashes versus the baroque, extended runs that characterize the aristeia of each champion.

  As with similes, repetition supports larger narrative structures. The type-
scene of supplication is bound up with a net of associations in the poem. There are two subtypes. First, in the midst of battle a fighter caught in a precarious situation may entreat his potential killer, grasping his knees, calling out for pity, and promising a share of the precious goods owned by his father, in return for being spared. Adrestos begs Menelaos for his life in this way (6.45), but Agamemnon’s arrival on the scene cuts short any hope he had of being kept alive for ransom: the fiercer of the Atreid brothers kills the Trojan on the spot. An enemy spy, Dolon, uses similar language and tactics, asking to be taken alive by Odysseus and his companion Diomedes rather than slain outright on their night raid (10.378), and promising abundant ransom. Here, the poet creates tension by prolonging the typical scenario: after Odysseus interrogates Dolon for another eighty lines, and the spy finally reaches out to touch the Greek’s chin in supplication, Diomedes decapitates the trembling Trojan. A third variation is even more elaborate: Achilleus marvels to find that Lykaon, whom he has already taken alive once and sold for ransom, has returned to the battle and fallen within his clutches again (21.65). Significant small changes make the scene resonate all the more: Lykaon reaches out to immobilize not only his would-be killer’s knees but also his spear; he recites twenty lines of autobiographical detail, explaining how he has arrived a second time in dire straits; and then it is Achilleus who first brings up the mention of rich ransom (apoina), only to deny that he will ever pay it, in a ringing speech asserting that all mortals—including himself—must die.