Introduction to this Volume

The Power of Thetis and the several essays included here are minimally revised (including some updated footnotes) from the form in which they were first published or presented. They thus stand as a record of their own moment in Homeric studies, a moment that they both reflect and, I hope, helped to further. The late decades of the twentieth century saw a general reckoning among Homerists with the powerful heuristic provided by the fieldwork of Parry and Lord as it was brought to bear upon research developed by ‘neo-analysis’—an approach through which the Iliad and the Odyssey were studied not as singular unities but rather as narratives shaping themselves in relation to traditional myth and to material given narrative form in the Epic Cycle. [1] The transformative encounter of oralist and neo-analyst perspectives on the Iliad’s adaptation of pre-existing materials and recombination of mythological motifs reinforced an awareness of the scope of oral poetics and attuned students more closely to its supple resources. [2] In its attention to the complex hearing that the Iliad encourages—a hearing of tradition within and against the highly shaped and selected texture of the poem—The Power of Thetis aspired to join this conversation and the broader, increasingly nuanced and resonating choral hearing of the poem: hearing within, around, before, and between the very specific poetic power of the Iliad.

The narratological interests pursued by literary scholars and anthropologists also informed The Power of Thetis and the essays included here (e.g., “Composition by Theme and the Mêtis of the Odyssey”); so too did literary studies on intertextuality, which—when generalized and liberated from exclusively textual and literary notions of poiêsis—proved fruitful for exploring what I called in The Power of Thetis the “superbly overdetermined” workings of {1|2} the Iliad. Scholars have turned closer attention to the gaps and contradictions in ancient narrative, [3] as well as to the interrelations among narrative traditions and mythological variants. In ongoing work subsequent to The Power of Thetis, I have aimed to put Homeric and Hesiodic works in conversation—or, more precisely, to reanimate the profound conversation embedded within and between them; for in these poems we can discern complex, sometimes mutually exclusive, systems of relation, which I have tended to call “inter-tropologic” relations, for lack of a more elegant term. If the Iliad and Odyssey shape themselves in relation to tradition, so too do the Homeric poems shape themselves in relation to Hesiodic narratives and ideologies: an underlying premise of my work—shared with many others—is that ancient Greek narrative is productively approached as a complex, interrelated, dynamic system. [4]

Such an approach may appear to err too much on the side of a synchronic systems-analysis (or neo-structuralist) approach to metaphor, trope, pattern, and formula, and by no means do I wish to downplay the historical problematics that scholars still debate regarding these poems. [5] Although the essays included here tend toward the literary side of analysis, this collection aims to engage with kindred work in “cultural poetics”: the intersection of cultural anthropology, work on the poetics of Archaic Greek narrative, and historically grounded accounts of the economies embedded in and represented by epic form the background matrix for my thinking. [6]

Some years ago, in dialogue with the work noted below, I began to reflect on the language of exchange in the Iliad, most specifically as it emerges in the discourse of combat. At the moment of final confrontation, enemy warriors repeatedly imagine their fatal struggle as a negotiation and death as part of an imminent bargain. [7] In response to the Trojan Poulydamas’ boast that he has killed Prothoënor, an Argive warrior, the Greek Ajax, in turn, kills a Trojan fighter and replies, “Consider, Poulydamas, whether this man’s death {2|3} isn’t equivalent in exchange for (anti) Prothoënor?” [8] We might adduce any number of structurally similar transactions; those invoked in battlefield insults were the starting point for this investigation (“Les Amis Mortels,” this volume).

Meditating on these dialogues led me to conclude that the discourse of the battlefield encodes and presupposes a conceptual ground, its features often marked by the term ?ντί ‘in exchange for’. Warriors not only threaten but also taunt one another, and when they do so they express their intention to pay the enemy back or to exact payment from him. These dialogues invite us to see in the poem a pervasive figurative system of exchange: Is this man’s death an adequate exchange for that one’s? Is Agamemnon’s seizure of Briseis worth Achilles’ wrath? Is timê sufficient recompense for fighting in the forefront of battle? [9] Is kleos sufficient recompense for the death of the warrior hero? Battlefield dialogues thus simultaneously take the rhetorical form of agonistic exchange and introduce the conceptual problem of equivalence. They usher us into the problematic of commensurability, which is the deepest structuring principle—the foundational problematic—underlying the various orders of exchange (of goods, women, words, blows, lives) in the poem.

Throughout the Iliad, the equivalence on which exchange is based is repeatedly presented not as a given but as a problem, a matching or measuring to be contended, worked out, fought over, thought through. Warriors on the battlefield refer to their cohort as philoi, a term that expresses the bonds of equality among the heroes, their horizontal equivalence or exchangeability one for one. [10] Yet, however equal they are in their collaboration on the field of battle, the heroes are also inserted into a hierarchical social order, which {3|4} the poem presents as coexisting with their lateral warrior bonds. This project is concerned in part with the tension between orders (e.g., vertical v. horizontal bonds), with the way the Iliad refuses to simplify or settle the claims of any pole of disputed valuation. [11] The poem begins with the question of whose authority shall prevail—Agamemnon’s polemical assertion of what Donna Wilson calls “fixed-rank” authority versus Achilles’ model of fluid, agonistic authority. [12] Their dispute introduces questions of judging, calibrating, and transacting: questions that invite us, as they invited its earliest auditors, to consider what “equal” means. For what should be unambiguous—that this “A” is equal to that “B,” that “A” is owed for “B,” or even that “A” and “B” might be compared—is not. In the course of the poem, whenever a hero is called “equal to a god,” it is precisely when he is about to be vulnerable, that is, when he is revealed to be exactly not a god. [13] To invoke the language of isos is in the Iliad to invoke its opposite or, more precisely, to destabilize the transparency of the equation, the congruence of the conjunctions. As Jakobson and his successors have taught us, figural comparisons—similes, metaphors, and more extended tropes—bear within them the shadow of disjunction, which the surface conjunction of terms apparently belies. If in the Iliad someone is said to be like a god only if he is, in fact, not a god, then we see a similar double movement encoded in every transaction at the level of social exchange and valuation: a woman might be worth two tripods or four oxen, [14] and in that sense “equal to” those items, but that is only because she is not tripods or oxen.

This is not to rehearse the logic of exchange value in its archaic moment; I hope rather to point to a mode of reflection often pursued in these pages. The exchanges and imagined equivalences presented and interrogated in the {4|5} Iliad partake simultaneously of linguistic/figural operations and ideational movements. The problematic of commensurability finds its systematic expression in those figures and tropes in the Iliad that themselves encode matching operations—the figural/ideational complex of anti for example, or that evoked by isos or philotês.

The Iliad explores the highest mortal stakes of equivalence and commensurability. The poem maps one territory for conceptualizing balance and equivalence, encouraging us to ask what the basis of sameness is in the poem. Achilles says, for example, that he regarded Patroklos as equal to his own life. [15] We should wonder: ‘Equal’ how? Through what “general equivalent” (to invoke a Marxian diction)? (Any metaphor, any simile might be read as introducing a problem of matching: Is my love like a red, red rose? Is Achilles god-like? And if so, in what ways?) To ask what underlies the much-discussed existential crisis of Achilles is to be led to the poem’s crisis of measure, of commensurability, of value and values.

My question has been, what is the ground for such exchange language, or exchange ideation? My work has required, in part, an extended defamiliarization of the logic of equivalence: in this sense such a reading responds to the logic of the Iliad, which itself consistently interrogates equivalence. As my discussion thus far suggests, this study arises partly out of an anatomy of language and partly out of a focus on Iliadic situations: crises of exchange, of judgment, of measurement, of value. Throughout the poem we see that crises of exchange, for example in Iliad 1, are also simultaneously crises of cognition.

As examples, we might consider two famous moments in the Iliad: the exchange of armor between Glaukos and Diomedes in Book 6 and Hektor’s recognition of the scales of Zeus at Book 16.658. Especially suggestive along these lines is a passage in Iliad 19 in which the scales of Zeus recur, this time in advice from Odysseus, who urges Achilles not to send men into battle hungry: “Let your heart endure to listen to my words. When there is battle men suddenly have their fill of it / When the bronze scatters on the ground the straw in most numbers / and the harvest is most thin, when Zeus has poised his balance / Zeus who is tamiês polemoio ‘steward of war’” (216ff.). [16] {5|6}

Contemplating these images and scenes, I have felt, along with other readers, that in them we might find some central basis for understanding the poetics of the Iliad. By “poetics” I mean, in the widest sense, the discursive and figural parameters of the imagination—the terms in which the poem imagines its subject, figures its thought, thinks its figures. What we have in the Iliad, we might say—echoing many critics committed to the coherence, richness, and systematic complexity of the poem [17] —is a poem thinking. In invoking “poetics,” we could as well invoke “the discourse of the poem.” Considered as discourse, the poem offers a self-regulating linguistic, figurative, and ideational system. What I have wished to track in the following pages are the deep structural and tropological movements in the Iliad.

Such preoccupations have led me to explore more deeply not only the Iliad but also, and necessarily, the larger corpus of early Greek poetry. If we shift our frame to include Hesiod (or, as Gloria Ferrari has brilliantly done, Alcman [18] ), we see that the problematic of matching, contending, measuring, and balancing cuts across the Archaic corpus. So it has proved fruitful to engage as well with Hesiod’s Works and Days, and intermittently with other Archaic poems, through which I hope to suggest both the figural and ideational movements within each work and also the movements of tropes that are resonant across the corpus of Archaic Greek poetry.

My interest in cultural poetics, in each poem and in the collective corpus as a kind of systematic working through, may be seen as indebted to the stimulating work of what has been called the ‘Paris School’ of classicists, especially the writings of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Marcel Detienne, and Nicole Loraux. [19] These scholars have carefully articulated various levels of concern encoded in cultural texts, for example, the relation among specific orders of being; they have taught us to be particularly alert to axes of sameness and difference and to the organization of these axes hori- {6|7} zontally, so to speak (viz. warriors contending), as well as vertically (beasts below men below gods). Their acute analyses of critical categories of thought have provided one kind of model for my reading and approach (“Genre and Generation in the Odyssey,” this volume), as they have for so many classicists on this side of the ocean. [20]

It has sometimes been charged that structuralist readings of texts, myths, or situations all too often lend themselves to the production of a rigid combinatoire or grid of binaries, and that there can be a crude structuralism is certainly true. The work of the scholars mentioned above is, however, nothing but subtle. (For an appreciation, see the final essay in this volume, “Remembering Nicole Loraux Remembering Athens.”) The essays in this volume do not offer an analytic formalism; my unit of analysis is typically not the term or the concept but rather the movement of the trope—thus my somewhat cumbersome invoking of “figural/ideational complexes” and movements. To find structuring principles in the Iliad, or in Hesiod’s Works and Days, to take each poem provisionally as a self-enclosed (but not rigid) system: these seem to me the methodological presumptions least likely to distort the poem, depending of course on the mix you take as evidence for the structure. I assume one looks at the language of the poem for evidence.

Taking poetic language as our evidentiary base helps us to trace the development by which key phrases and concepts of Archaic poetry—homoios, isos, etc.—are translated into political language in the Classical period. [21] Archaic metaphors have an afterlife, another life in the polis: in tragedy, in the funeral oration, in the courts. The ideational complexes around measuring and exchanging also inform pre-Socratic philosophy, which I hope to explore further in a discussion of dikê from Hesiod to Heraclitus. [22]

As previously suggested, over the past two decades, “exchange,” both as an economic mechanism and a linguistic-symbolic transaction, has become a fertile topos for classicists, as it had earlier for anthropologists, sociologists, and other students of culture. Sitta von Reden’s Exchange in Ancient Greece is an example of this interest; she observes that the “shift of interest from production to exchange is an attempt to overcome the cultural parochialism in which economic history traditionally unfolds.” [23] She, like Hans van Wees in {7|8} his compelling Status Warriors, takes up and extends the discussion advanced by M. I. Finley concerning the representation of economic life in ancient Greek poetry. [24] A half-century of anthropological and economic work, partly inspired by Marcel Mauss’s discussion of gift-economies, has informed attention to ancient Greek poetry as evoking an “embedded economy,” in Karl Polanyi’s terms: that is, the ancient Greek epics can be seen as representing or indexing a community in which “the economic” is not yet disaggregated from social, political, and ritual forms of life. I should reiterate here that my discussions of exchange language do not ground themselves in, or rely on, extended analyses of, say, “the gift” or “the commodity form,” nor do they explore historical questions; [25] ancient Greek poetry appears here, not as a possible archive for historians (as it does, in the first instance, for van Wees), but as a field of representation and cognition, provisionally a world unto itself. This is a methodological restriction of the field of inquiry that I hope will bear fruit.

Sitta von Reden helpfully observes that “exchange was a model of thought in ancient Greece itself,” yet she proceeds, “Conceiving of the world in terms of pairs of opposites and polarities, the Greeks expressed fundamental ideas about society and nature in terms of exchange.” [26] “Exchange,” however, need not be a structure of polarities and opposites; it can be, to shift the metaphor, a network of tropes, mobile and complex, irreducible to binaries: thus the need for poetics—for an analysis of the movement of tropes and thought. {8|9}

With the discourse of exchange in mind, we see that, as represented in the poem, the warriors’ entry into battle confirms relationships that are presumed to be reciprocal. B. Fenik’s thorough analysis in Typical Battle Scenes establishes that a warrior typically enters the battle when a friend or relative is killed, wounded, or under siege. Fenik shows that this entry—often a figure’s spotlit moment in the narrative—is, typically, explicitly motivated by anger, pity, or grief: warriors go into battle to protect, to rescue, or to avenge. Although the recompense offered for fighting is measured in material goods as an index of timê, neither the narrative nor the warriors adduce timê (or even kleos) as motivation at the point at which they take their lives in their hands. [27] What Achilles does in venturing into battle after the death of Patroklos is thus perfectly typical—an enlargement of the poem’s patterning, not a deviation. If Achilles is understood to be an intensification of the paradigmatic and essential warrior predicament, this suggests that the discovery of incommensurability the poem enacts through him is always there systematically—embedded, so to speak, in the cultural logic the poem everywhere elaborates.

An impressive recent examination of this cultural logic is Donna Wilson’s Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. [28] Wilson’s book offers a persuasive analysis of what she calls “the monumental compensation theme” of the poem, [29] focused in particular on the social and semantic fields of apoina (ransom) and poinê (reparation or revenge), insisting that they belong to a “unified social and semantic network”—a network the poem and its characters ceaselessly interrogate: “compensation thus emerges as the locus of a struggle for dominance based on a strategy of competing definitions and aggressive arrogation of roles.” [30] Her book rightly proposes “compensation as a coherent system”: “the poetics of compensation, or the collocation of formulaic and traditional elements, proves to be bound up with the politics, or social relations and power structures, of reciprocity in Homeric society.” [31] Wilson sharpens our grasp of the several systems of economy operative in {9|10} the poem, and her systematic analysis rescues us from excessively psychologizing and modernizing accounts of heroic identity.

It is important to observe that Iliadic emotions are social, not private, however individually and somatically located the representation of emotional experience. [32] To put it another way, it is a mistake to understand pity, anger, or grief as opposed to the cultural value of kleos; pity, anger, and grief partake just as profoundly of the social-symbolic code. Jean Baudrillard is one of the theorists who has taught us not to reduce “the symbolic” to “the psychological”: my discussion of Archaic poetics tries to bear that lesson in mind, focusing as it does on the logic of representation. Iliadic representation of subjectivity is always social, even and perhaps most profoundly when the poem locates cultural conflict or contradiction in an individual, most famously in Achilles. Bonds of reciprocity underlie and propel affect; exchange language structures the representation of emotion as much as the representation of combat or trade or sacrifice. Baudrillard writes: “The symbolic must never be confused with the psychological. The symbolic sets up a relation of exchange in which the respective positions cannot be autonomized.” [33] Every position implies a relation and thus a process. Extending this insight to Archaic poetry, we observe that there is no singular hero, there are heroes and contexts: one may be the Best of the Achaeans [34] —one is never solely the best; there is no solitary farmer in Hesiod—there are neighbors and brothers, getting along badly or well as they may; there is no unilateral sentence of justice—there is measuring, weighing, balancing.

The Iliad sustains a many-sided exploration of its constitutive predicaments, diagnosing its own impasses. In the founding dispute of Book 1, when Agamemnon declares that he is going to take Briseis, claiming that he is owed her for the loss of Chryseis, Achilles moves immediately to the question, why are we here? From Achilles’ perspective, what is being violated in the imminent seizure of Briseis is the imperative of reciprocity; yet Agamemnon articulates his claim through an apparently similar language of owed honor and goods. By shifting the plane of the immediate dispute to the broadest question of the war, Achilles orients us to reciprocity as a system: the Achaeans have come to Troy because they have acknowledged and honored their reciprocal obligations to the sons of Atreus. Agamemnon, by contrast, looks at the {10|11} local transaction, considering Briseis as rightful compensation for the loss of Chryseis.

We confront here not only a dispute about authority but more profoundly an impasse between levels of analysis—Agamemnon preoccupied with the immediate exchange; Achilles countering with a vision of the larger, cultural system of exchange that enables and subsumes all particular transactions. Achilles’ question introduces a significant element into exchange language and exchange dispute: the dimension of temporality. For, in the oath on the scepter or when he contemplates his two alternative kêres, Achilles considers the long view. Through Achilles the poem constantly signals its awareness that reciprocity as both a material and a social-symbolic system exists in time and over time. In Book 1, Achilles declares that prizes should not be redivided or redistributed now; he assures Agamemnon that if he waits until the war’s end he will be recompensed three times over. The mindfulness of temporality here is both Achilles’ and the poem’s. Thus we see that disputes over exchanges have as much to do with their timing as their contents.

As the Iliad thinks through the complexities of exchange, we see that the poem imagines its system of reciprocity not as a series of static, algebraic operations—this death for that one, this woman for that one, this insult for that one—but rather an experience of transactions in and through time. This temporal element forces all actors to take the measure of their predicaments: not only what would suffice, but when. Satisfaction that comes too late is not, of course, satisfaction; payback too early may similarly disappoint. The deep structure of cultural reciprocity—whether positive (philotês) or the negative reciprocity of debt or death-as-payback—must be seen, then, as requiring the ongoing work of measuring, thinking, figuring.

This temporalization of exchange is equally prominent in Hesiod. Mindful of the temporal element that renders exchange something other than a simple equation, something more than a spatialization or an image (e.g., the scales of Zeus), we can begin to understand a somewhat opaque pronouncement in Works and Days: Hesiod’s accusation that the dorophagoi basilees—fools that they are—do not know “how much more the half is than the whole” (ν?πιοι, ο?δ? ?σασιν ?σ? πλ?ον ?μισυ παντ?ς, 40). This culminating charge against these eminences, appearing at the very outset of the Works and Days, is a striking but curious rebuke. The much-discussed line has vexed many a commentator, [35] and I do not offer a solution to their vexation here. But what is clear from Hesiod’s assertion is that quantifying or taking {11|12} the measure of something is no simple operation, that the sum total which the process of measuring yields will not be transparently self-evident—may, in fact, be counter-intuitive: how can the half be more than the whole? Beyond and through this perplexity, this problem of measuring, we shall see that there is a connection between figuring this out and acting ethically, and—what is more—that there is an association between reckoning and power.

It is these notions that I have been concerned with over the past years, in thinking about why it matters that the basileis don’t know how things add up—that is, in thinking about the role of measuring, and its contribution to the representation of exchange, in the Works and Days. I suggest that the paradox of the half being greater than the whole, as stated, draws attention to a problem that has fundamental and pervasive application in the Works and Days: namely, the meaning of equivalence, proportionality, and equilibrium and their function in social relations—considered in a register that is at the same time figurative and pragmatic.

Like The Power of Thetis, the essays in this volume are marked by their time of composition. I hope that the readings in these pages will be of use to students of early Greek epic, and that readers will accept them as conditioned, contingent offerings on a common field. {12|}