Part II. Chapter 5. The Poetics of Exchange in the Iliad [1]

 

Τhe far-reaching implications of Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le Don, [2] much admired by ethnographers and anthropological theorists, have contributed greatly to our grasp of how thoroughly a code of reciprocity, expressed especially in the institution of gift-exchange, organizes social and economic relations in archaic societies in which, as Mauss made clear, social relations are economic relations. Mauss did not use archaic Greece as an example, and his conclusions initially served to inform scholarship on gift-giving in the contexts of marriage and hospitality, primarily as attested in the Odyssey. But there have been stimulating studies of reciprocity, early on by Louis Gernet and subsequently by M. I. Finley, Walter Donlan, and others, [3] that encourage us to go beyond those Odyssean contexts; to see gift-exchange as containing and regenerating competition, both constituting and challenging social contract; and to understand that reciprocity is a fundamental organizing principle of the Iliadic world, underlying both heroic behavior and heroic discourse.

A full-scale discussion of this topic would need to examine the interrelated notions of value, price and honor, portion and “destiny,” and to investigate distribution by booty, proposals of ransom, awards of prizes. What I would like to do in this essay is something more modest, having acknowledged the larger scheme in which it belongs: that is, simply to suggest one aspect of how the Iliad thematizes reciprocity, by indicating the ways in which an encompassing system—or economy—of reciprocal exchange structures the representation of social interactions and, more particularly, how a paradigm {167|168} of exchange is embedded in the language of social relations through a dense network of metaphor, one that makes significant interactions into transactions. Emile Benveniste, in his analysis of “Don et échange” in early Greek, [4] determined that diction having to do with gifts embraces a wide range of exchanges, or, to put it the other way, that a range of procedures, motivations, and goals is subsumed within the language of giving. In the Iliad we see the sphere of operation extending itself not so much lexically as metaphorically, as the poem proposes models of exchange and equilibrium that it unsettles, subjects to ironic transformations, restores, and again disturbs. Thus the poem constructs out of the war itself an overall social order as a process of exacting and meeting economic obligations within an ever-renewed accounting.

The dynamics of the Iliad’s paradigm of exchange may be introduced against the background of those figures in which equilibrium and disequilibrium, parity and disparity, are represented in similes of measurement and balance, vivid for their depiction of a strained, taut symmetry, as at Iliad XV 410–413: Here the battle is compared to a carpenter’s chalkline (στάθμη), a line drawn even, to allow a true measurement for hewing δόρυ νήϊον—timber that will be used to build the “balanced ships.”

As at Iliad XII 436 and XV 413 (ὣς μὲν τῶν ἐπὶ ἶσα μάχη τέτατο πτόλεμός τε), the battle is stretched out equally from both sides once again at XVII 543–544: Here an introductory simile of the kind that introduces the image in the earlier passages is elided or else has been displaced into the subsequent verses in which Zeus stretches out a rainbow as a portent of war.

These images of the war in balance recapitulate the metaphor of Zeus pulling the battle evenly from both sides, at Iliad XI 336: and at Iliad XVI 661–662: as well as at Iliad XVII 400–401: The war is drawn out into equilibrium, yet not attenuated; on the contrary, it is intensified in its evenness. Hector and Poseidon, from opposite sides, are said at Iliad XIV 388–391 to stretch to its deadliest (αἰνοτάτην) the conflict of battle: The figure of the stretched rope may recall a powerful metaphor earlier in the poem, in which Zeus and Poseidon pull and tie a cable around both armies. Paradoxically, it loosens or “unstrings” the limbs of many warriors: {169|170}

But the general image of strained evenness is made hideously specific in the simile, at Iliad XVII 389–395, of men stretching an oxhide, pulling equally from both sides—where it is not the battle itself that is stretched, but the body of the dead Patroclus: [5]

In figures depicting the battle as pulled taut to its extreme limit by equal force from either end, then, warriors are both subject and object of the stretching (the dead warrior lies τανύθεις, e.g., Iliad XIII 392 = XVI 485; XX 483; τανύσσας, XXIII 25), just as the poem shows enemies as both divided (οἵ τε πανημέριοι στυργερῷ κρίνονται Ἄρηϊ, Iliad XVIII 209) and dividing (ἐν μέσῳ ἀμφότεροι μένος Ἄρηος δατέονται, Iliad XVIII 264)—dividing “between {170|171} them the strength of Ares.” In these terms (as on the level of the narrative itself) the poem shows all its warriors to be at once agents and victims of destruction. War is ὁμοίϊος ‘equalizing’ as, elsewhere, only old age or death are ὁμοίϊος (Iliad IV 315 and Odyssey iii 236 respectively). The war god, as Hector says (Iliad XVIII 309), is even-handed, and slays the slayer.

Images of equilibrium freeze the volatility, the turmoil and clamor of fighting, into tableau-like immobility, portraying the battle as a dire tug-of-war in which, as Nicole Loraux has elucidated, [6] enemies are inextricably linked together at the same time as they are profoundly divided from each other—a paradox that corresponds to the Iliadic representation of warriors opposed in conflict as mirror-images of each other, never resembling each other more closely than when locked together in passionate strife. [7] An indelible image that belongs in this category is that of two men running—Hector and Achilles: the one fleeing, the other pursuing, as in a dream; the one unable to escape, the other unable to overtake him:

Yet, for all that the war renders its participants equal at one level of description, when it reveals a disparity between them, that disparity is definitive, and fatal. Thus, for example, Diomedes rightly says, “Unhappy are they whose sons match themselves against me in strength” (δυστήνων δέ τε παῖδες ἐμῷ μένει ἀντιόωσιν, Iliad VI 127); [8] and of Achilles’ pursuit of Hector, the narrative says, “It was a great man who fled, but far better he who pursued him rapidly” (πρόσθε μὲν ἐσθλὸς ἔφευγε, δίωκε δέ μιν μέγ’ ἀμείνων / καρπαλίμως, Iliad XXII 158–159).

The language of gauging—as when Helenus says of Diomedes, “It is not possible for anyone to equal him in strength” (οὐδέ τίς οἱ δύναται μένος ἰσοφαρίζειν, Iliad VI 101)—resumes the Iliad’s preoccupation with determining value as a function of relative measurement: warriors are compared not to an absolute standard, but to each other. Such language expresses the {171|172} fundamental character of social relations in the context of war, where the only meaningful categories are “greater than” or “less than” and where to be “greater than” is to kill and to be “less than” is to be killed. [9] Between them there appear no gradations; there is no such status as—and no hypothetical meaning offered to the notion of being—“almost as great as” or “slightly less good than” your antagonist.

More disturbing is that the poem seems to call into question the meaning of “equal”. How does the action of the Iliad allow us to understand what constitutes the term “equal to” or even whether it can have a meaning? An unsettling illustration of the problem is offered by the poem’s use of the phrase δαίμονι ἶσος ‘equal to a divinity’. When a hero entering the fray is described as δαίμονι ἶσος, the phrase introduces an encounter in which the term ἶσος can be tested, because the antagonist who confronts him is in fact a god. In each of the episodes in which this occurs, it becomes devastatingly clear with the destruction (or near-destruction) of the mortal fighter how utterly unequal to a god, in reality, the hero is. Apollo himself makes this explicit in his encounter with Diomedes. Diomedes may come close to fighting on the gods’ terms, but Apollo warns him: Apollo admonishes as if to correct a misapprehension or to dispel a familiar illusion—such as the one embodied in the very appellation δαίμονι ἶσος.

The problem extends beyond exposing the irreconcilable differences between the human and the divine. On the human level, the duel in Book VII between Hector and Ajax suggests the profound complexity that inheres in the {172|173} theoretically unambiguous status of “equal.” In this episode, in which Hector challenges “the best of the Achaeans” to meet him in single combat, the warriors themselves articulate the process of taking the measure of individual fighters, specifically assessing each compared to the others, to determine which one will be equal to—which, in the event, means greater than—Hector’s threat. Although the duel is designed to distinguish which of two antagonists is the greater, its actual outcome is prefigured in the prayer to Zeus uttered by the Achaeans on the sidelines as Ajax arms himself for combat: Yet the narrative describes the duel inevitably doing what it must, progressively revealing the superior might of Ajax over Hector. Hector’s spear fails to penetrate Ajax’ shield, while Ajax successfully pierces Hector’s shield completely, so that blood gushes from his wound. Hector retaliates by striking Ajax’ shield with a stone, but Ajax hurls a far larger one, which crushes Hector’s shield and Hector with it. The narrative leaves no doubt that, while they may have met on equal ground initially, Ajax would overpower Hector and kill him were their contest to take its natural course. The wished-for ἴση βίη, an ideal resisted by the intrinsic capacities of the antagonists, grows more and more remote. It is a notion that can be made to correspond to reality only by the intervention of a truce, diplomatically arranged and superimposed. The enforced stalemate that concludes their encounter suggests not only that equilibrium is fragile and fleeting, but that, if it is to be maintained even temporarily, it must be socially constructed. Or it may, in rare instances, be divinely manipulated. Thus Aeneas in his confrontation with Achilles uses the narrative’s metaphor to voice the hope that he might stand a chance against Achilles if only Poseidon were to stretch out an ‘equal outcome’ (ἶσον τέλος) to the war: And indeed it is only the intervention of Poseidon that allows Aeneas to emerge intact from a meeting remarkable for its elaborate, competitive rehearsal of claims to superior genealogical status and worth but, in the event, predictably familiar in its demonstration of the superiority of Achilles’ native ability. As a function of the intrinsic abilities of individuals, equilibrium between those at war appears fugitive, at best.

But within the narrative’s broad perspective, individual gains and losses are subsumed in a view of the aggregate, so as to produce the similes of the evenness of battle cited above. The balanced symmetry of war they describe is a stasis built out of the unrelenting, ongoing fluctuation of triumphs and defeats—a rhythm wherein there emerges at every moment a victor and a vanquished, yet through which, by turns, each side overbalances, and then is overbalanced by, the other.

This continuous process is given expression in the poem’s most memorable, recurring motif of measurement: that of the scales of Zeus, poised to determine survival or destruction for those who are, by a scarcely fathomable process, placed in the balance and weighed against each other. It is an image at once mysterious and transparent, enigmatic in blurring the lines between the literal and the figurative, between description and prediction—yet instantly comprehensible in what it signifies. The battle narrative of Book VIII introduces the image: The image recurs in the climactic account of the confrontation between Hector and Achilles in Book XXII, as though the weighing were itself the decisive event: Zeus holds the scales, as the balance shifts between Achaeans and Trojans, but does not intervene; destinies are calibrated independent of divine favor, according to an impartial principle of discrimination that allows them, as it were, to find their own level. The scales tip, ineluctably; never do they remain in equipoise.

In a passage in Book XVI, the scales of Zeus reappear when, intriguingly, the narrative describes with a brief comment Hector’s decision to retreat: This cannot refer to the only prior appearance of the scales in Book VIII because there they inclined otherwise, with the Trojans’ fortunes in the ascendant. What is it that Hector perceives? Does he actually see something, {175|176} something that the narrative assumes but omits to describe except through his reaction? Or does the narrative ascribe to him its own figurative mode of cognition and representation? Does the poem show him in the process of creating (and itself recreating) a metaphor? [10]

What is implicit in Hector’s reaction is not simply a reference to the previous instance of the motif’s occurrence (when in fact the Trojans, by contrast, were successful), but an interpretation of the dynamics of battle, one that recapitulates the narrative’s vision of the ceaseless movement in heroic relations between balance and imbalance, equal and unequal measure. That vision can be invoked by allusion, as here, because the recurring figures of equilibrium have prepared us for it, providing a framework in which to locate the motif of the scales.

The full implication of the motif’s place in a larger system becomes clearer from a passage in Book XIX, in which Odysseus makes reference to the scales of Zeus as part of an admonition to Achilles, urging him not to send men into battle hungry. Here what it means to “know” or “recognize” the scales of Zeus is clear. Although his image is not easy to decipher precisely, for Odysseus the scales of Zeus are part of a metaphor, one that coincides with the narrative’s representation, in which Achaeans and Trojans are poised as seemingly indistinguishable counterweights. Here they are sheaves of wheat—resources in a process of winnowing and weighing that, when complete, will finally, irre- {176|177} vocably, discriminate between them. We are made to see the act of weighing set within broader procedures of harvesting, husbanding, and dispensing, in which Zeus performs as steward (ταμίης) of war.

For the primary context, the function of scales is, crucially, that of economic activity. [11] Therefore, the presence of the motif must evoke, however generally, a process of transaction. It is explicit in a memorable simile at Iliad XII 433–438, where an honest widow employs a pair of scales to balance her wool so that she may eke out a pittance in wages for her children. As equal as her measures are, so evenly balanced was the fighting between Trojans and Achaeans: The fighting remained evenly balanced, that is, until Zeus gave κῦδος to Hector.

Other mechanisms and instruments supplement and reinforce the image of the scales in a pervasive model of transaction and distribution, as in the urgent struggle—with measuring ropes—in our earlier simile of the dispute over the division of a field: Armed conflict becomes the striking of a bargain in which the terms are continually subject to reevaluation as elements are added and subtracted, though the goal is a constant one. The poem’s figurations of parity and disparity participate in a representation of the war, not as random and chaotic disintegration, but as an economy of reciprocal exchanges—coherent, encompassing, self-perpetuating.

Warriors on the battlefield refer their life-and-death confrontations to a model of reciprocal economic claims, which means that they represent their actions in dialogue that takes place almost exclusively in a figurative mode. In Book XIII, Idomeneus kills the Trojan ally Asios together with his charioteer. Priam’s son Deiphobos, grieving for Asios, casts his spear at Idomeneus; he misses his target, but strikes Hypsenor nearby and cries out that the death of Asios has not gone unpaid (ἄτιτος). Idomeneus responds by killing a third Trojan fighter, Alkathoos, and calls out to Deiphobos to ask, “Do we agree this is a suitable return, three men killed in exchange for one?” as though they were negotiating together the terms for a bargain:

The diction of exchange is similarly explicit at Iliad XIV 470ff, where the Trojan Poulydamas boasts of killing Prothoënor, an Argive warrior. Ajax, in turn, kills a Trojan fighter and replies, “Consider, Poulydamas, whether this man isn’t equivalent in exchange for Prothoënor?”:

In the poem’s descriptions of ransom arrangements—all enacted in the past or imagined for the future—materials valued as treasure are transferred between individuals as recompense based on equivalent worth: [12] one of Priam’s sons, Lykaon, for example, describes having been sold in the past by his captor Achilles for one hundred oxen and subsequently ransomed for treasure worth three hundred oxen. But in such battlefield dialogue as I have been referring to, warriors’ deaths are figuratively measured against each other to meet a standard of parity, as though with an eye to making an appropriate exchange.

Thus—as in the examples of Agamemnon and Nestor cited above—characters in the Iliad do not speak of inflicting punishment on each other, or even of hurting each other or making each other suffer, but rather of making each other pay. They exact payment for sorrow endured, for outrage borne. The priest Chryses, at the opening of the poem, appeals to Apollo to “make the Danaans pay for his tears” by visiting a plague on them (τίσειαν Δαναοὶ ἐμὰ δάκρυα σοῖσι βέλεσσιν, Iliad I 42). Ares threatens to exact payment for the death of his son Askalaphos (Iliad XV 116), Achilles for Patroclus’ death (Iliad XIX 208; XXI 134); Menelaos will make Paris pay (Iliad III 28, 351, 366). Most stunning is the dialogue in Book XI between the two sons of the Trojan ally Antimachos and Agamemnon, who captures them together. Antimachos, the narrative tells us, had been bought off by Paris, and so opposed the return of Helen to the Argives. His sons plead for their lives, offering ‘appropriate’ ransom (ἄξια… ἄποινα ) and ‘boundless’ ransom (ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα). This, they say, their father will be glad to pay. Agamemnon replies that their father will not pay for their lives; their lives will be payment for his outrage (λώβη):

A specific kind of payment is that designated by the term ποινή. Ποινή in actual practice denotes a specific recompense, often in gold, paid by an individual as a blood-price to the next-of-kin of a man who has been slain. The practice is referred to, for example, by Ajax, who reproaches Achilles for his rejection of Agamemnon’s grandiose offer in Book IX. Achilles, Ajax says, is intransigent, impossible; for, after all, a man will accept a blood-price (ποινή) from the killer of his brother or his child:

Or again, a ποινή is at issue in the famous scene on the shield made by Hephaestus for Achilles: But ποινή generates a metaphor that encapsulates the economy of the battlefield, recalling the kind of negotiation Idomeneus questions Deiphobus {180|181} about, in which one death is weighed against another with the question “is this a suitable exchange?” When Patroclus enters the battle in Achilles’ place, he is said to kill many Trojans to exact ποινή for many Achaean deaths:

When the Trojan Akamas kills the Argive Promachos as the latter attempts to drag off the corpse of Akamas’ brother, Akamas asserts that his opponent’s death means that the ποινή for his fallen brother does not remain unpaid (ἄτιτος) for long:

Because the language in which these exchanges are figured belongs to the narrative as well as to the divine and human characters, the Iliad enlarges its perspective to view such transactions not as isolated, but as integrated in an ongoing cycle sustained by its own momentum. Thus the poem says that the ποινή for Patroclus’ death at Hector’s hands will be the deaths of many Trojan fighters. Yet Hector’s success itself constituted recompense in the first place. At Iliad XVII 201–208 Zeus meditates on Hector’s dressing for battle in Achilles’ armor and foresees Hector’s death. He reflects: {181|182}

When Akamas refers to the ποινή for his brother, therefore, or when Euphorbos takes aim at Menelaos and calls out, “Then, lordly Menelaos, you must now pay the penalty for my brother, whom you killed” (νῦν μὲν δὴ, Μενέλαε διοτρεφὲς, ἦ μάλα τείσεις / γνωτὸν ἐμὸν, τὸν ἔπεφνες, Iliad XVII 34–35), they reaffirm their participation in a system where debit and credit are constantly renegotiated, toward a settlement that is perpetually readjusted, a system that can function only because it is reciprocal—and collaborative.

The collaborative basis of these transactions is fundamental to their role within a larger framework of exchange. It represents enmity as partnership, in which each “pays the other back”—a searing irony that the warriors exploit in their dialogue. We see it in recurrent formulations: (to paraphrase) “you’ll give me εὖχος but your ψυχή will go to Hades” or “you’ll give me εὖχος and I’ll give you φόνος”; these describe an economy of circulation where everything is redistributed and nothing, so to speak, is lost. [13] {182|183}

The implications of such a relationship of collaboration in exchange between enemies are extended in the ironizing, metaphorical treatment of the notion of κόρος as ‘satisfaction’. For the response to the enemy’s demands for payment is the offer to give him satisfaction, however insatiable he may be. Agamemnon, in Book VII, says that the Achaean chiefs who volunteer to meet Hector in a μονομαχία will make Hector happy, happy to run, for all that he cannot get enough of battle. Idomeneus, at Iliad XIII 315ff, says that the two Ajaxes will give Hector a sufficiency of war—enough war. And Achilles in Book XIX promises that he will not cease fighting until he has driven a sufficiency of war on the Trojans, whom Menelaos in his harangue in Book XIII calls ἀκόρητοι μαχῆς ‘insatiable of battle’ and ἀκόρητοι ἀυτῆς ‘insatiable of the war cry’. Achilles will give them “enough.”

But to give your enemy “enough,” we understand, means to give him too much. To satiate his insatiability means to overwhelm him, to destroy him. And this, we learn, is how the Iliadic economy functions—equilibrium is destabilized, preventing the scales from settling evenly into those freeze-frames described above; thus more payments can be called for, more exchanges generated. Your struggle with the enemy for equal shares will always remain a struggle in which neither antagonist is finally satisfied.

And it is through the figure of Achilles that we learn it—Achilles whom the narrative calls, to his face, insatiable, in one of the few instances when it addresses him in the second person. For it is Achilles who says to the Trojans at Iliad XXI 128ff, “Die, perish, until you all pay for the death of Patroclus”: only the deaths of all the Trojans will pay for the death of Patroclus. But to say this is as much as to say that Achilles does not buy in, so to speak, to the figurative trades, the rhetoric of reciprocity, and the constructed system of even exchange that the warriors presuppose and reinforce.

Achilles, who begins the poem by being preoccupied with the problem of appropriate distribution and, in particular, adequate compensation, is brought to see—and to expose—the incommensurability of what any hero does and what he receives. In his speech to the embassy from Agamemnon in Book IX, he rejects the “deal” Agamemnon proposes: [14] {183|184} For Achilles only μοῖρα is ἴση—that is, only the destiny that comes to us all in the end is “equal”—and distributes payments evenhandedly:

But the other “misrecognition” that the poem identifies, also through the figure of Achilles, is the one supported by the metaphors of economic activity, whereby one death can be viewed as traded for, or as “paying for,” another—as though there could be parity, recuperation of damages, a stable, balanced reciprocity in the world of the battlefield, in the realm of suffering. The imagery of economic exchange makes that notion possible, concealing the harrowing, irremediable losses. For Achilles the only equation is that between himself and Patroclus, for whom he laments: Achilles, by the end of the poem, exposes the deficiencies of a conventional calculus expressed in the language of exchange—in metaphors of trading with weights and measures. As he explains to Priam in the description of the two πίθοι, suffering mortals share what is distributed unequally—and they suffer alike.

We might say that Achilles, by repudiating the economy of social relations and its metaphors, finally removes himself from the life of the poem. For the others, however, the metaphors of exchange have their own regenerative momentum. We see this in the paradox of the theme of enemies as partners who give each other what each needs. Your friends pity you, grieve for you, avenge you; but it is your enemy—your killer—who speaks your disappointed hopes. Idomeneus, for example, addresses the corpse of Othryoneus, whom he has just slain. He tells Othryoneus’ story: the promises, 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. He suggests to the corpse that the Achaeans will act as matchmakers for him in return for his services: {185|186}

Such parting taunts as that of Idomeneus (or we might think of Patroclus’ taunt to the corpse of Cebriones at Iliad XVI 745ff.) assume, in the metaphors they draw out, the intimacy of a shared code with a common currency, both economic and linguistic. But, as I have argued elsewhere, [15] the language that renders enemies as friends, and the reverse, puts an instrument of shattering effectiveness into the heroes’ hands. Such densely figurative language evokes a complex lifeworld precisely to annihilate it. And such exchanges dramatize the terrible power of a reciprocity exercised unto and beyond death: the triumphant hero will address his dead enemy precisely to recall him back into life to be perpetually destroyed—because perpetually imaginable, sharable, and thus annihilable in mutually recognized terms. {186|}