Abstract:Whatever the technology, whatever the age, geophonic, biophonic, and anthro-pophonic soundscapes are a wholesale part of the sensory experience of warfare, and this essay considers how representations of sound in the Iliad attempt to capture through attunement to aural sensory perception the extreme phenomenological experiences of warfare for individuals, communities, landscapes, and nations. Much attention has been given to the visual imagery in the Iliad, some attention to the acoustic poetics of the Iliad, but very little to (...) representations of sound as they relate to both the physical environment and the phenomenological experience of war. I argue here that representations of geophonic and biophonic sound in the Iliad frequently serve to contrast both anthrophony and the devastational impact of anthropogenic agency, and that this impact extends to the environmental. (shrink)

The Iliad opens with the image of abandoned corpses, left as prey to the wild beasts. It closes with the hard-won and respectful funeral of Hector, during which his maimed body is finally laid to rest. In-between these passages, death and the fate of dead bodies are often part of the epic's subject matter. The audience is treated to a wide selection of images concerning the fallen and their remains, ranging from those taken gently away from the battlefield to (...) be buried to those who are posthumously mutilated where they lie. Instances of corpse mutilation are rare elsewhere in Greek historical and literary writing, but occur in the Iliad at a regular rate. The gruesomeness of these acts makes for shocking and violent scenes, and represents a radical departure from the normal funeral ritual with lasting repercussions for the relatives of the deceased and the fate of the dead person in the afterlife. (shrink)

20세기 중반 이후, 지금까지 여러 학자들이 아킬레우스의 분노와 동정심에 관한 연구를 축적해왔다. 이 논문은 이를 바탕으로, 아킬레우스의 정서가 분노에서 동정심으로 갑자기 전환된 것이 아니라, 자신과 원수, 그리고 벗과 원수 사이의 끊임없는 동일화를통해 섬세하게 준비된 것임을 보이고자 한다. 특히 주목해서 관찰할 대상은 아킬레우스와 헥토르, 헥토르와 파트로클로스, 그리고아킬레우스와 프리아모스이며, 이를 통해 일관된 시학을 바탕으로섬세하게 시 전체를 계획해낸 한 사람의 시인을 상정하고자 한다.

Achilles’ dissatisfaction with the heroic code, despite his preeminence, is Homer’s platform on which he demonstrates that the code is an inadequate basis for the emerging polis. The political requires a new kind of man, one capable of love and friendship. For only this kind of man can be a proper citizen, a person capable of more than adherence to a heroic code.

The Iliad is rich in references to stories that have only incidental relevance to the main narrative. These digressions, as they are often called, have usually been assumed to reflect a wealth of pre-Homeric legend, some of which must a have been embodied in poetry. The older Analysts tended to explain the digressions in terms of interpolation. Whether regarded as genuinely Homeric or as interpolated these myths were considered as something existing in an external tradition. More recent scholars have (...) been prepared to admit that Homer may invent from time to time. For example, Sir Maurice Bowra observes that ‘the poet seems sometimes to invent a detail which looks as if it referred to some story outside his immediate subject but is in fact an invention brought to serve a passing need’. (shrink)

‘My own father’, Achilles says to Priam in the last book of the Iliad, ‘was a rich man and a powerful one. He was king of the Myrmidons, and he had a divine wife. But even so the gods gave him evils too. He had no family, only one son, and that son a παναώριος one. I do not look after him in his old age, but am far away, sitting here in Troy, inflicting misery on you and your (...) children.’The problem I propose to discuss is the meaning of παναώριος. The word is unique to this passage, and the standard translation ‘of all-untimely fate’ or ‘doomed to die young’ is open to many objections. I shall argue that by describing himself as ‘untimely’ what Achilles means is that he is someone who is always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, a misfit. It may seem a petty point, hardly worth the long argument that will be needed to establish it. But it has consequences for our judgement of the Iliad as a whole. If the one interpretation is correct, then Homer is content to repeat his effects without regard to the situation of his characters, which in any other author we would call careless writing. On the other interpretation he is capable of focusing down to quite detailed nuances. The question is not therefore one of lexicology alone but also of literary criticism.The translation ‘all-untimely doomed’ has warrant from antiquity. Leaf quotes a scholium παντελ⋯ς ἄωρον ⋯ποθανούμενον, and the word ⋯ωρία is used by a scholiast at 1.505 to refer to the fate by which Achilles was to die early. (shrink)

This chapter seeks to characterize the voice of the poet within the Iliad, and to show that a better understanding of the poet’s voice helps to explain several distinctive and puzzling features of Iliadic narrative. The chapter looks at the poet’s relationship to the Muses, and his temporal and spatial self-positioning within the world of the Trojan war, all of which illustrate the divine perspective he offers on that war.

It has been easy to take the apparently detached viewpoint of the two early Greek epics as actually objective, a window on a ‘Heroic Age’, on a ‘Homeric society’ and its values. We used to ask whether ‘Homeric society’ belongs to the poets' own time or to some earlier one. We still ask how to characterize and explain the ways in which the ‘Homeric world’ differs from any world that we can accept as having existed: we answer with phrases such (...) as ‘poetic exaggeration’ and ‘epic distance’. We have constructed ‘Homeric society’, but it remains an isolate. It can tell us nothing in return of the poets' intentions, or of the society of their time, unless we have a working hypothesis as to the place in that society that was held by the poets and their audiences. (shrink)

Dissecting criticism of Homer has proved to its own satisfaction that certain books of the Iliad are late, and have special affinity with the Odyssey. This Odyssean connexion is established by collecting verbal and metrical peculiarities and grammatical usages, which are found outside these parts of the Iliad only in what is held to be the later poem. The chief delinquents are I, K, Ψ and Ω but many would add the Apaté, Nestor's reminiscence in Λ, and other (...) tracts. There is not complete agreement as to the limits of the category; but generally it is assumed that the four books, and, when necessary, other parts of the Iliad, have the Odyssean taint. Strangely enough, Θ is not so treated. Yet, as Mr. Andrew Lang has remarked, it ought to be Odyssean, if, as so many think, it was composed as a ‘prologue’ to I. (shrink)

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in theIliadmust begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says, ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had losttwelvechildren. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days in their blood and there was (...) no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Tragic Evolutionary Logic of The IliadBrian BoydThe Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, by Jonathan Gottschall; xii & 223 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, $32.00 paperback.Jonathan Gottschall has conquered the oldest and craggiest peak of Western literature, The Iliad, by a new face. He stakes out the Darwin route to Homer so directly and clearly that he makes the climb inviting and (...) inspiring even to curious newcomers without high-altitude evolutionary training. And the vista he opens up offers us a chance to look in multiple directions: at Homer, at literary evolutionism and its possibilities, and at Gottschall's role in exploring this new route to discovery.One previous monograph has investigated a single literary work from a Darwinian viewpoint: Brett Cooke's analysis of Evgeny Zamyatin's 1921 science-fiction classic, We.1 Cooke's Human Nature in Utopia, by showing how Zamyatin appeals to the evolved nature of readers, in the face of the denial of human nature in his imagined One State and in early Soviet Communism, deepens our natural response to a modern classic. But where Cooke merely succeeds, Gottschall triumphs. The Rape of Troy not only deepens our response to a classic discussed for almost three millennia but also explains the world of Homer in a way no one could have seen without the multi-million-year perspective evolution allows—and does so with conceptual clarity, tight argument, effortless imagery, and copious verbal energy. [End Page 234]Gottschall emphasizes that his "evolutionary anthropology of conflict in Homeric society" does not attempt a Homeric "theory of everything" (pp. 3, 9). There is much of interest in The Iliad he does not touch on, and much even in possible evolutionary approaches to Homer that he does not consider. He focuses intently on a single two-part question: Why is there so much violence in the Iliad, and what effect does it have on how those in Homeric society see their world?After a brilliant introductory overview, he shows in his first two chapters how over the last century Homerists have increasingly turned to comparative anthropology to augment the meagre direct data. They have clarified that the Iliad was long obscured by later Western assumptions about states and kings, and that the poem probably reflects something like Homer's own world, within (at about 800 BCE) the late Greek Dark Age, a pre-state society in many ways closer to Highland New Guinea than to the worlds of Caesar or Charlemagne.Everyone who knows about the Trojan War knows that the Greeks fight Troy because the Trojan prince Paris took Helen from her husband, the Greek lord Menelaus. But readers of the Iliad want to know why thousands of soldiers on both sides persisted through ten years of brutal battle. Surely war on this scale cannot have been over just a woman? Scholars have proposed many explanations of what was really at stake. Immortal honor for men all too aware, day after bloody day, of their own physical mortality? Power? Status? Material goods? Prestige goods? A chance to neutralize enemies?By drawing on evolutionary biology and anthropology, Gottschall can show that this war, like most human violence against other humans, and even like most intraspecies animal violence, stems ultimately from male competition over females. He introduces the powerful and far-reaching principle of differential parental investment developed by Robert Trivers.2 As Gottschall lucidly elaborates: "males will attempt to mate more promiscuously both because sex is cheaper for them, and because they have the potential to produce many offspring with multiple females. I emphasize the words 'attempt' and 'potential' because if every male adopts a relatively promiscuous strategy, and if some males succeed, then other males will not reproduce at all" (p. 44). The far more divergent rates of reproductive success among males than among females prove to be the key determinant. Gottschall sums up: "males typically face higher risks of total reproductive failure and higher hopes of extraordinary reproductive success. This creates strong incentives to compete for mates. Males who are better able to compete for access to [End Page 235] scarce female reproductive capacity, in whatever form... (shrink)

Both aggressive and non-aggressive strategies of competition pervade the poetics of the “Iliad”, the “Odyssey”, and the “Argonautica”, shaping the expression of narrator-ethos and implicit standards of poetic quality. Studying a poetics of competition in scenes of conjugal bedroom conversation in Il. 3.421-448, Od. 23.295-343, and A. R. 4.1068-1111 benefits understanding of the text-immanent strategies employed to achieve and advertise the superior quality of these poems. The poetics of competition in Il. 3.421-448 can be read against Middle-Eastern poetry and (...) the Epic Cycle, that of Od. 23.295-343 against the Iliad and perhaps lost Nostoi-traditions, while A. R. 4.1068-1111 engages not just the Odyssey, but also Herodotus 3.134 f., the “Dios apate” in Il. 14, and Peripatetic and Alexandrian scholarship. (shrink)

This article treats representations of the wolf in the Greek archaic and early classical literary and visual sources. Using a close reading of the Iliadic Doloneia as a point of departure, it argues that wolves in myth, fable, and other modes of discourse, as well as in the early artistic tradition, regularly serve as a means of signaling the loss of distinctions that occurs when friend turns into foe and an erstwhile philos or “second self” betrays one of his kind. (...) Prominent in the discussion are two further issues: the generic confusion or oscillation that characterizes so many textual and artistic versions of the tale, as well as the loss of distinction between two roles that normative representations more regularly contrast, those of warrior and hunter, martial victim and animal prey. Within the Doloneia, warfare proves indistinguishable from the hunt. (shrink)

In the Iliad the symbolic value of gifts as tokens of reciprocity is more important than their material value. This is exemplified in the encounters of Diomedes with Glaucus in book 6 and Achilles with Priam in 24. Glaucus readily agrees to offer a much more valuable gift than Diomedes, and the narratorial suggestion that Zeus took away Glaucus’ wits is not shaped as the report of a fact but captures the views or feelings of observers such as members (...) of the audience. Achilles agrees to release the body of Hector in exchange for gifts. As Glaucus and Diomedes seal their pact and renew the ancestral guest-friendship relationship with the exchange of gifts, so Achilles seals his pact with Priam and his earlier one with the dead Patroclus with the acceptance and promise of gifts respectively. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliadby Lorenzo F. GarciaJonas GrethleinL orenzoF. G arcia. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies 57. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013. Distributed by Harvard University Press. viii + 321 pp. Paper, $22.50.The philosophy of Heidegger continues to cast a spell on some Classicists. It is less Heidegger’s own interpretations of Greek authors that serve as stimulus than (...) the main work of his early career, Sein und Zeit(Halle 1927), that seems to invite applications to ancient texts. Reading such studies as Shanske’s Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History(Cambridge 2007), I keep wondering to what extent the attractiveness of Heidegger to some Classicists ultimately derives from the impact that ancient texts may have had on the formation of his philosophy. Attending a humanistisches Gymnasium, Heidegger received a thorough training in Greek and must have read a fair amount of ancient texts in the original. Besides tying in with the existentialism of his day, the gloomy nature of Heidegger’s philosophy is highly reminiscent of what is traditionally referred to as Greek pessimism. It is easy, for instance, to sense in the concept of “ Sein zum Tode” an echo of the sentiment of the Herodotean Solon that “we must look to the conclusion of every matter and see how it will end” (Hdt. 1.32.9). The common tenor notwithstanding, applying Heidegger’s philosophy of Being to the interpretation of ancient literature is a daunting task.In Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad, Garcia draws on Heidegger to show that “the subject of the Iliad... is time itself and the durability of its objects to withstand time’s withering flow” (5). Garcia claims that the tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy of time plays out in the Iliadat various levels. For Heidegger, Daseinis defined by death, which is always impending and thereby constitutes its totality. Daseinis essentially Sein zum Tode(“being-toward-death”). This, Garcia argues, is reflected in the temporal economy of the Iliadwhich hinges on the notion of “not yet” already encapsulating a “no longer.” Various physical objects, humans, and, to some extent, also gods are presented as enduring, but fated to fade. Garcia’s central argument is that they thereby reflect the temporal dynamics of epic poetry itself. To him, kleos aphthitondoes not imply the idea of eternity, but a duration that entails its own ending. Before discussing the soundness of this argument in conjunction with its deployment of Heidegger, let me give a brief synopsis of the individual chapters.In chapter 1, Garcia elaborates on “the rhetoric of time and memory”; while “time has disintegrating effects..., memory in a pure or ideal form, on the other hand, preserves its object against time” (45). This dialectic comes to the fore in Iliad2 where the rotting of the ships and the flagging morale of the [End Page 481]Greeks indicate the “loss of cohesion through waiting” (55). At the same time, Garcia claims, Odysseus’ intervention illustrates the power of memory. Odysseus reminds the Achaeans of Calchas’ prophecy which he remembers as if “it was either yesterday or the day before” and “thereby seeks to undo the disintegration of the Achaeans’ emotional resolve” (63). The tension between the decaying force of time and the attempt at recuperation through memory yields the framework for the investigation of various entities and their temporal dynamics in the main part of the book.The second chapter is devoted to the fate of the bodies of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector. In the eyes of Garcia, “the preservation of these exquisite corpses serves as an analogue within the poem for the very project of the epic commemoration of Achilles—as if the epic were a ‘freezing’ of temporal flow against the ravages of time” (66). However, neither the application of ambrosia and nectar nor funeral rites achieve permanent preservation: bodies can be removed from time only temporarily. They are subject to “the logic of the ‘still perfectly’ and ‘not yet’” (94) and thereby mirror the fame of Achilles which, despite its longevity, carries its termination in itself.In chapter... (shrink)