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Title Pages
Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception

on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers
Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
Title Pages
Tobias Myers
(p.i) Homer’s Divine Audience (p.ii)
(p.iii) Homer’s Divine Audience
(p.iv) Copyright Page
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Page 2 of 2
Dedication

on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers

Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
(p.v) Dedication
Tobias Myers
for Nina (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Acknowledgements

on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers

Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
(p.vii) Acknowledgements
Tobias Myers
It is a task both pleasurable and daunting to recall the process by which this
book came into being, and the many people who contributed to its making. I can
still recall the desk where I was sitting, by the window of a 9th-floor apartment
on 110th Street in Manhattan, when I first felt the Iliad’s gods begin to work on
my perceptions in the way that this book argues they may. My 2011 Columbia
University doctoral dissertation was a first attempt to explore the relationship
between Homer’s audience and his gods. Subsequent revisions, deletions, and
expansions have resulted in a book that retains relatively little of the
dissertation’s content, but still reflects the formative ideas and critiques of those
who lent their assistance during my time as a graduate student, as well as those
who provided support and suggestions over several further stages of
development, during my time as a lecturer at Columbia and an assistant
professor at Connecticut College.
The faculty and graduate students at Columbia during my time there contributed
to a wonderfully conducive environment for research on Homer. Elizabeth Irwin
gave generously of her time throughout my dissertation work and beyond. Her
brilliant criticism, support, and enthusiasm over a period of many years were
invaluable. Katharina Volk not only improved my work with her comments, and
suggested the book’s eventual title, but also provided a necessary, steadying
perspective at a moment of crisis when I took the prior existence of an article
focusing on ‘my’ passages as evidence that I had arrived too late, and might as
well give up on the spot. Deborah Steiner, my dissertation adviser, introduced
me to the bewitching world of Homeric poetics, and improved my work
immeasurably through rounds of exacting readings and extensive comments.
Also, my sincere thanks to Jenny Strauss Clay, Helene Foley, Joseph Howley,
David Ratzan, Suzanne Saïd, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Laura Slatkin, and
Page 1 of 3
Acknowledgements
Nancy Worman for their engagement with my work at this time. Special
additional thanks are owed to Jenny Clay for sharing her then unpublished book
Homer’s Trojan Theater with me at a crucial moment in my dissertation’s
development, for giving (p.viii) me needed confidence by taking my comments
on it seriously, and for her support.
Writing a book while teaching at a small liberal arts college presents its own
challenges and rewards. Absent the chance meetings with fellow Hellenists on
street-corners and in stairwells, or the fierce discussions in lounges after invited
talks, and without the push to publish as primary justification for one’s stipend
or salary, one feels all the more keenly the value of support and interest from
friends outside one’s speciality. I wish to thank friends with whom I discussed
the ideas in this book; I think especially of Joshua Babcock, Michael Caramanis,
Michael Fish, John Murray, Desiree Sykes, and Andrew Waight. I also wish to
thank the many people at Connecticut College who gave friendship and
professional advice, especially Ginny Anderson, Simon Feldman, Afshan Jafar,
Eileen Kane, Steve Luber, Ross Morin, and Caroleen Sayej. A pre-tenure
sabbatical leave granted by Connecticut College in the fall of 2016, and support
from the Judith Opatrny fund, provided time for research. The book’s final
revisions were completed with the generous support of Sofia Koutsiana and
Jackson Kellogg, who gave me the use of their Athens apartment as a daytime
writer’s retreat in the winter of 2017–18.
Several classicists offered encouragement, comments, and advice, mostly from

afar, whose importance to me would be hard to overstate. Eleanor Dickey gave
the right advice at a crucial moment in the quest to get this book published. I
thank Helen Lovatt for her encouragement, for sharing her then unpublished
book The Epic Gaze, and for her many insightful comments. I am also very
grateful to Hayden Pelliccia for his kindness, for the example of his scholarship,
and for his deep engagement with my own work by correspondence. Special
thanks are owed to Sarah Nooter for her unflagging support and brilliant
comments on draft chapters, typically offered within a space of days or hours, at
many times over the course of this project’s development. And I thank James
Uden warmly for conversations which always left me with a profound sense of
the fun, value, and limitless possibilities of scholarship, for his good company
throughout many days writing in an Athens library, and most of all for his
generosity in reading the entire penultimate draft of my manuscript in just over
six days. His comments proved crucial to the final stage of revision.
Valuable feedback on parts of this book was offered by audiences for talks, or
conference participants, at Columbia University, the (p.ix) Open University,
Cornell University, the University of California at Davis, The George Washington
University, Boston College, Connecticut College, and Amherst College.
Alexander Loney in particular went the extra mile as a respondent for a paper
that would eventually become this book’s Chapter 1. Sincere thanks are owed to
Page 2 of 3
Acknowledgements
the readers for Oxford University Press—it is sobering to think what this book
would lack, without the benefit of revisions in response to their comments. I also
wish to thank the editorial and production teams at Oxford University Press,
especially Charlotte Loveridge for her guidance and care with the review
process in the final months. Responsibility for any faults that remain in the book
belongs to moira, myself, and atē—though not necessarily in that order.
I thank my parents for always encouraging honest exploration, and my siblings

Emma, Paul, Peter, and Tamsin, who are each my hero in their own ways. I am
very grateful to my children, Nora and Natalia, for their admirable patience
while I worked on this project over what has been, after all, their entire lives to
date—and for their interesting suggestions and demands about the content of
my next book. Most of all, I thank my wife, Nina Papathanasopoulou, for her
support, energy, and the countless hours she devoted to revising my work and
finding the patterns I could not yet see, sometimes reading new drafts on a daily
basis. She also carried our lives at times when I was lost in research, and kept
the greater joys of life from ever slipping out of view. I dedicate this book to her,
with love and wonder. (p.x)
Page 3 of 3
List of Figures

on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers

Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
(p.xiii) List of Figures

Tobias Myers
0.1. Sixth-century Attic black-figure amphora depicting Heracles

wrestling a lion. Attributed to the Painter of Berlin or the Painter of
Tarquinia. The Art Institute of Chicago; Katherine K. Adler Memorial
Fund, 1978.114. 15
Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY.
1.1. Sixth-century Attic black-figure amphora depicting two female
figures, hands upraised, who flank two duelling warriors on whom they
also gaze. Attributed to the Medea Group, c. 520 BCE. Side B, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Purchase, Christos G. Bastis Gift,
1961, 61.11.16.
www.metmuseum.org. 52
(p.xiv)
Page 1 of 1
Zeus, the Poet, and Vision

on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers

Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001

Tobias Myers
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198842354.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 1 argues that the Iliad’s proem anticipates certain key elements of the
battlefield spectacle to come: its central action (warfare and the desecration of
corpses), and its staging and direction (with Zeus and the poet as joint
orchestrators of the battlefield conflict). While the agency of Zeus and that of
the poet are highlighted in various ways throughout the text, they overlap
specifically in respect to their control of the warfare. Such moments of overlap
heighten excitement during performance, as the ‘now’ of performance and the
‘now’ of mythic Troy become momentarily indistinguishable. The chapter
concludes by bringing the lessons of its close readings together, to motivate and
describe a new approach to the metapoetics of the Iliad’s gods, in place of the
prevalent tendency to describe Zeus and the gods as drivers of ‘plot’. Instead,
the chapter suggests, divine control should be seen as the flip side of divine
viewing, and Zeus recognized as a figure who controls the course of the battle
(not the whole plot). One should ask not just how Zeus’ role and the poet’s
relate, but also what difference it makes for the Iliad as a performance event.
Where textual cues are sufficient, certain scenes of divine viewing can be
usefully read as a mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered by the poet
to his listeners.
Keywords: plot, proem, nucleus, enargeia, staging, direction, Zeus, poet, metaperformative
A god can do it. But tell me, how
might a man follow through the narrow lyre?
Page 1 of 36
Rainer Marie Rilke1
It is right for me to sing to you as to a god.
Phemius2
The gods’ role as spectators does not become prominent until passages in Book
4 and later. Yet the spectacular quality of those passages depends in no small
part on their power to harvest the fruit of ideas introduced much earlier: in
particular, the idea that the poem’s essential action is playing out not as a result
of happenstance, but as the product of intentional orchestration. Starting with
its opening lines, the poem introduces and develops this idea primarily through
the presentation of two figures: the poet himself, and Zeus.
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰϕθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε δαῖτα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
τίς τ᾽ ἄρ σϕωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι;
Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱός…
– 1.1–9
(p.28) Sing, goddess, the wrath of the son of Peleus, Achilles –

the destructive/accursed [wrath], which set countless sufferings on
the Achaeans,
and hurled forth to Hades many noble souls
of heroes – and them it was making into prey for dogs,
and a banquet for birds, and Dios boulē [‘a/the plan/will of Zeus’]
was coming to fulfilment –
yes, from when first they stood apart, in strife,
the son of Atreus, lord of men, and bright/godlike Achilles.
Which of the gods, then, brought them in strife to vie?
The son of Leto and Zeus…
By directing the Muse to sing (ἄειδε 1.1), specifying the subject matter (μῆνιν…
Ἀχιλῆος 1.1), and selecting a starting point for the narrative (ἐξ οὗ δὴ…and τίς
τ᾽ ἄρ σϕωε…1.6–9), the poet introduces himself as a figure of agency. That is, he
not only makes these decisions, but enacts the decision-making in propria
persona. During these initial moments, the Iliad’s dramatic ‘stage’ is not the
plain of Troy, but the setting of the poem’s performance. The dramatic action is
the performer’s assumption of the role of aoidos (‘singer’), in view of and for the
benefit of his audience, and his presentation of an initial vision of the Iliad:
Page 2 of 36
Achaean suffering, heroes dying, the exposure of corpses, and Zeus’ role in
bringing all of this about (1.2–5).
With the sudden statement in line 5 that Zeus’ boulē was being accomplished,
the poet invites listeners to conceive of the elements he has just highlighted—
violent death, the exposure of corpses—as being not only central to his song, but
also crucial, perhaps culminating features of Zeus’ designs. One effect of this
move is to set the poet’s vision of the Iliad in a tragic light: the song’s focus, we
are told, will be dying and defilement as the realization of an ineluctable divine
plan. Another effect is to suggest a parallel between Zeus and the poet. After all,
hearing these lines in their dramatic context—the invocation of the Muse—we
are also being told that the song’s focus will be dying and defilement as the
realization of the poet’s request. The roles of the poet and Zeus are thus
suggestively connected, through the results that their activities jointly produce—
the epic drama that the audience is about to experience.
The invocation presents a conundrum. As many scholars have noted, bodies are
never actually consumed by dogs and birds in the Iliad. Yet the poet presents
this situation, which is never to be narrated at all, as though it is foremost in his
mind as the poem begins. Zeus, for (p.29) his part, will memorably work to
ensure the preservation and proper burial of bodies—not their consumption by
birds and dogs.3 I will return to this apparent problem later, to offer a new
solution, which emerges in the course of pursuing the chapter’s main objectives.
This chapter explores the programmatic significance of the poem’s early focus
on the agency of both Zeus and the poet. It argues that the proem looks ahead to
an epic which puts mortality on display—a promise fulfilled at climactic
moments in which the audience is led to perceive violent action as the object not
only of viewing, but also of deliberate staging and direction. I use ‘staging’ as a
shorthand for these interrelated ideas: the act of arranging for an event or set of
events to occur (for instance, the day’s battle); the act of arranging for them to
occur before the eyes of a viewership; and finally the act of making these staging
operations evident to that viewership—that is, the creation of what might be
called a staged quality.
‘Direction’ I use to refer to ongoing direct control of a spectacle that has been
staged, and is in progress. The word is intended to capture loosely the following
set of ideas: Zeus sometimes directs as a general directs—commanding Iris and
Apollo, for instance, to deliver his orders to others. He also affects the direction
in which the battle turns, toward the Trojans or the Achaeans, as they push back
and forth. Like battles, a story may take a particular ‘direction’ (a metaphor
particularly apt for story-tellers working in an oral tradition who visualize their
story as linear sequence4), and when it comes to the progress of the spectacle at
Troy, Zeus, like the poet, sometimes organizes what he sees into narrative form.
Finally, we may think of the director of a play—anachronistic as the analogy may
Page 3 of 36
be, it does point to another important quality of Zeus’ direction, namely his
interest in creating a powerful dramatic effect. The language of staging and
direction is not intended to be prescriptive. Rather, I find it a useful alternative
to what has become the standard way of talking about Zeus’ special agency in
the Iliad, namely Zeus’ control of the poem’s ‘plot’ (see further below). The key
point, which links the various ideas in the foregoing list, is that Zeus’ control
helps to define, (p.30) and is itself defined in relation to, the central action—or
‘nucleus’—of a spectacle.5
Both Zeus and the poet stage and direct, in ways that are generally distinct, but
sometimes overlap to the point that attempting to distinguish between the two
figures seems to run against the grain of the text. Consider, for instance, the
opening of Book 11, where Zeus and the poet stage (in all three senses
enumerated above) the military spectacle of the third day of fighting.6 First,
Zeus sends Eris to the Achaeans’ ships holding a πολέμοιο τέρας (‘portent of
warfare’ 11.4). Eris’ shout makes the Achaeans eager for war and fighting
(11.12), and makes warfare sweeter for them than going home (11.13). Zeus
rouses a wicked confusion, and sends drops wet with blood from the sky οὕνεκ’
ἔμελλε / πολλὰς ἰϕθίμους κεϕαλὰς Ἄϊδι προϊάψειν (‘because he was about to
hurl many noble men [lit. “heads”] to Hades’ 11.52–55). This language recalls
that of the proem (1.3), while presenting a clearer and more tangible impression
of Zeus’ agency: where the proem intimates a vague connection between the
fulfilment of Zeus’ boulē (‘plan’ 1.5) and the sending of many noble souls to
Hades, in 11.53 Zeus himself is named as the one who will be doing the sending
(ἔμελλε…προϊάψειν ‘he was about to hurl’). It is Zeus’ direct control, as much as
his observation, that will define this conflict as a spectacle.7
For whose benefit is Zeus’ red rain? It does not seem to be for those who will be
fighting. There is no mention of any characters’ reactions to rain tinged with
blood, though this would surely be a bizarre and terrifying portent, especially for
peoples accustomed to look to celestial and atmospheric phenomena for clues in
times of uncertainty.8 The lack of a thambēsan (‘they were amazed’) or chlōron
deos (‘green fear’) suggests that the poet is thinking less of an omen for the
mortal actors, and more of a signal to his audience that the day’s battle will be
extraordinary and terrible.
Further, Zeus’ act smacks of ritual, suggesting something of the nature and
import of what Homer’s audience is ‘seeing’ at Troy. (p.31) The evidence of
Book 16—where Zeus will again pour down ‘bloody drops’ to the ground,
explicitly to ‘honour’ Sarpedon, who is about to die—suggests that the bloody
rain in Book 11, too, honours those who are about to perish.9 Indeed, the
pouring of blood onto the ground would be familiar to ancient audiences as a
very old way of honouring the dead.10 For one accustomed to such rituals, to be
witness to this falling blood might be felt as a kind of participation in the act of
honouring. Notably, the order of events is here reversed: the blood sent by Zeus
Page 4 of 36
descends to the ground to honour warriors who are not yet dead, at least in the
time-frame established by the narration.11 Yet for Homer’s audience, hoi nun
(‘men of today’), the race of heroes perished long ago, and so the evocation of
death ritual is particularly appropriate. Is this rain, then, a sign sent by Zeus, or
by the poet through Zeus? At this point, it would be hard to distinguish; nor, I
think, does the text ask us to do so. What is interesting is how the agency of
those two figures is highlighted at a point where they largely overlap, thereby
presenting the battle as a spectacle intended to command attention, and a
complex form of involvement, on the part of the viewer. This is what I mean by
‘staging’; an example of ‘direction’—in the battle for Sarpedon’s corpse in Book
16—is discussed in section 1.2 below.
This preliminary reading points to a nest of related questions. What is the nature
of viewer involvement in the spectacle at Troy? How is the poet’s agency made
manifest in the text? How does it relate to that of Zeus? These are complex
issues, which this chapter addresses beginning with the proem. Before taking
them up, however, it is worth noting another, perhaps more fundamental issue
that connects them all: namely, the problem of how to understand the
relationship between the world in which the poet sings to his (p.32) audience
on the one hand, and the world in which Achilles rages and Hector is buried, on
the other.
Three approaches to the problem of how these two worlds relate suggest
themselves. Classical narratology would relate them hierarchically, as located on
distinct ‘levels’ of narration. The poet’s world—containing himself and his
audience—is on an extradiegetic level (that is, outside his own diegesis), and
Zeus with all of the other characters are on an intradiegetic level (within the
diegesis). This hierarchical conception is fundamental to analysis of the Iliad as
narrative. Yet the Iliad does not present itself simply as narrative in the
abstract.12 Rather, it is a live event that seeks to involve audiences in the terror
and glory of their authentic past.13 The Iliad is art, but it is not fiction. There is a
reality that it seeks to attain, however imperfectly, and the poet draws on the
divine to make this happen.
A second way to describe the gap between Zeus and poet, or between audience
and Troy, is with reference to time-frames. The war is being run by Zeus in the
past; whereas the Iliad is being performed by the singer in the present. Indeed, a
double temporal perspective is woven into the fabric of our text, which implicitly
constructs its audience among ‘the people of the present’ (hoi nun) and, in other
passages, among ‘the people of the future’ (essomenoisi). This temporal gap is in
some respect bridged, from the audience’s point of view, whenever Homer
succeeds in making them feel they are eye-witnesses to past events.
Page 5 of 36
Jenny Strauss Clay, in a study illuminating the remarkable consistency of the

spatial layout of ‘Homer’s Trojan Theater’, describes the relationship between
worlds in the following way:
To claim that the Homeric poet makes the past present to his audience or
that he transports them from the present into the past – although he
manages to do both – does not quite do justice to the kaleidoscopic and
shifting character of the aoidos’ relation to the heroic world of which he
sings. I would prefer to describe that relation less in terms of past and
present but instead in spatial terms. The world of the heroes is not only (p.
33) past, it is elsewhere. The Muses can convey it to us not because they
were there when the Greeks and Trojans fought but because they are
present (πάρεστε) on the battlefield before Troy and are able to transmit
what they witness into our field of vision.14
This spatial sense of the shifting relationship between the performance setting
and the ‘heroic world’ does indeed emerge from the text, as I will argue,
contributing to the Iliad’s presentation of its action as spectacle. In general, I
have tried to remain alert to how all three of these basic ways of describing the
relationship between worlds—the hierarchical, temporal, and spatial—may
interact to shape audience perceptions in a given passage.
This chapter falls into three parts. The first part considers the role of the poet,
and then that of Zeus, in the proem and looking forward. It argues that the
proem’s interest in narrative content is bound up in its interest in enargeia (the
quality of vivid immediacy and presence). The second part moves far ahead in
the Iliad to consider an example of the sort of passage for which I see the proem
preparing: a passage that draws attention to the union of the poet’s and Zeus’
intentions in a spectacle displaying battle, death, and defilement. A conclusion
brings together the lessons of each of the chapter’s close readings, to outline a
new way of looking at the metapoetics of the Iliad’s ‘divine apparatus’.
1.1. The Proem’s Promise

1.1.1. The Poet and Audience Involvement
Discussions of the proem’s programmatics often focus on narrative content: plot;
theme; character; what the Iliad will be a story ‘about’. But the proem’s
anticipation of content, I suggest, is closely bound up with its anticipation of
enargeia. The audience is primed not only for the telling of a story, but for a way
of conceptualizing the intensity of their experience as they listen to the telling.
In supporting this claim, I consider first some stylistic features of the brief,
striking narrative of (p.34) lines 2–5 and the speech act of which they form a
part (the invocation). I then ask how reminders of the poet’s agency beyond the
proem may impact on audience experience of the Iliad’s ongoing performance.
Page 6 of 36
Homeric poetry is famed for making readers as well as listeners into eye-
witnesses, ‘riveting our attention to the act in itself and by itself’.15 According to
Erich Auerbach’s influential assessment of Homeric style, the story’s action
unfolds in a ‘uniformly illuminated’ present that ‘knows no background’.
Phenomena are presented ‘in terms perceptible to the senses’, and ‘in a local
and temporal present which is absolute’.16 Even scholarship demonstrating
shortcomings in Auerbach’s views has often reaffirmed his reading of a vividness
that is characteristically Homeric: that is, the smooth, rhythmical succession of
phenomena, each of which captivates the mind’s attention in turn.17 As Michael
Lynn-George puts it, ‘The achievement of his [Auerbach’s] analysis has been to
retrieve another time as a pure present, to make “once long ago” the same as
“now”.’18 Whereas Auerbach described Homeric vividness in terms of an
unconscious reflex, a ‘need’ to leave nothing obscure,19 subsequent scholarship
has shown that on the contrary, enargeia for Homer ‘was a quality to display,
reflect on and worry about’.20 The poet wants us to appreciate his poem’s
enargeia, and invites us to understand it as deriving from the Muse’s vision,
presence, and supreme skill in song.21
I would emphasize that this invitation begins with the proem itself. In a certain
respect, lines 2–5 resemble the regular narrative of the (p.35) Iliad. They
consist of declarative statements in the past tense, in the same traditional
language as the rest of the poem. Yet they present the reverse of what Auerbach
claimed to be the essence of the Homeric style. Homeric battles feature vivid
anatomical detail, but here fighting and dying are not described—they are
evoked obliquely, by reference to their causes (Achilles’ anger, Zeus’ plan) and
their effects (souls sent to Hades, bodies made vulnerable to scavengers).
‘Wrath’ is not normally the subject of verbs such as hurling and making. What is
missing is precisely that sense of visual immediacy and presence that the Muse’s
song is about to supply.22 ‘Homer cannot but concentrate all passion in a
momentary scene,’ writes Auerbach. ‘Before and after hardly exist, blank ages
that can scarcely be imagined or accounted for.’ Here, however, the gulf
between past and present is measured by the contrast between the present
imperative ‘sing’ and the past tense verbs of lines 2–5. Instead of the brilliance
of a world ‘fully illuminated’, we have the opacity of Dios boulē.
In the next lines, with the Muse successfully invoked, we are to understand that
the gulf between past and present has been bridged. The poet indicates the
approaching prayer-man, Chryses, by using a deictic, as though Chryses were
part of a visual field shared by poet and audience: τὸν Χρύσην (‘that man,
Chryses’ 1.11—trans. Lynn-George 1988: 51). Additional details prolong the
shared imagining of Chryses: his fillets, his hands, and his staff of gold (1.13–
14). Then, Chryses speaks. Character (or ‘mimetic’) speech breaks down the
distinction between the past and present, for it fosters the illusion that the
audience is directly hearing voices of long ago.23 Beseeching the assembled
Achaeans (λίσσετο πάντας Ἀχαιούς 1.15), Chryses first wishes that ‘you’ may
Page 7 of 36
sack Troy and return safely (1.19–20), then formally requests his daughter’s
return, using another deictic to indicate what he brought: τὰ δ’ ἄποινα δέχεσθαι
(‘take these things, the ransom’ 1.20).24 As the bard performs this speech, his
audience is (p.36) meant to feel themselves present at the assembly, listening
along with the Achaeans to Chryses’ plea.25
One might ask at this point just how much the poet’s agency actually figures in
the Iliad’s performance following the proem. After all, Homeric performance
poses on some level as the enactment of an old, unaltered tradition, in which the
poet’s freedom might be perceived as more or less circumscribed.26 Also, in this
variation of the opening invocation it is the Muse who has been asked to
‘sing’ (ἄειδε).27 Nevertheless, in continuing to think about the perspective of the
implied audience, I would point to the poet’s voice as a potent emblem of
continued agency. By calling on the Muse to sing, Homer invites his audience to
hear his own living, human voice—when he begins the song proper—as imbued
with the numinous power and authenticity they associate with the goddess.28
When Muses sing (ἀείδειν) in their own voices (as at Iliad 1.601–4), they do so
for the pleasure of gods. Thus, there is a sense in which the poet of the Iliad is,
like Phemius to Odysseus, offering to sing to each of his listeners ‘as to a
god’ (ὥς τε θεῷ Od.23.348).29
(p.37) Gregory Nagy similarly connects agency to voice: the poet who must ask
the seeing Muses for aid (at Il.2.486) is nevertheless himself ‘the master of kléos’
precisely for the reason that ‘it is actually he who recites it to his audience’.30
Emily Vermeule posits a special delight on the part of poet and audience, a
delight derived from their collective, continual appreciation of the poet’s
artistry: ‘the goal of a good epic poet…is to kill people with picturesque detail,
power and high spirits…and Homer the murderer never bores us.’31 Vermeule is
highly attuned to the poem’s artistry (she makes repeated comparisons to
ballet), but does not, I think, make sufficient allowance for the poetry’s claim to
provide access to a kind of truth that is not available in quotidian life. Vermeule
is nevertheless persuasive in positing the audience’s awareness of another kind
of truth: that men die precisely when and precisely how the poet’s voice tells us
they die; that is, when his words induce us to see it happening.32
On the evidence of the Odyssey, a bard will be judged on the basis of μορϕὴ
ἐπεῶν (‘shapeliness of words’), and whether he speaks κατὰ κόσμον / μοῖραν
(‘according to the ordering’ or perhaps ‘in the right way’).33 The latter phrases
would seem to emphasize the need for authenticity, such as that associated with
autopsy: the poet must convince.34 Meanwhile, it is his words, their shapeliness
(μορϕὴ ἐπεῶν), that must make each phenomenon real for the audience. In this
sense, the poet’s agency is palpable throughout.
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Additional attention is drawn to the poet’s ongoing role by his use of certain
identifiable techniques, as a growing body of scholarship shows.35 These
techniques include: references to οἱ νῦν (‘the men of (p.38) today’); statements
of what ‘would have’ happened next; apostrophes to characters; (re)invocations
of the Muse; and the introduction of a ‘hypothetical observer’ or ‘would-be
eyewitness’ (e.g., ‘then not even an observant man would have recognized
Sarpedon…’). Emphasizing his role as performer entails reminding listeners of
their own corresponding role as his audience. Hence, the use of these devices
may also be understood as a way of re-emphasizing that sense of separation—
first established in the proem—between the ‘now’ of narration and the ‘now’ at
Troy.
Yet reminders of the poet’s and audience’s roles should not necessarily be seen
as a way of ‘breaking the spell’ that reveals the other world. In many cases,
vividness may actually be enhanced. Distance and proximity are not exclusive.36
In fact, the poetry can be at its most captivating when it insists on both at once.
Consider this passage from Book 13—one which later tradition will record that
Homer chose as his best:37
ἔϕριξεν δὲ μάχη ϕθισίμβροτος ἐγχείῃσι

μακρῇς, ἃς εἶχον ταμεσίχροας· ὄσσε δ᾽ ἄμερδεν
αὐγὴ χαλκείη κορύθων ἄπο λαμπομενάων
θωρήκων τε νεοσμήκτων σακέων τε ϕαεινῶν
ἐρχομένων ἄμυδις· μάλα κεν θρασυκάρδιος εἴη
ὃς τότε γηθήσειεν ἰδὼν πόνον οὐδ᾽ ἀκάχοιτο.
– 13.339–45
Then battle, that wastes men, bristled with the long spears
they held, that slice flesh; and eyes were blinded
by the gleam of bronze from their beaming helmets,
and new-forged breastplates and shields shining,
as they came together. Fierce-hearted indeed would be one who
was gladdened then, looking on the struggle, and not grieved.
Helms, breastplates, and shields shine brilliantly. In a move from the abstract to
the palpable, the idea behind phthisimbrotos (‘that wastes men’ 13.339), used of
the ‘battle’, is recalled and made concrete in the (p.39) next line by
tamesikhroas (‘that slice flesh’), used of the ‘spears’.38 One might call this
moment the epitome of Auerbach’s ‘illuminated’ present—the foreground
reaches out as though to blot out any possibility of a background. Yet pace
Auerbach, the illumination is in no way an unconscious reflex.39 I read ὄσσε δ᾽
ἄμερδεν (‘and eyes were blinded’ [literally ‘harmed, damaged’]) as a climactic
moment—not in terms of the plot, but in terms of audience involvement. As no
one’s eyes are specified (no τῶν δέ introduces ὄσσε ἄμερδεν), the reach of the
gleam that blinds is open-ended; it dazzles any eyes it reaches.40 So the poet
says; then he makes us see it. This broadly shared visual experience is couched
Page 9 of 36
in a language of harm—amerdo, to ruin or damage. It is as though, in this one

respect, even those removed in space and time could be harmed along with the
fighters.
Yet in the very words that make this enargeia so compelling, joining past and
present, we also find a reminder of continued separation from that brilliant
reality. By enumerating the objects sending forth light, the poet compels their
visualization: the audience can still see, as can he. The paradox is this: the better
we ‘see’—the more successful the poet is in uniting past and present—the more
blinded we are. But the blinding will never be total, for we will never be only at
Troy.
Reflection on this paradox is evident in the succeeding statement: only someone

‘fierce-hearted’ (θρασυκάρδιος) would be gladdened, not grieved, by looking
(13.344–5). The poet is making an evaluative comment, thereby increasing
audience awareness of his mediating role (distance). Yet the comment also
prompts the audience to think of their relationship to the spectacle in terms of
direct visual perception (presence; proximity).41 It does so by posing the
question: are you gladdened, or grieved? To entertain this question is to grant,
at least provisionally, its premise: that one has, in fact, been seeing the battle.
(p.40) The very self-consciousness of the Iliad’s enargeia, then, can increase its
power to captivate. One might say that Homer has indeed achieved a present
that is ‘pure’ (Auerbach)—not because it excludes all other time-frames, but
because it acknowledges two time-frames while claiming them both as a single
present. In this way the separation between worlds that the proem establishes
on the one hand, and the enargeia that it anticipates on the other, are working in
tandem to generate an effect of greater enthrallment. The proem not only
anticipates a story in which Achilles’ anger leads to battlefield death and
defilement, but also anticipates an enhanced sense of directly experiencing
those past events, through the poet’s ceaseless execution of his song. It remains
to be seen how the statement that Zeus’ plan was coming to fulfilment interacts
with these other programmatic elements of the proem.
1.1.2. Dios d’eteleieto boulē

The formulaic phrase Dios boulē (‘plan/will of Zeus’),42 here itself used within
the larger formula Dios d’eteleieto boulē (‘[the/a] plan/will of Zeus was coming to
fulfilment’), serves more than one programmatic purpose. It establishes right
away the Iliad’s connection to the larger mythological tradition in which Zeus’
plans figure so prominently.43 Thinking somewhat more locally, one may note
that the phrase also anticipates the central importance of Zeus’ decision-making
in the Iliad as it proceeds to unfold.44 Of primary concern for the present study,
however, is the way that Dios d’eteleieto boulē functions in concluding the series
of emotionally charged statements in lines 2–5.45 In this section and the next I
will argue that these lines taken (p.41) together serve to anticipate a particular
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kind of metaperformative moment that recurs in the Iliad: moments when the
poet will pause, while bringing to life a particularly terrible and riveting
spectacle, to draw his audience’s attention to the roles of both Zeus and himself
in orchestrating all that they are seeing.
By concluding a short narrative (in this case, lines 2–5) with the idea of Zeus’
will coming to pass, Homer appears to be employing a trope of early hexameter
poetry. Let us compare passages from two texts roughly contemporary with the
Iliad: the Odyssey, and Hesiod’s Theogony. In Odyssey Book 11, Odysseus is
telling the Phaeacians of his journeys since Troy. He concludes a brief and
partial account of the story of Melampus and the cattle of Iphicles in the
following way:
ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ μῆνές τε καὶ ἡμέραι ἐξετελεῦντο

ἂψ περιτελλομένου ἔτεος καὶ ἐπήλυθον ὧραι,
καὶ τότε δή μιν ἔλυσε βίη Ἰϕικληείη,
θέσϕατα πάντ’ εἰπόντα· Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή.
– Od.11.294–7
But when indeed the months and days were filling out their course,
with the year coming round again, and the time came –
then it was that the might of Iphicles freed him [Melampus],
after he [Melampus] told all that was ordained. And the plan of Zeus
was coming to fulfilment.
Two related points can be made about Odysseus’ use of Dios d’eteleieto boulē.
First, he is marking a moment of narrative transition, within the larger story of
his travels: having said as much as he will on the subject of Melampus, he moves
on. Second, it seems that Zeus’ plan was coming to fruition through the freeing
of Iphicles—the very event which Odysseus, the story-teller in this case, has
chosen as an ending for his narration of the tale. Lexical repetition supports
such a reading—compare ἐξετελεῦντο, of the time of imprisonment, with
ἐτελείετο, of Zeus’ plan. Indeed, the binding of Iphicles has itself been attributed
just a few lines earlier to an allotment set by a god (χαλεπὴ δὲ θεοῦ κατὰ μοῖρα
πέδησε Od.11.292).46
A nearly equivalent formula is used in Hesiod’s Theogony to conclude a story of

Jason, Medea, and their child Medeius. Hesiod (the (p.42) voice of the singer)
has just told how Jason led Medea away from her homeland βουλῇσι θεῶν
αἰειγενετάων (‘through the plans (boulai) of the immortal gods’ Hes.Th.993). He
concludes his short narrative with Medeius’ birth (Μήδειον τέκε παῖδα ‘she bore
Medeius, her child’ Hes.Th.1001), and upbringing: τὸν οὔρεσιν ἔτρεϕε Χείρων /
Φιλυρίδης· μεγάλου δὲ Διὸς νόος ἐξετελεῖτο (‘Cheiron, son of Philyris, was
raising him in the mountains—and the mind (noos) of great Zeus was coming to
fulfilment’ Hes.Th.1002). Though noos appears instead of boulē, exeteleito
ensures that we understand noos as a plan with a goal—essentially a synonym
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for boulē. Evidently, Zeus’ intention was to see Medeius conceived and raised to
manhood. Hesiod, like Odysseus, concludes his mini-narrative with these words
and moves on.
In both the Odyssey and Theogony passages, the formula looks backward,
marking an ending—not to the larger story, but to the events that have just been
recounted. Narrator and god, it turns out, have been aiming for a particular
telos.47 If that of Zeus has not yet been fully achieved—as the imperfect
(ex)eteleieto hints—neither perhaps has the speaker come to the end of the
song-path on which he first embarked. Probably, he sees always further ahead.
Homeric epic, certainly, does not lend itself to finality.
Contemporary criticism loves to find reflexivity in art. It has become common

even among classicists (a tribe noted for our resistance to trends in criticism) to
discuss Zeus’ control of the poem’s ‘plot’, often explicitly or implicitly assigning
a metapoetic significance to his activities. Zeus’ boulē in line 5 is no exception:
the phrase ‘appears to define’ the poem’s plot initially,48 has the poem’s plot as a
‘referent’;49 or indeed is ‘the self-proclaimed “plot” of our Iliad’.50 (p.43) Yet
caution is in order. There is no word for (literary) plot in Homeric Greek.
Instead, we find words richly expressive of the social and cultural contexts in
which story-telling is embedded—words such as aoidē (‘song’), oimē (‘song-
path’), and klea andrōn (‘glories of / stories about men’).51 Whereas metapoetic
readings of the Odyssey begin firmly grounded in the philologist’s demesne—
Demodocus and Phemius are aoidoi (‘singers’)—the lexeme boulē does not make
so clear an invitation.
Metapoetics will be discussed more fully at the end of this chapter. For now, I
would like to suggest that in the case of the Iliad’s proem, the idea of the story’s
‘plot’ is bound up inextricably with the dynamics of the poet’s invocation, his
perspective, and his choices. I am not arguing that Archaic Greeks did not
conceive of story-lines in the abstract. Indeed, accustomed to hearing traditional
tales in many forms and circumstances, they surely must have formed some
habits of thinking about story-lines independently of any particular wording,
performance, genre, or even medium. Nevertheless, the Iliad proem, by
foregrounding the circumstances of performance, pushes audiences away from
such abstraction and toward the concrete. Plot does not exist anywhere in
particular. Zeus and the story-teller both do. These are figures who appear
before the audience on stage, can grip their imagination, and are presented as
commanding a direct impact on their experience.52 As the Iliad begins, Zeus is
not abstract, so much as distant—like Troy itself. He will not be for long. I
suggest therefore that what we tend to read as reflections on the progress of the
plot, an abstraction congenial to our critical habits, would be more likely
received in live performance dramatically, in terms of intentions realized—those
of the poet and of Zeus.
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How far do those intentions reach, as portended in the proem? The poet’s
narration and Zeus’ plan intersect at line 5. This ‘ending’ looks ahead, unlike the
parallel moments in the narratives of Odysseus and Hesiod. Yet it need not look
ahead to the poem’s conclusion. No evidence from early hexameter poetry
suggests that audiences would expect to be oriented at the beginning of a song
by phrases defining or (p.44) referring to the entire plot of the coming
narrative.53 Rather, in Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, as in the Iliad and the
Odyssey, audiences are oriented initially by the naming of a theme, an aspect of
whose importance is then elaborated. The Odyssey proem’s elaboration of the
‘man’ theme does feature at least one specific plot development from the
Odyssey proper—the consumption of the cattle of Helios—but makes no attempt
to signal the scope, let alone the outline, of the coming narrative. In the case of
the Iliad proem, no specific plot events are mentioned except for the opening
quarrel.
One could—joining many critics—detect in this Dios boulē a reference to Zeus’

plan to glorify Achilles by granting Trojan success, which appears later in Book
1. Taking a somewhat longer view of Zeus’ planning, one could also see the
phrase referring to the plan of Zeus that aims for Troy’s fall. The destruction of
Troy makes a kind of telos toward which the Iliad seems to tend, without ever
reaching it.54 A third possible referent, on an even larger scale, is a plan by Zeus
to reduce the human population by means of the Trojan War.55 However, critics
have been most persuasive in arguing for an ‘open’ or ‘indeterminate’ referent in
the Dios boulē of Il.1.5.56 Notably, each of the three referents just listed would
situate the poem’s stated theme, mēnis Achilēos, in a different causal
relationship with Dios boulē. The phrase thus creates tension, by raising
questions of causality, responsibility, and the nature of beginnings.57 Unable to
pin (p.45) down the plan, we are left imagining how the words and images we
are given—the dying and desecration—may fit with what follows.
The Iliad’s proem poses particularly stiff resistance to being read as an

anticipation of the poem’s plot. According to the vision adumbrated here, it is
not the ransoming and burial of Hector’s body (in Book 24) that contributes to
the fulfilment of Zeus’ plan, but the hurling of souls to Hades and the making of
heroes into feasts for animals. Moreover, as James Redfield has observed, the
arrangement of aorist to imperfect tenses in the four verbs of lines 2–5 create
the troubling impression that the desecration of bodies (in the imperfect), even
more than the killing (in the aorist), is the ‘special accomplishment’ of Zeus.58
How is it that the climactic moment of the proem’s narrative seems to be, in the
Iliad proper, a non-event—often threatened but never described?
In the face of this obstacle, Redfield nevertheless sees the proem reaching out to
embrace the whole Iliad: ‘The poet asks his Muse for the Iliad, and in asking for
it must say what it is. The proem thus states in brief compass the whole of which
it is the introductory part.’ To reconcile the proem’s content with the content of
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the Iliad, Redfield treats content primarily in terms of theme rather than plot:
‘The Iliad, [the proem] tells us, will explore the relations between man, beast,
and god; it will be a story of suffering and death, and will go beyond this to tell
of the ultimate fate of the dead.’59 This reading, by illuminating thematic
connections between poem and proem, does perhaps make the apparent
contradictions seem less important. But it does not really explain them. On the
subject of Zeus’ agency, Redfield suggests that the proem is ‘partly right’, since
‘gods bring war’, and war brings out human savagery, which leads to the
defilement of corpses.60 But finding that the proem is ‘partly right’, by way of
such an extended chain of logical connections, is not very satisfying.61
James Morrison has argued that the proem’s carrion-eaters constitute an

example of intentional misdirection on the part of the poet. The benefit of this
misdirection is found in the cultivation of (p.46) suspense: a ‘first-time’
audience for the Iliad would have to wonder whether Achilles will in fact carry
out his threat to see Hector’s body devoured by scavengers, since the narrator
has ‘authorized’ such an eventuality from the beginning.62 By this reading, the
proem does look ahead to the end of the Iliad after all, since it is only through
the ransoming and burial of Hector in Book 24 that the ‘real’ ending finally
supersedes that which the proem had seemed to anticipate. I can imagine that Il.
1.4–5 might well have the effect Morrison describes on some listeners. Yet I
would read the proem as a whole somewhat differently.
It is perfectly possible that an aoidos at the beginning of his performance might

be contemplating the song he plans to sing in its entirety.63 However, this is not
what the poet of the Iliad gives us. Rather, the impression his words create as he
asks the Muse to sing is that of a man gazing out ahead, over the song-path. He
sees something essential, and terrible; something that gives him pause. The
pause is signalled, even prior to his sudden shift to Zeus, by the imperfect tense
of τεῦχε (‘was making’ into prey for dogs…1.4)—a little discussed but significant
feature to which we will return. I do not think it is possible to identify a specific
moment in the poem on which the poet is pausing (unlike the Odyssey’s explicit
reference to the consumption of Helios’ cattle). But I do think that the
anticipation he sets up in the proem resonates most powerfully in moments of a
certain kind. Let us too journey out far along the song-path, to consider an
illustration of the sort of passage that, I suggest, re-echoes with the proem’s
promise.
1.2. Realizing the Proem’s Promise: An Illustrative Example from Book 16

Sarpedon lies dead. The fight to capture Troy has become, at least in this area of
the front lines, the fight to capture his body. The struggle (p.47) is so ferocious
and prolonged that mutilation and dust have robbed the dead man of any visible
traces of his individuality (16.638–40). This turn is not without irony, for it is
Sarpedon’s particularity—son of Zeus, king of the Lycians, and one of Troy’s
greatest defenders—that have made corpse and arms so desirable. Yet at the
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centre of the warriors’ frenzy is a bloody shape that might now to all
appearances be any body. ‘Not even a discerning man could have recognized
him’ (16.638–9), but surely no one in the melee is trying to look. The aggression
is relentless, mindless; so much is conveyed by the simile that follows, which
likens the men fighting for the corpse to flies swarming over milk in a pail
(16.641–4).
At this moment, the poet ‘steps back’ to recontextualize the scene, which he has
just been describing so vividly, as the object of Zeus’ gaze:
ὣς ἄρα τοὶ περὶ νεκρὸν ὁμίλεον, οὐδέ ποτε Ζεὺς

τρέψεν ἀπὸ κρατερῆς ὑσμίνης ὄσσε ϕαεινώ,
ἀλλὰ κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς αἰὲν ὅρα καὶ ϕράζετο θυμῷ,
πολλὰ μάλ᾽ ἀμϕὶ ϕόνῳ Πατρόκλου μερμηρίζων…
– 16.644–7
Just so they were moving round the corpse – nor ever did Zeus
turn his shining eyes from the fierce fighting –
but continually he was looking at them and pondering in his thymos,
contemplating the slaughter of Patroclus…
It often happens in the Iliad that an extended description of fighting concludes

with a short sentence, introduced by ὥς (just so, thus) and summing up what has
been described, before a switch of scene—that is, a move to another area of the
battlefield.64 At line 644, however, the sudden incorporation of Zeus who ‘never
turned his eyes away’ (16.644–5) rejects, for the moment, that well-established
narrative possibility. The poet, as well as Zeus, is refusing to turn away.
The Iliad loves to compel, and comment on, the viewing of a corpse—its beauty,
or its violation. Iliadic contests—whether military or funerary—are regularly set
in relation to a corpse. The body may be (p.48) the struggle’s product, cause,
prize, or honorand.65 Indeed, it may take only a small cue from the poet to ‘flip’
a scene in a listener’s mind, or position the corpse in multiple relations at once,
as we will see.
The fixed intensity of Zeus’ gaze defines the nucleus of the spectacle with
precision: περὶ νεκρὸν ὁμίλεον (‘they were moving round the corpse’ 16.644);
κρατερῆς ὑσμίνης (‘the fierce fighting’ 16.645).66 As the father of the dead man,
Zeus has good reason to be interested. The lines carry an emotional charge, as
Zeus stares continually, thinking about the killing of his son’s killer (αἰὲν…ἀμϕὶ
ϕόνῳ Πατρόκλου μερμηρίζων 16.647). Yet the quality of Zeus’ emotion is
difficult to read. Sarpedon’s death was part of a plan of Zeus (as we learned in
15.67). In contrast to Priam, who sees his son Hector killed and defiled in Book
22, Zeus is in total control here, as the passage is composed to emphasize. The
opening of Book 13 signalled Zeus’ loss of command with the phrases τρέπεν
ὄσσε ϕαεινὼ / νόσϕιν (‘turned his shining eyes far away’) and ἐς Τροίην…οὐ
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πάμπαν ἔτι τρέπεν ὄσσε ϕαεινώ (‘no longer turned his shining eyes toward Troy
at all’). The present passage recalls and reverses that language: οὐδέ ποτε Ζεὺς /
τρέψεν ἀπὸ κρατερῆς ὑσμίνης ὄσσε ϕαεινώ / ἀλλὰ κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς αἰὲν ὅρα (‘nor
did Zeus ever turn away his shining eyes from the fierce struggle, but he was
looking at them continually’).
Earlier in Book 16, Zeus had balked at the prospect of his son’s death (16.431–
8). Hera then protested, by invoking Sarpedon’s ‘assigned allotment’, predicting
the gods’ disapproval, and reminding Zeus that he could ensure that Sarpedon’s
body receive funeral rites (16.439–57).67 But it should be noted that Zeus’
hesitance in that earlier scene in no way reduces the importance of his role as
director (p.49) of this scene. The opposite is true. Responding to Hera, Zeus
uses language that underscores his own, personal agency: ἦ ἤδη ὑπὸ χερσὶ
Μενοιτιάδαο δαμάσσω (‘or shall I kill him now, at the hands of the son of
Menoetius?’ 16.438). ‘Shall I kill him?’ If Zeus’ heart is divided, his hand and eye
are firm.
The poem offers multiple ways of understanding the temporal limits of this
spectacle. The battle for Sarpedon’s corpse is well delineated as a coherent
episode in its own right, within Book 16.68 Yet that episode also represents one
phase of a larger spectacle, itself coherently defined, namely the fighting of the
whole day (Books 11–17).69 The day’s fighting, in turn, constitutes a phase in the
still greater spectacle of Iliadic warfare—all the battlefield contests that follow
Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon (Books 3–22), as announced in the proem.70
Moving beyond Zeus, let us now consider the part of the poet. As in the case of
the proem, so too the present passage first highlights the poet’s agency and his
audience’s involvement, and only then turns suddenly to Zeus. Here are the lines
leading up to the moment in which Zeus’ gaze is (re)introduced:
τῶν δ᾽ ὥς τε δρυτόμων ἀνδρῶν ὀρυμαγδὸς ὀρώρει

οὔρεος ἐν βήσσῃς, ἕκαθεν δέ τε γίγνετ᾽ ἀκουή,
ὣς τῶν ὄρνυτο δοῦπος ἀπὸ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης
χαλκοῦ τε ῥινοῦ τε βοῶν τ᾽ εὐποιητάων,
νυσσομένων ξίϕεσίν τε καὶ ἔγχεσιν ἀμϕιγύοισιν.
οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἔτι ϕράδμων περ ἀνὴρ Σαρπηδόνα δῖον
ἔγνω, ἐπεὶ βελέεσσι καὶ αἵματι καὶ κονίῃσιν
ἐκ κεϕαλῆς εἴλυτο διαμπερὲς ἐς πόδας ἄκρους.
οἳ δ᾽ αἰεὶ περὶ νεκρὸν ὁμίλεον, ὡς ὅτε μυῖαι
(p.50) σταθμῷ ἔνι βρομέωσι περιγλαγέας κατὰ πέλλας
ὥρῃ ἐν εἰαρινῇ, ὅτε τε γλάγος ἄγγεα δεύει.
ὣς ἄρα τοὶ περὶ νεκρὸν ὁμίλεον, οὐδέ ποτε Ζεὺς
τρέψεν ἀπὸ κρατερῆς ὑσμίνης ὄσσε ϕαεινώ,
πολλὰ μάλ᾽ ἀμϕὶ ϕόνῳ Πατρόκλου μερμηρίζων…
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– 16.633–47
And from [the combatants] a din arose – as of tree-cutters,

in a mountain glade – and the sound occurs from far away –
so their crashing sound arose from wide-pathed earth,
[a sound] of bronze and leather and well-made hides,
as they kept on striking with swords and two-edged spears.
Not even an observant man would any longer have recognized
brilliant Sarpedon, since he was covered by arrows
and blood and dust from his head to his feet.
And they were moving continually (aiei) round the corpse – as when
flies
in the stable buzz over buckets overflowing with milk –
in spring-time, when milk moistens the pails –
just so they were moving round the corpse – nor ever did Zeus
turn his shining eyes from the fierce fighting –
but continually (aien) he was looking at them and pondering in his
thymos,
contemplating the slaughter of Patroclus…
The two similes, and the ‘hypothetical observer’ invoked at 16.638, all serve to
emphasize the poet’s mediating role, and hence the separation between past and
present—even as they contribute to the scene’s vividness. The din must be truly
great, we are asked to sense, because it (like the felling of trees) is audible from
so far off (ἕκαθεν δέ τε γίγνετ᾽ ἀκουή 16.634). The description of what the
‘observant man’ would see is riveting—the mess of blood and arrows
(16.438-40). Yet the optative verb also recalls the audience’s own liminality.71
With the simile of the flies (16.641–4), the poet’s visual focus broadens out again
from the corpse itself, to include many small, living bodies—wild motion, against
a broader peaceful backdrop. To see fighters as flies requires a capacity for
emotional (p.51) distance; or, more precisely, for awareness of the possibility of
an emotionally remote perspective on the scene.
At the moment that Zeus is introduced, it becomes possible to understand in

retrospect all of the shifts of view, the spatial and emotional distancing, as
reflecting the possibilities of divine perspective available to Zeus as well as to
the poet and his audience. Zeus, like the poet, can adopt the ‘bird’s-eye’ view.
From a distance, he can hear the clash of arms (16.634)—as clearly as if it were
near (16.635–7). He could see Sarpedon’s body with clarity, recognize him—as
the poet can—despite the wounds (16.638–40), even from a great distance. And
from as far above as Zeus is perched, the motion round the corpse might well
resemble the motion of flies (16.641–3). The repeated use of αἰεί (‘continually’),
once for the men fighting and once for Zeus watching them fight (οἳ δ᾽ αἰεὶ περὶ
νεκρὸν ὁμίλεον…ἀλλὰ κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς αἰὲν ὅρα καὶ ϕράζετο θυμῷ 16.641, 646),
serves to connect the poet’s description of what we and he have been viewing to
the viewing activity of Zeus. The effect, ultimately, is to convey a sense that we—
Page 17 of 36
that is, Zeus, poet, and audience—have all been engaged in watching the same
action.
The idea of a spectacle that unites viewers qua viewers, even across time and
space, finds a parallel in visual art of the Archaic period. Consider Figure 1.1, a
sixth-century Attic black-figure vase showing two female figures, hands
upraised, who flank two duelling warriors on whom they also gaze.72
As Stansbury-O’Donnell notes in
his treatment of this vase, the
women would not
(naturalistically) be found on
the battlefield, and ‘we have to
consider that their presence
here as spectators is conceptual
rather than actual’.73
Stansbury-O’Donnell classifies
these women as ‘pure
spectators’ because they do not
belong to the time and space of
the nucleus: nevertheless, they
look on.74 Temporal separation
between spectator and nucleus
is thus self-consciously (p.52)
acknowledged (by the cues,
such as dress, that Stansbury-
O’Donnell identifies), and
rendered as spatial separation.
Figure 1.1. Sixth-century Attic black-
I suggest that both Homer and figure amphora depicting two female
the painter of this vase are figures, hands upraised, who flank two
effectively claiming that the duelling warriors on whom they also
spectacle at the centre of their gaze. Attributed to the Medea Group, c.
work can defy temporal 520 BCE. Side B, The Metropolitan
boundaries. It is not the case Museum of Art, New York; Purchase,
that Homer actually depicts (p. Christos G. Bastis Gift, 1961, 61.11.16.
53) viewers from a different www.metmuseum.org.
time and place, in the manner
of the vase painter. But he does
draw on audience awareness of their own viewing experience. The principle is
the same: shared vision implies a shared temporal frame. The two cases also
have at least some similarity in terms of artistic effect, for both painter and poet
show an interest in underlining the trans-temporal importance of the action
displayed in the nucleus. ‘The mythological past, like the contemporary battle, is
physically removed from the time and place of the viewer, but its impact is real
Page 18 of 36
and immediate as part of the fabric of civic life and belief.’75 These same words
could easily be applied to the Iliad’s vision of the Trojan War.
The next lines exploit this moment of textual self-consciousness, to present Zeus
in the act of deciding on the direction that the battle will now take:

πολλὰ μάλ᾽ ἀμϕὶ ϕόνῳ Πατρόκλου μερμηρίζων
ἢ ἤδη καὶ κεῖνον ἐνὶ κρατερῇ ὑσμίνῃ
αὐτοῦ ἐπ᾽ ἀντιθέῳ Σαρπηδόνι ϕαίδιμος Ἕκτωρ
χαλκῷ δῃώσῃ, ἀπό τ᾽ ὤμων τεύχε᾽ ἕληται,
ἦ ἔτι καὶ πλεόνεσσιν ὀϕέλλειεν πόνον αἰπύν.
ὧδε δέ οἱ ϕρονέοντι δοάσσατο κέρδιον εἶναι
ὄϕρ᾽ ἠῢς θεράπων Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
ἐξαῦτις Τρῶάς τε καὶ Ἕκτορα χαλκοκορυστὴν
ὤσαιτο προτὶ ἄστυ, πολέων δ᾽ ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἕλοιτο.
Ἕκτορι δὲ πρωτίστῳ ἀνάλκιδα θυμὸν ἐνῆκεν…
– 16.646–56
But continually he was looking at them and pondering in his thymos,

contemplating the slaughter of Patroclus,
whether right away shining Hector should kill him, too
– in the fierce fighting – on the spot, over god-like Sarpedon –
with bronze, and take the armour from his shoulders,
or whether he should keep increasing the steep toil/warfare (ponos),
for even more men.
(p.54) And in this way it seemed most profitable to him as he
thought,
that the noble therapon of Achilles son of Peleus should push
the Trojans and bronze-helmed Hector in turn
toward the city, and take the lives of many men.
And he sent a courage-less spirit into Hector first of all…
Zeus is in effect choosing whether Patroclus’ aristeia will continue or stop right
away.76 How is Homer’s audience to react? Are they to sense, on some level, that
the poet, through Zeus, is reflecting on his own process of choosing? I would
describe the effect in the following way. In this passage, the poet has issued a
powerful reminder of the ways in which the spectacle at Troy is being
orchestrated. To do so, he has heightened awareness of both his role and that of
Zeus. The proem had sharply distinguished the two figures, locating them worlds
apart. Now, though, it is not so easy to distinguish fully between them, for the
single area in which their manifold roles overlap the most—that is, their
relationship to the spectacle they see and control—has now, at this moment in
Book 16, become the focus of attention. The passage is reflexive in that it
celebrates the power of this song to deliver such an experience.
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Let us now think back to the proem. The mini-narrative of 1.2–5 reads well as
anticipation of the kind of moment we find rendered in 16.633–56. Time slows
down around the battle for Sarpedon, as the poet turns the scene around, to
inspect it and reflect upon it. Zeus’ gaze marks and sustains the pause. Zeus is
about to send Sleep and Death to rescue the body—an iconic scene in Greek art.
But in this extended moment, what we find is Zeus presiding over the body’s
defilement. Even the idea of the corpse as food is evoked, by the simile of the
flies (the warriors) swarming round milk (the body). The moment is marked by
the meeting of poetic and divine intentions, in the construction and presentation
of a spectacle.
Similarly, in the proem the aorists of 1.2–3 (‘placed sufferings’ and ‘hurled
souls’) suggest action accomplished—however invisible and distant that action
is, for now. Then the tense changes: τεῦχε, ‘them, it was making into prey…’.
The aorist τεῦξε does appear elsewhere in Homer, and is metrically equivalent.
The aorist would be the (p.55) unmarked choice, naturally continuing the
series of aorists. Yet the poet switches to the imperfect. Why? I suggest that, as
with the imperfect ἐτελείετο of Zeus’ plan, so with τεῦχε the point of the verb is
not so much action completed in the past, as the direction in which processes
are moving at the time of which the poet speaks. With the imperfects of 1.4–5
(‘was making’, ‘was coming to fulfilment’), the poet seems to pause on the horror
of bodies becoming less and less recognizably human—not as an accomplished
fact but as an ongoing drama. What is so conspicuously absent from the proem
is the single ingredient that is most emphasized in the passage from Book 16,
the ingredient that catalyses all the rest: the gaze.
This is mortality as spectacle. In the long sweep of the Iliad, it is an idea evoked
again and again, with great variety.
1.3. The Gods and Metapoetics

I would like to conclude this chapter by asking in what sense it is appropriate to
talk about a metapoetic level to the Iliad’s divine apparatus, given the
performance medium assumed by the text. The Iliad’s poetics can be usefully
defined as ‘Homer’s implicit account of the connections between poem, poet,
and audience’.77 As attention to the proem should remind us, the audience will
be aware at all times, on some level, of the physical setting of performance
around them, and of their own and the poet’s roles in that performance. If the
bard is doing his job well, they will also be aware of the past world of which they
are made to feel a part, and hence aware of the roles of Achilles, Hector, Helen,
and the rest. For the audience, then, the Iliad advances, from start to finish, in
both worlds ‘at once’. For them, the poem becomes metapoetic—or the
performance becomes metaperformative—when what is transpiring at Troy and
on Olympus appears to comment on, or somehow relate directly to, what they
themselves are doing by participating in this performance of the Iliad.
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The Odyssey shows a great degree of self-consciousness in its representations of

story-telling and bardic performance. The Iliad, by contrast, exhibits self-
consciousness more often in other ways: it (p.56) loves to point out its power to
confront audiences with compelling visions.78 The Iliad’s self-consciousness
about this power comes through in each reminder of the extraordinary temporal
gulf separating the performer and his audience from the story’s action—a point
on which this poem dwells far more than does the Odyssey.
Let us step back from the particulars of the passages analysed so far, to consider
the significance of Zeus’ control of events in the Iliad as a whole. In the
traditional language of Homeric poetry, Zeus’ agency is bound up in language
suggesting a process of allotment or apportioning: particularly the terms moira,
aisa, and moros, and their cognates.79 However, Homer offers no consistent
account of how this cosmic process of allotment functions, or the gods’ role in it.
Some language posits Zeus’ agency: Helen asserts that Zeus has assigned her
and Paris their ‘evil portion’ (κακὸν μόρον 6.357) and the traditional phrase Διὸς
αἶσαν ‘portion from Zeus’ is used not only by mortal characters but also by the
narrator.80 Other passages suggest that it is the gods as a group that decide how
events will come out.81 Some passages hint that ‘Zeus’ and ‘the gods’ are in fact
two different ways of referring to the same idea;82 others suggest that this is
true of Zeus and moira (or Moira).83 Sometimes Moira, or Aisa, is a personified
figure who spins out the thread of a mortal’s life at his (p.57) birth, apparently
independently of Zeus and the gods;84 other passages make moira an impersonal
construction.85 Given this range, it is impossible to tell whether, for example,
Hector refers to a personified Moira or an impersonal ‘allotment’ when he tells
Andromache than none have escaped moira (μοῖραν δ’ οὔ τινά ϕημι πεϕυγμένον
ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν 6.488). It is striking that within a few lines Achilles, in his
famous speech to Priam in Book 24, mixes up both imagery and agency with no
discomfort as he first describes ‘the gods’ in the act of ‘weaving’ a mortal’s
future, and then ‘Zeus’ in the act of ‘dispensing’ evils and blessings from two
jars.86 It is evidently not the case that Achilles is confused, but rather that the
discourse about cosmic design in which Achilles participates does not value
consistency of this kind.
The lack of a coherent framework means that the old debate as to whether Zeus
or moira is the ultimate cosmic authority can have no winner. Indeed, as most
today would agree, it seems to have been the wrong question all along, involving
an anachronistically rigorous test of logical consistency on the Iliad’s
conceptions of cosmic design. Nevertheless, that debate was a response to a
genuine problem. If the Iliad were merely unclear about the limits on Zeus’
power to determine outcomes, one could set that issue aside on the grounds that
it is one in which the text is not interested. In fact, however, the poet draws
attention to and manufactures tension out of this uncertainty, by representing
Zeus in the process of making decisions, as he weighs factors such as the wishes
of the other gods, the existence of previously established ‘allotments’ (moirai),
Page 21 of 36
and the gods’ awareness of those allotments. Thus, while the poet may not be
interested in displaying a consistent mechanism for how the cosmos runs, he is
(p.58) for some reason very interested in displaying fraught and dynamic
scenes of divine decision-making. The question is why.87
Many scholars have seen a reflexive dimension to cosmic design in the Iliad: ‘if
an early fall of Troy is proclaimed by Zeus to be ὑπὲρ μόρον [“beyond
allotment”], this means also that it would conflict with the organization of the
story by the poet.’88 Thus, ‘fate in Homer, μοῖρα (or μόρος or αἶσα), can have a
narrative significance.’89 But to whom is this narrative significance significant,
and why? After all, it is a disservice to the poet to assume that he is unable to
work out a narrative in which his planning and control are not exposed.90 Nor do
I think that the poet’s primary concern is to form and present a conception of a
relationship between ‘fate’ and processes of narrative and composition. While
the Iliad responds wonderfully to analysis, it is aimed not at analytical critics but
at audiences ready to be swept away by wonder, pleasure, terror, and tears.91 To
consider the effect of (p.59) reflexivity in performance, it is better to leave
aside consideration of ‘fate’ as a conceptual object, and instead to concentrate
on what the poet has made available in the particular: that is Zeus observing and
directing the action at Troy, sometimes in conjunction with other gods.
There are only four times in the Iliad when Zeus (and the poet through Zeus)
verbally challenges the idea that events at Troy must proceed according to the
allotted moirai. The first follows the poem’s initial depiction of combat, the duel
between Paris and Menelaus in Book 3. The last appears during the poem’s final
depiction of combat—the confrontation of Hector and Achilles in Book 22. The
third and fourth appear in Books 16 and 20, one preceding the duel between
Patroclus and Sarpedon, and the other preceding the theomachia.92 All four
passages highlight divine viewing and emotional response to what the god or
gods are seeing, particularly pleasure (terpesthai, 4, 20) and pity (eleein, 16,
22). This arrangement suggests that the challenge-to-moira motif, whatever its
application may have been in the broader epic tradition, is in our Iliad tightly
bound up in the poem’s developing conception of armed conflict as spectacle.
One way to discuss the metapoetics of Zeus’ decision-making is to say that he is

guiding the ‘story’ or ‘plot’, or to say he takes on an ‘authorial’ role.93 This
language, used carefully, can usefully convey the recognition that we find
ourselves responding to Zeus, at least in part, on the same level on which we
respond to indications of narrative design. But a poem of the Iliad’s complexity
invites multiple (p.60) understandings of its plot,94 and Zeus is not everywhere
authorial. Most especially, he is never noted watching or guiding council scenes,
including the crucial decision-making scenes in Books 1 and 9, on which the plot
of Achilles’ wrath initially turns. Scenes emphasizing Zeus’ direct control are
targeted.
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What Zeus does see and control is the course of the warfare on the Trojan plain.
This chapter has looked at passages in which Zeus’ gaze defines the object of his
control (16.633–56), and in which his staging activities define the parameters of
the battle that he will observe (early in Book 11). This same point holds true for
other passages often discussed with regard to Zeus’ authorial role in the Iliad. In
Zeus’ speech following Hera’s seduction, a speech in which Zeus reclaims
control of the course of the battle (or of the ‘narrative’ as is commonly stated,
with metapoetic implications), his train of thought closely tracks the course of
the conflict on the field (15.53–76). Schadewaldt accurately called Zeus’ speech
at 11.185–94 a presentation of ‘the poet’s program for the battle’.95
Extant scholarship dealing with the metapoetics of the Iliad’s gods has focused
almost exclusively on their decision-making, rather than their viewing. Yet in
both areas, we are dealing with more or less the same set of passages.
Beginning with Book 4—when the military spectacle at Troy gets underway at
last—every instance of decision-making on the part of Zeus (alone or with ‘the
gods’) constitutes a follow-up to a depiction of him (alone or with the group)
watching. By recognizing viewing and decision-making as two facets of a single
phenomenon, we will accomplish two things. First, we will discover that
emotional response and viewer complicity—two themes that the Iliad closely
associates with viewing—are as central to the Iliad’s interest in narrative
direction as to other aspects of the poem. Second, we will find ourselves better
positioned to take up a question that is not often explored in discussions that
refer to Zeus and the gods as ‘authors’ of the plot, or expressions of the poet’s
will: namely, at what point is the poem’s audience invited to recognize the
metapoetics that scholars detect, and to what purpose?
(p.61) One scholar who has read divine viewing in (what I would call) a
metapoetic sense is Pietro Pucci. In his 2002 article ‘Theology and Poetics in the
Iliad’, Pucci points to textual cues which, he suggests, realize the gods’ potential
as analogous to the ‘extratextual’ audience. These cues have to do with the
setting of the daïs, which resembles Odyssean daïs scenes featuring poetic
performances by Phemius and Demodocus. In his analysis, Pucci takes the vital
step of asking what sort of emotional impact might be delivered by audience
recognition of these cues.
Scholarship since the 1980s had recognized the gods’ role as sometime
‘focalizers’ of the poem’s action,96 and had also flirted with the idea that
audiences were meant to sense that their special vision was related to that of the
gods in the text.97 But Pucci goes further in arguing for a special ‘effect of
mediation’ produced by scenes of divine viewing. ‘Mediation’, for Pucci,
essentially means the transfer of the pleasure or pity of a watching god or gods
to the Iliad’s audience.98 The mechanism identified by Pucci does involve
focalization.99 But he also sees the contagious influence of the gods’ emotions as
being amplified by special resemblances between gods and audience. Pointing to
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the gods’ pleasure at 4.1–4, as they drink and view the duel between Paris and
Menelaus, Pucci writes that we should recognize this effect of mediation:
…For, of course, this [i.e., the Iliad’s] extra-textual audience is also

leisurely sitting and drinking, if the Odyssey gives us a realistic (p.62)
description of the setting in which the bard is singing (1.339–40, etc.), and
observing, by means of the narrative, what is happening. Therefore the
text implicitly induces the extra-textual audience (the Narratees) to receive
the scene of the duel with pleasure, just as the gods do…
What Pucci seems to be saying is that a member of the extratextual audience

who recognizes similarities between the gods’ environment and his own will
share the gods’ emotion as a result of that recognition. But as a general rule,
that reasoning does not seem to hold up. I can envision a film shot which pans
back from a graphic lynching scene, to reveal a man who is seated in a cinema
very much like the one in which I am watching that film, perhaps seated in my
seat, and who is laughing and munching popcorn as he watches. This thought
experiment tells me that the director’s trick would not induce me to laugh. Or
eat popcorn.
To be sure, I am not an ancient audience. Yet many ancient readers also found
the gods’ behaviour troubling. Would their unease have become pleasure
instead, if they had been listening to the rhapsode at a daïs? It does not seem
obvious that they would. A scholiast’s remark about Il.4.1–4, ‘they say it is not
fitting if the viewing of wars gives pleasure to the gods’,100 speaks to the shock
or discomfiture that can be delivered by the depiction of the gods taking
pleasure at their daïs.101
Consumers of compelling narrative art might experience, at least to some extent,

the sensations and emotions of any of the characters in a narrative. Focalization
can magnify that experience. But to do so is not necessarily to sympathize or
‘identify’ with those characters in other ways—an important factor in
considering the Homeric gods, who, as characters with their own desires and
relationships, rarely draw much sympathy.102 With the notable exception of
Thetis (not (p.63) an Olympian),103 even child-loss for gods, when it happens,
only seems to underline the much greater tragedy of human bereavement. Yet,
these are the characters that Homer portrays as his most consistently present,
and most audience-like, audience.
For this study, the concept I have found most useful in describing the reflexivity
of the divine audience in the Iliad is that of the mise en abyme. In its broadest
sense, this phrase is used to refer to ‘any aspect enclosed within a work that
shows similarity with the work that contains it’.104 Classic examples include the
play that Hamlet stages within the play called Hamlet; Escher’s drawing of two
hands drawing; the Odyssey’s depiction of Phemius singing about the Achaeans’
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return from Troy—a play within a play, a drawing within a drawing, a song of
return within a song of return. For the consumer of art, the inner representation
has the effect of ‘reflecting’ back on the larger work—on its purpose, the nature
of its functioning, the process of its production—thereby opening interpretive
possibilities. Scholars have fruitfully applied the mise en abyme and similar
models to analysis of the Iliad, mostly in studies of narrative content—such as
plot, theme, and speeches.105 But the mise en abyme’s usefulness for studying
the Iliad goes beyond its application to plot and theme.106 Any aspect of Iliadic
poetics might be set en abyme. What is needed is a cue sufficiently prominent
that the reflexivity can be justifiably analysed as part of the work’s reception.
The flexibility of the mise en abyme allows for greater precision than, for
example, might be attained by a straightforward claim that Homer’s audience is
‘like the gods’ or vice versa. The commonly used (p.64) mirror metaphor for
reflexivity is likewise too rigid: the gods are not at all a mirror for Homer’s
audience, for they are gods. It would be better instead to say that certain scenes
of divine viewing constitute a mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered
by the poet to his listeners. Gods and audience may or may not share a given
reaction. What they do share is a particular way of relating to the action. Only
the gods and Homer’s audience perceive the conflict at Troy as an orchestrated
spectacle, because only they are aware of Zeus’ operations or (in the case of
Homer’s audience) the poet’s—which overlap with those of Zeus at key points.
The spatial metaphor in the phrase mise en abyme (the same metaphor that we
find in the terms ‘extra-’ and ‘intra-diegetic’) proves especially well suited to the
Iliad’s spatial and visual poetics. But the relationship between outer and inner is
not straightforwardly hierarchical, as in the standard narratological model. The
gods may be ‘within’ the Iliad, conceived as a narrative. But they are not so
obviously ‘within’ the Iliad, conceived as a live event that connects past and
present. Rather, by constructing a conflict as the nucleus of a spectacle, the Iliad
situates observers as relatively more or less ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ to it. The
construction of such a spectacle, and the positioning of observers, begins
already with the divine and poetic staging of the first battle scenes of the poem,
as will be seen in the next chapter.
Notes:
(1) ‘Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll / ein Mann ihm folgen durch die
schmale Leier?’ (Die Sonnette an Orpheus 1, iii.1–2. The translation is mine.)
(2) ἔοικα δέ τοι παραείδειν/ὥς τε θεῷ - ‘It is right for me to sing to you
[Odysseus] / as to a god’ Od.23.347–8.
(3) Cf. Redfield 2001. On the gods and care of corpses, cf. Macleod 2001: 94 on Il
.22.358 and 24.54. Macleod writes of ‘a “law of the gods” which requires that all
corpses be buried’, citing also Soph.Aj.1343, Ant.450–5; Eur.Supp.563.
Page 25 of 36
(4) See n. 63.
(5) For ‘nucleus’ see Introduction, pp 14-17.
(6) Other aspects of this staging scene are discussed in Chapter 4.
(7) The verb of seeing comes at 11.83: εἰσορόων Τρώων τε πόλιν καὶ νῆας
Ἀχαιῶν, ‘[Zeus] gazing upon the city of the Trojans and the ships of the
Achaeans’. See further Chapter 4.
(8) Contrast, for instance, the fear of the soldiers as Zeus thunders at night,
following the first day of battle: τοὺς δὲ χλωρὸν δέος ᾕρει (‘and green fear
seized them’ 7.479).
(9) αἱματοέσσας δὲ ψιάδας κατέχευεν ἔραζε/παῖδα ϕίλον τιμῶν, τόν οἱ

Πάτροκλος ἔμελλε / ϕθίσειν ἐν Τροίῃ ἐριβώλακι τηλόθι πάτρης. 16.459–61.
(10) Burkert 1985: 59–60. See also Nilsson 1967–74: 186; Seaford 1994: 114;
Pucci 2002: n. 20. Blood sacrifices performed before battle, by contrast, were
intended to prevail upon the gods to bring about a particular outcome.
Therefore, such sacrifices seem a less relevant comparandum to Zeus’ sending
of blood than death ritual. The latter, like Zeus’ act, is intended as a means of
public honouring.
(11) The reversal by which death ritual precedes death is itself thematic to the
Iliad: Andromache famously raises a ritual lament for Hector though he is ‘still
alive’ (ἔτι ζωόν 6.500). For the imagery and language of funerary spectacle in
Hector’s final confrontation with Achilles, see Chapter 5.
(12) Bakker 2009 raises this issue in regard to both Homeric epics, and proceeds
to outline some consequences for how we should understand the Odyssey.
(13) Cf. Bakker 2005: 60: ‘…[performance] is the occasion when the community
allows a meaningful past to shape its present.’ My treatment of viewer
‘involvement’ is strongly influenced by Bakker 1993, though I do not use
‘involvement’ only in the technical linguistic sense employed in that paper.
(14) Clay 2011: 26. This excerpt is from a discussion of Homeric poetics that is
not limited to the Iliad, but is heavily based on the evidence of the Iliad. For my
part, I see the Iliad making use of this aspect of Homeric poetics differently than
the Odyssey.
(15) Vivante 1970: 137, also cited in Lynn-George 1988: 15.
(16) Auerbach 1953: 7. Ancient writers theorized enargeia, including Homeric

enargeia, as achievable variously by completeness of detail (cf. Auerbach), or
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selectiveness in providing detail, among other strategies (Zanker 1981;

Meijering 1987: 39–44).
(17) Auerbach’s reading was founded on what he saw as Homer’s inability to

leave anything undescribed, and Homer’s complete lack of interest in creating
suspense, or suggesting ‘unplumbed depths’ beyond the surface of this world of
illuminated forms. In fact, however, Homer does leave much undescribed, the
narrative does generate suspense, and depths ‘where the narrative surface
cracks’ (Haubold 2011: 26) are precisely where the Homeric poems’ interest
often seems to lie. See especially Lynn-George 1988: Chapter 1; Bakker 2005:
Chapter 4; Haubold 2011.
(18) Lynn-George 1988: 13.
(19) Auerbach 1953: 4.
(20) Haubold 2011: 26.
(21) See Ford 1992: 53–6. Of the ‘epiphanic’ quality of the Muse’s involvement
Ford writes: ‘It is vividness as a feature of divine epiphanies that is involved in
poetry’s power to make the invisible past appear to its hearers…because we are
granted [the Muses’] perspective; when the great speeches are given we seem to
be on the edge of the assembly, and when the heroic actions are performed we
seem to be present as onlookers’ (55).
(22) Cf. the comment of Schol. bT on Il.6.467: ὅτι οὐ μόνον ἀκούεται τὰ

πράγματα, ἀλλὰ καὶ ὁρᾶται. In the proem’s narrative, the situation described by
the scholiast is reversed—we are not yet seeing the phenomena, but are hearing
of them.
(23) Cf. Clay 2011:17 ‘For the direct speeches of an Achilles or an Agamemnon
shift the deictic center from the present moment of the performance in which we
are participating to the here and now of the characters: the Greek camp in the
tenth year of the War.’
(24) A demonstrative like οὗτος ‘conveys that the thing or person pointed at is
perceptually shared between speaker and interlocutor; οὗτος signals
“presence”’ (Bakker 2009: 128). On these particular deictics, cf. Lynn-George
1988: 51–52, whose translations I have used in this paragraph.
(25) For the Iliad’s involvement of audiences with decision-making in council

scenes, see Elmer 2013: esp. 204–24.
(26) Debate on this issue, following the rise of oral theory in Homeric Studies,
has been vigorous. Lord 1960/2000 esp. 13–29 is fundamental. For some
orientation on subsequent developments, see the useful discussions in Foley
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1995: esp. 19–65 and Jensen 2011: esp. 108–44, both of which take Parry and
Lord as a starting point.
(27) Redfield 2001: 460–1 assembles comparanda and sees the use of ἄειδε here
as ‘marked’. Rabel 1997: 23–5 contends that everything that follows line 8
should be considered to be no longer the poet’s voice, but the Muse’s. This
seems to me to draw too fine a distinction. The illusion would be hard to
maintain; after a few lines, or a few hundred, listeners would see the poet as
plying his craft. In any case, the later invocations of the Muses make little sense
if the poet is not to be thought of as the voice issuing the narrative which
precedes them. On the issue of where the poet’s agency can be distinguished
from the Muse’s, Garvie 1994: 245 has a balanced view, and gathers relevant
evidence. A key passage is Od.22.347–8 (Phemius is ‘self-taught’ and yet ‘a/the
god put oimai’ in his heart’).
(28) Cf. Clay 2011: 15; Ledbetter 2003: 25.
(29) Pelliccia 1995: 122 notes in his analysis of Homeric θυμός-speeches that
‘Homer could, when he wished to, observe a distinction between a speech’s
addressee…and its audience’ (emphasis in original), and explores Homeric
character speeches whose addressee(s) and intended hearer(s) are not
equivalent. One might add the proem as a variation: here, it is the performer
himself who addresses the Muse while aiming his speech (additionally) at his
audience.
(30) Nagy 1979/1999: 16.
(31) Vermeule 1979: 94, 97. One detects in Vermeule’s (I suppose intentionally
provocative) evocation of Homer’s own agency the possibility of a parallel with
the Iliad’s gods, who are sometimes said to kill men ‘at the hands of’ the mortal
character who does the actual slaying.
(32) See also Dalby 1998: 197 on aoidoi as ‘artisans’ and craftsmen; Dalby works
from the evidence of the Odyssey (esp. Od.17.382–5), and also by comparing
evidence for singers in Sumerian and Sanskrit traditions.
(33) Finkelberg 1998: 121–30 argues that kata kosmon means according to the
(true) order of the events, and kata moiran according to the right portion/i.e.
according to the truth. But see the trenchant critique of Halliwell 2011. On these
phrases, see also Walsh 1984: 16–17; Ford 1992: 122–3. For τέρπεσθαι as a
positively valued effect of poetry, see Chapter 2.
(34) For Macleod on ‘authenticity’, see Introduction n. 53.
(35) De Jong 1987 and Richardson 1990 are seminal. See also, Edwards 1991: 1–
10; Haubold 2000: 26; Clay 2011: 14–26. Cf. Lovatt 2013: 3 (on the simile
describing the far-gleaming cloud round Achilles’ head at Il.18.207–14): ‘The
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simile also moves the reader, in the wake of the narrator, out far beyond the
immediacy of Achilles’ vision, to dip briefly into another story, to be aware of the
crafted nature of epic narrative.’
(36) Clay 2011: 18: ‘The space constituted by epic is paradoxically near and far.’
(37) On the dating of the so-called ‘Contest of Homer and Hesiod’, see Uden
2010: 121–3.
(38) The epithets strike the ear as two elements in a succession, because of
assonance (-SIM-bro-tos and -SIKH-ro-as) and because of their appearance in the
same metrical position in successive lines.
(39) On this passage and Auerbach, see also Haubold 2011.
(40) Contrast Hes.Th.698–9 ὄσσε δ’ ἄμερδε καὶ ἰϕθίμων περ ἐόντων / αὐγὴ
μαρμαίρουσα κεραυνοῦ τε στεροπῆς τε, where the viewers, the Titans in this
case, are specified by the genitive.
(41) I do not think the poet’s point is that he has created a scene ‘so grueling
that we would not want to witness it directly’ (Haubold 2011: 26). The
conditional assumes vision; what it questions is the reaction.
(42) I tend to agree with Wolfgang Kullmann (1956: 167–8) that ‘plan’ is a better
translation than ‘will’ for boulē, because the former implies specificity.
(43) I find Murnaghan 1997 and Allan 2008 especially useful here. But I do not
follow Allan’s account at all points: e.g. ‘The Dios boulê is ever present and
embraces all of the god’s plans, whether local or cosmic’ (Allan 2008: 207). It is
not clear to me why the phrase need ‘always’ embrace ‘all’ the plans. Including
the English definite article (‘the Dios boulê’) begs the question.
(44) Studying Zeus’ thoughts and plans as the Iliad unfolds can tell us much
about the poem’s narrative structure: valuable work includes Rousseau 1996,
Clay 1999, and Heiden 2008.
(45) On the affective quality of οὐλομένην (1.2), see Redfield 2001: 463–64, who
concludes: ‘The bard thus brings before us his own reaction to, almost his
distaste for, his theme’ (464). Cf. Halliwell 2011: 47: ‘The request is elaborated…
by a cluster of emotionally charged judgments which disclose the immense
gravity of the theme.’
(46) For these reasons the interpretation offered in the main text is preferable to
the alternative interpretation, that the prophecies (θέσϕατα) pronounced by
Melampus were the plan of Zeus that was coming to fulfilment.
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(47) Feeney 1991: 58 likewise describes a converging telos: ‘As the νόος or βουλή
of Zeus reaches its fulfilment (τέλος, telos), so does the plot of an epic.’ But it is
significant that in none of these cases does the telos of Zeus’ νόος or βουλή
correspond to the epic’s final conclusion.
(48) Murnaghan 1997: 23: ‘The opening lines of the Iliad give two apparent
definitions of the poem’s plot’, the mēnis of Achilles and the Dios boulē, and
‘both of these rather abstract formulations appear to correspond to the same
specific course of events, which is set in motion in the first book of the poem…
This scheme or plot (in a literal sense) among the principal divine and human
characters thus appears to define the plot (in a literary sense) of the poem in
which it is narrated.’
(49) Allan 2008: 207: ‘Of course, the primary (local) referent for the Dios boulê is
the plot of the Iliad itself, that is, Zeus’ plan to bring honour to Achilles by
strengthening the Trojans (1.508–9, 11.79, 13.523–5, 16.121, 17.331–2).’
(50) Nagy 1979/1999: 81. Cf. the more recent formulation in Nagy 2003: 27:
‘Moreover, the Iliad prophesies – even at its very beginning – that its own
ultimate telos “fulfilment” will be the same thing as the irrevocable will of Zeus:
Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή ‘and the will of Zeus was reaching fulfilment
[telos]’ (1.5).’
(51) Nagy 1979/1999 e.g. 16–18; Ford 1997: esp. 401–6.
(52) As Bakker 2009: 127 has emphasized, ‘on the stage of orally performed
narrative…no voice, neither the narrator’s nor the character’s, is fictional’.
(53) Cf. Allan 2008: 210–12.
(54) For example, 22.410–11 anticipates Troy’s destruction by means of an apt

simile. Troy’s fall is the last event in the prediction voiced by Zeus at 15.70–1.
Redfield 2001 understands ‘Zeus’ plan’ in the Iliad proem as shorthand for ‘Zeus’
plan as revealed in a prophecy’ about the destruction of Troy.
(55) For the plan to lighten the earth of its burden, see Cypria fr. 1, also
employing the formula Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή. For this story’s possible
relationship to the Iliad, see Kullmann 1956 (who argues that this theme
predates the Iliad), and the rejoinder to Kullmann in Allan 2008: 206–7. See also
Murnaghan 1997: 24–25, including n. 2. Rousseau 2001 sees in the proem an
anticipation of the final destruction of the race of heroes, a plot that he sees as
woven through the entire poem. The conclusion of Demodocus’ first song in the
Odyssey may well refer to this plan, or to the destruction of Troy, or both: τότε
γάρ ῥα κυλίνδετο πήματος ἀρχὴ / Τρωσί τε καὶ Δαναοῖσι Διὸς μεγάλου διὰ
βουλάς (‘for then indeed was rolling the beginning of doom for the Trojans and
Danaans, through the plans of great Zeus’ Od.8.81–2).
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(56) Lynn-George 1988 (‘indeterminacy’); Murnaghan 1997; Clay 1999 (‘all three’
plans together drive the poem’s narrative); Allan 2008 (‘open’); cf. Elmer 2013:
157.
(57) On beginnings, see e.g. Rabel 1997: 35–57; Myers 2014.
(58) Redfield 2001: 474. Note that Hesiod’s tale of Medeius likewise represents
the final action before the switch to Zeus with an imperfect after an aorist:
Μήδειον τέκε παῖδα, τὸν οὔρεσιν ἔτρεϕε Χείρων / Φιλυρίδης· μεγάλου δὲ Διὸς
νόος ἐξετελεῖτο (Hes.Th.1001–2). Contrast aorist ἔλυσε, the penultimate verb in
Odysseus’ tale (Od.11.296).
(59) Redfield 2001: 476.
(60) Redfield 2001: 474.
(61) Rousseau 2001, pursuing another tack, reads the proem’s imagery as
‘figurative’ (141) and connected to destruction of the (race of) heroes (ἡρώων Il.
1.4).
(62) Morrison 1992: 90–2.
(63) Research into the practice of story-tellers in oral traditions reveals the
importance of visualization for remembering the sequence of events in a given
story; see Bakker 2005: 64–5 and Clay 2011: 112–13 on the relevance of the
work of the cognitive psychologist David Rubin for Homer.
(64) Richardson 1990: 31–5; De Jong and Nünlist 2004: 74 n. 19; Lovatt 2013: 39–
45. Shortly, the poet will indeed ‘follow the line of Zeus’ gaze’ to another
character, namely Hector. Nevertheless, the time spent on Zeus’ contemplation
of Sarpedon and the fighting constitutes an extended pause.
(65) In the present case, all four are true: Sarpedon is killed in the fierce fighting
(cf. Hera enjoining Zeus to allow Sarpedon to fall in the κρατερῇ ὑσμίνῃ 16.451),
his death sparks the Lycians to fight harder, with his body as prize, and Zeus
meanwhile makes the fighting especially destructive in his honour (16.567–8).
(66) Note the difference between my use of ‘nucleus’, which is rooted in

Stansbury-O’Donnell’s analysis of vases (see Introduction, pp.14–17), and the
original use of the term by Barthes for narratives. Barthes would describe Zeus’
act of gazing (as of 16.644) as constitutive of a new ‘nucleus’ of action in the
flow of the narrative, because we now see Zeus gazing in our mind’s eye. By
contrast, I am interested in how Zeus’ gaze helps to (re)delineate the nucleus of
the spectacle constructed for us by Homer—much as viewers depicted on vases
help to define a central nucleus of action, as constructed by the vase painter.
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(67) Hera’s conversation with Zeus also implies that the gods as a group will be
watching, and signals that their role affords them some kind of collective
importance in terms of their approval or disapproval.
(68) The battle for the body is first anticipated by Sarpedon himself. Dying, he
bids Glaucus urge the Lycians to Σαρπηδόνος ἀμϕιμάχεσθαι (‘fight around
Sarpedon’16.486), and asks Glaucus to fight ἐμεῦ πέρι (‘over me’ 16.497).
Glaucus follows through, first by urging the Lycians (Σαρπηδόνος ἀμϕιμάχεσθαι
16.533), then by asking Apollo to heal him αὐτὸς τ’ ἀμϕὶ νέκυι κατατεθνηῶτι
μάχωμαι (‘so that I may fight around the perished corpse’ 16.526). When at last
battle is indeed joined around the dead body (σύμβαλον ἀμϕὶ νέκυι
κατατεθνηῶτι μάχεσθαι 16.565), Zeus’ control is emphasized. He stretches
baneful night over the ‘fierce fighting’ (κρατερῇ ὑσμίνῃ 16.567) so that there be
terrible ponos around his son (16.567–8).
(69) Staged that morning by Zeus and the poet (11.1ff—p.30, this chapter), the
day’s fighting continues until Hera sends the sun below the horizon, and the
Achaeans cease from the fighting: παύσαντο δὲ δῖοι Ἀχαιοὶ / ϕυλόπιδος κρατερῆς
καὶ ὁμοιΐου πολέμοιο (18.241–2). See further Chapter 4.
(70) See further Chapters 3 and 4.
(71) On this function of ‘hypothetical observers’, see further Chapter 2, p. 67.
(72) Terracotta neck-amphora attributed to the Medea group, c. 520 BCE, Side B,
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image printed in Stansbury-O’Donnell 2006: 21.
(73) Stansbury-O’Donnell 2006: 20.
(74) Stansbury-O’Donnell 2006: 12–24 distinguishes four classes of spectator,

according to their relationship to the nucleus or ‘kernel’ of action: the ‘invested
spectator’, with ‘a stake in the narrative’, and who may become involved; the
‘interested spectator’ (slightly lower involvement); the ‘detached spectator’ (who
is at least present); and the ‘pure spectator’, who ‘does not belong in the time
and/or place of the central action’. Athena and Hermes in the vase analysed in
the Intorduction are of the first kind.
(75) Stansbury-O’Donnell 2006: 21. The ‘mythological past’ of which he writes is

that depicted on the vase discussed in the Introduction (Figure 0.1),where
Heracles fights a lion. In the Heracles vase, Stansbury-O’Donnell reads the two
unidentified observers as additional examples of ‘pure’ spectators: ‘Their dress,
or lack thereof, is consistent with their being in the time and space of the viewer,
and so they serve as indexes for the viewer of the vase’ (21).
(76) A warrior’s aristeia is a section of an epic poem during which that warrior is
dominant on the battlefield.
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(77) Ledbetter 2003: 11, with bibliography (ibid n. 9); Ledbetter is referring to
the Odyssey as well as the Iliad. See more recently Halliwell 2011: Chapter 2.
(78) Slatkin 2007 is thought-provoking on this topic.
(79) On these terms, see Introduction n. 14 and pp. 103–8.
(80) Διὸς αἴσῃ by Achilles 9.608. The narrator fashions ὑπὲρ Διὸς αἶσαν (17.321)
as a combination of Διὸς αἶσα and ὑπὲρ αἶσαν (examples of the latter include
3.59 and 16.780). For the distinction drawn in both Homeric epics between
mortal ignorance and the privileged view of divine workings granted by the poet,
see, e.g. Lloyd-Jones 1971: 7; Winterbottom 1989: 33; Taalman Kip 2000 passim.
(81) At 16.693 the narrator speaks of ‘the gods’ calling Patroclus to death (Ἔνθα
τίνα πρῶτον τίνα δ’ ὕστατον ἐξενάριξας / Πατρόκλεις, ὅτε δή σε θεοὶ θάνατον
δὲ κάλεσσαν; 16.692–3). Cf. Priam’s assertion that the gods instead of Helen are
to blame for the war (θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν 3.164). Dietrich offers several
examples to demonstrate that Zeus alone or θεοί together can assign a fate
(1967: 322–33), but does not acknowledge the fact that all of his examples are
taken from the speech of a (potentially ignorant) mortal rather than a god or the
narrator.
(82) As Yagamata 1994: 4 points out, the people ‘pray’ (ἠρήσαντο 3.318) and
reach out their hands ‘to the gods’ (θεοῖσι 3.318); but address ‘Zeus’ (3.20):
λαοὶ δ’ ἠρήσαντο, θεοῖσι δὲ χεῖρας ἀνέσχον, / ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν Ἀχαιῶν τε
Τρώων τε· / Ζεῦ πάτερ Ἴδηθεν μεδέων κύδιστε μέγιστε. 6.318–20.
(83) Lycaon says that because destructive Moira (or perhaps a destructive moira)
has placed him in Achilles’ hands he must therefore be hateful to Zeus, ‘who
gave me again to you’: νῦν αὖ με τεῇς ἐν χερσὶν ἔθηκε / μοῖρ’ ὀλοή· μέλλω που
ἀπεχθέσθαι Διὶ πατρί, / ὅς με σοὶ αὖτις δῶκε 21.82–4. Zeus and moira appear to
be interchangeable here. Cf. Dietrich 1967: 215.
(84) Hera speaks of Achilles’ life having been spun out by a personified Aisa:
αἶσα / γιγνομένῳ ἐπένησε λίνῳ ὅτε μιν τέκε μήτηρ 20.125–8. Hecuba apparently
uses the same traditional language as Hera when she refers to Hector’s lot spun
out by a personified Moira: τῷ δ’ ὥς ποθι Μοῖρα κραταιὴ / γιγνομένῳ ἐπένησε
λίνῳ, ὅτε μιν τέκον αὐτή 24.209–12.
(85) E.g., the Trojans fighting the Achaeans for Patroclus’ corpse vow to fight
even if ‘it is allotted (moira) that all alike die beside this man’ (…εἰ καὶ μοῖρα
παρ’ ἀνέρι τῷδε δαμῆναι / πάντας ὁμῶς 17.421–2).
(86) ὡς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι / ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις· αὐτοὶ δέ τ’

ἀκηδέες εἰσί. / δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει / δώρων οἷα δίδωσι
κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων· / ᾧ μέν κ’ ἀμμίξας δώῃ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος…24.525–9.
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(87) Elmer 2013 is now indispensable on this question. Elmer’s approach to these
scenes differs from mine in several ways: first and foremost, Elmer’s book looks
at divine decision-making as it relates to mortal decision-making, while I look at
divine decision-making as it relates to divine viewing. But the results of Elmer’s
book and the present study converge in certain ways; both, for instance, see the
text implicitly involving Homeric audiences in decision-making scenes.
(88) Bremer 1987: 34. The reference is to the theomachia, when Zeus sends the
gods to the battlefield μὴ καὶ τεῖχος ὑπέρμορον ἐξαλαπάξῃ (‘lest [Achilles] even
tear down the wall [i.e. of Troy] beyond what has been allotted (hypermoron)’
20.30). Cf. Nagy 1979/99: 40 on the Odyssey: ‘The poet Demodocus lives up to
the challenge of Odysseus that he recite the story of the Trojan Horse κατὰ
μοῖραν “according to destiny (viii 496).” Within the conventions of epic
composition, an incident that is untraditional would be ὑπὲρ μοῖραν “beyond
destiny.”’
(89) Richardson 1990: 194. Marks 2008 explores the significance of terms and
expressions ‘commonly translated as “fate”’ (p. 6 n. 4) in the Odyssey, while
making the larger argument that Zeus’ decision-making in the Odyssey tracks
the poem’s navigation of the (then extant) tradition of stories about the heroes’
returns from Troy.
(90) Aristotle criticizes what he sees as a deus ex machina solution to the

stampede for the ships at Il.2.155ff, halted by Hera and Athena: ϕανερὸν οὖν ὅτι
καὶ τὰς λύσεις τῶν μύθων ἐξ αὐτοῦ δεῖ τοῦ μύθου συμβαίνειν, καὶ μὴ ὥσπερ ἐν
τῇ Μηδείᾳ ἀπὸ μηχανῆς καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἰλιάδι τὰ περὶ τὸν ἀπόπλουν. ‘It is clear
therefore that the resolutions of the stories should happen through the story
itself, not as in the Medea from the mechanē, and in the Iliad in the episode
concerning departure by ship.’ Poet.1454a37–b2. Similarly, Dietrich 1967: 297–8
comments: ‘[The Olympian gods] become a machine, always at the poet’s
disposal, who uses their superhuman strength to impose his will on the action of
the poem. This machine is a convenient tool, often detrimental to the art of the
epic…’ Cf. Bremer 1987: 32 on Nilsson et al. Bremer himself takes a more
neutral stand (see his comments, ibid 34).
(91) Cf. the salient remarks of Ledbetter 2013: 13: ‘The fundamental question the
critic asks becomes not how does Homer view poetry, but rather how does
Homer want his poetry to be viewed, and why does he want his audience to view
it that way.’ Ledbetter sees Homer wanting his audience to understand their
experience as acquisition of a ‘kind of divine knowledge that has the immediacy
and pleasure of sensory experience’ (ibid).
(92) The passages in 4, 16, and 22 are of course closely related as ‘type’ scenes,
sharing a good deal of language. I include the passage in 20 as well, because
there too Zeus suggests that moira need not be final, and thereby prompts a
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response from his listeners: in this case, not an angry retort from Hera or
Athena, but a descent en masse to Troy.
(93) Cf. Ready 2012: 79: ‘To the extent that he guides the story in each epic, Zeus
adopts an authorial stance’ (79), in a lucid discussion to which I owe the
Schadewaldt reference in n. 95. Ready uses ‘story’ in a technical narratological
sense: the ‘story’ denotes the events of the narrative as abstracted and
reconstituted into chronological order (rather than in the order in which they
are made known to the narratee via the narrator’s discourse). Ready further
argues that Zeus’ control of analogical omens is suggestive of an authorial role
(ibid 79–81).
(94) For instance, Rabel 1997 distinguishes contrasting points of view within the
Iliad, from which the main plot is the story of the Trojan War (in the eyes of the
Trojans and Achaeans) or else the story of Achilles’ wrath (from the point of view
of the ‘Muse-narrator’).
(95) Schadewaldt 1938: 110 ‘das Programm des Dichters für die Schlacht’—
emphasis mine (cited in Ready 2012: 75 n. 97).
(96) Bremer 1987; de Jong 1987. Focalization, to offer a gross oversimplification

sufficient for present purposes, is the technique by which a narrator narrates
from a particular character’s perspective. In fact, narratologists do not agree on
what constitutes focalization. Mieke Bal’s account of focalization remains the
important one for Homerists because of its adoption by Irene de Jong for her
influential 1987 monograph Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the
Story in the Iliad.
(97) E.g. Janko 1994: 3: ‘But the bard claims a special vision, and can always say
which deity is involved, showing us the world through the eyes of the gods
themselves.’
(98) An example is Zeus’ statement at 20.23 that he is going to take pleasure in

watching the gods fight. Pucci calls this ‘mediation’, and explains his reasoning
this way: for ‘certainly listeners and readers of the narrative cannot be expected
to have a different reaction’ than Zeus.
(99) Pucci 2002: 31: ‘Of course [the gods] act as focalizers or mediators of
readers’ attitudes, tensions, and participation. Accordingly, when Zeus begins
the talk with a lamenting expression (22.168f.): “ὢ πόποι, he is a dear man
(ϕίλον), the one I see with my eyes pursued around the walls! My heart is
distressed,” how can the heart of the reader not feel the same pity and sympathy
for Hector?’ (emphasis added).
(100) The bT scholia at 4.4: ἀπρεπές ϕασιν, εἰ τέρπει τοὺς θεοὺς πολέμων θέα.
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(101) Cf. the astute caution of Bremer 1987: 41–2: ‘the real audience…is invited
to share the focalization of [the gods]…and at the same time to feel that it is only
a partial appreciation of what is going on.’
(102) To ‘identify’ with a character can mean many things. Gervais 2013, in an
article comparing violence in Quentin Tarantino’s films to violence in Lucan,
makes excellent use of Murray Smith’s typology of ‘identification’. The gods, by
Smith’s schema, might prompt one kind of sympathetic response,
‘alignment’ (i.e. focalization), without a second kind, ‘allegiance’ (which is ‘based
on the moral evaluation of a character’). The experience of a character’s
emotions by a consumer of narrative art (which Smith calls ‘emotional
simulation’) can likewise occur in isolation from feelings of sympathy for that
character. While I have not adopted the terminology for the present project, I
have learned much from both the typology and Gervais’ use of it.
(103) See Slatkin 1991 on the exceptional role of Thetis.
(104) Dallenbach 1989: 8. The metaphor was created by André Gide and is
derived from heraldry: to inscribe an image en abyme is to place it in the shield’s
centre.
(105) De Jong 1985 reads Achilles’ speech to his mother at 1.366–92 as a ‘mirror’
of the tale that the poet just told his audience; Alden 2000 is a monograph
devoted to arguing that shorter narratives within the Iliad reflect on the main
narrative, as a ‘coded reference’ (13); Rengakos 2006 looks at the funeral games
in Book 23 as a mise en abyme of themes from the main plot.
(106) See the interesting work of Becker 1995 on the Shield of Achilles in Iliad
18. ‘I treat ekphrasis as a mise en abîme of the poetics, not just of the themes of
the Iliad: in ekphrasis not only does the bard become one of us, an audience, but
also the description itself, metonymically, becomes a model for the poem’ (5).
Rinon 2008: 116–18 reads Demodocus’ first song as a mise en abyme of ‘the
interepic dialogue of the Odyssey with the Iliad’.
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The Duel and the Daïs: Iliadic Warfare as Spectacle

on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers

Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
The Duel and the Daïs: Iliadic Warfare as

Spectacle
Tobias Myers
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198842354.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 2 explores how the Olympians and the Iliad’s audience are positioned as
viewers for the warfare in Books 1–4, and their roles defined. The first section
focuses on the gods. Homer initially defines the gods’ role as viewers by drawing
on two specific paradigms of live event: entertainment at a daïs (banquet), and
the formal duel. Each of these paradigms carries its own suggestions as to the
nature of the event, its stakes, and the relationship between viewer and action.
As entertainment accompanying a daïs, the warfare may generate pleasure
(terpein) for viewers whose critical role is to praise or blame the dramatic figure
pulling the strings. As a spectacle modelled on the formal duel, the warfare is
observed by implicated, partisan viewers, who are themselves a part of the
conflict, and can become actors by entering the central space. Rich tension is
generated by the combination of these paradigms. The chapter’s second section
reads the opening of Book 4, in which the gods watch a duel from their daïs, as a
mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered by the Iliad to its listeners. On
the one hand, the combination of duel and daïs shapes audience understanding
of the kind of spectacle that they, too, are witnessing, and their own relationship
to the action. On the other hand, the gods’ particular responses—both to the
events on the ground and to their staging and direction—dramatize possible
responses on the part of Homer’s audience.
Keywords: daïs, duel, battlefield, warfare, Helen, mise en abyme, terpein, pleasure, complicity
Song is being. For the god, it is easy.
Page 1 of 42
The Duel and the Daïs: Iliadic Warfare as Spectacle
But when do we exist? When does he turn
toward our existence the earth and the stars?
Rainer Marie Rilke1
Come here, dear girl, to see the theskela erga
of horse-taming Trojans and bronze-greaved Achaeans.
Iris2
The previous chapter argued that the Iliad’s proem anticipates certain key
elements of the battlefield spectacle to come: its central action (warfare and the
desecration of corpses), and its staging and direction (with Zeus and the poet as
joint orchestrators of the battlefield conflict). While the agency of Zeus and that
of the poet are highlighted in various ways throughout the text, they overlap
specifically in respect to their control of the warfare. Such moments of overlap
heighten excitement during performance, as the ‘now’ of performance and the
‘now’ of mythic Troy become momentarily indistinguishable.
The present chapter focuses on viewership.3 It explores how the Olympians and
the Iliad’s audience are positioned as viewers for the warfare in Books 1–4, and
their roles defined. Of course, the (p.66) gods do not only see warfare, and the
poet makes vivid to his audience much more than just the battle scenes. Yet in
practice, the poet restricts his use of the divine viewing motif almost entirely to
military and funerary contexts—and the latter, as we will see in later chapters,
are in fact integrated into the military contests so as to create the impression of
a single Iliadic spectacle centred on both killing and memorialization of the
dead. As a result, passages that show correspondence between the gods’
viewing role and that of the extratextual audience come overwhelmingly in the
context of this battlefield spectacle. As Zeus’ and other divine gazes make
evident a ‘nucleus’ of action, an additional emphasis on the audience’s own
visual engagement with the scene contributes to the illusion that all parties—
gods, poet, and audience—are engaged in observing the same spectacle.
The chapter’s first section focuses on the gods. Homer initially defines the gods’
role as viewers by drawing on two specific paradigms of live event:
entertainment at a daïs (banquet), and the formal duel. Each of these paradigms
carries its own suggestions as to the nature and purpose of the event, what is at
stake, and the relationship between viewer and action. As the entertainment
accompanying a daïs, the warfare may generate pleasure (terpein) for viewers
whose critical role is to praise or blame the dramatic figure who is pulling the
strings. As a spectacle modelled on the formal duel, the warfare is observed by
implicated, partisan viewers, who are themselves a part of the conflict they view,
and can become actors by entering the central space. The rich tension
Page 2 of 42
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Note for a time
capsule
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Note for a time capsule
Author: Edward Wellen
Illustrator: Richard Kluga
Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71869]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTE FOR A

TIME CAPSULE ***
NOTE FOR A TIME CAPSULE
By EDWARD WELLEN
Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA
Yes, I know, the rating services probably never call

you up. But they call me up twenty times a week!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity March 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I take it you sociologists living in what to me is the future (I take it
there's a future, a future with a place for sociologists) will note the
unlikely revolution in taste now going on. For your information, then,
here's why the rating services are reflecting a sudden upping from
the pelvis to the cortex—just in case this will have become a cause
for wild surmise.
You probably know what the rating services are ("were," to you; but I
don't want to tense this document up). Most people nowadays don't
know about the rating services; they know of them.
Every so often I hear someone say darkly, "I don't know about those
polls. I've never had a call from them and no one I know has ever
had a call from them."
I keep quiet or mumble something noncommittal. I could say,
truthfully, "I do know about those polls. They ring me up more than
twenty times a week." I could say that but I don't.
Not so much because I don't want to seem a crackpot or a liar as
because I don't want to spoil a good thing. Or at least what I think is
a good thing—and for the time being what I think is a good thing is
what the world thinks is a good thing.
Now, in order for you to get the picture you must understand that the
New York metropolitan area fashions the literary and musical fads of
the United States and the United States by example and by
infiltration via writings and movies and recordings fashions the fads
of the world. And the New York metropolitan area goes by the
opinions I frame.
It probably seems strange to you that I, in any amassing of statistics
merely one digit in the neighborhood of the decimal point, can claim
to exert such far-reaching influence.
But I've seen much the same sort of thing in my work as a CPA.
Someone possessing relatively few shares in a holding company
may exercise an inordinate amount of power over the national
economy.
An analogous set of operations makes it possible for me to be an
esthetic shot of digitalis in the body politic. That's why Bartok's
Mikrokosmos is at this writing the top tune and why archaeology
professor Dr. Loob is high man on the polls with his TV show Dig
This! and why the world has taken such a turn that you may very
likely be calling this the Day of the Egghead.
But you're most likely asking at this point, "Why, in the name of
statistical probability, did this character get so many calls when so
many people got none?" And your next thought is, "Or did he? Was
he a paranoiac?"
Here's my answer to your second question. I'm certainly not
imagining any of this. You're bound to come upon some signs of
these times and know what I've said about the revolution in taste is
true. Otherwise there'd be no point in my setting this down or in your
reading it.
The hard part is to convince you that the rest of it—about my role—is
true. The trouble is there's nothing about me personally that would
help me convince you. There's nothing uncommon about me except
that my tastes were previously uncommon.
As I mentioned, I'm a CPA. I live in a suburb of New York City. I have
an office in the city. I'm really semi-retired and take care of only a few
old business friends, so my listing in the Manhattan phone directory
doesn't include the terms CPA or ofc. I have a commutation book
and the usual gripes against the NYNH&H. As a matter of fact I'm
writing this while commuting and you'll have to blame not me but the
roadbed and the rolling stock for any of this you may find difficult to
decipher, for really I have a very neat handwriting. Although there's
no noticeable pressure of work I stay on at my office after the girl's
quitting time. (She still chews gum, but all day yesterday she was
humming Bartok's Mikrokosmos.) I balance books until the line at the
bottom of the column becomes a bongo board on a decimal point
and then I squeeze my eyes and shake my head and go home.
I live alone. I'm a widower. I have one daughter. Thank goodness
she's grown, married, and living in a place of her own, so there's no
one to tie up the phone. I've given up frequenting the haunts of my
old cronies. Though I miss their argumentative companionship I take
comfort in the fact that I'm furthering our common interests. I don't
give a hang that my lawn needs mowing; let the wind violin through
the grass—I'm staying near the phone.
It's between six and seven in the evening at the office and between
eight and midnight at home that I receive the calls.
That brings me to your first question—about why I consistently get
so many calls when so many people get none.
Let me make it clear at once that even if the polls were buyable or
fixable, and I'm not suggesting they are, I haven't the means to buy
or the electronic knowledge to fix supposedly random calls. Besides,
I'm fairly ethical.
Then what's the answer?
Naturally I've given this phenomenon more than a bit of thought, and
I've formulated a theory to explain—at least to my satisfaction—why
what's happening's happening. I believe the drawing power of my
phone numbers inheres in the nature of number.
Now don't go getting hot under the collar—if you're still wearing
collars—before you hear me out.
I'm not talking about numerology or any such mystical hocus-pocus.
I'm talking about the psychopathology of everyday life. That's what's
skewing and skewering the law of probabilities.
I know this demands explaining, so I'll be specific.
Apart from these calls from the rating services, I keep receiving calls
on my home phone from people who set out to dial a certain
undertaker—I beg his pardon, funeral director. We have the same
exchange, in fact his number differs from mine only in that the first of
his last four digits is a zero while my corresponding one is a nine.
Of course by now you've put your finger on it. These people are
dialing the under—funeral director because, in the current
colloquialism, someone's number's up. They misdial because they're
unconsciously saying nein to the zero of death.
I've analyzed both my home phone number and my office phone
number in this fashion, figuring out what their components connote
singly and as gestalts. And I can see why these fortuitous
combinings command attention, why these numbers leap out of the
directory pages right at you. Privately I call such a number a
common denominator with a way of accreting its numerator.
I hope you're not laughing at me.
After all, when you remember what number is, what's happening
follows naturally. Number's a language we use to blaze our way
through the wood of reality. Without number we couldn't say what is
more or less probable, we couldn't signpost our path. But using
number is like trying to detect the emission of a photon without
having to receive that photon. The difficulty lies in trying to get
number at least one remove from the font of all language—the
human mind. Possibly we'll come closest to order, be at one with
reality, when we can order number—at the level of statistical
probability—to be truly random, at one with chaos.
At any rate, there you have it. I'd like to go into greater detail but I'm
afraid to.
Before my phone numbers up and atted 'em I was content merely to
tune out the noisome and the fulsome and sigh to myself, "That's life.
You ask for beer and get water."
That is, I thought I was content.
It's only now that I'm getting beer with an egg in it that I realize how
passionately I hated the way things were and how passionately I'd
hate to have to go back to that way.
I don't know how long this phenomenon will go on but while it lasts I
mean to make the most of it.
I unashamedly enjoy watching the expression of bewildered
enthusiasm on everyone's face. That expression is there because
everyone listens to and looks at what the polls tell him is popular and
because everyone tells himself he likes it because "everyone" likes
it.
But in some respects my feelings are more uncertain. I'm glad and at
the same time sorry for the longhair musicians. It seems more
embarrassing than pleasing to them to find themselves suddenly the
idols of bobby-soxers. I try not to think of Stravinsky barricading
himself against the adulating adolescents souveniring him to his
underwear.
As you can see, I've had to harden my heart. (It's tempting to say I've
had to become number.) And I intend to be even more ruthless.
I'm planning, for example, to place on the Hit Parade Dhaly's
Concerto in Alpha Wave for Oscillograph and Woodwinds.
That's why I'm being exceedingly careful to leave nothing to chance.
Though this document is sort of a hostage to fortune, I'm taking into
account the possibility that I might lose it while commuting and that it
might fall into the hands of some unsympathetic contemporary. So
I'm not writing down my phone numbers or my name. I want to keep
the lines clear for the pollsters.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTE FOR A
TIME CAPSULE ***
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Homers Divine Audience The Iliads Reception On Mount Olympus Tobias Myers Full Chapter

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Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's

Reception on Mount Olympus Tobias

Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception

Print publication date: 2019

(p.i) Homer’s Divine Audience (p.ii)

(p.iii) Homer’s Divine Audience

(p.iv) Copyright Page

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

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© Tobias Myers 2019

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First Edition published in 2019

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Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception

Print publication date: 2019

for Nina (p.vi)

Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception

Print publication date: 2019

Several classicists offered encouragement, comments, and advice, mostly from

I thank my parents for always encouraging honest exploration, and my siblings

Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception

Print publication date: 2019

(p.xiii) List of Figures

0.1. Sixth-century Attic black-figure amphora depicting Heracles

Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception

Print publication date: 2019

Zeus, the Poet, and Vision

Abstract and Keywords

A god can do it. But tell me, how

might a man follow through the narrow lyre?

Rainer Marie Rilke1

It is right for me to sing to you as to a god.

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

(p.28) Sing, goddess, the wrath of the son of Peleus, Achilles –

Jenny Strauss Clay, in a study illuminating the remarkable consistency of the

1.1. The Proem’s Promise

ἔϕριξεν δὲ μάχη ϕθισίμβροτος ἐγχείῃσι

in a language of harm—amerdo, to ruin or damage. It is as though, in this one

Reflection on this paradox is evident in the succeeding statement: only someone

1.1.2. Dios d’eteleieto boulē

ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ μῆνές τε καὶ ἡμέραι ἐξετελεῦντο

A nearly equivalent formula is used in Hesiod’s Theogony to conclude a story of

Contemporary criticism loves to find reflexivity in art. It has become common

One could—joining many critics—detect in this Dios boulē a reference to Zeus’

The Iliad’s proem poses particularly stiff resistance to being read as an

James Morrison has argued that the proem’s carrion-eaters constitute an

It is perfectly possible that an aoidos at the beginning of his performance might

1.2. Realizing the Proem’s Promise: An Illustrative Example from Book 16

ὣς ἄρα τοὶ περὶ νεκρὸν ὁμίλεον, οὐδέ ποτε Ζεὺς

It often happens in the Iliad that an extended description of fighting concludes

τῶν δ᾽ ὥς τε δρυτόμων ἀνδρῶν ὀρυμαγδὸς ὀρώρει

And from [the combatants] a din arose – as of tree-cutters,

At the moment that Zeus is introduced, it becomes possible to understand in

ἀλλὰ κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς αἰὲν ὅρα καὶ ϕράζετο θυμῷ,

But continually he was looking at them and pondering in his thymos,

1.3. The Gods and Metapoetics