By Gregory Nagy, 2024.09.02;
re-edited, with supplementary comments, by Arin Anderson and Hannah Lynch, 2023.09.04
What I write here, consistently to be called an Outline, aims to introduce “first-timers” to the English translation that I use for the Homeric Iliad, available for free in an online Sourcebook containing, among other texts, English translations of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, in addition to seven tragedies and two prose works of Plato, along with selected readings from other ancient Greek authors. For readers who don’t know the content of the Iliad—but even for those readers who think they know enough about it—this Outline will be most useful for you to read in its entirety even before you start reading the Iliad, though you could try a “quick read” of Iliad 1. Another way for me to say “Iliad 1” is to talk about “Scroll 1” of the English-language text of the Iliad that I regularly use when I communicate with first-time readers of this epic. (I will explain further below what I mean by “scroll.”) Please note that you will find Iliad 1, just as you will find Iliad 2 through 24, in the online Sourcebook. Your “quick read” of Iliad 1 could happen either after you read this Outline or, if you are feeling adventurous, you could try reading Iliad 1 even before you finish reading this Outline here. In other words, you could try reading Iliad 1 right after you read what I say about this “Scroll 1” here in the Outline, and then, after you finish your “quick read,” you could go on and finish reading the rest of the Outline, continuing with what I say about “Scroll 2” and continuing further, all the way to the end, at “Scroll 24.”
But even before you read anything from me in this Outline and before you try reading Iliad 1 in the Sourcebook, I recommend that you first read three preliminary things.
You will find the first two of these three preliminary things in my book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Harvard University Press 2013, paperback 2020, which is available both in an online version,https://chs.harvard.edu/book/nagy-gregory-the-ancient-greek-hero-in-24-hours/, as well as in the printed paperback version. For the time being, I will abbreviate the online version of The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours as H24H, and the paperback version as h24h.
The first of these three preliminary things for you to read is the “Introduction” in h24h, which is the same thing as “Hour 00” in the online version.
And the second thing is the “Introduction to Homeric Poetry” in h24h, which is the same thing as “Hour 0” in the online version.
As for the third thing, it is something new for me, in all my many years as a teacher of Greek literature. It comes from a new book, Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry, hereafter abbreviated as AGHAP, which has been printed by a Greek publishing house named “ΕΠΟΨ” and is now being distributed and sold by Harvard University Press in 2024. An online version is available to you for free if you go to the site Classical Continuum, https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu.
Those of you who are especially interested in ancient Greek ideas about heroes as idealized athletes will definitely want to do a “quick read” of Part I as well as Part II Essay 1 of this book. But even those of you who are not particularly interested in athletics will want to have a look.
To repeat… You will want to read, even before reading this Outline, both the “Introduction” (“Hour 00”) and the “Introduction to Homeric Poetry” (“Hour 0”) in h24h (H24H). (From here on, I will write simply H24H instead of alternating between H24H and h24h.)
And I would appreciate a “quick read” of Part I and Part II Essay1 in AGHAP.
After you read my Outline here in its entirety, your reading of the first three Hours of H24H, which come after Hour 00 and Hour 0, will go much more smoothly for you, since those Hours 1 and 2 and 3 will already touch on various parts of the Iliad that I highlight here in my Outline. My favorite example is what you will read about “Scroll 19” in my Outline here, where a main character is saying to another main character something like this: I’m sorry—or, I guess I’m sorry.
By the time you finish reading this Outline and then go on to finish reading the first three “Hours” of H24H, you will feel confident, I predict, that you are having the best possible “first experience” in reading with me the English translation of the Iliad as provided in the Sourcebook. I make things easier for you in the Outline by providing much more detail at the beginning, especially with reference to what I say about the “Scrolls” of the Iliad that are numbered 1 through 6. After that, as you will see, my Outline will then get less and less detailed as you read along—except for a few specially selected “Scrolls”—since your reading of the book H24H will become more and more comfortable as you proceed from one “Hour” to the next. To say it another way: you will keep getting more and more confident, I predict, about your coming to terms with your own personal understanding of the Iliad.
I hope I have explained well enough here why you will want to read this Outline—that is, why you will want to read it right after reading Hour 00 and Hour 0 in H24H, which, to repeat, are the same as the “Introduction” and the “Introduction to Homeric Poetry” in h24h. Oh, and there is also the extra reading in Part I and Part II Essay 1 of the online AGHAP.
Let me add, though, just for the record, that there exist many other “outlines” of the Iliad. Here is one example, written by David Silverman, https://www.reed.edu/humanities/110Tech/Iliad.Outline.html.
That work is quite admirable, faithfully retelling details, but I do not recommend it for us. It is far too detailed for first-time readers who are working with me.
Before I start my own Outline, from “Scroll 1” through “Scroll 24,” I propose to deal with some basics.
The term “scroll” refers to an ancient roll of sheets used by ancient Egyptians for writing texts—and, eventually, used by Greek-speakers in writing their own texts, including such treasured texts as the Homeric Iliad. The fabric of the sheets was made from a plant known as the papyrus. Papyrus grows like weeds—in Egypt. Sheets of writing-surface made from papyrus used to be mass-produced in ancient Egypt.
There once existed in the ancient Greek world a set of 24 such papyrus rolls or “scrolls” containing the Iliad, which was a monumental poem known today as an “epic.” It was very long, by Greek standards, extending over 15,000 verses (= poetic “lines”) in length, supposedly composed by “Homer,” a mythologized poet who was idealized by the ancient Greek world as the ultimate Poet. In fact, Homer was generally known to the ancient Greeks simply as ‘the Poet’ or, literally, ‘the Maker’, as for example in the writings of the philosopher Plato. (Homer’s name is hereafter written without quotation marks.) The Iliad of Homer and also his Odyssey, extending over 12,000 verses, were each divided into 24 scrolls. (From here on, I will stop italicizing Iliad and Odyssey.)
In the ancient Greek world, these scrolls were known as “rhapsodies,” because Homeric poetry as written into the scrolls was meant to be performed by professional reciters called rhapsōidoi or ‘rhapsodes’, which meant ‘those who sew together the song’. In terms of poetic performance, the best word for referring to the 24 units for performing the Iliad and the Odyssey each would be “Rhapsody 1 2 3 etc.” But I will refer to the units simply as “Scroll 1 2 3 etc.” since the performance traditions of the Iliad and Odyssey have not survived from the ancient world. Only the ancient texts have survived. But I prefer not to say “Book 1 2 3 etc.,” since I find that the English word “Book” in such a context can be misunderstood all too easily.
In the overall structure of the Iliad, the main hero of this epic, Achilles (also spelled Achilleus, also Akhilleus), feels a kind of cosmic anger, the ancient Greek word for which is mênis. Not coincidentally, this word is the first word of the Iliad. It is the true beginning. And I emphasize, from the start here, that beginnings are all-important.
Because of his anger, Achilles pulls out of the war that is being fought by the Achaeans (also known as Danaans or as Argives), whom the ancient Greeks imagined as their glorious ancestors, against the Trojans, inhabitants of ancient Troy, who seem at first to be non-Greeks but who are pictured by the Iliad as speaking Greek. I try not to think of the Achaeans as “Greeks.” They are epic Greeks as imagined by post-epic Greeks.
In the Iliad, both the Achaeans and the Trojans are pictured as heroes, living in a heroic age, whom Greek-speaking people living in a post-heroic age had mythologized as their very own larger-than-life prototypes. Heroes for them were prototypical mostly in good ways but also in bad ways. For us readers today, the heroic age of the Greeks, glorified by their idealized poet named Homer, came to an end soon after the Trojan War, which took place, if we calculate in terms of what the Poet is saying in his epic poetry, toward the end of the second millennium BCE. In referring to dates, I prefer to write BCE = “before the common era” instead of BC = “before Christ”; also CE = “common era” instead of AD = Latin “anno Domini.”
I pay special attention to what the Poet says at the very beginning of the Iliad here, in Scroll 1.
The Poet starts the Iliad by highlighting a special kind of anger. The ancient Greek word for this anger is mênis. As noted already, the Poet says this word as the first word of the Iliad. He prays to a Muse, who is understood to be a goddess of perfect poetic memory, asking her to ‘sing’ the anger. Not sing about the anger, but to sing for him the anger itself, that is, to sing the song, which is the anger. And the Poet himself is a singer. In fact, Homer was for the Greeks the ideal Singer. This idea about Homer has been definitively formulated by Harvard’s own Albert Lord, in a book originally published by Harvard University Press in 1960 under the title The Singer of Tales. Homer himself was the idealized Singer of Tales for the ancient Greeks. But the ultimate poetic authority is not the Singer of Tales but the divine Muse who inspires the Singer to remember what the Muse remembers. As we will see in Scroll 2, where the Poet thinks of a whole grouping of Muses, these goddesses have perfect memory because they were there, they were already present, in the heroic age. They saw and heard everything that happened then. The Singer of Tales in the post-heroic age must rely on the memory of the Muses. That is why the Singer of Tales prays to his Muse to inspire him to sing the song of the anger.
Why, then, was Achilles so angry as to withdraw from the Trojan War? We read the background in Scroll 1, which sets up the beginning of the Iliad. And my summary for this all-important part of the Iliad can be subdivided into points A B C D E.
A. The hero Achilles was angry because the god Apollo was already angry—he too, like Achilles, had felt a cosmic kind of anger, mênis, because Agamemnon, over-king of the Achaeans, had mistreated Khrūsēs (conventionally spelled Chryses), priest of the god Apollo.
Alert to readers: From here on, and throughout the rest of my Outline, I shift the brief retellings from past-tense to present-tense.
B. The over-king Agamemnon mistreats and thus insults Khrūsēs by refusing the priest’s plea that his daughter Khrūsēïs be set free by Agamemnon. From here on, I will spell the names of the priest and of his daughter simply as Chryses and Chryseis. Chryseis has become a captive woman, degraded as a war-prize and assigned by the Achaeans to Agamemnon for him to possess. And possession includes sexual possession. As a war-prize, this woman has become the sexual possession of Agamemnon.
Here I offer a most necessary alert to readers about tales sung by the Singer of Tales, with specific reference here to tales that tell about events that are likely to be morally disturbing to today’s readers… I need to make an essential point, from the start, about such tales—to which I will hereafter refer not as tales but rather, more neutrally, as narratives. My point is this: having studied the “plot” of the Iliad for a lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the Singer of Tales—to whom I will hereafter refer simply as the Master Narrator—does not approve of the treatment of women as war-prizes. The era of the Master Narration that is performed by the Master Narrator is imagined as morally superior to the era involving the gods and heroes that are the subject of his Master Narration. The post-heroic era of the ancient Greeks was thought—by them—to be morally superior to the heroic era.
C. The god Apollo is so angry about the insult committed by the over-king Agamemnon against the priest of Apollo that this god causes a disaster for the Achaeans, afflicting them with a plague—an epidemic that is causing widespread death, first to animals and then to humans. Reacting to the disaster, the hero Achilles calls on the hero Agamemnon to release that over-king’s war-prize Chryseis and to return her to the custodianship of the woman’s father, a priest of Apollo. Then Apollo can stop the plague. Agamemnon feels threatened, and he gets into a major quarrel with Achilles. But even Agamemnon, despite his moral obtuseness, recognizes that he has to give up Chyseis, thus appeasing Apollo and stopping the plague, but he is a “sore loser,” declaring that he now intends to humiliate Achilles, who had humiliated Agamemnon by challenging the over-king to give up Chryseis. Agamemnon declares that he will now forcibly take as his own possession a woman named Briseis, who had been awarded to Achilles as that hero’s own war-prize. In other words, Agamemnon will force Achilles to give up Briseis and will now possess her as a consolation-prize, as it were, for his loss of Chryseis.
Here I need to offer another alert to readers of the Iliad. In terms of my overall analysis of this epic, the attitude of Achilles here about his own war-prize, the woman Briseis, is at this point in the Master Narration quite questionable. Is Achilles any better, morally, than the over-king Agamemnon and his attitude about Chryseis, the woman that he has just lost as his war-prize? It is as if his loss of Briseis to the over-king is simply an insult to his pride as a hero. It is as if Briseis, like Chryseis, is merely a possession for Achilles—at this point in the Master Narration. But we will see, as the Master Narrator proceeds to narrate his Master Narration, that the feelings of Achilles will be transformed as the narration proceeds. We will see. By the time we reach the point in the Iliad where Achilles is quoted by the Master Narrator as speaking about Briseis, we will see whether Achilles still has the same limited feelings about Briseis that he shows here in Scroll 1. I should add already now, relying on my training as a linguist in the earliest phases of my academic life, that I interpret the meaning of the name Chryseisas a woman connected with the gold of a supreme king and the meaning of Briseis as a woman connected with the might of a supreme warrior.
D. The hero Achilles, as the supreme warrior in the Iliad, is superior to the hero Agamemnon as a warrior. To be contrasted is Agamemnon as the supreme king of the Achaeans. He is their over-king by virtue of being ruler of Mycenae, a citadel described in Homeric poetry as ‘rich in gold’. As king of Mycenae, Agamemnon is not only over-king of all the Achaeans: he is also the ruler of what archaeologists reconstruct as the Mycenaean Empire, which was a loose confederation of quasi-independent kingdoms that flourished in the second part of the second millennium BCE. Thus Agamemnon, although he is inferior to Achilles as a hero, is socially superior to Achilles because he, not Achilles, is over king of the Achaeans. Achilles is king of the Myrmidons, a grouping of warriors that is merely a sub-set of all the warriors who are known as the Achaeans.
E. The Achaeans have failed to stand up to Agamemnon when their over-king declares his intention to take Briseis from Achilles, and Achilles is deeply hurt by the lack of solidarity shown to him by his comrade warriors. But he is socially obligated to give up Briseis, for Agamemnon to possess, since his comrade warriors had not stopped their over-king. The personal hurt that is felt by Achilles, which is called an akhos or ‘pain’ by the Master Narrator, now metastasizes into a cosmically powerful feeling of mênis, ‘anger’, and this cosmic anger of Achilles will now result in his sitting out the Trojan War until the Achaeans come to their senses. But when will that happen? There is no point in looking for answers to this question—yet—while we are thinking only about what happens in Scroll 1. The point for now is simply this: the background for the narration of the whole Iliad has all been narrated here at the beginning, in Scroll 1. And we will have to wait for Achilles to continue sitting out the war until he finally re-enters the fighting—and that will only start happening in Scroll 22.
With this background in place, we are now ready for a summary of what happens in all the other Scrolls of the Iliad.
Scroll 2
The failures of Agamemnon as a leader of warriors, even though he is over-king of the Achaeans, become more evident as he now decides to test the battle-readiness of his fellow warriors. There is a major failure of judgment here, and the failure is about to be narrated.
This failure happens in an episode about the False Dream of Agamemnon. In this context, Agamemnon is insulted by Thersites, a character who specializes in what I describe in my own research as blame poetry. But the hero Odysseus, who is the top advisor to Agamemnon in the Iliad, puts an end to the blaming of Agamemnon by Thersites and humiliates the blame poet.
Also narrated in Scroll 2 here is the Catalogue of Ships, where the Poet describes all the Achaeans who sailed to Troy to fight the Trojan War, focusing on the leaders themselves and on the numbers of ships under their command.
Then there follows a Catalogue of the Trojans and their allies.
The two Catalogues of Scroll 2, especially the Catalogue of Ships, are a burden for modern readers to read, but hearing the performance of these Catalogues in the ancient Greek-speaking world was most interesting for the listeners, who as I already said had thought of themselves as distant descendants of the heroes featured in the Iliad.
Scroll 3
Since it is already the tenth year of the Trojan War, there is much war-weariness, and efforts are now being made to find a resolution that would end the war.
These efforts will culminate in a duel to the death—but this duel will fail as a hoped-for solution to all the wounding and dying. In this context, the Poet gets a chance to introduce, as if for the first time, some of the major characters who will be involved in the rest of the Iliad. Conspicuously missing, of course, is Achilles, who will now be sitting out the war until he re-enters the fighting after Scroll 19. Achilles is absent, yes, but the Poet is trying hard to concentrate on those characters who are very much present here—and who are all relevant in one way or other to Achilles.
First there is Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world, whom we see blaming herself here as the cause of the Trojan War. She is shaming herself, narrating how she, already a married woman, had been abducted from Sparta by a Trojan lover and taken across the sea to faraway Troy, where she has become the lover’s wife. But why all this self-shaming? What does the Master Narrator think? I will leave it to you as readers to decide, once you start reading the Iliad in earnest. And here is a related question for you: is Helen really accepted by the Trojans as the new wife of her lover?
Relevant to this question is the personality of Helen’s lover, the good-looking Paris, prince of Troy and son of Priam, king of Troy. Paris is also known by his princely name, Alexandros.
And then there is the older brother of Paris, Hector, who disapproves of the abduction of Helen but tries very hard to be kind to Helen.
Oh, and then there is Priam himself, king of Troy and father to the two princely brothers Paris and Hector. He too is trying to be kind to Helen.
On the other hand, there is Helen’s former husband, Menelaos, king of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and over-king of the Achaeans=Danaans=Argives. Menelaos is partnering with that over-king in leading the Achaeans to Troy, and he is eager to avenge personally the abduction of his former wife Helen. And to win her back.
But the war-weariness remains a sore problem. The war has been ongoing for nine years already. This is now the tenth year. So, what happens now is a half-hearted attempt being made to find a way out. A one-on-one duel to the death is now arranged for Menelaos and Paris as the opponents. Whoever wins in this duel to the death will then get to possess Helen—and then the war will be over, will it not? But this attempted solution fails. The duel gets interrupted by way of divine intervention. Paris is saved from death—this time—by the goddess Aphrodite, who has been blamed as the originator of the torrid love affair of Paris with Helen. Paris is now spirited off to safety from the scene of the duel with Menelaos—thanks to Aphrodite. The goddess not only saves Paris from death at the hands of the vengeful Menelaos, but she takes Paris directly to the boudoir of Helen so that the couple may resume their passionate lovemaking.
Scroll 4
So, the war-weariness persists. And attempts to end the war persist. A truce is now arranged between the Achaean side and the Trojan side, but it is broken when Menelaos is wounded by an arrow shot at him by a princely ally of the Trojans. The shooter is a master of archery, called Pandaros. Menelaos is wounded by the arrow shot at him by Pandaros, but the wound is not fatal. The war is on again. Warriors on both sides are getting killed again, now in the tenth year of the Trojan War. From the standpoint of our Iliad, however, it is as if the war has just started for the first time. After all, why did we have to hear the Catalogues of the opposing sides in Scroll 2, as if for the very first time? Why are such main characters as Helen of Sparta brought on stage, as it were, here in Scroll 3, as if for the very first time ever?
Scroll 5
Now comes much more fighting. Many more deaths on both sides. Much gore. Only the deaths of leaders, however, ever get narrated in detail, over and over again, and the names of the dying heroes are being mentioned with great care by our conscientious Master Narrator. Any mentions of the deaths of the fighting masses, however, go without names.
Among the major heroes who are featured in Scroll 5 here, the biggest name on the Achaean side is Diomedes. This hero, together with his fighting-partner and personal chariot-driver named Sthenelos, gets top billing in Scroll 5.
Now the Trojan ally Pandaros, master of archery, tries to kill Diomedes by shooting an arrow at him, but the arrow wounds Diomedes only superficially. Pandaros gives up on trying to be successful in the Iliad as an archer. He has by now already failed twice, missing the chance to become the one warrior in the Iliad who could have ended it all for the Achaeans. But Pandaros won’t give up. He now tries a third possible way to achieve hoped-for success. He becomes an improvising chariot-fighter instead of a fighter who shoots arrows. No success here, either, and now Pandaros gets killed. The Iliad thus demonstrates that archers simply don’t do well in the fighting in this epic. The most successful warriors in the Iliad, as we will see, are chariot-fighters. But even their success won’t last, as we will see when we get to Scroll 16.
But there is more to be said about archery already now, even though it results in failures here in the Iliad. When Diomedes gets wounded in the heel by an arrow here in Scroll 5, there is a hidden implication in the narrative. We see here a sharp contrast with Achilles, who has one and only one mortal “sweet spot” on the surface of his entire body, and that is his heel. This detail is never mentioned directly by the Master Narrator of the Iliad. But I think we see in this scene here, where Diomedes gets wounded in his heel, an allusion to the death-by-arrow that is ultimately experienced by Achilles, even though this death-by-arrow that awaits Achilles never gets directly described that way in the Iliad. The death of Achilles, where he gets shot in the heel and dies, is narrated in another epic, the Aithiopis, which means ‘the song of the Aethiopians’ and which is part of a body of non-Iliadic and non-Odyssean epic poetry that was known to the ancients as the Epic Cycle. Unfortunately for us, the ancient text of the Cycle has not survived, except in the form of abbreviated plot-outlines plus a few verses here and there that happen to be quoted by ancient authors.
In any case, the Achilles Heel does not get mentioned directly in the Iliad. But there is an indirect hint here in Scroll 5, in this scene where Diomedes gets wounded by an arrow shot at him by Pandaros. And that is because Diomedes in so many ways is one of the most worthy epic rivals of Achilles as a warrior. He is really the closest parallel to the kind of warrior that Achilles proves himself to be—though Achilles never gets to show his full range of abilities as a warrior in the Iliad. But the fact is, Diomedes does not happen to have the same specific point of vulnerability that Achilles has. Not the same “sweet spot.” One of my favorite questions for first-timers who are reading the Iliad is this: does Achilles have some other kind of “Achilles Heel” in the Iliad? There is no definitive answer to my question, though a student who once took the “Heroes” course did happen to guess what I guess is the real “Achilles Heel” of Achilles in the Iliad. Another one of my favorite questions: what do you think might be the “sweet spot” of Diomedes? I have my own possible answer, which I base on a close reading of Scroll 5. But I don’t expect all my fellow-readers to agree with my answer.
In any case, the momentum of Diomedes in all the bloody fighting that is being narrated in Scroll 5 of the Iliad is so outstanding that he even gets to wound two immortal Olympian gods. When I say Olympian I mean immortal gods who live in a palace on top of a heavenly mountain called Olympus. First-time readers of the Iliad tend to have a problem with these gods. The major problem has to do with the fact that the Olympian gods keep getting personally involved in the fighting of heroes in the Trojan War.
Here in Scroll 5 of the Iliad, the first of the two Olympian immortals who get wounded by the the hero Diomedes, even though he, like all the other heroes who fight in the Trojan War, is mortal— is the goddess of sexuality and love, Aphrodite herself. For those who know something about Roman mythology, I should point out here that the Latin equivalent of Greek Aphrodite is Venus. This goddess Aphrodite had intervened directly in the fighting by trying to protect her son, the hero Aeneas (in the Greek language, his name is Aineias), who is a prince fighting on the Trojan side. Today, people who are reading the Iliad for the first time and who happen to have at some earlier time already read the epic Aeneid of the Roman poet Virgil may be surprised to discover that Aeneas already has a big role in Greek epic, including the Homeric Iliad. When we see him fighting Diomedes, however, he does not make all that much of an impression on first-time readers of the Iliad. The fact is that Diomedes, aided by his divine patroness, the goddess Athena, nearly kills Aeneas here in Scroll 5. But Aeneas is protected by his own divine patroness, the goddess Aphrodite, who is actually also his divine mother. Also protecting Aeneas is the god Apollo, who is one of the most pro-Trojan of all the Olympian gods. As I already said, divinities keep intervening in the fighting. And some of the most direct examples of such interventions are narrated here in Scroll 5—though we will see the most shocking of all examples only when we reach Scroll 22.
In any case, here is how the wounding of Aphrodite by Aeneas happens. Diomedes, missing a chance to kill Aeneas, still manages to wound that hero’s loving mother, Aphrodite herself. Diomedes draws blood when he wounds the interfering Aphrodite. When divinities get wounded, however, they bleed not human blood but a divine liquid called ikhōr. Such bleeding proves to be not at all fatal for divinities. Aphrodite, wounded, leaves the field of battle.
Still another hero who gets top billing in Scroll 5 is Sarpedon, king of Lycia and an ally of the Trojans. The Lycians, we will find out later, are non-Greek-speaking people—though Sarpedon speaks Greek in the Iliad. Sarpedon engages in a one-on-one battle with the Achaean hero Tlepolemos, who prides himself on being the only warrior in the Iliad who happens to be the son of the ultimate hero of an earlier heroic era, Herakles, who is son of Zeus. But that distinction does not intimidate the Lycian Sarpedon, who is the son of Zeus himself. Sarpedon succeeds in killing Tlepolemos. Meanwhile, Diomedes continues being most successful in battle. Now he even stands up to the god of unlimited war, Ares. He wounds Ares, who then goes through the motions of death—which is described as comic for an immortal to be doing, that is, to be going through the motions but not actually managing to experience death. Death is dead serious only for mortals. But what was Ares doing on the battlefield? This Olympian too, like the Olympians Athena and Aphrodite and Apollo, was interfering in the ongoing battle. Ares had been aiding Hector, who is already emerging as the ultimate leader of the warriors fighting on the Trojan side in the Iliad.
Scroll 6
This scroll of the Iliad is a favorite for many first-time readers.
The Olympian gods have left the battlefield—for now. But the fighting continues. The Achaean hero Diomedes now encounters a most remarkable hero fighting on the Trojan side: he is a prince named Glaukos, who, like Sarpedon, originates from Lycia. Diomedes is about to engage with this Glaukos in a one-on-one battle, but he does not know the identity of his would-be opponent. So, Diomedes first calls out to Glaukos, asking him this question: Who are you, anyway? Diomedes must be thinking to himself: are you another one of those interfering immortal Olympians—or are you a mortal like me? The reply of Glaukos is one of the most celebrated passages in ancient Greek literature. I will not spoil things for you with a retelling. It will be better for you to read this passage slowly when you get around to reading the whole Iliad after you have finished with my Outline here. The passage about Diomedes and Glaukos, when you do get to reading it, will merit a delightful slowdown in your pace of reading. I promise. But I cannot resist at least telling you, even now, the main idea in this passage. The idea is this… we mortals are like leaves, since we live and die just as leaves flourish and then wither. That is our human condition. And an example of our human condition, continues Glaukos in speaking to his opponent Diomedes, is a hero named Bellerophon, who emigrated from the Greek-speaking city of Corinth, once named Ephyra, and crossed the Aegean Sea, on his way to what would then turn into his new homeland in Asia Minor, in Lycia. This Bellerophon is also known for riding in the skies on the back of a magical flying horse named Pegasus. As Glaukos adds: oh, by the way, Bellerophon is my ancestor. Again, I won’t spoil the experience of your savoring this passage, and I will add here simply one more detail: these two heroes back off from fighting each other to the death.
Another passage in Scroll 6 is my own personal favorite in all the Iliad: it is where Hector, the supreme warrior of the Trojans, says good-bye to his loving wife Andromache and to their infant son, Astyanax. It will be the last time this doomed hero will ever see his wife and child. The infant takes one look at the looming horsehair that graces the helmet of his father, and he starts wailing in fear, but the hero now takes off his terrifying headgear and kisses the child. Watching this tender scene, Andromache is described as ‘smiling through her tears’. When my readers read Hour 3 of H24H, they will see that I have much more to say about this Homeric moment, focusing on the poetics of lament, by which I mean a situation where you cry while you sing and sing while you cry.
But I now I need to say something else about Scroll 6 in the Iliad, as also about the scrolls that follow, all the way through Scroll 24. As I noted already from the start, readers of H24H will be reading about the many observations I have to make about all these scrolls. By contrast, however, at least so far in this Outline, I have been concentrating on further background that might not be obvious when you start reading the Iliad in earnest, starting at Scroll 1. Most of what I have said so far about Scrolls 1 through 6 has been about such background.
That said, since you will not be starting to read the Iliad until after you have finished reading this overall Outline, I will now speed ahead with increasingly shorter summaries of the action being narrated, since I have already tried to provide most of the background needed for your reading. Still, there is some further background still to be provided, and I propose to continue my Outline by concentrating on such background.
Scroll 7
As the war continues, there are still efforts being made to reduce all the killing. Hector, champion of the Trojans as their supreme warrior, challenges the Achaeans to come up with their own champion, described as ‘the best of the Achaeans’, to fight him in a duel to the death. Whichever of the two champions wins will thus also win for his side the Trojan War, thus ending the war. But Achilles, who is the supreme warrior of the Achaeans, is sitting out the Trojan War, and he is clearly ‘the best of the Achaeans’ in the Iliad. So, who will take his place?. Among the rivals of Achilles, the hero Ajax, son of Telamon, wins the honor. This Ajax, whose name is also spelled Aias, is arguably the most tragic figure in the Iliad, and I have written a whole book on what makes him so tragic. A pdf version of this book is available. For now, however, I concentrate on what happens in the scene where the duel to the death is described. The outcome of the duel results in no death for now, since the two champions fight to a draw. They part on friendly terms, exchanging gifts. The sword that Ajax gets as a gift from Hector, as I emphasize in the book I mentioned, turns out to be the weapon that this hero uses to kill himself at a later point in his life, which is mentioned in Scroll 11 of the Homeric Odyssey.
So, the Trojan War must go on. Now the Achaeans build a wall to protect themselves from the attacking Trojans. This wall, built to the south of a large bay along the coastline of the Hellespont where the ships of the Achaeans are beached, will define the northern limit of the fighting between the Achaeans and the Trojans from this point onward in the Iliad—all the way till the end of Scroll 17. I have relevant comments in a selective Commentary I have published online on both the Iliad and the Odyssey, to which I will hereafter refer as Commentary I&O, and the link for which is here: https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/a-sampling-of-comments-on-the-homeric-iliad-and-odyssey-restarted-2022/
I have analyzed in Commentary I&O the scenes of chariot warfare that take place over the Plain of the River Scamander, starting after Scroll 7. These scenes are framed by the Wall of the Achaeans to the North and the River Scamander to the East. For those interested in details about chariot warfare, you can find my analysis by searching online for I.11.497–500 in Commentary I&O, and I epitomize here from there…The Achaeans are encamped in the north and defending the Wall that separates them and their beached ships from the Trojans, who are attacking from the south. The river Scamander, flowing from the southeast toward the northwest and emptying into the Hellespont, separates Troy in the northeast from the encampment of the Achaeans in the northwest. Meanwhile, the Wall of the Achaeans separates their encampment and their ships in the northwest from the Trojans who are attacking the Wall from the south. The Achaeans built the Wall because the Trojans, emboldened by the momentum of Hector, have by now crossed over from the southeast side of the river Scamander to the southwest side, moving into the plain situated to the south of the Achaean Wall. So now this whole plain to the west of the Scamander has become a battleground for chariot-fighting. Hector is fighting further to the east, staying close to the west bank of the Scamander, while Ajax is fighting further to the west.
Scroll 8
The Trojans are starting to be the winners and the Achaeans are starting to be the losers in the Trojan War. The tide of war is turning. Hector is planning a full-scale assault on the Achaeans, who are hiding behind the Wall of the Achaeans. If the Trojans manage to breach the Wall, they will be able to burn the ships of the Achaeans, beached along a large bay that once existed along the coastline of a most dangerous part of the seas around the land of Troy, known as the Hellespont. For those interested in details about the fire that threatens to burn down the ships of the Achaeans, to which I will refer hereafter simply as the Fire of Hector, you can find my analysis by searching online at Comments I&O for I.01.320–348, I.01.558–559, I.02.001–006. If Hector had ever succeeded in burning the ships of the Achaeans, it is assumed in the Master Narration of the Iliad that the civilization of the Greeks would have become extinct in the heroic age, so that there would be no Greeks surviving into the post-heroic age.
Scroll 9
The Achaeans are in big trouble, and even Agamemnon knows it. He is advised by the wise old warrior Nestor—and he accepts Nestor’s advice—to send emissaries (usually described as ‘ambassadors’) to make amends with Achilles, who is still sitting it out at his station, next to his own ship that is beached on the shores of the Hellespont. The emissaries who are chosen are (1) the elderly hero Phoenix, who had been like a human mother to Achilles after this hero had been abandoned, already as a child, by his divine mother Thetis; (2) a close comrade of his, the hero Ajax; (3) another hero, Odysseus, who is also supposedly a comrade. According to the plan for persuading Achilles to rejoin his comrade warriors in fighting their war at Troy, Phoenix was supposed to be the first speaker to address Achilles and to tell the hero about the offer made by Agamemnon in the effort of the Achaeans to make amends and to offer compensation for damage to the honor of Achilles. But, contrary to the original plan, it is Odysseus who unexpectedly speaks first, and this hero’s formulation of the offer made by Agamemnon does not fully correspond to the actual wording of Agamemnon that the over-king had intended to be conveyed to Achilles. In terms of Agamemnon’s own formulation, there would be a kind of compensation in the process of making amends, yes, but any acceptance of the high-king’s offer would have undermined the heroic identity of Achilles. As I analyze the situation in Comments I&O I.09.120-161, Agamemnon makes an unacceptable offer in formulating the terms of the compensation that he offers to Achilles. The last four verses of his formulation, at lines 158-161 of Scroll 9, bluntly reassert the over-king’s claim to be superior to Achilles. When Odysseus restates to Achilles the terms of Agamemnon, at lines 260-299, he omits what Agamemnon claims about his superiority to Achilles. It can be argued that Achilles, if he had accepted the terms of Agamemnon as reasserted by Agamemnon himself, would have put at risk his own epic stature in the Iliad. Achilles rejects the offer, saying that he heeds the prophecy of his divine mother, that he will be faced with a choice: either a long life if he goes home and quits participating in the Trojan War, or a short but glorious life that will merit kleos, which is the ‘glory’ that a hero gets from the epic poetry that glorifies him. Then Phoenix still tries to persuade Achilles to accept the offer, and he backs up his attempts at persuasion by telling an instructive tale about a hero who lived in an earlier era, by the name of Meleagros. In H24H Hour 2, I offer a detailed analysis of the significance of this myth and its relevance to Achilles. Then Ajax speaks, and he is so angry about the refusal of Achilles to rejoin his comrade warriors that he does not even speak to Achilles directly: he just says to Phoenix: it’s no use, let’s go back to headquarters and report to Agamemnon that we have failed: Achilles is so pitiless about our plight that we will never persuade him.
Scroll 10
An interlude, showing how heroes behave as warriors in the nighttime as opposed to daytime. The rules of warfare are different at night. There is a nighttime skirmish taking place. On the Trojan side, a wolf-like character named Dolon is sent by Hector to spy on the Achaeans, who in turn send Diomedes and Odysseus to spy on the battle-camp of the Trojans, who have by now been so successful in the war that they are camping outside the walls of Troy. But Dolon is ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes. And he gets killed. By contrast, the spying attempt of Diomedes and Odysseus is successful, and they even manage to kill, in the Trojan battle camp that they had infiltrated, an important ally of the Trojans. He is Rhesus, king of the Thracians.
Scroll 11
The fighting resumes in the daytime, and Agamemnon has some of his best moments as a warrior. Such moments are described by Greek authors in the Classical period and beyond as aristeiā, which means ‘[a narrative of] best moments’. The over-king personally kills many Trojans, but he is eventually knocked out of battle, suffering a very serious wound. Other Achaean leaders also get wounded, and the pendulum swings back. The Trojans now have the upper hand again. Patroklos, best friend of Achilles, starts getting involved. He is urged to try and persuade Achilles to rescue the Achaeans from further harm.
Scroll 12
The Trojans break through the Wall of the Achaeans, which has been protecting their ships from the Fire of Hector.
Scroll 13
The fighting rages, and the ships of the Achaeans are now seriously endangered. But although the Achaeans are now definitely on the losing side, the Trojans have not yet succeeded in their attempts to burn down the beached ships of the Achaeans.
Scroll 14
The Achaeans counterattack. They benefit from the help of the goddess Hera, who helps the god Poseidon rouse the Achaeans. Zeus, who is observing the war from the heights of Mount Ida, would have not allowed this intervention, but Hera, his sister and wife, seduces the supreme god. After a vigorous round of sexual intercourse, Zeus falls asleep, and that is when the intervention of Poseidon in the Trojan War can more fully take effect here.
Scroll 15
Zeus wakes up, and the interfering pro-Achaean Olympians are scolded. Once they are cowed by Zeus, the pendulum can swing back to the Trojans. Hector gets “second wind,” and he is once again on the verge of leading his Trojans to victory in the Trojan War by setting the beached ships of the Achaeans on fire.
Scroll 16
Patroklos, in tears, implores his best friend Achilles to let him wear the supreme hero’s armor, so that he may thus enter the fighting, even without Achilles, and help the Achaeans save the ships from the Fire of Hector. Achilles assents, and Patroklos now goes off, wearing the armor of Achilles. He leads the Myrmidons to the scene of battle where Hector has already managed to set on fire the flagship of the Achaean ships beached on the bay of the Hellespont—and has already forced into retreat even the hero Ajax, who has been till now the strongest defender of the ships. Patroklos succeeds in putting out the initial fire that would have spread from the flagship, ending up in the destruction of all the ships of the Achaeans and, ultimately, of all the Achaeans themselves. Patroklos has now become the savior of the Achaeans. But, at this moment of ultimate success, everything now starts to go wrong. After Patroklos manages to kill the hero Sarpedon of Lycia in one-on-one mortal combat, he now ventures out, riding on the war chariot of Achilles, now driven by an ad hoc charioteer named Automedon (the Greek name means ‘automatic pilot’), to the plain of the Scamander, which is the ultimate battle-ground of chariot-fighting in the Iliad, and he will now encounter Hector. Patroklos will be killed in his role as a chariot-fighter by Hector in that Trojan’s own role as a chariot-fighter—which is how the two warriors are described at lines 732-733 and 755 when these two fighters each leap off the platforms of their racing chariots driven by their drivers. The driver of Hector, matching the driver of Patroklos, is the charioteer Kebriones, who is a bastard son of King Priam and thus a half-brother of the princely Hector. The two chariot-fighters Patroklos and Hector, now that they have hit the ground running after leaping from their chariots, start to run at each other, ready to engage in mortal combat. The god Apollo will now aid Hector in the killing of Patroklos. First Apollo stuns the hero on his head, with downturned hand, effectively knocking all the armor off the body of Patroklos. Then Hector’s ally Euphorbos manages to pierce with his spear the now unprotected body of Patroklos. After the piercing, Euphorbos melts into the mass of supporting Achaean warriors. And now Hector, as the third killer, finishes off Patroklos with a final blow. The details of this tripartite killing of a hero, which corresponds to the tripartite killing of a sacrificial animal, are analyzed in H24H Hour 5.
Scroll 17
What immediately follows is much fighting and killing, where the aim on both sides is possession of the dead body of the hero Patroklos. I need to give some background here. I say background, because the Master Narrator does not say directly what I will say. Why not? It is because everyone back then knew what what I am about to tell my first-time readers here. In the ancient Greek world, a hero’s dead body was a talisman of fertility and prosperity for the community that buried it in its own locale. I formally make the argument about this historical reality in H24H Hour 11§9. I mention that argument of mine already here only because I find that readers today are understandably shocked at the fact that there is such an all-important concern about possessing the body of a hero who has just been killed. So many other less-important heroes are getting killed left and right here in Scroll 17—all because of the fact that both the Achaeans and the Trojans desperately want to possess the dead body of Patroklos. In terms of the main action, however, I can summarize the two main outcomes of what the Master Narrator is narrating about the action here. Number One, Hector now manages to possess the armor of Patroklos—which is really the armor of Achilles—but the Trojans in general fail to possess the body of Patroklos. Number Two, the Achaeans manage to re-possess the body of Patroklos—but without the armor of Achilles. Too bad for the Trojans, I should add, that they could not possess the body of Patroklos, since possession of that body could have resulted, though the Trojans would not necessarily know it, in their possessing a talisman, as I just called it, of success. As we will see from an overall reading of H24H, cult heroes are impartial about aiding their worshippers, even if the worshippers had been formal enemies in war. In any case, Hector will be wearing the armor of Patroklos, which is really the armor of Achilles, and this means that he will now look just like Achilles. Meanwhile Achilles now needs to have a new set of armor, but that will have to wait till Scroll 18. We the readers still have a lot of waiting to do, since Achilles does not yet even know the grim news, that Patroklos has been killed
Scroll 18.
Achilles gets the grim news. He is beside himself with grief. He has just lost not only his “best friend,” as we readers today think of Patroklos. He has also lost his alter ego, as I argue in H24H Hour 6§58. We will get to that argument when you get to Hour 6. For now, all that matters is that Achilles is so grief-stricken that he goes through the motions of dying. He is lying there prone, in the role of a corpse. His immortal mother Thetis comes to him not just to comfort him but to perform a lament over his would-be dead body. That lament is “quoted” in the epic language of the Master Narrator. I analyze her lament in Hour 8§33, but my readers don’t have to read that yet. It can wait till we reach Hour 8 together. For now, we just have to appreciate the fact that the old world of Achilles is now dead to him. He will now forever be the man of constant sorrow. I talk about that already in my Introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey, which is Hour 0 in H2H. I first use the term already in Hour 0§17. Soon the anger of Achilles will transform from a cosmic anger or mênis, which is what his antger has been till now, into a berserk form of anger that is known as kholos in the ancient Greek language. That word derives from the idea of yellow bile, a basic fluid hidden within our human bodies—hidden until it erupts in uncontrollable rage. I refer to this phenomenon as a berserker’s warp spasm in H24H Hour 6§44. But first-time readers of the Iliad today are not yet ready for that kind of anger. We will have to wait for that new kind of anger for Achilles to take shape in Scroll 19. For now, we need to be patient and simply keep reading. All we need to know for now is that Achilles will have to have vengeance against Hector and will now have to save the Achaeans on his own, without the aid of his charioteer Patroklos. You see, Patroklos had always been the charioteer of Achilles before his later wish to be the chariot-fighter instead of chariot-driver ever came true. This wish of Patroklos was of course selfless, because he had felt grief over the sufferings of his fellow Achaeans, who were getting slaughtered by the Trojans because the supreme warrior Achilles, his best friend, was sitting it out and not fighting, bound by that cosmic mênis of his, which had a grip on him ever since Scroll 1. And just look at the consequences of that fatal wish of Patroklos ! But we as readers still have to concentrate on the immediate need of Achilles to re-enter the Trojan War. He will now need a new set of armor. Her immortal mother Thetis will now go to the divine workshop of Hephaistos, the god of all technicians in his role as Master Metalworker, and Thetis will now ask Hephaistos to make a new set of armor for her son. The ultimate masterpiece of technology in the Iliad will now be the new Shield of Achilles, made for him by Hephaistos, and the we see the making in progress, as described by the Poet, our Master Narrator. The description of this Shield by way of the Poet’s verbal art was known to the ancient Greeks as the poetic art of ecphrasis, that is, where verbal art pretends that it is visual. What is being created here when Hephaistos uses his visual art to create the new Shield of Achilles is simultaneously the verbal art of the Poet, our Master Narrator, whom the ancient Greeks knew as Homer. What is created here simultaneously by Hephaistos and Homer is the new world of Achilles, his new Cosmos, which takes shape in the Iliad of Homer. The Iliad is saying to us readers of today: welcome to the ultimate World of Achilles as created by the Master Narrator of the Iliad. Instead of my retelling here everything about this World of Achilles—which would be impossible in any case, I concentrate on just one scene here inside that Cosmos. It is where a juridical arbitration is happening. An anonymous defendant is obviously being accused by an anonymous prosecutor, who is seeking compensation for the death of an anonymous dead man, but the defendant is claiming that he has the right to pay for the compensation in full, without further consequences. I analyze this scene in H24H Hour 13§37, but please do not read my analysis until we reach Hour 13 together. If you read my analysis now, it would spoil for you the intellectual delight of trying to analyze the meaning of this scene for yourself. I will give you just one hint for now: maybe this scene of arbitration, narrated by the Master Narrator at the centerpoint of the Shield of Achilles, is confronting humanity with a most fundamental question: what is the price of a human life ?
Scroll 19
In all our excitement over the artistic marvel known the Shield of Achilles, all of us readers of the Iliad—even experts as well as first-timers—tend to forget that the dead body of Patroklos has not yet been rescued from the attempts of the Trojans to possess this body in the ongoing battle between attacking Trojans and defending Achaeans in their grim struggle over possession. And Achilles is not yet ready to seal himself inside the protective cover of his new set of armor. So, to move things along, the goddess Athena now takes the initiative. She has always been the primary divine patroness of Achilles, ever since Scroll 1, and she now prompts Achilles to make a most grand and all-intimidating appearance on the battlefield, now fully visible both to his own Achaean comrades and to the hated Trojans. Achilles now stands resplendent in his heroic glory, and he lets out a shout of anger so powerful that it scares off the Trojans, so that the naked body of Patroklos can finally be repossessed by the Achaeans and taken back to headquarters, safe and sound, to be made ready for a funeral that is intended by Achilles to be best funeral of the ages. But first, Achilles must unsay, in public, the cosmic anger or mênis he has felt toward Agamemnon about that over-king’s insult to his identity as a hero—as also toward his comrades, all the Achaeans, who had allowed Agamemnon to get away with his insult back in Scroll 1. Now, finally, in Scroll 19, Achilles will take back his anger, but only the kind of anger that is described as mênis by the Master Narrator. As I noted already, first readers are not yet ready for the impending horrors of that other kind of anger, still to come, pictured as a toxic kind yellow bile, kholos, that will make heroes go berserk when it explodes from inside the body and splatters everything it reaches on the outside. But, right now, we must not yet be thinking of the horrors yet to come. We must think of the awkward meeting where Achilles reconciles with his hated personal enemy Agamemnon, who in turn must force himself to say to Achilles: I’m sorry for insulting you.
I already mentioned this awkward moment when I was commenting in this Outline about Scroll 1, where the original insult happened. And I have extensive comments about the “apology” of Agamemnon in my book, at Hour 1 of H24H. But, right now, since we must finish soon with this Outline so that I may keep it brief enough for readers who are getting ready to read the Iliad for the first time, I will stick to the most basic aspects of Scroll 19. To say it most briefly: Odysseus persuades everyone that the essential protocols must be observed. Agamemnon must now formally restore Briseis to Achilles. Meanwhile, Briseis performs a lament for Patroklos. And Achilles follows with a brief lament of his own, not forgetting to lament his own oncoming death, which will be necessary because he has chosen to stay and fight at Troy rather than have a safe homecoming and a long life. He already knew that he was faced with such a choice, and now he finally makes the choice.
Scroll 20
Achilles has now rejoined the Achaean comrades in the Trojan War, and his new kind of anger, kholos, makes him go berserk. His cruelty in dealing out death to all Trojans is boundless. He has become an exponent of Ares, god of uncontrolled warfare. There are interludes, however, where the Master Narrator mutes the intensity of the slaughter. An example is a one-on-one combat between Achilles and Aeneas. Before their combat begins, the two heroes taunt each other with boasts about their own epic glories. After their verbal exchange, however, the physical exchange leads to the rescue of Aeneas by divine intervention. And the intensity of the slaughter can now resume.
Scroll 21
The martial rage of Achilles becomes ever more intense. The slaughter and the cruelty of Achilles will surely shock first-time readers. Is he committing war crimes? By the time he is slaughtering Trojans who are trying to escape from their pursuing Avenger by fording the river Scamander, which separates the Iliadic field of previous chariot-fighting on the flat plain, situated to the southwest of the river, from the narrower area framing the Walls of Troy, situated to the northeast of the river, Achilles has become so frenzied in his orgy of killing Trojans that he is now starting to choke the river with the corpses of Trojans he has slaughtered. Mistake, big mistake. It turns out that the river Scamander is a depersonalized divine force which, once it gets personified, is the same “thing” as the river-god named Xanthos, meaning ‘the one with the golden hair’, and this god turns out to the all-time water-god of the Trojans. This water-god Xanthos is just as cosmically powerful as the fire-god of the Achaeans, named Hephaistos, who as we have already seen is also their metalworker god, creator of the Iliadic Shield of Achilles. Since Achilles is by now literally on fire in his slaughtering frenzy as he violates Xanthos the water-god of the Trojans by choking the divine waters of the river Scamander with the corpses of Trojans who worship this god Xanthos, the fiery hero is now joined by the fire-god Hephaistos in resisting the attempt of the water-god Xanthos to drown Achilles and thus quench his fire. In the cosmic battle that ensues, the Olympian gods take notice, and they join in the fighting. Half of the Olympians take the side of the Achaeans, but the other half takes the side of the Trojans. Now the whole conflict degenerates into a cosmic-scale battle of the gods, but, somehow, it cannot be dead serious, since Olympian gods, as we have seen, do not and cannot die. The unseriousness of it all, as they go through the motions of a deadly battle, is familiar to students of early Near Eastern myths, where such an event is generally known as divine burlesque. But the laughter it might provoke, I must add, does not mean that such narratives are not sacred. It’s just that not everything that is sacred needs to be dead serious.
Scroll 22
The Master Narration now reverts to the serious—to the dead serious. Achilles, now that he has escaped from drowning and from the quenching of his all-consuming inner fire, will now be heading for Hector, who is about to meet his doom. The narration is so intense and full of tension that I would spoil it with my own retelling for the readers, especially for the first-timers. Suffice it to say that Achilles, after a painfully lengthy one-on-one combat with his hated enemy, wounds Hector mortally and is now standing over his enemy’s dying body. Hector’s last words plead for an honorable funeral, but Achilles, in his most savage moment, declares a ghastly wish: I wish I could bring myself to cut you up and devour you raw. The main hero of the Iliad has become a beast. His bestiality, although he will not go so far as to devour his victim, still leaves the dying Hector with the certainty, declared by Achilles, that this beastly avenger intends to feed Hector’s body to scavenging birds and dogs. No decent funeral for you, Hector. No cremation, which would be the preferred form of a funeral for any Homeric hero. Meanwhile, Andromache, in her private quarters, is preparing a hot bath for Hector, hoping for his return from the day’s fighting. What follows, where the Master Narrator tells of Andromache’s reaction when, following morbid premonitions, she bolts out of her room and rushes to the Walls of Troy outside to get a view of what is happening out there on the battlefield, is for me the most moving of all moments narrated in the entire Iliad. I will not spoil it for our readers when they reach this part of Scroll 22. I will add only that I treasure the words of the lament that Andromache is finally recorded as singing after she catches sight of the dragging of Hector’s corpse behind the chariot of Achilles as it speeds across the Plain of Scamander.
Scroll 23
The Achaeans now give Patroklos that funeral that is meant to be the most perfect of all funerals. About this funeral, I will let the readers make up their minds about it, but I must say, simply, that the ritual of the funeral itself gets polluted by Achilles. A clear symptom of the pollution is the human sacrifice that is performed at the funeral. The funeral is followed by the athletic even of “funeral games,” about which I provide extensive analysis in Hour 7 of H24H.
Scroll 24
Again, I provide extensive analysis in H24H, this time in Hour 8 as well as in Hour 7. I will say only this much about it all here. Achilles wins back his humanity, abandoning his bestiality, by taking pity on the sorrow of Hector’s father, once he realizes that his own father would have felt the same sorrow if he, Achilles, had been killed instead of Hector. So, Achilles surrenders the corpse of Hector to Priam, who then arranges a proper funeral for his son. In fact, it’s a perfect funeral. In the end, the poetics of pity, articulated masterfully in Scroll 24, can now overrule the poetics of anger.