Part II. Chapter 2. Les Amis Mortels [1]

Battle in the Iliad is far from wordless carnage, resonating only with the sound of armor clashing. The general description of the poem’s first military encounter begins strikingly by contrasting the eerie silence of the Greek troops with the heteroglossia of the Trojans. But once the battle is joined:

This paper is about how Homeric warriors talk to each other in battle. The Iliad, as has often been observed, repeatedly emphasizes a distinction between the requirements of warfare and those of debate (agorê) or council (boulê). Achilles, for example, in Book XVIII, claims unparalleled ability in the former, while yielding to others’ superiority in the latter. [2] My concern, however, is with an intersecting category, namely with what warriors say to each other not in an assembly, passing around the scepter, but in the setting of battle—just the place where we would expect speech to be at most a vehicle for conveying a blueprint of the battle plan: “Advance!” “Retreat!” and so forth. But on the contrary, as every reader of the Iliad comes to appreciate, verbal exchanges between warriors in combat are extensive and often elaborate. What function and value does the Iliad assign to speech in this setting? {120|121}

In recent Homeric studies, much important work has been done on kleos as a theme and as an epic value—that is, on what will be said about warriors by those generations of men who come after them. My focus here is on what is said to them, or rather, what they say to each other. If the fair division of prizes and the distribution of food are an issue in the Iliad, if there is a calculus and a weighing of everything heroes get, is there an implicit measure for language as well—is there language that is fitting, language that gives too little, language that says too much? In the Homeric world of formally marked exchanges—oaths, prayers, vows, laments—that confirm a range of socio-religious ties, virtually all belong to other arenas, from which they are imported into the world of war. My subject here will be the exchanges that are fundamentally shaped by the condition of battle, those exchanges not adapted but indigenous to it.

Early in Book XIII of the Iliad, at a perilous moment for the Greeks, with the fighting growing increasingly brutal and with many of their chief fighters wounded, as Hector and the Trojans advance on the ships, the Cretan leader Idomeneus encounters Thoas, son of Andraimon (or so he believes; in fact it’s Poseidon in disguise); brief conversation ensues. Questioned by “Thoas,” Idomeneus attributes the Achaeans’ disadvantage in the war to Zeus’ ill-will, and (as though to explain why this turn in their military fortunes cannot be blamed on inadequate Achaean fighting) he pauses to praise Thoas, specifying not his strength or his speed, but his practice of rousing up other warriors—of inciting them to battle: Idomeneus here draws attention to an essential aspect of the warrior function, one that is as crucial in epic action as wielding a spear or planning battle strategy. To incite men to combat (otrunai) is a demonstration of vital authority on the part of any warrior and a critical—in some ways the most critical—contribution to the war effort. It is principally what the gods have to offer when they enter the fray with partisan intent, either in their own guise or in someone else’s. Poseidon in Book XIV (367ff.) asserts that the Greeks {121|122} “will feel the absence of Achilles less if we spur each other on (otrunometha).” Diomedes, at XIV 131ff., urges the other heroes, wounded though they are, to otrunai the men. Nestor, in Book X, blames Menelaos for what he thinks may be his failure to rouse up the other heroes. [3] Sarpedon’s dying words to Glaukos are: To rouse the laos ‘fighting host’, to succeed at inciting (otrunai) them, urging them as a group and individually to risk their lives, is a complicated proposition because it is done not simply by example but through words—and by words that must invoke and underscore fundamental assumptions about reciprocal relations between philoi in the context of battle, or, to put it another way, how the context of battle defines what it means to be philoi.

In a general sense, and (it would seem) paradoxically, it is the military event—just the thing one would expect to render talking superfluous—that draws attention to the power of words in the Iliad. What invites Idomeneus’ commentary on the dire situation for the Greeks, and his praise of his interlocutor as one who rouses the troops, is a single, telling question. “Thoas” demands: This question, I suggest, has not only an ironic, metonymic, rhetorical value—“Where are the actions you promised? Where are the goods you said you’d deliver?”—but also an important literal meaning: what has become of that indispensable instrument of aggression, the threat that heartens one’s allies and alarms the enemy? “Where have the threats gone?” is a question that is posed elsewhere in the Iliad—for example, by Apollo to Aeneas in Book XX: {122|123} Achilles, as he sends the Myrmidons with Patroklos out to terrify the Trojans, reminds them not to forget their apeilai, the boasting threats they uttered while waiting by the ships. [4] When Hera in Book VIII (219ff.) puts it into Agamemnon’s mind to otrunai his troops, he asks where the hostile words against the Trojans have gone that the men had uttered at Lemnos. Threats have two audiences: one’s comrades, on the one hand, and the enemy on the other. The reference to threats constitutes in itself a form of encouragement, and as such draws attention to the double-edged quality of words as weapons in the Iliad. [5]

Addressed to either audience, hostile words may be potent, but they must be justified; otherwise they become a testimony to cowardice, pusillanimity. Threats that are empty are like an ineffective spear cast or sword thrust that leaves the initiator more vulnerable, or like armor that does not protect its wearer. Thus Aeneas challenges Pandaros (at Iliad V 171): To which Pandaros, having failed at mortally wounding Diomedes, replies in disgust that his bow is anemôlia ‘useless, futile’—a term that occurs formulaically in the phrase anemôlia badzein ‘to speak idly’. [6] {123|124}

Menelaos in Book VII, when he wants to move the reluctant Greek chiefs to accept Hektor’s challenge to a duel, simultaneously stirs and reproaches them in a speech that begins by addressing them as apeilêteres ‘threateners’. [7] In Menelaos’ words, if none of the Danaans had stood forth to face Hector, it would have been a lôbê ‘disgrace’, an affront for the ‘threateners’—one they would have inflicted upon themselves: every threat is potentially a boomerang that may rebound against the speaker, and the speaker may be exposed, or expose himself, by having spoken. But champions do stand forth, and Ajax, who presents himself to meet the challenges from Hektor (and from Menelaos and Nestor), and who wins the lottery among the aristoi Achaiôn, is then indeed described as advancing against Hektor with threats (apeilêsas prosêuda). Hektor replies to Ajax’ speech by saying mê meu peirêtidze (Iliad VII 235), which is a term used otherwise only for military action (Iliad XII 47, 257; XV 615)—it denotes ‘breaking through enemy lines’. [8]

Addresses to one’s enemy, this suggests, are military actions in themselves—not an adjunct to combat but a form of combat. Thus Apollo instructs Aeneas in Book XX on how to face Achilles in battle with the following remarkable advice: He warns Aeneas to defend himself not against Achilles’ spear, but against his words. The Ajaxes similarly instruct their followers:

In their final duel, Hektor equates Achilles’ faulty spearcast with his speech—the inaccuracy of the one necessarily implies the falseness of the other:

We learn, moreover, from a dialogue between Sarpedon and Tlepolemos, that there is a heroic precedent (perhaps in an epic tradition) for the catastrophic effects of hostile language: Herakles sacked Troy, we are told, because of a ‘rebuke’ (enipê) by Laomedon. [9] There are of course passages in which speech is explicitly devalued, but it is worth bearing in mind that these occur in contexts that at the same time emphasize and highlight the efficacy of hostile words—so that such passages appear to acknowledge the power of words by attempting to deflect or minimize it. [10]

The heroes themselves, then, acknowledge a special aggressive impact of language, which returns us to the warrior’s function of inciting (otrunai) his comrades. As Idomeneus’ statement to “Thoas” makes clear, combative words spoken to encourage those on one’s own side are judged by the heroes themselves to have equally powerful force.

What language, then, is used to rouse warriors to lay down their lives? In the most frequent form of collective address, which can serve as the unmarked model for such exhortations, they are specifically invoked as philoi: Nestor, at XV 661, begins with: “Dear friends, be men” (ὦ φίλοι ἀνέρες ἔστε), and the passage concludes: “So he spoke, and stirred the spirit and heart in each man” (ὣς εἰπὼν ὄτρυνε μένος καὶ θυμὸν ἑκάστου, Iliad XV 667).

A related form of this, occurring seven times in the poem, spoken by both Greeks and Trojans, is: It occurs, for example, at VI 112, VIII 147, XI 287, and Hektor delivers it at XV 487. “Be men”; “remember your valour”—these iterations encourage by implying that the philoi are adequate to their task intrinsically, by virtue of being the men that they are; they need only be reminded of it. Hektor continues:

Menelaos’ speech and the words of “Thoas,” however, show us a significant transformation of this model. Menelaos challenges his fellow Achaeans as Ἀχαιΐδες οὐκέτ’ Ἀχαιοί (Iliad VII 96)—they are not men; they may not even be human, but inert “water and earth” (ὕδωρ καὶ γαῖα). In contrast to the {126|127} reassurance Hektor offers to the warriors about to die, moreover, “Thoas” demonstrates his ability, praised by Idomeneus, to urge on—otrunai—his comrades with the lines: Agamemnon, as well, predicts this frightful future: To add simply one other example of this kind of revision, one might point to the passage in Book VI, where Nestor urges on the fighters with: He calls on them not to hang back in order to plunder their Trojan victims, but to kill more men (ἀλλ’ ἄνδρας κτείνωμεν) with the reassurance that they will soon plunder them unhindered, and his speech concludes with “speaking {127|128} thus, he spurred on the strength and spirit of each one” (ὣς εἰπὼν ὄτρυνε μένος καὶ θυμὸν ἑκάστου). How important spoils are to every warrior we know from the Iliad as a whole: that they are an emblem of valor is illustrated by the dialogue between Meriones and Idomeneus in Book XXIII; how much their value is endorsed by Hektor in particular we know from Book VI, where his ideal for his son is that Astyanax shall one day bring back the ἔναρα βροτόεντα from a warrior he has slain (Iliad VI 480–481).

Consider then Hektor’s speech at Iliad XV: In other words, side by side with the sort of otrunai rallying cry, cited earlier (ἀνέρες ἔστε, etc.), that we might imagine would be offered to inspire fighters—the kind that guarantees warriors the security of their heroic expectations as to their masculinity and as to their entitlement to a warrior’s prizes, a warrior’s funeral, and a warrior’s renown—there exists another verbal strategy that evidently undermines that security and inverts the image of the warrior as given by warriors themselves (as by Hektor of Astyanax in Book VI), and these messages are offered as a form of inciting to battle as well.

In a famous scene in Book IV, [11] Agamemnon rebukes Diomedes, one of his most reliable champions, reproaching him for lurking in the background rather than fighting in the forefront (the verb used here, ptôssein ‘to cower like an animal’, recurs regularly in such speeches). It is an accusation of cowardice cast in terms that attest to the glorious reputation of Tydeus while denigrating his son by comparison. Not only has Diomedes failed in {128|129} the heroic ideal of surpassing one’s father, but Agamemnon’s harangue also implies that Diomedes will not earn the kleos that his father deservedly attained. Diomedes’ friend and fellow epigonos, Sthenelos, objects—“we are better than our fathers!”—but Diomedes silences him: Agamemnon’s insults, which would deny Diomedes heroic stature, are justified by virtue of constituting a gesture of encouragement.

Not only the hero himself but his family as well—his whole collection of male relatives—are the object of Sarpedon’s abuse of Hektor at Iliad V 471ff. By way of exhorting Hektor, Sarpedon asks him where his former menos has gone, proceeding to demean Hektor’s brothers and brothers-in-law, whom he describes as cowering (kataptôssousi) like frightened dogs. His words “bite” Hektor and send him back into the fray.

Immediately prior to Agamemnon’s attack on Diomedes, the Greek leader treats Odysseus and Menestheus to an equally vitriolic rebuke, charging that although they eat as much as they can at the feast (dais), they do not take their share of the fighting, an accusation that implies a breach of the isê dais. [12] Agamemnon calls Odysseus a string of abusive terms, including kerdaleophron—an insult otherwise used only by an enraged Achilles to Agamemnon in their quarrel in Book I. Odysseus responds furiously in his own defense, lashing out verbally at Agamemnon, whereupon Agamemnon responds happily that “what you think is just what I think” (τὰ γὰρ φρονέεις ἅ τ’ ἐγώ περ). [13] This exchange of insults is evidently an expression of homophrosunê ‘like-mindedness’—which, as we know from the Odyssey, is the definition of a happy marriage! [14] {129|130}

The warriors implicitly acknowledge the message underlying this rhetorical code, and later, when Agamemnon proposes that they return home, Diomedes himself explicitly questions whether Agamemnon has confused code and message. At the opening of Book IX, he reprimands Agamemnon, asking, “You don’t think that we really are as unwarlike and cowardly as you said we were, do you?” [15]

But the possibility of that confusion is allowed for by the verb neikeô, which here designates Agamemnon and Sarpedon’s verbal action (e.g., καὶ τὸν μὲν νείκεσσεν ἰδὼν κρείων Ἀγαμέμνων, Iliad IV 368), as well as Menelaos’ acte de langage in Book VII (νείκει ὀνειδίζων, μέγα δὲ στεναχίζετο θυμῷ, Iliad VII 95) and, also in Book VII, Nestor’s long reproach designed to rouse the fighting spirit in the chiefs (ὣς νείκεσσ’ ὃ γέρων, οἳ δ’ ἐννέα πάντες ἀνέσταν, Iliad VII 161), to cite only a few examples. Neikos is the term that designates (for the characters themselves) the entire conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans (Iliad III 87; VII 374 = Iliad VII 388), as well as the literal battle in progress (δὴ γὰρ μέγα νεῖκος ὄρωρεν, Iliad XII 361, XIII 122, XV 400, etc.). If we remember that Paris neikesse (Iliad XXIV 29) the goddesses in his courtyard, we know that denigration can have far-reaching consequences. The example of Achilles, who withdraws even before Agamemnon takes Briseis because of his threat to do so, is close at hand.

So these are violent, hostile, trouble-making speeches intended to promote solidarity and consensus—speeches that at the same time verge on being conflicts (neikea), utterances whose charged content has explosive potential; they are, as it were, one side, or half, of a neikos. The language used to enforce collective bonds, to promote active participation in the collective enterprise, is in fact the same language used to challenge and intimidate the enemy, to dominate him; it is the language of the verbal aristeia. [16]

To represent your opponent as a woman, a helpless child, as a frightened animal, to question his lineage, to promise him mutilation, to predict the misery of his parents, the anguish of his bereft wife and infant: these are enemy artillery, so to speak—the enemy’s destructive blows against a hero’s integrity. [17]

Characteristic is the insult that Herakles’ son Tlepolemos hurls at Sarpedon when they confront each other on the battlefield (Iliad V 628ff.): {130|131} Sarpedon is a coward incapable of the exploits of his forebears—so much so that Tlepolemos doubts his genealogy. Reminiscent of Agamemnon’s denigration of Diomedes, this is, however, the initial move in a deadly duel: These are the last words Tlepolemos utters; he and Sarpedon match rebukes and exchange spears simultaneously. But both Tlepolemos’ taunt and his spear cast miss their mark; they are vitiated, both of them, by the fact that Zeus truly is Sarpedon’s father, and he brushes the spear away from his son.

What, then, are we to make of this pronounced replication of the language and thematics of verbal assault and domination, designed for one’s mortal enemy, appropriated in the service of enhancing allegiance to one’s own side?

One explanation that must be excluded is formulaic rigidity, because despite the formal typological consistency of these exchanges [18] there is in fact extensive formulaic repetition only in the positive (so to speak) exhortations (ἀνέρες ἔστε, φίλοι, etc.) and not in the negative ones. At the same time there is careful formula restriction, so that, for example, although the verb neikeô occurs several times in conjunction with the phrases oneideiois epeessi and cholotoisin epeessi of different speakers to different addressees, neikeô with the phrase aischrois epeessi occurs three times, used only of Hektor addressing Paris. [19] It has been fully demonstrated [20] that such precise formula distribution is a traditional compositional technique and could clearly be brought to bear on these passages as well. {131|132}

Are these exchanges that serve to establish a hierarchy of heroes so that an order of authority, a chain of command, can be determined? [21] Evidently not, as the previously cited passages indicate, in that the prominent fighters on both sides rebuke and are rebuked in turn. One might, on the contrary, suggest that there is a leveling, equalizing effect to these reciprocal, vituperative utterances. Pierre Bourdieu has proposed that such insults and rebukes actually dignify the receiver—that they put the insulter and the insulted on an equal footing. [22] There may be some element of this in the Iliadic exchanges.

Many passages in the Iliad attest to the fine line, or unstable complementarity, between competitive and cooperative behavior among the heroes. The tension this generates plays a decisive role in the events of the poem at every level, and clearly at its turning points, among them the opening quarrel and Achilles’ sending Patroklos into battle with instructions not to storm the walls of Troy. Equilibrium is possible, though fleeting, because it occurs most often on the field of battle, as lives end, yet it is again disrupted in the brief space between deadly encounters on that field.

One can see the shifting balance on a verbal level in the scene in Book XIII, where Idomeneus, returning to the battlefield, meets his friend Meriones on his way back to pick up a spear at Idomeneus’ tent. [23] The ensuing dialogue can be read as an implicit rebuke and response on the pattern of other speeches of encouragement that question why the addressee is somewhere other than the front line of battle or on his way to it.

Idomeneus makes no explicit reproach, but elaborately asserts his own prowess, measured in war plunder that attests to his courage in close fighting; if Meriones needs a spear, he, Idomeneus, has more than he needs—Meriones should help himself. Meriones replies to the suppressed reproach. As though Idomeneus had enjoined him, on the otrunai pattern, to remember his valor (alkê), he responds that he has not forgotten it (Iliad XIII 269), that he stands in the forefront of the fighting, and, significantly, that Idomeneus, of all people, should know it.

Idomeneus agrees, and inverts the kind of rebuke Diomedes delivers to Odysseus (to epotrunai him): {132|133} No one, Idomeneus now says, could disparage the courage of Meriones; Meriones will never be killed by a spear in his back: he will go face forward into the προμάχων ὀαριστύν (Iliad XIII 291). The competitive potential of this exchange, negotiated into agreement, is reintegrated into a cooperative effort in which the two warriors join forces in battle. They abandon their cooperative conversation in order to avoid words of reproach from another man. [24]

Who should know Meriones better than Idomeneus? Who should know you better than your comrade-in-arms? Nothing is more evident in the Iliad than the absolute dependence of the philoi on each other for their lives. Although this is obviously true of the phalanx as a whole, it is given clearest expression through the representation of warriors joined in closely linked pairs. The warriors themselves articulate this bond primarily in relation to military aggression (e.g., Thoas/Poseidon-Idomeneus, Iliad XIII 235–238). Diomedes claims, prefiguring Achilles in Book XVI, that he and Sthenelos alone could take the city of Troy (Iliad IX 46–49). [25] But from the first marshaling of the troops, the poem’s emphasis is on the mutual efforts of the philoi to protect each other (Iliad III 8–9).

The battle books are composed for the most part of the actions (aggressive and defensive) of warriors in pairs. A vivid example of a pair of warriors at work might be Teucer and Ajax at Book VIII: The fraternal bond is a model for the countless pairings of which the larger collective is composed, and of which Achilles and Patroklos are only one fully elaborated instance. [26] It is a bond indissoluble in death—indeed, it is especially activated by the death of one of the pair. Studies of the narrative structure of the battle scenes have detailed the range of the fighters’ interdependence, [27] and one may add that they are dependent on each other for the motivation to fight—the immediate motivation; for one of the most common narrative patterns describing entry into combat is that a warrior is wounded or (more likely) killed, a friend or close relative sees, is stricken with pity or grief, and plunges more deeply into the fray. [28] Countless examples illustrate the reality, underlying the ideology of the philotês of the Männerbund, [29] that in battle your life is as fully in the hands of your friend as of your enemy; the former is as dangerous to you, as potentially fatal, as the latter.

Sarpedon, gravely wounded, pleads with Hektor not to let him become a spoil of battle (helôr) for the Danaans. He beseeches Hektor, as one would supplicate an enemy, not to deprive him of his return to fatherland, wife, and child (Iliad V 684–688). Earlier (Iliad V 488–492), he warns Hektor that, lest the Trojans become the prey and plunder (helôr kai kurma) of the Greeks, Hektor must supplicate the leaders of his allies to stand fast. {134|135}

It is those on your own side who have it in their power to ensure that you do not become a spoil of war—or die in obscurity, unavenged. The Trojan Akamas kills the warrior attempting to drag off the body of Akamas’ brother, crying out that he has not left his brother’s death unrepaid for long; “thus a man prays to leave behind someone close to him as an avenger in battle” (Iliad XIV 484–485).

What your enemy speaks as a threat, that intolerable prospect that you will end as carrion for dogs and vultures, is a truer threat in the mouth of your friend. For warrior allies to speak to each other in the language of the enemy, to collude with the enemy in words, is to reinforce their reciprocal obligations as philoi by reference to that devastating potential. The life-and-death import of philotês is underscored by the appropriation of the enemy’s diction. In this sense, the speeches of rebuke recapitulate in themselves the nature of the philos bond—not only functionally, by subsuming competition into cooperation and turning neikos against the enemy, but symbolically, by representing one’s ally as the enemy he could be, in order to enhance his value as the friend that he is.

In this connection it is worth pointing out that in the human sphere of the Iliad, echthros, echthos, echthairô and their derivatives are applied only to those on one’s own side. Greeks do not use it of Trojans, nor do Trojans of Greeks. You must be philos in order to be echthros. [30]

There is, of course, another side to this paradox. Who knows you better than your comrade-in-arms? No one, perhaps; but there is someone who knows you equally well: your enemy. The common vocabulary of sexual relations and military combat has been fruitfully investigated, [31] and it represents an important aspect of the way in which the Iliad develops the theme of the intimate enemy. The individual who appraises your body most carefully in every detail (e.g., Achilles scrutinizing Hektor in Book XXII), who knows the particulars of your strengths and weaknesses, who apprehends your courage and deepest fear, who is with you at the moment of truth—that person is your enemy. But this knowledge is not solely corporal. [32]

Your friends pity you, grieve for you, avenge you, but it is your killer who speaks your disappointed hopes. Idomeneus addresses the corpse of Othryoneus, whom he has just slain; he tells Othryoneus’ story: the promises, {135|136} now never to be fulfilled, by which Othryoneus was to have received Priam’s daughter in marriage in return for beating the Greeks back from the city: This is startlingly reminiscent of the narrative’s commentary on the unavailing efforts or attributes of those transient minor warriors who surface and disappear, but whose point of view, surprisingly, is made part of their brief history. [33] {136|137}

It is here, perhaps, that the poem shows the discourse of the battlefield in all of its overwhelming power. The ironizing taunt of the warrior to the dead victim is in fact the final blow; it inflicts achos ‘anguish’ on the survivors as though the taunt had drawn blood, had caused the fatal wound. [34] Yet this is not because it is, like the rebukes and challenges, necessarily overtly hostile. One might easily imagine a taunt in which the warrior boasts of his superior ability and disparages his victim’s inadequacy. But to the extent to which the victor and vanquished are compared in these speeches, the difference between them is, often, that the latter’s expectations of the future were not justified.

Ultimately, it is that capacity of language to confuse categories, to render friends as enemies and the reverse, that puts an instrument of shattering effectiveness into the heroes’ hands. What words can do on the battlefield, beyond any weapon, is indicated in the hortatory rebukes that, figuratively rendering the philoi as enemies, challenge them continually to reaffirm their status as philoi. But the fullest demonstration of their ability is in these parting taunts, which exploit the singular—indeed, unique—linguistic resource, the essential condition of language: the metaphor. Consider the words of Patroklos to Kebriones at Iliad XVI: [35] Through his words the warrior has the power not simply to destroy but to transfigure—to bring the image of domesticity, of private existence, onto the battlefield, to reproduce a world beyond the dusty plain of Troy. Above all, they allow the hero to keep on fighting after his enemy is dead—to address him as though he could hear, to bring him back to life. {138|}