4 – Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità e del Vicino Oriente –

Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia

PAPERS ON ANCIENT LITERATURES:

GREECE, ROME AND THE NEAR EAST

Proceedings of the “Advanced Seminar in the Humanities”

Venice International University 2004-2005

edited by

ETTORE CINGANO & LUCIO MILANO

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 INDICE

PREFACE p. I

SILVIA BARBANTANI
Some Remarks on the Origin and Orthography of the “Ptolemaic Hymns”
P.Lit.Goodspeed 2 p. 1

ELTON T.E. BARKER

Momos Advises Zeus: Changing Representations of ‘Cypria’ Fragment 1 p. 33

JOVAN BILBIJA
Ancient Dream-Books as Mirrors of Worlds p. 75

ANNA BONIFAZI
Early Greek Explorations Across the Mediterranean and the Semantics
of Nostos in Homer p. 105

LUCA CADILI
Nimbus: Vergil, Lucretius, Sophocles and a New History of the Latin Language
(Georg. 1.328-29, Lucr. 6.253-55 and Soph. frg. 538 Radt) p. 135

JOEL CHRISTENSEN
Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems
and the Iliad p. 179

CLAUDIO DE STEFANI
ALWFHTOS ERWS: Anatomy of a Late Greek Poem p. 203

MARTIN DINTER
Tragedy and Epigram p. 213

MYRTO GARANI
The Palingenesis of Empedocles’ Calliope in Lucretius p. 231

AMIR GILAN
Were There Cannibals in Syria? History and Fiction in an Old Hittite
Literary Text p. 267

ERIK HAMER
Horace, the Carmen Saeculare and Callimachus p. 285
PHILIP HARDIE
Lucan’s Song of the Earth p. 305

JULIA NELSON HAWKINS

Caesar and Caesarian Section: the Poetics of Medicine and Childbirth in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses p. 331

MIGUEL HERRERO DE JÁUREGUI

Orphic Mediations Between Greek and Foreign Religion p. 369

DONALD E. LAVIGNE
Some Preliminary Remarks on the Persona in Hellenistic Epigram and Iambos p. 387

ANNE LÖHNERT
Scribes and Singers of Emesal Lamentations in Ancient Mesopotamia
in the Second Millennium BCE p. 421

ANNA NOVOKHATKO
Horace’s Iambic and Satiric Poetry Within the Framework
of the Ancient Greek Tradition p. 449

ANNICK PAYNE
Lycia – Crossroads of Hittite and Greek Traditions? p. 471

JACK M. SASSON
Time & Mortality. Creation Narratives in Ancient Israel and Mesopotamia p. 489

WILLIAM MICHAEL SHORT

Clipeos an Armillas? Ambiguity in the Riddling of Tarpeia p. 511

RACHEL STROUMSA
Narrative Hymns Across the Levant p. 529

MARIE LOUISE VON GLINSKI

Non Sum Qualis Eram: Reflections on Horace’s Poetic Persona in Odes 4 p. 549
UNIVERSALITY OR PRIORITY? THE RHETORIC OF DEATH IN THE
GILGAMESH POEMS AND THE ILIAD∗

Joel Christensen

Since the theme of Venice International University’s seminar is literature and culture
in the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, I am happy to compare a
monumental work from Mesopotamia to one from Greece. Many readers have identified
parallel perspectives on human mortality in the Gilgamesh poems and the Iliad.1 In this
paper, I will address these poems’ rhetorical moves in the discourse of mortality and
poetic fame. Both the Gilgamesh poems and the Iliad present a series of rhetorical
moves concerning “heroic” death and a compensatory eternal fame that include what I
identify as a primary heroic stance, a crisis of it, and a proposed alternative.2
Furthermore, both poems evince a metapoetic consciousness of their own power to
convey fame as they do exactly that. An examination of these similarities, moreover,
yields interesting divergences, all of which, I argue, stem from contrastive contexts. In
the spirit of the seminar, I will present the parallel movements of fame separately and
then outline some implications of their comparison. Before addressing the texts I will
discuss the challenges and stakes of such an investigation.
A comparative project may encounter objections at its inception. Comparisons
between the works in question are often justified as studies of poems of the same genre.
As Piotr Michalowski, among others, has argued, calling Gilgamesh an ‘epic’ is a
severe anachronism – epic is a descriptive term canonised by the post-Homeric Greeks
and retrojecting it often prompts readers to misread works from very different
traditions.3 Additionally, the use of the term ‘heroic’ to describe the epoch or values

∗
This paper began in a seminar co-chaired by Christoper Ratté and Lawrence Schiffman at NYU in
2001 and developed considerably during my participation in VIU’s two-year colloquium where it
benefited from extensive discussion in May 2005. For its present form I am indebted to Professors
Irad Malkin and Piotr Michalowski for their careful and timely responses as well as fellow seminar
participant Elton Barker.
1
See WILSON 1986, 38-41; BURKERT 1992, 117-18; and HAUBOLD 2002. For a collection of presumed
parallels between the two poetic traditions, see MORRIS 1997, 617-23 and WEST 1997, 334-437.
2
This study departs from earlier ones by framing the question of heroic death as one of rhetoric. I
struggled with choosing a term for the opening rhetorical move. My original term ‘typical’ seemed to
betray an assumption of universals at the inception of the discussion. I see this primary move as the
first and most basic expression of the expectations and promises of ‘heroism’.
3
MICHALOWSKI 1992, 77 and HAUBOLD 2002.
 Joel Christensen

contained within the texts is misleading insofar as its modern connotations are foreign
to Ancient Mesopotamia and often misunderstood in connection with Ancient Greece as
well.4 In this paper I will use this anachronistic term to denote the culturally constructed
system of values for outstanding or exceptional men of the highest social class. With
this usage I do not mean to imply that the cultural constructs are identical, merely that
in both literatures we may isolate a matrix of marked values that occupies similar
cultural space. What I hope to do rests on the assumption that it can be mutually
beneficial for both sides of a comparative equation to investigate the similarity of
themes contained within works that occupy analogous places in their respective
cultures.5 Hence, I propose as a starting point for comparison not common genre but a
potentially shared exegetical purpose in the contemplation of mortality.6
Scholars (classicists especially) have long lacked satisfactory methodology for
classifying and understanding similarities between the literatures of the ancient Near
East and Greece.7 A collection of parallels, beyond being valuable for analogy alone,
can appear banal without explication.8 Modern readers often turn to polar opposites for
explanation, labeling parallels as coincidental, therefore universal, or, when there is
provable contact or linear historical priority, derivative (the earlier is ‘original’). Both
claims should provoke recoil. Classical scholars long resisted the admission of
significant influence on Greece from the Near East for reasons of cultural chauvinism.
Since, culturally, we endow the primary or original with authority and value, we often
fear what will be lost in admitting the ‘miracles’ of Greece as something less than
miraculous.9 Indeed, the work of Walter Burkert and Martin West has made great

4
See HAUBOLD 2002, 4.
5
Both works come from what Johannes Haubold has described as a system of myths that serve to
transmit an understanding of human history to the culture in question (2002, 8-12). Michalowski
wonders whether or not the Near Eastern ‘epics’ should be singled out from other Ancient Near
Eastern material (1992, 247). When addressing ‘historiography’ in the Ancient Near East in another
work, Michalowski has also argued that there may be significance to ‘the general import of generic
categories, without giving evidence to any one particular form’ (1999, 77).
6
In focusing on the social function of a given theme or motif I draw on helpful methodological advice
from the structuralist approach to myth as formulated by JACOPIN 1988.
7
This problem occupies the beginning of Haubold’s article (2002, 1-7). Much of what follows has been
inspired by Haubold’s careful analysis of the difficulties of this particular comparative field. Dowden
(2001, 172), in his review of WEST 1997, presents five reactions to a presented parallel.
8
On the importance of the Near East to Homerists see Burkert’s brief comments (1992, 4-7 and 119-
20), Haubold’s introduction (2002, 1-3), and Morris’ article (1997). Haubold cites Petriconi’s
assertion that knowledge of the Near East is as essential to a Homerist as knowledge of Greek is to a
Latinist – an assertion with which West agrees (1997, xi). Petriconi is unambiguous about the vertical
relationship between the Gilgamesh poem and the Iliad. (1964, 329). Such a stance permeates
scholarship, e.g., MORRIS 1997, 599.
9
A point of contrast emphasised by HAUBOLD 2002 and BURKERT (1992, 1-8) is the extent to which
comparative work in Indo-European culture and poetics is accepted by Classicists. This interpretive
move has been accepted partly because it is non-threatening. The comparative study of Indo-European
literature and linguistics is both about establishing prior possibilities and cataloguing shared
universals. Near Eastern material, on the other hand, represents a ‘border area’ that makes
Assyriologists and Classicists alike uncomfortable: geography renders the fields not completely alien,

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

progress in confronting such cultural prejudice. Nevertheless, their claims of cultural

influence, often contingent on proving contact and mapping out lanes of transmission,
seem specious to some.10 Michalowski, for example, as he emphasised in our seminar,
cannot conceive of cultural exchange between peoples so thoroughly alienated by
language and time.
On the other side, the claim of the universal quality of a motif or theme often seems
empty.11 Since the birth of comparative mythology and its Anglophone popularisation
through the work of J.G. Frazer, universality has often elided significant contextual
differences in order to make claims of cross-cultural truths. Indeed, we often dance
dangerously on a precipice insofar as in searching for parallels we find that for which
we are looking to the detriment of significant elements around it. Furthermore, it is
difficult to ‘read’ texts from so remote a culture when we are already imbued with the
assumptions of a training in western literary aesthetics, a danger exacerbated when a
classicist approaches Near Eastern literature fresh from reading Homer.
In art, architecture, and religion, the Near East exercised considerable influence on
Archaic Greece – it is hard to imagine that Greek literature developed independently of
the rest of its culture.12 Neither of the available polarities is dispensable or intrinsically
deficient. The problem is the way that we deal with them.13 I have found it conceptually

but mysteries of transmission and the boundaries of time and language only serve to increase the
opacity of their relationships.
10
In Burkert’s presentations, such speculations often seem out-of-place or excessively speculative. On
the similarity of battle scenes between Egyptian literature and Greek epic, Burkert writes:
‘Considering the date of the Assyrian text, one might even toy with the idea that some Greek singer
had arrived in Assyria together with his mercenaries, and that he composed this song on the battle of
Halule which so much pleased the king that it was incorporated in the official annals where it forms a
strange contrast to the standard dreary and dull list of battle and plundering’ (1992, 119). The thought
is, indeed, interesting, but something of a dead-end. West imagines bilingual poets and entertains the
notion that ‘Homer’, if not actually a non-Greek individual, is a name borrowed from the Near East
(1997, 622-4). Sasson also speculates on transmission but he sees the priestly classes as the primary
means or cultural intercourse – an assertion that lurks throughout Burkert’s Orientalizing Revolution
(1972, 275-7).
11
This is, for me, one of the central difficulties of resorting to universalism. It is often too easy. To
quote another shared heritage of the Near East and the West, we should remember the advice of
Ecclesiastes: nihil sub sole novum. Claims of the universal quality of a motif or theme make
contemporary scholars uncomfortable partially because so much emphasis is now put on ‘difference’
and the value of that which is unique – the sapping of universalism’s power is also a heritage of post-
modern philosophy. For discussions on universalism see MOSCOVICI 2001 and ASSITER 2003.
12
On this topic, see (for starters) BURKERT 1992, PENGLASE 1994, and WEST 1997. The Homeric epics
do, in fact, exhibit a ‘consciousness’ of the Near East in the form of Egyptians and Phoenicians
especially. See MORRIS 1997, 609-16. Not insignificant is the fact that the alphabet received and
modified for Greek is Near Eastern in origin. See POWELL 1991 for speculation on the Homeric epics’
importance in this importation.
13
Classical scholars, as it seems to me, are especially prone to thinking in terms of polarity or
opposition. Part of this is an intellectual heritage but another is, perhaps, the training we receive in the
field itself. Somehow, the mén and dé of classical Greek become ingrained in our systems of logic.
For a now classic analysis of polarity in Greek thought see LLOYD 1966. We need to remember,

181
 Joel Christensen

useful to consider the postmodern approach of network theory where relationships are
not conceptualised as a hierarchy akin to a tree with roots and branches, but rather to an
extensive rhizome with an ‘interconnected root system’ exhibiting ‘individual leafy
plants’.14 Such a model abandons a fixed order of priority and allows for discrete
dissemination and re-assimilation of ideas with a potential for a multidirectional flow.
If, in thinking of the cultural, symbolic and poetic theatre of the Mediterranean as such
an entity, we do not treat priority and universality as mutually exclusive, we can,
perhaps, better approach the ‘influence’ of Near Eastern material on Greek Epic.
Furthermore, the adoption of a Mediterranean perspective can help us escape the
recidivism of our fields, disciplines often caught in the academic trap of self-
justification. With these two steps in mind, it is my assertion that cultural ‘borrowing’ is
often a result of both utility and affinity. It is clear from Indo-European studies that a
poetic tradition is one of the oldest inheritances of the Greek language.15 In whatever
form this tradition became exposed to Near Eastern culture, a ‘borrowing’ of motifs,
structures, and images was an extended process of assimilation made possible by basic
affinities between traditions conditioned by human universals and shared geographical
settings. I suggest that a poetic feature or mythical motif travels through multiple
sources and obtains cultural import almost immediately. The best illustration of this
possibility I can offer is the status of ‘truth’ in oral poetry as understood by some
Homerists. In short, the utterance of a tale by a narrator, inspired in performance by
Muses, is itself a testament to its truth.16 Myth and poetics are surprisingly flexible – as
Pierre-Yves Jacopin shows in his analysis of Yukuna mythology and its adaptation to
the arrival of the “white” man, completely alien themes and elements can be rapidly
adapted in an oral culture to explain material or perspectival changes without drastic
alteration of the system.17
With these various methods in mind, I will now turn to the two traditions in question.
In order to preserve clarity, I will discuss each tradition’s rhetorical moves separately
and then, after summarizing their similarities, I will explore in what ways we can
consider their differences conditioned by separate contexts.

The Gilgamesh Poem(s)

The Gilgamesh poem(s)18 deal almost exclusively with death. After Enkidu and
Gilgamesh reconcile their differences, they turn to the task of ridding the Cedar forest of

however, that antithesis is a basic technique of rhetoric and persuasion and in this is nearly always
artificial to some degree.
14
This model is offered for Greek identity by MALKIN 2003, 56 and based on theories proposed by
many, but among them GUATTARI – DELEUZE 1987.
15
On Indo-European poetics, see WATKINS 1995.
16
See, for example, PUCCI 2002, 19.
17
JACOPIN 1988.
18
Piotr Michalowski warns that it is dangerous to conflate the versions of the Gilgamesh poems
separated by temporal and linguistic gulfs. Some scholars do, in fact, take the Gilgamesh tales as part
of a tradition surrounding the hero. Jack Sasson, for example, uses the analogical argument of the
Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory to support a similar assertion (1972, 267-8). The positing of an oral

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

fierce Huwawa, but as they begin their expedition Enkidu expresses his anxiety: ‘My
friend, turn back… / do not [pursue] this journey’ (Tablet III 230).19 In the Old
Babylonian version, Gilgamesh answers his friend with a primary heroic attitude:

Who is there, my friend, can climb to the sky?

Only the gods [dwell] forever in sunlight.
As for man, his days are numbered,
Whatever he may do, it is but wind.

Here are you, afraid of death!

What has become of your mighty valour?
Let me walk in front of you,
and you can call to me ‘Go without fear!’

If I should fall, let me make my name:

‘Gilgamesh joined battle with ferocious Huwawa’.
You were born and grew up in the wild,
A lion attacked you, you experienced all.

Grown men fled away from your presence,

…you [in the] evening.
[Why now] do you speak like a weakling?
[with your] spineless [words] you make me despondent.

Let me start out, I will chop down the cedar!

[A name that] is eternal I will establish for ever!
[Come,] my friend, let us hie to the forge,
let them cast [us hatchets] in our presence. (Yale Tablet, 140-62)20

Gilgamesh makes several rhetorical moves. First, he establishes their mortality –

man’s life is brief, he is not like the gods and his death is inevitable. That a man cannot
scale heaven (or that apotheosis is impossible) is the leading line of his exhortation.
Gilgamesh directly opposes ‘mighty valour’ to Enkidu’s fear of death; to be heroic, in
Gilgamesh’s terms, precludes one from bowing to mortal anxiety. In his second move,
he clarifies that, in exchange for endangering what is already limited, a hero receives
fame, the ‘name’ he promised earlier. Since life is limited, fear of the inevitable is
irrational, but premature or risked death, according to this proverbial calculus, is a
‘good’ trade for enduring fame. Glorious deeds, in the primary equation, secure some

tradition, however, is extremely speculative. See COOPER 1992 and MICHALOWSKI 1992 for two
discussions of this problem. For a history of the Gilgamesh texts see TIGAY 1982.
19
GEORGE 1999, 29.
20
GEORGE 1999, 110-11.

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 Joel Christensen

share of the immortal for mortal man.21 Gilgamesh also articulates this view in a
passage from the Standard Version:

Take my hand, friend, and we shall go [on] together,

[let] your thoughts dwell on combat!
Forget death and [seek] life!
…the careful man.

[Let him who] goes first be on guard for himself and bring his
comrade to safety!
It is they made a name [for days] long in the future. (Tablet IV 253-268)22

Here, again, Gilgamesh pairs eschewing anxiety over death with a name (future
fame) as promised compensation for a life risked or lost. The primary heroic stance is
thus summarised: human life is not immortal, fame is, therefore it is a fair trade to lay
down our limited time for an enduring name.
Gilgamesh’s tale does not offer only this bland reflection on life and heroic death.23
The pair successfully kill Huwawa and cut down the Cedar in order to construct their
own monument, but their audacity attracts divine enmity. Enkidu is awarded death for
his pursuit of glory.24 When he sees that death is imminent, Enkidu cries out.
Gilgamesh’s earlier exhortation is little solace as Enkidu realises that his numbered days
are at an end. Although an epiphany of imminent death does not negate the possibility
of limitless fame, Gilgamesh’s discourse loses its efficacy – in the face of death, the
primary heroic stance is empty.
Gilgamesh cannot accept the death of his friend – he mourns over the body for a
week; only when a worm crawls out of the corpse’s nose does he acknowledge what has
really happened. Once he accepts his friend’s demise, however, Gilgamesh begins to
grasp the precariousness of his own life: ‘I shall die, and shall I not be like Enkidu? /
Sorrow has entered my heart / I am afraid of death, so I wander the wild’ (Tablet IX 3-
5).25 So deeply has his confidence been shaken that the once dauntless Gilgamesh shirks
at the sight of lions (Tablet IX 9). His new quest, to find immortal life, accentuates the
gulf between the promise of the primary heroic stance and the reality of human death.26
A name is a name and not the person it labels.27 Gilgamesh’s quest is at once an
objection to and a crisis of the heroic attitude in a search for real immortality,

21
The speech also alludes to immortality gained through children (discussed below). For this type of
immortality and the ‘seeds of a teleological discourse’ that parallel Plato’s Symposium see HELD 1983.
22
GEORGE 1999, 38-9.
23
Sasson sees the poet applying ironic foreshadowing in Gilgamesh’s comments to Enkidu (1972, 268-
70).
24
GEORGE 1999, 54.
25
GEORGE 1999, 70.
26
Michalowski writes that Gilgamesh ‘perceives the emptiness of the metaphor of fame’ (1999, 80).
27
From the standpoint of semiotics, we may envision the crisis of the promise of fame as a realisation of
the gap between signifier and signified. Indeed, a lapse in the belief of fame’s power to create a world
may also be understood as a questioning of the discourse of poetry and the efficacy of language itself.

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

symbolically a quest for a deeper understanding of death.28 Now that Gilgamesh has
witnessed death, he wants to know what it means. A feature of this is the clear
assimilation between Gilgamesh’s grief over the loss of Enkidu and his desperation over
his own mortality encapsulated nicely by his words to the tavern-keeper: ‘How can I
keep silent?] How can I stay quiet? / [My friend, whom I loved, has turned] to clay, /
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has [turned to clay.] / [Shall I not be like] him, and
also lie down, / [never] to rise again, through all eternity?’ (Tablet X 67-71).29
Alternation between invocations of his friend and references to the first person evokes
an image of the two blending together. Gilgamesh’s initial words to Enkidu, that one
who risks life gloriously is rewarded with immortal fame, imply that that which is
limited should be exchanged for the unlimited, a ‘name’ that will be won. Once
Enkidu’s death has routed his confidence, however, Gilgamesh’s repeated lament
bemoans the distance between the name that lives on and the self that simply lives.
As he runs from death, Gilgamesh searches for a way to understand it. What is death
like – is it the dreamless sleep of forever or is it something like life?30 Gilgamesh’s
restless journey takes him across the sea to discover the secret of immortality from
deathless Uta-napishti, the only survivor of the legendary deluge. Uta-napishti instructs
him to entreat the gods for immortality and, when his prayer goes unfulfilled, he offers
Gilgamesh a plant that will make him young again as something of a consolation
prize.31 As he returns home, however, a snake consumes the plant before he can.
Gilgamesh watches the snake shed its skin and he weeps (Tablet XI 305-309).
During his quest for immortal life, Gilgamesh passes through the realm of normal, or
non-heroic life. In the Old Babylonian version the tavern-keeper, Siduri, in her tavern
on the edge of the sea, offers advice apart from how to find Uta-napishti:32

But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,

enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
Dance and play day and night!

Let your clothes be clean,

let your hair be washed, may you bathe in water!

28
Gilgamesh is ‘two thirds god and one third human’ (I 48; GEORGE 1999, 2) but like Achilles, he is not
divine enough to avoid death.
29
GEORGE 1999, 78.
30
On a journey during which he kills beasts and men, according to an Old Babylonian version,
Gilgamesh hears from the sun god Shamash that he will never find the life he is seeking. Gilgamesh
responds with questions about the nature of death (Sippar Tablet I 10-15; GEORGE 1999, 123).
31
Uta-napishti tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood and then tells him to go sleepless for six days and
seven nights. When he falls asleep on the first day, Uta-napishti’s wife bakes a loaf for every day that
he sleeps so that he will have evidence of how much time has passed (Tablet XI 1-235; GEORGE 1999,
88-96).
32
In the Standard Version, Siduri sees Gilgamesh coming and bars the door. After she lets him in,
Gilgamesh expresses his grief before she tells him how to find Uta-napishti (Tablet X 5-90; GEORGE
1999, 76-9).

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 Joel Christensen

Gaze on the child who holds your hand,

Let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace.’ (Sippar Tablet III 6-13)33

Gilgamesh does not want to hear what the tavern-keeper has to say – he continues to
lament his friend’s death and his own imminent demise as he asks again for the way
across the sea. The tavern-keeper’s words, envisioned as an alternative to the primary
heroic stance, not only offer advice on daily living, but also provide a coded message on
the only type of extra-mortality possible for man. On one level, her advice is hedonistic,
essentially equivalent to ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. On the other
hand, the final lines offer something more. I suggest that the bar-maid’s ‘common-
sense’ advice both entails how to live daily when there are no battles or monsters to
subdue and implies what sort of immortality is actually available to man. To ‘gaze on
the child who holds your hand’ is to contemplate your progeny – a symbol of the only
type of immortality available to humans (biological reproduction) ensured by following
the barmaid’s closing direction to ‘let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace’.
Although the Gilgamesh Epic presents us with a protagonist who undergoes a crisis
of faith in what might be seen as the heroic, it does not leave the crisis completely
unresolved. At the end of the extant tablets there is no immortal life for any man but
Uta-napishti, and the epic returns to fame’s consolatory potential.34 When Gilgamesh
sees Uruk from afar on his return trip, he tells Ur-Shanabi, the boatman, to carefully
survey the city he built, repeating the beginning of the poem:

Climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!

Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!
Were its bricks not fired in an oven?
Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?
A Square mile is city, a square mile date-grove, a square mile is
clay-pit, half a square mile the temple of Ishtar:
three square miles and a half is Uruk’s expanse. (Tablet XI 323-28)35

At this moment, Gilgamesh becomes a poet in the telling, or retelling, of his own
story. The city is monumental, a testament to Gilgamesh’s own efforts, a vessel for
fame nearly as enduring as the poem itself. That the poem ends with its own beginning
as Gilgamesh abandons his quest and takes comfort in his works has been interpreted as
the enjoyment of the city as symbol of his life or as emblematic of what will remain

33
GEORGE 1999, 124. Both Sasson (1972, 274) and Beye (1984, 17) see this advice as traditional.
34
It is interesting that the poem conveys actual immortality upon the only man who actually tells his
own story, a man who participates in the creation of fame.
35
Tablet I 18-23 = XI 323-8 (GEORGE 1999, 99). The archaeological record shows that during the time
in which the ‘historical’ Gilgamesh lived frequent hostilities between growing cities led to a period of
intense fortification building. The poem envisions the building from this period as testaments to an
earlier heroic age – much the same way in which Archaic and Classical Greeks looked back to the
immense walls of the Dark or Mycenaean ages (SASSON 1972, 261-2).

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

after his death.36 I see no need to disambiguate the city’s meaning: the walls of Uruk are
at once signs of life and what remains after it.37 The clay of the city walls, moreover,
may evoke the clay tablets of the poem or point to the tale enclosed beneath them.38 The
poet does not need to end by saying that Gilgamesh received his immortal fame – such
an assertion would be tautological before Uruk’s walls and within poetry itself.
Although the poem openly doubts whether immortal fame is a sufficient exchange for
mortal life, in the end it is a testament that nothing but this is allowed for men.
Thus, in the discourse of fame, the Gilgamesh poem follows its eponymous hero as
he articulates the primary stance, undergoes a crisis regarding the value of fame when
he is faced with the death of his friend, encounters the non-heroic alternative and turns
in the end to a metapoetic re-assertion of fame’s potential. The poem appropriates
criticisms of the discourse of fame and incorporates them into a contemplation of
human mortality from the point-of-view of its protagonist.

The Iliad
In the Iliad we find a similar repertoire of rhetorical moves regarding fame. A
consideration of Homeric kleos, a term that at once refers to the fame poetry confers and
epic poetry itself, is paramount for any study of the Iliad.39 The discourse of kleos
pervades both sides of the conflict. Hektor often appears as an advocate of its rhetoric as
when, in attempting to persuade the Achaians to accept his challenge to a duel, he
promises fame to any man who dies at his hands:40

kaiv potev ti" ei[ph/si kai; ojyigovnwn ajnqrwvpwn

nhi>; poluklhvi>di plevwn ejpi; oi[nopa povnton:
ajndrov" me;n tovde sh'ma pavlai katateqnhw'to",
o{n pot j ajristeuvonta katevktane faivdimo" {Ektwr.
w{" potev ti" ejrevei: to; d j ejmo;n klevo" ou] pot j ojlei'tai.

And later someone, one of those born after us, as he sails by in his many benched
ship on the murky sea, will say, ‘this is the marker of a man who died long ago; he
was the best and Hektor killed him’. So one day someone will say and my fame
will never perish. (7.87-91)

36
See GORDON 1965, 84 for the former assertion and SCHEIN 1984, 17 for the latter.
37
An interesting aside and possible symbolic resonance is Gilgamesh’s lament: ‘[My friend, whom I
loved, has turned] to clay, / my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has [turned to clay]’ (Tablet X 69-70,
GEORGE 1999, 79).
38
Michalowski describes Gilgamesh as pointing to a tablet box under the walls that contain his tale. Of
further importance is the fact that Gilgamesh echoes Uta-napishti in the telling of his own tale (1999,
80). Hope Nash Wolff believes that the poem offers two kinds of heroic glory, one that is highly
personal and focused on deeds and one that is socialised and symbolised by the walls of Uruk (1969,
392).
39
NAGY 1999, 15-17 and 97.
40
Hektor also talks about glory in speeches at 6.446, 8.195, and 17.220-337. See also his prayer for
Astyanax (6.476-81) and his deliberative speech in book 22 (22.99-130). For studies of Hektor’s
character in the Iliad see REDFIELD 1975 and FARRON 1979.

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 Joel Christensen

Hektor asserts that he will gain an eternal fame by vanquishing his foe, but he also
attempts to allay the mortal fears of those he challenges by assuring them that they too
will gain fame for their deeds, even if they lose. Here, fame is that of an actual
monument – a mound or grave presents a tangible testament both to the victor and the
vanquished – but Hektor’s fame manifests itself as well in the words of those who
wander by the grave-marker (‘one of the men born later will say’).41 Fame, in this sense,
is not restricted to those who triumph, it is granted to all who act through the renewable
resource of words and tangible monuments to their deeds. This is, essentially, the
simplest expression of what I consider the primary stance in the rhetoric of fame.
Hektor revises his stance in book 22 before he faces Achilles: ‘And now my fate has
arrived, may I not die without a fight and ingloriously at least, but may I do something
big that even men of the future will come to know.’ (22.303-5).42 Again, Hektor chooses
to focus not on the fame of victory but the fame of valorous deeds. In contrast to his
earlier assertion, Hektor yearns to do one last ‘big thing’ (mevga rJevxa" ti) – although
Hektor never questions the arithmetic of exchanging life for glory, he searches always
for more.43 In Hektor’s words, fame is men of the future talking about your ‘big deed’
but his last minute yearning for one greater deed may reflect the crisis or questioning I
will address shortly. By his own logic, he has already won immortal renown, that rarest
of commodities for which men should be willing to perish. By wishing for more, Hektor
implies that what he has is not enough – and, truly, it never can be. Trapped within his
own rhetoric, although Hektor really wishes for is more life, he can only desire that
which is already his.
In Sarpedon’s famous speech to Glaukos (12.310-28) we find an elaboration of the
expectations and responsibilities inherent to the primary heroic stance.44 Sarpedon first
rhetorically affirms their privileged position among their countrymen and then asserts
that it is this very position that obligates them to prove their noble worth through noble
deeds – deeds that will earn them fame.45 The two men, according to Sarpedon, are
honoured (tetimhvmesqa) as immortals by their people and this preferential treatment

41
In the Greek tradition, that the physical grave is a monument to the life of the fallen resounds in
Thucydides’ Funeral Oration of Pericles (2.43). See also Lysias’ Epitaphios 79-81.
42
… nu'n au\tev me moi'ra kicavnei. / mh; ma;n ajspoudiv ge kai; ajkleiw'" ajpoloivmhn, / ajlla; mevga rJevxa"
ti kai; ejssomevnoisi puqevsqai. See Bakker (1997, 166-9) for brief, but lucid comments on the
connection between deed and song.
43
One explanation for this is that only someone who has the leisure to question the exchange will do so
(Achilles; to a certain extent, Sarpedon). Hektor cannot choose to fight or not to fight and, as a part of
his character, he seems keenly aware of his mortality. Despite briefly deluded assertions to the
contrary (e.g., 16.859-61) Hektor seems to be all too aware of his and his city’s imminent defeat
(6.447-55).
44
Adam Parry cites this passage when he asserts that ‘moral standards as values of life are essentially
agreed on by everyone in the Iliad’ (1956, 3). See PUCCI 1998, 49-68 for an extended discussion.
45
On this obligation see WHITMAN 1982, 28 and PARRY 1971, 411. On the position of the Homeric king
in relation to his society see ADKINS 1960, 34-5. For a criticism of Adkins’ formulation see LONG
1970 and CREED 1973. PUCCI 1998 also discusses this subject in his chapter ‘Honor and Glory in the
Iliad.’ For a recent treatment of this theme see WILSON 2002.

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obligates them to attain the immortality available for men.46 The near divine honours
that they receive, the very acts that require them to seek kleos, are material (food, wine,
land). Following this statement, Sarpedon wishes that they were immortal so they would
not have to fight, touching upon the irony of heroic immortality, an immortality that is
something completely different from that of the Olympian gods.47 Since they are mortal
and they will die no matter what, they should go into battle and ‘win glory or give it to
someone else’ (328). It is life’s status as a limited commodity that gives those who risk
it a share of the immortal in the form of fame. Sarpedon’s speech provides a
presentation of the primary heroic stance but also, within the desire to be immortal, a
compressed recognition that this exchange is not be perfect, a hint of a crisis. His
preference would be not to die at all and to live on forever young as the gods do –
allowing that the exchange of life-for-fame is far from unambiguously endorsed in the
Iliadic world. I see Sarpedon as anticipating objections to his exhortation to battle and
answering them with a re-assertion of man’s mortality, kleos might not be the same as
life, but what else is there?
The questioning, or crisis, of the primary reaction implied in Sarpedon’s speech may
operate as a subtext of Achilles’ speeches throughout the epic. While the conflict
between Achilles and Agamemnon, and Achilles’ problematic rejection of the heroic
life, can be more material than existential, the exchange of life for ever-lasting fame
operates as a subtext throughout the Achaian political crisis.48 For Achilles, the issue of
glory is best articulated in the famous ‘choice’ framed by his mother:

mhvthr gavr tev mev fhsi Qevti" ajrgurovpeza

dicqadiva" kh'ra" ferevmen qanavtoio tevlo" dev.
eij mevn k jau\qi mevnwn Trwvwn povlin ajmfimavcwmai,
w[leto mevn moi novsto", ajta;r klevo" a[fqiton e[stai:
eij dev ken oi[kad j i{kwmi fivlhn ej" patrivda gai'an,

46
An irony of some Iliadic passages is that the very speakers who are wishing for immortality were
worshipped in some form in Archaic and early classical Greece. L.R. Palmer shows that Sarpedon’s
name might be related to Mycenaean sa-ra-pe-da, a parcel of land sacred to Poseidon (1963, 216-7).
The word Sarpedon uses for ‘great piece of land’ (temenos) also describes estates under the
jurisdiction of a temple, priest, or god. The distinction between Greek gods and cult-hero is oftentimes
unclear. Nagy discusses the connotations of this confusion in the Iliad (1999, 67-173). On Achilles’
cult-states see HOOKER 1988. For the blurry line between ‘deity’ proper and heroic mortal, Herakles is
an important figure. On this issue see GALINSKY 1972.
47
Whitman summarises this nicely: ‘The whole paradox is here: Honor is in action and self risk. It is
precisely because we can die that the battle is meaningful. Death is the catalyst of the irreconcilables’.
(1982, 28). Hektor also imagines himself as a god but his wishes are, curiously, opposite in tone from
Sarpedon’s. In his speech from book 8, Hektor wishes he were immortal and ageless but not in order
to get away from the battle. Instead he wishes to be able to fight forever. (8.54-551). Cf. 13. 824-32.
48
Whether or not Achilles rejects the heroic code has been an object of debate since Adam Parry
published his seminal article (1956). REEVE 1973 challenges Parry’s assertion and insists that his use
of rhetorical questions was not ‘absurd’ but an extraordinary application of the formulaic repertoire.
Many others have addressed the problem. For a discussion and bibliography, see MARTIN 1989, 146-
205. For an interpretation of the conflict between Agamemnon that, if accepted, has the potential to
dispel much of Achilles’ inscrutability, see WILSON 2002.

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 Joel Christensen

w[letov moi klevo" ejsqlovn, ejpi; dhro;n dev moi aijw;n

e[ssetai, oujde kev m j w\ka tevlo" qanavtoio kiceivh.

For my mother, Thetis silver-feet, says that I carry two fates in respect to death. If I
remain here and fight around the city of the Trojans, then my homecoming is lost
but I will have eternal fame. But if I go home to my dear paternal country, then my
noble fame perishes, but my life will be long and death’s end will not find me
quickly. (9.410-416)49

Here Achilles succinctly describes the primary exchange of a short life for eternal
glory, but he does so in order to show that he has another option. His withdrawal from
heroic life is, in itself, a miniature crisis – one that requires powerful speeches from
close friends for Achilles to temper his reaction. In comparison with Sarpedon’s concise
presentation, Achilles’ justifications for not fighting throughout book 9 do not
necessarily have to do with kleos except in the condition that one’s possessions (the
point of contention between Agamemnon and Achilles) bear some relation to his fame.
In the Achaean community whatever one possesses that has been given for valour is an
evaluation of a hero’s worth to his companions. Achilles’ objection is that this system
has ceased to have any meaning.50 Although much of what he says after this may be a
matter of rhetorical posturing, Achilles explains that the heroic life is not the only one
and the alternative he proposes is a departure from war, a return to his homeland, and
marriage. Despite his complaints and imagined ‘other’-life, Achilles ultimately resolves
to wait by his ships to enter the battle only when his own ships are attacked.
Although Achilles’ crisis is multi-layered and overtly involved with his quarrel with
Agamemnon, it, nevertheless, entails a partial rejection of a ‘heroic’ model and allows
for an integration of the problematics of kleos into the Iliad’s story. Achilles remains
concerned with fame despite his physical and ‘philosophical’ withdrawal. When he
advises Patroklos (16.83-5), he tells him to listen so that he may win ‘honour and glory’
for him. Once Patroklos has died, Achilles wishes to be dead himself (18.98) and then
shows that he awaits his death and will accept the fame of his deeds:51

kh'ra d j ejgw; tovte devxomai oJppovte ken dh;

Zeu;" ejqevlh/ televsai hjd j ajqavnatoi Qeoi; a[lloi.
oujde; ga;r oujde; bivh JHraklh'o" fuvge kh'ra,
o{" per fivltato" e[ske Dii; Kronivwni a[nakti:
ajllav eJ moi'ra davmasse kai; ajrgalevo" covlo" H { rh"
w{" kai; ejgwvn, eij dhv moi oJmoivh moi'ra tevtuktai,
keivsom j ejpeiv ke qavnw: nu'n de; klevo" ejsqlo;n ajroivmhn...

49
On the ‘choice’ as a possible Iliadic innovation, see HAINSWORTH 1993, 116-17.
50
Cf. 9.319-324. For an illuminating view of the Iliadic struggle over timê (honor in terms of social
standing and prestige goods) see WILSON 2002.
51
Redfield puts it simply: ‘With Patroclus’ death a new clarity comes to Achilles. Life, which before
had been so puzzling, becomes lucidly meaningless’ (1975, 18).

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

And I will welcome my fate whenever, indeed, Zeus and the rest of the immortals
wish to fulfill it. For not even the strength of Herakles, who was most dear to lord
Zeus, the son of Kronos, avoided death. Hera and her harsh wrath overcame him.
So I too, if indeed the same fate is mine, will lie down when I die. But now I will
seize noble fame. (18.115-22)

Following his loss, Achilles looks back to fame and recuperates its consolatory
potential by saying that no mortals can escape death, not even Herakles, therefore the
acquisition of kleos is the best that they can hope for. In comparing himself to Herakles,
Achilles is at once anticipating future fame and contemplating the past repute of a
‘dead’ hero. The Herakles comparison is a compressed allomorph of the primary stance.
Since not even the greatest man who lived could become immortal, life is inescapably
limited and the best that can be done is to seek the recompense of fame, as Herakles did.
Achilles continues to connect his death with Patroklos’s, but he also extends this
‘truth’ to others. When he encounters Lykaon, a man he had ransomed earlier, he
reveals his new outlook in his refusing to accept his suppliancy again:

nu'n d j oujk e[sq j o{" ti" qavnaton fuvgh/ o{n ke qeov" ge

jIlivou propavroiqen ejmh/'" ejn cersi; bavlh/si
kai; pavntwn Trwvwn, peri; d j au\ Priavmoiov ge paivdwn.
ajlla; fivlo" qavne kai; suv: tiv h\ ojlofuvreai ou}tw"_
kavtqane kai; Pavtroklo", o{ per sevo pollo;n ajmeivnwn.
oujc oJrava/" oi{o" kai; ejgw; kalov" te mevga" te_
patro;" d j ei[m j ajgaqoi'o, qea; dev me geivnato mhvthr:
ajll j e[pi toi kai; ejmoi; qavnato" kai; moi'ra krataihv:

But now there is no one who will avoid death, no one whom the god, at least, puts
in my hands in front of Troy, no one of all the Trojans, and especially the sons of
Priam. So friend, die too. Why do you mourn like this? Even Patroklos died and he
was much better than you. Do you not see what kind of man I am, how fine and
large? I come from a noble father and a divine mother bore me, but strong fate and
death await me too. (21.103-10)

Bitterly, Achilles tells Lykaon that since he and Patroklos must die, there is nothing
to distract him from his vengeance or persuade him to spare another. Achilles seems to
identify with Lykaon through their shared mortality, but the absence of any mention of
glory as a consolation for death underscores the harrowing effect of Patroklos’ death.
This passage has been viewed as merely a justification for Achilles’ revenge, but its
similarity in tone with the Herakles passage should not be dismissed.52 Achilles
internalises and then generalises Patroklos’ death: these two passages reveal his
acceptance of his own death but here he goes further. In denying the obligations of
suppliancy, he himself becomes the instrument of death’s inevitability.

52
RICHARDSON 1993, 63.

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 Joel Christensen

The Iliad also presents an alternative to the hero’s life. As I mention above, in his
speech to Odysseus when he imagines forsaking his immortal glory, Achilles threatens
to go home, marry, and enjoy the possessions accrued by his father (9.380-405). After
he has killed Hektor and buried Patroklos, Thetis reminds Achilles that he is not yet
dead:

tevknon ejmo;n tevo mevcri" ojdurovmeno" kai; ajceuvwn

sh;n e[deai kradivhn memnhmevno" ou[tev ti sivtou
ou[t j eujnh'" ajgaqo;n de; gunaikiv per ejn filovthti
mivsgesq j: ouj gavr moi dhro;n bevh,/ ajllav toi h[dh
a[gci parevsthken qavnato" kai; moi'ra krataihv.

My child, how long will you consume your heart with mourning and grieving,
mindful neither of food nor sleep? It is also good thing to sleep with a woman, for
you will not live long, since indeed death and strong fate already stand near you.
(24.128-32)

Thetis’ penultimate injunction to her son is that he should enjoy the amount of life
that remains for him – he should eat, sleep and have sex.53 Her solution is similar to
Achilles’ alternatives in book 9, but this advice follows his heroic deeds as she
encourages her son to re-enter the world of living by enjoying food and sleep.
Hedonistically or not, she advises him to refresh himself with sex as well, since his time
is near its end. When he responds to Priam’s supplication in book 24, Achilles shows
that he understands death intimately as he advises Priam to ‘bear up’ since ‘you will not
achieve anything in mourning your son, you will not restore him’ (24. 549-51).54 In
offering the example of Niobe to induce Priam to eat, Achilles, perhaps, reveals what he
has learned from his mother (24.599-620).
Achilles is also concerned with his progeny. Earlier in book 19, when he says of
Patroklos’s death that ‘I could suffer nothing worse’, he directly connects his friend’s
death with his son’s future: Achilles thought that Patroklos would be there to take
Neoptolemos home once he had died (19.315-37). The theme of family and one’s
offspring is even more central to the Odyssey where Achilles appears once and denies
the importance of his glory, asking only for news of his son.55
The Iliad offers a very complex picture of the primary heroic attitude. Hektor best
encapsulates this rhetoric in his speeches, but the pathos of his death may call the

53
Gresseth labels this the carpe diem philosophy (1975, 15).
54
a[nsceo, mhd j ajlivaston ojduvreo so;n kata; qumovn:
ouj gavr ti prhvxei" ajkachvmeno" ui|o" eJh'o",
oujdev min ajnsthvsei", pri;n kai; kako;n a[llo pavqh/sqa.
55
Odyssey 11.488-503. A reader will note how little I mention the Odyssey and this is not from some
prejudice against the epic. Indeed, in the system I have outlined it is far from insignificant. In short I
see the Odyssey as the companion piece that contemplates man’s place outside the context of war
where heroic death is an impossible or disfavored option. For the Iliad as the poem of death, see
GRIFFIN 1980, 95. On the epics’ different conceptions of kleos, see NAGY 1999, 35-7 and passim.

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validity of his assertions into question.56 It is not whether or not he receives glory for his
heroic deeds that is in doubt, but to what degree the Iliad presents his exchange as
sufficient. Sarpedon’s compressed presentation of the stance, crisis, and resolution,
along with Achilles’ complex relation to his own heroism, serves to problematise the
rhetoric. Although Homeric epic is generically interested in securing the primacy of
poetic fame, it allows the precious brevity of human life to stand next to it – so that the
audience can contemplate the possibilities themselves.
A closer look at the epic’s end sheds some light on the question. The final three
significant speeches of the epic are the funerary lamentations of Hecuba, Andromache
and Helen (24.725-81) followed by the burial of Hektor and the final line of the epic w}"
oi{ g j ajmfivepon tavfon {Ektoro" iJppodavmoio ‘So they heaped up the tomb of horse-
taming Hektor’ (24.804). The Iliad’s closing moments are a testament to the life that is
granted to heroes after death – they receive songs of mourning, the tangible grave that
marks their lives and, ultimately, the kleos of poetry itself. Heroes from before the Iliad
are present throughout the text in genealogies, paradeigmata and apologetic speeches –
they are always on the lips of the heroes at hand.57 Most famously, even Achilles
himself sings of those who came before him. In book 9, when the embassy arrives, they
find Achilles playing the lyre, ‘delighting his heart by singing the klea andrōn’ – the
famous deeds of men (9.186-9). In short, what we find in the Iliad is the deployment of
a traditional theme, a co-option and incorporation of criticisms of and alternatives to this
theme and a resolution that amounts to a recuperation of fame along with its problems.
The epic secures for itself the primacy of words and poetry in the conferral and
transmission of kleos through a series of metapoetic vignettes of heroes consulting
songs, reflecting on fame and striving after that which they obtain from the audience as
the singer performs his tale.

Discourse and Difference

We have briefly surveyed how the Gilgamesh poems and Homer’s Iliad present
discourses on life and death that include a primary heroic stance, a questioning or crisis
of the stance and an alternative that details a day-to-day life including the enjoyment of
a man’s ephemeral pleasures and the importance of offspring. While the Gilgamesh
poem’s rhetorical moves focus on the eponymous hero, the Iliad’s involve several
prominent characters: the considerable weight of mortal anxiety that presses on
Gilgamesh is distributed among Hektor, Achilles, and others. The Iliad incorporates
reflections on mortality into a complex matrix of an individual’s value to his larger
group and obligations concomitant with membership in a community. In the final
portion of this paper, I will review the similarities between these two treatments of fame

56
For Hektor’s ‘antiheroic’ behavior, see FARRON 1979.
57
In the Iliad especially heroes and gods use the past as a comparison for the present. Although scholars
(Willcock) have identified only some of these as persuasive paradeigmata the phenomenon is
significant for understanding the Homeric view and use of the past. See Iliad 4.370-400, 5.381-415,
6.122-233, 7.124 -60, 8.357-69, 9.433-605, 10.284-95, 11.656-802, 14.243-62, 15.14-33, 17. 19-32,
18.112-20, 19.95-133, 23.626-50 and 24.519-20. See WILLCOCK 1964 and EDMUNDS 1997 for a
recent discussion and bibliography.

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 Joel Christensen

and ‘heroic’ death and propose that their significant differences are all, in fact, a feature
of contrasting political contexts. In closing I will return to the problems of evaluating
the relationship of these poems discussed in the introduction.
Apart from rhetorical similarities in the discourse of fame, the works also share
thematic resonance in the framing of the arguments. Divine women offer the heroic
alternative to Achilles and Gilgamesh, both of whom, incidentally, meet them on the
edge of the sea.58 Additionally, in each story a hero from an earlier age underscores the
impossibility of mortals achieving immortality – Uta-napishti makes it clear that his
apotheosis was one of a kind; Achilles deprives Herakles of his immortality.
Furthermore, both Gilgamesh and Achilles come to face their own mortality through the
deaths of their friends.59 An interesting contrast appears in the reactions these
epiphanies elicit. Whereas Gilgamesh identifies with Enkidu’s passing and fears his
own impending death, Achilles’ identification with Patroklos yields not the fear of death
but an embrace of it. Achilles sees himself dead in Patroklos’ death and accepts it;
Gilgamesh clings to life morosely and searches for a way to keep it. Indeed,
Gilgamesh’s eschatological musing seems to have no place in the Iliad. Achilles does
not fear his own death, but, rather, he fears living with Patroklos dead; even Hektor does
not seem to fear death as he flees – he fears dishonour and the fall of Troy that will
follow his death.60 Hektor’s wishes to be young and deathless forever are qualitatively
different: he wants to continue fighting for his city.61
While both poems depict the difficulties in declaring that immortal fame is sufficient
compensation for a shortened life, neither one offers absolute resolution, although their
endings betray a certain loyalty to the poetic re-iteration of fame. In each case we may
identify the incorporation of fame and its criticisms as attempts to mitigate the
weaknesses of a discourse and recuperate its strengths. The discourse concedes its
fallacies only to insist on the absoluteness of its truth. Thus, the closing lines of each
work point to the tangible traces of men long gone – Gilgamesh indicates the walls of
Uruk to the boatman and the Iliad ends with mention of Hektor’s grave (taphos). But
this is not all the poems leave their audiences as each turns metapoetically to the power
of language to convey fame and, possibly, their own status as vessels of immortal
renown: Gilgamesh begins to recite his own story just as Achilles delights his heart in
the songs of the heroes who preceded him. Even in this striking metapoetic perspective
there is an essential contrast in referentiality. Gilgamesh looks to the city and the story
58
In ancient Greece especially there is a symbolic connection between women and reproduction as the
cause of death. See FALKNER 1995, 60, STEARS 1998, and SEGAL 1974. Cf. Hes. Th. 589-612 and Op.
60-105 and also Simonides of Amorgos ‘Diatribe Against Women’.
59
WILSON 1986, 38-9.
60
It is difficult to approximate the status of a fear of death in the Iliad. Surely, suppliants beg not to be
killed (6.46-50, 10.378-81, 11.131-5 and 21.74-96) but Achilles and Hektor do not clearly fear death
qua death. Hektor worries about the shame of destroying the host (22. 100-8) and he does hesitate in
facing Achilles, even imagining a deal to avoid the combat (22.111-22). When he pleads with
Achilles, it is not to escape death but to rescue his corpse from disfigurement. Indeed, Homeric heroes
are as concerned with negative fame (or shame) as much as positive kleos, a detail that may point to
another significant difference between the traditions.
61
See note 47 above.

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

of his own fame; Achilles rehearses the stories of men who came before. In short, I
believe that Gilgamesh’s gaze reifies his own tale and Achilles’ looks outward to a
larger mythopoetic tradition. The oral-background of Homeric poetry in contrast to the
self-conscious textuality of the Gilgamesh poem may contribute to this difference in
poetics. Gilgamesh’s story is one he can read and hold in his hands, but Achilles’ tale,
and those of the heroes before him, are heard. The very word that denotes their fame
(klea) is derived from a verb of listening.62
A further contrast is the extent to which the crisis of the heroic discourse is
embedded or compressed in the Iliad given the central position it occupies in the
Gilgamesh poems, which, I propose, follows from the most striking difference, namely
the assimilation of a hero’s value in material goods in a communal context to the heroic
ethos in the Iliad.63 The Iliad is the story of heroes performing their deeds in a
cooperative (and competitive) socio-political context; Achilles is not a Herakles figure
traveling through the wilds and defeating monsters to establish his name. That there is
so little mention of material wealth in the Gilgamesh stories and, indeed, in the tales that
surround Herakles, both underscores the importance of the community theme in the
Iliad and marks it as a possible accretion to a heroic motif inherited from a Greek epic
tradition.64
This contrast may reveal to what extent the poems reflect different cultural milieux.
Even in its latest form, the Gilgamesh tale conservatively archaises and appropriates the
concerns and values of a monarchic political reality where the city’s leader is closely
associated with a patron god, whereas the Iliad incorporates a shifting cooperative
aristocracy as a significant departure from what came before it.65 Indeed, I suggest that
all of the major points of contrast I have drawn out (the absence of a fear of death in the
Iliad, difference in poetic consciousness and the discreteness of the Iliad’s discourse on
fame) are related to the political context of the poems’ compositions. Gilgamesh looks
to the textualised version of himself, thus perpetuating his tale, not necessarily the genre

62
See note 40 above.
63
Indeed, while some have argued that mortality is the central issue of the Iliad, I suggest that it only
becomes an issue once the fabric of social relations is torn by Agamemnon and Achilles is forced to
contemplate his position outside the system of social valuation. There is another connection between
these two themes—as Donna Wilson explains, Achilles believes he is due honor (timê) from Zeus
because he is short-lived. He is due this honor because his mother Thetis was destined to give birth to
a son greater than his father and Zeus, to avoid overthrow, forced the divine Thetis to marry a mortal
(2002, 64-70). On Achilles, Thetis and the theme of succession, see SLATKIN 1991.
64
A comparison between the exploits of Gilgamesh and Herakles would be equally profitable, but since
we possess no complete Herakles-epic it is impossible to make similar comparisons in discourse.
Although Herakles was a popular subject for epic poetry (e.g., Creophylus’ The Capture of Oikhalia,
Pisander’s Heraklea and Panyassis’ Heraklea), we have only limited remains from this tradition. In
the extant fragments, however, Herakles is a hero and the exclusion of his Olympian immortality
parallels the Homeric epics. Nagy notes that ‘the theme of immortality is simply left outside the
framework of the Oikhalias Halosis’ (1999, 168).
65
For recent evaluations of the Iliad’s politics, see HAMMER 2002, WILSON 2002, and BARKER 2004.
For comments on potential political importance of Mesopotamian literature see MICHALOWSKI 1990,
390-5.

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itself. His poem is about coming to terms with a definition of self that is poetic and
pragmatic, fear of oblivion fits naturally in his exploration of death. Achilles sings
generic stories of epic pasts, carrying on with the support of kleos in general, an oral,
living tradition. His political context is about a community, the individual is less
important and there is a further consciousness of a community of kleos, a continuum of
heroes. He does not want to live when Patroklos dies just as Hektor wants to live
forever to continue defending his city. In Gilgamesh’s political world, there is only the
king, his tale alone matters. When Enkidu passes, he passes from the story; it is when he
realises that death is inevitable that Gilgamesh’s tale really begins.
In closing, what can we say about the relationship between these poems? I have,
admittedly, done a certain violence to both traditions by culling a set of themes from
their poetic contexts: such categories start to unravel under rigorous testing. But this, in
itself, is not tragic, for methods of reading are often most telling when they fail. In my
investigation, for example, it has been the realisation that the category of crisis, which
fit so well in my understanding of the Gilgamesh poem, is ill-suited to the Iliad that has
led me to see how different the two stories are. As some have complained, the
Gilgamesh story is attractive to western scholars because its concern with mortality and
individualism appears so ‘western’, a feature it may not share with other works from the
region.66 In answering this complaint, we must also acknowledge the possibility that the
Homeric epics take a distinctly different view of human mortality from other
contemporary and earlier epics.67 For our discussion, we should admit that confronting
mortality is a universal human condition and the development of rhetorical stances on
mortality and human action in response a practically automatic result.
The metapoetic turns, their difference in perspective notwithstanding, may be harder
to explain by universal human reaction to death. Poetic self-consciousness is part of
what makes each work outstanding in its own culture and may betray a Near Eastern
influence on Greek epic. The obstacles to this proposition, as it would be treated
conventionally, are considerable. The idea that there was a direct influence of the
poetics of Gilgamesh’s story on the development of Greek epic is attractive but requires
a level of linguistic competence that is beyond the simple branching of themes and
motifs.68 What points of contact can we imagine to have allowed for influence on this
level? The Hittites, who possessed paraphrases of the poems and had contact with
Greece prior to the composition of the Homeric epics, provide a possible vehicle for this
influence, but one could argue in turn that these metapoetic turns are universals of
poetics.69 Perhaps the form of the crisis of mortality in the Gilgamesh stories did
influence nascent Greek epic as they were assimilated precisely because they possessed
elements recognisable or attractive to their new audiences. As I discuss above,

66
HAUBOLD 2002, 3-4. See also MORRIS 1997, 606.
67
GRIFFIN 1977, 369-71.
68
While Greek epic is accepted by most modern scholars to have roots in an oral tradition, the same
cannot be asserted for the Gilgamesh tales. Long before the Trojan war the languages of the
Gilgamesh poems were ‘dead’ and their transmission confined to a literate and elite minority of the
population See COOPER 1992 and MICHALOWSKI 1996, 188-9.
69
For this tantalizing possibility and further information on the Hittites see PUHVEL 1983 and 1991.

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 Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad

Herakles’ struggle against death in his myths provides important background material
for Homer’s tale; the cycle of tales surrounding Herakles may have in turn been
influenced by Near Eastern patterns, we may even see Phoenician Melqart as an
intermediary between Gilgamesh and Herakles.70
The problem with the way we discuss cultural transmission is that we are conditioned
to base acceptance of a proposed influence on the plausibility of a suggested avenue of
transmission. One significant drawback to this approach is that everything we can say
about cultural transmission is contingent on the accidents and exigencies of historical
survival. If we turn to network theory in the ancient Mediterranean we may envision the
two traditions as part of a matrix of themes evolving through constant cultural
exchange. Furthermore, we are liberated, to a certain extent, from the demand to
provide a specific avenue of transmission. Beyond the affinities I have already outlined,
I believe, following Johannes Haubold, that both poems occupy similar spaces in the
mythical history of their cultures – hence, each work endeavours in some capacity to
deny the immortality of the gods to men and in turn to delimit cultural space that is
available. The consolatory tone of the metapoetics of Gilgamesh’s poem could shift in
translation from one political context to another. By this, I mean that if we accept the
possibility of a poetics of fame in the Mediterranean, such a poetics would adapt to new
political realities, i.e., as a larger aristocratic community eclipsed a god-related monarch
in political importance the poetics of fame would shift to emphasise the values of this
larger community. Additionally, the notional importance of the physical monumenta-
lism of Mesopotamia (shared with Egypt) should not be dismissed. I suggest that
competition through art to express understanding of human mortality through
monumental creation is a conceptual link between the traditions that need not, indeed
cannot, be limited to one or two modes of transmission. In short, I propose that stories
of Gilgamesh and Greek heroes, when coupled with physical monuments and
monumental poems, reveal a shared world view that cannot be limited to one culture or
sufficiently explained through vertical transmission.
Although the results of this discussion are far from conclusive, the matter of the
crisis in heroic discourse, as I have framed it, can be seen both as a feature of the
subject’s clear universality and a result of Near Eastern influence. I have made several
suggestions as starting points for dealing with comparative material drawn from
Classical Greece and the Near East but a theme that pervades my approach is
transparency. When we discuss these subjects it is important not only for individual
analysis but for scholarly exchange that we admit the prejudices we bring to the material
and our motivations in taking up these studies. Foremost, I believe that a depolarisation
of approaches is essential: assuming that a parallel can be one thing or the other is
interpretively limiting. Additionally, we must acknowledge that even when parallels

70
This connection is, of course, highly speculative. The Greeks themselves identified Melqart with
Herakles, but what interests me is that Melqart functioned partially as a god of resurrection (see
METTINGER 2001, 83-90) but was also the patron god of city-kings (his name literally means “king of
the city”). Aubet surmises that Melqart has his origins in the deification of an early king, which is not
unlike the tales we receive about Gilgamesh (2001, 154).

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 Joel Christensen

have been observed and an explanation offered, this is only the beginning of the
process. Indeed, data gathered by some is often only later understood by others.
A comparative study may successfully show two things: the potency of an idea that
can be assimilated from one culture and time to another and the unique or separate
aspects of the two cultures combined. Emphasising the contextual operation of a heroic
rhetoric that is at once similar to but unique from an earlier tradition can only enrich our
understanding of both poems. Even in the case where we can come to no definitive
solution on the meaning of parallels, we benefit from the interplay between a universal
theme and its specific instances. In this comparison we can see how important the
community is to the Iliad and, in the absence of an articulated fear of death, we see how
integral the existential panic is to the Gilgamesh tale. Furthermore, a recognition of
these differences validates the gathering of parallels and, for me, vindicates the exercise
with the reward of a better appreciation of both poems and their contexts.

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