Rehumanized: The Iliad on Violence, Lament, and Becoming Human

Part 2: Theoretical Interlude

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

I missed a week of posting, thanks to a whirlwind of work and a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to present a talk at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. To make up for the skipped week, I will present the talk here in three parts. The First part, on Violence and Lament, is here.

Some of the thoughts and words from this section are from Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things.

Narrative Blends

The way I take about how audiences engage with Homer draws on work I have done on cognitive psychology and the Homeric Odyssey and on the structure and generation of Homeric poetry in my recent Storylife, On Epic, Language, and living things, which applies a series of biological analogies to Homeric poetry and early Greek myth as a test case for exploring how narratives are more like living organisms than they are not. When I talk about the structure of ancient Greek poetry, I emphasize that there is a reciprocal relationship between the shape of the story and its cognitive function.

One of the most significant structures in early Greek poetry is ring composition. The structure, however, also has semantic functions. Just as a formula answers the needs of both structure and meaning, so too do the larger structures beyond the line. A ring frames, providing opportunities for both structure and interpretation. Such mirroring repetition helps to refocus or emphasize the beginning idea and invites audiences to reconsider the elements in between in light of such parenthetical reminders. As Erwin Cook argues, further, ring composition is essential to how the narrative helps guide reception. Rings have parenthetical function—they set the material they contain off from what surrounds them. But they are more permeable than our punctuation: they invite us to consider how the part set apart by the repetition relates to itself and material outside the ring: ringed structures make propositions about what goes together and how things should be understood.

Other epic structures have similar effects: Lines of speech introduction and conclusion, for example, help us transition into direct speech and out of it from narrative while also providing some information on how the speech is intended and/or received (or is to be received). Similarly, similes are bounded by “just as” and “just so” statements that separate narrative or speech from comparison, directing audiences to follow through the comparison both at its beginning and end. These comparisons are rarely 1:1 and perfectly clear, they often shift and move from one element inside the simile (a vehicle) to a different corresponding element outside the simile (the tenor).

In the shifts and interpretive demands put on audiences by narrative structures, speeches, and similes alike I see an echo, if not a confirmation, of a model of reading explored by Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind. As Turner describes, when we hear (or read) a story, we do not actually 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. From this perspective, when we hear a story, we fill in details that are not expressed but we are also guided in understanding the plot and its themes by our own experiences. When we hear narratives together in group settings, we each construct our own notional blend, one we adapt and shift as we reflect on it together. So, not only is the ‘same’ story not actually the same for different people, but the ‘same’ story is different for the ‘same’ person over time.

The parenthetical framing strategies I have discussed all similarly mark the movement from a more concrete space into a blended one, to an invitation to make connections in the blended space between self and story. This happens within epic with mimetic speeches and challenging similes, but we can see characters engage in reading meaning into the world when discussing omens or experimenting with telling stories themselves. If we follow the part-for-whole structure of epic itself, then the interpretive invitation of a speech or a simile is in part a model for the relationship between the audience and the whole poem. Characters in the poem model anticipating responses to speeches, encountering misinterpretations, and trying to use narrative to understand their world; similes invite us as readers outside the poem to compare the action of the narrative to different worlds and imagery. The process of witnessing the former and then engaging in the latter, I believe, helps to train audiences in the iterative and ambiguous task of applying epic narratives to the worlds around us.

Similes and Similarities

Similes are an important device to help us understand the structure and interpretation of Homeric poetry. They replicate pars pro toto the blending and movement that happens when audiences hear and begin to interpret the stories. Two things I would like to emphasize in the similes I have selected are the slippage or blending of detail between the domains of tenor and vehicle and the movement within the simile from the initial comparison to include a greater part of a world than one might expect.

The first example has Paris finally dressed to go to war in Iliad. The verbal repetitions link the tenor and vehicle for us, and the effect of comparing Paris to a show-horse is comedic and pointed. But note as well the bleedover of human-traits to the horse in the simile: the horse’s extravagant hair evokes as much a dandy princeling tossing his hair as that of a stallion. The bathing, the swift feet, the jaunting off for mares, all speak to a horse compared to Paris as much as a prince compared to a horse. The bleedover is a species of the very kind of cognitive blending that happens when we absorb any narrative and try to process it through the language and experiences that are familiar to us.

Simpler, but still telling is the simile from book 7: When Hektor and Paris leave the gates, the relationship between tenor and vehicle is unstable: we start out, perhaps wrongly, thinking that they are the sailors but find out as we move through the simile that their return to battle is witnessed by the Trojans, who are the at first unexpressed tenor to the simile’s sailors. Hektor and Paris are the favorable wind sent to relieve them. This shifting, re-blending of space through the unfolding of the narrative aims our mental gaze first at the princes returning to war, then to an imagined vessel, then to the Trojans altogether, moving us through the narrative and to a new place in the tale. The details left unexplored may strike different audience members: the inversion of Trojans as sailors, the emphasis on the toil of their work, the implication of divine agency, so crucial throughout Hektor’s characterization from this moment until Achilles’ return. The simile refracts and bends, leaving listeners to recompose its meaning.

To be clear, I am arguing that epic poetry provides models for its own interpretation within it—not as a clever puzzle for audiences to discover, but as an outgrowth of its development over time. This structure, moreover, is not home to epic poetry alone. Indeed, I think we find it as a central compositional principle of early Greek poetry, even when it is not explicit. Let’s consider a famous example from lyric poetry, Sappho’s fragment 16 (c. 6^th Century BCE; Lesbos)

This poem starts out with a narrative conceit of an imagined debate, at some level communicating the ancient equivalent of “different strokes for different folks”. The first stanza has at times been characterized as being about poetic topics and genres: talking about love, the argument goes, is the function of lyric, while horsemen and cavalry are about war. Then, the speaker moves from the debate about the relative nature of beauty and passion to a point of comparison from myth: Helen chose her love for Paris over all else. The narrator closes the comparison after two stanzas to turn back to her narrative world, comparing Anaktoria both to Helen and to the “loveliest things” on the dark earth.

This striking poem offers a couple of important points about parenthetical thinking and the cognitive blend. Note how a structural ring that starts in the narrator’s projected ‘real world’ circles around the world of myth. But as we move from the outside in, then to the outside again, the narrator accumulates detail: the world of myth ‘contaminates’ the external world: Sappho (the narrator) is Helen, but Anaktoria is Helen too, standing amidst the Lydian chariots and infantrymen. The move from the myth back to the framing device is made through the self-conscious “this reminds me of….” The resulting concatenation of myth-detail with the narrative frame performs for the audience the kind of cognitive blending that Mark Turner describes. Sappho’s narrator is at once a singer opining on the relativity of beauty and also a besotted lover who sees in the world of myth the longing and force of her own experiences. As audience members witnessing this process, we recombine the details, starting at first in the debate about beauty, then trying to unpack and understand the jump to talking about Helen before moving all too quickly to follow the narrator’s logic and blending in the closing stanza.

The Iliad betrays a consciousness of this process. Consider the long story that Phoinix tells Achilles in book 9 of the Iliad. When Phoinix arrives, he is trying to persuade Achilles to return to battle through a long story from the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt. But he frames this story with reference to Achilles: he says that it is right to listen to the pleas of those who are dear to you, “just as we have learned previously from the famous stories (klea andrōn) of heroic men / whenever intense anger overtakes someone” In doing so, Phoenix echoes the narrative’s presentation of Achilles earlier , where it depicts him as singing through the klea andrōn to himself as the embassy approaches and it engages with the thematic situation at hand.

The story that Phoinix tells, however, presents a rather targeted version of the Calydonian boar hunt. The hunt can be 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 Phoinix’s story, Meleager sits out of the conflict until even his wife, Kleopatra—a clear inversion of Patroklos’ name—asks him to join the battle. 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,” warning him that he too will end up fighting without honor. 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.