Donna WILSON In the Name of the Father: ransom and the rhetoric of reparation in Iliad 9

In Iliad 9, the Greeks are reduced to desperate straits, which Agamemnon ascribes to Zeus-sent atê. Nestor, however, asserts a connection between the seizure of Briseis and the Greek defeat. He urges Agamemnon to send Achilles gifts, accompanied by soothing words, and thereby induce him to return to the fighting. Agamemnon agrees to offer apoina, accompanied not by soothing words but by a demand for subordination. Previous scholarship has found it difficult to reconcile Agamemnon's 'indemnity' with his harsh words. Recent anthropological analysis offers a more satisfactory account of matters by demonstrating that Agamemnon's gifts are part of a strategy of domination in a social system in which rank is fluid and under constant negotiation. In this paper, I use typological analysis of exchanges within the poem to define the type of compensatory exchange to which Agamemnon's offer conforms. I provide a corresponding account of Agamemnon's demand for subordination and, further, propose that the embassy speeches may be seen as stratagems for constructing the view that the emissaries wish Achilles to take of Agamemnon's actual offer.

Agamemnon does not offer reparation, or, to use the Homeric term, poinê. What he offers is ransom, apoina, for the lives of the Greek army. The distinction is not "merely semantic"; it rests on a difference in the social-symbolic function of two types of compensatory exchange in Homeric society. Agamemnon offers apoina because it allows him to mitigate his loss of personal status and, moreover, enables him to figure himself in the role of the father. The embassy's project, demonstrated in Phoinix' story of the Litai and Atê, is thus to appropriate Agamemnon's gifts and, at the same time, to disguise them by supplying the soothing words Agamemnon had eschewed. Achilles, however, responds to the offer of ransom rather than to the embassy's rhetoric. Previous scholarship has regularly figured Achilles' heroic identity in accordance with his rejection of material compensation. Achilles' heroic identity does not, however, turn on rejection of material poinê. Instead, the poem evinces a thematic unity in which it poses the question of whether its hero(es) will exercise restraint in victory, demonstrated by a willingness to accept apoina. In this, Achilles, in programmatic contrast to Agamemnon, ultimately succeeds.