[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This “critical guide” to the Iliad is well-conceived and comprehensive. It consists of an introduction, a main section of 24 chapters, each with a different author and devoted to one book of the Iliad, and a concluding section of Works Cited. After reading through the whole, one comes away with the feeling of having benefited from reading the Iliad with a multitude of gifted teachers. The jacket advertises this as “showcas[ing] the diversity of approaches to the Iliad.” This is certainly true to a degree, even if the oralist approach spearheaded by Gregory Nagy seems dominant. Even so, the volume does a remarkable job of covering a vast field of scholarship. It bridges the gap between an in-depth commentary and a companion with general introductions. Of course, it also means that, when read on its own, it needs to be read in its entirety to provide something like a complete literary introduction to Homer. But I can well imagine someone teaching a class on one or two books of the Iliad, assigning the corresponding chapters from this book, and filling in the gaps, as needed, with teacher commentary and additional literature as the semester progresses.
According to the jacket, the book is geared toward both undergraduate and graduate students of the Iliad reading it in translation or in the original. As someone trained in Germany, where knowledge of the original Greek is often a requirement from the beginning, I am not ideally equipped to assess if my impression is accurate, but think the volume would be more on the challenging side for undergraduates without any prior knowledge of Greek language and culture. The focus is also almost exclusively on literary matters, so this Critical Guide is not the place to look for historical or archeological information,[1] nor for linguistic or metrical discussions. The student that took shape in my mind as the intended audience is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a graduate student (or ambitious undergraduate) of literature. I can easily envision students using this resource when writing term papers and essays. I can also see scholars from other disciplines checking in with this volume for more context. Considering that perfect accessibility for readers without knowledge of the original Greek is maintained throughout, the depth and breadth of this guide is truly commendable. A grasp of ancient Greek is, lamentably, a matter of social class in many areas of the world, so that endeavors to make the subject less elitist are a necessary addition to ‘traditional’ classical scholarship, and will hopefully inspire some to learn the language. A few contributors picked out a Greek word or two (in transcription) for sustained analysis to create a deeper understanding of the Homeric world, and these contributions were among the most insightful.[2] It is not necessary to know a language in order to become acquainted with a few key terms and the important cultural concepts they convey. To round off my praise, many of the interpretive portions are compelling, not to say bold, and will stimulate even experts in the field.
Each of the 24 core chapters consists of four subsections, a “plot summary,” “themes,” “poetics,” and “internal cross-references and further reading.” The plot summary does not require explanation; suffice it to say, it is quite detailed. The subsection entitled “themes” is, I believe, intended to identify the major issues of a book, contextualize them within the Iliad as a whole, and interpret them. The subsection “poetics” would seem to imply a primary concern with aesthetic issues, including narratological issues, but it was not possible to distinguish “themes” from “poetics” in all contributions. Since the plot is summarized both in the “summary” and, in part, in the “themes” section, reading could be a bit taxing with all the repetition, but I imagine the very same repetition can be didactically beneficial. The useful internal cross-references make up for the missing index.
As announced on the jacket, the Critical Guide to the Iliad aims to provide “synthetic reviews of current scholarship.” The qualification “current” is taken quite seriously; my impression is that the main focus lies on anglophone scholarship of the past 20 to 30 years. This is perplexing, at times, because although the European scholar has grown accustomed to an anglophone bias in classical scholarship, it can still be baffling to find the relevant literature on some key issues omitted – Walter Arend is not mentioned for type scenes, for example. Other missing titles include Marchinus van der Valk’s important work,[3] anything by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Arie Hoekstra, or Edzard Visser. There are, surprisingly, quite a few items of German language scholarship that made it into the book, however, perhaps because the Basel commentary, which is available in English translation, was consulted, but if any French, Italian, or Greek publications that have not been translated into English were referenced, they must have escaped me.
Possible arguments against the strong oralist position are not meaningfully entertained (even though this would undoubtedly make students better potential proponents of the oralist persuasion), but, in the book’s defense, doing this appropriately would easily have exploded the confines of a chapter and strained the students’ training in transmission history, South Slavic Song, and other related fields; and it is in any case a moot point where the original Greek is not accessible.
My personal ‘Bechdel test’ for Homeric scholarship is whether it mentions at some point the minor detail that our heroic Iliadic protagonists plan to rape captives (cf. Il. 2.354f.). This volume thankfully passes that test (p. 56). The unsavory (and, admittedly, trigger-prone) topic is quickly passed over, however. To be fair, there are regular shorter comments on gender issues that are exceedingly valuable.[4] Overall, although this guide claims the attribute “critical” in its title, the goal is not to make students so critical that they wonder why the would-be rapists who are the protagonists of the Iliad have been invoked as ideals of heroism, masculinity, and humanism for more than 2,500 years. But then again, does it ever cease to be refreshing to hear the humanism of a rape culture defended anew? Measured against the overall status quo of Homeric studies, this book does a good job of ‘making women’s voices heard.’ This oddball reviewer believes that humanism truly begins with the instatement of women’s and children’s rights.
The ideology behind the masculinity of the Iliad is not scrutinized at length, although it is one of the controlling concerns of the narrative, and, to put it quite pointedly, one comes away with the run-of-the-mill romanticized notion of Achilles as an overprivileged man with tragic anger, honor, and mortality issues who is redeemed to humanity in a touching man-to-man with Priam, another overprivileged man. The tendency in the final chapter on Iliad 24 is to foreground the “humanism” of shared grief over loved ones lost in the war, especially in terms of father-son relationships. That is all well and good, but it should be paired with the sobering realization that Iliad 24 thereby deeply romanticizes personal loss in war and therefore, ultimately, romanticizes war.[5]
Considering that this book is very much a product of the past twenty years of scholarship and co-authored by many gifted female scholars, I am a little disappointed that there is apparently still no way to do justice to the often breathtakingly exquisite poetry of the Iliad, while also casting a sober and disenchanted gaze on the somewhat misguided idealizations it has engendered over the past 2,500 plus years (and in doing so, encouraging a critical awareness of our own society’s moral hypocrisy, an endeavor perhaps more worthwhile than pursuing antiquated notions of something misleadingly labeled humanism).
Quite a few narratological concepts are introduced in the “poetics” subsections. There are also recurrent comments on how the original audience might have understood the Iliad when it was performed, without offering much in the way of theoretical background (beyond a brief exposition of traditional referentiality). I have taught students about reader response in a similarly simple way in lessons, when it seemed ill advised to enter into the murky jungle of theories like those of Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss etc. So, what I am really missing is an acknowledgment that such theories exist and that assessing the way a historical audience reacted to the epics is not as straightforward as it may seem. However, Elizabeth Minchin’s concise subsection on Poetics (p. 100ff.), for example, will resonate with students and does an admirable job of demonstrating how to start thinking about audience response.
It is not possible to do justice to each chapter in this review, so my account restricts itself to collecting a few examples of the depth achieved throughout. Ready’s excellent Introduction admirably gives introductory accounts of transmission (e.g. the role of papyri with wild texts) and South Slavic Song and catalogs some helpful resources.
The volume continues with a stimulating chapter on Iliad book 1 by Mary Bachvarova. She introduces important notions like the Iliad’s status as an oral-derived work, the workings of traditional referentiality, Nagy’s Five Ages of Homer, and formulas. She goes into quite some detail toward the end of her contribution when she seeks to uncover how “the dispute over Chryseis” (p. 20) is a motif transferred from the Hurro-Hittite tradition, the Song of Release. She qualifies her approach as putting an oralist lens on a neo-analytical approach. The actual treatment of the motif and its supposed source consist of noting general similarities (“divine anger triggered by a dispute in an assembly over captives who are not released”, p. 23) and asserting there are parallels in the angry “wording” of Zazalla’s and Agamemnon’s replies. These parallels in the wording were not immediately obvious to me, and it would have been helpful if they had been made explicit. The internal contradiction and the “Anspielungscharakter”[6] of the Iliad text which ought to be at the heart of a neo-analytical approach are not mentioned, nor is a “Faktenkanon” and how it is presupposed by the Iliad text.[7] This part of the chapter, as it is, reduces the theory of neo-analysis to the simple notion that motifs are transferred from somewhere else.[8] (I am confident this is not the case for the in-depth treatment in Bachvarova’s monograph, which is not available to me at the moment). While a professed agnostic as far as the Iliad’s text formation is concerned (p. 15), Bachvarova uses the observed motif transferrence as evidence of a “pre-Panionic performance context” (p. 24).
Rachel Friedman gives an accessible and intelligent account of Homeric similes and catalogs (p. 31ff.). Emily Katz Anhalt has written an original interpretation of Iliad book 4 (somewhat reminiscent perhaps of Simone Weil) which is highly engaging in terms of the moral concepts governing it, but which, in the reviewer’s opinion, in some points misreads the overall predominantly conservative, idealizing message the Iliad is trying to send (and I think the ancient scholia support this opinion).
William Brockliss succinctly summarizes scholarship on the Achaean wall and the Homeric question (p. 88ff.). Lynn Kozak expresses fascinating ideas about the role of corpses as “affective agents” in the Iliad (p. 203ff.). Charles Stocking explains Bakker’s “scale of interformularity” (p. 236). Zoe Stamatopoulou achieves remarkable depth in unraveling the symbolic weight of defiled corpses (p. 244ff.). Many arresting thoughts about supplication, lament, funeral rites, corpses, and memorializing the dead are voiced throughout.
Fortunately, there is little to note about the quality of the translation (which is mostly restricted to single words or phrases). On p. 201, one reads about Achilles that “his entourage are brawlers” (Il. 17.165, ἀγχέμαχοι θεραπόντες) – not wrong, but an interesting choice.
The book has been superbly edited for typographical and formatting errors.
It will undoubtedly prove a valuable resource in educating students about the Iliad.
Authors and Titles
Introduction – Jonathan L. Ready
Book 1 – Mary R. Bachvarova
Book 2 – Rachel D. Friedman
Book 3 – Deborah Lyons
Book 4 – Emily Katz Anhalt
Book 5 – Carolina López-Ruiz
Book 6 – Lilian E. Doherty
Book 7 – William Brockliss
Book 8 – Elizabeth Minchin
Book 9 – Tobias Myers
Book 10 – Christos C. Tsagalis
Book 11 – Maureen Alden
Book 12 – Emily P. Austin
Book 13 – Jonathan L. Ready
Book 14 – Lilah Grace Canevaro
Book 15 – Ruth Scodel
Book 16 – Deborah Beck
Book 17 – Lynn Kozak
Book 18 – Andromache Karanika
Book 19 – Kirk Ormand
Book 20 – Charles Stocking
Book 21 – Zoe Stamatopoulou
Book 22 – Alex Purves
Book 23 – George Alexander Gazis
Book 24 – Louise Pratt
Notes
[1] A notable exception: A paragraph on Nestor’s cup in Alden’s chapter, p. 135.
[2] Doherty’s well-written, approachable chapter, pp. 71–81, is a case in point.
[3] Valk, M. van der, Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad. Leiden 1963–1964. Valk, M. van der, Eustathii archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem pertinentes. Leiden etc. 1971–1987.
[4] E.g. Doherty on p. 74: “Book 6 thus includes an important expression of the poem’s ideology, which is that of a society (whatever its relationship to an actual historical society) in which gender roles are strictly delimited and the ultimate power and value are attributed to a warrior aristocracy.” Also Katz Anhalt, p. 56: “Moral transgressions and an eagerness for violence combine with the objectification of women to produce senseless, unjustifiable suffering. Leading men make their community especially vulnerable to conflict, suffering, and death by considering women male possessions and emblems of male achievement.” I would note that on my interpretation, the Iliad does not portray such suffering as senseless, even if this notion is occasionally entertained as a possibility, but romanticizes it by implying ‘that is simply how tragic human life is, isn’t it beautiful?’.
[5] Pace Katz Anhalt, p. 56: “The characters within the Iliad glorify warcraft, but the narrative as a whole celebrates wordcraft.” Yet the question remains whether the Iliad celebrates, specifically, wordcraft that glorifies warcraft. Also pace Myers, p. 112, “his [Achilles’] speech is not the only time in the Iliad that the war is said to be regrettable or unnecessary.” For how do these anti-war statements measure up against numerous aristeiai and the extensive portions of the Iliad where the grotesque violence of battle is relished?
[6] Kullmann, W. Quellen der Ilias. Wiesbaden 1960, p. 13.
[7] This omission is remedied by Brockliss, p. 89.
[8] Lyons, p. 46, shows awareness of the internal contradiction of Helen’s ill-timed wall-watching in book 3 to explain its provenance from a “prehistoric Indo-European tradition.”