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
