The following essay is written as a companion to a lecture series in the Myths of Greece and Rome course at the University at Albany by Daniel Gremmler. It follows the translation and line numbering ofThe Essential Iliad (Hackett, 2000) and The Essential Homer (Hackett, 2000).
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Book 2 is perhaps most famous for its “Catalogue of Ships,” which details each chieftain, the kingdom he rules, and the number of men (ships) he commands. Although that is valuable information, our interest lies elsewhere: 1) We will investigate the relationship between humans and gods in the Homeric world; and 2) We will begin to explore the way in which the poem deploys its literary foils.
Book 1 taught us that there are certain expectations about the interactions between gods and humans in Homeric epic. These expectations can be loosely categorized according to three polarities that guide the Greeks’ understanding of the relationship between gods and humans:
Humans are ignorant in comparison to the gods. We can extrapolate this further: human knowledge is empirical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is gathered through observation (the senses) and experimentation. Empirical knowledge is exploratory; it relies on a limited and fluctuating horizon. In other words, it is limited by our (very human) senses, but we know there is more beyond what we can see, smell, hear, etc. at any given moment. That is why scientific knowledge is in a perpetual state of change, and that scientific facts, no matter how repeatable their outcomes may be, are referred to as theories rather than facts. As empirical data changes, so does empirical knowledge. The possibility always exists that new data may be uncovered to change what we know or how we know it.
Divine knowledge, by contrast, is absolute. There is nothing to learn beyond or behind it. Nor is there the possibility of any new data set that can augment or refute divine knowledge. In contrast to empirical knowledge, divine knowledge is unchanging and unquestionable. It does not depend on the limited capacity of the individual’s or group’s collective senses. At the risk of being reductive, that is why faith-based knowledge is often referred to as “zealotry” by those who do not believe it. However, if one believes or trusts their knowledge as absolute (which all divine knowledge is), then one tends to be unwilling to compromise or entertain challenges to that knowledge set. Pushed to its logical limits, this is one explanation for inter-religious violence. However, this speculation is based on empirical knowledge, so it is at best only a theory. ;-)
Thus, human knowledge (empirical) falls short in comparison to divine knowledge (absolute). It is, by comparison, ignorant. Humans are, therefore, ignorant. Only the gods possess abiding knowledge. This divide is a constant tension throughout Greek mythology.
A mortal is one who dies. An immortal is one who does not die. The difference is obvious but deeply meaningful. The Greeks had a word for gods (theoi). They had a word for humans (anthropoi). However, when Hesiod or Homer unfold a scene in which both gods and humans are present, the terms they regularly deploy are mortal and immortal; this highlights the fundamental difference between gods and humans. Human life is ephemeral, transient. The gods, by contrast, are constant, enduring. Furthermore, mortals grow old, and they die. The gods neither age nor die. Homeric literature frames this dichotomy as both a blessing and a curse at various points in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Human strength (and here we include demi-gods), no matter how strong, pales in comparison to the strength of the gods. On rare occasions, a hero successfully challenges a god, but, like Book 5 of the Iliad, that victory is framed as the exception that proves the rule, and the corpus of Greek myths proves, time and again, that the gap between human power and that of the gods is insurmountable.
In summary, humans are defined, in contrast to the gods, as 1) ignorant, 2) ephemeral, and 3) weak. The gods are viewed as 1) intelligent, 2) everlasting, and 3) supremely powerful. These qualities are common amongst world religions, both past and present, so they are not terribly difficult to digest, but it is important that we keep them in mind as we study the myths.
Agamemnon’s encounter with Dream at the beginning of Book 2 is one of many instances in the Iliad that reinforce the relationships between gods and humans that we discussed above. Zeus sends Dream [1] to manipulate Agamemnon. Dream is one of many frightening progeny of Nyx (Night).
Attic black-figure on white-ground lektythos (c. 500 BCE), attributed to Sappho Painter.
Metropolitan Museum of Art 41.162.1941
Nyx, goddess of the night, drives a four-horse chariot across the sky – only two horse heads are visible but the numerous forelegs indicate a team of four. She is crowned with an orb of darkness and trails a veil of nocturnal mists (erebos). The figure is labelled NUKS on the vase. Opposite her is the nearly identical form of Heos (Eos-Hemera), the goddess of dawn and day, trailing a veil of light (aither).
"Nyx is the primordial goddess of Night, and she is mother to a frightening brood of children, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, including Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), Eris (Strife) and the Oneiroi (Dreams)" (Nyx. Theoi.com)
In the scene, Dream appears before the mortal king and delivers the following message:
“I am a messenger from Zeus, who is
Far away, but loves you and pities you.
He orders you to arm your long-haired Greeks.
Now is his time to capture Troy.
The Olympian gods are no longer divided;
Hera has bent them all to her will
And targeted Troy for sorrow from Zeus.
Think it over. Keep your wits about you,
And don’t forget this when sleep slips away.”
And the voice trailed off, leaving him there
Dreaming of things that were never to be.
He thought he would take Priam’s city that day,
The fool. He didn’t know what Zeus had in mind,
The pain and groans for both Trojans and Greeks
In the unendurable crush of battle. (2.27-45 emphasis added)
Dream is heaven-sent. He announces himself as such, and indeed, all dreams are daemonic (supernatural) in nature. From our omniscient narrator’s perspective, the audience is aware that this Dream is deceitful. Zeus wants Agamemnon to bring his military might to bear on the battlefield so that they can lose, thus honoring Zeus’ pact with Thetis. But Agamemnon, like any mortal, is oblivious to the machinations of Zeus’ mind. He is referred to as a “fool” specifically because “He didn’t know what Zeus had in mind.” In truth, Agamemnon is not a fool but, rather, a human that the poem juxtaposes with a god. As a human, he has no chance of matching wits with Zeus, nor does he attempt to do so.
Dreams work similarly to prophecy and music in the Greek world in that they are both divine in their origin and elusive in their meaning. Perhaps the most famous example from prophecy is the story Croesus and the fall of Lydia as told by Herodotus.[2] Lydia was a prosperous kingdom ruled by Croesus. Croesus learned of a prophecy from the Delphic oracle that he “would destroy a great empire if he went to war against Cyrus [king of Persia].” Confident that he would be victorious based on this prophecy, Croesus went to war with the budding Persian Empire but was soundly defeated. Lydia lost its sovereignty to Persia, and Croesus learned a hard lesson: oracles and prophecies can be misleading. They are communications between gods and humans, and humans lack the knowledge to interpret them clearly. The great empire that he destroyed turned out to be his own.
Attic red-figure amphora attrubuted to Myson (early 5th century).
Louvre G 197.
"Croesus (named Kroisos), king of Lydia (c. 560-540), sits, enthroned – garlanded with laurel, holding his scepter and making a libation from a phiale - on a high pyre stoked by his servant (named Euthymos).
A friend of the Greeks, the story goes that when the Persians overthrew him, he prepared for death, but Apollo saved him. The large size, careful potting and painting, and 'frameless design' (like the Berlin Painter's) indicate this is a special piece.
The mythological scene on the reverse is eastern, but the image of Croesus on the pyre is an historical event that happened some decades before the vase was painted. Both scenes involve the east and they were painted while Athens was threatened by invasions from Persians" (Beazley Archive).
Narrative art, just like any other myth (“story”), reflects the attitudes and anxieties of its time and place of origin. The expansion of the Persian army was a very real and pressing concern in the middle of the 6th century. This concern is reflected in the painting.
Photo: Bibi Saint-Pol (wikimedia)
Music, too, is difficult for humans to comprehend. Firstly, music in this sense means “art of the Muses” rather than simply the strumming of a musical instrument. Poetry or verse might be a more modern analog but think more like “song” than Shakespearean sonnet. The “Invocation to the Muses,” the introductory element of Hesiod’s epic, Theogony, articulates the relationship between music and human knowledge that underlies ancient Greek attitudes. The following excerpt begins with the Muses addressing Hesiod, who at this point has not yet learned to “sing”:
“Hillbillies and bellies, poor excuses for shepherds:
We know how to tell many believable lies,
But also, when we want to, how to speak the plain truth.”
So spoke the daughters of great Zeus, mincing their words.
And they gave me a staff, a branch of good sappy laurel,
Plucking it off, spectacular. And they breathed into me [3]
A voice divine, so I might celebrate past and future.
And they told me to hymn the generation of the eternal gods,
But always to sing of themselves, the Muses, first and last. (27-35 emphasis added)
According to Hesiod, the arts of the muses have magical properties related to knowledge and memory. The parents of the Muses are Zeus and Memory, so the fact that their arts (music) work in some fashion associated with memory is not surprising. If we were to analyze music for its mnemonic properties in the 21st century, we would focus on the effects of rhythm and repetition that allow for only a certain number of syllables in a given meter or words in a rhyme scheme. Thus, a person can “remember” the lyrics to a song while the music plays, but when the music stops, the lyrics are more difficult to recall or predict. In the 8th Century BCE, however, the explanation was more mystical: inspiration. And how do we explain the impulse to tap our feet or sway back and forth, even to sing along when music is played in our presence? It is as if something external has invaded our bodies, if not taking over, then certainly affecting our ability to control ourselves, our impulses.
Music has power, particularly a power related to memory. The poet is inspired to recall a past that he would be otherwise unable to remember,[4] and in doing so, he remembers events of the past for his audience as well. But there is a more sinister or dangerous quality to music in the first half of the excerpt: like Dream does to Agamemnon in Book 2, the Muses can “tell many believable lies.” The problem is in the human’s inability to discern true dream from false dream; true song from false song; or in Croesus’ case, the truth of prophecy from misleading wish fulfillment.
Oracles, music, and dreams, all three forms of communication are of divine origin, but they can be notoriously difficult to interpret. This is Agamemnon’s dilemma: Dreams are divine. That much is certain. But how is he to know whether the dream is false or true? Does it even matter? He can take what he knows to be a god-sent message at face value, or he can ignore it, thereby insulting the deity who sent him the message. Either decision is tinged by doubt, human ignorance, and the risk of offending a god. One truth is certain above all others: when the gods speak to us, we are all fools.
Following his visitation from Dream, Agamemnon chooses to “test” the resolve of the Greek army in an attempt to spark their fighting spirit. As he explains the matter to the council of kings, “We’d better move if we’re going to get the men in armor. But I’m going to test them first with a little speech, the usual drill – order them to beat a retreat in their ships. It’s up to each one of you to persuade them to stay” (77-80). Agamemnon’s rationale may seem curious, but it becomes clear how this speech is intended to motivate the troops once he begins:
“Danaan heroes and soldiers, Zeus
Is a hard god, friends. He’s kept me in the dark
After all his promises and nods my way
That I’d raze Ilion’s walls before sailing home.
It was all a lie, and I see now that his orders
Are for me to return to Argos in disgrace,
And this after all the armies I’ve destroyed.
I have no doubt that this is the high will
Of the god who has toppled so many cities
And will in the future, all glory to his power.
But it will be shame for generations to come,
That such a large and powerful army of Greeks
Has fought this futile war against a few puny men.
…
Let’s clear out with our ships and head for home.
There’s no more hope we will take Troy’s tall town.” (110-41)
The speech emphasizes “disgrace,” “shame,” the failure of a much larger force against a smaller one, and the absence of “hope.” These are all anathema to heroes in Homeric epic. To retreat is to incur shame and disgrace, the things one avoids at all costs in a timorous society. This shame is heightened by Agamemnon’s emphasis on their considerably larger force than the Trojans, thus magnifying the degree of their failure and its requisite disgrace. Agamemnon hopes, with the help of his council of kings who are privy to his plan, to motivate the rank and file soldiers by playing on their culturally conditioned desire to avoid shame. With the aid of his peers, Odysseus in particular, Agamemnon succeeds in his endeavor to rally the fighting spirits of the army but for one man, Thersites.
Thersites is an anomalous figure in the Iliad. He feels more at home as the comic relief in Aristophanes’ comedies or, even better, representative of the lecherous servant class in a Shakespearean play. He functions in the Iliad as one of many literary foils for Achilles. In the most general terms, a foil is “a character who is presented as a contrast to a second character so as to point to or show to advantage some aspect of the second character.”[5] Thersites functions as a foil for Achilles because they both engage in similar activities and publicly accuse Agamemnon of nearly identical misdeeds. The poem’s description of Thersites is as important as what he says:
[The soldiers] had all dropped to the sand and were sitting there,
Except for one man, Thersites, a blathering fool
And a rabble rouser. This man had a repertory
Of choice insults he used at random to revile the nobles,
Saying anything he thought the soldiers would laugh at.
He was also the ugliest soldier at the siege of Troy,
Bowlegged, walked with a limp, his shoulders
Slumped over his caved-in chest, and up top
Scraggly fuzz sprouted on his pointy head.
Achilles especially hated him, as did Odysseus,
Because he was always provoking them. Now
He was screaming abuse at Agamemnon. (231-42)
Thersites is the opposite of Achilles in every possible way. His description begins with the practice of physiognomy, the idea that a person’s character can be judged by his physical characteristics. Thersites is ugly and broken (bowlegged, limp, slumped shoulders, caved-in chest, sporadic balding, a misshapen head). He is a “blathering fool” who says whatever he thinks will get a rise out the crowd as opposed to Achilles, who values direct and honest speech. But perhaps his worst trait is that he is not an accomplished warrior, known more for his exploits with the point of his tongue than the point of his spear.
Yet Thersites’ criticism of Agamemnon is eerily similar to the tongue-lashing Achilles delivered against the Greek leader in Book 1:
“What’s wrong, son of Atreus, something you need?
Your huts are filled with bronze, and with women
We Achaeans pick out and give to you first of all
Whenever we take some town. Are you short of gold?
Maybe some Trojan horse breeder will bring you some
Out of Ilion as ransom for his son
Whom I or some other Achaean has captured.
Maybe it’s a young girl for you to make love to
And keep off somewhere for yourself. It’s not right
For a leader to march our troops into trouble.
You Achaeans are a disgrace, Achaean women, not men!
Let’s sail home in our ships and leave him here
To stew over his prizes so he’ll have a chance to see
Whether he needs our help or not. Furthermore,
He dishonored Achilles, who’s a much better man.
Achilles doesn’t have an angry bone in his body,
Or this latest atrocity would be your last, son of Atreus!” (245-61)
Like Achilles, Thersites accuses Agamemnon of sitting back while ‘real heroes’ fight his battles for him. Then, once the enemy has been defeated and their townspeople subdued, Agamemnon receives his prize “first of all.” Thersites jibes that Agamemnon’s newfound war-lust must be fueled by a more carnal lust for yet-another captive Trojan concubine. Worse still, Thersites connects Agamemnon’s lust for unearned honor and women with Achilles’ refusal to fight for him. And while Thersites may have the right of it in that Agamemnon wronged Achilles (Nestor’s intervention in Book 1 made that clear), he also finds himself guilty of Achilles’ impropriety: publicly challenging his leader out of turn.
That Thersites, a man reviled by Achilles, could become an ally in his quarrel with Agamemnon, reinforces the inappropriateness of Achilles’ actions in Book 1. If Achilles were a lesser warrior, perhaps one without a wall of confiscated armors decorating his hut, then he might have met the same fate Thersites does at the hands of Odysseus:
“Mind your tongue, Thersites. Better think twice
About being the only man here to quarrel with his betters.
I don’t care how bell-toned an orator you are,
You’re nothing but trash. There’s no one lower
In all the army that followed Agamemnon to Troy.
You have no right even to mention kings in public,
Much less badmouth them so you can get to go home.”
[…]
And with that [Odysseus] whaled the staff down
On Thersites’ back. The man crumpled in pain
And tears flooded his eyes. A huge bloody welt
Rose on his back under the gold stave’s force,
And he sat there astounded, drooling with pain
And wiping away his tears. (266-91 emphasis added)
Even Odysseus, the Greek hero most venerated for his orator’s skills, is appalled by Thersites’ practiced tongue: “I don’t care how belle-toned an orator you are. You’re nothing but trash.” Not only is Thersites Achilles’ sole ally, the person in the army whom he loathes the most and whom he is least similar to, but it’s clear that if Achilles did not enjoy high esteem amongst his fellow kings and princes, he would have been beaten for his transgression in Book 1 just as Thersites is here. As a foil, Thersites’ presence draws attention to just how inappropriate Achilles’ actions were in Book 1 when he quarreled with Agamemnon in the first place. We will encounter other, less “blathering fools” as foils for Achilles, but they will all similarly provide insight into Achilles’ actions and inform readers how they should gauge those actions.
[1]Dream’s name in Greek is Oneiros. The Oneiroi were daimōns or winged spirits descended from Nyx (Night), Nyx & Erebos (Darkness), or Hypnos (Sleep). Read more here.
[2] Histories.
[3] Inpiro. It’s where the word “inspire” comes from. It literally means “breathe into.”
[5] Foil (Literature). Encyclopedia Britannica Online.