The Iliad's Economy of Pain

Abstract

Homer-or the ancient oral bards who bear his name-dismembered the human body with loving inventiveness. What such moments rarely contain, however, is an extended description of anguish or agony. Homeric warriors normally expire all at once in a black mist or in a bone-crunching clatter of armor; they groan, gasp, and vomit blood; but…they seldom die in pain. (41) The claim that pain is an element foreign to the Iliad's numerous accounts of death may seem, at first glance, unlikely. As Morris notes, battlefield carnage is vividly described. Weapons in the nearly 150 accounts of both fatal and non-fatal wounding refer to a corporeal topography so precise that scholars once hypothesized that Homer must have had some connection to the medical profession, if he was not, in fact, a surgeon himself. 1 The threat of violent penetration is constant: Hector hopes that Achilles will literally incorporate his spear (…w dAE min s" §n xro˛ pçn komÄ isaio, Il. 22.286 ), and he threatens Ajax: "my long spear…will bite your delicate body" (a ‡ ke talãss˙w / me›nai §mÚn dÒru makrÒn, ˜ toi xrÒa leiriÒenta / dãcei, 13.829-31). 2 Yet it is true that when a warrior falls, we hear these boasts and taunts, rather than the noise of pain. These are not opportunities for the epic poet to focalize the experience of the warrior. The dying hero is halfway to becoming a shade, halfway to becoming a corpse: the capacity for omniscient narration to speak from within is quickly disappearing. On the exceptional occasions when the fading warrior does speak, what bridges the gap between the hero and the dead man is not pain but prescience: Patroclus foresees the death of Hector, in addition to gaining more-than-mortal insight into the conditions of his own; Hector, in turn, prophesies the death of Achilles. 3 Suffering, we might conclude, belongs to the psuchê, which leaves the limbs, then hovers over them briefly to lament the loss of youth and manliness (cuxØ dÉ §k =ey°vn ptam°nh ÖAÛdÒsde bebAEkei, / ˘n pÒtmon goÒvsa, lipoËsÉ éndrot∞ta ka‹ ¥bhn, 16. 856-57, 22.362-63).What Morris finds lacking in Homer's descriptions of death is not simply pain but, more precisely, a narrative interest in odunai (the word is typically found in the plural), the pains most closely associated with violence

The abject and the vulnerable: the twain shall meet: Reflections on disability in the moral economy

“…Even in a warrior culture, the wound is a blow to both body and honour. Holmes (2007) argues that loss of blood in classical antiquity was equivalent to loss of ‘vital energy’. It reduced the warrior to a liminal figure.…”

What's Religious about the Iliad?

“…But the most remarkable form of poetic extension in the Iliad is catachresis, defined as the mixing of metaphors and personalization of objects and contexts, and ultimately the dissemination of meanings by poetic connotation. Rather than evidence of disowned emotions (per Snell (), for instance), or just lazy figuration, catachresis is a poetic strategy to make comprehensible dimensions of experience which elude other forms of discourse, as Aristotle recognized (Holmes :59). We already know that Achilles is distressed, but when that emotion is extended into his spear, described as pikra , “bitter, aggrieved” (22.206), yearning “to sate itself on human flesh” (21.167–168), we grasp his injury in a way that becomes virtual.…”

The artistry of the Homeric simile

“…See especially 5.136,5.554,11.414,11.548 = 17.657,12.229,16.487,17.61,17.133,17.725,17.737,20.164,and 20.490. 120. For discussion of the effect of this simile see Moulton 1977:97-99 andStanley 1993:133. In contrast see Holmes 2007, who finds Homer using this simile to challenge the usual heroic exchange of time for blood.…”