3. Half-Burnt: The Wife of Protesilaos In and Out of the Iliad

The last chapter examined a speech that aimed to break Achilles out of his withdrawal and spur him back onto the battlefield. Achilles was to return to battle before it was too late to get gifts, unlike Meleager, who lay in his chamber until the person dearest to him, his wife Kleopatra, recited to him the disasters about to befall her and the rest of Calydon. Now we are drawing near the moment in Book 16 when Patroklos steps into Kleopatra’s role and begs Achilles to fight. Instead of going out himself, of course, Achilles agrees to send Patroklos out in his armor to drive the Trojans away from the ships: a half-measure, neither returning nor remaining completely withdrawn. The act, then, forms a pendant to the story of Meleager both in this straightforward way and in more subtle ways that will shortly become apparent. Yet the moment is puzzling, if one thinks in terms of plot or Achilles’ intentions. [2]

We will deepen our understanding of this moment, along with the drama leading up to it and falling out from it, by analyzing it from the perspective of performance or presence. But it is not an instance of “becoming the character” like the speech of Phoenix; it is something more complex. Its kinesthetics are more dispersed, and grapple more directly with absence, longing, and action at a distance, instead of with bringing something buried into vigorous presence. Once again a background story, previously neglected, foments a set of poetic and performative effects. The background materials I excavate in this chapter are deployed even more delicately than those in play in the Phoenix speech, almost forming a meditation upon performance at the same time that they fuel it.

On the face of it, Book 16 resembles the aristeiai of Diomedes and Agamemnon; it is after all the aristeia of Patroklos, complete with arming scene. [3] Yet the script here is not simple: Book 16 dramatizes not only the emergence of Patroklos but also a strange partial emergence of Achilles—the emergence of Patroklos as Achilles’ double. [4] The plot of the Iliad as a whole, of course, may be thought of as the withdrawal and emergence of Achilles, or withdrawal, devastation, and return. [5] Though Achilles does eventually have his own massively elaborated arming scene, there is no single moment of emergence, but an unfolding over several books. Achilles makes several appearances verging on the epiphanic, viewed from within the world of the poem, including when he shouts at the trench and twelve people automatically drop dead (18.230). [6] From the perspective of the Achilles plot, the dispatch and death of Patroklos is only a substitute epiphany.

In this study I am concerned with what happens in the world of the poem insofar as it strikes against “presencing” to create a spark. There are, for example, moments when the bard draws a spark of “presence” or “becoming” from the flint of composition or poetics that prompt the audience to ask: Where is this action coming from? Is this performer inside or outside the poem?

One such moment, one within the “becoming,” or emergence, of Achilles, was examined in Chapter 1: the apostrophes to Patroklos leading up to his death. Through the apostrophes, the bard is taken over by Achilles and seems to lose control of the unfolding plot. (These apostrophes, and especially the first, will be enlivened further by a closer look at how they function in the drama: see below.) One might also single out Achilles’ speech in Book 9, a speech whose superior insights and verbal pyrotechnics lift Achilles to the level of the performing poet, effacing the distinction between bard and character. [7] The apostrophes, the epiphany at the trench, and the famous speech are part of a larger arc, an arc that includes the extraordinary scene in Books 15–16.

But this scene is something beyond the emergence of a character: it is the orchestration of an uncanny space. At the juncture between Books 15 and 16, a more subtle space of transformation is created where the body of the performer is less central to that transformation, where characters from the past haunt the present in multiple ways without entirely taking it over. The focus of this process is the stern of a ship, which is transformed into a stage and a portal in time and space. And the dimensions of the created space expand outward.

Nevertheless, the poet-performer here draws on ingredients familiar from the previous chapter, elements we can use to get our bearings for this more complex histrionic path. This includes a background story that involves eros and death, the overlaying of the space of present action with an alternative space, the gradual approach to a “source of energy” for the emergence of a character, and characters who are taken over by figures from the past. As with the themes in Phoenix’s speech (e.g., the repeated cursing), the background material here provides especially fertile thematic ground for the “coming forth” of the character. In the Interlude following this chapter, I make the case for a connection between this background material and that in Phoenix’s speech, and speculate about a possible source for this connection.

The role of this background material—even its existence—has not been sufficiently recognized. I thus begin by showing how this story, the story of Protesilaos, works in the background of the poem in a general way, and then turn to how the story bodies itself forth. I shall first examine thematic resonances between the Protesilaos story and the unfolding drama. I then turn to the way space is reconceived as well as transformed in performance. This discussion of space in turn frames a closer examination of the theme of substitution and the way this theme surfaces into the level of performance. As the discussion proceeds, I bring the embodied performance into the argument more openly, suggesting how the “kinesthetics” of the background story operates in performance. In the light of this interpretation, one may detect stirrings of this performative impetus in the books leading up to Book 15.

Protesilaos was, of course, the first of the Achaeans to leap from his ship onto Trojan soil and to die. This is alluded to in his name [8] and mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships:

Figure 16

As Eustathius notes, death comes to Protesilaos in mid-air, as he leaps in a present participle. [9] Later, at least, on his cult statue at Elaious, a copy of a copy of which now dominates a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York [10] (see Figure 16), he is forever about to leap from his ship to his death, his canonical mid-action pose. This much of his story is clearly alluded to in the Iliad as a familiar one.

Less well recognized is the way that Protesilaos’ leap and death continue to haunt the Iliad beyond the Catalogue. In Book 15, Protesilaos’ ship becomes the focal point of intense drama when Hektor is at last about to set fire to the ships. [11] Ajax with his long spear is striding from ship to ship (15.676, μακρὰ βιβάσθων), which is envisioned in the simile of the trick rider as a leaping (θρώσκων, 684). This leaping, taking place on the Achaean ships on the Trojan beach, and ending at Protesilaos’ ship, recalls Protesilaos’ initiatory leap (2.702, ἀποθρώσκοντα). To oppose him, Hektor makes straight for a single black-prowed ship (15.693). After presenting Hektor’s swoop with an eagle simile, the narrator reveals that Hektor was guided in this by a shove of Zeus’ big hand (694–695), an eerie intervention. The narrator pauses to describe what “you would say,” along with the thoughts of the opposing warriors:

All three parties, Achaeans, Trojans, and we the audience, are mistaken; the narrator’s comment seems to stretch the opposed forces to the breaking point in presenting these mistaken impressions on all sides. This slow-motion action [12] reaches its climax when in a vivid, cinematic gesture Hektor finally lays hold of the stern of that one particular ship:

Hektor’s grasp seems to inspire the memory of the ship’s former captain. [13] The sudden proximity to this object seems to release from the performer the description not only of Protesilaos but of his sad fate: this very ship would not bring him back again to his fatherland. [14] Note the connotations of ἥψατο (704): Hektor “grasps” the stern of the ship, but the word also means “kindle,” and shortly, at the other end of the Patroklos–Achilles encounter, Hektor will help do just that to this ship (16.112–124). The verb collapses the two moments, a neat encapsulation of the series of collapses and substitutions that comprise this scene and its sequel. [15] Ajax and Hektor are frozen in place for all of 16.1–102, while the fatal conversation unfolds. As others have noted, [16] line 102 of Book 16, Αἴας δ’ οὐκέτ’ ἔμιμνε· βιάζετο γὰρ βελέεσσι, repeats 15.727. Notice too that while Hektor’s grasp of the stern brings on the transformation at the beginning of Book 16, the stern is once again the focus of the fire at 16.124, followed by a startling mid-line shift back to Achilles, [17] stirring up Patroklos.

Ajax has manifestly stepped into Protesilaos’ role as he leaps onto his ship, reprising the very pose of Protesilaos in his moment of glory, frozen into his cult statue (again, Figure 16). There is a sense of a return to the beginning of the war, of things shifting and replaying themselves (“around the ship of that very man ...” τοῦ περ δὴ [18] ), perhaps even a sense that Ajax has been possessed by Protesilaos; Protesilaos has somehow entered the unfolding drama. [19] In the tradition seen in the Cypria, it is Hektor who kills Protesilaos, so it requires little imagination to see Ajax facing Hektor, on Protesilaos’ ship, as a replica or reenactment of that earlier moment. [20] It is as though Zeus, with his big hand, is guiding the puppets back into proper position so that a new beginning can spring forth, a beginning not of the war itself but of something else.

This duel at the ship of Protesilaos is the scene that sets up Patroklos’ tears at the beginning of Book 16: the scene suddenly shifts to Achilles and Patroklos, and they finally have the conversation that sends Patroklos out to his death. But Protesilaos’ ship frames that fatal conversation at both ends, since it is there, when Patroklos emerges (16.286), that his first encounter takes place. Protesilaos’ ship signifies the initiation of action, and his leap the necessary death of one fighter at the beginning of action, a quasi-sacrifice. These themes frame and make sense of the intervention of Patroklos; it is not difficult to see how the “leap” story plays in the background of the action. [21]

Returning to the catalogue entry (2.698–702), recall the bare mention of the widow left behind in Protesilaos’ “half-built” (ἡμιτελής) house, an ἀμφιδρυφής widow, “torn on both [cheeks]” (in mourning). That is all the audience hears of his wife in the Iliad. But a fully developed love story about the couple was exceedingly popular in later tradition, and there is no way to know when such a story came into existence. [22] Euripides wrote a Protesilaos, of which fragments are extant; [23] the Cypria at least alluded to the story, since it gave the wife a name and probably told some version of her suicide. [24] But full versions happen to survive only in much later texts, in Lucian, Apollodorus, Philostratus’ Heroikos, Ovid’s Heroides, Propertius, Catullus, and others, as well as in visual art, most impressively on Roman sarcophagi, which often recall Euripidean tragedy. [25] Most scholars have concluded that the later tradition takes this bare suggestion from the Catalogue of Ships about the half-built house and torn cheeks (a “genre scene”), and fleshes it out into a romance.

And it is a supernatural, deeply romantic story, the kind of thing for which, we are often assured, the Homeric poet has no use. [26] But the previous chapter brought into focus some of those love stories, including that of Marpessa and Idas, which the Iliad puts to quite intensive use. Not to mention the fact that Achilles and Patroklos have already found themselves mirrored by Meleager and Kleopatra. So: what if the story of Protesilaos and his wife, too, were kindled in the audience’s minds by the barest of references, just as surely as if I were to utter the words “Lear” or “Ophelia” or “Danny Boy”? Let us presume that the Homeric audience was just as familiar with this story as, for example, an Athenian fresh from Euripides or a Roman husband shopping for a sarcophagus. [27] What would come to the mind of such a listener?

The passionate devotion between Protesilaos and his wife allowed them briefly to overcome death. The dead Protesilaos returns from Hades for one last visit with his wife, either because one of them persuades the gods, [28] or because his eros lifts him to the surface. [29] (Some versions present, instead, a vision of the live man. [30] ) After this visit, the wife kills herself, either on her own initiative or because Protesilaos convinces her to join him. In some versions, he arrives before the news of his death, so that when they are first reunited, she believes she is embracing a live human being, and although he hesitates, he eventually has to tell her he is dead. At some point, either before or after the visit, the wife makes a statue of Protesilaos. This statue she worships with offerings or tries to animate by means of Bacchic ritual. Most pathetically, she also tries to sleep with it. A servant, observing this, believes that she has taken a real lover; when her father intervenes and discovers the statue, he burns it on a pyre in disgust. Deprived of this surrogate object, the widow throws herself on the same pyre with the statue or kills herself some other way. At any rate, in all versions, she kills herself.

That may be, but does the Iliad know of Protesilaos’ resurrection? The answer seems to be yes. An initial piece of evidence is found in the Catalogue of Ships.

The Iliad figures the return of Achilles into battle not only as a withdrawal and return, but more specifically as a figurative resurrection, an anastasis. [31] In the Catalogue, the poet remarks that Achilles was lying in grief by his ships, but that he would soon “rise up again” (τάχα δ’ ἀνστήσεσθαι ἔμελλεν, 2.694). This line in itself need not, of course, carry connotations of resurrection. But immediately following it are three catalogue entries in a rhyming relationship to it that illuminate its significance. Immediately after Achilles comes Protesilaos, [32] whose catalogue entry we discussed above. Protesilaos is in turn followed by Eumelos, son of the resurrected Alcestis, who volunteered to die for her husband Admetus.

Following Eumelos is the absent Philoctetes, whose catalogue entry closes with the refrain, τάχα δὲ μνήσεσθαι ἔμελλον, “but quickly they were going to remember him” (2.724), echoing closely the line in Achilles’ own catalogue entry, τάχα δ’ ἀνστήσεσθαι ἔμελλεν. Memory, the means by which Philoctetes is retrieved from Lemnos, often serves metaphorically as a kind of resurrection in Greek poetry, notably when the gods “remember” Odysseus and retrieve him from the death-realm called Calypso. In the Protesilaos story, too, it is Protesilaos’ inability to forget his wife that enables his return from the underworld. [33] The schema is then: —that is, two stories of actual resurrection framed by two metaphorical ones. Eustathius remarks (ad 695–710), [34] καὶ ὅρα ὅτι μετὰ τὸν ὡσανεὶ κείμενον, ὡς προείρηται, Ἀχιλλέα τὸν ὡς ἀληθῶς κείμενον Πρωτεσίλαον ὁ ποιητὴς παρέθετο, “Observe that after the one who is ‘as-if’ lying down, as mentioned previously, Achilles, the poet puts next to him the one truly lying down, Protesilaos.” (There is more to say about the connection between Alcestis, dying in place of Admetus, and Patroklos, but in this chapter we are concerned with Protesilaos.) [35] So the Iliad not only incorporates the return of Protesilaos from Hades; it also links this return with the metaphorical reanimation of Achilles.

To return to the action in Book 15 and 16: the audience sees Protesilaos’ ship, there is a moment of desperation on the part of Ajax (playing Protesilaos), and the camera suddenly shifts to Patroklos and his tears. “The usual arrival sequence is abandoned: we are not told what [Achilles] was doing when [Patroklos] found him, and [Patroklos’] speechless tears replace his expected utterance, provoking [Achilles] to speak first.” [36]

Patroklos has not, it would seem, observed the action at Protesilaos’ ship. “Achilleus and Patroklos are unaware how desperate a stage has been reached in Aias’ battle against Hektor. ...” [37] The narrator does not describe Patroklos’ tears as a response to the battle at the ship, but we have just been witnessing it, and Patroklos now surfaces with an emotional response—as though he has seen the ship, or slipped into our position. [38] Still, it is striking that Patroklos makes no mention of the urgent situation at Protesilaos’ ship and catalogues instead the Achaean injuries. This adds to the impression that the two are strangely removed from the action, yet close to it at the same time. This simultaneous distance and nearness resonates with the themes of the substitute and the ghost, which are at work in the Protesilaos-wife and in the Achilles-Patroklos stories.

When all signs point toward Achilles finally rising up and emerging from withdrawal to save the Achaeans, Patroklos comes out as his substitute, or Doppelgänger. His is a rising-up-again, but also a death. As often in both Homeric poems, although various spaces have connotations of death, there is no consistent one-to-one correspondence. Achilles’ hut is a quasi-death realm, eventually fully transmogrified into Hades’ palace in Book 24, [39] and clearly the emergence from that realm is a movement from death to life. Yet Patroklos goes out of it to his death.

How should we formulate what happens when we hear the name of Protesilaos, see his ship, and then witness the tears of Patroklos, stepping into our shoes, and his conversation with Achilles? I would not wish to circumscribe the effects. Just as a simile would not be Homeric if tenor and vehicle were aligned in every detail, so too we should not press for tight analogy, but open ourselves to the resonances.

The theme of eros inducing resurrection and suicide—penetrations of the boundary of death from either side—figures in many ways into the presentation of Achilles’ return, and into what is here in its place, the substitute-death of Patroklos. Everything that follows, Patroklos’ quasi-sacrifice [40] and Achilles’ quasi-suicide [41] in response (expressing his wish to die, killing someone in his own armor, etc.), is compressed into this episode taking place under, and narratively framed by, Protesilaos’ ship. The stories of Protesilaos and his wife are part of this compression. I do not mean to suggest that the Protesilaos story contributed this or that element to the Iliad. Many of these likely stem from or are inspired by the “Memnonis” [42] —some version of the story of Memnon’s killing of Antilokhos, and Achilles’ death while avenging him. Here I am focused in the first place upon how framing the tragedy of Patroklos by allusion to Protesilaos affects the audience’s experience of Achilles and Patroklos. The story of Patroklos is strongly demarcated by the presence of Protesilaos’ ship; it comes right into the narrative, unlike (say) Memnon. On the other hand, the story of Protesilaos may not only frame the narrative but also suffuse the story in several ways. So although the Protesilaos story may not form the warp or weft for Book 16 in the way that the Memnon story does, it both frames the whole and complements the Memnon story. Textually speaking, the Protesilaos story could be thought of as an additional thread in the weave, or as an embroidery on top of a Memnonis subtext, or as a filter through which we experience the Memnon subtext as well as the main events of the Iliad. Insofar as the Neoanalysts have not accounted for the presence of Protesilaos in a satisfying way, I propose to bracket the Memnon theory to a large extent in exploring the way the Protesilaos story functions in the text and in the performance.

Protesilaos’ wife kills herself because she cannot live without her husband. As is well recognized, Patroklos’ death replays in advance, so to speak, the death of Achilles. More poignantly, Patroklos’ death seems to bring on Achilles’ death already within the Iliad. Patroklos’ death starts a chain reaction leading eventually to Achilles’ actual death, but it also entails Achilles’ immediate death. And so, when Achilles learns (from Antilokhos!) of Patroklos’ death in Book 18, Thetis and the Nereids come to mourn (not console) Achilles. This scene recalls, or rather replays, the story of their mourning him when he is actually dead. [43] Even a scholar who denies that the Memnon story is known to the Iliad remarks that Thetis’ accompaniment by the Nereids reflects their lament for Achilles (an event reported in the Odyssey). [44] Achilles goes to avenge Patroklos knowing it means his own death. He is explicit in his wish to die (18.98, αὐτίκα τεθναίην). This may not have been the case in the Memnon-story, where Achilles merely defies an oracle in avenging his friend.

Achilles’ insatiable manipulation of the corpses of Patroklos and Hektor (which, in the latter case, the gods step forward to limit) bears a family resemblance to the wife’s manhandling of her husband’s statue which her father puts an end to by fire. Achilles’ contact with Patroklos’ corpse occurs throughout the rest of the poem. At 19.4–5, Thetis finds Achilles Πατρόκλῳ περικείμενον ὃν φίλον υἱὸν / κλαίοντα λιγέως (“lying round Patroklos / crying shrilly”). One ancient scholiast, deeply struck by this word περικείμενον, “lying round,” remarks:

Notice that the passage that provided the last example in Chapter 1 (“Trojan Horse”), the wife “pouring” herself over her husband, comes to the mind of the scholiast. Later Achilles, laying his man-slaughtering hands on Patroklos’ corpse (23.18), speaks to him “even in Hades,” and then stretches out Hektor’s corpse beside the bier, the bed, of the dead Patroklos (23.25), as though trying to replace him. After the funeral, Achilles cannot sleep, but tosses and turns this way and that (24.5), crying, remembering his dear companion, longing for his manhood and his good μένος, every exploit they shared, all the pains he suffered with him. The memory of these things causes him to lie now on his side, his back, his front. Suddenly he stands upright and whirls around on the beach. He has still not satisfied himself with manipulating the bodies and drags Hektor’s corpse around Patroklos’ tomb, three rounds at a time, pausing to rest each time. It is this that draws the ire of the gods, and particularly Apollo, who complains (24.46–49) that Achilles’ grief has gone beyond standard operating procedure for mortals and that he should have done with it.

It would seem that the widow’s father in Euripides’ Protesilaos made a similarly calculating speech to his grieving daughter, which included such bons mots as: and: and finally (in threatening to burn the statue and urging his daughter to remarry): To this his daughter perhaps replied:

The statue, an image of Protesilaos, could even influence the way Achilles makes an image—this time of himself—out of Patroklos, as he arms him to resemble himself, and then of Hektor, an image which he then kills, as the wife kills herself when the image is destroyed. [47] Achilles’ dream of Patroklos, his reaching out to grasp his image that cannot hold him in return, may or may not recall the wife’s commingling with the statue, or her vision of the ghost visiting her for so short a time. Achilles begs Patroklos to stand closer to him: “embracing each other, even for a little while, we could take our fill of deadly mourning” (23.97–98). Something similar could be said of Patroklos’ request that their bones be mixed in the single golden amphora given to Achilles by Thetis. [48] Achilles’ dragging the corpse of Hektor is explicitly characterized by Hekabe (24.756) as an attempt to reanimate Patroklos.

Of course, many of these motifs might be found in other stories of passionate grief, or stories connected with hero cult, in which lament figured prominently. Some may have appeared in both the Memnon story and that of Protesilaos and his wife. The point is not to collapse the two levels, background and foreground, via their similarities into some sort of single conglomeration of meaning, or to use one as the key to the other. The similarities between the stories of Protesilaos and his wife, and Achilles and Patroklos, should not be appreciated from afar as a table with two columns. Rather, the poem frames the shared motifs, and shapes how they are experienced, alerting the listener to similarities that would not come to mind without that framing. The ship of Protesilaos overhangs these motifs such that they all fall into one Protesilaian undercurrent [49] that runs through the rest of the poem but gushes to the surface here at the end of Book 15 and the beginning of Book 16 in a powerful set of images. Perhaps even the “torn cheeks” of Protesilaos’ wife may come to mind later, in the startling wish Achilles expresses to Thetis, not only that he win noble kleos, but also that he:

If the theme of resurrection is active in the foreground and in the background, we must add that, in the case of Protesilaos, there is no resurrection without the wife. In all surviving versions, Protesilaos’ return from the dead goes hand in hand with his passionate erotic attachment to his wife, and hers to him. But where is she in the Iliad? [50] Any audience familiar with the story will cast their mind’s eye over the sea to her when they “see” Ajax facing Hektor on Protesilaos’ ship. And just as they do, the scene is transformed to Patroklos and Achilles, “at home” in their tent, and a conversation about home. The audience will expect her, as she and Protesilaos longed for one another. She will not appear, but another couple, an image of them, takes their place. Her presence, however, also seems to be signaled within the framing of the episode itself.

As I mentioned, when Patroklos finally emerges, his first encounter takes place at Protesilaos’ ship. The poetic choice to stage the action at that ship is accounted for well enough by the story of Protesilaos’ leap, as was the case with Ajax’s leap in Book 15. Patroklos sacrifices himself as did Protesilaos; Protesilaos’ initial leap corresponds to Patroklos initiating the return of the Myrmidons and eventually of Achilles.

But that explanation is incomplete, for a detail there strongly suggests the wife at home. When Patroklos puts out the fire, the poet comments: The Homeric hapax ἡμιδαής, “half-burnt,” along with the ship in the nominative being left behind, λίπετ’, echo (again) two details from the catalogue vignette:

ἡμιτελής is another Homeric hapax, and again we have “left behind,” in the passive (ἐλέλειπτο). It is gratifying to discover that Eustathius pointed out this connection long ago: [51]

The epithet in one sense closes the door that was opened with the reference to Protesilaos at the end of Book 15, but also reminds us that Patroklos, in extinguishing the fire and leaving the ship half-burnt, will now launch out on the excessive part of his mission, leaving Achilles “at home” with his own action halfway initiated. It would be an exaggeration to say that we see the ship of Protesilaos transformed into the house of his wife, and that now we have the “wife,” Patroklos—though he has taken on the role of Protesilaos and gone out first. But because the two spaces are both formed around the solo performer, something akin to such a transformation occurs. The ship of Protesilaos itself even appears as an image or sign of him, here threatened with burning like his statue, as its transformation into the house recalls the wife’s self-destruction by fire. [52] Protesilaos’ ship is already figured as a double of Achilles’ ship, setting off the action; its metaphoric nature is at least double.

Does the half-burnt ship become the half-built house? The epithet superimposes the two locations, house and ship, Thessaly and Troy. It is the story of Protesilaos that makes possible this transport in space as well as time (going back to the original leap). The role of Protesilaos and his ship is not simple, but overdetermined; [53] this overdetermination extends into spatial dimensions as well as pointing temporally to the beginning of the war. These dimensions shape and are shaped by performance dynamics.

How does this connection between house and ship affect the episode that is framed by the ship? It is with the battle at Protesilaos’ ship hanging, and a reminder that Protesilaos would not return home again, that the poet suddenly shifts attention to Patroklos and Achilles. In Book 16, the audience is presented with Achilles and Patroklos as a “domestic” pair. This image of domesticity is enhanced in multiple ways, and it is far from straightforward: Aristotle might label it atopon.

Achilles, seeing Patroklos weeping, pictures him, in the first words of his speech, as a little girl clinging to her mother’s dress and asking to be picked up (16.7–10). [54] After this domestic simile the first question that occurs to Achilles is whether there is news from home—but “they say” that both their fathers, Menoitios and Peleus, are still alive: those ones we would grieve if they were dead (13–16). This is strangely detached, and effectively so: Achilles affects to be so far removed from the ships that he is “at home”; yet he is interested in news from his home on the other side of the sea as from a distant place. [55] The unhurried way in which Achilles’ speech unfolds as he studies the face of Patroklos [56] both adds to the sense of being wrenched away from the space of the battlefield and re-grounds the performer’s center of consciousness, his origo as a performer, in Achilles. Achilles, like the bard, is neither here nor there. The scene in Book 16 mirrors the half-built house back in Phylake, where the drama of Protesilaos’ wife turns upon bad news from the other side of the sea. Only after mentioning their fathers at home does Achilles suggest that Patroklos might be grieving for the Argives. His last line, “Tell me, so that we both know,” occurs twice in mother-child dialogue, when Thetis asks Achilles first about the loss of Briseis (1.363), and then, of Patroklos himself (18.74).

But this line is surely not only “typical of parent–child interviews—an apt resonance here.” [57] Rather, as Ledbetter [58] has shown, Achilles’ speech at the opening of Book 16 emphatically reenacts the earlier tearful encounter between mother and son, with Achilles playing Thetis and Patroklos playing Achilles—what we are calling musical chairs. So while Book 15 ends with Ajax reenacting Protesilaos’ leap, initiating the war, the first speech in Book 16 draws from the first book of the poem. Bringing the Memnon-theory into the mix complicates matters, for the Thetis–Achilles conversation, on that theory, already recalls an earlier tradition of her warning him. [59] But this in turn may be related to the initial leap of Protesilaos (see below), so rather than a nexus of many threads, we may have here one thread knotted up.

Patroklos here stepping into Achilles’ Book 1 role, weeping to a mother, can be seen to anticipate or flag his stepping into the role of Achilles in his replay of the Achilles–Memnon story later in Book 16. [60] Better, Achilles’ simile reflects, from a distance, on the role that his friend is about to play. If Achilles’ simile and the replay of Iliad 1 prepares for the later role-playing in Book 16, this in turn is prepared and framed by the scene at Protesilaos’ ship. But with a difference: the Protesilaos story itself contains the theme of the ghost and the substitute, and the effect of a death on a distant beloved, so that the acts of substitution are experienced within this frame.

But all of this is experienced not as a set of stories layered on top of one another, as in a series of friezes running atop another series, but rather as a transformation of the body of the bard. If Achilles’ simile reflects on the events to come, pondering them from a strange distance, what immediately follows this speech deepens this effect. For here is the first of the apostrophes to Patroklos in Book 16. The effect of this first apostrophe is manifold; but it is shaped and amplified by the shift from the ship of Protesilaos to the ship of Achilles. It is shaped by this shift just as powerfully as the last apostrophe is shaped by Patroklos’ imminent death. The bard, in becoming Achilles, ‘seeing’ Patroklos and using the simile, indicates not just the ‘special relationship’ between the bard and Achilles, as we see in Book 9, but also the special relationship between Achilles and Patroklos, and as it were the bard and Patroklos. The simile and the drawn-out attention to how Patroklos looks go so far in setting Patroklos before the performer that the apostrophe comes forth from the mouth of the narrator, who remains in Achilles’ shoes after his speech. This sudden transport of the bard into Achilles can also be experienced as a transport of Achilles forward into the time of the audience—forward into the body of the bard, in our time—since he addresses Patroklos in the past tense. So while in his speech Achilles intimately addresses a Patroklos who is in fact before him, the apostrophe in effect means that “he can’t really be there”: it is the dead Achilles recalling this episode. So the apostrophe puts Achilles in the underworld, as we remarked in Chapter 1: but he is also being reanimated. He is, then, already a ghost: the apostrophe, set in the context of the Protesilaos imagery and the other poetic effects we have noted, crowns these effects and puts Achilles forward as haunted and haunting at that moment. [61] Yet just prior to this he is querying Patroklos as though he were the one with instant access to news from over the sea. Here Protesilaos appears not only to frame the ongoing action, indicating its meaning through the “sign” of his ship, and to steer its plot, but to enter into the body of the performer-as-Achilles. [62]

This combination of the pair’s distance from and nearness to the threatened ship, as well as the ambiguous distance of Achilles and Patroklos to each other, is a kind of zooming in on the Achaean camp as a city, the building of the wall, and the eventual transmogrification of Achilles’ tent into a palace. (This theme appears in Phoenix’s speech, discussed in the last chapter, when Phoenix pretends that the Achaean camp constituted a “home” to be defended.) After the initial exchange between Achilles and Patroklos, Achilles retrieves a cup from a chest that Thetis sent with him on his departure for the war, as though he is at home sending Patroklos off. [63] This “domestication” is crystallized in the mounting surreal series of similes bringing out the domesticity of the Myrmidon camp, of Achilles’ tent, and eventually of Achilles himself bereft of Patroklos. After Achilles compares Patroklos to a little girl, this series includes the simile of a man building a wall for his home (16.212–214), and continues with the simile of the wasps who “have their homes on the road” (16.261), houses that stupid children disturb, “making a common evil for many.”

The culmination of this image, linking Achilles with “home” and with burning, thus bringing to completion the magical effect Trojan fire has had on him through the ship of Protesilaos, is the simile of fire destroying homes at 17.737–739, its development at 18.207–214, 18.219–221, wherein an island village lights fires in the hope that people will come to save them, and finally Achilles’ shield flashing at 19.375 like the flash of fire from the mountains that appears to sailors being swept by winds away from their loved ones. [64] However often animals’ homes are devastated by hunters and other animals in similes throughout the poem, this series concentrates our attention upon the Myrmidon camp as a domestic space and then, once Patroklos has died, zooms in laser-like upon Achilles himself, who, ostensibly coming to the rescue as the defender hoped for in the simile (18.213), instead has actual fire shooting out of his own head (19.381): “Help me: help me. My house is burning.”

In fact, Ajax sounds this “home front” theme in the stirring speech that closes Book 15, immediately before the fatal conversation:

The epithet ἑτεραλκής focuses upon the pivot point, and resonates with the fact that Hektor has now reached the point furthest from the city; the limit is now being reached that will trigger “outside” intervention from Achilles. ἑτεραλκής is used elsewhere [66] of victory going to the other side; the sentence as a whole points toward the change in perspective in the Patroklos and Achilles scene that follows. The Achaeans have no polis or dēmos close by: but of course it is Patroklos and Achilles who immediately respond to this need and (as if) this speech; the couple are thus framed as such a dēmos, a home front that is yet ἑτεραλκής, an unheimlich home. [67]

The replacement of Protesilaos and his wife by Achilles and Patroklos is part of a complex web of substitutions of one character for another or for a group. Some are part of the mythic background, some are part of the action of the poem. Even those that seem tamely informative, however, come out into the dramatic proceedings in Book 16.

We learn in the Catalogue (2.703–709) that Protesilaos has been replaced by his brother, whose name, Podarkes, is Achilles’ epithet; indeed, Achilles is ποδαρκής immediately before this in his own Catalogue entry (2.688). Podarkes gets his name from his father Iphikles, whose swiftness was superhuman, [68] whereas swiftness of death is actually more salient to Achilles, ὠκύμορος (“swift-fated”).

As Protesilaos is a sacrifice for the entire fleet, [69] so is Achilles himself a sacrifice for the cosmic order, the substitute for the child Thetis never had with Zeus. [70] By one account Protesilaos is even a substitute for Achilles. Thetis warns Achilles not to be the first to leap from his ship since whoever does so will die; [71] Protesilaos, in taking the lead, thus takes Achilles’ place, [72] as Patroklos does in the Iliad. Philostratus’ Heroikos recounts a dialogue between a skeptic called “Phoenix” [73] and the gardener in the sanctuary of Protesilaos. In this work, which revels in the details of Protesilaos’ erotic resurrection, Achilles and Protesilaos appear as rivals. The Dardanos anēr (“Dardanian man,” 2.701) who kills Protesilaos provides another link, since that phrase is used of Euphorbos when he helps to kill Patroklos-playing-Achilles. [74]

I have not yet discussed the name of Protesilaos’ wife. It enters the discussion here because of its role in the play of substitution. In the Cypria, her name is Polydora, whereas in most later accounts she is Laodameia, daughter of Akastos. [75] Now Achilles has a (half-)sister named Polydora. She is mentioned only as the mother of Menesthios, [76] who stands in Achilles’ place in the quasi-catalogue of ships immediately following the decision to send Patroklos out. Thus, Protesilaos’ brother Podarkes shares Achilles’ epithet, and Achilles’ sister Polydora bears the same name as Protesilaos’ wife in the Cypria. Achilles has stepped into the role of Protesilaos, to the extent that the burning of Protesilaos’ ship has been equated with the burning of Achilles’ own ship. Yet his place is now taken by someone (Menesthios) who is given a mother, Polydora—who shares the name of Protesilaos’ wife.

The orgy of substitution in this catalogic passage recalls, in its themes of substitution and replacement, the sequence in the Catalogue of Ships we discussed above. And it is playing alongside, as an accompaniment, the primary substitutions of Patroklos for Achilles, and Patroklos-Achilles for Protesilaos-wife. Yet it ratchets up the substitutions into the bizarre, as though the poet-performer is feverishly turning over in his mind the act of substitution being undertaken by Patroklos. [77] This is yet another way in which the bard is taken over by Achilles, anxious about his act in acceding to Patroklos’ request. Here emerges the connection between the themes of substitution and compensation, as grappled with by Achilles, [78] and the substitution that occurs in performance.

Perhaps this sister Polydora is invented just for this moment, as another reminder of Protesilaos; perhaps not. [79] Whatever may be her connection to Achilles, in the Cypria, according to Pausanias, Polydora, wife of Protesilaos, is the daughter of Meleager and Kleopatra, and thus the granddaughter of Marpessa and Idas:

Back in Book 9, Meleager was put forward as an example for Achilles not to follow; yet the parallels between the two heroes were clear, and the tragic trajectory of the rest of the poem was outlined, even initiated in the Meleager story. There would be a largely involuntary replay of the Meleager story. Patroklos would obviously play Kleopatra, cued by their names and their initially silent but intimate role, but that shoe had not actually dropped—Patroklos had not confronted Achilles—until this moment in Book 16. Now is when Patroklos is speaking to Achilles as Kleopatra, long silent, spoke at last to Meleager, [80] sending him to his death. Patroklos will fail where Kleopatra succeeded, and will take the role of Meleager himself. The moment when Patroklos is making his Kleopatra-like speech is framed by a story involving Kleopatra’s daughter. In both cases, we think he is the woman (the wife of Meleager, then of Protesilaos), but he turns out to be the man. [81]

Already it is clear that Achilles and Patroklos “become” Protesilaos and—let us call her by her more popular name—Laodameia. This is true not necessarily in the sense that their story has been woven, tailored, or embroidered to resemble that tale; it could be true in the minimal sense that the action in Book 16 is framed by this outlandish love story. However, it is possible that the Achilles-Patroklos story was altered to fit with Protesilaos. The ship’s epithet “half-burnt” might be the most striking example of this, but we have considered other themes above, such as the creation of a substitute and reanimation, that begin to make their way into the performance. If we had the Cypria, we would have a better idea of precisely what our text owes to the Memnon story, as opposed to the Protesilaos story.

These questions of Quellen are pertinent, as in the case of Marpessa and Phoenix, and they are indeed related to the workings of presence and performance. So now that we have cleaned up the grammatical situation—that is, the background story along with some of its implications for the audience’s experience of the performance—we can examine the virtues of the passage as a script more freely. The question is how the script deploys background myth in tandem with other techniques to produce certain effects of presence: the sense of the bard taken over by a character, or, as with Phoenix, a character animated “from elsewhere.” In other words, we are concerned not so much with the source of the text as, in this chapter as with the previous one, the (as-if) source of action—though for a performing poet these are not really separable.

Having the Protesilaos story in the background, and as a tangible backdrop (the ship), the unfolding tragedy of Achilles and Patroklos seems to be psychagogically “being run from elsewhere.” Achilles and Patroklos are not moving under their own volition, or from motives bound up with the plot; they are playing out roles in a different story.

This is different from, but related to, their reprising of roles from earlier stories about Achilles, Memnon, and Antilokhos, or for that matter Achilles and Thetis. The Protesilaos story bears the theme of the visiting ghost and magic substitution right in the heart of the story. While an audience who knows the story of Memnon and Antilokhos can experience the events in Book 16 and following as a replay in advance, the ship of Protesilaos touches off the theme of the ghost and configures the events to follow as a ghostly replay. But there is a more directly performative way in which the Protesilaos story “ghosts” the Iliad. The first apostrophe to Patroklos was one glimpse of this. But these eerie kinesthetics are set up much earlier: to this we now turn.

While Achilles vows to Ajax not to emerge and fight until the fire reaches his own ships (9.650–653), the half-measure he takes in sending Patroklos out, and triggering the tragedy, is (as it were; see above) in response to the fire reaching the ship of Protesilaos. In fact, earlier in Book 15 the poem reinforces the expectation that the turning point would be Achilles’ own ship. At 15.63–64, Zeus has wrenched back his awful control of the plot, and predicts/vows that the Achaeans will “fall among the ships of Peleid Achilles.” So the ship of Protesilaos substitutes for the ship of Achilles. [82] But let us not dispose of this by saying Achilles sends out a substitute of himself because the fire has reached the substitute for his ship. It is not so abstract.

Although Phoenix’s speech had inspired or anticipated the tragedy of Patroklos, this plot is actually set in motion when Achilles, standing on his ship (11.600), notices the Achaean rout and calls Patroklos from the tent. This is where Patroklos gives his chilling reply, “What do you need from me?” [83] (his first words in the entire poem), and Achilles sends him out to see what is happening (anticipating his later dispatch in Book 16). When we return to Achilles in Book 16, it is possible that the audience is to think of him as still standing on his ship, waiting for the news. (This can also be simply indicated by gesture and eye-direction. [84] ) This spatial orientation, however embodied, is of a piece with the notion that “the battleground … is but a stage on which Zeus and Achilles himself witness the rapid and inexorable unfolding of the latter’s destiny (11.597–604),” as Nagler puts it, [85] except that Achilles’ role in this unfolding is far from clear, in part because the plot is invaded by other persons from other plots. In any case, the action in Book 16 does follow close upon a speech by a man standing on a ship—Ajax, alone on Protesilaos’ ship, lamenting the fact that there are no nearby allies. Patroklos’ interaction with Achilles in Book 16, the prelude to his aristeia, is framed on both ends by Protesilaos’ ship, as we saw. But his Book 11–16 circuit, in which he visits Nestor, receives the suggestion to don Achilles’ armor, and encounters Eurypylos, is also framed by a man standing on a ship: Achilles in Book 11, and Ajax at the end of Book 15 (followed by Achilles in 16).

The Protesilaos story lends itself to such concrete expression; there is a “kinesthetics” to the story just as there is for Eris, as discussed in Chapter 1. [86] The hero’s most striking aspect is his leap, which appears on the cult statue and from there on coins and visual art. The Vatican Protesilaos sarcophagus (see Figure 17, next page), [87] though late and heavily influenced by Euripides, provides unexpected help in seeing what the Iliad has done in its own, minimalist, medium. The sarcophagus is framed at both ends by ships: Protesilaos first leaping off his ship to his death on the left, and finally boarding the boat of Charon at the extreme right. For Protesilaos, his ship was the boundary between life and death, and this is what makes his cult statue so powerful. His ship’s edge represents death as well as the initiation of action, and makes an ideal beginning and ending for a quasi-ring composition—as appears on the sarcophagus and also in the Iliad when Hektor reaches it—as well as an evocative cult statue pedestal. While on the sarcophagus the ship at one end is echoed by the boat of Charon at the other, here in the Iliad the ship of Protesilaos is replaced by the ship of that lord of the dead manqué, Achilles, who will reprise this role more explicitly in Book 24. (On the Alcestis sarcophagus, Museo Chiaramonti, the place of Charon is taken by Hades on his throne.) The pairing of the ship of Protesilaos with Charon’s boat and the house of Hades on the sarcophagi spreads out in linear space a transformation embodied in space and time by a solo performer in the Iliad.

Figure 17

Both a sarcophagus and a Homeric bard are ideal media for representing the boundary between life and death, or rather, for mediating that crossing. The house on the tragic stage often represents the House of Death. But the sarcophagus and the Homeric bard are by nature containers of the dead, and they each exploit this nature in various concrete ways. We have seen that the performer uses his own body as a kind of gateway for the dead to emerge. This emergence operates hand in hand with other kinds of emergence at other levels of the text, such as the emergence of Patroklos and/or Achilles from their tent or their camp.

The circuit that Patroklos completes between being dispatched by Achilles in Book 11 and his second dispatch, to his death, in Book 16, is so full of imagery of the death realm, not to speak of the carnage of the Battle Books, that it might be called a katabasis in the same sense as Priam’s visit to Achilles. Now it is virtually impossible to map the various spaces of the Iliad in terms of a life vs. death dichotomy, and so such readings will not convince those who require a one-to-one allegorical reading. [88] For example, if the gates of the Achaean wall manned by Lapiths in Book 11 function as gates of Hades, [89] a skeptic may well wonder whether the gates of Troy can equally well serve this function. [90] The answer is yes: “the connection between Hades and its gates was so strong that the mere mention of gates could evoke associations of death,” [91] and in each case the impending death (of Asios and Patroklos, respectively) and other contextual details complete the picture. Again, if Achilles’ withdrawal and return are bound up in the symbolism of a katabasis, how is it that, when he returns to the battle, he is “already dead” and the Nereids perform a quasi-funeral for him? The answer is that this is simply how this poem is: using traditional patterns, but not subject to systematic “this is that” allegorical reading. Similarly, only in Book 24 does Achilles’ tent transmogrify into the house of Hades, but, as we have seen, the Achaeans make a procession to supplicate him in Book 9 somewhat as though he were a (dead) hero of cult.

Lowenstam’s reading of the gates may suggest that the Achaean wall and trench form a kind of Hell. Indeed the wall, based somehow upon the τύμβον… ἕνα … ἄκριτον (translated by Kirk as “one communal mound,” [92] 7.336–337) has an uncertain relationship to the burnt corpses: are they still in the τύμβος and thus part of the wall? At any rate, it is from the hellish fight around the wall that Patroklos is—finally—emerging when he meets Achilles in Book 16. But Patroklos himself has not witnessed the battle firsthand. More accurately, while we the audience are emerging from the action of battle, Patroklos is emerging from his encounter with Eurypylos. As Lowenstam argues, “Eurypylos” strongly connotes the gates of Hades. [93] Patroklos is with Eurypylos for all of Books 12–14 and part of Book 15, as the audience discovers when he is still there tending his thigh-wound at 15.390. It is from those “gates” that he emerges at 16.1, just as we, the audience, emerge from the scene at Protesilaos’ ship.

It is strange to find that Patroklos has been at the hut of Eurypylos so long, as though frozen in time, but stranger still that even when he is not with Eurypylos he spends most of his time in doorways (or tent-openings). Thus in Book 11 he runs out of the tent, “like Ares, and this was the beginning of his evil” (11.604), only to appear suddenly at Nestor’s tent and stand impressively in the doorway, “a mortal equal to a god” (θύρῃσιν ἐφίστατο ἰσόθεος φώς, 11.644). Nestor leads him in by the hand and bids him to be seated (ἐς δ’ ἄγε χειρὸς ἑλών, κατὰ δ’ ἑδριάασθαι ἄνωγε, 11.646). He refuses a seat (11.648), and thus stands frozen in (or near) the doorway throughout Nestor’s entire speech (11.656–803). In the course of this (lengthy as usual) speech, Nestor tells a story about when he went with Odysseus to recruit Achilles and Patroklos, and Peleus poured wine and prepared the meat. Within this embarrassingly contrived mise en abyme of the present situation, some musical chairs takes place, and Nestor himself makes a sudden appearance in the doorway (11.776, note the half-line break): It is in the context of this rehearsal of the previous visit to Peleus that Nestor delivers the fatal recommendation that Achilles send Patroklos out in Achilles’ armor (11.794–803).

Without a response to this sermon, Patroklos runs off, but immediately happens upon Wide-Gate himself (11.809), who, despite his dire thigh-wound, has a mind still intact (νόος γε μὲν ἔμπεδος ἦεν, 11.813), like Teiresias among the dead (Odyssey 10.493–495), and is consulted by Patroklos as such. The long time Patroklos sits tending to Eurypylos (thus reprising Nestor tending to Machaon, though Patroklos, unlike Nestor, tells stories to cheer his patient, 15.393) is emphasized (15.390–393) and framed by references to Eurypylos and his shelter, lest the audience forget (12.1–2; 15.392). His circuit resembles Hektor’s Book 6 farewell sojourn in Troy, itself enclosed within encounters at the gates, only Patroklos is, as it were, frozen at the “gate” until he suddenly reappears beside Achilles in Book 16. [94]

This striking spatial configuration could be interpreted as some sort of “liminal” condition prior to his death, such that he spends Books 11–15 at the gates of Hades before going to this death—sent by Nes-tor, playing his ironic role as with his son in Book 23. [95] When Patroklos finally speaks his fateful speech, he ends with the words of Nestor (16.36–45 , 11.794–803), words that provoke from the narrator the observation that, great childlike fool, he was begging for his own death. These words are “ghosting,” as it were, words that Nestor already framed by rehearsing an earlier scene in which he takes up a pose in imitation of Patroklos, framed by a doorway. Pylian Nestor himself has a strong traditional association with gates, and perhaps this scene takes its inspiration from that—after all, it is in this same scene that Nestor tells the story of leading the Pylians, as Frame argues, not simply to victory but back to life. [96] Later, in fact, when Patroklos is actually in this liminal state between life and death, as a ghost, he complains to Achilles that he is trying to pass through the gates of Hades (23.71) and is wandering through the wide-gated house of Hades, ἀν’ εὐρυπυλὲς Ἄιδος δῶ (23.74), the only instance of this epithet in the Iliad. [97] (Note too the doubling of this image in Iris’ visit to the winds, standing on their stone threshold, 23.201–202, and especially her refusal to take a seat, οὐχ ἕδος, a unique echo of Patroklos’ refusal at 11.648.)

Figure 18

But it also sets up kinesthetically—or schēma-tically, in terms of stance and gesture—Patroklos’ emergence through the body of the bard, and finally, fully, through the door into the space of performance for his aristeia and death. Compare again the Protesilaos (Figure 17) and Velletri (Figure 18) [98] sarcophagi, where scenes of the dead emerging through doorways (as though from inside the sarcophagus, the corpse) to reunite with the living are framed by Protesilaos’ ship and the boat of Charon (or the house of Hades). The bard both is the gate and emerges through it. While Patroklos lingers frozen at the gate of the bard’s body, through the kinesthetic imaginings of the Gate, the two men on ships framing Patroklos’ sojourn create a space for emergence (see Figure 19: “Patroklos’ Frozen Circuit,” drawn by Oren Riggs). The performer can easily embody Achilles standing on the ship in Book 11 by looking down at the mass of battle, just as the authorial Helen does in Book 3, and by calling Patroklos out of the hut, directing his voice downward (this is indirect discourse, but the performer can gesture all the same). As Patroklos, the performer might call upward as he asks, “What do you need of me?” Similarly, in Book 15, whenever and however he embodied Ajax on the ship (please, not actually leaping), he could indicate his position by looking down at his invisible opponents. [99]

Figure 19

When Hektor then lays hold of the ship, I do not see how any performer would not embody this gesture, whether subtly or broadly. This concrete gesture would breathe new life into the following lines about Protesilaos and his own doomed journey, which come as Janko says “as if by sudden inspiration.” The very proximity, the physical contact in performance with this invisible object, primed by moments when he seems to stand upon it as someone else, seems to give birth in the performer-narrator to the memory of Protesilaos and his sad fate.

At that moment there is a slippage in the chain of causation, as things unfold somewhat as if Protesilaos’ ship were the ship of Achilles. But let us not resort to the level of the text and speak of a slippage of the signified under the signifier, or some such thing. It is rather more concrete and enjoyable than that. Once the performer as-if lays hands on the ship, gesture or no, he ‘receives’ this new story, as registered by speaking the lines about the ship (15.704–708) that did not take Protesilaos home again: lines apropos of Achilles, and, we soon find, of Patroklos too. Now, shunted suddenly to that ship as the leaping Ajax, he speaks Ajax’s speech, with its reference to the polis and its odd use of heteralkea, putting us on the lookout for a “home front.” Then, suddenly, the performer as narrator informs us that Patroklos was standing by Achilles crying, and utters the simile of the dark spring (16.3–4).

The vividness and studied quality of the simile brings about a shift: the bard now stands before the weeping Patroklos, gazing upon his face, his body thus in the position of Achilles. As the performer becomes Achilles, he is strangely distant, as though he had not seen anything that we just saw, gently (or in whatever tone) asking Patroklos about whether there is any “news from Phthia.” This violently wrenches us out of the previous violent action, which we have left so abruptly. At once the encounter at Protesilaos’ ship seems to cause the appearance of Achilles and Patroklos—and to have nothing to do with it. Hektor’s grasp fills the bard with the memory of Protesilaos, which induces the becoming, the reanimating, of Achilles, both in terms of his partial emergence (through a substitute) into battle, returning through an image of himself, and in terms of his occupation of the performer’s body. The performer has already set Achilles up as standing on his own ship (11.600). Touching Protesilaos’ ship, however enacted, induces the becoming of Achilles, the inhabitant of a space that has now been set up as the equivalent to Protesilaos’ ship, the pivot point for the action, and its initiating source. But now as Achilles, he suddenly slips into the role of the dead occupier of that ship (Protesilaos). [100] They are at the same time transported into an oddly removed “home.” Patroklos’ tears, at once seemingly caused by the action at the ship and utterly unconnected with it, convey to the audience the effect of action at a distance. But this is just what the performer does in touching his invisible object: as he does so, the space around him shifts.

It would be ham-handed to force this orchestration of objects and characters in space into the rubric of “becoming the character.” But it does use some of the same ingredients, and isolating these helps to grasp the complex play with presence. When the bard grasps the ship as Hektor, as with Menelaos and the helmet (see Chapter 1), an object in the world of the poem induces a “becoming” in the performer (along with other effects). The ship, like the helmet, is empty of its former inhabitant. Hektor has reached the apogee of his heroic action, and the bard embodies the intensity of Hektor’s contact by remembering Protesilaos, bringing on a total recall of the beginning of the war as well as the beginning of the Iliad. Hektor’s heroic reach pierces through the world of the battlefield to the world of domestic suffering and also to the unfolding performance.

Seeing the animation of Achilles as a reaction to Hektor’s broaching reach brings out an unexpected parallel to the appearance of Eris flanking both sides of the “becoming” of Agamemnon (11.1–73; see Chapter 1 above). Recall that Eris appears at the beginning, in a relation of “musical chairs” with Agamemnon, to animate him, and then oddly reappears afterward to oversee with pleasure the work that was after all inspired by her. Remarkably, this sequence too is centered on a ship, as Eris stands on Odysseus’ ship to shout. She is, both at the beginning, on the ship, and at the end, taking the place of the ἀνὴρ μάκαρος ‘blessed/wealthy man’ of the farming simile, an overseer, standing above the action. So too is Achilles. Like Eris, atop his ship in 11.600, he sets Patroklos’ circuit in motion. At the end of the cycle, there is an eerie sense that Achilles is “behind” Patroklos as Eris is Agamemnon, but here the analogy’s crudeness starts to become obvious.

What is this space that is constructed for the ship of Protesilaos? A character, laying hands on the ship, gives birth to bardic memory, and also induces a virtuosic presencing. This performance effect is in keeping with the kind of space in which the stern is thematically a boundary between life and death: that is, for Protesilaos, dying as he leaps off of it. So the life/death boundary coincides with the “becoming” boundary, as in the first examples of Chapter 1, the aristeiai. The performer reaches into the beyond for a new motivation and a new plot, but involuntarily. He is induced to become Achilles and Patroklos; they are induced to play out their suicidal roles. This is registered in the apostrophes, first when a half-present Achilles reacts on his own and through the narrator to Patroklos’ strange, disconnected weeping, and then, as Book 16 proceeds, when the narrator, focalizing Patroklos’ imminent death through the absent Achilles, reacts to that death as though he has inadvertently let it happen.

Like the sēma in the chariot-race speech of Nestor, and like Kleopatra in Phoenix’s speech, the ship of Protesilaos is also an end-point for action, a goal that, when reached, ignites new ideas and a new presencing effect in the performer. (Recall too Aristotle’s ring-compositional image, where thought backs up to a certain point, and then gives way to action.) Unlike those moments, however, this one does not take place at the center of a speech. Instead Protesilaos’ ship forms the turning point of the action of the entire Iliad. It is also the furthest point reached by Hektor, the turning point in his “chariot race” ending in his death. The bard uses Hektor as the vehicle for his own processes of memory and enactment.

That the ship is envisioned as a kind of transitional space, a space for linear progression to pivot out into a new dimension (Friedrich), a space in which dead people rise up to inhabit live ones, is consonant with its being “half-burnt.” Half-burnt objects were used to communicate with the dead and in curses, drawing up power from the underworld. [101]

The ramifications of “half-complete” (ἡμιτελής) are similar, only for dead rather than living practitioners. In Lucian’s Cataplus, the dead Megapenthes uses the fact that his house is half-built to bargain with Plouton and Persephone for his return to life. [102] This is no doubt a parody of the Protesilaos story (see Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead 27.1, where Protesilaos specifically mentions his half-built house to Aiakos). But the principle is well known from hero cult (and modern ghost stories): the dead person returns to tend to unfinished business. [103]

The image of being half in one realm and half in another also matches the state of mind of Achilles, straddling two plots or two intentions. Taplin writes: “He did, however, concede to Aias that he would not fight until Hektor threatened his own ships with fire. Now Patroklos’ plea ... tips the balance so that the undertaking to Aias is half-fulfilled and half-evaded.” [104]

A half-burnt object straddles the realm of the living and the dead. In the realm of love, the soul splits itself between two lovers. Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium elaborates a comic variation on this theme, where the lovers are two halves of one body. The “half-soul” is particularly appropriate to songs or poems of farewell (so-called propemptika). [105] These poems wish for the safe return of the beloved just as Achilles prays to Zeus (16.233–248) upon Patroklos’ departure (cf. esp. ἀσκηθής μοι, 247). Bringing such love-symbolon imagery into this moment may appear to make the poetry too overdetermined. But this very motif of the single spirit in two bodies appears just at the moment of Patroklos’ departure, although it is Patroklos and the charioteer who are described as ἕνα θυμὸν ἔχοντες, “having a single spirit” (16.219). This same formula appears at 15.710 just after the elaborate invocation of Protesilaos’ ship. There it is applied to the opposing armies, who “did not wait for the rushes of arrows and of javelins, but they standing nearby and having one thumos fought with sharp double-axes and battle-axes ...” [106] This description is framed by Hektor’s grasping the ship (704, 716). “Having a single spirit” is not a common formula in the Iliad. Besides these two instances, the only other (17.267) describes the Achaeans around the dead Patroklos.

Thus, the two epithets form two halves of a whole—half-complete house, half-destroyed ship, one on each side of the sea—and each envisions the kind of object that permits travel between realms. [107] This is a good place for a shape-shifting bard (the man whom Plato easily associates with the wandering, dead hero and the magician) to bring his characters to light and to create confusion about his own source of action. In the image of Protesilaos and Achilles on their ships, the poet has created a figure—or a Gestus, in Brecht’s sense—of being stuck between worlds, a space for himself to most fully realize his play between life and death, between lover and beloved, between action and spectatorship, narrator and character, in the poem and out. The ship itself, as a transitional space and as a source for “action at a distance,” which when fired sets off action on an equivalent stage at a certain remove, prepares the ground for the series of substitutions and false images that follows, and for the eerie equation between the death of Patroklos and the death of Achilles.

Like the ship, these substitutions are made of the warp of poetics, or poiēsis, and the weft of presence, or genesis in the sense of becoming. Some of them seem tamely “poietic”: the mere information, for example, that Menesthios substituted for Achilles. Others are entirely on the level of presencing or becoming: the poet “substitutes for” Achilles. But for most of these substitutions it is not easy to separate the two dimensions. And this is because substitution is the very business of the Homeric performer.

The analogy to the chariot-race speech of Nestor, where the performer more deeply “becomes” Nestor when he envisions approaching the turning point (which is a sēma, a tomb), prompts the observation that Protesilaos on his ship, on his cult statue, may have served a similar function in ritual, as worshipers processed to the statue and away from it again. Though speculative in the extreme, this—or something like it—seems to me a satisfying approximation to the workings of ring composition in Homer, if not some sort of counterpart in an earlier stage of the tradition. [108] It also recalls the journey of the sun to the winter solstice point, and the burst of fertility there, as embodied in the myth of Alkyone. [109]

The script at the juncture of Books 15 and 16 has some of the same performative virtues as other passages we have seen, including the speech of Phoenix. It also involves similar themes: a structure threatened with fire, sacrifice, and an exceedingly uxorious husband. [110] But as a package it has an entirely different quality. One can see this difference as a matter of poetics with a corresponding effect in presence. Meleager’s physical intimacy with Kleopatra, along with her mother’s rape, fomented her takeover of the body of Phoenix and the bard. Protesilaos’ ghostly intercourse with their daughter across the sea and away among the living conjured a delicate play among longing, death, resurrection, distance, memory, creation, destruction, and spanning of realms. Phoenix, in his speech, marshals and unfolds numerous figures and spaces, and also creates a space of emergence in the performance of the repeated curses. But to a great extent these containers and the figures bursting out of them are nested within one another inside the body of the bard. In contrast, here in the scene overshadowed by the ship of Protesilaos, along with its prelude and its aftershocks, the disparate and dispersed kinesthetics, the imagery of the gate, the turning-point, the ship, the house, the sea of separation, the mental and physical frenzy of substitutions, and the dimension added by death and resurrection, orchestrate a play of presence that the bard, shall we say, could only half embody.