Editor's Note

It is with great pleasure that I introduce the first of our four clusters on literary and material culture. In our original call for papers, material culture was defined broadly as everything from economic, political, and social practices to the actual conditions for the production, distribution, and interpretation of texts (be they oral or written). Literary culture was defined as the poetics (or prosaics) of conventional genres, the works of specific authors, or individual texts. This cluster devoted to Literary and Material Culture in Archaic and Classical Greece features three important papers that together form a coherent suite. They each represent in their own fashion the way in which the most exciting work done in philology today is that which crosses the boundaries of the text, not to leave it behind, but to expand and enrich it.

Our first paper by Jonathan Ready, "Toil and Trouble: The Acquisition of Spoils in the Iliad," plunges us into the confusing but high-stakes world of Homeric economics. Ready argues that two competing understandings of the origin and distribution of spoils are at work in the Iliad. Deploying Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry's "socio-anthropological framework" for understanding "the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges" in modern societies, Ready argues that the Iliad presents both a model of short-term and long-term exchange. The former sees spoils as derived directly from individual action. The hero exchanges his blood and toil for the right to despoil the enemy and to keep what he has "earned." The latter model sees the spoils gained in war as providing the foundation of a communal and even cosmic order. That order is reaffirmed by both the pooling of those resources in a common store and their subsequent redistribution under the aegis of the community's leader, in this case Agamemnon. The relationship between these two orders of exchange—how they are articulated with one another, and the consequent relations between the individual, the collectivity, and positions of authority, which are affirmed thereby—is, according to Ready's reading, precisely what is at stake in the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles.

With Brooke Holmes's paper, "The Iliad's Economy of Pain," we move from the distribution and exchange of spoils to the distribution and exchange of pain. The social body becomes the body of the Homeric warrior in society. Pain, here, functions less as an autonomic response or a private personal misery than as something seen and shared. In so far as it attains this collective recognition, pain too becomes subject to a system of exchange in which one set of miseries can be said to equal another in the realm of distributive justice. Chryses' tears are thus repaid by the plague visited upon the Achaeans. Anger at Agamemnon is repaid with the blood of the army. Yet, as Holmes demonstrates, there are also other pains, pains that exist outside of this economy and that know no rate of exchange. These are the pains of grieving women, like Hecuba after the death of Hector, or those of men that are compared to the pangs of women in childbirth, as in the case of Agamemnon's wounding in Book 11. The Homeric body and its pains are thus shown to be constituted within a gendered economy of suffering that is central to the poem and its most basic conflicts, an economy of exchange that simultaneously posits its own beyond.

Holmes ends her paper on Homeric pain by comparing the irreducible pain of Hecuba to the pain of later tragic heroines. In Robin Mitchell-Boyask's paper, "The Athenian Asklepieion and the End of the Philoctetes," it is the body in pain of the Homeric hero that literally takes center stage. Mitchell-Boyask demonstrates that, despite Sophocles' play being set on the isolated island of Lemnos, the Philoctetes in fact continually alludes to its own staging in the physical, cultural, and political landscape of fifth-century Athens. The healing of Philoctetes' wound, in the context of the plague that wracked Athens in the 420's, is in turn shown to function as a metaphor for the possible healing...