Achilles Sings the Hero Within
Stories and Narrative Blends in Iliad 9
This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 9. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
When the embassy finds Achilles in Iliad 9, he is sitting outside, singing songs:
Iliad, 9.185-191
“They came to the dwellings and the ships of the Myrmidons
And they found [Achilles] delighting his heart with the clear-voiced lyre,
A finely wrought one which was silver on the bridge,
The one he chose as a prize after sacking the city of Êetiôn.
He delighted his heart with that and sang the famous stories of men.
But Patroklos sat alone opposite him in silence,
Waiting for time when the grandson of Aiakos would stop his songs.”Μυρμιδόνων δ’ ἐπί τε κλισίας καὶ νῆας ἱκέσθην,
τὸν δ’ εὗρον φρένα τερπόμενον φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ
καλῇ δαιδαλέῃ, ἐπὶ δ’ ἀργύρεον ζυγὸν ἦεν,
τὴν ἄρετ’ ἐξ ἐνάρων πόλιν ᾿Ηετίωνος ὀλέσσας•
τῇ ὅ γε θυμὸν ἔτερπεν, ἄειδε δ’ ἄρα κλέα ἀνδρῶν.
Πάτροκλος δέ οἱ οἶος ἐναντίος ἧστο σιωπῇ,
δέγμενος Αἰακίδην ὁπότε λήξειεν ἀείδων
What is Achilles doing here? One ancient author believed that he was taking Taylor Swift’s advice and calming down:
Aelian, Varia Historia 14.23 Achilles plays the Lyre to Calm his Rage
“Kleinias was serious in his manner and he was a Pythagorean in his philosophical training. If he was ever driven towards rage or had a sense of getting hot-headed, immediately before he became too overwhelmed with anger and before it was clear it was coming, he picked up the lyre and began to play. In response to people asking what the reason for this was, he responded melodiously, “I am calming myself”. Achilles in the Iliad seems to me to put his rage sleep when he sings along to a lyre and brings reminds himself of the famous tales of former men through his song. For, since he was a musical man, he chose the lyre first out of all the spoils.”
Κλεινίας ἀνὴρ ἦν σπουδαῖος τὸν τρόπον, Πυθαγόρειος δὲ τὴν σοφίαν. οὗτος εἴ ποτε ἐς ὀργὴν προήχθη καὶ εἶχεν αἰσθητικῶς ἑαυτοῦ ἐς θυμὸν ἐξαγομένου, παραχρῆμα πρὶν ἢ ἀνάπλεως αὐτῷ ἡ ὀργὴ καὶ ἐπίδηλος γένηται ὅπως διάκειται, τὴν λύραν ἁρμοσάμενος ἐκιθάριζε. πρὸς δὲ τοὺς πυνθανομένους τὴν αἰτίαν ἀπεκρίνετο ἐμμελῶς ὅτι ‘πραΰνομαι.’ δοκεῖ δέ μοι καὶ ὁ ἐν ᾿Ιλιάδι ᾿Αχιλλεύς, ὁ τῇ κιθάρᾳ προσᾴδων καὶ τὰ κλέα τῶν προτέρων διὰ τοῦ μέλους ἐς μνήμην ἑαυτῷ ἄγων, τὴν μῆνιν κατευνάζειν• μουσικὸς γὰρ ὢν τὴν κιθάραν πρώτην ἐκ τῶν λαφύρων ἔλαβε.
Aelian’s interpretation is interesting in part because it makes sense—Achilles is often seen as resting, or taking up time with the singing. But modern interpretations put a lot more weight into Achilles’ words, and what exactly it means to sing the “famous stories of men” (kléa andrôn). Ancient authors seemed to see the poetry as providing a source of wisdom.
Schol. A ad.Il. 9.189b ex. 1-2
“Klea andrôn: [this is because] it is right to be ever-mindful of good men. For singers make their audiences wise through ancient narratives.”
ex. κλέα ἀνδρῶν:ὅτι ἀειμνήστους δεῖτοὺς ἀγαθοὺς εἶναι· οἱ γὰρ ἀοιδοὶ διὰ τῶν παλαιῶν ἱστοριῶν τοὺς ἀκούοντας ἐσωφρόνιζον.
I think few listeners of popular music would agree that all singers improve their audiences, but there’s a convention within Homer of singers (aioidoi, often translated as ‘poets’) being left to advise or watch over people (as with Agamemnon and Clytemnestra). Modern scholars have noted that the phrase kléa andrôn is shorthand for “epic poetry”. Others have also seen evidence for ancient performance in this scene: Gregory Nagy suggests a “a stylized representation of relay mnemonics”. Jose Gonzalez puts it like this: “Here the hero engages in what amounts, on the lips of the performing rhapsode, to a magnificently self-referential metapoetic representation of hypoleptic rhapsodizing”.
The context of book 9 of the Iliad provides another opportunity to think about the function of the kléa andrôn. My dissertation advisor, David Sider was the first person I heard argue that Achilles was singing through the kléa andrôn in order to try to figure out his course of action. That is, Achilles is singing through other heroic narratives trying to figure out what to do next.
This is partly confirmed later when Phoenix chastises Achilles by saying: “This is not what we have heard before in the famous stories of men/ heroes, whenever a powerful anger overtook someone” (οὕτω καὶ τῶν πρόσθεν ἐπευθόμεθα κλέα ἀνδρῶν / ἡρώων, ὅτε κέν τιν’ ἐπιζάφελος χόλος ἵκοι, 9.524-5). And in the Odyssey, the same phrase is used to indicate Demodokos’ ability to sing songs from the Trojan War, right before he sings about the conflict between Odysseus and Achilles. (Μοῦσ’ ἄρ’ ἀοιδὸν ἀνῆκεν ἀειδέμεναι κλέα ἀνδρῶν, 8.73)
This is not the only time that epic implies Achilles is using earlier narratives for self-comparison. So, the basic suggestion is that the phrase kléa andrôn is a metonym for tales from myth or epic and that Achilles is not merely entertaining himself but, just as Phoenix invites him to consider the lessons from “the famous stories of men” as precedents to help correct his behavior, Achilles is singing in order to figure out where his story fits in the pantheon of tales he knows.
But book 9 throws a bit of a curve at audiences expecting the kléa andrôn to provide a solution. The story that Phoenix tells does not push Achilles to change his mind, instead, it produces an unclear response. And I think the story Phoenix tells helps us understand storytelling within the Iliad better (along with the epic itself).
One of the models I have been using to think about how stories are used comes from a cognitive approach to literature. In his book The Literary Mind, Mark Turner argues that when we hear (or read) a story, we cannot experience the narrative created by the teller of the tale. Instead, the story unfolds in a cognitive blend in a space between the world of the narrative and the reader’s mind. What this means, in effect, is that our actual mental picture of narrative blends our own experiences and memories with the sketches we receive from stories and generates a new thing, a tale wholly in our own minds.
I think that this model of understanding narrative helps to explain a lot of the asymmetric correspondences between tellers, audiences, and tales in Homer. This helps also to frame devices like similes that shift and move between the opening and the close of the comparison and often blend characteristics of the tenor (the thing compared) and the vehicle (the comparison). In the case of paradeigmata (stories meant to persuade) it can also help us understand what happens when people try to use a tale: the teller has an idea for what the story should do to his audience, but it does something else.
One thing to start with here, is that Phoenix already seems to make significant changes to his tale. He offers Achilles the story about Meleager, set in the narrative of the Calydonian Boar Hunt, but as part of an internecine conflict that really doesn’t figure much in the narrative’s more well known arc (sound familiar, Iliad?). Traditionally, the hunt is a tale of heroes banding together to kill a massive boar, devolving into a conflict over the spoils when Meleager, the young prince of the city, tries to give the boar’s hide to the heroine Atalanta. In rage, Meleager’s mother, Althaia, destroys a log that is tied to Meleager’s life force, resulting in his death. In some accounts, there’s even a prophecy that Meleager would lose his life if he fought his uncles.
There is some pretty clear evidence that Phoenix is attempting to create a particular narrative blend of the story and his world for Achilles. In his tale, Meleager sits out of the conflict until even his wife, Kleopatra—a clear inversion of Patroklos’ name—asks him to join the battle. In addition, according to Phoinix, Meleager ignored the promises of gifts, had to fight anyway, and ended up laboring without recompense. Phoenix ends by telling Achilles to “think about this” (9.600), warning him that he too will end up fighting without honor. The surprise for Phoenix? Achilles tells him he does not care about the gifts and threatens to leave for home in the morning.
Phoinix frames his narrative with explicit invitations to make comparisons between the experiences of his addressee and that of the central character in his story. He offers a specific interpretation that Achilles rejects because Achilles is likely taking a different lesson from the narrative (to stay out of battle because he does not want the goods or the social obligations they imply). This exchange, then, features both how storytellers adapt stories to the experiences of the audiences and also how audiences misread or reread the stories through their own perspectives as they create their own narrative blend.
Phoenix’s tale has been understood as something of a failure—that is, that Achilles does not hear Phoinix’s tale or that it was somehow the wrong story. Instead, I think that Achilles hears Phoinix’s story and takes his lesson to heart: he does not want to accept Agamemnon’s apology or his gifts. But he also does not want to abandon the war entirely. So, he takes Meleager as a positive model instead of a negative one. He actively shapes the meaning of the tale by imagining himself in a different version of it.
The latter part of this post adapts some material from a book called Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things, coming out from Yale in late 2024.
A short bibliography
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Avery, Harry C. “Achilles’ Third Father.” Hermes 126, no. 4 (1998): 389–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4477270.
Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer's Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Compton, Todd M. 2006. Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History. Hellenic Studies Series 11. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Finlay, Robert. “Patroklos, Achilleus, and Peleus: Fathers and Sons in the ‘Iliad.’” The Classical World 73, no. 5 (1980): 267–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/4349196.
Garcia, Lorenzo F., Jr. 2013. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 58. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Hellenic Studies Series 47. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Mackie, C. J. “Achilles’ Teachers: Chiron and Phoenix in the ‘Iliad.’” Greece & Rome 44, no. 1 (1997): 1–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/643142.
Nagy, Gregory. 2002. Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Hellenic Studies Series 1. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Rosner, Judith A. “The Speech of Phoenix: ‘Iliad’ 9.434-605.” Phoenix 30, no. 4 (1976): 314–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/1087169.
Scodel, Ruth. “The Autobiography of Phoenix: Iliad 9.444-95.” The American Journal of Philology 103, no. 2 (1982): 128–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/294243.
Scott, John A. “Phoenix in the Iliad.” The American Journal of Philology 33, no. 1 (1912): 68–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/288985.
Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Yamagata, Naoko. “Phoenix’s Speech - Is Achilles Punished?” The Classical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1991): 1–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/639017.