The Iliad of Homer

by Richmond Lattimore

  165 The befouling of head and neck symbolically expresses the wish for the living lamenter to be close to the corpse’s condition.

  248 The depiction is psychologically apt—a grief-maddened father recklessly turns on the living to take out his resentment.

  291 Hekabē’s pious insistence that Priam entreat Zeus for an omen contrasts with her son’s attitude toward bird signs (12.237). Elsewhere, only in the Odyssey are signs elicited (e.g., Od. 20.100). Usually the gods send them unbidden.

  334 Hermes the psychopompos (“soul-conductor”) was credited with accompanying spirits to and from the realm of the dead, a role related to the knack of inducing sleep. Priam’s journey resembles a trip to the underworld.

  480 Interesting reversals mark the simile: Achilleus, whose manslaughtering hands were just mentioned, rather than being the suppliant killer is compared to the crowd who marvel at him. At the same time, the autobiography of Patroklos (23.85–90) is evoked by this mention of an outlaw exile.

  486 Priam’s plea that Achilleus remember his father makes psychological sense to the audience that has heard the hero recall him with increased frequency over the last days, at 16.15, 18.87, 18.331, and 23.144.

  527 The parable of the jars, meant to console Priam, presents a bleak view of life’s hardships, but one not unique in archaic Greek literature: compare the story of Pandora and her jar (Hesiod, Works and Days, 47–105). Rather than doling out good to one and evil to another, the best Zeus can offer humans is a mixture, while the worst comprises evil undiluted.

  560 Achilleus’ dangerously rapid change of mood is triggered by Priam’s well-meaning wish that he return home, since the hero knows well that he is doomed never to go back to Phthia. He draws back, in reaction, from the human sympathy just witnessed to a divine framework, saying that only the gods’ command makes him surrender the corpse. In taking care that the body be prepared out of sight, Achilleus shows acute sensitivity to the limits of his own self-control (584).

  602 A second consolatory narrative selects an example from myth, the tale of Niobē’s boast of superiority to the goddess Leto and its consequence. Achilleus does not draw a moral about hubris but points instead to the necessity for food even in extreme grief. Niobē’s transformation to stone seems a reward for endurance, a natural memorial to her eternal mourning (since water must run down the rock face).

  649 The sarcasm has as its object the sons of Atreus, as Achilleus knows they are of the sort to try to contravene his wishes even now.

  699 Kassandra, fairest of Priam’s daughters (13.366), in other sources is said to have spurned Apollo’s love, and as punishment her warnings to the Trojans were never believed. At the fall of Troy, she is dragged away from her refuge at Athene’s altar, although clasping the statue of the goddess, and raped by Aias the son of Oïleus.

  720 The singers (male, as the Greek text makes clear) as professional lamenters lead the mourning ritual. The less formal lament by women is described in descending order of closeness (mother, wife, sister-in-law), but in ascending dramatic order, concluding with the woman whose fate started the war.

  735 For the fist time, Andromachē envisions the possibility that her son Astyanax will be killed at Troy, as finally happens.

  765 While Andromachē and Hekabē dwelt on the effect of Hektor’s death and his appearance, respectively, only Helen captures the essence of his personality, his generosity and gentle protection. Furthermore, only Helen admits openly that she laments for herself as well (773). Her remark that it has been twenty years since coming to Troy is an odd slip, unless it is a rhetorical exaggeration, or the remnant of another version (traces of which are found later) according to which the Greeks took ten years after their initial expedition (which went astray, to Mysia) before regrouping and mounting a second.

  782 The poem ends with a glimmer of hope: the doomed Achilleus relents long enough to allow the enemy to bury their champion. That the emotional climax should center not on Achilleus but his victim Hektor (shown to be every bit as heroic as the Greeks) speaks for the deep humanity of the whole composition.

  Bibliography

  EDITIONS AND COMMENTARIES

  Chantraine, P., and H. Goube, eds. Iliade: Chant XXIII. Paris, 1964.

  Griffin, J. Homer: Iliad IX. Oxford, 1995.

  Kirk, G. S. et al., eds. The Iliad: A Commentary. 6 vols. Cambridge, 1985–93.

  Leaf, W., ed. The Iliad. Edited with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes, and appendices. London, 1900–1902.

  Macleod, C. W., ed. Homer: Iliad, Book XXIV. Cambridge, 1982.

  OTHER TRANSLATIONS AND CRITIQUES

  Arnold, M. “On Translating Homer.” In Matthew Arnold: Selected Essays, edited by Noel Annan. Oxford, 1964.

  Chapman, G., trans. Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad. Edited with introduction and glossary by A. Nicoll; with a new preface by Garry Wills. Princeton, 1998.

  Fagles, R., trans. Homer: The Iliad. Introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. New York, 1990.

  Fitzgerald, R., trans. Homer: The Iliad. New York, 1974.

  ———. “Heroic Poems in English.” Review of The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore. Kenyon Review 14 (1952): 698–706.

  Logue, Christopher. War Music: An Account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer’s Iliad. New York, 1987.

  Lombardo, S., trans. Homer: The Iliad. Introduction by Sheila Murnaghan. Indianapolis, 1997.

  Newman, F., trans. The Iliad of Homer. London, 1856.

  Pope, A., trans. The Iliad of Homer. Edited by M. Mack. New Haven, 1967.

  COMPANIONS

  Foley, J. M., ed. A Companion to Ancient Epic. Malden, MA, 2005.

  Fowler, R., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge, 2004.

  Jones, P. V. Homer’s Iliad: A Commentary on Three Translations. Bristol, 2003.

  Leaf, W. A Companion to the Iliad for English Readers. London, 1892.

  Postlethwaite, N. Homer’s Iliad: A Commentary on the Translation of Richmond Lattimore. Exeter, 2000.

  Powell, B., and I. Morris, eds. A New Companion to Homer. Leiden, 1997.

  Wace, A. J. B., and F. H. Stubbings, eds. A Companion to Homer. London, 1962.

  Willcock, M. A Companion to the Iliad: Based on the Translation by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago, 1976.

  ESSAY COLLECTIONS WITH FURTHER BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Cairns, D. L., ed. Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad. Oxford, 2001.

  Emlyn-Jones, C., ed. Homer: Readings and Images. London, 1992.

  Kirk, G. S., ed. The Language and Background of Homer. Cambridge, 1964.

  McAuslan, I., and P. Walcot, eds. Homer. Greece and Rome Studies 4. Oxford, 1998.

  Montanari, F., ed. Omero tremila anni dopo. Rome, 2002.

  Myrsiades, K., ed. Approaches to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. New York, 2010.

  Rubino, C. A., and C. W. Shelmerdine, eds. Approaches to Homer. Austin, 1983.

  Wright, G. M., and P. V. Jones, eds. Homer: German Scholarship in Translation. Oxford, 1997.

  Wright, J., ed. Essays on the Iliad. Bloomington, IN, 1978.

  THE EPIC CYCLE, HESIOD, GREEK MYTHOLOGY

  Athanassakis, A. Hesiod: Theogony; Works and Days; Shield. Baltimore, 1983.

  ———. The Homeric Hymns. Baltimore, 1976.

  Burgess, J. S. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore, 2001.

  Davies, M. The Greek Epic Cycle. Bristol, 1989.

  Griffin, J. “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977): 39–53.

  Martin, R. P. Myths of the Ancient Greeks. New York, 2003.

  Penglase, C. Greek Myths and Mesopotamia. London, 1994.

  West, M. L. “Iliad and Aethiopis.” Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 1–14.

  ———. Greek Epic Fragments. Cambridge, MA, 2003.

  HOMER AND HISTORY

  Carter, J., and S. Morris. The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule. Austin, 1995.

  Chadwick, J. The Decipherment o
f Linear B. Cambridge, 1958.

  ———. Linear B and Related Scripts. Berkeley, 1987.

  Crielaard, J. P. “Homer, History and Archaeology: Some Remarks on the Date of the Homeric World.” In Homeric Questions: Essays in Philology, Ancient History and Archaeology, ed. J. P. Crielaard, 201–88. Amsterdam, 1995.

  Dalby, A. Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic. New York, 2006.

  Easton, D. “Has the Trojan War Been Found?” Antiquity 59 (1985): 188–95.

  Erskine, A. Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power. New York, 2001.

  Finley, M. The World of Odysseus. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, 1979.

  Foxhall, L., and J. K. Davies, eds. The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context. Bristol, 1984.

  Latacz, J. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Translated by K. Windle and R. Ireland. Oxford, 2004.

  Mellink, M. J., ed. Troy and the Trojan War. Bryn Mawr, 1986.

  Morris, I. “The Use and Abuse of Homer.” Classical Antiquity 5 (1986): 81–136.

  Morris, S. P. “A Tale of Two Cities: The Miniature Frescoes from Thera and the Origins of Greek Poetry.” American Journal of Archaeology 93 (1989): 511–35.

  Nagy, G. Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Washington, DC, 2002.

  Powell, B. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge, 1991.

  Puhvel, J. “Homeric Questions and Hittite Answers.” American Journal of Philology 104 (1983): 217–27.

  Sherratt, E. S. “Reading the Texts: Archaeology and the Homeric Question.” Antiquity 64 (1990): 807–24.

  Van Wees, H. Status Warriors: War, Violence, and Society in Homer and History. Amsterdam, 1992.

  Vermeule, E. T. Greece in the Bronze Age. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1972.

  Wade-Gery, H. T. The Poet of the Iliad. Cambridge, 1952.

  Wood, M. In Search of the Trojan War. London, 1985.

  Wood, R. An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer. Hildesheim, 1976. Orig. 1769 and 1775.

  HOMERIC SOCIETY AND VALUES

  Alexiou, M. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge, 1974.

  Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, 1951.

  Fisher, N. Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece. Warminster, 1992.

  Haubold, J. Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation. Cambridge, 2000.

  Lloyd-Jones, H. The Justice of Zeus. 2nd ed. Berkeley, 1983.

  Martin, R. P. Healing, Sacrifice, and Battle: Amechania and Related Concepts in Early Greek Poetry. Innsbruck, 1983.

  Yamagata, N. Homeric Morality. Leiden, 1994.

  HOMER AND ANCIENT ART

  Anderson, M. J. The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art. Oxford, 1997.

  Carpenter, T. H. Art and Myth in Ancient Greece: A Handbook. London, 1991.

  Hedreen, G. M. “Image, Text, and Story in the Recovery of Helen.” Classical Antiquity 15 (1996): 152–84.

  Johansen, K. F. The Iliad in Early Greek Art. Copenhagen, 1967.

  Snodgrass, A. Homer and the Artists. Cambridge, 1998.

  Woodford, S. The Trojan War in Ancient Art. London, 1993.

  ORAL POETRY: INTERPRETATION AND IMPLICATIONS

  Edwards, M. W. “Homer and Oral Tradition: The Type-Scene.” Oral Tradition 7 (1992): 284–330.

  Fenik, B., ed. Homer: Tradition and Invention. Leiden, 1978.

  ———. Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad. Wiesbaden, 1968.

  Foley, J. M. Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington, IN, 1991.

  Hainsworth, J. B. “The Criticism of an Oral Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 90 (1970): 90–98.

  Honko, L. Textualising the Siri Epic. Helsinki, 1998.

  Janko, R. “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts.” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 1–13.

  Jensen, M. S. The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory. Copenhagen, 1980.

  Kim, J. The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity of the Iliad. Lanham, MD, 2000.

  Létoublon, F., ed. Hommage à Milman Parry: Le Style formulaire de l’épopée homérique et la théorie de l’oralité poétique. Amsterdam, 1997.

  Lord, A. B. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, NY, 1991.

  ———. The Singer of Tales. 2nd ed. With introduction by S. Mitchell and G. Nagy. Cambridge, MA, 2000. Orig. 1960.

  Morrell, K. S. “Chaos Theory and the Oral Tradition: Nonlinearity and Bifurcation in the Iliad.” Helios 23 (1996): 107–34.

  Nagy, G. Homeric Questions. Austin, 1996.

  ———. Homeric Responses. Austin, 2003.

  ———. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge, 1996.

  Nagler, M. Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer. Berkeley, 1974.

  Parry, M. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Edited by Adam Parry. Oxford, 1971.

  Reece, S. The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene. Ann Arbor, MI, 1993.

  Reynolds, D. Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition. Ithaca, NY, 1995.

  RECEPTION

  Clarke, H. Homer’s Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newark, 1981.

  Graziosi, B. Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge, 2002.

  Graziosi, B., and E. Greenwood, eds. Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon. New York, 2007.

  Graziosi, B., and J. Haubold. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London, 2005.

  King, K. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer through the Middle Ages. Berkeley, 1987.

  Lamberton, R. Homer the Theologian. Berkeley, 1986.

  Lamberton, R., and J. Keaney. Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes. Princeton, NJ, 1992.

  Michelakis, P. Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, 2002.

  Myres, J. L. Homer and His Critics. London, 1958.

  Prins, Y. “Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania.” In Nation/Language and the Ethics of Translation. Edited by S. Berman and M. Wood. Princeton, 2005.

  Reid, J. D., ed. The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1900s. New York, 1993.

  Schwartz, E. et al., eds. The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris. New Haven, 2005.

  Vandiver, E. Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War. New York, 2010.

  HOMERIC POETRY IN GENERAL

  Crotty, K. The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ithaca, NY, 1994.

  Dalby, A. “The Iliad, the Odyssey and Their Audiences.” Classical Quarterly 45 (1995): 269–79.

  Ford, A. Homer: The Poetry of the Past. Ithaca, NY, 1992.

  Frame, D. Hippota Nestor. Washington, DC, 2009.

  ———. The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic. New Haven, 1978.

  Griffin, J. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford, 1980.

  Kirk, G. S. The Songs of Homer. Cambridge, 1962. Repr. 1977.

  Minchin, E. Homer and the Resources of Memory: Some Applications of Cognitive Theory to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Oxford, 2001.

  Moulton, C. Similes in the Homeric Poems. Göttingen, 1977.

  Nagy, G. Homer the Classic. Washington, DC, 2009.

  Pucci, P. The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer. Lanham, MD, 1998.

  Scott, W. The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile. Leiden, 1974.

  Scully, S. Homer and the Sacred City. Ithaca, NY, 1990.

  Seaford, R. Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford, 1994.

  Thalmann, W. G. Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry. Baltimore, 1984.

  Vivante, P. The Homeric Imagination: A Study of Homer’s Poetic Perception of Reality. Bloomington, I
N, 1970.

  Whitman, C. H. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge, MA, 1958.

  Wolf, F. A. Prolegomena to Homer. Translated with introduction and notes by A. Grafton, G. W. Most, and J. E. G. Zetzel. Princeton, NJ, 1985. Orig. 1795.

  Bouvier, D. Le sceptre et la lyre: L’Iliade ou les héros de la mémoire. Grenoble, 2002.

  Bowra, C. M. Tradition and Design in the Iliad. Oxford, 1930.

  Collins, L. Studies in Characterization in the Iliad. Frankfurt am Main, 1988.

  De Jong, I. J. F. Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad. Amsterdam, 1987.

  Dué, C., and M. Ebbott. Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary. Washington, DC, 2010.

  Edwards, M. W. Homer: Poet of the Iliad. Baltimore, 1987.

  Gaca, K. L. “Reinterpreting the Homeric Simile of Iliad 16.7–11: The Girl and Her Mother in Ancient Greek Warfare.” American Journal of Philology 129 (2008): 145–71.

  Hammer, D. C. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman, OK, 2002.

  Holoka, J. P., ed. Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition. New York, 2003.

  Lowenstam, S. The Death of Patroklos: A Study in Typology. Königstein im Taunus, 1981.

  Lynn-George, M. Epos: Word, Narrative, and the Iliad. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1988.

  Mackie, H. Talking Trojan. Lanham, MD, 1996.

  Martin, R. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca, NY, 1989.

  Morrison, J. V. Homeric Misdirection: False Predictions in the Iliad. Ann Arbor, 1992.

  Mueller, M. The Iliad. London, 1984.

  Muellner, L. The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic. Ithaca, NY, 1996.

  Nagy, G. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore, 1979; 2nd ed., 1999.

  Redfield, J. Nature and Culture in the Iliad. Chicago, 1975; 2nd ed., 1994.