Good men are always exceedingly prone to tears

In this morning's Homer Multitext seminar we began exploring the scholia that accompany Iliad 19 in the Venetus A manuscript. In my previous post, I wrote about the poetics of the captive woman's lament in Homer, and the ways in which a traditional audience might understand Achilles' mourning for Patroklos as it is described in 19.4-6. In that post I was concerned to show how Achilles may have conjured for a traditional audience the image of the lamenting and soon to be captive woman who has fallen over the body of her husband slain in battle, as in the simile of Odyssey 8.521-531, in which Odysseus, weeping in response to the third song of Demodokos, is compared to just such a woman (see also here and here). As I have written about in my 2006 book, The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy, the sorrow of both Achilles and Odysseus is compared to that of captive women, their own victims in war, in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. I was very intrigued therefore to find that the scholia of the Venetus A discuss Achilles' crying in this passage. Here is what the A scholia have to say at Iliad 19.4:

κλαίοντα λιγέως  πάντας τοὺς ἥρωας ἁπλότητος χάριν εὐχερῶς ἐπὶ δάκρυα ἄγει. Ἀγαμέμνονα· Πάτροκλον Ὀδυσσέα ἐφ' οὗ καὶ τὴν παραβολὴν τῆς χήρας ἔλαβεν. ἀεὶ δὲ ἀριδάκρυες ἀνέρες ἐσθλοί· 

"lamenting with piercing cries"  [Homer] leads all the heroes, because of their sincerity, to tears easily: Agamemnon, Patroklos, Odysseus, to whom he makes the comparison of the widow. And good men are always exceedingly prone to tears.

The comment refers explicitly to the simile of Odyssey 8, giving further support to the idea that the kind of weeping being attributed to Achilles at the beginning of book 19 is like that of generic captive woman of Odyssey 8, or of Briseis, whose lamentation for Patroklos later in Iliad 19 is described with similar formulaic language that explicitly invokes the death of her husband.

Just as intriguing to me is the comment that comes next: "And good men are always exceedingly prone to tears." Though it is not marked off in any special way in the Venetus A, the sentence clearly comes from a tradition of proverbs, as we find for example in the work of the Roman sophist Zenobius (1.14) and quite a few other authors:

Ἀγαθοὶ δ' ἀριδάκρυες ἄνδρες: ἐπὶ τῶν σφόδρα πρὸς ἔλεον ῥεπόντων. 

Good men are exceedingly prone to tears: [used] in reference to those exceedingly inclined towards pity.

The A scholion is slightly different from what we find in the authors of the proverb tradition; there we find the more Homeric sounding ἀνέρες ἐσθλοί in place of Ἀγαθοὶ... ἄνδρες.

This same proverb is also adduced in the B scholia at Iliad 1.349, which similarly discusses the propensity of heroes to cry. (The note in B is considerably longer than the one in A, but they overlap in many respects.) In Iliad 1.349 Achilles weeps after the two heralds of Agamemnon take away Briseis:

ἣ δ᾽ ἀέκουσ᾽ ἅμα τοῖσι γυνὴ κίεν: αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς
δακρύσας ἑτάρων ἄφαρ ἕζετο νόσφι λιασθεί 

The woman [= Briseis] went together with them, unwilling. Meanwhile Achilles
wept and straightaway sat apart from his companions, withdrawn

In the Venetus B scholion on this passage, the passage from Odyssey 8 is actually quoted, and the phrase ἀεὶ δ' ἀριδάκρυες ἀνέρες ἐσθλοί (with the same wording as in A) is explicitly called a παροιμία, a proverb:

ἕτοιμον τὸ ἡρωϊκὸν πρὸς δάκρυα· καὶ Ὀδυσσεὺς· ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίῃσι [= Odyssey 8.523]· καὶ ἡ παροιμία· ἀεὶ δ’ ἀριδάκρυες ἀνέρες ἐσθλοί· ἄλλως τε καὶ φιλότιμος ὢν ἀνιᾶται τῇ ὕβρει· παλαιᾶς τε γὰρ συνηθείας στέρεται· καὶ τοῦ γυναίου ἀκουσίως ἀπαλλάττεται· ἄκρως δὲ ἐρῶντα χαρακτηρίζει· οὗτοι γὰρ ταῖς ἐρημίαις ἥδονται, ἵνα τῷ πάθει σχολάζωσι· τὸ δὲ νόσφι, ὅπως μὴ γνώριμον τοῖς ἑτέροις ᾖ τὸ πρὸς τὴν μητέρα ἐντύχημα. τὸ δὲ ἄφαρ δηλοῖ καὶ τὸ ἔπειτα :~ 

The heroic nature is prone to tears. [For example,] Odysseus: “As when a woman weeps” [= Odyssey 8.523]. And [there is] the proverb: “Good men are always exceedingly prone to tears.” And otherwise being a lover of honor he is grieved by the hubris [i.e. of Agamemnon] and also he is deprived of his former intimacy [i.e., with Briseis]. And he is removed from the woman unwillingly. And [Homer] characterizes him as desiring her passionately. For these take pleasure in solitary places, in order that they have a respite from suffering. And the “νόσφι” [= “apart’], in order that the meeting with his mother not be known to his companions. And the “ἄφαρ” means “ἔπειτα.”

Variations on this same scholion can also be found here in the Townley manuscript (Burney 86), the Υ.1.1, and the Ω.1.12. The Townley scholion reads as follows:

δακρύσας ἑτάρων· ἕτοιμον τὸ ἡρωϊκὸν πρὸς δάκρυα· καὶ Ὀδυσσεὺς· ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίῃσι [= Odyssey 8.523]· καὶ ἡ παροιμία·· ἀεὶ δ’ ἀριδάκρυες ἀνέρες ἐσθλοί· Ἀγαμέμνων· ἥτε κατ' αἰγίλιπος πέτρης [= Iliad 9.15]· ἄλλως τε καὶ φιλότιμος ὢν· ἀνιᾶται τῇ ὕβρει· παλαιᾶς τε συνηθείας στέρεται· ἴσως δὲ καὶ τὸ γύναιον ἀκουσίως ἀπαλλαττόμενον ἐλεεῖ· ἄκρως δὲ ἐρῶντα χαρακτηρίζει· οὗτοι γὰρ ταῖς ἐρημίαις ἥδονται, ἵν' οὕτω τῷ πάθει σχολάζωσιν· ὑπὸ μηδενὸς ὀχλούμενοι :~

δακρύσας ἑτάρων The heroic nature is prone to tears. [For example,] Odysseus: “As when a woman weeps” [= Odyssey 8.523]. And [there is] the proverb: “Good men are always exceedingly prone to tears.” Agamemnon: “which down from a steep rock” [= Iliad 9.15]. And otherwise being a lover of honor he is grieved by the hubris [i.e. of Agamemnon] and also he is deprived of his former intimacy [i.e., with Briseis]. And perhaps he feels pity for the woman being removed unwillingly. And [Homer] characterizes him as desiring her passionately. For these take pleasure in solitary places, in order that they have a respite from suffering in this way, being disturbed by no one.

This version of the note contains an additional example (Agamemnon, who is also listed in the Venetus A scholion) and an additional citation of the text to go with it (Iliad 9.15) as well as other variations of syntax and an additional clause at the end not found in B. It also lacks the comment on νόσφι found at the end of the B scholion.

Finally, we also find the proverb in the Genavensis 44 scholia at 1.349, according to the edition of Nicole, in two forms, both of which are closer to the version of Zenobius than they are to what we find in other manuscripts of the Iliad:

ἔστι γὰρ παροιμία ἣ λέγει· «ἀγαθοὶ δ' ἀριδάκρυες ἄνδρες,» ἤτοι· «οἱ ἀγαθοὶ ἄνδρες οὐκ ἀδάκρυες. 

For there is a proverb which says "Good men are exceedingly prone to tears" or "The good men are not without tears."

It is fascinating to find the proverb and the larger comment in which it is embedded in all six of the oldest manuscripts of the Iliad with scholia, and to note that the comment varies considerably in wording and length from manuscript to manuscript. Even the proverb - the type of saying that might be expected to resist change - is seemingly multiform. As Neel Smith observed in our seminar session today, it is clear that our scholia in the various manuscripts do not go back to a single source that was faithfully excerpted, but have been drawn from a variety of scholarly reference works from which the scribes made selections, expanding and compressing as they had space and inclination. In other posts on this blog Mary Ebbott and I have argued that we should be thinking of these scribes as editors, not copyists, and this one note provides a perfect example of why we should see them this way.

The content of the scholion is fascinating as well. Greek heroes lament like captive women and they are ἐσθλοί. They cause suffering and they experience suffering, and it is their suffering that unites them with their female victims. For more on the weeping of Achilles, I highly recommend the work of H. Monsacré, Les larmes d'Achille. Le héros, la femme et la souffrance dans la poésie d'Homère (1984).

Achilles and the captive woman's lament in Iliad 19

This year at the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar the student-faculty teams are creating an edition of book 19 of the Iliad in the Venetus A, as well exploring the poetics of this particular book, which happens to feature a lament by Achilles' concubine Briseis, the only words she speaks in the poem. In one of our sessions Mary Ebbott and I spoke with the students about lament as a traditional genre of song, primarily performed in Ancient Greece by women, that has been incorporated into and infuses the epic poetry of the Iliad. We wanted to show the students how oral traditional poetry not only works differently, but also is received differently by its audience. We began by exploring two passages. The first comes immediately after the third song of Demodokos in Odyssey 8, in which Demodokos sings about Odysseus raging through the streets like Ares during the sack of Troy:

ταῦτ’ ἄρ’ ἀοιδὸς ἄειδε περικλυτός· αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς
τήκετο, δάκρυ δ’ ἔδευεν ὑπὸ βλεφάροισι παρειάς.
ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίῃσι φίλον πόσιν ἀμφιπεσοῦσα,
ὅς τε ἑῆς πρόσθεν πόλιος λαῶν τε πέσῃσιν,
ἄστεϊ καὶ τεκέεσσιν ἀμύνων νηλεὲς ἦμαρ·
ἡ μὲν τὸν θνῄσκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντα ἰδοῦσα
ἀμφ' αὐτᾠ χυμένη λίγα κωκύει· οἱ δέ τ’ ὄπισθε
κόπτοντες δούρεσσι μετάφρενον ἠδὲ καὶ ὤμους
εἴρερον εἰσανάγουσι, πόνον τ’ ἐχέμεν καὶ ὀϊζύν·
τῆς δ’ ἐλεεινοτάτῳ ἄχεϊ φθινύθουσι παρειαί·
ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς ἐλεεινὸν ὑπ' ὀφρύσι δάκρυον εἶβεν.

The renowned singer sang these things. But Odysseus
melted, and wet the cheeks below his eyelids with a tear.
As when a woman laments, falling over the body of her dear husband
who fell before his city and people,
attempting to ward off the pitiless day for his city and children,
and she, seeing him dying and gasping,
falling around him wails with piercing cries, but men from behind
beating her back and shoulders with their spears
force her to be a slave and have toil and misery,
and with the most pitiful grief her cheeks waste away,
So Odysseus shed a pitiful tear beneath his brows. (Odyssey 8.521-531)

The simile is so striking because the generic woman of the simile, who has fallen over the body of her husband slain in battle, and who will soon be captive slave, could easily be one of Odysseus’ own victims in the Trojan War. Although the woman does not actually speak, the formulaic language of the simile has powerful associations with the lamentation of captive women elsewhere in epic, with the result that the listener can easily conjure her song.

In the second passage, Achilles makes the connection between heroic kleos and the grief of women explicit:

νῦν δὲ κλέος ἐσθλὸν ἀροίμην,
καί τινα Τρωϊάδων καὶ Δαρδανίδων βαθυκόλπων
ἀμφοτέρῃσιν χερσὶ παρειάων ἁπαλάων
δάκρυ’ ὀμορξαμένην ἁδινὸν στοναχῆσαι ἐφείην,
γνοῖεν δ’ ὡς δὴ δηρὸν ἐγὼ πολέμοιο πέπαυμαι·

But now may I win good kleos,
and may I cause some one of the deep-girdled Trojan and Dardanian women
to wipe the tears from their delicate cheeks with both hands
and lament unceasingly.
And they may know that too long I have held back from battle. (Iliad 18.121-125)

Some of the most beautiful passages of the Iliad are not generic, however, but feature the first person laments of such figures as Andromache, Hecuba, Helen, and Briseis. John Foley has shown, for example, that Andromache's speech to Hektor in Iliad 6 conforms in every way to the structure and content of women's laments for the dead in the Greek tradition (Foley 1999: 188–98; see Dué 2002, chapter 4 and my earlier blog post).  Briseis' lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19 echoes many of the same structure and themes and even particular phrases that we find in Andromache's speech:

Βρισηῒς δ' ἄρ' ἔπειτ' ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ

ὡς ἴδε Πάτροκλον δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκᾠ,

ἀμφ' αὐτᾠ χυμένη λίγ' ἐκώκυε, χερσὶ δ' ἄμυσσε

στήθεά τ' ἠδ' ἁπαλὴν δειρὴν ἰδὲ καλὰ πρόσωπα.

εἶπε δ' ἄρα κλαίουσα γυνὴ ἐϊκυῖα θεῇσι·

(I) Πάτροκλέ μοι δειλῇ πλεῖστον κεχαρισμένε θυμᾠ

ζωὸν μέν σε ἔλειπον ἐγὼ κλισίηθεν ἰοῦσα,

νῦν δέ σε τεθνηῶτα κιχάνομαι ὄρχαμε λαῶν

ἂψ ἀνιοῦσ'· 

(II) ὥς μοι δέχεται κακὸν ἐκ κακοῦ αἰεί.

ἄνδρα μὲν ᾧ ἔδοσάν με πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ

εἶδον πρὸ πτόλιος δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκᾠ,

τρεῖς τε κασιγνήτους, τούς μοι μία γείνατο μήτηρ,

κηδείους, οἳ πάντες ὀλέθριον ἦμαρ ἐπέσπον.

οὐδὲ μὲν οὐδέ μ' ἔασκες, ὅτ' ἄνδρ' ἐμὸν ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεὺς

ἔκτεινεν, πέρσεν δὲ πόλιν θείοιο Μύνητος,

κλαίειν, ἀλλά μ' ἔφασκες Ἀχιλλῆος θείοιο

κουριδίην ἄλοχον θήσειν, ἄξειν τ' ἐνὶ νηυσὶν

ἐς Φθίην, δαίσειν δὲ γάμον μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσι.

(III) τώ σ' ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί.

ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ', ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες

Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ' αὐτῶν κήδε' ἑκάστη. 

Then Briseis like golden Aphrodite,

when she saw Patroklos torn by the sharp bronze,

wailed with piercing cries, falling around him. And with her hands she struck

her breast and tender neck and beautiful face.

And then lamenting she spoke, a woman like the goddesses:

(I) “Patroklos, most pleasing to my wretched heart,

I left you alive when I went from the hut.

But now returning home I find you dead, O leader of the people.

(II) So evil begets evil for me forever.

The husband to whom my father and mistress mother gave me

I saw torn by the sharp bronze before the city,

and my three brothers, whom one mother bore together with me,

beloved ones, all of whom met their day of destruction.

Nor did you allow me, when swift Achilles killed my husband,

and sacked the city of god-like Mynes,

to weep, but you claimed that you would make me the

wedded wife of god-like Achilles and that you would bring me in 

the ships 

to Phthia, and give me a wedding feast among the Myrmidons.

(III) Therefore I weep for you now that you are dead ceaselessly, 

you who were kind always.”

(Refrain) So she spoke lamenting, and the women wailed in response,

with Patroklos as their pretext, but each woman for her own cares. (Iliad 19. 282-302)

In terms of narrative, Briseis’ widowed and captive status is quite personal. Lament is a powerful form of speech in which women can narrate their own life experiences, and this is the only place in the Iliad where we learn about Briseis’ life prior to her capture. But her lament gains a great deal of power from the fact that Briseis’ grief foreshadows the grief of every Trojan wife. When Briseis throws herself down on the body of Patroklos, she is already a captive woman—something that Andromache only imagines herself to be in Iliad 6.

Such resonances and interconnections are made possible by the traditional diction and formulaic language in which the Iliad and Odyssey have been composed. The audience's familiarity with such language likewise allows them to receive these passages on a deeper level than would an audience hearing this passage for the first time. When Briseis falls over the body of Patroklos and and begins lamenting with piercing cries, a traditional audience can not only think of the generic husband of Odyssey 8, but also Briseis' first husband, whom she has already lamented, and look ahead to the death of her current would be husband, Achilles, whom she mourns here just as much as she does Patroklos. (See again my earlier blog post for Briseis' lament for Achilles in the Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna as well as the Introduction to Dué 2002.)

We concluded this exploration of the poetics that underlie Iliad 19 by looking at the opening lines of the book, in which Thetis brings Achilles his new set of armor to wear into battle, where she and he know he will soon die. She finds him like this (Iliad 19.4-6):

εὗρε δὲ Πατρόκλῳ περικείμενον ὃν φίλον υἱὸν

κλαίοντα λιγέως: πολέες δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτὸν ἑταῖροι

μύρονθ᾽

She found her dear son fallen about [the body] of Patroklos,

lamenting with piercing cries. And his many companions around him

were weeping

We asked the students to consider how they might understand the passage differently in light of the poetics of the captive woman's lament that we had been exploring. In Odyssey 8, Odysseus' tears and grief are compared to those of a captive woman. Here in Iliad 19 Achilles physically embodies the actions, tears, and lamentation of such a woman while mourning his comrade. And just as the women antiphonally respond to Briseis as she concludes her lament (cf. the women of Andromache's household in Iliad 6.499 and the women of Troy at Iliad 22.515 and 24.746), so too do Achilles' comrades respond to him. In fact the A scholia on these lines gloss μύροντο (19.6) as ἐθρήνουν. When viewed in this way, the grief of Achilles reverberates with the grief of the many women whose husbands he has killed (and the husband he has yet to kill, Hektor), and we realize that Achilles' kleos comes at the cost of not only the unceasing lamentation of the women of Troy, but also his own never ending sorrow. 

Nikolai Ge, Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus (1855)

Works Cited

Dué, C. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, MD, 2002.

Foley, J. M. Homer’s Traditional Art. University Park, 1999.

For more on the poetics of lament that underlie the Iliad and Odyssey and the unnamed woman of Odyssey 8 see G. Nagy, "An unnamed woman’s lament as a signal of epic sorrow."

Variations on Briseis: Special Homeric Poetics Edition

In June the Center for Hellenic Studies will once again host the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar. Each year the seminar introduces a new generation of student researchers to the principles that underly the Homer Multitext project via a particular book of the Iliad. By the end of the seminar the students will not only have created their own edition of the text and scholia for that book as represented in the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad, they will also know a great deal about how the Iliad was composed and the poetics of a work that was composed in performance.

Attic  red-figure skyphos (Louvre G 146) showing
the taking of Briseis by Agamemnon

This year's book is Iliad 19, which happens to feature the only words spoken in the poem by Briseis, the woman whose seizure by Agamemnon in book 1 initiates the entire plot of the Iliad. In my 2002 book, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis, I used the character of Briseis as an entry point for discussing the multiformity of the epic tradition and how that affects our understanding of the poetics of the Iliad. Because Briseis only speaks ten verses in the Iliad, one might be tempted to think that she is not a traditional character, or to put it another way, that she does not have her own story. Briseis’ role in the Iliad is indeed enormously compressed from the standpoint of both the Iliad as a whole and the entire tradition of the Epic Cycle. In the Iliad she does not even have a name—her name means simply “daughter of Brises.” Yet elsewhere there are hints that her name was Hippodameia, and that she was part of another story—or other stories.  She is named Hippodameia by the A scholia at 1.392 and in Dictys of Crete. Here is what the Venetus A scholia say about her:

κούρην Βρισῆος: ἐοικεν πατρωνυμικῶς τὰ ὀνόματα αὐτῶν σχηματίζειν ὁ ποιητὴς καὶ οὐ κυρίως ὡς γὰρ ἄλλοι ἀρχαῖοι ἱστοροῦσιν. ἡ μὲν Ἀστυνόμη ἐκαλεῖτο· ἡ δὲ Ἱπποδάμεια. ὁ δὲ τρόπος ἀντωνομασία 

It is likely that the poet forms their names patronymically and not precisely. For as the other arkhaioi [poets] tell it, the one [Chryseis] was called Astynome and the other [Briseis] was called Hippodameia. The trope is antonomasia [i.e., using one name for another]. 

While it is not certain which poets or song traditions are meant by arkhaioi here, the work of Albert Henrichs has shown that the term arkhaioi in the scholia generally refers to Homer and earlier poets in contrast with more recent poets (hoi neôteroi), who include Hesiod, the archaic poets, the tragedians, and Alexandrian poets like Callimachus. The comment suggests then that in some early epic narratives Briseis had a personal name, and by extension, a story to go with it.

It is important to understand that the Iliad is a narrative about the anger of Achilles in the tenth year of the Trojan War. Much earlier as well as much later events are woven into a story that takes place in only a few days’ time. Even though at over 15,000 verses it might take as many as three days to perform, the Iliad is nevertheless a compression of the potentially full extent of epic poetry about Troy—what we might call the ultimate expansion of the Iliad. I suggest that one result of this compression is that the Iliad only gives us a glimpse of the figure of Briseis, whose role in the larger epic tradition must have been much greater.

It seems likely that there were at least two variations on the story of Briseis in antiquity, because of the two-fold pattern she fulfills in the surviving ancient references. In at least one tradition she is very much a young (or at least unmarried) girl, the daughter of King Brises of Pedasos, whom Achilles receives as a prize along with Diomedeia, the daughter of King Phorbas of Lesbos (see Chapter 3 in Dué 2002). But according to Iliad 2.688-694, 19.295-296, and elsewhere she was captured by Achilles in the sack of Lyrnessos, and in her lament for Patroklos (Iliad 19.292-302) Briseis says that she was married, and that Achilles killed her husband, who may have been King Mynes. Our Iliad alludes to multiple variations on these two basic themes.

Briseis is featured in a number of ancient vase paintings, which are similarly multiform in their depiction of Briseis' story. (See Chapter 1 of Dué 2002.) The one included above shows her being taken by Agamemnon from the tent of Achilles (a variation on the Iliad, where two heralds come to take Briseis). This event is narrated in book 1 of the Iliad, where the text says, tantalizingly, that she went “unwillingly.” In Iliad 9 Achilles proclaims that he loves her as a man loves his wife, even though he won her in war (ἐκ θυμοῦ φίλεον δουρικτητήν περ ἐοῦσαν 9.343). In Briseis’ lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19 we learn of her hope to become Achilles’ wedded wife in Phthia. And so we see that compressed but not entirely hidden within the Iliad there is also a love story. (See also Fantuzzi 2012.)

A multitextual approach to the Iliad allows us to appreciate the long history and multiformity of the tradition from which poets and vase painters told their stories. As I write in my 2002 book, Archaic vase-paintings can even make it possible for us to reconstruct variant poetic traditions to which the Iliad alludes (see Muellner 2012 for another example). It is important, however, to make a distinction between the Iliad—the fixed text as we now know it—and Iliadic or Cyclic traditional narratives. n our Iliad Agamemnon sends two heralds to take Briseis, but, according to another way of telling the story, Agamemnon comes in person. The archaic artists knew both variants of the tale, and “told the story” both ways, choosing between them like an epic poet in performance.

Because of the nature of what survives, we have only a narrow window into the larger tradition from which painters and poets composed their narratives. Reconstruction of the larger tradition can be difficult and sometimes impossible, but an examination of the sources that do survive show us that the ancient Greek artistic and epic traditions were at one time very fluid. The Iliad is one way of telling the tale of Troy, but it is by no means the only way, as the example of Briseis makes clear.

Works Cited

Dué, C. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, MD.

Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love. Oxford.

Henrichs, A. 1993. “Response.” In Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World, eds. A. W. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A.A. Long, and A. Stewart. Berkeley.

Muellner, L. 2012. "Grieving Achilles." In Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry, eds. F. Montanari, A. Rengakos, C. Tsagalis, pp.197-220. Berlin.

Hektor’s Variation on a Lament by Briseis

One of the topics that I am most interested in on this blog and in connection with the Homer Multitext more generally is the concept of multiformity. A primary research question addressed by the Homer Multitext is the extent to which the variation and multiformity that once characterized the performance and composition of the Homeric poems are still evident in the historical documents that transmit the text of these poems to us. As Albert Lord showed (see especially Lord 1960), in an oral epic song tradition like that in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, no song was ever sung the exact same way twice. The song was created anew each time, using the traditional building blocks of formula and theme, employed in varying degrees of expansion and compression. Every formula is traditional, but every formula carries with it many layers of accumulated meaning, meaning that resonates through time and even across geographical distances. What is “good” about such traditional poetry is not “newness,” but, as Milman Parry put it, putting tradition “to the best use” (Parry 1932, 12-14 [= Parry 1971, 334-35]).

Richard Martin built on the work of Parry and Lord to show how patterns and structures associated with different genres of poetry and speech outside of epic (such as boasting, lament, love song, etc) came to be incorporated into epic, and so formed building blocks with powerful resonance of their own (see especially Martin 1989). One of these genres that I have explored in my own research is that of the traditional lament for the dead, especially as performed by the captive (and soon-to-be captive) women of the Iliad, such as Briseis and Andromache. Laments have a traditional structure and have traditional content, themes, and imagery, but they are dynamic forms of song. They have particular relevance to the life of the woman singing the song and narrate her own personal experiences while at the same time drawing on universal patterns and the experiences of sorrow and grief within the community of mourners. In other words, every lament is a multiform of a notional or archetypal lament, but no two laments are ever the same.

This week I happened to be reminded of the laments for Achilles in the epic of Quintus of Smyrna, whose Posthomerica (which might be translated as “epic events after Homer”) narrates the death of Achilles and the sack of Troy. In that epic, Achilles’ prize of war Briseis gives the following lament (3.551-576):

πασάων δ’ ἔκπαγλον ἀκηχεμένη κέαρ ἔνδον
Βρισηὶς παράκοιτις ἐυπτολέμου Ἀχιλῆος
ἀμφὶ νέκυν στρωφᾶτο καὶ ἀμφοτέρῃς παλάμῃσι
δρυπτομένη χρόα καλὸν ἀύτεεν· ἐκ δ’ ἁπαλοῖο
στήθεος αἱματόεσσαι ἀνὰ σμώδιγγες ἄερθεν
θεινομένης· φαίης κεν ἐπὶ γλάγος αἷμα χέασθαι
φοίνιον. Ἀγλαΐη δὲ καὶ ἀχνυμένης ἀλεγεινῶς
ἱμερόεν μάρμαιρε, χάρις δέ οἱ ἄμπεχεν εἶδος.
τοῖον δ’ ἔκφατο μῦθον ὀιζυρὸν γοόωσα·
ὤ μοι ἐγὼ πάντων περιώσιον αἰνὰ παθοῦσα·
οὐ γάρ μοι τόσσον περ ἐπήλυθεν ἄλλό τι πῆμα,
οὔτε κασιγνήτων οὔτ’ εὐρυχόρου περὶ πάτρης,
ὅσσον σεῖο θανόντος· ἐπεὶ σύ μοι ἱερὸν ἦμαρ
καὶ φάος ἠελίοιο πέλες καὶ μείλιχος αἰὼν
ἐλπωρή τ’ ἀγαθοῖο καὶ ἄσπετον ἄλκαρ ἀνίης
πάσης τ’ ἀγλαΐης πολὺ φέρτερος ἠδὲ τοκήων
ἔπλεο· πάντα γὰρ οἶος ἔης δμωῇ περ ἐούσῃ,
καί ῥά με θῆκας ἄκοιτιν ἑλὼν ἄπο δούλια ἔργα.
νῦν δέ τις ἐν νήεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν ἄξεται ἄλλος
Σπάρτην εἰς ἐρίβωλον ἢ ἐς πολυδίψιον Ἄργος·
καί νύ κεν ἀμφιπολεῦσα κακὰς ὑποτλήσομ’ ἀνίας
σεῦ ἀπονοσφισθεῖσα δυσάμμορος. Ὡς ὄφελόν με
γαῖα χυτὴ ἐκάλυψε πάρος σέο πότμον ἰδέσθαι.
ὣς ἣ μὲν δμηθέντ’ ὀλοφύρετο Πηλείωνα
δμωῇς σὺν μογερῇσι καὶ ἀχνυμένοισιν Ἀχαιοῖς
μυρομένη καὶ ἄνακτα καὶ ἀνέρα·

(For a translation, see Theoi.com.)

In my 2002 book, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis, I argued that this lament in Quintus of Smyrna may well reflect (however dimly) an archaic epic lament by Briseis for Achilles that has not survived. Instead, we have an echo of that lament in her lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19.282-302, a lament which seems to be in many ways a lament for Achilles himself. An ancient audience would have been able to connect the deaths of the two comrades, and so her lament for Patroklos would have resonated on multiple levels. (See Dué 2002: 1-16 and 74-76.) The traditional formulaic language of oral poetry (and indeed lament) would have evoked all at the same time the deaths of Briseis’ first husband, Patroklos, Achilles, and indeed all husbands who die in battle—including Hektor.

Many scholars, including myself, have noted that Briseis’ lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19 shares many features with the speech of Andromache to Hektor in Iliad 6 (405-432), in which Andromache attempts to persuade Hektor not to return to battle. And in fact, as John Foley has shown (1999:188-198), Andromache’s speech is a lament in every way, even though it is not explicitly called a goos or thrēnos. (Please see chapter four of Homeric Variations for a full analysis.) She first addresses Hektor in the second person directly, then narrates the deaths of her family members in the sack of her city, and then concludes by addressing Hektor once again. The content of Andromache’s speech in Iliad 6 likewise resonates with other traditional laments in the Iliad. For example, the reproach that has been noted as characteristic of laments often takes the form of an accusation of abandonment. Andromache does not reproach Hektor directly in this speech, but she does warn him not to leave her a widow and their son an orphan. Hektor admits he would rather die than see Andromache led off into captivity (6.464-465). Andromache herself expresses a wish to die if she loses Hektor (6.410-411), and this wish too is a common feature of laments. The accusation of abandonment in both ancient and modern Greek laments is typically accompanied by a description of the lamenting woman’s endangered position in the community. Andromache relates how she has lost the protection of all of her family members, and sets up Hektor as her last resource. Many of the traditional lament themes that are featured in Andromache’s speech recur when she learns of the death of Hektor in Iliad 22 and in her lament at Hektor’s funeral in Iliad 24. She relates how Hektor has left her a widow and their son an orphan. She describes the life of servitude that will be hers, and speculates that Astyanax will likewise be a slave or else hurled to his death from the walls (24.727-728, 732-735).

Andromache’s and Briseis’ laments are representative of the way that wives and women in general comment on their status in the community once the man whom they are mourning is dead. Michael Herzfeld has shown in his study of a modern Cretan funeral how women may actually manipulate their status by evoking the sympathy of their audience and warding off potential reproach. Mary Ebbott, following up on the work of Herzfeld, has analyzed Helen’s language of self-blame in the Iliad in order to show how Helen uses the language of lament in even non-lament contexts to voice a view of herself that other characters in the Iliad never express. We can see in Andromache’s speech a similar kind of positioning through lament language even before Hektor’s death.

Likewise, Briseis’ lament for Patroklos deals more with defining her relationship to Achilles than it does with Patroklos. Like Andromache, Briseis uses the medium of lament to narrate the pains of her life and manipulate her status within her community. Briseis sets up first Patroklos and then Achilles as her primary resource after the deaths of her brothers and husband. She mentions the kindness of Patroklos (19.300) in order to comment on her own vulnerability. When she notes that Patroklos always promised to make her Achilles’ “wedded wife” (kouridiê alokhos) she seeks to legitimize her position through lament. She creates a status for herself that might protect her in some way when Achilles himself dies.

With the laments of Book 24 that conclude the Iliad comes an awareness that Andromache, Hecuba, and every Trojan wife will soon be captive women. And just as Achilles’ death is constantly foreshadowed, but does not occur in the Iliad, so the capture of Andromache by Greek warriors, an event that is foretold in Books 6, 18, and 24, does not take place within the confines of the Iliad itself. Her capture is instead realized in the figure of Briseis, the “wife” of Achilles. Just as Patroklos and then Hektor are substitutes in death for Achilles within the poem, so Briseis can be a substitute for Andromache. And as the funeral of Hektor foreshadows that of Achilles, Andromache’s fears for herself in turn reverberate back to Briseis, whose story, upon the death of Achilles, will come full circle, and she will be a widow and a captive once more.

As you can see, I am fascinated by the way that the traditional diction of Homeric poetry creates meaning and interconnection between different characters and different parts of the poem. For me, the repetitiveness of the poetry allows for more meaning not less. The patterns and structures of lament that I have been discussing here would have been very familiar to an ancient audience, who would have grasped them on an unconscious level. When Andromache begins using what I have called the “language of lament,” the emotional power of that speech would have connected with an ancient audience in a particular and powerful way, just as it does, within the poem, with Hektor.

This brings me back to the lament of Briseis in the Posthomerica, and, in an interesting way, Hektor. Indeed the bulk of Briseis’ lament in the Posthomerica evokes her lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19, with her narration of the loss of her homeland, parents, and brothers, and her “wife”-like (ἄκοιτιν) status with Achilles. But the last part of her lament, in which she tells of her soon-to-be captive (once again) status to a master in Greece, and her longing for death before seeing him dead, recall above all the fears that Hektor expresses for Andromache, as he explains to her why he must return to battle. In a justifiably much admired passage (the first part of which is itself a repetition of Agamemnon’s words at Iliad 4.163-165) he says (6.447-465):

εὖ γὰρ ἐγὼ τόδε οἶδα κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν:
ἔσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτ᾽ ἄν ποτ᾽ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋμμελίω Πριάμοιο.
ἀλλ᾽ οὔ μοι Τρώων τόσσον μέλει ἄλγος ὀπίσσω,
οὔτ᾽ αὐτῆς Ἑκάβης οὔτε Πριάμοιο ἄνακτος
οὔτε κασιγνήτων, οἵ κεν πολέες τε καὶ ἐσθλοὶ
ἐν κονίῃσι πέσοιεν ὑπ᾽ ἀνδράσι δυσμενέεσσιν,
ὅσσον σεῦ, ὅτε κέν τις Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων
δακρυόεσσαν ἄγηται ἐλεύθερον ἦμαρ ἀπούρας:
καί κεν ἐν Ἄργει ἐοῦσα πρὸς ἄλλης ἱστὸν ὑφαίνοις,
καί κεν ὕδωρ φορέοις Μεσσηΐδος ἢ Ὑπερείης
πόλλ᾽ ἀεκαζομένη, κρατερὴ δ᾽ ἐπικείσετ᾽ ἀνάγκη...
ἀλλά με τεθνηῶτα χυτὴ κατὰ γαῖα καλύπτοι
πρίν γέ τι σῆς τε βοῆς σοῦ θ᾽ ἑλκηθμοῖο πυθέσθαι.

For I know this well in my heart and soul,
a day will come when holy Ilium will be destroyed,
and Priam and the people of Priam of the good spear.
But the pain of the Trojans in the future is not so much a concern for me
nor that of Hecuba herself nor of Lord Priam,
nor that of my brothers, who many and noble
have fallen in the dust at the hands of enemy men,
as much as your pain, when some one of the Achaeans with their bronze khitons
leads you away weeping, having deprived you of your day of freedom.
And then being in Argos you will weave at the loom for another woman,
and carry water from the Middle Spring and Upper Spring,
treated very shamefully, and powerful necessity will lie upon you...
May the heaped up earth of my tomb cover me dead
before I learn of your shout and your being dragged away.

What Hektor fears for Andromache, as we all know, will indeed come true, and in the Posthomerica, for Briseis, it has come true once again. Rereading the lament of Briseis in the Posthomerica I now see that in the Iliad Hektor, like Andromache, draws on the powerful language of lament to make his case. We have in essence, dueling proleptic laments from these two characters, which dramatically adds to the emotional effect of this scene.

Although anthropological research has shown that women were the traditional performers of lament in antiquity, the male heroes of epic do sometimes lament. Achilles in particular has been shown to be versed in both women’s and men’s song-making traditions. (See especially Monsacré 1984.) Here we see that Hektor has heard Andomache’s lamentation, and responded with a traditional lament of his own. This is particularly striking to me in part because ancient laments seems to have been antiphonal, with the mourner and audience responding to one another. (On the antiphonal nature of Greek laments, already represented in the laments of the Iliad, see Alexiou 1974: 131-60 and Dué 2006: 12-14.) This kind of responsion between the doomed couple makes their words even more evocative of an actual funeral.

Hektor’s variation on the captive woman’s lament is powerful precisely because it is a multiform of a pattern of speech deeply imprinted on the audience. It is powerful because it repeats, because it draws on formulas that have evolved over centuries to express precisely this kind of otherwise inexpressible sorrow. And so we see that the laments of Briseis and Andromache and Hektor are all multiforms of one another, and yet each perfectly communicates the very individual pain of each one.

(The image at the top of this post is of a painting by Zoie Lafis, Threnouses [2005], based on an ancient Greek vase.)

Works Cited
Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge.

Carlisle, M., and O. Levaniouk, eds. 1999. Nine Essays on Homer. Lanham, Md.

Dué, C. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, Md.

Dué, C. 2006. The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy. Austin.

Ebbott, M. “The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad.” In Carlisle and Levaniouk 1999: 3-20.

Foley, J. M. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. University Park.

Herzfeld, M. 1993. “In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral.” American Ethnologist 20.2: 241-55.

Lord, A. B. 1960/2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA. 2nd rev. edition, 2000.

Martin, R. P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca, N.Y.

Monsacré, H. 1984. Les larmes d'Achille: le héros, la femme et la souffrance dans la poésie d'Homère. Paris.

Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford.

Parry, M. 1932. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Versemaking. II. The Homeric Language as the Language of Oral Poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932): 1-50 [repr. in A. Parry 1971: 325-64].