Erwin COOK Homeric akhos and Agamemnon’s Test of the Army in Iliad Book 2
The Diapeira episode from Iliad Book 2 in which Agamemnon tests his men is remarkable in many respects, not the least of them being the sheer number of interpretive cruces found within it. In my paper I will offer an integrated reading of the episode based on the semantics and thematics of akhos, “grief”, in Homer. My larger findings help resolve an ancient crux at 2.171, where Homer apparently feels compelled to explain why Odysseus is not attempting to launch his ship, and then identifies akhos as the reason for his inaction (Kirk 1985, ad loc). Homer clearly sign-posts the nature of Odysseus’ akhos as grief over loss of timê in Athene’s subsequent speech to him, but the reference is proleptic and has consequently eluded later commentators.
I begin by distinguishing between two complementary types of akhos, and go on to show that the episode is organized by intersecting versions of a thematic pattern that I reconstruct from the comparanda, chiefly Books 1, 8, 9 and 15 of the Iliad. The first type of akhos is caused by extrinsic loss, most commonly of philoi, family and friends, who may be dead or simply absent. Responses to such loss vary from yearning to lamentation and even flight for home. The second type of akhos is caused by loss of timê, honor and status, either by an individual or the group to which he belongs.
This second type of akhos initiates a common narrative pattern that meets A. Lord’s definition of a theme and can be usefully classified as such (Lord 1960, 68). In this theme, an opponent typically gains the advantage in a struggle. He then seals his advantage with a boast, or his adversary may imagine him as doing so. The injured party, or a philos, experiences akhos over a loss of timê, which he may also consider to be unjustified. His akhos then excites his thumos which causes him to respond impulsively, whether by retaliating or by continuing to fight. In cases where the individual is attempting to preserve his own timê, this impulsive response is viewed as foolhardy and he must be restrained and persuaded to follow a reasoned course of action. Reason is embodied in the person of a wise counselor, whose advice can be seen at some level as reflecting the internal thought processes of the character experiencing akhos. The character invariably faces a choice between fighting and withdrawing, although which of these choices is viewed as correct may vary.
The seeds of both types of akhos are to be found in Agamemnon’s speech before the troops. Specifically, Agamemnon appeals to the army’s akhos in order to persuade them to flee for home, in the expectation that the gerontes will use his own words to transform their akhos into grief over loss of timê. When the flight begins, however, it is a gerôn, Odysseus, who feels akhos over the suddenly real prospect of losing timê before he recovers his composure and restrains the troops as Agamemnon had hoped. Thus, when Athene appears to him and warns of the Trojans’ boasting if the Greeks sail for home, she supplies the cause of an akhos from which Odysseus is already suffering. Such prolepses are a natural by-product of double motivation (Lesky 1961), and to audiences accustomed to having a character’s actions explained in terms of both personal and divine agency it would have made very easy sense indeed.
The Diapeira thus interweaves a scene in which akhos produces an impulse to flee with another in which akhos produces an impulse to fight. The impulse to flee in the first theme becomes what the impulse to fight opposes in the second. The story line is thus: Agamemnon’s tests the army by initiating an akhos-theme in the expectation that the gerontes will complete it by assuming the role of counselor and restraining their men ‘with words’. The army’s akhos, however, is so powerful, and their response to it so overwhelming, that the gerontes are unable to perform their intended function and complete the theme. Odysseus experiences this same akhos, but realizes that if the army sails for home the entire war will become a Trojan boast at Greek expense, a Trojan Iliad that will be sung for generations to come. This same realization, suggested to him by Agamemnon’s speech and directly represented by divine epiphany and parainesis, initiates a new akhos-theme, over loss of timê, that prevents him from laying hold of his own ship and allows him to complete the first theme by restraining the army’s flight.
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