II.1. Women in the Epic Be that as it may, there is no mistaking the fact that Homer fully reveals what remained true for the whole of antiquity, that women were held to be naturally inferior and therefore limited in their function to the production of offspring and the performance of […]
I.4. The Feminine and the Warrior As a poem of war, the Iliad places at the foreground an intense focus on friendship between companions, as well as between combatants. Yet it is also true that, while women are considered “others,” conjugal love is often evoked in the Homeric epic. Before attempting to […]
I.3. Erotic Images of War Erotic images of war in the Iliad could, by themselves, justify a study of considerable proportion. It is a vast question, this relationship between eroticism and war … I will attempt in this chapter simply to underline a series of associations found in the vocabularies of both […]
I.2. Physical Evidence of the Hero To specify certain masculine values, I will endeavor in this chapter to provide an account of the bodily information that the poet provides about his heroes. This examination will not be a question of prescribing “Homeric medicine,” but of the image of the warrior’s body as […]
I.1. Proper Relations to Aphrodite: A Criterion in the Definition of Heroic Conduct It might seem paradoxical to approach the question of heroism in the Iliad by way of Aphrodite, thus giving sustained attention to episodes where the majority of the action occurs within the walls of Troy. Yet it is also […]
Introduction “Since when is it that men (and not women) no longer cry? Why was ‘sensibility,’ at a certain moment, transformed into ‘sentimentality’?” [1] Initially this line of questioning from Roland Barthes referred to the romantic hero. But we can go further still: on the threshold of history and […]
Preface to the English Edition Hélène Monsacré When I wrote this book on Homer, thirty years ago, [1] I tried to grasp the ambiguities of a heroic character: brave, courageous, and yet sensitive. The greatest hero of all time, Achilles, has supernatural powers and fights with divine weapons, but he […]
Translator’s Note: Truchement ≈ Caretaker Nicholas J. Snead I learned the term truchement as a first-year M.A. student studying French language and literature at the University of Virginia, where I had the wonderful good fortune to take a Balzac seminar with Peter Brooks, a visiting professor there that year. Truchement is […]
Foreword Richard P. Martin, Stanford University Warrior, hero, super-male—Achilles should not cry. Not, that is, in the contemporary understanding of the categories he seems to personify, categories that (one might at first assume) have always dominated the imagination of our cultural forefathers, from the earliest epics, through John Wayne westerns, to […]
Bibliography Ahlberg-Cornell, G. 1992. Myth and Epos in Early Greek Art: Representation and Interpretation. Jonsered, Sweden. Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge. 2nd ed., Lanham, MD, 2002. Allan, W. 2005. “Arms and the Man: Euphorbus, Hector, and the Death of Patroclus.” […]