Perfidy and Passion: Reintroducing the Iliad

Introduction: Riddles of Identity in the Iliad

3 Introduction Riddles of Identity in the Iliad C ritics take for granted Homer ’s skill in portraying memorable characters. The opening book of fers vignettes giving access to the protagonists’ flaws and desires: the arrogant king who rejects a suppliant, the impetuous warrior who angrily challenges authority .1 But in what follows I look at the question of character awry . Rather than the differences between Homer’s characters, the individual desires and qualities that make them unique, I concentrate on the ways in which the desires of separate characters infiltrate the desires of others. Instead of asking what a character wants, we will ask from where he or she wants it. For the Iliad shows how these desires came to inhabit the characters’ psyches. It traces the fl uidity of human desir es, the messiness of our motivations, the way human needs and wants ar e constructed in and through the needs and wants of others. One consequence is that any defi nitive statements about identity, whether of an individual or a group—say, “Achilles is prone to anger,” or “the Trojans are peace-lovers who are defending their families” — will turn out to be oversimplifi ed, the beginning rather than the end of the inquiry. For what we can say about almost any character in the poem can be traced to the desir es of others. Individual selves become less discrete, just as what is inside and outside of any character becomes much harder to gauge. Character is an ongoing interpr etative challenge for us because it is alr eady a problem for those within the poem. T o “know thyself” is rarely easy. To see identity as a problem to be contested is to venture into critical terrain more commonly associated with the Odyssey. Indeed, we can 4 Introduction usefully transfer some of the central questions that have dominated critical approaches to Homer’s Odyssey onto the Iliad. So at the risk of indirection, let us take a brief look at the well -known enigma that opens the Odyssey, before encountering a disguised enigma at the beginning of the Iliad. Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of . . . (Od. 1.1–3) Ἄνδρα µοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς µάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε· πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω . . . The name of the poem’s hero is withheld, and this gives the poem the form of a typical Greek riddle. Ariddle begins with an unnamed thing or person—“There is a thing which”—follows it with a series of puzzling and seemingly contradictory identifying descriptions, and provokes us into finding a solution. This riddling structure opens up as many questions as we will allow it to. 2 For example, it not only pauses over the identity of this unnamed man, but also asks what it means to be a man. How can one determine the identity of a single man when his essence seems to be in tension with the many tropoi (masks, turns, linguistic games) that he wears? Or, to use a later psychoanalytic vocabulary , what is a “man” beyond the sum total of ego -identifications, of roles that he takes up that ar e always socially defi ned and therefore created for him by others—and thus not so clearly his after all? Finally , though the temptation to find a referent is hard to resist, we should also notice that the question of who will hold power on Ithaca, be the man, is up in the air at the poem’s beginning. This zer o-sum struggle for power soon takes center stage, with pretenders to the title, including the suitors and Telemachus, as well as Odysseus himself. The question mark hovering over the identity of the man points toward social conflict alongside the problems of self-discovery.3 Now, this seems to contrast with the pr oem of theIliad, where the subject matter, “anger,” is explicitly attached to a name, “ Achilles.” Characteristics routinely attributed to each of these heroes—Achilles as truthteller , Odysseus as trickster—would therefore find a correlative in the form of representation at work in each poem: the Odyssey as deceptive, the Iliad as clear. But before letting the certainty of this critical com- Introduction 5 monplace take over, let us move forward to the first appearance in the Iliad of the Odyssey’s riddling word andra. It...