Brothers, Sisters, Wives, and Divine (Dis)Order
Setting things Straight in Iliad 15
This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 15. 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.
Book 15 revisits themes of theomachy (“divine war”) without actually showing the gods at war. The two primary conflicts are between Zeus and Hera and then Zeus and Poseidon. In a way, the first pairing echoes conflicts between gendered gods in the Theogony while the latter resonates with intergenerational strife or, perhaps, different models for authority among the gods. I outline some of how this engages with the themes of politics in the Iliad in the first post on book 15, but there are more connections here with other narrative traditions as well. In this post I will focus on Zeus’ responses to Hera and Poseidon.
Zeus and Hera
Hera’s rage and behavior, as Joan O’Brien (1990) argues, anticipates the disorder and chaos of the following books of the Iliad. (And accordingly, the forced resolution of her rage in book 24 is an echo of the force ending of Achilles’ rage.) O’Brien emphasizes how Hera becomes a “tutelary god” for Achilles and notes that they both have associations in this poem with kholos, anger that is socially motivated. (See Walsh’s 2005 book for more on anger words in the Homeric poems.)
The transferal of irrational violence from an elemental male god in the Theogony to the Queen of the Olympians in the Iliad may be another reflex of the resolution of tensions in Hesiod’s poem: Zeus balances out and overrules Hera in a manner that relies on the threat of force but not its activation and it is in Zeus’ role as an arbiter that Hera’s rage against the Trojans is put to rest. (Or, at least forestalled: Any reader of the Aeneid knows that wrathful Juno will be there after the city falls.)
One of the important features of Hera’s anger and her conflicts with Zeus is that they help to bring a clarification to his ‘plan’ for the poem. The moments in books 4, 8, and 14/15 when Hera opposes Zeus result in clearer articulations of his plan. At the beginning of 15, after he awakens and threatens Hera, Zeus offers a clear foreshadowing of events to come including the deaths of Sarpedon, Patroklos, and Hektor (15.63-71). And as James Morrison shows (1997), this is also connected to the larger arc of the Trojan War. Zeus, in his response to Hera and the conflict of the war, outlines where the events of the Iliad fit in the larger picture: the death of Hektor will be followed by the Greeks surging from the Greek ships until they capture the city.
Zeus’ speech to Hera is interesting for its forcefulness and the details it claims:
Homer, Iliad 15.11-35
When he saw Hektor, the father of men and gods pitied him;
then, glaring terribly, he spoke his speech to Hera:
‘Impossible Hera, your trick really was so wily—
it kept shining Hektor from battle and routed his troops.
I truly do not know whether you will take part in
this harsh defiance again and I will flog you with blows.
Do you really not remember when I hung you from on high
and attached two anvils from your feet and bound around your hands
a golden chain, unbreakable? Then you hung in the sky and the clouds
and the gods raged over great Olympos at your side
but they could not free you—whomever I caught
afterwards I would seize and throw from the threshold so he would fall
to the earth powerless. So, then the ceaseless grief
over godlike Herakles did not leave my heart,
the one you, by persuading the breezes, sent with the wind Boreas
over the barren sea as you devised evils for him,
then you even sent him to well-inhabited Kos.
I saved him from there and led him back again
to horse-nourishing Argos even though he had suffered so many things.
I will remind you again so that you will stop your deceiving,
so you know whether sex and the bed will be of any use to you,
the sex you had when you departed from the gods and deceived me.’
So he spoke, and ox-eyed queen Hera shivered.
This is not the only time in the Iliad that Zeus claims the physical power to counter all the other gods together, but the scene he describes here is so specific that it seems bizarre. The D Scholia to the Iliad suggest that Zeus’ description of his punishment of Hera is some kind of a coded philosophical message about the relationship between the air, the aether, and the earth and that the anvils are water and land that depend on the sky and the golden bonds are the ethereal fire that sky (here, really Zeus) uses to bind the elements together.
I don’t know much about that! But the specificity of the image seems conducive to some kind of an allusion to another tradition. The second important comment here is the echo of conflict over Herakles. For Zeus, who is helping Achilles, the whole dynamic is a replay of the trials of Herakles and in this instance he is intervening to keep Hera at bay. Note that Hera does not respond in any significant way. She retreats and is more or less compliant for the rest of the epic.
As part of the dynamic of their marital relationship, Zeus’ repeated threats to Hera (here, in book 1 and book 4) are somewhat unsettling. As Katerina Synidinou shows, however, these threats are not actualized in the epic and they don’t seem to move Hera completely, since she ignores him right up through the seduction in book 14 which prompts his strongest language. Some authors have seen the back-and-forth between Zeus and Hera as a representation of a conflict between diverging religious systems (a patriarchal sky father winning over an ancient earth-mother) but this simplistic model has been successfully challenged. Hera definitely appears to lose status in the Iliad, as Walter Burkert observes, but this movement may also convey echoes of sacred marriage rituals (the so-called hieros gamos), emphasizing the power of seduction and in many cases the importance of fertility.
Zeus and Poseidon
In the first post for book 15, I mentioned the divine theme of the division of honors and the stability of the divine universe. Divine anger over threats to such stability is an important theme of early Greek poetry–the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is in part a rumination on how to maintain cosmic balance. (For some of these echoes see Erwin Cooks essays below). The language of division, conflict, and judgment emerge clear in Poseidon’s response to Iris.
The ancient story that Poseidon alludes to fills in some of the details from the Theogony. We know from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter that the story of Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus splitting control of the cosmos is not peculiar to the Iliad. There is of course some awkwardness in Zeus’ relationship to his brother. As G. M. Calhoun (and others) argues, Zeus is positioned as both father and king in the Iliad. The problem is that he is technically younger than Poseidon and Hades but qualifies as older on the technicality that Kronos ate Poseidon and Hades when they were born and Zeus later forced them to be vomited up in a kind of twisted second birth. The father role is complicated: Benveniste (1969, 210-1) argues that the IE term *pəter does not carry with it the notion of reproductive paternity but contains a semantic notion of rulership and cosmic order connected to the supreme IE god. It is combined with an interesting position for Zeus in the Iliad: he is never called a king, even though gets that title in Hesiod’s Theogony (886).
One of the chief features of the exchange in book 15 is that Zeus does not deign to engage with Poseidon directly. Instead he sends Iris to tell him to stop messing around.
Homer, Iliad 15.162-6
‘And if he will not obey my words, but disregards them,
let him consider, indeed, in his heart and mind
that he does not dare to face me coming on even though he is strong;
since I say well that I am far better in strength
and older by birth; and his dear heart does not shirk from saying
he is equal to me whom even the other gods fear.’
Zeus characterizes his power as residing in his superior strength and his greater age. Implicit in this combination is the ability to punish Poseidon along with the right to do so. When Poseidon responds to Iris’ message, he addresses force first:
Homer, Iliad 15.185-99
‘Alas, even though he is noble he has spoken presumptuously,
if he will restrain me, unwilling, with force, when I have equal timê.
For there are three of us, brothers, whom Rhea bore to Kronos,
Zeus and I, and the third, Hades, rules over the underworld.
But everything was divided in three parts, each was allotted his timê.
I drew my lot to inhabit the gray sea always,
when we drew lots Hades drew the misty gloom
and Zeus took the wide sky in the heaven and the clouds.
But the earth is still common to all and so is great Olympos.
So I will in no way walk in step with Zeus’ thoughts,
let him, even though he’s stronger, remain in his allotment at peace.
Let him not at all try to abuse me shamefully with his hands,
for it is better for him to chastise his daughters and sons
with terrible words, those children he fathered himself,
they will listen to him urging them on and by compulsion too.’
Poseidon’s dismissal indicates that he conceives of Zeus’ authority in two independent systems. First, as he states, Zeus drew lots in the division of the world with his brothers and maintains control over one realm of three (four if you count the “neutral” zone of earth). Second, as patêr, Zeus is the head of his family, the children he fathered (and his wife). From Poseidon’s point of view, he is subordinate to Zeus in neither system. He rejects the notion that Zeus can and should abuse him and attempts to reduce his authority to his own household.
The story of the three-fold division of the world among a group of gods may be one that is consciously (or less so) shared with Ancient Near Eastern myth, as Bruce Louden, Walter Burkert, and Andre Lardinois have argued (among others). Here, I think, Poseidon is allowed to voice this world-view even as the perspective is subordinated to a single-god in authority model.
The resolution of this conflict points to the very impossibility of anything but a patriarchal order on Olympos: Poseidon attempts to lay claim to some sort of oligarchic power structure, a claim that he bases on a denial of Zeus’ paternity. Iris seems to respond to this by emphasizing both Zeus’ imminent threat and his age. She also appeals to his sensibility, his desire to keep things from falling into a greater state of disorder.
‘Dark-haired earth-shaker, should I really report in this way
this harsh and forceful language to Zeus,
or will you change your mind a bit? The thoughts of the noble are flexible.
You know that the Furies always follow the elders.’
Iris, by emphasizing Zeus’ age, reasserts paternity within the frame of the threat of Poseidon’s rebellion which, in essence, pales in comparison with the threat of Zeus’ force. Like Milton’s Satan, Poseidon attempts to claim a share in the control of the universe. Unlike Lucifer, Poseidon relents because he knows he will fail. Nevertheless, his threatened future rebellion bears an intriguing resemblance to Satan’s: it is a coalition aimed at obliterating the supreme god’s powers. Poseidon’s response confirms that what is really going on here are hurt feelings:
Poseidon’s Response 15.209-17
‘Iris, goddess, you especially speak this word according to fate;
good also comes whenever a messenger knows proper things.
But this grief overcomes my heart and chest
whenever he wishes to taunt me with wrathful words,
since I am of equal lot and assigned to the same fate.
But now surely, even though I am angry, I will yield.
However, I will tell you another thing, and I threaten this in my heart:
if without me and Athena the forager,
and without Hera, and Hermes, and lord Hephaistos,
he spares lofty Troy, if he does not wish
to sack it and give great strength to the Argives,
then let him know this, that our anger will be incurable.’
Poseidon occupies a strange place in early Greek poetry: we know that he is a god of some importance, but his significance seems to be waning in comparison to gods like Zeus, Apollo, and Athena. Some of the meaning of this exchange is tied up in the earlier conversation between Zeus and Poseidon in book 7 where the latter expresses his anxiety about the destruction of the walls of Troy and the eradication of his fame. Poseidon is, at some basic level, a deity worried about his place in the pantheon. In book 7 he looks to Zeus to confirm his importance, his place of honor. We could imagine that he turns against Zeus, even if briefly, because he has lost faith. At the same time, it is not beyond the imagination to speculate that the Iliad is also trying to figure out how a god like Poseidon fits into the world of its audience.
Poseidon speaks to confirm a certain status quo. His retreat here anticipates Achilles’ reconciliation with Agamemnon for the sake of a larger goal. His language throughout echoes the conflict between the two Greeks but models a capitulation to a shared goal, namely the destruction of Troy. The audience knows that this has always been Zeus’ plan and the impact of this should not be understated. Regardless of how overwhelming Zeus’ power is, the events of the Iliad have demonstrated that he can be overcome through certain means. But the poem has also shown that his reign does not rely only on his authority through age and his overwhelming force. Zeus’ ability to plan, to manipulate the plot, and see further than the other gods is an attribute of his intelligence and, in a way, a confirmation of the resolution of the conflict in the Theogony.
A short Bibliography on Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Adkins, A. W. H. “Threatening, Abusing and Feeling Angry in the Homeric Poems.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 89 (1969): 7–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/627461.
Burkert, W. 2004. Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bermejo Barrera, José Carlos. “Zeus, Hera y el matrimonio sagrado.” Quaderni di Storia, vol. XV, no. 30, 1989, pp. 133-156.
Calhoun, G. M.. “Zeus the Father in Homer.” TAPA, 1935, pp. 1-17.
Clark, Isabelle. “The « gamos » of Hera: myth and ritual.” The sacred and the feminine in ancient Greece. Eds. Blundell, Sue and Williamson, Margaret. London: Routledge, 1998. 13-26.
Cook, Erwin F.. “Structure as interpretation in the Homeric « Odyssey ».” Defining Greek narrative. Eds. Cairns, Douglas L. and Scodel, Ruth. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2014. 75-100.
Cook, Erwin F.. “Epiphany in the « Homeric Hymn to Demeter » and the « Odyssey ».” Papers of the Langford Latin Seminar: Fifteenth volume 2012. Eds. Cairns, Francis, Cairns, Sandra and Williams, Frederick. ARCA; 51. Prenton: Cairns, 2012. 53-111.
Lardinois, André. “Eastern myths for western lies : allusions to Near Eastern mythology in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 71, no. 6, 2018, pp. 895-919. Doi: 10.1163/1568525X-12342384
López-Ruiz, C. 2010. When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Louden, Bruce. “Iapetus and Japheth: Hesiod’s Theogony, Iliad 15.187-93, and Genesis 9-10.” Illinois Classical Studies, no. 38 (2013): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.5406/illiclasstud.38.0001.
Maitland, Judith. “Poseidon, Walls, and Narrative Complexity in the Homeric Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1999): 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/639485.
MORRISON, J. V. “‘KEROSTASIA’, THE DICTATES OF FATE, AND THE WILL OF ZEUS IN THE ‘ILIAD.’” Arethusa 30, no. 2 (1997): 273–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578099.
O’Brien, Joan. “Homer’s Savage Hera.” The Classical Journal 86, no. 2 (1990): 105–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297720.
SYNODINOU, KATERINA. “The Threats of Physical Abuse of Hera by Zeus in the Iliad.” Wiener Studien 100 (1987): 13–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24747703.
Walsh, Thomas. Feuding Words, Fighting Words: Anger in the Homeric Poems. Washington, D. C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. 2005