The Life and Death of Agamemnon’s Scepter: The Imagery of Achilles (Iliad 1.234–239)*

This paper compares how Achilles constructs and deploys imagery of the scepter and of tree-felling in his oath at Iliad 1.234–239 with the way the Homeric narrator uses similar images elsewhere in the Homeric corpus. My reading of 1.234–239 against both 2.100–108 and 4.482–489 shows how Achilles subverts the conventional celebratory associations of this scepter and tree imagery. Ultimately the analysis demonstrates that the poet manipulates these conventional images to intensify the crisis between Achilles and Agamemnon in book 1 and reveals how these manipulations create radically different emotional effects in an audience knowledgeable of these conventions.