The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Homer · an epic poem in twenty-four books · 15,687 lines of Greek hexameter · read in the Greek of Monro and Allen, with Murray’s prose (1924) for sense and Pope’s couplets (1715–20) for the English
Mode
Heroic epic as tragedy; oral-formulaic narrative of victor and vanquished alike
Mythos
The wrath and its price; the substitute who dies in the hero’s place, the descent into the beast, the return to the human through a suppliant
Phase
A few weeks of a long war, from a ransom refused to a ransom accepted
Presentation
Poem; twenty-four books, 15,687 lines of formulaic hexameter in Monro and Allen’s text, quoted in Pope’s couplets and Murray’s prose
Register
From the gods’ comedy to a father at the killer’s knees; speech close to half the poem
Scale
One man’s anger, one plain, two peoples and the gods
Governing Proposition
One man’s anger, in a few weeks of a long war, costs his friend, his enemy and himself, and the poem follows the honour men kill for until it has turned persons into prizes and bodies into things. Its wager is that the last word belongs to the enemy’s father, kneeling to kiss the hands that killed his sons.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem’s first word is its subject: mēnin, wrath. “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles” (1.1). A war the poem knows to be long is cut down to a few weeks and built round one man’s anger, not round the fall of the city, which it never reaches. A prize is taken from Achilles in the first book. He withdraws, and the cost of his withdrawal is counted in Achaean dead through the central books, until he sends his friend out in his own armour, loses him, returns, kills the man who killed him, and gives the body back. In the fifth line the poem names the cause: “thus the plan of Zeus came to fulfillment” (1.5). The long middle is the anger paid for.
The poem closes as it opens. It begins with a father, the priest Chryses, coming to the ships to ransom a daughter, and ends with a father, Priam, coming to ransom a son. The word for ransom, apoina, comes seven times in the first book and eight in the last, and never more than three times in any book between. Nine days of plague and twelve of the gods’ absence open the poem; twelve days of Hector unburied and nine of mourning close it. The full dawn line, ēmos d’ ērigeneia phanē rhododaktylos Ēōs, “as soon as early rosy-fingered Dawn appeared” (1.477), stands in the poem twice, there and at 24.788. Only the night raid of the tenth book stands outside the design; nothing later depends on it.
The medium is the formulaic hexameter, and its stock is in plain view. Some thirteen lines in a hundred recur whole elsewhere in the poem, and more than half end on two words that end some other line. Hector is korythaiolos Hektōr, “Hector of the flashing helm”, thirty-seven times. What the poem makes of that stock is a line left out, a couplet used twice, an epithet moved to another man’s hands. The repetitions are joinery, and a translation that varies them loses what they join. Murray’s close prose keeps them; Pope’s couplets, quoted here for the English poem, recast them. The hexameter as sound and performance is beyond this reading, and nothing here rests on how the verse is heard.
Movement II
In the sixth book Diomedes asks Glaucus, between the armies, who he is. Glaucus answers that the question hardly matters: “Like leaves on trees the race of man is found”; the wind scatters one year’s leaves and the forest puts out the next, “They fall successive, and successive rise” (6.146–149). Then he gives his lineage anyway, at length. They find they are “friends from our fathers’ days” (6.231), and exchange armour instead of blows, Glaucus “giving golden for bronze, the worth of an hundred oxen for the worth of nine” (6.235–236). Fifteen books later Apollo, declining to fight for the sake of mortals, calls them “pitiful creatures, that like unto leaves” (21.464).
In the same book Hector goes into the city, and the household he is fighting for is shown once, whole. Achilles killed Andromache’s father when he sacked her city (6.414–416). She says: “Nay, Hector, thou art to me father and queenly mother, thou art brother, and thou art my stalwart husband” (6.429–430). He answers with a line of shame, aideomai Trōas kai Trōiadas helkesipeplous, “wondrously have I shame of the Trojans, and the Trojans’ wives, with trailing robes” (6.441–442). He reaches for his son, and “The babe clung crying to his nurse’s breast, / Scared at the dazzling helm, and nodding crest” (6.467–470). Andromache takes the child back dakryoen gelasasa, “smiling through her tears” (6.484), and at home her women “mourn the living Hector, as the dead” (6.500).
The war is known in combat; peace is known only by comparison and ornament. When the wall holds and neither side gives way, the deadlock is a working woman weighing wool, “that she may win a meagre wage for her children” (12.435). On the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles there is a city at peace, a lawsuit over the blood-price of a man slain, and a field of gold that grows black behind the plough: “herein was the great marvel of the work” (18.549). Sarpedon gives the fighter’s reason plainly. Were the two of them ageless and deathless he would not fight; but “fates of death beset us, fates past counting, which no mortal may escape or avoid” (12.326–327). So: “Or let us glory gain, or glory give!” (12.328).
Movement III
The embassy of the ninth book finds Achilles in his hut, singing. He plays a lyre taken from the spoil of Eëtion’s city, the city where Andromache’s father died, and he sings klea andrōn, “the glorious deeds of warriors” (9.189), while Patroclus sits opposite him in silence. Odysseus repeats the gifts Agamemnon has listed, thirty-six lines of them, almost word for word, changing only the person. He leaves out the end. Agamemnon had said: “And let him submit himself unto me, seeing I am more kingly” (9.160). Odysseus does not say it.
Achilles answers as if he had heard it. “Who dares think one thing, and another tell, / My heart detests him as the gates of hell” (9.312–313). He will not marry Agamemnon’s daughter; let Agamemnon choose another, one “more kingly than I” (9.392). The word, basileuteros, comes in this book only at 9.160 and 9.392: the line that was left out is answered in its own word. Pope’s Achilles says “Some greater Greek let those high nuptials grace”, and the link is lost; it holds where the Greek is kept. Then the hero takes the economy of honour apart from inside it: “Fight or not fight, a like reward we claim, / The wretch and hero find their prize the same” (9.318–319). Murray is nearer the Greek: “in one honour are held both the coward and the brave”.
His mother has told him he carries two fates. “Here, if I stay, before the Trojan town, / Short is my date, but deathless my renown” (9.412–413); if he goes home, a long life and no fame. Phoenix answers with the older kind of song, in the words the poem used for Achilles’ own: so “have we heard the fame of men of old”, klea andrōn hērōōn, and when wrath came upon them, “won might they be by gifts” (9.524–526). Achilles refuses the example. The poem has shown its hero singing the tradition and has made him refuse its lesson. The embassy fails. Its answer is another embassy, fifteen books later, to the same hut: one old man, with a ransom.
Movement IV
Patroclus goes out in Achilles’ armour, and the poem arms him in the lines it uses for every hero, the greaves first, line after line, until it comes to the spear: enchos d’ ouch helet’, “Only the spear of the peerless son of Aeacus he took not” (16.140). No one but Achilles can wield it. The four lines that say so (16.141–144) return word for word three books later, when Achilles arms and takes it up (19.388–391). The difference between the friend and the hero is one negation in a stock scene. Patroclus kills Sarpedon, and Zeus, who could save his son, lets him die and rains drops of blood on the earth (16.431–461). Then Apollo strikes Patroclus from behind, and Hector kills him.
His death is told in two lines: psychē d’ ek rhetheōn ptamenē Aïdos de bebēkei / hon potmon gooōsa lipous’ androtēta kai hēbēn, “his soul fleeting from his limbs was gone to Hades, bewailing her fate, leaving manliness and youth” (16.856–857). The same two lines, after the same line before them, tell the death of Hector (22.361–363), and the poem uses them nowhere else. The two deaths are told as one, and they point to a third, Achilles’ own, which the poem does not reach. When the news of Patroclus comes, Achilles lies in the dust megas megalōsti, “mighty in his mightiness” (18.26), the words used of the dead charioteer Cebriones (16.776). Pope closes both deaths on one line, “A naked, wandering, melancholy ghost!”, and so keeps the repetition; but “naked” is his, and manliness and youth are lost.
The rest is the price. The captive women weep with Briseis over Patroclus: “Her sister captives echoed groan for groan, / Nor mourn’d Patroclus’ fortunes, but their own” (19.301–302). Lycaon, a son of Priam, clasps Achilles’ knees by the river and is answered with the word for friend: alla philos thane kai sy, “Nay, friend, do thou too die; why lamentest thou thus? Patroclus also died, who was better far than thou” (21.106–107). “There shall come a dawn or eve or mid-day” when Achilles too is killed (21.111). Under the wall Hector speaks the line of shame he spoke to Andromache, word for word (22.105). He dies in the armour he stripped from Patroclus, “the rich mail Patroclus lately wore” (22.322–323), and the man who kills him wishes he could “carve thy flesh and myself eat it raw” (22.347).
Movement V
In the last book Priam goes by night to the hut of the man who killed his son. Hecuba has asked how he can go alone: “Of iron verily is thy heart” (24.205). He comes in unseen, clasps Achilles’ knees and kisses his hands, cheiras / deinas androphonous, hai hoi poleas ktanon huias, “the terrible, man-slaying hands that had slain his many sons” (24.478–479). Androphonos, man-slaying, has been Hector’s epithet eleven times; twice before it has passed to Achilles’ hands, laid on the dead Patroclus (18.317, 23.18). Here it is on the hands of Hector’s killer, and Hector’s father kisses them. The simile that follows is turned inside out: the suppliant is likened to a killer, “as when sore blindness of heart cometh upon a man, that in his own country slayeth another and escapeth to a land of strangers” (24.480–481).
Priam asks him to remember his own father, “Think of thy father’s age, and pity mine!” (24.486–487), and then says what he has done: etlēn d’ hoi’ ou pō tis epichthonios brotos allos, / andros paidophonoio poti stoma cheir’ oregesthai, “and have endured what no other mortal on the face of earth hath yet endured, to reach forth my hand to the face of him that hath slain my sons” (24.505–506). Paidophonos, slayer of children, is a word the poem uses nowhere else. Three lines later Priam weeps for “man-slaying Hector” (24.509). The two men weep together, each for his own, Priam for his son and Achilles for his father and his friend: “And now his sire he mourns, and now his friend” (24.511–512).
Achilles raises him, and speaks Hecuba’s three lines back to him with one letter changed: exenarixe becomes exenarixa, “the man who hath slain thy sons” becomes “me that have slain thy sons” (24.203–205, 24.519–521), and “Of iron verily is thy heart” stands in both. Then he states the law the whole poem has kept: the gods have spun the thread for mortals “that they should live in pain; and themselves are sorrowless”, and “two urns are set upon the floor of Zeus” (24.525–527), one of ills and one of blessings. Whether the visit changes Achilles or only pauses him, the poem does not say. It ends with a burial, not a sack: hōs hoi g’ amphiepon taphon Hektoros hippodamoio, “On this wise held they funeral for horse-taming Hector” (24.804). Its last word is the enemy’s epithet.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is as tight as any on the bench: a prize taken, the withdrawal, its cost counted in Achaean dead, the friend sent out in the hero’s armour, the return, the body given back. The long middle is compelled; the wrath has to be paid for at length. In the Greek the repetitions resist the subtractive test. Odysseus’ repeat of the gift-list cannot be cut without losing the line he leaves out (9.160), which Achilles answers (9.392). The messenger repetitions are the medium’s convention. What holds it lowest of the twelve is structural: Book X, 3.69 per cent of the lines, lifts out whole, and the Catalogue, 2.51 per cent, could be thinned.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the honour men kill for turns persons into prizes and bodies into things, until the only measure left is what is done with a corpse. Achilles says so from inside the system: “in one honour are held both the coward and the brave” (9.319). The poem opens with a father ransoming a daughter and closes with a father ransoming a son, and its last disclosure is that the enemy is a father too: “Remember thy father, O Achilles like to the gods” (24.486). The captive women mourn Patroclus, “but their own” (19.302). The seeing is not sustained. In XXIII a woman is the wrestling loser’s prize, valued “at the worth of four oxen” (23.705), without a word.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Height and frequency are both very high, and the elevation comes in every kind: dread in the nod with which Zeus “made great Olympus quake” (1.530); serenity in the watchfires, where “all stars are seen, and the shepherd joyeth in his heart” (8.559); terror in Achilles’ voice at the trench, clear as a trumpet (18.219–221); grief in Achilles lying in the dust megas megalōsti, “mighty in his mightiness” (18.26), in the words used of a corpse (16.776). On the shield a golden field grows black behind the plough: “herein was the great marvel of the work” (18.549). The flats are the Catalogue and stretches of XIII, and they hold it off the ceiling. Nothing is credited for the sound of the verse.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Myth built, and the building is in the props. Achilles’ armour passes to Patroclus, from Patroclus to Hector, and Hector is wearing it when Achilles kills him: “the rich mail Patroclus lately wore / Securely cased the warrior’s body o’er” (22.322–323). The hero kills his own image. The spear Patroclus does not take (16.140) is the one Achilles takes, in the same four lines (16.141–144, 19.388–391). The archetypes are load-bearing: the chosen early death (9.410–416), the substitute who dies in the hero’s place, the descent into the beast, “carve thy flesh and myself eat it raw” (22.347), and the return to the human through a suppliant. Everything stays particular: Hector’s son cries at the horse-hair crest (6.467–470).
Score: 9.8 / 10
The tradition the poem inherits is mostly lost, so the turn can be read only from inside it. The inheritance is plain in the Greek: more than half the lines close on two words found closing another line, and the poet tells the Muses that “we hear but a rumour and know not anything” (2.486). The turn is plain too. A war saga is cut to a few weeks around one man’s anger. Achilles sings klea andrōn, “the glorious deeds of warriors” (9.189); Phoenix offers the old song’s lesson in the same words, that its heroes were “won ... by gifts” (9.524–526), and Achilles refuses it. What the departure cost cannot be read, because the field it left is lost.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The form knows what the content alone could not say. It works by ring: apoina, ransom, comes seven times in the first book and eight in the last, and at most three times in any book between; the full dawn line stands only at 1.477 and 24.788. The embassy that fails at Achilles’ hut (IX) is answered by the one that succeeds (XXIV). And the formula is part of the structure. The couplet that sends Patroclus’ soul to Hades (16.856–857) sends Hector’s (22.362–363), so the two deaths are told as one, with the hero’s own to come. A prose that varies the lines, as Butler’s does, loses that knowledge. Book X stands outside the ring.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and the record is the longest on the bench: Alexandrian editing, the scholia, Plato’s quarrel with Homer, Aristotle’s Poetics, the Homeric Question from Wolf (1795), Parry and Lord’s oral theory, Simone Weil’s essay on force (1940), and no sign of exhaustion. The text keeps producing pairings on return. Andromache’s Hector, father, mother and brother to her (6.429–430), sits beside Briseis’ husband and three brothers killed on one day (19.291–294). Glaucus’ leaves (6.146–149) answer Apollo’s mortals, “pitiful creatures, that like unto leaves” (21.464). Achilles sings on a lyre from Eëtion’s city (9.186–189), where Andromache’s father died (6.414–416). Whether Priam’s visit changes Achilles or only pauses him stays open.
Score: 9.8 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the poem built a war epic around one action and one passion and made it a tragedy of victor and vanquished alike. Greek tragedy, Plato’s case against poetry and Aristotle’s theory of plot all begin from it. That it reorganised the field it entered cannot be checked, because that field is lost; that it constituted the field after it can. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: in the Latin West the Greek text went largely unread for about a thousand years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection runs continuously through Greek education, Virgil, Chapman, Pope and Keats, and in the last century through Weil, Logue and Oswald.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over more than two and a half millennia, through manuscript and papyrus traditions in which the Iliad is the most copied Greek literary text. The surface is fixed to a world as gone as any on the bench: the boar’s-tusk helmet (10.261–265), wine bought with captives (7.475), a host listed town by town (II), women given as prizes. The poem has outlived all of it and is read now for the shape it gave them. The topical surface still costs something: the Catalogue needs a map and a commentary. A translator’s Jove and Minerva also need a gloss, but the Greek has Zeus and Athena, and the translator’s convention is not charged to the poem.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Judged on the Greek, as command of its medium, the formulaic hexameter. The stock is plain: 13.3 per cent of lines recur whole, and more than half end on a two-word close found elsewhere. The command is in what the poem makes the stock do. Inherited lines are placed so that they bind (16.856–857, 22.362–363); omitted so that the omission is answered (9.160, 9.392); negated so that the negation carries the plot, enchos d’ ouch helet’, “the spear ... he took not” (16.140); moved so that Hector’s epithet lands on his killer’s hands (24.479). The costs: an epithet idles, Aphrodite wounded and answering as “laughter-loving” (5.375), and Book VIII reuses a quarter of its lines. The sound of the verse is credited nothing.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The two most distant elements are the battle of the gods and Priam at Achilles’ knees. In the first, Zeus laughs for joy to see the gods come to blows (21.389–390), and Hera boxes Artemis’ ears with her own bow (21.489–492). One law governs both, and Achilles states it: the gods have spun the thread for mortals “that they should live in pain; and themselves are sorrowless” (24.525–526). The gods’ comedy is the measure of mortal weight. What does not hold is in the roster. Pylaemenes, killed at 5.576, follows his son’s body “shedding tears” at 13.658; Schedius dies as son of Perimedes (15.515) and again as son of Iphitus (17.306). Zeus’ will and fate are left unreconciled (16.431–461).
Score: 9.4 / 10
Every order is present, held in one structure. Consciousness: Achilles questioning the economy of honour (IX), Hector’s soliloquy under the wall (22.99–130). The family: Hector, Andromache and the child, Priam and Hecuba, the absent Peleus. Labour: reapers in a rich man’s field (11.67–69), a woman weighing wool “that she may win a meagre wage for her children” (12.435), the ploughmen on the shield. The state: the assembly, Thersites beaten with the sceptre (2.265–266), the elders judging a blood-price (18.497–508). History, the sacred and the natural order: genealogies, sacrifice, and the storms, rivers and beasts of the similes. What is thin is the sacred as a moral order: justice appears only in a simile, against men who “give crooked judgments” (16.387).
Score: 9.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.6 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.8, with The Sublime and The Made at 9.7. A myth built into its props, the longest record of return on the bench, and an inherited medium made to bind, omit and transfer, so that its repetitions carry what the poem knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.9, held by Book X, the night raid, which lifts out whole at 3.69 per cent of the lines, and by a Catalogue that could be thinned; the repetitions are the poem’s joinery and are not charged. Next above it, The Swerve at 9.0: the turn is legible inside the poem, but the tradition it left is lost, and what the departure cost cannot be read.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.7, The Living Form at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.8, Pressure on Tradition at 9.8, The Imperishable at 9.8, The Unconcealment at 9.6 and The Swerve at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by half a point. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 8.9, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.6. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the Greek text of the Iliad, Monro and Allen’s edition from the Perseus Digital Library — twenty-four books, 15,687 lines and 111,895 words; the numbering skips six lines the editors omit (9.458–461, 11.543, 14.269). Every score is judged on the Greek. The whole was measured by script, and about 1,200 lines were read directly in the Greek, at the passages that bear on the making and the language; the order of scenes, speeches and similes was read whole in Samuel Butler’s prose (1898), which keeps every one of them in place. Translations · A. T. Murray’s Loeb prose (1924), for sense, chosen because of the versions compared it alone keeps the Greek’s repetitions as repetitions: it renders the death couplet of 16.856–857 and 22.362–363 alike both times. Pope’s heroic couplets (1715–20), Project Gutenberg e-text #6130, for the English quotations, chosen as the best English poem of the four. Every Pope quotation was checked against Murray; where Pope adds to or departs from the Greek at the point in question, the page quotes Murray instead or says so. Where a point turns on the Greek words, they are given transliterated, with Murray’s English after them. Butler, and Lang, Leaf and Myers, served for comparison only. Murray’s bracketed line numbers are left out of quotations. The reader cannot hear the hexameter, its quantities or its performance; that limit is the reader’s, and nothing on this page is scored for or against the sound. Citations are by book and line of the Greek.