Homer's Trojan Theater

An ugly secret, sometimes betrayed by the sudden jerk of the head of the dozing reader, admits in muffled tones that a substantial proportion of what is recognized as great literature is boring. The definitive work on the tedium of great art has yet to be written, but it would doubtless include lengthy chapters on The Fairy Queen, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Wilhelm Meister, I Promessi Sposi, Balzac’s 50 page description of a card game played in only one area of Normandy—I’ll leave my readers to supply their own candidates for full treatment. Wretch that I am, I have to admit that I never got past page 37 of Broch’s Death of Virgil. Now, among Greek texts frequently appearing as finalists for The Most Boring Award are undoubtedly the Catalogue of Ships and the so-called Battle Books of the Iliad.

My title is Homer’s Theater of Troy with a play on three meanings of the word “theater”; first, a theater of war offering a synoptic vision of a military campaign; then, theater as a place for spectators to observe a dramatic performance. Derived from the extraordinarily rich Greek terminology involving sight, theesthai signifies a particular kind of seeing, one in which the act of perceiving elicits wonder in the beholder. Finally, somewhat anachronistically, I am alluding to what was known in the Renaissance as the “theater of memory,” a gloriously complex version of the classical mnemonic system of loci.¹

Descriptions of battle take up fully one third of the Iliad. Of the poem’s 360 named characters, 232 are warriors killed or wounded (cf. Mueller 1984: 82).² Outside of the rare but notorious instances of Homer’s nodding when a character, once killed, appears later to fight again,³ the poet is remarkable in his ability to keep his characters on the battlefield straight. At each moment, he seems to know the location of his characters; and if his attention shifts elsewhere for a while and then returns, he finds them again where they belong, whether in the same place or where they were headed. My question here is: how does he do it? Over the course of thousands of verses, we find astonishingly little confusion. His remarkable control over the activities of his characters becomes most evident when the narrative splits the battles into several arenas.

Anyone who has read the Iliad will remember, perhaps not so fondly, the Battle Books, particularly Books 12–15. The narrative is only occasionally relieved by short “obituaries,” similes, and the shenanigans of the gods (inter alia the high comedy of Hera’s seduction of Zeus). But after the major Greek heroes (with the exception of Ajax) have been put out of commission, for the most part we are assaulted with a welter of names, some appearing only as “cannon fodder,” and relentless descriptions of wounding and slaughter, many quite grisly and grotesque. Indeed, the whole sequence constitutes a monumental example of Homeric retardation; nothing decisive occurs. The wall of the Achaians, breached at the end of Book 12, must be taken again, and the burning of the Greek ships, long threatened and delayed, finally happens only at the end of Book 15. But van Wees tries to reassure us: “For all their length, the battle scenes will seem far from boring once we can visualize the action” (van Wees 1997: 668). Other critics, however, insist that “the reader is given only sparse and poorly visualized spatial information” (Anderrson 1976: 17 and 23); concerning the action on the plain of Troy: “There is no general design on which we may rely in following the progress of the narrative” (Leaf 1900–1902: 1, 525). Yet a more careful examination reveals that the seemingly chaotic arrangement of the fighting is in fact highly structured and coherent.

While studies of ring-composition or analyses of the typical building blocks of Homeric battle sequences have all contributed to the understanding of the patterns of epic combat, they have been largely unconcerned with the spatial and temporal organization of the fighting and its overall progress. The...