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."

Audiences and Tradition

ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι:
ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε πάρεστέ τε ἴστέ τε πάντα,
ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν
(Iliad 2.484-486)

Tell me now, Muses, you who have Olympian abodes,
since you are goddesses and you are present for all that happens and you know everything,
while we only hear the kleos and we know nothing


Nikola: All right, but when you've learned my song, would... you sing it exactly as I do?
Sulejman: I would.
N: You wouldn't add anything... nor leave anything out?
S: I wouldn't... by Allah I would sing it just as I heard it. ...It isn't good to change or to add.
(Lord, The Singer of Tales, 27)

The notion of “innovation” is one of the most difficult ones that we grapple with when we, as members of a highly literate culture that prizes creativity and the concept of “genius,” encounter an oral tradition that explicitly claims not to prize it. Just as the South Slavic singers that Milman Parry and Albert Lord interviewed with the help of Nikola Vujnović claimed to always sing their songs the same way every time, so too the Homeric narrator claims to repeat exactly what he has heard from the Muses, because he himself “knows nothing.” In such a tradition, the poet claims that his song is the truth, and as such it must be unchanging. In reality, we as outside observers of the tradition, can demonstrate that in fact the songs do change from performance to performance and tradition, far from being fixed and static, dynamically evolves over time. But for the singers on the inside of the tradition, the song remains notionally unchanging.

What, then, is “genius” in an oral tradition? What distinguishes one poet from another? We should first acknowledge that in even asking this question we are revealing our own bias. But as Milman Parry himself put it [Parry 1932, 12-14 (= Parry 1971, 334-35)]: “One oral poet is better than another not because he has by himself found a more striking way of expressing his own thought but because he has been better able to make use of the tradition. . . . The fame of a singer comes not from quitting the tradition but from putting it to the best use.”

I have explored the history of our modern Western struggle with separating genius from innovation when it comes to Homer in a lengthy essay called “The Invention of Ossian” (available here). In this post I would like to approach the question a little differently by considering the role of performance and audience in the shaping of tradition.


I recently had the opportunity to attend a concert by Fleetwood Mac, a band that reached its peak of album sales and popularity in the mid-to-late 1970s. All the members of the band are much older now and their vocal abilities are no longer what they once were, and yet the giant arena in Houston (the Toyota Center) was sold out, and the band gave an outstanding three hour performance that thrilled the crowd. Why did we all pay so much money to attend this performance, when we could have listened to a technically superior version of all the songs on CD or mp3? There is something primal, it seems to me, in our desire to gather together as a community to hear music. Even today in 2013, in the fourth biggest city of the United States, in a giant basketball arena full of strangers, we still seek to experience music with other people. As disparate from each other as we all were, we were united through our shared love of the music for the duration of the performance. That experience, I would argue, is one that we can share however distantly with the traditional audiences of the Homeric or South Slavic epic traditions, whose members would have been united by their deep familiarity with and love of the poetry of their traditional culture. Because such poetry was experienced only in performance, I would argue that there would have been an even more important bond between the experience of performance and the connection between audience members generated by the performance.

Another aspect of the concert had me thinking about Homer. As much as we appreciate live performance today for its communal aspects, and for the interaction it creates between performer(s) and audience, there is inevitably a certain pull that we feel towards the “traditional” way of doing the song - that is the version that we know from our ipods and CDs, the version we have heard countless times. At this particular concert, as thrilled as I was to hear the legendary Stevie Nicks singing live, I was disappointed that many songs had been rearranged to better suit her now more limited vocal range. I'm sure we all would have preferred the arrangements with which we were all very familiar. Moroever, there were times during the concert when the band performed some new material. The energy in the room substantially dropped; people sat down, went to the concession stand, or the bathroom. This got me thinking: what other form of entertainment or art is like this? If your favorite tv show comes out with a new episode, or your favorite novelist comes out with a new novel, you are delighted and race to view it/read it. Yet here we all were disappointed that the band was singing a new song. I don't think this is only the case for bands like Fleetwood Mac who were popular 35 years ago. I can remember going to an R.E.M. concert when I was young and experiencing the same sensation. I can't remember what the new songs were that R.E.M. performed that night. For all I know they may have been their next number 1 hits, but in that moment of performance, I wanted what I already knew - and so did the rest of the audience.

Unlike a modern band, the traditional singers of the South Slavic or Homeric traditions did not need to sell new albums. There were of course no albums to sell or equipment on which to play them. The singers made their living performing live what audiences wanted to hear, and it seems that what they wanted to hear were the songs that they all knew and loved. It is hard for us to get our heads around the fact that the best singers would not have been the ones thrilling their audiences with a new song or a new way of telling the story. But perhaps it can help us to understand this process better if we realize that this kind of poetry was only experienced in performance, which is to say, before an audience who knows the song already and has to be pleased.

There is something about live performance that creates community and thereby reinforces tradition. “Newness” is not what is wanted or called for in that moment. And yet newness does happen. The songs at the Fleetwood Mac concert were sung a bit differently (though still, ultimately, they were “the same”) and new songs were performed. Audience interaction contributed to and shaped what transpired. The tradition was perpetuated, but was also evolving, through performance.