hector's white bones in soft robes of purple

thinking about heroes wishing to switch places……..

[…] when Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles, he addresses Achilles as “best of the Achaeans”. But the Odyssey then has Achilles saying that he would rather be alive and the lowliest of serfs than to be dead and the kingliest of shades. […] Achilles seems ready to trade places with Odysseus, whose safe homecoming will be marked by a painful transitional phase at the very lowest levels of the social order. The words of Achilles in the first nekuia are ironically conjuring up the glorious days of the Iliad when he had said:

“I have lost a safe return home [nostos], but I will have unfailing glory [kleos].” (IX 413)

The destiny of the Odyssey is that Odysseus shall have a nostos, ‘safe return home’. From the retrospective vantage point of the Odyssey, Achilles would trade his kleos for a nostos. It is as if he now would trade an Iliad for an Odyssey. By contrast, at a moment when Odysseus is sure that he will perish in the stormy sea, he wishes that he had died at Troy: “…and then the Achaeans would have carried on my kleos.” (v 308-311)

From Gregory Nagy’s The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the hero in ancient Greek poetry (1979)

no more nestor slander! “his speeches are so random and nonsensical!” genuinely they always hold some pertinent lesson or example he wants the younger commanders to consider and follow. he’s not only a main advisor of the greek campaign, but also their main historian (and when you consider that he has outlived generations you realize just how powerful that is, because he gets to decide how those stories are framed and conveyed, as the sole surviving witness of so many heroic feats and losses! history may be decided by the victors, but when those victors eventually die it is nestor who gets the final say).

“he’s always bragging about how strong and brave he was in his youth, it’s so annoying”. idk, isn’t there something achingly human in his grief at (and almost recurring realizations of) inhabiting an increasingly deteriorating body? in his self-consciousness of not being able to participate among the younger men he advises? no one who knew nestor in his prime are alive anymore, he is the only custodian of his own story as well as those of his past comrades.

“he’s so long-winded!” yes, famously so! and i love that it’s such a recognizable way for elders to behave, even centuries later. nestor is not a warrior or argonaut or adventurer anymore, his words and wisdom are all he has left to contribute. he knows he’s getting towards the end of his own lifespan, and when he dies his perspective (three times the life experience of anyone else!) will be lost, so he makes sure to hold the floor and share his stories/histories when he can, for as long as he can. of course he does.

oooh i love reading interpretations i haven’t considered before! you know that part in book 9 of the iliad when the embassy finds achilles at his tent with the lyre, before he spots them:

With the lyre he was bringing pleasure to his heart,
singing about the celebrated deeds of men.
Patroclus, his sole companion, sat there facing him,
waiting in silence until Achilles finished singing.

and it’s a wonderful little moment of recursion in the epic where achilles acts as a rhapsode of heroic songs within a song of heroes performed by a rhapsode

the thing is, i’ve always read the end of that line as patroclus calmly waiting for achilles to finish his song so they can proceed with some other planned activity (a meal or whatever). but i’m reading gregory nagy who interprets that line as patroclus waiting for his turn to sing, and to continue the unnamed epic narrative that they both presumably know. taking turns performing an epic!

i don’t know how common that interpretation is, but the concept is very appealing to me. imagining that patroclus is not a passive listener in that moment, but a collaborative storyteller, ready to take over when achilles needs to rest his voice. does their song change slightly from one to the other, are details added or changed to engage each other? it becomes a nod to the tradition of oral storytelling itself, the tradition that created the iliad

Achilles and Hector. Illustration by John Buckland-Wright for the 1950 Folio Society edition of the Iliad.

i just learned about Men in Aïda by David Melnick, a purely homophonic translation of book 1 of the Iliad, which in english becomes a very disjointed story about a gay bath house

so from the start of the proem of the Iliad:

mēnin aeide theā pēlēiadeō Akhilēos
oulomenēn, he mūri’ Akhaiois alge’ ethēke,
pollās d’ iphthīmous psukhas Aidi proiapsen

melnick’s transcription becomes:

Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, emery Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if Team Mousse suck, as Aida, pro, yaps in.

here’s an archive.org link to the book if you wanna check out this little oddity yourself

on this reread of the iliad (lattimore translation) i just genuinely appreciate how neatly and efficiently nestor is first introduced right in the middle of a dramatic scene:

Nestor the fair-spoken rose up, the lucid speaker of Pylos, from whose lips the streams of words ran sweeter than honey. In his time two generations of mortal men had perished, those who had grown up with him and they who had been born to these in sacred Pylos, and he was king in the third age.

he’s good at talking and he’s fully outlived two generations so far. bam there’s your nestor

i’ve noticed just how often achilles’ dragging of hector’s corpse is framed mostly as an act of extreme disrespect, or only some brutal show of triumph. personally i think that’s underselling both achilles’ intention and what the trojans must be thinking as they watch it happen.

hector’s corpse is divinely protected so it can’t be damaged by the greeks after death; all that effectively happens in the iliad is that his body gets dirty. but under normal circumstances (and i’m not gonna impose realism on mythology, but the iliad is famously detailed when it comes to bodily trauma), the physical reality of dragging a corpse along stony ground for miles would be severe disfigurement and dismemberment. first the skin would wear off, then soft tissues, then extremities would start to detach. i think the iliad’s original audience would be aware of that as an intended outcome.

achilles (who doesn’t yet know that hector’s body has been granted divine stasis) doesn’t just want to parade his enemy’s corpse around, he wants to tear it apart (“i only wish that this fury inside my heart would drive me to carve you to pieces and eat your flesh raw…”), he wants it to not resemble a human anymore. he wants hector’s blood and flesh to circle the city of troy. he wants to make it impossible for hector’s family to gather the pieces of him to cremate and that way hector’s spirit won’t find passage into the underworld. that’s what the gods are preventing from happening, they’re not just keeping the corpse pretty for priam to pick up later.

Sarpédon (1874) by Henri Lévy

Zeus mourns the death of his son Sarpedon, killed by Patroclus (not pictured). Death (Thanatos) and Sleep (Hypnos) carry the corpse.

it’s wild to me to learn that we have ancient commentaries (T scholiast) pointing out the significance of diomedes deliberately not naming his father when he lists his genealogy in book 14 of the iliad

wild because in all editions i know, diomedes DOES name tydeus in that scene, and the respectful way he talks about him informs a lot of how i view diomedes as a character. but already in ancient times there were apparently variants of the iliad in circulation where diomedes’ speech about his forefathers DIDN’T have a line going–

I declare that I am by birth from a noble father, Tydeus, whom the heaped earth has covered in Thebes.

(how quickly and unprompted he brings up his father’s nobility and proper burial! it’s like he wants to get ahead of anyone who might point out that tydeus died in a cursed campaign after he completely dishonoured himself through cannibalism, and the king of thebes famously denied the soldiers burial, at least for some time)

excising that line makes the rest of his speech more careful and precise. imagine this is the beginning of his speech instead of the continuation of the previous line:

There were three blameless sons born to Portheus, and they lived in Pleuron and steep Calydon: Agrios and Melas, and the third, Oeneus the horseman, the father of my father. In manliness he surpassed them.

(tydeus is unnamed and uncharacterized, only there as a practical biological link between tydeus and his blameless grandfather)

i’m so fascinated by an iliadic diomedes who is eager to paint his father as a noble hero, and i am equally fascinated by an iliadic diomedes who self-consciously skips his father when talking about his family tree. both of those versions have so much, and different, texture! another one of those moments of pondering the countless variants that have existed of the iliad through the millennia, even if it’s frustrating that we can’t ever know some One True Version

everyone shhh for a second and look at this ink doodle of diomedes and glaucus hugging by 18th century painter antoine-jean gros