What this series is bringing home to me is how transactional the Iliad is. We start with buying off Apollo and finish with Priam buying back Hector's corpse. The one deal you can't make, says Achilles in book 9 (and Sarpedon here) is buying a man back from death.
I think there is a contrast between the weirdly specific and weirdly symmetrical deals in book 10 (info on whether the ships are guarded: horses and chariot, info on whether they have retreated to Troy: black sheep) and the contract outlined by Sarpedon. The book 10 deals are enforceable promises, Sarpedon is king anyway but is explaining the social contract by which he gets to stay king. Fighting earns him his meals and his temenos and also the assent of the Lycians to him having those things. Book 10 is contract law, Sarpedon is reprocity.
What this series is bringing home to me is how transactional the Iliad is. We start with buying off Apollo and finish with Priam buying back Hector's corpse. The one deal you can't make, says Achilles in book 9 (and Sarpedon here) is buying a man back from death.
I think there is a contrast between the weirdly specific and weirdly symmetrical deals in book 10 (info on whether the ships are guarded: horses and chariot, info on whether they have retreated to Troy: black sheep) and the contract outlined by Sarpedon. The book 10 deals are enforceable promises, Sarpedon is king anyway but is explaining the social contract by which he gets to stay king. Fighting earns him his meals and his temenos and also the assent of the Lycians to him having those things. Book 10 is contract law, Sarpedon is reprocity.
my friend Erwin Cook has an article on Homeric Reciprocity that is definitely worth reading!
https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/class_faculty/26/
wow thank you for this
thanks for reading!