Janina Stahl’s Inner Life and Feeling in the Iliad as a whole advances a core thesis: “Through description, Homer puts the recipients in a position not simply to observe feelings and inner processes. He does not provide a simple authorial commentary, but rather enables the recipient to identify with the characters, to immerse themselves in their emotional world, and thus makes their actions seem logical. Homer does not describe in an explicit, authorial manner (approximating the German plakativ-auktorial) what the heroes feel, but instead brings their emotional world to life through their respective actions and reactions.”[1]
In referring to Homer (rather than to Homeric epic or Epic tradition), Stahl reflects her working assumption that she is analyzing the work of a single author. The perspective behind her core thesis has deep roots in German reception of Homeric poetry. Stahl begins with a passage from Friedrich Schiller’s essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.”[2] Schiller contrasts the encounter of Ferragus and Rinaldo, a muslim and christian warrior, both rivals in love, with that of Diomedes and Glaucus in Iliad 6. Schiller argues that Ariosto “belongs to an advanced epoch, to a world where simplicity of manners no longer existed” and therefore provides a very emotionally explicit description of how the two of them cover each other in wounds but then unite and ride side by side. Homer, by contrast, in Schiller’s view, treats the encounter “as if he had been relating something that is seen every day — nay, more, as if he had no heart beating in his breast,” describing the scene “with dry truthfulness.”
Stahl follows in the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften that Wilhelm Dilthey gave a theoretical foundation and Bruno Snell made famous with his 1948 Entdeckung des Geistes. An analysis of TAPA 1956/1957 determined that less than half of the citations pointed to secondary sources in English, while German accounted for almost a third (31.1%).[3] While specialists on Homer could be expected to work with Snell in the original German, Thomas Rosenmeyer produced an English translation of Snell’s The Discovery of Mind) and opened it up to a wider audience. Snell’s perspective, like Schiller’s one and a half centuries before, treats Homeric epic as a more primitive form of human expression. This perspective has not resonated nearly so much among anglophone students of Homer. Readers who are not sympathetic to the perspective of Geisteswissenschaften should, however, not dismiss Stahl’s book.
The introduction (pp. 11-23) uses Vergil’s depiction of Aeneas and his emotions to contrast the methods that we see in Homeric epic (pp. 13-14). She then focuses particularly on the wrath and pity that Achilles exhibits (pp. 14-21). The survey of research (pp. 25-47) is helpful as the last decade has seen substantial research into emotions as represented in the ancient world (pp. 27-31). Stahl is closer in approach to German and British classicists such as Bruno Snell, Walter Burkert, Arbogast Schmitt, Jasper Griffin and Martin West. She does cite work on mênis, “wrath”, by Calvert Watkins and Leonard Muellner (pp. 36-39), but Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Gregory Nagy do not appear in the bibliography or even (as far as I can tell) in the text.
Scholars on Homeric poetry in performance such as Egbert Bakker and Anna Bonifazi[4] have dramatized the emotional effects of common words such as particles and pronouns. There is a lot of scholarship with which Stahl could have added more life and intellectual vitality to her work.
The core of the book consists of close readings for passages of the Iliad: Iliad 1.1-430 (pp. 49-132), 9.1-655 (pp. 132-172), 11 (pp. 172-175), 16.2-256 (pp. 175-194), 18 (pp. 194-207), 19 (pp. 207-212), 22.25-404 (pp. 212-249), and 24.3-676 (pp. 249-277). Both new and long-time readers of the poem will profit from going through these readings as they go through the accompanying sections of the Iliad. The descriptions are clear. The footnotes primarily connect Stahl’s discussion with widely available commentaries, with good coverage of anglophone resources (e.g., Pulleyn on Iliad 1, Griffin on Iliad 9, Macleod on Iliad 24, the six volume Cambridge Commentary on the Iliad).
I do think that Stahl would have strengthened her argument if she had pointed out, forcefully and at some length, that there are, in fact, places in the Iliad where we get a very direct view of the inner feelings within characters. Stahl devotes more space to Iliad 1 than to any other part of the poem. At 1.188-194, the poem describes the inner emotional feelings of Achilles in detail: “Grief (achos) came upon the son of Peleus, and within his shaggy breast his heart was divided, whether he should draw his sharp sword from beside his thigh, [190] and break up the assembly, and slay the son of Atreus, or stay his anger (cholos) and curb his spirit (thumos).” With superhuman speed, Athena materializes and physically yanks Achilles by the hair before he can draw his sword (1.194-218), leading to a dialogue that is invisible to any of the mortal observers and that takes place, as far as anyone can see, entirely within Achilles.
Stahl would have been better served enumerating at least some of the most famous passages where we clearly see what is happening in the internal emotional life of characters in the Iliad. It would have been more effective to go through some of the many passages where the narrative allows us to infer the emotional states of various characters by observing their actions rather than having windows into their souls.
Stahl devotes more than three pages (pp. 87-91) to 1.188-192, carefully enumerating the physical symptoms of Achilles’ emotional state. At the end of this extended analysis of five lines (p. 91), she provides an eloquent appreciation for this representation of internal emotional life:
Here one can clearly see the precise observation and analysis of the inner life of Homeric characters: Achilles experiences an inner pain that constricts his chest (achos), and yet he is still capable of nuanced deliberation (diandicha mermêrixen), namely whether to give in to a sudden surge of anger (cholos) or to calm his strong inner will (thumos, which resides in the aforementioned chest) to avoid succumbing to rage and killing Agamemnon. This inner will is not merely a simple affect like cholos, but an instrument that – as will soon be seen – can look further ahead and make a reasoned decision. These considerations take place ‘in his heart’ (kata phrena, V. 193) and ‘in his willpower’ (kata thumon, ibid.). Here, the heart would then stand for the purely emotional reaction, whereas the thumos is used more in the sense of rational deliberation. Perhaps the distinction between phrên and thumos is as follows: phrên is the seat of all soul activities, the source of passions, thoughts, and (less frequently) the will. Thus, conceptually, there is a blending of thinking and feeling; in terms of gradation, an activity of the phrên is an inner activity that, combined with a thought act, emphasizes the component of the inner and is directed inward. The thumos, as shown, is also an inner activity with emotional implications, but it is oriented towards action, hence directed outward.
Stahl, however, draws a conclusion that (in my view) runs contrary to everything that she had just described (pp. 89-90): “Accordingly, all mentioned parts of the body fulfill a function; thus, Homer shows the inner life of the hero and the associated implications without needing to explicitly point them out (Demnach erfüllen alle genannten Teile des Körpers eine Funktion; so zeigt Homer das Innere des Helden und die damit einhergehenden Implikationen, ohne dass er explizit darauf hinweisen müsste).” The opening book of the oldest surviving work in the continuous tradition of European literature provides one of the most striking descriptions of fury that have ever been composed. I understand the argument that we should not view cholos and the thumos as part of inner life but many scholars (myself included) do not find that idea plausible.
Much, probably most, of the book is devoted to recapitulating the text. This practice does, of course, direct our mental gaze to particular details, words and lines and can thus stimulate a distinctive new reading. Footnotes that link primarily to a compact set of reference works do allow those without access to very large libraries to follow the complete argument. At the same time, without more detailed discussion of the rich scholarly tradition it is harder for the reader to see if Stahl has offered a particularly new insightful or controversial reading.
The conclusion contains sections on “Inner Life” (Innerlichkeit: pp. 281-284), “Concepts of Action and Concepts of Freedom” (Handlungsbegriff und Handlungsfreiheit: pp. 281-287), “the Authorial Narrator and Narratological Principles” (Der auktoriale Erzähler und narratologische Prinzipien: pp. 287-302). The 80 footnotes in the conclusion reveal a change in focus. Where the close readings had regularly cited anglophone commentaries (if not much anglophone research), in the 80 footnotes of the conclusion I found 80 references to German scholarship vs. 9 to English-languages works (Charles Segal: note 1; Jasper Griffin: note 2; Irene de Jong notes 21, 24; Theodore Andersson: notes 42, 49, 53, 59 and 62). Of the 9 anglophone publications, only one (de Jong 2004) had been published since 1989 (de Jong 2004). I did not see any citations to works in French, Italian or any other languages. Thus, readers will have to do their own work if they want to relate Stahl’s conclusions to contemporary scholarship that is not in German.
This book seems only to be available in print form. Specialists and libraries that collect German scholarship on Greek literature will have no difficulty with the moderate 48.60 EUR price for the print edition, but a digital version would make this work much more widely accessible. German funders and universities have labored to support open access publication and books such as this would draw particular benefit from being available under an open license. Many (and probably most) non-native speakers would use machine translation to help them and Large Language Models could already provide English language summaries. Ideally, references to primary sources would be annotated, not only so that readers could call up online editions but also so that readers of online editions could (at some point) see where Stahl has commented on a particular passage.
Overall, I think that this book is well worth reading. Insofar as Stahl reflects a tradition of Homeric scholarship that differs from that in which many of us work, she makes reading more difficult. But those who do reflect on this book and its conclusion will have an opportunity to explore how a very different community thinks about Homeric Epic.
Works Cited
Bakker, E. J. (2005). Pointing at the past: from formula to performance in Homeric poetics. Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University. Distributed by Harvard University Press. https://chs.harvard.edu/book/bakker-egbert-j-pointing-at-the-past-from-formula-to-performance-in-homeric-poetics/
Bonifazi, A. (2021). Particles in ancient Greek discourse: exploring particle use across genres. Center for Hellenic Studies. https://chs.harvard.edu/book/bonifazi-drummen-de-kreij-eds-particles-in-ancient-greek-discourse/
Crawford, G. A. (2013). A Citation Analysis of the Classical Philology Literature: Implications for Collection Development. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 8(2), 214–224. https://doi.org/10.18438/B8HP56
Graziosi, B., & Haubold, J. (2010). Iliad, book VI. Cambridge University Press.
de Jong, I. J. F. (2004). Narrators, narratees, and narratives in ancient Greek literature: studies in ancient Greek narrative (I. J. F. de Jong, R. Nünlist, & A. M. Bowie, Eds.; 1st ed.). Brill.
Schiller, F. (1902). Complete works of Friedrich Schiller, in eight volumes. P. F. Collier, New York. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009795569
Snell, B. (1948). Die Entdeckung des Geistes; Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen, Claaszen & Goverts. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001811785
Snell, B. (1953). The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European thought. (T. G. Rosenmeyer, Trans.). Blackwell, Oxford. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001222241
Notes
[1] Stahl p. 12: “Homer versetzt die Rezipienten mit dieser Schilderung in die Lage, Empfindungen und innere Vorgänge nicht nur zu beobachten. Er gibt keinen simplen auktorialen Erzählerkommentar ab, sondern er befähigt den Rezipienten, sich mit den Personen zu identifizieren, in ihre Gefühlswelt einzutauchen, und motiviert so ihre Handlungen schlüssig. Homer schildert nicht plakativ-auktorial, was die Helden fühlen, sondern führt ihre Gefühlswelt durch die jeweiligen Handlungen und Reaktionen vor Augen.”
[2] The German essay is sufficiently prominent to have its own brief Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Na%C3%AFve_and_Sentimental_Poetry; English translation of Schiller’s comparison of Ariosto and Homer is available as Schiller 1902: vol. 8 pp. 288-29. Note that Graziosi 2010, p. 38 (commenting on Iliad 6.232-236) also discusses this passage.
[3] Crawford 2013.
[4] E.g., Bakker 2005 and Bonifazi 2021, both of which are available online under an open license.