Revolt! In the Iliad!

An Article by J. S. Clay and Thinking about Protest and Homer

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. Following the completion of book-by-book posts entries will fall into three basic categories: (1) new scholarship about the Iliad; (2) themes: (expressions/reflections/implications of trauma; agency and determinism; performance and reception; diverse audiences); and (3) other issues of texts/transmission/and commentary that occur to me. 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.

As I mention in the final post in my book-by-book reading of the Iliad project, there’s a lot of work published about Homer. In classical studies’ primary bibliographical database, when you select for ancient author “Homerus” and specify “Iliad” in the textfield, there are 1481 entries. This does not include material published within the past 18 months or so.

As I move into my project of talking more about Homeric scholarship, I am going to start from the top of the list, and choose articles as they speak to me. My goal is direct people to conversations going on in Homeric scholarship; to highlight interesting work; to contextualize it within the framework of other conversations; and to comment, in brief, about why this work matters. My ancillary goal is to stray away from the old odium philologicum and instead emphasize the interdependence of scholarship, how conversations move together and interweave and reshape the way we see the past.

When I was working on my dissertation, I used to print out articles and write abstracts by hand. Each article would have a cover sheet with key words, cross-references, and whatever thoughts came to mind. These blog posts are going to be something like that.

I am going to start with a short one, because it is rather recent and because it speaks to recent events from my own strange perch here in academia.  Jenny Strauss Clay, who has written many important books about Homer, published  ‘Achilles revolutionary ?: Homer, Iliad 1.191’ at the end of 2022. In this article she explores whether or not the phrase τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν at Iliad  1.191-2 (“whether he should raise up the people” vel sim.) is an indication of “ an Achilles at least momentarily contemplating fomenting a revolt on the part of the army against Agamemnon's authority.” 

In later Greek, forms of the word histēmi can at times indicate rebellion. Our English words apostate and apostasy are connected to the idea of “standing apart” from someone. Clay argues that the compound ἀναστήσειεν here shows Achilles thinking about disrupting the assembly and scattering the host. The entire deliberative phrase here would thus be “[he was thinking whether he should….] cause the army to revolt, and then kill Agamemnon or stop his outrage and hold back his anger” (τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὃ δ’ Ἀτρεΐδην ἐναρίζοι, / ἦε χόλον παύσειεν ἐρητύσειέ τε θυμόν). Clay suggests that understanding the implication correctly here, also helps us as readers to comprehend why Agamemnon must test the army in book 2 and also functions to explain the extreme responses of both hero and king in their dispute.

Agamemnon intervening between the quarreling Ajax and Odysseus. Detail from an Athenian red-figure clay vase, c.5th century BCE. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Clay refers to the work of David Elmer, Kurt Raaflaub, and Dean Hammer here, and I think we can add Elton Barker and one of Hammer’s articles here. As Hammer shows, Achilles repeatedly uses the language of apostasy when he first declares that he will not obey Agamemnon and later when he asks “who should readily obey?” Agamemnon when he acts so outrageously. The ‘obedience’ here is also interesting: from the perspective of plebiscitary politics, obedience is perhaps less important than consent. Jakob Stensgaard has argued that forms of peitho in the Iliad may properly mean “give consent to” in Homer rather than indicating obedience as they would in later Greek. His discussion makes it clear how confusing and dynamic the political conversation is.

As I discuss in my post on politics and Iliad 1, the epic is keenly engaged with concerns of political organization. My friend Elton Barker has described in his book Entering the Agon how the Iliad is engaged in the process of institutionalizing dissent and creating contexts for political activities. Part of what Clay’s suggestion offers is the chance to see Achilles’ language as more manipulative and destructive than we had previously. In turn, this allows us to reread the events of book 2, following Clay, as a series of political actions aimed at harming the implicit and explicit damage Achilles causes. In particular, this clarifies the treatment of Thersites as a scapegoat. He functions to articulate a dissent similar to Achilles’ in book 1 while being subjugated and violently returned to order.

I chose this article today because I have been thinking about protest and the academy. One of the most deflating things I have witnessed in my years as an academic is the way the neoliberal university expropriates the values of social justice and inclusion for very particular ends and then, in recent years, violently springs back to silence voices rising to hold leaders to account. The protests and arrests at Columbia this week are good examples of it, but they are merely the most recent incidents that expose just to what extent higher ed functions to enforce a status quo all while engaging in a kind of social window dressing. We advertise for socially engaged, activist students; we promote engaging with the world; but what happens when students do precisely that?

Following work by Peter Rose and William Thalmann, I have long seen Homer as engaged in such double ideological moves. When I saw a headline saying that “more than 108” student demonstrators had been arrested at Columbia, I thought of some of my counter-readings of the Odyssey, imagining the suitors as provocative agents against a political system that had left them on the outside. The epic gives us just enough justification for their murders–alleged transgressions of xenia, insulting Odysseus in his HOME; planning to kill Telemachus–that any reasonable reader is justified in believing that their murders are justified, even if discomfiting. Yet, there are just enough indications of unease at the murder of 108 suitors, the mutilation of enslaved people, the hanging of enslaved women, and Odysseus’ abject failure as a leader, to sow just enough doubt that some of us (me) want to see Homeric epic as critiquing Homeric monarchy.

But what if, instead of buying this reading, we see the Homeric narrator as a centrist critic wringing hands over the public disruption caused by the youth pointing out the deep hypocrisy and imminent danger of their political structures? In an op-ed for the Guardian Moira Donegan wrote, “It is worth stating plainly what happened at Columbia: the raid was nothing less than the product of collusion between a university administration and rightwing politicians to suppress politically disfavored speech.”

Successful public narratives–whether we are talking about Homeric epics or journalism–interweave dissonant voices and dominant strains to speak to wider audiences while still not completely undermining the power structures that make their genres possible. I think there’s much more to be said about the concept of protest in the Homeric poems and how its forms–verbal, non-violent, confrontational–are mediated and mitigated by epic plots and characters. And, in this, there’s more to be said about audience relationship with protest and to what extent narrative art can–or will–function to serve its audiences or the structures of power than contain them.

Short Bibliography

n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.

Barker E. T. E. 2004. “Achilles’ Last Stand: Institutionalising Dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society: 92–120.

———. 2009. Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford.

Jenny Strauss Clay, ‘Achilles revolutionary ?: Homer, Iliad 1.191’, Classical Quarterly, N. S., 72.2 (2022) 934-939. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838822000520

Elmer, D.F., The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making in the Iliad (Baltimore, 2013), 66

Raaflaub, K., ‘Politics and interstate relations in the world of ancient Greek poleis: Homer and beyond’, Antichthon 31 (1997), 1–27.

Hammer, Dean C. “‘Who Shall Readily Obey?’: Authority and Politics in the ‘Iliad.’” Phoenix 51, no. 1 (1997): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1192582.

D. Hammer, The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought (Norman, OK, 2002), especially 82–92

Haubold, J., Homer's People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge, 2000)

Minchin, Elizabeth. “Men's talk and women's talk in Homer: rebukes and protests.” Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 19-20, 2006-2007, pp. 213-224.

Rose, P. W.. “Thersites and the plural voices of Homer.” Arethusa, vol. XXI, 1988, pp. 5-25.

Rose, P. W.. “Divorcing ideology from Marxism and Marxism from ideology: some problems.” Arethusa, vol. 39, no. 1, 2006, pp. 101-136.

Rose, P. W.. “Ideology in the Iliad: polis, basileus, theoi.” Arethusa, vol. 30, no. 2, 1997, pp. 151-199.

Peter W. Rose, Class in Archaic Greece. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiii, 439. ISBN 9780521768764. $120.00.

Jakob Stensgaard. “Peitho in the Iliad: A Matter of Trust or Obedience?” Classicalia et Medievalia 54 (2003) 41-80.

William G. Thalmann, The swineherd and the bow : representations of class in the Odyssey. Myth and poetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998

Thalmann, William G.. “« The most divinely approved and political discord »: thinking about conflict in the developing polis.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 359-399. Doi: 10.1525/ca.2004.23.2.359