20.65-89 The sides taken by the gods are consistent with the sympathies they display throughout the poem. Hera, Athena and Poseidon have aided the Achaeans from the start. (See note 24.35-36.) Hephaestus could be expected on the same side as his mother, Hera, and Hermes, born in a cave on Mount Cyllene in central Greece, naturally favored the Achaeans. Ares, Apollo and, of course, Aphrodite, to whom the Trojan Paris gave the prize in the beauty contest, have supported the Trojans all along. Leto and Artemis are the mother and sister of Apollo, and Xanthus is the principal Trojan river.
20.174 Sea monster: see note 5.733-38.
20.220-28 The time I caught you: Achilles refers to his capture of Lymessus, the town where he acquired Briseis as his share of the booty. See 2.784-88, 19.66- 68 and 20.106-8.
20.248-79 Aeneas is to be the only survivor of the royal house of Troy, and here his lineage is established. (See the Genealogy, p. 617.) He will, as Poseidon says (355-56), “rule the men of Troy in power—/ his sons’ sons and the sons born in future years.” But Troy will be destroyed, and not rebuilt: Aeneas’ kingdom will be a new foundation. This was to be adopted by the Romans, the conquerors of Greece in the second century B.C., as their own foundation legend: Aeneas, with his son, Ascanius, and a band of Trojans who had escaped from the burning city, sailed west and landed in Italy, where Aeneas’ descendants later settled on the site that became the imperial city of Rome. Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, gave this legend its classic form.
20.286 A ship with a hundred benches: this would be an impossibly large ship.
21.378-79 A worthy match: since Hephaestus is a god whose element is fire, he is the obvious ally to call in against the waters of Scamander.
21.506 Those troubles we suffered here alongside Troy: see note 7.523-25.
21.551 He lets you kill off mothers in their labor: Artemis, as the goddess who presides over childbirth, causes deaths as well as safe deliveries.
22.35 Orion’s Dog: the Dog Star, Sirius, is the brightest star in the heavens (the name “Dog” is now reserved for the constellation in which it is seen—Canis Maior). This constellation appears to be close to the side of Orion, named after a mythical great hunter. Sirius ushers in the “dog days” of late summer—harvest time and a period of intense heat in Mediterranean countries, and a sickly season for their inhabitants. See 5.5, 11.70.
22.438 Stab his body: on the conduct of the Achaeans here, an ancient commentator remarked: “The emotion [of triumph] is that of a low mob, and it magnifies the greatness of the dead man.” (Cited from Griffin, p. 47.)
23.86 The river: the Styx. See note 2.858.
23.381 Tight-strung car: the front of the chariot (and some think the floor as well) consisted of a sort of mat of plaited leather straps.
23.492 Take the oath: see lines 646-50, where Menelaus challenges Antilochus to swear an oath that he did not commit a deliberate foul.
23.756 When Oedipus fell: the Greek word usually means “fell in batue”—a different fate from that of the hero of Sophocles’ play.
24.35-36 When they came to his shepherd’s fold: a reference to the legend of the Judgment of Paris. When the gods came to celebrate the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the goddess Strife threw a golden apple among the guests, announcing that it should be awarded as a prize to the most beautiful of the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. But no god was willing to take the responsibility of judging among them. Zeus finally appointed Paris, then minding his flocks on Mount Ida. All three of the goddesses offered him bribes. Hera promised to make him ruler of all Asia; Athena offered him wisdom and victory in all his battles; Aphrodite offered him the love of Helen, wife of Menelaus, the most beautiful woman in the world. He gave the apple to Aphrodite: the result was the Trojan War, and the undying hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and the Trojans. (See Introduction, p. 41.) Poseidon hated Troy for a different reason: he had been cheated of his wages for building the walls of Troy by Laomedon, Priam’s father. See 21.505-22 and note 7.523-25.
24.97 Samos: the island facing Thrace, later called Samothrace.
24.487 This is the twelfth day: we translate the reading hide (line 413 in the Greek), not the êôs of the Oxford Classical Text.
24.545 To host an immortal: though Achilles and his divine mother Thetis do in fact meet face-to-face (1.422-510, 18.82-162), this is not true of most of the encounters of men and gods in the Iliad. Men meet the gods in disguise (in Book 13 Poseidon disguises himself as Calchas) or the god comes to men from behind, as Athena does to Achilles in Book 1 and Apollo to Patroclus in Book 16. In older, legendary times, however, men might entertain the gods in special circumstances: Hera, for example, reminds Apollo (at 24.74—76) that he and all the gods came to the wedding feast for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.
Z4.613-21 The gods, presumably, are the only beings to receive unmixed portions from the jar of blessings.
24.708-27 Niobe: in the usual version of the Niobe legend, she turns into stone like the rock face on Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor, which “weeps”—i.e., water runs down it. Homer adds the detail that the people too are turned into stone to explain why they did not bury the slaughtered children who lay “nine days ... in their blood.” His most telling addition, however, is that Niobe, instead of being turned into stone immediately, dries her eyes, in effect, and turns her thoughts to food—“precisety because,” as Willcock puts it, “that is what Achilles wants Priam to do” (vol. 2, p. 319).
24.866 Hurl you headlong down from the ramparts: the very fate that. after the fall of Troy, Astyanax would meet. See Introduction, p. 37.
24.899 The twentieth year for me: it does not seem likely that Helen and Paris would have taken ten years to get to Troy in the first place and then endured ten years of siege. The expression is probably just an emotional intensification. like our expression “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times ...”
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
I. Texts and Commentaries
Homeri Opera. Ed. by D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen. Vols. I and II. Oxford Classical Texts. London, 1920.
The Iliad. Ed. with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes and appendixes by Walter Leaf. 2d ed., 2 vols. London, 1902.
The Iliad of Homer. Ed. with introduction and commentary by M. M. Willcock. 2 vols. London, 1978-84.
Iliad: Book XXIV. Ed. by C. W. MacLeod. Cambridge, England, 1982.
The Iliad: A Commentary. General Ed., G. S. Kirk. Vol. I: Books 1-4, Kirk. Cambridge, England, 1985. Vol. II: Books 5-8, Kirk, 1990. Vol. III: Books 9-12, J. B. Hainsworth, 1993; Vol. IV: Books 13-16, Richard Janko, 1992; Vol. V: Books 17-20, Mark W. Edwards, 1991; Vol. VI: Books 21-24, Nicholas Richardson, 1993.
Iliad: Book IX: Ed. by Jasper Griffin. Cambridge, England, 1995.
II. Critical Works
Atchity. Kenneth J. Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory. Carbondale, 1978.
Critical Essays on Homer. Boston, 1987.
Adkins, A. W. H. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford, 1960.
Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer.” In On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor and London, 1960.
Austin, Norman. Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey. Berkeley Los Angeles and London, 1975.
Bakker, Egbert, and Ahuvia Kahane, eds. Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance, and the Epic Text. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
Bassett, S. E. The Poetry of Homer. Berkeley, 1938.
Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tyius, and Susanne Wofford, eds. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community. Berkeley, 1999.
Bespaloff, Rachel. On the Iliad. Trans. Mary McCarthy. New York, 1947.
Beye, Charles R. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition. New York and London, 1966.
Bowra, Sir Maurice. Tradition and Design in the Iliad. London, 1930.
Bremer, J. M., I. J. F. de Jong, and J. Kalff, eds. Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry: Recent Trends in Homeric
Interpretation. Amsterdam, 1987.
Camps, W A. An Introduction to Homer. Oxford, 1980.
Carter, Jane B., and Sarah P. Morris, eds. The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule. Austin, 1995.
Chadwick, John. The Mycenaean World. London and New York, 1976.
Clarke, Howard. Homer’s Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newark, Delaware, 1981.
Crotty Kevin. The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ithaca and London, 1994.
Edwards, Mark W Homer: Poet of the Iliad. Baltimore and London, 1987.
Fenik, Bernard. Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad: Studies in the Narrative Techniques of Homeric Battle Description. Wiesbaden, 1968.
Ferrucci, Franco. The Poetics of Disguise: The Autobiography of the Work in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Trans. A. Dunnigan. Ithaca, 1980.
Finley, Sir Moses. The World of Odysseus. 2d rev. ed. Harmondsworth, 1979.
Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context. Cambridge, England, 1977.
Ford, Andrew. Homer: The Poetry of the Past. Ithaca and London, 1992.
Greene, Thomas M. The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity. Chapter 3, “The Iliad.” New Haven, 1963.
Griffin, Jasper. Homer. Oxford, 1980.
Homer on Life and Death. Oxford, 1980.
Guthrie, W K. C. The Greeks and Their Gods. London, 1949; repr. Boston, 1955.
Hainsworth, J. B. The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula. Oxford, 1968.
Hogan, James C. A Guide to the Iliad: Based on the Translation by Robert Fitzgerald. New York, 1979.
Jenkyns, Richard. Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil. Bristol Classical World series. London, 1992.
King, Katherine Callen. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1987.
Kirk, G. S. The Songs of Homer. Cambridge, England, 1962.
Lamberton, Robert. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1986.
—————————, and J. J. Keaney, eds. Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes. Princeton, 1992.
Lattimore, Deborah Nourse. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1987.
Lloyd-Jones, Sir Hugh. The Justice of Zeus. 2d ed. Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 41. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983.
Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass., 1960.
Martin, Richard. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca, 1989.
McAuslan, Ian, and Peter Walcot, eds. Homer. Oxford and New York, 1998.
Morris, Ian, and Barry Powell, eds. A New Companion to Homer. Leiden and New York, 1997.
Moulton, Carroll. Similes in the Homeric Poems. Göttingen, 1977.
Mueller, Martin. The Iliad. Unwin Critical Library, ed. Claude Rawson. London, 1984.
Myrsiades, Kostas, ed. Approaches to Teaching Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. New York, 1987.
Nagler, Michael. Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1974.
Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore and London, 1979.
Nilsson, M. P. Homer and Mycenae. London, 1933.
Otto, Walter F. The Homeric Gods. Trans. Moses Hadas. New York and London, 1954.
Page, Sir Denys. History and the Homeric Iliad. Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 31. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1959.
Parry, Adam M. The Language of Achilles and Other Papers. Foreword by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Oxford, 1989.
Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Ed. Adam Parry. Oxford, 1971.
Rabel, Robert J. Plot and Point of View in the Iliad. Ann Arbor, 1997.
Redfield, J. M. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector. Chicago and London, 1975.
Rubino, Carl A., and Cynthia W Shelmerdine, eds. Approaches to Homer. Austin, 1983.
Schein, Seth L. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984.
Scott, John A. The Unity of Homer. Berkeley, 1921.
Scully, Stephen, Homer and the Sacred City. Ithaca and London, 1990.
Segal, Charles. The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad. Mnemosyne, supp. vol. 17. Leiden, 1971.
Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York, Toronto, 1994.
Shive, David M. Naming Achilles. New York, 1987.
Silk, M. S. Homer: The Iliad. Cambridge, England, 1987.
Slatkin, Laura M. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeleγ, Los Angeles and London, 1991.
Stanley Keith. The Shield of Homer: Narrative Structure in the Iliad. Princeton, 1993.
Steiner, George, and Fagles, Robert, eds. Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views, ed. Maynard Mack. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962.
, ed., with Aminadov Dykman. Homer in English. Penguin Poets in Translation, ed. Christopher Ricks. Harmondsworth, 1996.
Suzuki, Mihoko. Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic. Chapter 1, “The Iliad.” Ithaca and London, 1989.
Taplin, Oliver. Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad. New York and London, 1992.
Thornton, Agathe. Homer’s Iliad, Its Composition and the Motif of Supplication. Göttingen, 1984.
Vermeule, Emily T. Greece in the Bronze Age. Chicago and London, 1964.
—————————. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 46. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979.
Vivante, Paolo. Homer. Hermes Books, ed. John Herington. New Haven and London, 1985.
—————————. The Iliad: Action as Poetry. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies. Boston, 1990.
Wace, Alan J. B., and Stubbings, Frank. A Companion to Homer. London, 1962.
Wade-Gery, H. T. The Poet of the Iliad. Cambridge, England, 1952.
Weil, Simone. The Iliad or The Poem of Force. Trans. Mary McCarthy. Politics Pamphlet No. 1. New York, n.d.; rep. Wallingford, Pa., n.d.
Whitman, Cedric H. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1958.
Willcock, Malcolm M. A Companion to the Iliad: Based on the Translation by Rich mond Lattimore. Chicago and London, 1976.
Wofford, Susanne L. The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic. Chapter 1, “The Politics of the Simile in the Iliad.” Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992.
Wood, Robert. An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer. London, 1769; rep. Philadelphia, 1976.
Wright, John. Essays on the Iliad: Selected Modern Criticism. Bloomington and London, 1978.
PRONOUNCING GLOSSARY
The main purpose of this glossary is to indicate pronunciation. Identifications are brief, and only the first appearance of a name is listed.
Phonetic Equivalents:
Stress is indicated by an apostrophe after the stressed syllable (af’-ter).
ABANTES (a-ban’-teez): people of Euboea, 2.626.
ABARBAREA (a-bar-ba-ree’-a): nymph who bore two Trojans, Aesepus and Pedasus, to Bucolion, 6.25.
ABAS (a’-bas): son of the Trojan prophet Eurydamas, brother of Polyidus, killed by Diomedes. 5.165.
ABU (a’-bi-eye): northern tribe of Thrace, 13.8.
ABLERUS (ab-lee’-rus): Trojan killed by Antilochus, 6.37.
ABYDOS (a-beye’-dos): city on the southern shore of the Hellespont, northeast of Troy, 2.948.
ACAMAS (a’-ka-mas): (1) Trojan, son of Antenor, comrade of Aeneas, killed by Meriones, 2.934. (2) Trojan ally, son of Eussorus, commander of the Thracians, killed by Telamonian Ajax, 6.9.
ACESSAMENUS (a-ke-sa’-men-us): Thracian warlord, father of Periboea, 21.162.<
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ACHAEA (a-kee’-a): general, collective name for mainland Greece, 1.191.
ACHAEANS (a-kee’-unz): Greeks and their allies ranged against the Trojans, 1.2.
ACHELOUS (a-ke-loh’-us): (1) river in central and northwestern Greece, the largest river in Greece, 21.220. (2) River in Phrygia (Asia Minor), east of Troy, 24.725.
ACHILLES (a-kil’-eez): son of Peleus and Thetis, grandson of Aeacus, commander of the Myrmidons, Achaean allies, 1.1. See notes 1.1, 3.174, 19.494, 20.220- 28.
ACRISIUS (a-kri’-si-us): king of Argos, father of Danaë, 14.383.
ACTOR (ak’-tor): (1) son of Azeus, father of Astyoche, 2.603. (2) Apparent forebear of Cteatus and Eurytus, the Moliones, 2.714. (3) Father of Menoetius, grandfather of Patroclus, 11.938. (4) Father of Echecles, 16.224.
ADAMAS (a’-da-mas): Trojan, son of Asius (1), killed by Meriones, 13.649.
ADMETUS (ad-mee’-tus): king of Thessaly, son of Pheres, husband of Alcestis, father of Eumelus, 2.814.
ADRASTUS (a.dras’-tus): king of Sicyon, father (or perhaps grandfather) of Aegialia, father-in-law of Diomedes, 2.663.
ADRESTIA (a-ares-teye’ -a): city northeast of Troy, 2.939.
ADRESTUS (a-drees’-tus): (1) Trojan, son of Merops, brother of Amphius (1), commander of contingent from Adrestia, killed by Diomedes, 2.941. (2) Trojan killed by Menelaus and Agamemnon, 6.44. (3) Trojan killed by Patroclus, 16.812.
AEACIDES (ee-a’-si-deez): “grandson of Aeacus,” patronymic of Achilles, 18.256.
AEACUS (ee’-a-kus): son of Zeus, father of Peleus, grandfather of Achilles, 9.230.
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