Homer: A Very Short Introduction by Barbara Graziosi

Author:Barbara Graziosi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ancient & Classical, Folklore & Mythology, Greece, History
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-28T03:00:00+00:00

Projects and relationships are interrupted by death. Protesilaus, the first Achaean warrior to disembark on Trojan soil, is killed straight away, and leaves a young wife in a ‘half-built house’. Axylus, killed by Diomedes, ‘used to live in Arisbe, by the main road, and entertained everyone, yet not one of his guests could save him’. Lycaon’s mother cannot wash him, lay him on a bier, and mourn for him, because his corpse is thrown into a river and ‘fish heedlessly lick its wounds’.

The poet may offer only some brief details—but we have the impression that he could tell us more. Just as with Homeric allusion more generally, there is no sharp distinction between tradition and innovation when describing the life and death of individual warriors. In the case of some men, audiences may know more than the poet chooses to tell (as with Protesilaus, for example). In the case of others, it seems that the poet brings them to life precisely at the moment when they are killed: there is no need to suppose that Axylus, for example, was known from other epic tales. The overall effect, in any case, is the same. Whether the poet resorts to allusion or invention, we are made painfully aware that every death is the loss of a specific man, about whom there would be more to know.

Poetry becomes a way of paying homage to the war dead: Alice Oswald captures this aspect of Homeric epic in her poem ‘Memorial’—a recasting of the Iliad in the form of a list of casualties. Sometimes, the poet offers a memorable image:

Ajax, son of Telamon, stabbed Imbrius with his long spear,

below the ear; he wrenched the spear out, and Imbrius toppled

like an ash-tree that is felled by the bronze on a tall

mountain peak and scatters its tender leaves down to the ground.

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