Animus Classics Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2

ANIMUS

CLASSICS

JOURNAL

Spring 2023

Volume 3

No. 2

Cover art by E.G. Keisling

ANIMUS 1 THE CLASSICS JOURNAL OF THE UNIVERSITY

OF CHICAGO

VOLUME III, NO. 2

SPRING, 2776 AUC

0ANIMUS, THE CLASSICS JOURNAL OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, VOL. III, ISSUE 2

A LIST OF THE ARTICLES IN THIS VOLUME

12 HORACE, ODES 1.7: ENGLISH VERSE

TRANSLATION

Blake Alexander Lopez

16 PSYCH(Ē)! : DEFINING THE DEAD SOUL IN

HOMER

William McClelland

32 ABSTRACTION OF A KOUROS

Katherine Terrell

34 WHAT IS LOVE? COMPARING VITA NUOVA

BY DANTE ALIGHERI TO THE SYMPOSIUM

BY PLATO

Karim Mitri

48 CATULLUS 42, A RESPONSE

Francesco Cipriani

50 TRANSLATING GRIEF: AN EXCERPT OF

ILIAD 23

William McClelland

56 TROJAN HORSE

Guo Xiwen

58 THE ILIAD: ANCIENT GREEK HISTORICAL

FICTION

Greta Rose Lunder

72 CLYTEMNESTRA’S PIETÀ

Chloe Chow

74 WHERE THERE’S SMOKE...

Karen Yunjia Guo

BOARD OF THE ANIMUS CLASSICS JOURNAL

Natalie Nitsch, Sarah M. Ware Editors-in-Chief

Daniel Mark-Welch

Managing Editor

Elizabeth Harrison

Secretary

ACADEMIC

Josephine R. Dawson

Section Editor

Robert Gorman

Ken Johnson

Jacob Botaish

Asst. Section Ed.

CREATIVE

Gabriel R. Clisham

Section Editor

Anjali Jain

Shannon Kim

Asst Section Ed.

TRANSLATION

Alexander Urquhart

Section Editor

Erin Choi

Matthew Turner

Asst Section Ed.

BLOG

Penelope Toll

Section Editor

Isabella Cisneros

Asst Section Ed.

Alexander M. Lapuente

Jack Howard

Jacob Keisling

General Assistant

Design Editor

Consultant

p. 8 1

REVIEWERS & COPY EDITORS

REVIEWERS

Jack Maurice Archer

Bill Baker

Serdar Celikus

Gabriel R. Clisham

Spencer Dalton

Josephine R. Dawson

Thomas C. DeGirolami

Elizabeth Harrison

Anderson Hu

Benjamin Huffman

Gwendolyn Jacobson

Anjali Jain

Ken Johnson

Mira Kaplan

Ahna Kim

Esther Kim

Hudson Ozaki Kottman

Harris Lencz

Sanny Li

Michelle Lu

Robert Luo

Daniel Mark-Welch

Jaewon Moon

Natalie Nitsch

Dellara Sheibani

Penelope Toll

Alexa Torres

Anushree Vashist

Sarah M. Ware

Jonathan Yin

COPY EDITORS

Spencer Dalton

Anderson Hu

Benjamin Huffman

Anjali Jain

Elizabeth Johnson

Mira Kaplan

Ahna Kim

Shannon Kim

Harris Lencz

Robert Luo

Avery Metzcar

Carrie Midkiff

p. 9 1

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

As we close our Spring 2023 spreadsheet and move from

Classics 21 outside to the Classics quad, we would like to

take a moment to reflect on the people who dedicated

their time and energy to Animus this year.

Gratitude

for our

Staff

Gratitude

for Classics

faculty and

staff

As always, we are incredibly grateful for the ongoing support of

our Animus staff and personnel, without whose work the journal

would not be possible. To our Peer Reviewers, who poured

over submissions and wrote insightful feedback for authors and

our staff, to our Copy Editors, whose eyes are no doubt strained

from ensuring every “i” was dotted and every “t” was crossed,

and to our Assistant Section Editors, we appreciate your continued

dedication, and we thank you endlessly for your many hours

of hard work.

We are grateful for the support of the Classics department, particularly

Kathy Fox and Professors Jonah Radding and David Wray

for their advice and assistance, and Classics Bibliographer Catherine

Mardikes for archiving each issue of Animus for posterity.

We would also like to thank UChicago’s Student Government

p. 10 1

Committee, without whose funding this issue would not have

been possible, and Elizabeth Harrison in her role as treasurer of

the Classics Society.

We owe enormous thanks to our design consultant, Jacob Keisling,

who more than answered the call of his position in creating

beautiful Kelmscott Press-inspired designs for this volume of the

journal. We are also grateful for the forward-looking work Jacob

has done to simplify the design process of the journal for future

iterations of the Animus staff when his tenure on Staff ends following

this issue.

To our outgoing Board and staff members, we appreciate the

constant dedication and care that you have given to support

Animus. We will especially miss Josephine’s ever-discerning eye

and spreadsheet-whispering abilities, Daniel’s predilection for

strange culinary creations, Alex’s translation theory acumen,

Jack’s soothing presence, and Jacob’s alarming proficiency with

AI. We also want to thank our long-time Peer Reviewer, Gwendolyn

Jacobson, whose insights have shaped our translation section

since the beginning of the journal. To our incoming and continuing

Board members, we look forward to what you will bring to

Animus. This year has been wonderful; we have no doubt that

next year will be even better.

Lastly, Animus as a publication would not have been possible

without Natalie Nitsch. As the journal’s first Managing Editor

and co-Editor-in-Chief over the past two years, Natalie has

been foundational in establishing Animus as a high-quality student-run

publication at UChicago. Her steadfast dedication to

Animus over the past three years–in creating a robust peer review

system, redrafting our by-laws, organizing massive spreadsheets,

and so much else–serves as a model for all of us at Animus, and

she will be sorely missed, not in the least by her co-Editor-in-

Chief. We look forward to Elizabeth Harrison joining Sarah Ware

next year as co-Editor-in-Chief and Anjali Jain stepping into the

role of Managing Editor, and wish them nothing but harmony and

a lack of technical issues.

Warmly,

Natalie Nitsch and Sarah M. Ware

On Jacob

Keisling

and his

tireless

efforts

To outgoing

Board

members

On Natalie

Nitsch and

her legacy

at Animus

p. 11 1

HORACE, ODES 1.71ENGLISH VERSE TRANSLATION

BLAKE ALEXANDER LOPEZ, TRANSLATOR

HARVARD COLLEGE

In order to replicate the metrical effect of the original

Alcmanian strophe of Horace Odes 1.7, I have

translated the poem into English verse with alternating

lines of iambic heptameter and iambic pentameter.

No particular rhyme scheme is intended.

Tip: Make sure to pronounce the e-sounds in words like

Albunea, Anio, and Tiburnian as glides (e.g. like a consonantal

y) in order for the lines to scan properly.

p. 12 1

ODES 1.7

Ay, some shall praise distinguished Rhodes or Mytilene’s

shores

Or Ephesus or two-sea’d Corinth’s walls

Or Thebes, whose Bacchus sings her songs, or Delphi, Phoebus’

love,

Or Thessaly’s own Tempe, well renowned;

Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytilenen

aut Epheson bimarisve Corinthi

moenia vel Baccho Thebas vel Apolline Delphos

insignis aut Thessala Tempe;

The only task of certain men is virgin Pallas’ town

To glorify in neverending song

And on their front to place a far-culled olive-woven wreath.

And many still in Juno’s honor shall

v

sunt quibus unum opus est intactae Palladis urbem

carmine perpetuo celebrare et

undique decerptam fronti praeponere olivam.

plurimus in Iunonis honorem

Name Argos, land of horses’ graze, and old Mycenae’s wealth:

But Sparta does not strike me nearly so,

Nor do Larissa’s fruitful fields at all affect me thus,

As that abode of loud Albunea’s own

x

aptum dicet equis Argos ditesque Mycenas:

me nec tam patiens Lacedaemon

nec tam Larisae percussit campus opimae,

quam domus Albuneae resonantis

p. 13 1

xv

As well as headlong Anio and the lush Tiburnian grove

And too the orchards, wet with rippling streams.

And as white Notus oft of clouds wipes clean the darkened

sky

And does not endless teem with menaced rains,

et praeceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus et uda

mobilibus pomaria rivis.

albus ut obscuro deterget nubila caelo

saepe Notus neque parturit imbris

xx

Remember thou now wisely so to bring unto their end

The sadness and the toils of mortal life

With unmixed wine, O Plancus, whether camps thee shall

retain,

Resplendent with their standards, or thy dense

perpetuo, sic tu sapiens finire memento

tristitiam vitaeque labores

molli, Plance, mero, seu te fulgentia signis

castra tenent seu densa tenebit

Tiburnian shade. And when old Teucer Salamis did flee,

Including his own father, nonetheless

He’s said to’ve wreathed his wine-wet temples with a poplar

crown,

And thus his saddened friends did he address:

Tiburis umbra tui. Teucer Salamina patremque

cum fugeret, tamen uda Lyaeo

tempora populea fertur vinxisse corona,

sic tristis adfatus amicos:

p. 14

“Wherever fortune, more than mine own father kind, us bears,

We shall press on, my dearest comrade-mates.

Naught is to be despaired with Teucer as your guide and lead.

For firm Apollo’s promise shan’t abate,

xxv

“quo nos cumque feret melior fortuna parente,

ibimus, o socii comitesque.

nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice Teucro.

certus enim promisit Apollo

That yet another Salamis on newfound land shall rise.

O brave and once worse suffering of men,

Most often by my side, now banish these your cares with

wine;

The vast sea us recalls to sail again.”

xxx

ambiguam tellure nova Salamina futuram.

o fortes peioraque passi

mecum saepe viri, nunc vino pellite curas;

cras ingens iterabimus aequor.”

CITATION

Horace. Horace, Odes and Epodes. Edited by Paul Shorey and

Gordon J. Laing. Chicago: Benj. H. Sanborn & Co., 1919.

p. 15

PSYCH(Ē)! 1DEFINING THE DEAD SOUL IN HOMER

2 William McClelland, Univ. of Michigan—Ann Arbor

When it comes to using Homer as a source, the

soul is a difficult thing to define, and scholarship

within the past century has proved that

there exists no firm consensus as to what the Homeric

soul truly is. The various Homeric “hypostases”—that

is, words denoting mental language and other internal

activity—are all ambiguous and are often translated

interchangeably by English speakers to mean concepts

like “mind,” “heart,” and “soul” despite the nuances of

the words that make these imperfect equivalents. In

his recent quantitative linguistic analysis of the Homeric

epics, Boban Dedović discusses how, in English,

concepts like “mind” and “heart” are container spaces

in which one may perform mental action, while the

soul is more abstract and less involved with reasoning;

however, in Greek, these hypostases “functionally

correlated to life substances which can act as agents

independent of the person.” 1 In other words, Homeric

hypostases such as νόος, θυμός, ψυχή, φρένες, πραπίδες,

καρδία, κραδίη, κῆρ, and ἦτορ were not so much what we

would consider in our modern understanding to be the

“mind” or “soul” or “heart,” but were freer to act independently

of the person to which they belonged. This

1. Dedović, “‘Minds’ in ‘Homer’: A quantitative psycholinguistic

comparison of the Iliad and Odyssey; or, lexical

frequency analyses of Homeric noos (νόος), thymos (θυμός),

psykhe (ψυχή), phrenes (φρένες), prapides (πραπίδες), kardia

(καρδία), kradie (κραδίη), ker (κῆρ), and etor (ἦτορ), in contrast

to alleged English-equivalents amongst seventeen dual-work

translators,” 14.

16 Psych(ē)!

abundance of internal terms, of course, begs the question of

what counts as the self. If someone is made up of a collection

of different metaphysical entities that can act independently

of a person, then what counts as the actual person?

There have been various attempts to answer this question,

though no general consensus has been reached. Bruno Snell

notably argued against the existence of a unified concept of

the soul or self in Homer, though this point of view has been

subject to a great deal of criticism in recent decades because

of the theory’s inability to explain how a Homeric person operates

coherently despite their independently-working hypostases.

2 There is also the argument from silence, which holds that

just because there is no specific word for or clear delineation

of a self, that does not mean it does not exist; however, this

exists mostly as a counterargument to Snell. 3 Michael Clarke’s

“Flesh and spirit in the songs of Homer” from 1999 and Edward

Jeremiah’s 2010 book, The Emergence of Reflexivity in Greek

Language and Thought, question how to approach and interpret

this mental language as well, but I will move past them

at the moment to consider Joseph Russo’s more recent claim

that the Odyssey and the Iliad must be evaluated separately in

terms of a person’s sense of self since the ways in which decisions

are made differ between epics. 4

Russo (2012) points out that there is a significant difference

between the representation of mental processes between the

two epics and argues that anyone claiming something to be

“Homeric” must be extremely careful in doing so. 5 This point

is backed by Dedović, who writes about how many of the hypostases

translated as “soul” or “mind” had previously been

correlated with some physical processes in the Iliad before becoming

mentally affiliated in the Odyssey. 6 The more frequent

usage of hypostases in the Odyssey thus supports the idea

that a more coherent internal self had developed before its

composition, since a more developed sense of self would produce

more references to that self’s internal activity. Therefore,

sometime between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the internal notion

of “self” became more concrete, something that could be

referred to or take its own actions in different ways. This is not

2. Gaskin, “Do Homeric Heroes Make Real Decisions?” 2.

3. Dedović, 28.

4. Russo, “Rethinking Homeric Psychology: Snell, Dodds, and Their

Critics,” 13.

5. Russo, 28.

6. Dedović, 14.

Psych(ē)! 17

to say that the Iliadic self or soul did not exist or was not considered

to have a physical form; rather, it seems that the Odyssean

Greeks had simply begun to think of a tangible sense

of self more frequently than their earlier, Iliadic counterparts.

However, with the acknowledgement of these semantic nuances,

the relatively short amount of time between the composition

of the Iliad and the Odyssey—estimated to be around

50–100 years—is not long enough to change the concept of the

self and the soul completely. There are a number of concrete

actions involved in burial practices that do not seem to change

between the epics, and references to the soul and its capabilities

overlap in belief between the two as well. Although there

remains a significant question as to how different the internal

perception of the soul and the self is between the Iliad and

the Odyssey, for this analysis, I believe that it may be passed

over. Since the dead were physically treated by the living in a

similar way between the two epics, it is not a great logical leap

to assume that the Greeks during the time of Homer thought

of the afterlife and the dead soul in a similar way between the

two epics as well.

The Ψυχή v. the ‘Soul’: Semantic Nuance and Linguistic Analysis

As mentioned previously, there is no one word for “soul” in

ancient Greek that correlates exactly with a modern idea of

the soul, which—in the United States and Western Europe—is

often heavily influenced by Christianity. So, instead of looking

for a direct representation of such a concept in the Homeric

epics, it is better to search for an approximation, especially

when taking the complications of defining the self into

account, given the numerous hypostases. It is hard to figure

out what the Homeric Greeks believed happens to a person

after death if we do not know what they thought a person

even was. Jan Bremmer’s categorization of the ψυχή (psyche)

as the Greek representative of Ernst Arbman’s “free soul”—the

part of a soul linked to individual personality, as opposed to

the “body soul” comprised of physical attributes represented

by other hypostases—becomes useful in this context. 7 As

Bremmer asserts, “...the free soul is the individual’s nonphysical

mode of existence not only after death but also in dreams,

swoons, and other types of unconsciousness.” 8 The ψυχή’s continued

existence in these metaphysical and unconscious spaces

is indicative of its role as a person’s life-force, as it possesses

7. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 13.

8. Bremmer, 13.

18 Psych(ē)!

capabilities beyond those of other hypostases and maintains

attributes that pertain to the individual.

However, it bears reiterating that this comparison between

the ψυχή and the soul is not precise. Darcus (1979) points out

two primary ways in which Homer describes the ψυχή: it is an

active agent at the time of death or loss of consciousness as

well as when it is in the Underworld, and it can also be formed

as an accusative direct object acted upon by a god, a mortal,

or the “owner” of the soul himself. 9 This substantiality suggests

that the English word “soul” would not accurately encompass

the full meaning of what the Greeks believed the ψυχή to be

as the modern English-language perception of the soul is often

one that leans more towards the metaphorical. Therefore,

I will use ψυχή when referring to the Homeric Greek concept of

the “soul” unless otherwise stated in order to prevent anachronism.

Now, a linguistic exploration of ψυχή is in order. The etymology

of ψυχή is unclear, and it has presented a challenge to classical

linguists for years. The most straightforward theory is that it is

derived from the well-attested verb ψύχειν, “to breathe/blow,”

which makes logical sense given that in Greek literature, the

ψυχή often exits the body through the mouth. 10 Another theory

put forward by Onians (1951) suggests that ψυχή may be

more specifically related to the alternative definition of ψύχειν,

“to chill/make cold,” and that the ψυχή is not just related to

breath as a whole, but represents the cold breath exhaled at

the moment of death while the θυμός is the warm breath of

life that is itself utterly destroyed at such a time. 11 Whichever

the case, the verb ψύχω remains the most apparent root from

which ψυχή was derived.

However, the next step to understand the etymology of ψυχή

is not so simple. There is no one agreed-upon reconstruction

of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form from which ψυχή and/or

ψύχω may have emerged, though one possible form is *b h es-. 12

This form has produced possible cognates in Sanskrit (bhástrā,

“bellows”) and Albanian (badër, “asphodel”). However, the

steps to form ψυχ- from the PIE root are unclear due to the

9. Darcus, “A Person’s Relation to ψυχή in Homer, Hesiod, and the

Greek Lyric Poets,” 32–3.

10. Bremmer, 21.

11. Onians, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind,

the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, 94–5.

12. “Ψύχω,” Wiktionary.

Psych(ē)! 19

emergence of the initial *ps—which might also be from the

zero-grade of some other root—from *p h - (the expected outcome

in Greek of sound change to the voiced aspirated bilabial

stop *b h ). There is also apparently some suffix that produced

the *-χ- as well that has not been adequately explained. 13

It is intriguing, though, that the potential cognates in the

*b h es- theory relate to the circumstances of the ψυχή in Homer.

It is breathed out and flies away from the body, an obvious

connection to the moving air implied in ‘bellows,’ and the ψυχή

also finds its final destination in a field of asphodel. Based on

this semantic evaluation, it seems that ψυχή may indeed be

derived from that same PIE root *b h es-, but this is yet to be

effectively proven. As a result, comparative linguistics can only

take us so far in the search to understand the ψυχή in death

beyond providing tentative supporting evidence of its breathlike

nature and its geographical situation in the Underworld.

Dr. Richard Janko has offered another theory as to the root

of ψυχή that the initial *psu- may have resulted from metathesis

of the initial consonant cluster in the root *sphu-, which

appears in σφυγμός, “pulse/heartbeat.” 14 However, σφυγμός is

comprised of the root *sphug- and suffix -μός, and for the root

*psukh- to develop from this earlier root form, it would require

not only metathesis of the initial consonant cluster, but the

voiceless velar stop *g would need to sonorize to become *χ. As

mentioned above, there is no clear explanation nor substantial

evidence to provide relevant comparisons for the emergence

of the suffixal *χ since there is no standard way in which a *g

produces a *χ in Greek. 15 As for the former point about metathesis,

although this theory would be helpful in limiting the possible

roots from which *psukh- may be derived in comparison

to the possibility that the initial *ps- may have arisen from a

zero-grade form, it is impossible to tell for certain whether the

*sph- initial cluster underwent metathesis in this case. It does

not help that there is no determined standard outcome for

metathesis of two fricatives. 16 Lastly, the semantics of σφυγμός

do not align as well with ψυχή as those of the verb ψύχω, so I

am more inclined towards the initial theory that ψύχω provides

the root. The discussion of such complications in linguistic

13. Fortson (Professor of Greek and Latin Language, Literature and

Historical Linguistics) in discussion with author, October 2022;

“Ψύχω,” Wiktionary.

14. Richard Janko, email message to author, February 26, 2023.

15. Benjamin Fortson, email message to author, March 6, 2023.

16. Fortson, 2023.

20 Psych(ē)!

analysis of ψυχή remains worthwhile, though, as this example

demonstrates the difficulty in attributing roots and historical

semantic meanings to the term.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that ψυχή is used during later

times as a word for “butterfly,” most notably by Aristotle

(γίγνονται δ᾿ αἱ μὲν καλούμεναι ψυχαὶ ἐκ τῶν καμπῶν; “And butterflies,

being called such, come about from caterpillars”). 17 It is

also the name of the goddess of the soul, who is often portrayed

as having butterfly wings. 18 This equation of the ψυχή

with a butterfly may be related to its proposed derivation

from ψύχω, given that breath can “fly” like a butterfly, but the

reverse may also be true: that the ψυχή was imagined to be

a butterfly when exiting the body and that this idea carried

over from Homeric times into the Classical period. Additionally,

the word for “chrysalis” in ancient Greek is νεκύδαλος, which

derives its first half, νεκυ-, from the word for “corpse”—νέκυς.

Thus, there appears to be a significant association between

butterflies and death during the Classical period, possibly resulting

from the insect’s clear transitions between stages of its

life. A chrysalis may have been emblematic of a form of “death”

that culminates in re-emergence as a new being, similar to the

process of initiation—which often symbolized a sort of death

and rebirth—in Classical cult practices. With that acknowledgement,

let us move on to the evaluation of the ψυχή in the

epics themselves.

The Ψυχή, the Body, and Capabilities After Death

The way in which the ψυχή manifests in death is vital to understanding

what exactly it is and what its capabilities are.

Unpacking what it can do illuminates the importance of burial

rites during the Homeric times and earlier since those capabilities

were dependent on whether the person in question

received a proper burial. We will start with the first moments

of death. When a person dies, the ψυχή “flies away” from the

physical body and down to the Underworld. 19 This ψυχή, while

active, is no longer considered to be part of a full human being;

as Achilles says in Book 23 of the Iliad, ...ἦ ῥά τίς ἐστι καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδαο

δόμοισι ψυχὴ καὶ εἴδωλον, ἀτὰρ φρένες οὐκ ἔνι πάμπαν (“Truly, there

exists some psyche and image in the house of Hades, but there

17. Aristotle, History of Animals, 551a13–14.

18. Antonakou and Triarhou, “Soul, butterfly, mythological nymph:

psyche in philosophy and neuroscience,” 177.

19. Homer, Odyssey, XI.222; The specific word translated here is

ἀποπταμένη.

Psych(ē)! 21

is no phrenes in its entirety.”) 20 The ψυχή thus continues to exist

in the Underworld, but the dead person’s φρένες does not. The

ψυχή appears, then, to be made of sterner stuff; it outlasts the

physical body and at least some of its other functions, lingering

in some form in Hades’ house.

There is a strong correlation between the state of the physical

form and the capabilities of the ψυχή, and just because the

ψυχή still ‘exists’ in the Underworld does not necessarily give it

agency or free movement while there as it derives power from

its relationship to physical forms of being such as blood and

the body. It is only when the dead drink blood that they may

achieve a truly lifelike state once again, as Odysseus observes

during his visit to the Underworld during the Nekyia. Drinking

blood, a symbol of life-force, allows the ψυχή to resemble

whomever it was in life; ψυχαί that drank the animal blood offered

to them by Odysseus became able to communicate more

directly with him. This episode is representative of the belief

that blood carried such potent life-giving properties as to partially

revive the ψυχή upon ingestion. Alternatively, the exposure

of the body to the elements after the ψυχή has left it will

limit what the ψυχή is able to do. When the body to which the

ψυχή once belonged goes unburied, the ψυχή—perhaps counterintuitively—becomes

trapped. According to Iliad 23, ψυχαί

cannot cross the river Okeanos and go through the House of

Hades if they do not receive the proper burial rites, and it is this

inability to pass through the gates that leads Patroklos’ ghost

to come to Achilles in his dream and ask to bury him properly. 21

The unburied face a liminal existence; their ψυχαί cannot travel

into the Underworld, but they cannot go back to the realm

of the living and are therefore left wandering through in-between

spaces such as dreams or along the banks of the river.

In this respect it is intriguing that in the Odyssey, the ψυχαί of

the unburied—such as those of the suitors—are found among

those of the buried. 22 However, since Book 24 may have been

a later addition to the Odyssey, this may indicate that later

Greek afterlife beliefs no longer included a physical separation

between the buried and unburied, or that—though Johnston

(1999) argues that this explanation is less likely—the poet was

merely attempting to include certain characters to move the

20. Homer, Iliad, XXIII.103–4.

21. Homer, Iliad, XXIII.71–4.

22. Homer, Odyssey, XXIV.100.

22 Psych(ē)!

plot along. 23

While all of the dead—buried or otherwise—are physically limited

to the confines of the Underworld in the epics, the unburied

still appear to have some indirect influence over the living.

An example of this can be found in the Odyssey when Elpenor

requests that Odysseus return to the island of Circe to give

him a proper burial, μή τοί τι θεῶν μήνιμα γένωμαι (“Lest I become

a cause of wrath for the gods against you.”) 24 If Elpenor

does not receive a proper burial, then the gods may exact vengeance

against the living on his behalf. This is a curious idea;

by this claim, Elpenor implies that the gods care more for the

proper treatment of the dead than for the well-being of the

living. To be dead becomes more worthy of respect than to

be alive. One possible explanation for this idea is that when

someone is alive, they still have their flesh—the mortal part

of them—but when they are dead and their corpse has rotted

away, the only part that remains is their immortal ψυχή. Another

less lofty explanation for Elpenor’s claim is that it is intended

to be comic. Elpenor’s death-by-drunkenness is darkly funny,

and his demand for a burial mound akin to those erected for

heroes who died at Troy seems ironic; thus, his claim that the

gods will enact their divine rage upon Odysseus if he does not

bury him could be another example of Elpenor’s inflated sense

of self. However, I am inclined to believe that either the latter

is not the case or that both of these explanations may be true

simultaneously, since later works such as Sophocles’ Antigone

also show divine retribution for one’s refusal to bury the dead.

Book 24 of the Iliad additionally shows Apollo admonishing

the other gods for allowing Achilles to continue to drag Hector’s

corpse around Troy, and Achilles mentions in his telling of

the story of Niobe to Priam that, speaking about Niobe’s murdered

children, ...τοὺς δ᾽ ἄρα τῇ δεκάτῃ θάψαν θεοὶ Οὐρανίωνες (“...

and the heavenly gods buried them on the tenth day.”) 25 The

gods seem to have a vested interest in making sure people—or

heroes, at least—receive proper burial rites. However, it is unclear

how much the ψυχή is actually able to do to encourage

retribution. The gods act of their own accord; Elpenor’s ψυχή

may simply be aware of the gods’ concern for the dead and be

counting on their sympathies to gain the respect he deserves.

So, while not actively able to punish the dead, the ψυχή may

23. Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the

Dead in Ancient Greece, 58–9.

24. Homer, Odyssey, XI.73.

25. Homer, Iliad, XXIV.33–55, 612.

Psych(ē)! 23

indirectly influence the gods towards encouraging proper burial

by merely existing.

The Ψυχή’s Connection to Memory

The fate and capabilities of the ψυχή in Homer are also influenced

by the ψυχή dependence on human memory. Achilles

asserts that ...θανόντων περ καταλήθοντ᾽ εἰν Ἀΐδαο… (“All of the

dead forget everything in Hades…”), and this implies that, after

death, the ψυχή loses its memory of life and likewise cannot

learn about the lives of others who have died, having forgotten

everything from before entering Hades. 26 If humans want

to experience any sort of meaningful afterlife, they must accomplish

great deeds during their lifetimes, not so that they

may be celebrated by the dead, but remembered by the living.

Sarpedon emphasizes this point in his speech to Glaukos in

Book 12 when he famously says:

...εἰ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε

αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ᾽ ἀθανάτω τε

ἔσσεσθ᾽, οὔτέ κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην

οὔτέ κε σὲ στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν:

νῦν δ᾽ ἔμπης γὰρ κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο

μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βροτὸν οὐδ᾽ ὑπαλύξαι,

ἴομεν ἠέ τῳ εὖχος ὀρέξομεν ἠέ τις ἡμῖν. (Homer, Iliad, XII.322–28)

For if we, having fled the war all around,

forever we were destined to be ageless and undying,

I would not myself fight on the front lines

nor would I prepare you for battle to gain great glory;

but now, in any case, for countless spirits of death are bearing

down,

from whom it is not possible for mortal men to flee nor

escape,

let us go, either we will stretch out a boast to someone or

someone to us.

It is important to note in this passage that the κῆρες were Underworld

spirits that drank the blood of those who died violently.

27 Instead of receiving burial rites from their community

that affords them a proper commemoration of their life, those

who died on the battlefield were thus subjected to having their

blood drained by chthonic entities. If blood is considered to be

a physical indicator of life remaining in the body, that means

26. Homer, Iliad, XXII.389.

27. Homer, Iliad, XXII.326.

24 Psych(ē)!

that the life forces of those who die in battle are claimed by

thirsty spirits rather than by their communities. However, this

fate applies only to those left behind on the battlefield; there

are instances of contests for the bodies of great warriors who

die in battle, such as the fights over the bodies of Patroklos

and Sarpedon. It is these warriors who receive proper burials,

and as a result, they will be remembered; at this point, their

ψυχή may rest. Their life and blood become their community’s

responsibility, and the weight of that responsibility ensures

their legacy and memory will carry on beyond their death,

even as they forget themselves.

To the point about memory and community, it would be remiss

not to mention that it only applies to those who are capable

of committing heroic deeds, and, in the context of Homer,

that achievement is limited to the elite members of the

society. The leaders and greatest of the warriors in the Trojan

War are almost all kings or favorites of the kings, so it is difficult

to say whether an average person would have a similar

philosophy of death as someone for whom glory is possible to

achieve. There are many soldiers on both sides of the conflict

who do not have the same elite status as those discussed most

prominently in the Iliad, but that is precisely the point: they

do not receive the same attention as the elites. The leaders

of the armies are also supported by the divine, from Athena’s

patronage of Diomedes to Aphrodite’s connection to Paris,

so the gods’ personal investment in the burial of humans may

also have a class element. Since average people do not get the

same relationship to the divine in Homer, their potential to do

great deeds is already less than that of the elite members of

their society. Thus, the system works against them, and their

burial may not be as important—or at least, it is not discussed

at such great lengths—because they are inherently at a disadvantage

when it comes to being remembered by their communities

for a long time to come.

That being said, let us focus specifically on the link between

the ψυχή and memory, as it makes the social practice of funerary

and burial rites even more vital due to the way in which

they allow a mortal person to become ‘immortal’ in memory.

As Johnston (1999) writes of the Homeric dead, “...although

the dead are not completely senseless in their natural state...

they exist in a sort of twilight state, incapable of any meaningful

interaction with the living.” 28 Memory acts in much the

28. Johnston, 47.

Psych(ē)! 25

same way. A memory is not a tangible thing as it exists only

in the mind, but it is still able to affect present actions. Remembering

the past is a visceral experience; hence, the idea

of the past “coming back to haunt someone.” Thus, the ψυχή

becomes little more than a metaphor for a memory once it has

been properly buried and nothing but bones remain.

Since mortals, by definition, do not live forever, this memorializing

provided an incentive for Greeks to do great deeds while

alive in order to be properly remembered. For most people,

Homer’s Underworld is bleak, with nothing much to do for all

of eternity; a memory does not need anything to entertain itself,

after all. However, if a mortal does something heroic or

extraordinary, they can achieve a more tangible “afterlife” not

only in the minds of their loved ones but also in oral poetry.

In this sense, the “soul” becomes a possession of the community

rather than something one may identify with personally.

The way in which a person defines themselves does not matter

so much as how their community defines them, especially after

death. In tandem with the Homeric hypostases and theories

about the soul, it appears that, in the Iliad, the soul after

death is linked to external forces such as community and the

divine more than it is connected to a coherent sense of self.

A dead person cannot bury themselves; likewise, they cannot

remember themselves or tell their own life story. That which

they were in life no longer exists tangibly alongside the living,

so it must count on an intangible preservation.

There is, of course, a question of whether one can draw the

conclusion that Homeric heroes are motivated by the potential

to be remembered in poetry just from looking at Homer

since that would require them to be aware of oral poetry as

a possible avenue for their immortality. In other words, they

are characters in a story; is it going too far to assume they are

conscious of their own narrative while they are in it? For the

purposes of this study, I believe it is not necessary to make

the distinction between being remembered in the memories

of others versus being memorialized specifically in oral poetry.

The bard and the audience already know how they remember

and memorialize their dead heroes—they are doing so by

singing and listening to the story. The heroes of the Iliad and

the Odyssey want to be remembered in some way, and those

receiving and retelling the story understand that, during their

time, this is through poetry; the bard, therefore, has no real

need to make meta-commentary about the poem’s own role

26 Psych(ē)!

in memorialization.

In terms of the link between the corpse and memory, there

are instances of the Homeric dead appearing to the living to

admonish them for not practicing the proper burial rites and

asking to be burned so as to be remembered, and the frequency

of that action directly links cremation and “immortality.” In

Book 23, Patroklos tells Achilles outright that, by refusing to

burn and bury his body, Achilles had forgotten him, the implication

being that Patroklos’ body must be burned in order for

him to be remembered. 29 In a similar manner, during Elpenor’s

speech to Odysseus, he says:

μή μ᾽ ἄκλαυτον ἄθαπτον ἰὼν ὄπιθεν καταλείπειν

νοσφισθείς…

ἀλλά με κακκῆαι σὺν τεύχεσιν, ἅσσα μοι ἔστιν,

σῆμά τέ μοι χεῦαι πολιῆς ἐπὶ θινὶ θαλάσσης,

ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι. (Homer, Odyssey,

XI.71–6)

Do not leave me behind going unlamented and unburied,

turning your back…

but burn me entirely with my armor, whatever is mine,

and throw together a burial mound for me on the shore of

the gray sea,

a mound of a wretched man for the passersby to learn from.

By burning and interring Elpenor’s body, future travelers would

be able to learn about him and hear his story, and he could

secure a form of immortality in this sense. The burning away

of mortality also appears in the case of Achilles himself as well

as for heroes such as Herakles, though, in those cases, the

burning merely separates the immortal, god-descended part

of their being from their mortal form. 30 With the body being a

mortal, ephemeral thing subject to decay, its burning releases

the person from their bonds to mortality and transitions them

into the next stage of their existence as an immortal, yet intangible,

being that remains alive in the memories and songs

of the living while existing simultaneously in the Underworld

as a ψυχή and εἴδωλον.

The “soul” as it exists in Homer is thus a liminal thing, buried

or otherwise. It can perform some limited physical actions and

can be acted upon, but it cannot do much more than appear

29. Homer, Iliad, XXIII.71.

30. Burgess, The Death and Afterlife of Achilles, 102.

Psych(ē)! 27

in dreams and hope for godly assistance in the event that its

corresponding body goes unburied. It can wander the banks of

the river Okeanos and move through the House of Hades, and

may sometimes wander into liminal spaces like dreams or visions

if unburied, but it cannot accomplish anything concrete

or even speak unless it is supplied with sacrificial lifeblood. In

the end, if all goes well—if a person, usually a member of the

upper class, does great deeds, and if they are buried and honored

properly by their community—it stays in the Underworld

as a metaphysical version of a memory. It has none of the hypostases

that the body contained while alive, but it “exists”

merely as a shadow of a person who is now being kept alive

only in the sense that one may still be alive in oral tradition

and the longevity of their community’s memory.

28 Psych(ē)!

Psych(ē)! 29

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antonakou, Elena I. and Lazaros C. Triarhou. “Soul, butterfly,

mythological nymph: psyche in philosophy and neuroscience.”

Arquivos de Neuro-psiquiatria 75, no. 3 (2017): 176–9.

Aristotle. History of Animals, Volume I: Books 1-3. Translated

by A. L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library 437. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1965.

Bremmer, Jan. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1983.

Burgess, Jonathan S. The Death and Afterlife of Achilles. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Darcus, Shirley M. “A Person’s Relation to ψυχή in Homer,

Hesiod, and the Greek Lyric Poets.” Glotta 57, no. 1/2 (1979):

30–39. www.jstor.org/stable/40266465.

Dedović, Boban. “‘Minds’ in ‘Homer’: A quantitative psycholinguistic

comparison of the Iliad and Odyssey; or, lexical

frequency analyses of Homeric noos (νόος), thymos (θυμός),

psykhe (ψυχή), phrenes (φρένες), prapides (πραπίδες), kardia

(καρδία), kradie (κραδίη), ker (κῆρ), and etor (ἦτορ), in contrast

to alleged English-equivalents amongst seventeen

dual-work translators.” Proceedings of the 12th International

Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario,

Canada, October 11–14, 2022.

Gaskin, Richard. “Do Homeric Heroes Make Real Decisions?”

The Classical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1990): 1–15.

Griffin, Jasper. Homer on Life and Death. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1980.

Homer. Homeri Opera in five volumes, Vol. 2. Edited by D. B.

Monro and T. W. Allen. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1920.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann

Ltd, 1919.

30 Psych(ē)!

Johnston, Sarah Iles. Restless Dead: Encounters Between the

Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999.

Onians, Richard Broxton. The Origins of European Thought:

About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and

Fate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. https://

archive.org/details/epdf.pub_the-origins-of-europeanthought-about-the-body-the-mind-the-soul-the-worldtime-/page/93/mode/2up.

Russo, Joseph. “Rethinking Homeric Psychology: Snell, Dodds,

and Their Critics.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, New

Series 101, no. 2 (2012): 11–28.

Psych(ē)! 31

ABSTRACTION

OF A KOUROS

KATHERINE TERRELL

Stanford University

32

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

This work is based on the New York Kouros, an early

example of a life-sized sculpture in Greece. Kouroi

were often made of marble or limestone and were

used primarily as grave markers or votive offerings in

sanctuaries. They were characterized by their stylized

and idealized representations of the human form,

with rigid upright postures, arms held at the sides,

and one foot forward. The Kouros statue was influential

in the development of Greek art as it represented

the transition from the geometric and structured

forms of the previous era to the more naturalistic and

lifelike representations of the Classical period. This

digital artwork rethinks the depiction of the New York

Kouros and offers a unique and modern take on it by

blending ancient and contemporary aesthetics.

33

WHAT IS LOVE?1COMPARING VITA NUOVA BY

DANTE ALIGHERI TO THE SYMPOSIUM BY PLATO

2 Karim Mitri, Lebanese American University

TABSTRACT0

he concept of Love has been of utmost importance

in the Classical period. Plato explored

and added a new layer to it, that of Platonic

Love. Centuries after, in one of the most prominent

periods of classical revivalism, in 13th Century Italy

comes Italian poet Dante Alighieri cherishing and applying

Platonic ideals in his love story with his “most

gracious lady” Beatrice. In this paper, I conduct a

comparative literary analysis of Plato’s Symposium

and Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova in an attempt to get

a clear definition of Platonic and idealized Love that

links the two works together and allows the reader a

new perspective to this classical concept.

It is my belief that people have entirely failed to

understand the power of Love, for if they had

understood they would have erected the greatest

temples and altars to him and would offer up the

largest sacrifices. (Plato, The Symposium, 189c)

Love was lord over my soul, which had been wedded

to him so early; and, through the power that

my imagination granted him, he gained such mastery

and assurance that I was forced to do whatever

he wished. (Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, 2)

34 What is Love?

In The Symposium and Vita Nuova respectively, Plato and Dante

Alighieri attempt to explore and understand the complex concept

of love poetically and philosophically, interchangeably.

“To prophetic temperaments like Dante and Plato, passion

and reason, cognition and feeling, are blended.” 1 Plato adopts

a more theoretical framework analyzing this concept through

the Greek god of love, Eros. The Symposium is layered into seven

different discourses that harmonize and collide in an attempt

to formulate a Platonic theory of love. In other words,

Plato does not address the philosophical public with a formal

treatise on love, but rather allows the different characters to

formulate their own praise of Eros, transforming the voice of

the author into multiple and sometimes contradictory dimensions.

However, Dante’s work is autobiographical by nature. In

it, he takes the reader on a journey to explain the nature of

the love he has for his “most gracious lady” 2 Beatrice, putting

his emotions in a mixture of poetry and prose in a work that

has lived on for centuries, and which is still powerfully related

to the idea of love in the contemporary world. Plato and Dante

come together through harmonizing philosophy and poetry

in a “music that creates agreement in all these things by implanting

mutual love and unanimity between the different elements.”

3 This paper compares Vita Nuova of Dante Alighieri

and The Symposium of Plato in order to come up with a useful

formulation of what love is and the effect it has on human beings’

lives.

Love is a pivotal part of the human experience. It appears and

disappears in different shapes and forms in all stages of life,

surprising humanity, humbling it, making it adore the world

and despise it. It is no coincidence that love is found in the early

years of one’s life, for it holds a certain unprecedented power,

maturing each and every citizen of the world. In fact, the

first speaker Phaedrus kicks off the first discourse in praise of

Eros, the god of love, as he says, “what greater blessing there

can be for any man to have right from youth.” 4 Similarly, Dante

begins his Vita Nuova with his first perception of Beatrice at

nine years old:

Nine times since my birth had the heaven of light revolved

in its orbit, returning almost to the same place, when before

my eyes there first appeared the glorious lady of my mind,

1. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “Plato’s Eros and Dante’s Amore,” 325.

2. Dante, 15.

3. Plato, 187c.

4. Plato, 178c.

What is Love? 35

called Beatrice by many who did not even know what her

name was. (Dante, Vita Nuova, 5)

Beatrice was a stranger to many of Dante’s friends including

Dante himself at some point. “As a ‘Nine’ factored by three,

the Trinity, alone, she is free from taint of original sin, and is –

like the blessed Virgin – an immaculate conception.” 5 Had he

not been inspired by Love to remember Beatrice and fall in

love with her, perhaps this state of estrangement would have

persisted. But that certainly is not the case, for Dante explores

Beatrice and her immensity in his life truthfully and authentically

and moves from a state of estrangement to a state of

kinship in his relationship with Beatrice inside his own mind 6

as she transformed, through Love, from a complete stranger

to the person for whom he wept, whom he called Beatrice,

the one who blesses. Furthermore, Hollander claims, “whether

or not she (Beatrice) existed at all, is not terribly important.” 7

There seems to be this spiritual ideal of Beatrice that exists

in Dante’s mind and which delivers her from the supposed

necessity of her true, historical existence. Hollander touches

on the extent of Dante’s love for Beatrice. She exists primarily

through this love, accomplishing the contingency of her Earthly

existence.

“Nine years to the day later, dressed in white, between the two

gentili donne, she appears to Dante and grants him her salutation.”

8 Beatrice greets Dante and “it was in Beatrice’s greeting

that all his happiness lay.” “Dante as a boyish lover experiences

an indescribable happiness from the greeting of his beloved.” 9

In The Symposium, the second speaker Pausanias explains the

duality of the goddess Aphrodite in relation to Love as he says

“the Love who works with the latter Aphrodite should correctly

be called “Common Love” and the other “Heavenly Love.” 10

Dante seems to have both Heavenly and Common loves for

“the daughter not of mortal man, but of a god” 11 as he quotes

Homer. “His encounter with her creates a love poetry along

the lines of what we term the courtly tradition. Her denial of

5. Jefferson B. Fletcher, “The Allegory of the ‘Vita Nuova,’” 23.

6. Robert Hollander, “‘Vita Nuova’: Dante’s Perceptions of Beatrice,”

3.

7. Hollander, 7.

8. Hollander, 1.

9. Bernard S. Levy, “Beatrice’s Greeting and Dante’s ‘Sigh’ in the

‘Vita Nuova,’” 54.

10. Plato, 180e.

11. Dante, 5–7.

36 What is Love?

her greeting creates a new style of poetry; her death eventually

changes the entire focus of his life.” 12 The influence Beatrice

has on Dante cannot be contained within the courtly tradition;

it is far vaster and more profound: “Earthly space then is structured

around Beatrice. It is divided into two great categories:

terrestrial space and celestial space, the latter corresponding

to the hierarchy of the heavens.” 13 Beatrice then becomes the

zenith, the ethos of Dante’s entire world. It is not a love of big

words and idealism, it is a love that creates and ends a life,

a love that persists and holds a certain sanctity. “Dante and

Plato can be seen as culminators and synthesizers of a tradition.”

14 In that way, Dante and Plato establish a love that both

contains and transcends the Earthly world, a love Heavenly as

well as Common: it “is the peculiar union of personal and particular

love with some transcendent love which contains it.” 15

In The Symposium, Phaedrus, who believes in courage as the

criterion of beautiful deeds and goodness, 16 offers the example

of “Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias” 17 and he claims that

“when she had actually given up her life for him, so noble did it

seem not only to men but also to gods, that they sent back her

soul from the Underworld.” 18 In this story, death for the sake of

Love is viewed as courageous and noble. Though explored in a

different light, Dante suffers under the hands of death, though

not losing his own life just yet but rather losing the life of his

beloved. “‘Do you not know? Your wondrous lady has departed

from this world.’ Then I began to weep most piteously, and

not only in my imagination, for my eyes were truly wet with

tears.” 19 It is not exactly the courage to die for one’s lover as

Alcestis did that Dante musters, but the Phaedrusian courage

to keep on living, to grieve, after a beloved’s death. It is having

the courage to renounce joining them in death and staying

alive. It is the ultimate sacrifice. “It is not so much that we seek

our other half just because it was once part of us … we only

wish to be united with that which we perceive to be good.” 20

12. Joseph A. Barber, “The Role of the Other in Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova,’”

128.

13. Michel J. Viegnes, “Space as Love in the ‘Vita Nuova,’” 83.

14. Mazzeo, 316.

15. Mazzeo, 316.

16. Kenneth Dorter, “The Significance of the Speeches in Plato’s

Symposium,” 216.

17. Plato, 179b.

18. Plato, 179c.

19. Dante, 91.

20. Martin Warner, “Love, Self, and Plato’s Symposium,” 331.

What is Love? 37

In this image, Dante introduces a parallel between the reality

and his dream as well as the perseverance of his sadness. A

year after her death, Dante is still in love with Beatrice:

Into my mind there came the gentle lady

Who for her worth and merit, the Most High,

Placed in that heaven of humility

Where she now shares the dwelling place of Mary.

(Warner, “Love, Self, and Plato’s Symposium,” 332)

It is apparent that, though she died, Dante is unwilling to

let go of Beatrice and his eternal love for her. In fact, his description

of Beatrice points at his Heavenly aspect of Love

explained by Pausanias. But why is it eternal? Warner argues:

“this love is bound up with a desire for immortality, to overcome

our finitude, and hence to create or express that which

will endure.” 21 Therefore, through both Plato and Dante’s marriage

of Love with Death, it can be seen that when subjected

to Death, Dante’s perception of Love explores Divinity rather

than actuality as it tends towards a form of almost worship.

In Phaedrus’ story, Love is carried on after death, for as Alcestis

died for her lover, Admetus, her love persisted, is remembered

and is perhaps still felt by her beyond her Death. “So

long, in fact, as the love is directed solely at the other person

little of lasting spiritual value is likely to be created: the power

of love to transcend human finitude is released when we

are led to recognize the beautiful qualities of the beloved as

being exemplified elsewhere.” 22 And so, Dante does not target

all of his love towards Beatrice, because had he done that, it

would have died a long time ago. Instead, he targets it towards

this idea of Beatrice through poetry, faith, and the trinity. This

is how Dante is once again reunited with Beatrice, just as in

Mount Purgatorio. And thus, Dante loves “the qualities rather

than the individual, particularly the spiritual qualities” which

makes his love so grandiose. 23

Building upon the concept of the nobility of Love amidst

Death, it is important to recall an essential part of Pausanias’s

speech in praise of Eros:

When the lover in his attempt to win his beloved performs

extraordinary acts our custom deems his actions, praiseworthy,

though if anyone else were to dare to behave in this way

21. Warner, 332.

22. Warner, 332.

23. Warner, 332.

38 What is Love?

in the pursuit of any other aim and with anything other than

this in view, he would incur the strongest disapproval. (Plato,

The Symposium, 182e–183a)

In this excerpt, a whole other behavioral construct is built

around the concept of love and the actions done because of

and for love. This is in accord with Pausanias’s idea of “the

good … is ultimately … the ‘law’ of selfishness: everything is

subordinate to the attainment of one’s personal goal.” 24 This

selfishness comes into play when one infatuated with Love is

granted the proverbial green light from society to grow one’s

rage, frustration, sadness, and desperation out of proportion

without having to suffer the dire consequences, and is rather

praised for it. Keeping that in mind, in Vita Nuova, Dante

is seen weeping on several occasions, whether feeling his beloved’s

emotions of grief transmit to his own or even when he

mourns her death. Amidst his most intense sadness, the ladies

who are friends of Beatrice, attempt to console Dante, rather

than look at him in disbelief or deeming his actions ludicrous,

or labeling him as a weak, soft-hearted man. They admire his

courage and selfishness. He acts selfishly because he projects

his emotions onto the world without permission, being free

to postpone the direct implementation of the social contract

that claims one must keep one’s emotions to oneself. It is only

in the context of love that such an action is permissible in a

society such as the one Dante was part of. They say “He looks

as if he were dead … Let us try to bring him comfort.” 25 It is

crucial to observe these ladies more critically: “a fundamental

quality of the essence of Beatrice is that it is transferable, and

indeed, at both the beginning and the end of the work it is in a

sense transferred” 26 through her entourage, the ladies. Dante’s

extreme actions and reactions caused by the influence she has

on him as these ladies are an extension of her rich self.

So far, Dante and Plato have allowed us to look at Love from

an Earthly Common perspective and hint towards a more divine

form of Heavenly Love which can also be described as

Love beyond Earth. Beyond Earth lies the Heavens, and that is

exactly where Dante places Beatrice: “This is no mere woman,

but one of the fairest angels in heaven.” “We identify the particular

person with absolute goodness itself.” 27 Dante does not

24. Dorter, 217.

25. Dante, 93.

26. Barber, 134.

27. D. C. Schindler, “Plato and the Problem of Love: On the Nature

of Eros in the ‘Symposium,’” 218.

What is Love? 39

stop there in his Twenty-Sixth Book of Vita Nuova but goes on

to idealize Beatrice further:

My lady gives her greeting that speech dies

On every trembling tongue, and no man’s eyes

Are ever bold enough to look on her. (Dante, Vita Nuova, 113)

“Dante rises from natural desire of the salute, her human and

‘accidental reward,’ to the charity whose object is the salute,

or ‘essential reward’ of blessedness, to wit, the immediate vision

of God.” 28 With such an image, Dante draws Beatrice as

a lady with such Heavenly power, she is no longer human or

dead, but rather metamorphosed into a Divine creature, beyond

earthly perception and power. “The love event is traditionally

private, but in Dante’s story his love moves from a

private (Dante and Beatrice), local level (Dante, Beatrice, the

cor gentile) to a public, global level (Dante, Beatrice and the

readers across generations)” 29 and even beyond the global level

towards the Heavenly and Divine beyond Earth.

Pausanias explains the concept of slavery in Love. He says that

when one is in love, they “willingly endure the kind of slavery

even a slave would not put up with.” 30 Plato’s words resonate

with Dante and all the people who are intoxicated by Love and

succeeds in describing their state. “When my lady had departed

from this life, the whole city was left like a widow robbed of

all her dignity” Dante exclaims as he was “still weeping.” 31 Dante’s

pain has developed into a whole city, into a universe of its

own, compared to a widow, with immeasurable devastation

but Dante does not stop here. He mentions the term “dignity”

and claims that he has lost it and has therefore become enslaved

by this pain, enslaved because of Love.

We take the view that if someone is willing to devote himself

to another person in the belief that through that person he

will become a better man himself in some kind of

wisdom or in any other part whatever of excellence, then

this kind of voluntary slavery is not wrong, nor is it obsequiousness.

(Plato, The Symposium, 184c)

Through these words, Pausanias’s argument seems to provide a

defense of Dante’s actions and deems them righteous.

28. Fletcher, 21.

29. Barber, 137.

30. Plato, 183a.

31. Dante, 125.

40 What is Love?

Agathon, the fifth speaker and the one prefacing Socrates,

describes Love: “In the first place let me say that the god is a

skillful poet and he is also able to make another person a poet

too.” 32 Agathon believes that the good lies in virtue and wisdom

33 and what better way to reach that than through poetry.

On the other hand, Dante describes how love calls upon him,

A spirit of love, destroying all the other spirits of the senses,

expelled the feeble spirits of sight and told them: “Go and

honour your lady”; and he remained in their place. And anyone

who wished to know Love could have done so by watching

the tremor of my eyes. (Dante, Vita Nuova, 35)

As he says these words, Dante claims that Love lives within his

senses, conquers his body, mind and soul and speaks through

him, thus urging and helping him to produce sublime poetry.

As per Agathon’s claim, Love the poet made Dante a poet himself,

through offering him a figure such as Beatrice. Dante is

evidently a poet in his writing career but he is also a poet in

life, in the world around him. Dante lives poetry; it is not only

his craft but also his identity. The feeling of love is the energy

which wills him to compose and live poetry. It is even visible in

his eyes: “I spoke of Love because I bore in my face so many of

his signs that it could not be hidden.” 34 The influence of Love

on Dante was stronger than him, so he submitted and let Love

lead the way, therefore crowning Love as Dante’s mentor, Dante’s

muse. For had it not been for Love, Dante’s Divine perception

of Beatrice would not have existed and neither would

these lines of poetry and prose. Agathon further develops his

point:

Who will deny that it is by the wisdom of Love that all living

things are begotten and born? Do we not know that in the

practice of this craft any man who has this god for a teacher

will turn out to be brilliant and famous, while the man untouched

by Love will remain obscure? (Plato, The Symposium,

197a)

“In the practice of this craft” relates to Dante as one of the immortal

figures of the literary world. According to Plato, Dante

has been kissed by Love and he has blessed him to become

“brilliant and famous.” Schindler argues that “one fashions

oneself in love’s own image, expresses love’s nature in one-

32. Plato, 196d–196e.

33. Dorter, 223.

34. Dante, 38.

What is Love? 41

self.” 35 Validating Agathon’s point, Schindler showcases the intimate

role Love plays, as the mirror through which one sees,

understands, and betters oneself.

He sees a woman honoured there whose light

Shines forth with such a splendour that the sight

Compels the pilgrim spirit to gaze on her.

The way he sees her makes him speak of this

In words too deep for me to understand. (Dante, Vita Nuova,

167)

Beatrice’s beauty is of such greatness that “language and

thought cannot express or understand all that is true concerning

her,” 36 it is described “in words too deep for me to understand.”

Plato even participates in this speechless act as he

“makes love actually present by releasing it from the limitations

of (mere) discourse.” 37

Aristophanes, the ironic and comic playwright demands of his

listeners: “please do not treat it [the speech] as funny” 38 and

appreciate the seriousness and depth of his account in praise

of Eros. Aristophanes’s account of Love remains the most valuable

in the scope of this analysis as it accurately encapsulates

Dante and Beatrice’s experience. Aristophanes begins:

No one would suppose it to be only the desire for love-making

that causes the one to yearn for the other so intensely. It

is clear that the soul of each wants something else

which it cannot put into words but it feels instinctively what

it wants and expresses it in riddles. (Plato, The Symposium,

192c–192d)

Following this argument, Aristophanes, who values piety

as the key to Eros, 39 does not want to limit Love to a simple

desire to have sexual intercourse or the expression of love

through “love-making,” thus confining Love to one of its forms,

“Common Love” as mentioned earlier. Therefore, Plato is drifting

away from love in reality, in the body, on Earth and drifting

towards a love which causes one not to gaze and find elation

from sensuality, from looking, losing oneself in an eternal gaze

of the material world but rather to look away, as Dante describes:

35. Schindler, 209.

36. Mazzeo, 317–8.

37. Schindler, 208.

38. Plato, 193d.

39. Dorter, 222.

42 What is Love?

Her eyes, wherever she may turn them, send

Forth in a flame spirits of love that strike

The eyes of anyone who meets her look

And then pass through to where the heart is found.

You will see Love depicted in her face;

But that is where no man can fix his gaze.

(Dante, Vita Nuova, 73)

Levy explains Dante’s description of Beatrice’s mouth “bocca”

as he speaks about his beloved’s eyes but then moves on to

“her mouth, which is the goal of love, in terms which suggest

the typical pattern of the boyish courtly lover, who desires a

responsive kiss from the lady.” 40 Consequently, it has become

apparent that the courtly lover’s sole goal following this description

is an initiation of a sensual, sexual act of kissing. With

that in mind, the contrast is quickly drawn by Dante: “the reference

to the mouth, which in fact had been alluded to only

in respect to the fact, is made in terms of the lady’s greeting” 41

and nothing else. “Those who looked upon her experienced

such a sweet delight that, while unable to describe it, they

were compelled to sigh in response.” 42 In his view, Dante’s

mention of Beatrice’s mouth and more specifically, the lips is

to claim that they “move a sweet spirit so full of love that it

penetrates to the soul and tells it to sigh.” 43 No arousal or sexual

connotations are to be associated with this mention of the

lips, as Dante looks away, unable to contain the immensity of

such a gaze.

Dante is assured that it is because he loves Beatrice so intensely

that he is unable to look her in the eyes, fix her gaze, and

perhaps at some point, establish a physical relationship of

some sense, ranging from a mere look and touch all the way

towards the act of sexual intimacy and procreation. That he

was not able to do. Nor does he narrate anything of that sort

in his poetry and prose, with his lady Beatrice, since for him,

this Platonic, idealized relationship he develops with Beatrice

and avidly writes about is enough and complete. In the penultimate

speech, the one towards which Plato has been building

up, Socrates echoes these thoughts: “personal corporeal

beauty passes over into a greater immaterial beauty and, in

so doing, increases the lover’s ardor and leads him through

the universe, which is the very object and content of philoso-

40. Levy, 55–6.

41. Levy, 56.

42. Levy, 57.

43. Levy, 59.

What is Love? 43

phy, to the threshold of the very highest grace itself.” 44 This is

where one finds the earliest conceptions of Platonic Love, the

one Dante has for Beatrice, and the one Plato praises, through

Socrates, as the highest and greatest Love of them all.

This idealized love Dante expresses in his Vita Nuova is given

another layer in an observation in The Symposium as Socrates

studies the idea of symbolic pregnancy resulting in a conclusion

that coincides accurately with Dante’s views. Plato begins

“All human beings are pregnant, in body and in soul” 45 and as

White elaborates this idea further, he states:

Men who are pregnant in body, then, turn to women-to engender

within their kind; while those who are pregnant in

soul conceive and bring forth wisdom (the most important

species of which are self-mastery and justice), together with

other forms of excellence. Men pregnant in this way - poets,

inventive craftsmen and the like - look around for persons

who are beautiful, and taking the education of these

in hand, at once find much to say on excellence and on how

men ought to live. In addition, they produce writings, legal

institutions and other things of the kind; and many of them

become famous. (F.C. White, “Love and Beauty in Plato’s

Symposium,” 150)

Therefore, what this paper has shown is that Dante is, in fact,

pregnant in soul, as he brings “forms of excellence,” a “poet,”

looking “around for persons who are beautiful,” as he “finds

much to say on excellence.” Besides, Plato “identifies the

‘something’ of that which love is always of as the beautiful,

or the good.” 46 He produces “writings” on his “most gracious

lady” and goes on to “become famous.” In this excerpt White

describes, through Plato, the life course of Dante, especially

relating to his journey under the influence of and inspired by

Love. “As Beatrice grows lovelier and lovelier, Dante grows wiser

and wiser and more and more amorous. Love of beauty and

love of wisdom are one, they do not tend to negate each other

but operate harmoniously on every level in the soul’s journey

to God.” 47 Dante is strengthened and nourished by Love; he

reaches new heights until he reaches “the final step” of “supreme

being, the highest intelligible reality as the object of

44. Mazzeo, 320.

45. Plato, 206c.

46. Schindler, 210.

47. Mazzeo, 321.

44 What is Love?

love.” 48 Thus, “in love there is a sense of desire for what is not

yet attained or fulfilled, love of its very nature impels us to

seek the beautiful.” 49 “Beauty of a soul is of greater worth than

beauty of body.” And so, both Plato and Dante are in pursuit

of this beautiful soul, not only to accomplish philosophical

prowess and influence through writing but also to satisfy their

inner souls and personal emotions: “We do not simply love the

Beautiful, He loves us in turn.” 50

Aristophanes’s speech culminates in perhaps the most important

idea in The Symposium, “The Myth of Division.” Aristophanes

explains that long ago, there used to be the androgynous

sex as a combination of the other two sexes (male and

female). “They were awesome in strength and might, and their

ambition was great too. They made an assault on the gods.

They could hardly kill them and annihilate the whole race

with thunder bolts; neither could they put up with their insolence,”

51 Then, Zeus came up with an idea to solve this whole

problem. He says “I shall split each one of them in half, and

that will make them weaker.” 52 And so, “after the original nature

of every human being had been served in this way, the

two parts longed for each other and tried to come together

again.” 53 Dante shall be “weaker” without his significant other,

and shall “long” for her, struggling to withstand this asymmetry

of loneliness, forever. Dante never really moves on even

until the end of his days, after composing The Divine Comedy,

in which his “most gracious lady” plays a monumental role. It

seems that he cannot seem to move on from it, and he never

did.

The Symposium and Vita Nuova have built a foundation to

establish the concept of “Platonic and Idealized Love,” one

that echoes beyond Time, Earth, and Death. This paper has

attempted to combine the two works in order to come with

a good conception of Platonic Love. The echoes that exist between

Plato and Dante are astounding, to see the revival of an

Ancient Greek philosopher’s ideas in the poems of an Italian

Renaissance man after more than a millennium. But how much

does it translate into a real world experience of love?

48. Mazzeo, 324.

49. Warner, 331.

50. Mazzeo, 332.

51. Plato, 190b, 190c.

52. Plato, 190d.

53. Plato, 191a.

What is Love? 45

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alighieri, Dante. Vita Nuova. Translated by Anthony Mortimer.

London: Alma Classics, 2011.

Barber, Joseph A. “The Role of the Other in Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova.’”

Studies in Philology 78, no. 2 (1981): 128–37. http://www.

jstor.org/stable/4174069.

Dorter, Kenneth. “The Significance of the Speeches in Plato’s

Symposium.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 2, no. 4 (1969): 215–34.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40236685.

F. C. White. “Love and Beauty in Plato’s Symposium.” The

Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): 149–57. https://doi.

org/10.2307/632038.

Fletcher, Jefferson B. “The Allegory of the ‘Vita Nuova.’”

Modern Philology 11, no. 1 (1913): 19–37. http://www.jstor.org/

stable/432849.

Hollander, Robert. “‘Vita Nuova’: Dante’s Perceptions of

Beatrice.” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the

Dante Society, no. 92 (1974): 1–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40166219.

Levy, Bernard S. “Beatrice’s Greeting and Dante’s ‘Sigh’ in the

‘Vita Nuova.’” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the

Dante Society, no. 92 (1974): 53–62. http://www.jstor.org/

stable/40166222.

Ludwig C. H. Chen. “Knowledge of Beauty in Plato’s Symposium.”

The Classical Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1983): 66–74. http://

www.jstor.org/stable/638647.

Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony. “Plato’s Eros and Dante’s Amore.”

Traditio 12 (1956): 315–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27830329.

Plato. The Symposium. Translated by M. C. Howatson. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2008.

46 What is Love?

Schindler, D.C. “Plato and the Problem of Love: On the

Nature of Eros in the ‘Symposium.’”Apeiron: A Journal for

Ancient Philosophy and Science 40, no. 3 (2007): 199–220.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40914052.

Viegnes, Michel J. “Space as Love in the ‘Vita Nuova.’” Lectura

Dantis, no. 4 (1989): 78–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44806725.

Warner, Martin. “Love, Self, and Plato’s Symposium.” The Philosophical

Quarterly (1950-) 29, no. 117 (1979): 329–39. https://

doi.org/10.2307/2219448.

Zych, Paulette Marie. “The Concept of Love in Plato.” Social

Science 53, no. 3 (1978): 133–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41886277.

What is Love? 47

CATULLUS 420

FRANCESCO CIPRIANI

In Catullus 42, the poet summons wrathful

hendecasyllables against a woman who has

stolen his writing tablets, encouraging his

verses to insult her.

Adeste, hendecasyllabi, quot estis

Omnes undique, quotquot estis omnes.

Iocum me putat esse moecha turpis

Et negat mihi uestra reddituram

Pugillaria, si pati potestis.

Persequamur eam, et reflagitemus.

Quae sit quaeritis? Illa quam uidetis

Turpe incedere, mimice ac moleste

Ridentem catuli ore Gallicani.

Circumsistite eam, et reflagitate:

‘Moecha putida, redde codicillos,

Redde, putida moecha, codicillos.’

Non assis facis? o lutum, lupanar,

Aut si perditius potes quid esse.

Sed non est tamen hoc satis putandum.

Quod si non aliud potest, ruborem

Ferreo canis exprimamus ore.

Conclamate iterum altiore uoce

‘Moecha putida, redde codicillos,

Redde, putida moecha, codicillos.’

Sed nil proficimus, nihil mouetur.

Mutanda est ratio modusque nobis,

Si quid proficere amplius potestis,

‘Pudica et proba, redde codicillos.’

p. 48 1

0A RESPONSE

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD UNIV.

This is how I believe she might have replied.

The poem is the same number of lines as Catullus’

and I have written in (at times loose) hendecasyllabic

meter, to match the original.

Call me harlot or tramp and even strumpet,

Still my name will be harped through streets and creased sheets

Still my stain will exude your polished stanzas.

Slick with words to enforce the fickle diktat

Of the artist who smacks his lips in love and

Lets ink tip from his cracked and greasing member:

“You shall live through my gift and drink at glossed ends,

Immortality leaking from this lipsticked

Godhead” Fool! You yourself abide as far as

Your diptych and without, fall dumb as hyacinths

When picked under the shards of moonlit tundras.

Come, let’s watch the sun set to fairer skies, once

More neglecting our thrusted hands and bleary

Eyes, a herald of worlds where bones unravel

Flesh, earth summons the folds; a world where words you

Wrote roam voicelessly under heaven’s cold screen

Each night downloading its stars. I stole your tablets

So, ahead of your time, you too can try kiss

The chapped lips of the Muse who lies in chewed gags.

Don’t blame me for a fate that codes the cosmos

And has helixed its restlessness in our thumbs.

You and I are the same, two drops of rain loaned

To the zephyr; stray notes in wait among waste

For a stranger to long and echo their throes.

p. 49 1

TRANSLATING GRIEF1AN EXCERPT OF ILIAD 23

WILLIAM MCCLELLAND, TRANSLATOR

UNIV. OF MICHIGAN—ANN ARBOR

As someone who loves the Iliad and the translation

process, I feel that—while there are already

many remarkable translations—there’s still potential

for the poem to be rendered more poetically in

English. Richmond Lattimore’s translation is known to

be highly accurate; Stanley Lombardo’s is fit for a stage;

and Caroline Alexander aimed to translate line-for-line

while ascribing as closely as possible to the Greek and

maintaining realistic dialogue. However, I believe there’s

room for improvement in terms of a semantic translation

that ascribes more closely to the poetic meter and

emulates the feeling of the text, which is what I hope to

accomplish with this snippet. I did not attempt a linefor-line

translation; instead, by using iambic pentameter,

I tried to preserve the original lyricism of the poem,

while simultaneously using engaging language that will

appeal to any person––whether they are someone who

loves Homer and epic poetry or simply someone having

to read it for class. As Emily Wilson points out in

her own translator’s note of the Odyssey, Homer is both

contemporary and very much not, and it is that quality

of immortality and stark datedness that makes Homer

incredibly difficult but equally fun to translate. I prioritized

emotion alongside meter because of this. Akhilles’

rage is what defines the Iliad, and in this moment at the

start of Book 23, we see the grief that lies beneath that

rage. I wanted to make that agony as clear as possible

here. Ultimately, my goal with this translation was to

communicate the raw emotional pain contained within

this excerpt. It’s a swirling mass of grief, violent wrath,

love, and selfishness. I can only hope that this translation

does those emotions justice.

p. 50 1

ILIAD XXIII.15-82

Now drenched with tears were spears and swords and sand,

for all the soldiers longed for him, that man

who’d taught them all the ways of striking fear.

And then the son of Peleus moved close,

with wracking sobs, to lay his blood-stained hands

upon the heart of his beloved friend:

xv

δεύοντο ψάμαθοι, δεύοντο δὲ τεύχεα φωτῶν

δάκρυσι: τοῖον γὰρ πόθεον μήστωρα φόβοιο.

τοῖσι δὲ Πηλεΐδης ἁδινοῦ ἐξῆρχε γόοιο

χεῖρας ἐπ᾽ ἀνδροφόνους θέμενος στήθεσσιν ἑταίρου:

“Goodbye, Patroklos, go and say hello

to Hades’ house; I promise you I’ll end

these tasks on your behalf now that you’re dead,

like dragging Hektor’s naked body here

so hungry dogs can tear into his meat;

and right before your blazing mound, my hand

will slit the throats of twelve amazing youths

from Troy, because I want them each to feel

this violent grief that fuels me at your death.”

xx

χαῖρέ μοι ὦ Πάτροκλε καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδαο δόμοισι:

πάντα γὰρ ἤδη τοι τελέω τὰ πάροιθεν ὑπέστην

Ἕκτορα δεῦρ᾽ ἐρύσας δώσειν κυσὶν ὠμὰ δάσασθαι,

δώδεκα δὲ προπάροιθε πυρῆς ἀποδειροτομήσειν

Τρώων ἀγλαὰ τέκνα σέθεν κταμένοιο χολωθείς.

He promised this, then left to do an awful deed:

he dropped the corpse of godlike Hektor facedown

in the dust beside the bed which once,

before his death, Patroklos claimed as his.

xxv

ἦ ῥα καὶ Ἕκτορα δῖον ἀεικέα μήδετο ἔργα

πρηνέα πὰρ λεχέεσσι Μενοιτιάδαο τανύσσας

ἐν κονίῃς:

p. 51 1

xxx

And all the men removed their armor made

of shining bronze, and they released the loud

and rowdy-neighing steeds, and then the hordes

of soldiers went to sit beside the ship

of Aiakos’ grandson, swift of foot,

and he laid out a massive feast for them.

Then many milky-colored oxen writhed

in throes of death as they were slaughtered in

their iron chains, and many bleating goats

and sheep were slaughtered by the men as well.

A lot of white-tusked pigs all plump with fat

were laid out too, then in Hephaistos’ flames

they each were burnt, and blood poured out around

the corpse alongside contents from their cups.

xxxv

xl

xlv

οἳ δ᾽ ἔντε᾽ ἀφωπλίζοντο ἕκαστος

χάλκεα μαρμαίροντα, λύον δ᾽ ὑψηχέας ἵππους,

κὰδ δ᾽ ἷζον παρὰ νηῒ ποδώκεος Αἰακίδαο

μυρίοι: αὐτὰρ ὃ τοῖσι τάφον μενοεικέα δαίνυ.

πολλοὶ μὲν βόες ἀργοὶ ὀρέχθεον ἀμφὶ σιδήρῳ

σφαζόμενοι, πολλοὶ δ᾽ ὄϊες καὶ μηκάδες αἶγες:

πολλοὶ δ᾽ ἀργιόδοντες ὕες θαλέθοντες ἀλοιφῇ

εὑόμενοι τανύοντο διὰ φλογὸς Ἡφαίστοιο:

πάντῃ δ᾽ ἀμφὶ νέκυν κοτυλήρυτον ἔρρεεν αἷμα.

And then Achaian kings brought him, that king,

the son of Peleus so fast of foot,

to shining Agamemnon, leader of them all,

since they—though it was hard, he didn’t want

to go—persuaded his heart which beat through rage.

And when they came to Agamemnon’s tent,

they ordered clear-voiced messengers to stand

a hefty tripod by the fire at once,

with hopes the son of Peleus might cleanse

himself of all the bloody, crimson gore.

But he, refusing firmly, swore an oath:

“In truth, it isn’t right by Zeus, the one

born last but still is best of all the gods,

to wash my head before we’ve gone to place

Patroklos in the fire and heap a mound

and cut our hair, since there’s no pain that could

befall my heart like this again as long

as I may live.

p. 52

αὐτὰρ τόν γε ἄνακτα ποδώκεα Πηλεΐωνα

εἰς Ἀγαμέμνονα δῖον ἄγον βασιλῆες Ἀχαιῶν

σπουδῇ παρπεπιθόντες ἑταίρου χωόμενον κῆρ.

οἳ δ᾽ ὅτε δὴ κλισίην Ἀγαμέμνονος ἷξον ἰόντες,

αὐτίκα κηρύκεσσι λιγυφθόγγοισι κέλευσαν

ἀμφὶ πυρὶ στῆσαι τρίποδα μέγαν, εἰ πεπίθοιεν

Πηλεΐδην λούσασθαι ἄπο βρότον αἱματόεντα.

αὐτὰρ ὅ γ᾽ ἠρνεῖτο στερεῶς, ἐπὶ δ᾽ ὅρκον ὄμοσσεν:

‘οὐ μὰ Ζῆν᾽, ὅς τίς τε θεῶν ὕπατος καὶ ἄριστος,

οὐ θέμις ἐστὶ λοετρὰ καρήατος ἆσσον ἱκέσθαι

πρίν γ᾽ ἐνὶ Πάτροκλον θέμεναι πυρὶ σῆμά τε χεῦαι

κείρασθαί τε κόμην, ἐπεὶ οὔ μ᾽ ἔτι δεύτερον ὧδε

ἵξετ᾽ ἄχος κραδίην ὄφρα ζωοῖσι μετείω.

“But come now, let’s go eat and sate ourselves;

and Agamemnon, ‘king among all men’—

at dawn, go get your men to gather wood

and bring as much of it as you can get

to lead the corpse beneath the murky dark,

so that unceasing fire will burn him up

with speed and out of sight, and army men

may turn once more to deeds that they must do.”

l

ἀλλ᾽ ἤτοι νῦν μὲν στυγερῇ πειθώμεθα δαιτί:

ἠῶθεν δ᾽ ὄτρυνον ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Ἀγάμεμνον

ὕλην τ᾽ ἀξέμεναι παρά τε σχεῖν ὅσσ᾽ ἐπιεικὲς

νεκρὸν ἔχοντα νέεσθαι ὑπὸ ζόφον ἠερόεντα,

ὄφρ᾽ ἤτοι τοῦτον μὲν ἐπιφλέγῃ ἀκάματον πῦρ

θᾶσσον ἀπ᾽ ὀφθαλμῶν, λαοὶ δ᾽ ἐπὶ ἔργα τράπωνται.

He asked for this and all obeyed, for they

had heard it loud and clear. Then eagerly,

the army feasted, getting food prepared,

and all shared equal portions of the meal.

But when they had their fill of meat and drink,

some men walked back to lie within their tents,

but still Akhilles laid upon the shore—

the sea before him roaring loudly while

he anguished, wracked with grief, beside some men,

his Myrmidons, in vastness where the waves

rose up to meet the sand—when sleep took hold

of him, releasing all his spirit’s fears

as it poured sweetly down upon his limbs,

the ones which ached and tightened when he rushed

lv

lx

p. 53

lxv

at Hektor, moving nearer windy Troy;

but then the soul of poor Patroklos came

to him, the picture of his former self

with all his greatness and his stunning eyes

and voice, and even wearing clothes he’d worn;

and standing over him, he spoke a word:

ὣς ἔφαθ᾽, οἳ δ᾽ ἄρα τοῦ μάλα μὲν κλύον ἠδὲ πίθοντο.

ἐσσυμένως δ᾽ ἄρα δόρπον ἐφοπλίσσαντες ἕκαστοι

δαίνυντ᾽, οὐδέ τι θυμὸς ἐδεύετο δαιτὸς ἐΐσης.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο,

οἳ μὲν κακκείοντες ἔβαν κλισίην δὲ ἕκαστος,

Πηλεΐδης δ᾽ ἐπὶ θινὶ πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης

κεῖτο βαρὺ στενάχων πολέσιν μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσιν

ἐν καθαρῷ, ὅθι κύματ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἠϊόνος κλύζεσκον:

εὖτε τὸν ὕπνος ἔμαρπτε λύων μελεδήματα θυμοῦ

νήδυμος ἀμφιχυθείς: μάλα γὰρ κάμε φαίδιμα γυῖα

Ἕκτορ᾽ ἐπαΐσσων προτὶ Ἴλιον ἠνεμόεσσαν:

ἦλθε δ᾽ ἐπὶ ψυχὴ Πατροκλῆος δειλοῖο

πάντ᾽ αὐτῷ μέγεθός τε καὶ ὄμματα κάλ᾽ ἐϊκυῖα

καὶ φωνήν, καὶ τοῖα περὶ χροῒ εἵματα ἕστο:

στῆ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς καί μιν πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν:

lxx

lxxv

lxxx

“You sleep, Akhilles, yet you grasp for me.

You did not heed me when I still lived,

just now that I am dead! I’m begging, so

I can pass quickly on through Hades’ gates,

Go honor me. The souls, they shut me out—

those weary shades—and they have not allowed

for me to cross the river yet, and so

I wander, aimless, outside Hades’ house

with gaping entrance gates, always in vain.

But place your hand in mine; I’m weeping, since

I won’t come back from Hades once you all

perform my burial rites with blazing fire.

For we, as living men, will not confer

together, just the two of us, away

from all our fellow men, since wretched fate

has opened up its mouth to swallow whole

my life, this fate that was my destiny

as long ago as when I first was born;

and you, Akhilles who resembles gods:

your fate decrees that you will die before

that wealthy city, Troy. But I will speak

to you of something else, and I will give

p. 54

you my commands in hopes you might obey!

‘εὕδεις, αὐτὰρ ἐμεῖο λελασμένος ἔπλευ Ἀχιλλεῦ.

οὐ μέν μευ ζώοντος ἀκήδεις, ἀλλὰ θανόντος:

θάπτέ με ὅττι τάχιστα πύλας Ἀΐδαο περήσω.

τῆλέ με εἴργουσι ψυχαὶ εἴδωλα καμόντων,

οὐδέ μέ πω μίσγεσθαι ὑπὲρ ποταμοῖο ἐῶσιν,

ἀλλ᾽ αὔτως ἀλάλημαι ἀν᾽ εὐρυπυλὲς Ἄϊδος δῶ.

καί μοι δὸς τὴν χεῖρ᾽: ὀλοφύρομαι, οὐ γὰρ ἔτ᾽ αὖτις

νίσομαι ἐξ Ἀΐδαο, ἐπήν με πυρὸς λελάχητε.

οὐ μὲν γὰρ ζωοί γε φίλων ἀπάνευθεν ἑταίρων

βουλὰς ἑζόμενοι βουλεύσομεν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐμὲ μὲν κὴρ

ἀμφέχανε στυγερή, ἥ περ λάχε γιγνόμενόν περ:

καὶ δὲ σοὶ αὐτῷ μοῖρα, θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ᾽ Ἀχιλλεῦ,

τείχει ὕπο Τρώων εὐηφενέων ἀπολέσθαι.

ἄλλο δέ τοι ἐρέω καὶ ἐφήσομαι αἴ κε πίθηαι:

CITATION

Homer. Homeri Opera in five volumes, Vol. 2. Edited by D. B.

Monro and T. W. Allen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920.

p. 55

TROJAN HORSE

GUO XIWEN

University of Manchester

56


The Trojan horse is a story we all know from childhood.

It has also been described in detail in ancient

Greek mythology. Many artists have interpreted this

theme with realistic or abstract artistic techniques.

In this piece, I use collage to present this theme. I

place the wooden horse in a prominent position, and

its texture suggests the tactility of the material. The

Greek soldiers hidden inside are also the focus of what

I want to show. One soldier in the horse’s neck with

an ax prepares to attack, while three soldiers lower

in the horse’s body carry the ladder together to assist

others. In the background, I depict the scene of the

night assault. The torn city, the flames, and the moon

all hint at the narrative. Corresponding to the texture

of the wooden horse, I add some details to the depiction

of the city. In the choice of color, I first follow

the physical characteristics of the objects themselves.

Meanwhile, to echo our distance from the classical

scene, I use more vintage-inspired color. Overall, I

hope to bring the audience a new visual experience

to this familiar story through the juxtaposition of a

classical scene with a modern art style.

57

THE ILIAD1ANCIENT GREEK HISTORICAL FICTION

2Greta Rose Lunder, Northwestern University

Since the modern discovery of the archaeological

site of Troy, the city described in Homer’s Iliad,

scholars have debated whether the Trojan War

was a historical event. Some scholars argue that a

plethora of evidence of destruction and abandonment

points to the occurrence of a major conflict at the Late

Bronze Age site, and therefore suggests the historicity

of the Iliad. Others, however, argue that there is not

enough evidence for a major conflict, and therefore

the Iliad is a fictional composition. I intend to prove

that neither side of this debate is entirely correct, and

instead that the Iliad is in fact a fictionalized narrative

based on genuine historical events in the Late Bronze

Age. Those events were not one large-scale war at the

site of Troy, however, but a period of repeated conflicts

between Mycenaeans and Hittites in Anatolia that

gave rise to a tradition of Greek-Anatolian warfare. 1

Therefore the Iliad, while not an accurate account of

historical events, draws from a collective memory of

actual Late Bronze Age conflicts.

My argument will be proven through four strands of

evidence. First, excavations at Troy have not revealed

any conclusive evidence of large-scale warfare in the

Late Bronze Age, the time period in which the Iliad is

mostly set. Second, the Mycenaeans of Bronze Age

Greece had significant contact with western Anatolia

1. Eric Cline, “Hittite Literary Evidence,” 340; Dimitri Nakassis,

“The Aegean in the Context of the Eastern Mediterranean

World,” 666–7.

(see Figure 1) and came into conflict with the neighboring

Hittite Empire. Third, both archaeological evidence of Greek

and Anatolian cultural continuity from the Bronze Age to

the Iron Age, and the numerous references in the Iliad to the

Bronze Age landscape and material culture, reveal a continued

memory of Bronze Age history and engagement with this

history. Finally, Homer, an Ionian Greek, would likely have

been familiar with the tradition of Greek-Anatolian conflict,

and chose to locate this conflict at Troy, the best preserved

Bronze Age site in western Anatolia.

Ancient Greek writers identified the Iliad’s setting as the

Late Bronze Age. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century

BCE, believed that the Trojan War was a historical event that

occurred 800 years before his time, around the end of the

thirteenth century BCE. This date concurs with a third century

BCE Greek inscription, which recorded the war as spanning

from around 1218 to 1209 BCE. Eratosthenes suggests that Troy

fell at a slightly later date in 1184 BCE. 2 The dates given by these

ancient authors are reflected in references to prominent Bronze

Age centers, including Mycenae, the city of Agamemnon in the

Iliad, and several Bronze Age artifacts, including the boar’s

tusk helmet. 3 “Those who held the well-founded citadel of

Mycenae....over all these ruled King Agamemnon.” 4 Although

the Iliad seems to be set in Mycenaean times, excavations

at Troy from the thirteenth century BCE reveal no signs of

a conflict as significant and long-lasting as the Trojan War.

In the early to mid-thirteenth century BCE, a catastrophic

event led to the end of Troy VI (see Figure 2). The nature of

this destruction is more consistent with earthquake damage

than that of a violent conflict, with cracks in the fortifications,

collapsed towers, and a lack of weapons. 5 Although the

earthquake did not necessarily destroy the entire site, the

evidence of conflict is simply too sparse to suggest a major

confrontation like the Iliad’s Trojan War.

Another catastrophic event occurred in 1180 BCE, bringing an

end to the recently reconstructed Troy VIIa (see Figure 2). This

time, however, there is substantial archaeological evidence

that this was caused by an attack. Traces of fires and unburied

human remains appear throughout the site, as well as a deposit

2. James Whitley, “Homer and History,” 258.

3. Whitley, 261–2.

4. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Barry B. Powell, 2.572–9

5. Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, 82; Nakassis,

“The Aegean,” 671.

The Iliad 59

of bronze arrowheads and possible slingshot stones. 6 Although

this fits with the Iliad’s Trojan War narrative and Eratosthenes’s

date for the fall of Troy, it occurred simultaneously to or

just after the major Mycenaean Greek palace centers were

destroyed, circa 1200–1180 BCE. With the widespread collapse

of the Mycenaean palace system, a coordinated attack by

Mycenaean Greek forces on a fortified city such as Troy would

be highly unlikely. It is possible that these attackers were the

Sea Peoples—marauders recorded by various Mediterranean

civilizations during the Late Bronze Age—but there is no

definitive evidence to indicate the identity of Troy VIIa’s

attackers. 7 Regardless, due to the Bronze Age Collapse, this

conflict could not have been carried out by a group with a

strong and organized Bronze Age Greek identity.

Although there is a lack of evidence for a large-scale war

between Trojans and Mycenaean Greeks, there is a large body

of evidence revealing long-term regional conflict in Bronze Age

Anatolia between the Hittite Empire and the Mycenaeans.

Both the Western Anatolian archaeological record and Hittite

historical records provide evidence that the Mycenaeans were

engaged in this regional conflict. 8 Excavations at Anatolian

sites along the Aegean coast have uncovered a pattern of

Aegean and Greek mainland-oriented exchange. At Miletus,

there is evidence of strong Mycenaean influence with locally

produced Aegeanizing pottery making up the majority of the

assemblage from the fourteenth century BCE onwards and

Mycenaean tomb types emerging after the end of this century. 9

The presence of Mycenaean and Aegeanizing pottery, tombs,

and other Mycenaean artifacts in Western Anatolia, and

particularly at Miletus, is undeniable and points to a continued

Mycenaean presence in the area throughout the Late Bronze

Age.

Beginning in the late fifteenth century BCE, Hittite records

confirm Mycenaean presence on islands off the coast of

Anatolia. Hittite texts mention “Ahhiya” (later this name shifts

to “Ahhiyawa”), a region located to the west of Asia Minor

in the Aegean. This location is based on Hittite descriptions

of Ahhiyawa’s position “across the water” and geographical

analyses of Western Anatolian powers that show no evidence

6. Bryan E. Burns, “Troy and Its Treasures,” 393; Cline, 1177 B.C., 122.

7. Cline, 1177 B.C., 122–7.

8. Cline, 1177 B.C., 83–5.

9. Nakassis, “The Aegean,” 671–4.

60 The Iliad

of any Ahhiyawan kingdom. Therefore, the conclusion is that

Ahhiyawa could not be situated within Western Anatolia,

and instead must have been located on the Aegean islands or

Greek mainland. 10 It has been suggested that the Hittite name

Ahhiyawa is linguistically related to the Greek name “Akhaiwia,”

which eventually gave rise to the term Achaean, used by

Homer to refer to the Greeks throughout the Iliad: 11 “The rage

sing, O goddess, of Achilles, the son of Peleus, the destructive

anger that brought ten-thousand pains to the Achaeans.” 12

While there is no scholarly consensus regarding how much

of Bronze Age Greece was covered by the term Ahhiyawa, it

has been suggested that Ahhiyawa was a confederation of

Mycenaean states, somewhat similar to the Achaeans in the

Iliad. 13 Whether a united kingdom or an association of smaller

states, the Ahhiyawans were clearly powerful players in Bronze

Age Anatolia, as attested by the Hittites.

Repeated conflicts between Ahhiyawa and the Hittites began

to be recorded in the early fourteenth century BCE. Hittite

records name Attarissiya, a commander of the Ahhiyawans,

who raided Anatolia and Cyprus with “100 [chariots and...

thousand infantry].” 14 The number of chariots and infantry

described in this text is large for this time period, and indicates

that Attarissiya wielded significant power in Anatolia. This

would make the Mycenaeans a noteworthy Bronze Age political

entity in the Aegean region. Then, in the late fourteenth

century BCE, the Hittite vassal states of Western Anatolia

and Miletus (here referred to as Millawanda) rebelled against

the Hittites with the aid of Ahhiyawa. “....[because Uhhaziti

had supported the king of Ahhiyawa] and [...] the land

of Millawanda to the King of Ahhiyawa....[dispatched] Gulla

and Mala-ziti, infantry [and chariotry, and they] attacked [the

land of Millawanda]. They captured it, together with civilian

captives, cattle, and sheep....” 15 This Hittite record reports that

the rebellion was put down and Millawanda destroyed. This

corresponds with the archaeological record of Miletus, which

reveals a destruction level from the late fourteenth century

10. Jorrit M. Kelder, The Kingdom of Mycenae: A Great Kingdom in the

Late Bronze Age Aegean, 2; Nakassis, 666.

11. Cline, “Hittite Literary Evidence,” 339.

12. Homer, Iliad, 1.1–3.

13. G. Beckman, T. Bryce, and E. Cline, The Ahhiyawa Texts, 6.

14. Beckman et al., The Ahhiyawa Texts, 5.

15. Beckman et al., 29.

The Iliad 61

BCE. 16

During the first half of the thirteenth century BCE, the power

struggle between Ahhiyawa and the Hittites increased as an

individual named Piyamaradu conducted repeated raids in

western Anatolia with the support of Ahhiyawa. Piyamaradu’s

activities continued throughout the reigns of three Hittite

kings, and the trouble he caused is outlined in the Tawagalawa

Letter, written circa 1250 BCE. This letter is named for the

brother of the Ahhiyawan king to whom it is addressed, and

it recounts Tawagalawa’s recruitment of people hostile to the

Hittites in Western Anatolia. It also refers to the support that

Ahhiyawa has provided to Piyamaradu by granting him refuge

in its territories, including Millawanda (Miletus), a sign of

Ahhiyawa’s continued presence during this period in Western

Anatolia. 17

These hostilities continued into the late thirteenth century

BCE, but the power balance shifted in favor of the Hittites.

During the reign of Tudhaliya IV, from around 1237 to 1209

BCE, an Ahhiyawan-backed rebellion in the Seha River Land

was quashed, and the Hittites took control of Miletus. This

episode is referenced in the Millawata (Miletus) Letter: “As I,

My Majesty, and (you), my son, have established the borders

of the land of Milawata.” 18 A letter dated shortly after the

Milawata Letter then instructs a Hittite ally to establish an

embargo on Ahhiyawan trade with Assyria, another enemy

of the Hittites. In this letter, the title “King of Ahhiyawa” is

crossed out, indicating that Ahhiyawa and its rulers no longer

merited the same level of respect as they had in the past. 19

Based on these records, Miletus was at the center of these

repeated conflicts and was key to Mycenaean strength in

Anatolia.

As Hittite-Ahhiyawan conflicts seem to center on Miletus,

where does Troy fit into this Bronze Age political landscape?

From the sixteenth century BCE onward, Hittite documents

repeatedly mention a place called “Wilusa.” This name has

been linked to Homer’s “Ilios,” alternatively known as Troy,

16. Charles Brian Rose, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy, 29;

Nakassis, “The Aegean,” 673.

17. Cline, 1177 B.C., 79–80.

18. Beckman et al., The Ahhiyawa Texts, 129; Cline, “Hittite Literary

Evidence,” 340.

19. Cline, 1177 B.C., 93–4.

62 The Iliad

based on linguistic evidence. The earlier Greek form of Ilios

was “Wilios,” which very closely resembles the Hittite name

“Wilusa,” leading many scholars to argue that they are, in fact,

the same. 20 While mention of the involvement of Wilusa (Troy)

in Ahhiyawan-Hittite conflicts is limited in Hittite documents,

these documents suggest that Wilusa remained loyal to the

Hittites throughout the fourteenth and early thirteenth

centuries BCE. 21 In the early thirteenth century BCE, a treaty

was signed between a king of Wilusa, named Alaksandu, and

Muwatalli II, king of the Hittite Empire from 1295-1272 BCE.

This treaty outlines the aid Alaksandu received from Muwatalli

II in defeating his enemy. Although the name Alaksandu has

been linked by some scholars to the Greek name Alexander,

the enemy that Muwatalli II defeated on his behalf remains

unnamed, and therefore this conflict cannot be linked to the

Ahhiyawans. 22

Accounts describe Piyamaradu campaigning against the

Hittites in Wilusa during the reigns of Muwatalli II and his

successor Hattusili III in the mid-thirteenth century BCE, but

there is still no mention of any large-scale violence occurring

at Troy. The closest the Hittite records come to confirming

the Trojan War is a passage in the Tawagalawa Letter (1250

BCE): “And concerning the matter [of Wilusa] about which we

were hostile —[because we have made peace], what then?” 23

While this text indicates some kind of hostility between the

Ahhiyawans and Hittites involving Troy in the thirteenth

century BCE, it makes no mention of an outright war occurring

at Wilusa. Additionally, the destruction from this period

resulted from an earthquake rather than conflict. Following

this, at the end of the thirteenth century BCE, the Milawata

Letter briefly mentions that the king of Wilusa was deposed

by hostile forces, but does not name these opponents. 24

Therefore, all attempts to establish any of these documents as

recording a historical Trojan War have been purely speculative,

as they either do not explicitly involve the Ahhiyawans, or do

not align with the archaeological record at Troy.

The archaeological record at Troy, located in the Northeastern

Aegean, contains evidence of Mycenaean contact. Mycenaean

influence in the Northeast, however, was less extensive than

20. Cline, 1177 B.C., 80–1.

21. Cline, 1177 B.C., 80.


23. Cline, 1177 B.C., 79–80.


The Iliad 63

in the Southeastern Aegean, particularly at Miletus. Although

Wilusa was located in a strategic region for trade, the use of

imported Mycenaean pottery remained small. Beginning in

the mid-fifteenth century BCE, Mycenaean imports appear in

the archaeological record and increase from 15 to 50 known

fragments by the end of the century. During the fourteenth

century BCE, Mycenaean pottery reached its highest level,

with painted imports reaching 3%, and local imitations of

Mycenaean shapes comprising approximately 10% of the

overall pottery assemblage. Following this period, in the

thirteenth century BCE, the number of Mycenaean imports

declined, although local imitations persist. These percentages

pale in comparison to Miletus, however, with Mycenaean types

comprising 95% of pottery in the fourteenth and thirteenth

centuries BCE. 25 While evidence of Mycenaean contact was

widespread in Western Anatolia, its influence was clearly

much more concentrated around Miletus than Troy. Overall,

the context in which Troy appears in Hittite documents and

archaeological records shows that, while it was inevitably

involved in Eastern Mediterranean trade, it played a more

peripheral role in the Ahhiyawan-Hittite power struggles than

Miletus.

The Bronze Age Collapse, which occurred around the turn of the

twelfth century BCE, involved the widespread destruction of

the major Mycenaean palace centers as well as the capital of the

Hittite Empire. Nevertheless, while instability was widespread

in the Eastern Mediterranean, Mycenaean and Anatolian

societies did not completely collapse. Some destroyed palace

centers in Greece, including Tiryns, Korakou, and Lefkandi,

show signs of rebuilding smaller structures during the twelfth

century Postpalatial Period. 26 At Troy specifically, pottery from

level VIIb suggests that the site was still occupied by the same

culture alongside some new inhabitants during the twelfth

century BCE. 27 In the tenth century BCE, the ruins of a major

structure from Bronze Age Troy appear to have been used as

a cult center, indicating a connection with Troy’s past. Similar

cult centers can be found at Bronze Age sites on the Greek

mainland as well, such as at Mycenae and Tiryns. 28 This reveals

25. Rose, The Archaeology of Troy, 26; Luca Girella and Peter Pavúk,

“The Nature of Minoan and Mycenaean Involvement in the Northeastern

Aegean,” 25–35.

26. Oliver Dickinson, The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity

Change between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC, 60–1.

27. Rose, The Archaeology of Troy, 38.

28. Rose, 49; Stavroula Nikoloudis, “Mycenae,” 357–60.

64 The Iliad

that the populations of Greece and Anatolia continued to live

among and engage with the ruins of Bronze Age centers, which

remained very visible throughout the Postpalatial and Iron Age

landscape. This continuous visual reminder of the Bronze Age,

as well as the ritual activities, preclude widespread loss of

cultural memory. Although Bronze Age history was likely not

transmitted in accurate, detailed ways, it surely continued to

occupy the minds of those living among its ruins.

This enduring engagement with the Bronze Age during the

Iron Age is reflected in various narrative elements of the Iliad.

The Catalog of Ships is one of the major seemingly Bronze Age

elements of the Iliad. Many of the locations named in the Catalog

are well-attested Bronze Age sites, such as Pylos, Mycenae,

and Tiryns, which all lost prominence by the Iron Age. Other

Bronze Age sites disappeared entirely following the Bronze

Age Collapse, such as Eleon, Peteon, and Hyle. 29 This would

seem to indicate a strong knowledge of Bronze Age geography.

Other sites complicate this picture, however. Delphi, Sparta,

and Argos are all included in the catalog despite being obscure

settlements during the Bronze Age, while certain prominent

Bronze Age sites are excluded entirely. Other parts of the

Iliad confirm this synthesis of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the

story’s landscape: “Once I went to Phrygia covered in vines

where I saw multitudes of the Phrygians riding their horses...” 30

Phrygia, a central Anatolian kingdom, did not gain prominence

until the late Iron Age, making this part of the Iliad a reflection

of the eighth century BCE political landscape in which it was

composed. 31 Therefore, the Catalog of Ships and the broader

geography of the Iliad reveal both that Iron Age Greeks were

familiar with the locations of diminished or abandoned

Mycenaean centers, and that they viewed the landscape

through an Iron Age perspective, where new settlements and

civilizations had come to prominence following the Bronze

Age Collapse. 32

Also found in the Iliad is the inclusion of objects with Bronze

Age archaeological counterparts. These include Nestor’s Cup,

found at Mycenae and dated to the beginning of the Late

Bronze Age, and the boar’s tusk helmet, examples of which are

dated from 1500 to 1100 BCE. Within the Iliad itself, objects

like Nestor’s Cup and the boar’s tusk helmet are provided with

29. Benjamin Jasnow, “Catalogue of Ships: Archaeology,” 312–4.

30. Homer, Iliad, 3.184–6.

31. Rose, The Archaeology of Troy, 41–2.

32. Jasnow, 312–4.

The Iliad 65

extensive aristocratic histories that create a link between the

past and the present. 33 Outside of the narrative, in the Iron Age

world of the Iliad’s creation and its audience, the significance

of these Bronze Age objects is tied to their status as ancestral

artifacts. During this time period, ancestral artifacts likely

served to form connections through time to ancestors, and

express prestige and power. This can be seen at Lefkandi, on

Euboea, where antique Cypriot and Mesopotamian metalwork

of bronze and gold are deposited in Early Iron Age burials. 34

Another Early Iron Age cremation at Knossos contains a boar’s

tusk helmet that was likely already several hundred years old

prior to its burial. 35 The use of Bronze Age artifacts in the Iliad,

therefore, seems to draw from this Iron Age use of ancestral

objects, providing them with intricate histories that reflect

prestige and tradition.

These examples demonstrate Homer’s intricate relationship

with the Bronze Age past from his Iron Age present. Although

the Bronze Age elements are seen through the lens of Iron Age

realities, the breadth and authenticity of Homer’s knowledge

of the Bronze Age, and, therefore, the knowledge of his

contemporaries, cannot be dismissed. It is also likely that

this connection with the Bronze Age extended to the many

conflicts that defined the Aegean for hundreds of years and

informed the composition of the Trojan War narrative. The Iliad

is therefore not a straightforward reproduction of historical

events, but rather a complex engagement with an ancestral

past informed by Iron Age realities.

The remaining question is why the Iliad is centered on Troy,

rather than a more significant site of Bronze Age conflict

between the Hittites and Mycenaeans, such as Miletus. This

ties into the Iliad’s intricate relationship with the Bronze Age,

demonstrating that there is not a direct line from Bronze Age

events to the events contained within the Iliad. If the Iliad

were a faithful telling of Bronze Age history, the archaeological

record and Hittite documentary evidence suggest it would

have focused on Miletus rather than Troy. However, in the

eighth century BCE, the Bronze Age ruins of Troy were the

best preserved on Anatolia’s western coast, making the city

a more visible remnant of the past than Miletus. During this

time some of the Trojan Bronze Age structures were repaired

33. Whitley, “Homer and History,” 262–6.

34. Carla M. Antonaccio, “Homeric Materiality,” 281–4.

35. Whitley, “Homer and History,” 262.

66 The Iliad

for ritual use, and signs of occupation increase. 36 Activity

indicating Iron Age ancestor or tomb worship also emerges in

the archaeological record at sites such as the Menidi Tholos

and the tombs at Prosymna, and steadily increases during the

eighth century BCE. 37 Due to the maintenance of Bronze Age

structures and increased ritual activity, therefore, Troy would

have been perceived as an imposing and active cult site with

strong ties to the Bronze Age, making it a natural choice for

the setting of the Iliad.

A combination of archaeological evidence and historical

records shows that, while a ten-year war did not occur at

Troy, the Iliad is rooted in historical Bronze Age events. The

continued presence of imposing Bronze Age structures in

the landscape simply would not allow the inhabitants of the

Aegean to forget their past. Therefore, the repeated conflicts

in Anatolia between the Hittites and Mycenaeans became

incorporated into the cultural practices and memories of

their descendants. They engaged with this past through ritual

activities, as seen in eighth century BCE Troy, and through

storytelling, as seen in the Iliad. The Iliad therefore serves as a

reminder that, although names, dates, and locations may have

been lost to time, the events of the Bronze Age continued to

hold great cultural significance for many following centuries.

36. Rose, The Archaeology of Troy, 42, 49–51.

37. Joanne M.A. Murphy, “Archaeology of Hero Cults,” 336–8.

The Iliad 67

IMAGES

Figure I.

Charles Brian Rose, “Troy in the Bronze

Age,” in The Archaeology of Greek and

Roman Troy

68 The Iliad

Figure II.

Joshua Hammer, “The Ruins of Troy,” in

“In Search of Troy.”

The Iliad 69

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to Homer, edited by Corinne Ondine Pache, 339–40. Cambridge:


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336–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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The Iliad 71

CLYTEMNESTRA’S PIETÀ

CHLOE CHOW

Northwestern University

72


This piece was unsurprisingly inspired by Michelangelo’s Pietà,

a marble statue depicting the scene of the Virgin Mary holding

the body of Jesus, and the story of the sacrifice of Clytemnestra’s

daughter, Iphigenia, for the Greek troops. Where Michelangelo’s

Jesus is cradled in his mother’s arms, Iphigenia falls

limp, more closely resembling a slaughtered animal than a person.

Her neck is cut like that of a sacrifice, while the matching

blood on her and her mother’s hands alludes to the messiness

of Iphigenia’s death. Clytemnestra’s face is grief-stricken and

furious, far from the smooth expression of Michelangelo’s Virgin

Mary. While the story of the Pietà ultimately celebrates the

sacrifice of Mary and Jesus as pretense for the resurrection, the

sacrifice of Iphigenia is an act of pointless violence in appeasement

of far-off gods. If Clytemnestra is holding her daughter’s

body, Iphigenia has not and will not be saved.

While Michelangelo’s statue shows a seemingly serene Mary

and virtually unblemished Jesus in white marble, I wanted my

interpretation to be jarring in bright colors and with explicit

wounds. The blues, greens, and yellows of Clytemnestra’s robes

flow around her in a manner echoing the sculpture. Though Iphigenia

wears simple white fabric symbolizing her innocence,

the hints of yellow and blue flow right into the fabric of her

mother’s clothes, pulling the two together. The red halo ties

together the blood pooling down from the middle of the piece

as a physical representation of the rage which has settled on

Clytemnestra that will one day bring her to kill Agamemnon

and Cassandra.

While making this piece, I focused on maintaining motion in

the figures through the blending of chalk pastels in Clytemnestra’s

robe to offset their static position. I also wanted to make

sure that the figures were positioned realistically to emphasize

the weight of Iphigenia. The finer details were done in charcoal

pencil and minor adjustments were made digitally.

73

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE...

KAREN YUNJIA GUO, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

immortality was the gift you gave him,

lesbia, if i dare to say as much with the gods around.

like a fire giving blistered skin to the hand that tries to hold it,

except he was prometheus:

maybe there was already something divine about him. meanwhile,

i watch you laughing with him and feel awfully human,

promising myself that this is something i can stand, but

at the same falling, destitute, all reason

ripped away from me.

endeavoring speech only proves its absence. when i

sound out a sentence, the syllables slur; the only clear

sound is your name—lesbia lesbia lesbia—

echoing through my skull.

darkness comes next. i hear the stars roaring.

everything is fire, immolation moving from tongue to

oesophagus, burning from skin down to bone.

voicelessness does not suit you, catullus.

ignore the flames crowding your vision. accept it.

die from it. try to stamp it out,

embers smouldering underfoot. or redefine the immortality

that she provides. we only remember cities after they fall;

understand that their names are full of fallacy, mumbling

ruins inside your mouth.

p. 74

CATULLUS 51

0

ille mi par esse deo videtur,

ille, si fas est, superare divos,

qui sedens adversus identidem te

spectat et audit

dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis

eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,

Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi

vocis in ore.

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus

flamma demanat, sonitu suopte

tintinant aures, gemina teguntur

lumina nocte.

otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:

otio exsultas nimiumque gestis.

otium et reges prius et beatas

perdidit urbes.

...there’s fire. In this

translation of Catullus

51, I wanted to

embody the dichotomy

of the poet’s

voice—a combination

of deeply intimate

feeling and winking

irony—in a contemporary

style. The

result is rhymeless,

rhythmless, and far

from word-for-word

accurate; but in keeping

with Catullus’

own debt to Sappho,

his original Latin is

not so far as you

might think.

p. 75

Animus Classics Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2

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