Introduction: Homeric Anger

{1} Across the landscape of Homeric studies there are monuments that demonstrate how central anger is to whatever the early Greeks—audience and performers alike—imagined the Homeric narratives to be about. By our own various references to the powerful concept of anger, we seem to wave it as a magic wand for conjuring meaning. The titles of some of the most insightful works in Homeric studies at times seem to me part of an inscription recording a magician’s incantation, set up in the agora of Homeric studies: This list can easily be expanded to include the analysts’ attempts to find the Ur-Ilias by styling it the mênis- (“anger-”) poem. [1] So too the literary critic will confidently locate the subject of the Homeric Iliad in this central concept; for example, according to C. Whitman, “the Wrath of Achilles had probably been an epic subject for generations when Homer found it.” [2]

Such conversations about anger have continued from antiquity to the present day, with the first scholium telling us that the variety of Homeric terms for anger are just so many synonyms: {1|2} This ancient observation—pointing out that anger has as vigorous a cohort of synonyms as the fig—provides a background question for this study. Do the words for anger in Homeric texts present us with mere synonyms, so that the scholiast’s careful conspectus of terms for Achilles’ anger in Iliad 1 may be accurately called synonymous? Or should we look more carefully? Should we examine anger more closely than we do figs? [3]

Indeed, we have at least thirteen words for anger in Homer, [4] and one of them has special status as the subject of the Iliad, as is made clear by the rigorous poetics of Homeric prooemial style. [5] An epic whose characters cross the Trojan plain to slaughter one another depends upon the very emotion that drives them to pursue the war. We can join critics, ancient and modern, in acknowledging that an understanding of anger is crucial to any reading of the Homeric texts.

One question remains: How surely do we know that to which we have so readily agreed? For all our certainty about Homeric anger, our studies have produced only a few substantial works devoted to analyzing this important concept. Indeed, the semantics of the entire range of anger terms in Homer remains obscure, despite a number of promising excursions into this area of study. In 1879, J. H. H. Schmidt discussed the Greek synonyms for anger in Synonymik der griechischen Sprache. Table 1 groups the Homeric words as they are cited by Schmidt.

Table 1. Schmidt’s list of anger terms From a commonsense point of view, Schmidt’s categories are quite reasonable. The first category shows what we might call natural anger, [6] while the items in the last category are selected on the basis of anger’s temporal duration. In itself, {2|3} longevity indicates a kind of grudge or ill will. [7] The second category is a kind of catchall, where anger can lead to various points on the emotional spectrum, from anxiety to hate. [8]

Schmidt’s categories are to some degree in harmony with mine; after all, I am about to suggest that kótos is characterized by “duration,” and we can all recognize that mênis, Homeric anger par excellence, is extensive in a similar fashion. Nevertheless, Schmidt’s list sometimes separates terms that are, when viewed through Homeric poetic practice, linked by ring-composition. Indeed, no categorization that neglects poetics could tell us that khṓesthai and khólos need to be grouped together, but Homeric poetry does in fact link them as coordinated elements in ring-composition. [9] Clearly, to go beyond lexical completeness, we need to take Homeric poetics into account.

In 1950, J. Irmscher published Götterzorn bei Homer, his 1947 Berlin dissertation directed by W. Schadewaldt. As the title indicates, his treatise is primarily concerned with divine anger. In his first chapter, Irmscher ambitiously sets out to cover thirteen words for anger. [10] He isolates the violation of timḗ as the central motive for anger in the Iliad and goes on to argue that in the Odyssey it is human húbris that motivates Zeus’s wrath; Irmscher, however, falls short of producing a definitive treatise on the semantics of Homeric anger. Indeed, Irmscher exhibits some problems of method, especially in his neglect of the oral-poetic character of Homeric diction. Thus, although he acknowledges the traditional nature of Homeric poetry, we do not see the necessary attention to issues of context and diction in traditional poetics. To proceed in his manner, admittedly, makes the lexicographical work more straightforward, as a variety of Homeric words can be readily cataloged and then included in a single analysis. [11]

Nonetheless, this laudable impulse to lexical inclusiveness itself presents a problem. Do all the words that Irmscher cites really belong together? [12] For example, in the analysis of Zeus Xenios, the terms kótos, mênis, and khólos seem interchangeable. [13] At the very least, we need an analysis of the context and diction in which these terms are found if we are to judge them synonyms. Indeed, we cannot grasp the relationship of these words, one to another, without a close study of Homeric traditional usage, as revealed through a detailed review of Homeric poetics as it relates to each term. To proceed otherwise neglects our most important resource in the understanding of Homeric poetry, the traditional use of context and diction through its customary practice in these poems. [14] Indeed, we will see that khólos and kótos are rigorously kept separate, with very few waverings, throughout Homeric poetry.

Comparable in scope to Irmscher’s work, P. Considine (1969) produced a study of “divine wrath” in the Near East and Greece, assembling many important parallels that abound in Homeric, Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Hittite texts. As with many other studies on anger, Considine’s method here does not focus on the poetic usage of particular words for anger. Thus, we are left without a clear notion of the boundaries that mark the territory covered by different lexical {3|4} items. That Homeric narrative is intimately bound up with a complex poetics must simply never be ignored. For example, in discussing Hera’s “disarming address” to Aphrodite, where Hera alludes to Aphrodite’s kótos against the Trojans as a possible impediment to her helping Hera in the Diòs Apatḗ, Considine seriously underestimates what is being said when he translates Il. 14.191-92: “Will you be cross [kotessaménē] and refuse me, because I am on the Danaans’ side and you are on the side of the Trojans?” [15] Now the divinity’s reference to kótos here is far from an attempt to minimize their conflict. Rather, it is an attempt to remove the most powerful hindrance to Hera’s request for Aphrodite’s help, namely, the kótos of Zeus. In his work on the lexicon for anger in Greek (1966, 1985, 1986), Considine carefully considers the lexical variety of Homeric diction, especially in opening and exploring the semantic field, all the while capably demonstrating that adequate analysis requires a detailed study of context. One needs to add, however, that in Homeric poetry, context is more than a paraphrase of the immediate narrative moment in which the term occurs. The richness of the language requires us to study each passage’s form and place it in the wider diction of the poems in addition to the narrative context in which the lexical item occurs. [16]

One of the most frequently cited articles on the terminology for aggressive impulses in Homer is A. W. H. Adkins’s “Threatening, Abusing and Feeling Angry in the Homeric Poems” (1969). The author is concerned with five words: neikeíein “to quarrel,” apeileîn “to threaten,” okhtheîn “to be troubled,” khṓesthai “to be angry,” menaeínein “to rage.” [17] Adkins discusses two distinct words for anger (khṓesthai, menaeínein), even while attending to the relationship between khṓesthai and okhtheîn, where he concludes that the subject has a more positive attitude toward action if he is in a situation where khṓesthai is appropriate than he has when okhtheîn is appropriate. As was the problem with the studies by Irmscher and Considine, Adkins makes no attempt in his brief article to set out systematically the meaning of khṓesthai within the formal poetic context of Homeric poetry. Instead, one passage is juxtaposed with another in a manner that depends on the associative skills of the researcher. Adkins’s distinction that okhtheîn signifies “a psychological response of frustration, distress and anger” [18] and that khṓesthai means “confusedly grief and anger at once” is neither systematic nor satisfying. [19]

What remains to be done is to make clear the syntagmatic relationship between anger terms and their immediate context and the paradigmatic relationships they have with one another; without such study, the relationship that obtains between, for example, khólos and khṓomai remains invisible; without a commitment to the system in which these terms have their function, it is difficult to arrive at the hypothesis that drives Feuding Words and Fighting Words, that khólos and kótos are distinct from one another.

Before addressing my own method, I want to suggest that as difficult as the problem of studying a large lexical field is for the Homerist, it is even more so {4|5} for the cultural historian who tries to sort out from the galaxy of Homeric vocabulary the notions that best characterize Homeric anger in order to establish large-scale cultural trends of great importance. A cultural historian may, with understandable dismay, balk at the suggestion that a full-scale formulaic analysis is in order before anyone may venture into the terrain of Homeric narrative.

Yet it is precisely this problem that will be encountered by those who, trying to put the Greeks in context, take the words for granted in the interest of a seemingly more important enterprise. For example, E. Voegelin makes a problematic claim about Homeric khólos: Here Voegelin is justified to say that there is an anger that as a legal institution parallels cultural structures such as can be observed in the Roman institution of inimicitia / amicitia. But that anger is not khólos—it is kótos. For kótos is directly related to the incipient vocabulary of Greek legal institutions (including díkē “judgment,” “justice”; húbris “outrage”; and the like), especially as the terms relate to the traditional institutions of reciprocity. And, as I will demonstrate, khólos bears little resemblance to a “legal institution.” The only way to sort out khólos from kótos, however, is to study systematically the semantics of anger that makes clear such a distinction. Indeed, without such work, it is hard to imagine how a cultural historian can distinguish which word describes “a lordly wrath” and which “a private state of emotions.”

My emphasis on Homeric matters steers the discussion away from later Greek material. Indeed, the reader will notice that missing from this book is an extended analysis of the literature on anger in the ancient world after the early Greek period. Fortunately, as this book went to press an important book on ancient anger appeared, one that provides just such an extended analysis. W. V. Harris’s Restraining Rage (2001), focusing on the restraint of anger, exhaustively covers a vast panorama of Greek and Roman thinking about anger, with a central aim of examining Greco-Roman antiquity’s yearnings for the repression of anger. The importance of this project goes without saying, especially given the philosophical tradition’s tenacious speculation on this topic (Harris 2001, 84-128).

In contrast, I focus my discussion of anger on Homer in order to fill what seems to me a lacuna. As can be surmised from my comments above, the study of anger in antiquity has often taken Homeric anger for granted or at least as worthy only of being confined to a review-chapter serving as background for the rest of antiquity. Despite this drawback, the studies of anger in the later literature {5|6} have been admirably vigorous (as now with Harris and with even more recent work [Braund and Most 2003]); we Homerists should emulate that vigor.

Yet, to study anger in Homer is not the same as to account for anger in the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity. It is, I must say, quite different. For the Homeric texts present problems of poetics and of form that simply cannot be sped over in the interest of getting to later philosophical texts and historical data. If philology is the art of slow reading, the study of Homer is the art of slow and steady reading: for to deal with poetics is not merely to correlate lexical glosses with immediate context. One must view the lexical data within the traditional matrix that is its life’s blood. The task of the Homeric scholar, now, is to treat Homer not merely as an antecedent to “the polis” (Harris 2001, 27), but as a poetic intervention into profound cultural issues, an intervention that deserves a full and robust intellectual engagement. Such a vigorous Homeric poetics is a humane way to make more meaningful the dialogue between Homerists and other readers of the ancient world. [21]

At the heart of a systematic poetics of Homeric narrative are the traditional meanings together with the traditional forms that produce those meanings within the practices of oral poetry. In the words of L. Muellner: “Obviously semantic analysis cannot be effective without an awareness of such considerations of technique.” [22] This kind of complexity of Homeric poetic semantics can be enriched by looking at how the highly developed anger systems of other cultures such as the Ifaluk are deployed within their traditional forms of discourse. By turning to the anthropological literature on emotions, where anger is conceived of as a social phenomenon, I hope to give the Homeric material a comparative context. The following examples can begin to show how an anthropologically informed approach might begin to work. [23]

For example, C. Lutz, in Unnatural Emotions, her ethnography of the Ifaluk in the Southwest Pacific, gives an account of their emotional life as it relates to the way the Ifaluk organize their cultural perception of anger: Lutz establishes the way words for emotions are charged with meanings that are conceptual, political, moral, and, more generally, cultural. In short, such a study implies that through the consideration of emotional vocabulary, it is possible to come to terms with critically important conceptual features of a given culture. {6|7}

Similarly, M. Rosaldo in her Knowledge and Passion (1980) describes the dynamics of emotion as manifested among the Ilongot in Northern Luzon in the Philippines. [25] Rosaldo’s discussion is worth quoting at length for her account of how the terms that define the Ilongot cultural understanding of anger are to be taken: The Homerist should emerge from an anthropologist’s analysis of anger with renewed expectations that semantic work can move beyond the well-tended groves of lexical classification and into the wilder forests of words and things. If, as M. Rosaldo describes them, metaphors for anger might be based on a “loose conceptual scheme that underlies them,” it may be that philological rigor will not have the flexibility to unearth loose schemes as well as it does the tightly constructed ones. [27]

What will be the link between an analysis of Homeric anger words and an analysis that draws from work outside classical studies? The links will be various, but a secure way for the reader of Homeric poetry to begin is, at the outset, to lay the foundation for the work by close attention to and analysis of early Greek diction. R. Sacks suggests that this approach to “the problem of recovering tradition” involves two steps. [28] The first step is to collect all the attestations of a traditional phrase; and the second step is to search out “those patterns which, with all their complexities, are actually displayed by Homeric phrases.” [29] Sacks reminds us how far we are from an adequate description of Homeric practice.

The approach to “searching out” needs to be determined from the outset, since the meanings we find, as hermeneutics has taught us, are intimately bound up with the meanings that we search for. Do we have any control over our first steps, or are we bound to choose our objects of study at random? I return to Sacks’s observations for direction: “Studying Homer is not like studying an existing language. If we want to focus on the theoretical in our analyses of the {7|8} English language, we may take some comfort in being native speakers and thus experts in the language’s synchronic ‘traditions.’ No such expert can ever again exist for Homer …” [30] The problem of the nonliving tradition confronts us immediately. On whom could we rely to be as fluent in Homeric diction as the singer and audience once were? However, certain revelations in the narrative can bring us closer to that expert understanding. These revelations can occur in the form of the folk definition. I will return to this term later in this Introduction, but for now I note that within the text there survive statements about terms such as mênis, khólos, and kótos that go beyond exemplifying the meaning of the term. As we will see, once a native explanation of a term is found, the meaning of that term can be tested alongside that definition. We will also see that this process can guide and ground our study more firmly than even the best of our own intuitions as a nonnative audience.

In the give-and-take of an anthropological field situation, researcher and informant, ideally, find ways to communicate the principles that underlie their statements. I have, of course, no informants to interview. Nonetheless, though we can interact with neither poet nor audience, we may take heart that the Homeric poems show human actors both involved in and commenting upon their social structure, in what will be a variety of ways. [31] Indeed, that these texts are epics in form makes possible moments such as that of Calchas’s definition (described below). One aspect of epic, its expansiveness, makes it a good place to look for an informed definition of a term denoting anger. [32] Once that definition is given, if it is confronted by an inquiry that both illuminates rigorous connections and exploits loose conceptual schemes, it may yield insight, to use M. Rosaldo’s words, into Homeric culture’s “set of principles and connections [that have] elaborate ramifications for [its] social life.” [33]

The student of Homeric poetry is left with a struggle if not a dilemma: to use the methods of linguistics, anthropology, and the other intellectual disciplines for studying human culture and at the same time maintain sharp focus on the poetry, a task the social scientist sees as secondary. Thus, the student of Homeric poetry must keep in mind the poetic object in question, all the while avoiding the siren- song of the applied methodology. This act balances the real and the fictional, and it is indeed difficult to draw documentary evidence about a culture from its creative narrative art.

Because I have suggested that this study will turn to anthropological and linguistic cultural inquiries in order to understand the poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and because it will be evident that this process will be engaged after we have addressed formal issues, it is wise to ask whether social or literary perspectives have priority in my work. The methodological distinction between a social study and a textual one demands more theoretical rigor than I intend to apply here. But it will become evident that I am not trying primarily to reconstruct archaic or bronze-age social structures by combing through the evidence of the Homeric texts. Since I begin my analysis with close readings of {8|9} words, passages, and texts, my focus is primarily on those texts, the aim being to draw out of the cultural categories examined, such as the notion of “feud” or “aggression,” a conceptual field that will be of value to students of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Thus, even if an archaic Greek cultural practice is found out by sheer hard work, it is placed immediately into the service of the text. In sum, this is a work of poetic analysis using the tools at our disposal—which include social theory—to organize evidence and give shape to conclusions. But those conclusions remain, unflinchingly, about the text.

In pursuing the usefulness of bringing to bear anthropological insights onto the study of literature, in trying to understand the way that structural analysis of texts illuminates those texts, I have found compelling the insight of Marshall Sahlins as he, from the anthropologist’s perspective, confronts the way structural analysis interacts with history. For Sahlins, “a set of historical relationships … at once reproduce the traditional cultural categories and give them new values out of the pragmatic context,” so that to analyze the “structure” of a cultural system is not to deny its historicity, nor can a study of history be innocent of the structural system that, for a given culture, provides meaning for the events undergone by the human actors within that culture. [34] Sahlins thus sees structure and history as inextricably related. My use of this observation is to apply it to the experience of a text, so that the structure that we labor to bring forth is set beside the text itself. Although this is not the place to establish securely the analogy on which my use of this idea depends (text : poetics :: history : social structure), let me again assert that the observations on Homeric poetics in this book are made not only in order to understand the system that lies behind the texts but also in order to deal directly with and illuminate the Iliad and the Odyssey. [35]

I return to M. Rosaldo for a clue to our opening enigma: Why does anger, important as it is for Homer, still need to be explored at the most basic levels? Rosaldo’s research provides us with a theoretical basis from which to understand why the central concept of the Iliad is not yet clearly grasped. She suggests that the distinction between symbolic and ordinary language has led students of culture to underrate the complexity, and the cultural specificity, of ordinary words. It might be thought, she suggests, that But then:

Anger is so much a common part of the way of life for a Homeric warrior that we have come to set aside the terms for the concept of anger as an item of inquiry. This mistake is even harder for us to observe since in our own lives the term “anger” is also part of day-to-day existence; in other words, we think we already know what it is. In fact, our referral of mênis to English wrath is itself an attempt to claim a transparent meaning for this term. Surely, we think, this anger is just like the wrath of the Old Testament Yahweh, an exalted anger. [38] I mean to say that anger, for Homer, has been taken by readers as a “strictly referential term,” the meaning of which we recognize immediately. Further, the lexica do not indicate the systematic nature of the distinction between khólos and kótos to be elucidated in this study. [39] The dictionaries acknowledge a difference in intensity between the two, but crucial contextual features have yet to be examined for their rich elaboration of the semantic force of these terms. Such terms are “demanding of interpretation” in M. Rosaldo’s words, just as much as terms of great social significance—such as, for example, “justice.”

The importance of anger has been acknowledged in Homeric studies primarily for mênis but not for the dozen or so other Homeric terms for anger. A word like khólos seems less likely to draw our attention precisely because it is the mere unmarked term for anger. [40] M. Rosaldo’s observation that studies of other cultures tend to gravitate to what is considered a priori the symbolically laden material might account for our neglect of the other words for anger, including khólos. [41]

Thus, Homerists still need to address systematically, even if belatedly, the central concept of the field. Perhaps, we can show, as M. Rosaldo shows for the Ilongot, that the emotion of anger is part of a system, a net of senses intricately related to Homeric social life. Such a result should not surprise us, since the most recent anthropological and linguistic studies of the emotions have indicated the central importance of anger to cultural studies. [42]

Before we proceed, I note that Homerists are not alone in coming late to these issues. Awareness of the importance of anger is a recent development even in the social sciences. Sociological and psychological studies of aggression, some researchers complain, pay too little attention to anger. Favoring behavioral, and hence measurable and quantifiable models, our own culture’s tendency has been to exclude the emotions from analyses of aggression. Consider the summary given by R. Novaco: [43]

We are thus presented with a remarkable series of facts. First, the proem to the Iliad signals to us that anger is central to the epic’s analysis of the forces that lead human beings to destroy each other. Second, we fall short of coming to terms with the complex Homeric diction relating to anger. Third, and finally, the social sciences, even as they pursue the ethnography and psychology of primary cultures, have also until recently neglected to observe that human aggression may be rooted psycho-emotionally and culturally in anger. [45]

In terms of method, then, we need three approaches. First, we must focus on anger itself as a semantic field in Homeric poetry. Second, we need to study closely the specific diction for anger in the medium of Homeric verse. And third, we need to set this research within the context of anthropological and social research into the formation and expression of emotions in human groups. The main methodological focus of this book depends upon the first two approaches, especially as they relate to the system of anger displayed in the two words kótos and khólos, in the course of which the third approach is drawn into service for a thorough study of the linguistic and poetic evidence. But how then should we approach that poetic evidence?

A good overview of the approach to diction taken here is presented by R. Sacks in the introduction to The Traditional Phrase in Homer (1987). Sacks’s emphasis, along with that of those he cites in the field (including Frame, Lowenstam, Muellner, Nagy, Shannon, Sinos, Slatkin, Watkins, and others), is to discover the “depth” of traditional phraseology through “the method of collecting all attestations and looking for a pattern or patterns, contextual and otherwise.” [46] I find it comfortable to link the present endeavor to Sacks’s declaration in his work that “the central assumption … is … that we should still be searching out those patterns that, with all their complexities, are actually displayed by Homeric phrases.” [47] I add only that by using poetic analysis coupled with a look at the comparative material displayed through anthropology, historical linguistics, and other approaches beyond the purview of ordinary Greek language study, we have acquired a powerful tool for the analysis and interpretation of the Greek text.

Where has that kind of work been done with respect to anger in Homer? It should not surprise us that the most rigorous examination of anger has been produced in the study of mênis, especially since that word initiates Homeric discourse. I introduce the material on mênis here because in the study of this important word, method has made all the difference for our coming to terms with anger in Homer. {11|12}

That such approaches can have powerful results is clear from the work of Leonard Muellner and Calvert Watkins, [48] who have both shown that mênis can be illuminated by the rigorous study of Homeric diction. Indeed these studies demonstrate that mênis is a taboo word, never used by speakers in reference to their own anger. [49] Mênis is part of a systematic cultural taboo whose roots can be found in the violations that lead to it. [50] That mênis has as its source the productive root men- is certain, although the process of formation has posed problems, reviewed in detail by Muellner (1992 and 1996, with Watkins 1977a). I am encouraged by Muellner’s success in establishing the taboo meaning of mênis through a rigorous approach to Homeric diction. Among Muellner’s findings (Muellner 1996), I single out as relevant to my work in this book the following conclusions about mênis as a word for anger in Homeric narrative: first, mênis is avoided in contexts when one speaks of one’s own anger; second, in the Iliad the noun mênis refers exclusively among mortals to Achilles; and third, there is a complex sociolinguistic structure that houses this term. [51]

Given the success of this method as applied to mênis, the other words in the lexicon of Homeric anger should receive the same rigorous attention that has been given to the first word of the Iliad. In Feuding Words and Fighting Words, then, I focus on two of those words for the following two reasons: first, in order to expand our understanding of the range of anger terminology in early Greek epic; and second, because a specific passage in Book 1 of the Iliad singles these two words out for special consideration.

In this book, my approach, then, is to gather and discuss all the examples of two terms (khólos and kótos), in order to examine them with reference to Homeric diction. In the process of doing this, the anthropological, linguistic, and social topics that arise are to be treated insofar as they are helpful toward understanding Homeric narrative. Note that even as I adhere to the principle of collecting all the examples, the collection is ultimately grounded in an observation from within the culture. Rather than producing an abundance of linguistic data that would be true to lexical completeness while capsizing the central goal of coming to terms with the productive use of anger in this poetry, I ground my arguments in the words of the prophet Calchas in Book 1 of the Iliad. I emphasize that the group of words selected for study is not arbitrary but can be said to stem as a group from an interpretation in the text.

Now it is time to introduce the passage that will be often in the foreground and always in the background of this book. In this Introduction, the passage highlights the intricacy of Homeric diction for anger. The final four verses of this passage provide the original stimulus for this book.

Near the opening of the Iliad, the Achaean prophet, Calchas, requests that Achilles protect him from Agamemnon’s wrath once the source of the plague is revealed:

In line 75 the text shows that mênis signifies the anger of Apollo represented by the plague that ravages the Achaean camp. Quite rightly, Calchas worries that his revelation of the source of Apollo’s anger will lead to a mortal’s anger (ándra kholōsémen, Il. 1.78). This observation may be true of anyone, but Calchas is concerned about the political power this man wields: hòs méga pántōn / Argeíōn kratéei kaí hoi peíthontai Akhaioí “Who has mighty rule over all the Argives, and the Achaeans obey him,” Il. 1.78-79. Next, Calchas introduces yet another word for anger (khṓsetai).

Finally, Calchas opposes one kind of anger to another in a systematic fashion, that is, in a way that implies some regular difference between the two: khólos is immediate (autêmar “on this very day,” Il. 1.81) and is related metaphorically with the physiological process of digestion (katapépsēi “swallows down, digests,” Il. 1.81). In addition, khólos is surpassed in its consequences by the last kind of anger here cataloged, kótos; for kótos has consequences that reach out far beyond the present (metópisthen “in the future,” Il. 1.82), and kótos may, in the course of things, reach some end to which it by nature tends (óphra teléssēi “until he brings it to pass,” Il. 1.82).

Calchas’s own words indicate that there is an opposition between khólos and kótos. Grammatically, K. Ameis and C. Hentze point to the chiastic pairing of khólos and kótos, helped by the placement of the particle ge after khólon in Il. 1.81. [52] The arrangement formed by Calchas clearly plays on a set of oppositions between khólos and kótos in a way that needs clarification. First, how can we say that khólos may last only the day, while kótos has a teleology of its own? How active is the metaphor in katapépsēi? How consistent is any of these propositions with the rest of Homeric language?

Moreover, what about their formal features? Of all the words for anger these are the two that are closest in form to one another. They both begin with a velar {13|14} and belong to the same noun-paradigm; each has two syllables and could take part in similar alliteration and assonance patterns. [53] Thus, on purely formal grounds, these two words for anger may be studied together as part of the sensitive workings of Homeric formular diction. Yet only three times in the manuscript tradition do these two words serve as variants for each other (Il. 14.111, Il. 24.584, and Od. 13.342).

I will be looking closely at the issues that arise from my selecting these two words for anger as exemplary of Homeric culture’s construction of anger. To close this Introduction, however, let us consider a feature of Calchas’s speech that might independently indicate to us the speaker’s value for the study of Homeric language: Calchas presents us with a folk definition of anger terms.

This latter point is important enough to elaborate further, at least briefly. In reference to the theoretical value of such kinds of folk speech, consider the following two statements by a folklorist as he considers the force of folk definitions: And again:

Seen in the light of Manes’s observations, Calchas’s statements constitute a folk definition of two Homeric terms for anger. [56] Thus, let this study in the semantics of anger begin with the definition of khólos and kótos provided us by Calchas, the prophet of the Achaeans. Indeed, we can prepare for our encounter with the basic Homeric concept by quoting Odysseus’s fillip to his friends:

Footnotes