I think that ειμέν should be understood with ἐπιδευεῖς. So, we have something like: we are not lacking an equal feast, nor in the tent of Agamemnon, nor here and now.
So, he just got X, and says: I don’t lack something like X, nor in the past with A., nor now with you.
Is this Greek idom or just a very clumsy way of saying that the food and drink was above average? Or do I miss something?
Odysseus reminds Achilles that in the past Agamemnon has entertained him–and implies that Agamemnon is willing to meet his demands. Achilles’ response conveys the message that of course Agamemnon has entertained him in the past (and may be willing to accommodate him now), but at this point, that’s irrelevant; Achilles doesn’t care.
δαιτὸς ἐΐσης – denotes fairly divided portions of food at a feast, but here the implication is a fair division of spoils. That was Achilles’ original complaint, but by now Achilles is already far beyond that.
Okay, that helps. Thanks. Reminding Achilles of Agamemnon’s hospitality in the past makes sense.
Still, the construction with ἐπιδευεῖς seems strange to me and hard to translate.
δαιτὸς μὲν ἐΐσης οὐκ ἐπιδευεῖς – This is part of a system of formulas. See Iliad. 1.468, 1.602, 2.431, 4.48, 7.320, 23.56, 24.9. It generally means that no one lacked their fair share–the mark of a good meal in accordance with conventions of reciprocity in the heroic society depicted in the Homeric poems.
But in this passage in Book 9, as I mentioned, it takes on a symbolic weight and meaning. Odysseus’ invocation of the conventional ethic of reciprocity is brushed aside by Achilles, who rejects these conventions and no longer feels bound by them.
It seems to me that this is a striking example of how the traditional formulas of the epic language aren’t necessarily just meaningless filler in the Iliad: sometimes they are, but here a formulaic expression is pregnant with meaning.
And its significance here arises precisely out of the formulaic character of the expression and the fact that the formula embodies the conventional heroic ethic of reciprocity: this passage stands the formula on its head.
Very helpful, as always, Qimmick.
How did did you find all the passages where this formula is used? Is this a search option of the Perseus site?
Please don’t tell me you just knew them by heart; that would be too discouraging.
How did did you find all the passages where this formula is used?
The Prendergast Concordance to the Iliad. There is also one by Dunbar to the Odyssey. There are instances of this formula in the Odyssey, too, but I didn’t cite them.
The Perseus search engine could be used for this purpose, too. Search the Iliad for all forms of δαίς.
A number of years ago there was an article in the magazine that my undergraduate university puts out for alumni about an alumnus who memorized the entire Iliad and Odyssey in Greek. He is (or was) an accountant by profession. Maybe if and when I retire . . .
Book IX is surely another higlight after book I and VI. One of the purposses the embassy serves is no doubt to bring Achilles, whose wrath is after all the theme of the Iliad, back on stage and it does so very effectively.
I think I have read in Griffin or Mueller that the value and sincerity of Agamemnon’s atonement offer (tripodes, horses, women, kettles, and some mycenean real estate) is a point of literary controversy. To me, as a first time reader, it is pretty clear that Achilles is in the wrong here. Till the embassy it seems natural to sympathise with him in his quarrel with Agamenon, but no longer so after his blunt refusal. Not only does Agamemnon offer a lot more than Briseis alone, the original point of contention, but Achilles speech shows his anger, as the man himself, to be out out of control. One gets the strong impression that nothing Agamemnon could conceivably have offered or done, would have been good enough for him.
How did the Greeks see Achilles? As a flawed hero, or as the victim of a greedy and ungrateful king?
Agamemnon is a greedy and ungrateful king and his offers are insincere–they’re essentially bribes to get Achilles back into the fray without a sincere admission on Agamemnon’s part that he has delivered a serious affront to Achilles’ honor and sense of his own worth as an individual. This is especially grievous to Achilles because it is becoming clear to him that he will die if he does go back into battle.
But for his part, Achilles is also wrong to reject Agamemnon’s offers, especially after Phoenix’s moving speech. And Achilles’ refusal sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Patroclus’ death. When Patroclus dies, I think, Achilles’ frenzied rage and blood-lust, and his inhuman treatment of Hector’s body, are not just the product of his grief for his friend: his grief is compounded with his own feelings of guilt and complicity in Patroclus’ death.
Book 9 holds shows both the rightness and the wrongness of Achilles’ refusal of Agamemnon’s offers without resolving the tension.
A side-note on the Prendergast-Dunbar concordances. One or the other (I forget which—maybe both) was a clergyman, evidently with time on his hands. The concordance was compiled by hand—each verse being written out as many times as there were words in it. Hard to imagine such willing drudgery on the part of a thinking person; there seems something immoral about it.
On bk.9, I think Qimmik nails it. I wouldn’t call Ag’s offers “insincere” exactly, and I’m not sure Ach knows his reentering the fray will mean his death. They are my only reservations, both very small.
Modern responses to Ach’s refusal (and to his withdrawal in the first place) tend to be harsher than ancient.
Oh, and the notion of the “flawed hero” is modern, not ancient.
Agamemnon is incapable of delivering a genuine apology because for him a genuine apology to someone he regards as his inferior would diminish his status as king. Agamemnon can’t really bring himself to accept responsibility for his conduct towards Achilles–he blames it on ἄτη, a delusion inflicted upon him by the gods. He says: ἀασάμην, οὐδ᾽ αὐτὸς ἀναίνομαι. 9.117.
For Achilles, however, Agamemnon’s gifts are mostly worthless because he knows, or is becoming increasingly aware, that he is soon going to die if he accedes to Agamemnon’s efforts to bring him back into the battle. mwh: I think this becomes clearer to him and to us over the course of the poem, but I think he has at least an inkling of his choice between a long life in Phthia and imminent death at Troy by Book 9. This is why his situation in Book 9 is so poignant.
Of course, for someone like Achilles, facing death is an obligation, as it is for Sarpedon, who embodies the heroic code of conduct in an exemplary way (12.310 ff.) and dies at Patroclus’ hands. But Achilles’ foreknowledge of his impending death if he goes back into battle is exactly why Agamemnon’s failure to deliver a genuine apology rankles him so. Not only will he die, but his honor will not be given its due.
I heard this very man giving a recitation in person at a grammar school local to me (in the UK), when he was over on a visit from the States. A special evening was dedicated to his performance. The year was 1995 or '96. In addition to reciting large chunks he’d chosen himself, he was able to recite specific passages on request, though I’m not sure he was able to do this with equal facility for all of Homer. He had certainly achieved a prodigious feat of memory, all the same.
I’m sorry to say the evening was not a very pleasurable experience. His recitation style was hurried, mechanical, monotonous, and utterly devoid of drama or emotion, as far as I remember. In the end I stopped trying to make out the words and heard only the rattle of the dactyls, going on ceaselessly and unmusically like one of those wind-up toys that are a novelty for a second or two and then can’t wind down soon enough.
He was in at least his late sixties in '95/'96, so he may have taken Homer with him to another world by now.
“His recitation style was hurried, mechanical, monotonous, and utterly devoid of drama or emotion, as far as I remember.”
Well, he was an accountant after all. (I should talk, right?–I’m a lawyer.)
And you have to remember Dr. Johnson’s words about the dancing dog (actually, he said that a female preacher is like a dancing dog–but of course I can’t say that today): the wonder is not that it’s done well, but that it’s done at all.
Here I am in my late 60s too (I turn 68 next week), and all I will take to another world is about the first 20 verses of the Iliad, a few of the Aeneid, the first two or three stanzas of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and part of Don something or other’s monologue from Le Cid. What a wasted life!
The resolution of Achilles’ refusal to grant Agamemnon’s plea to re-enter the battle in Book 9 occurs at the very end of the Iliad, when Achilles manages–with great difficulty and almost in spite of himself–to bring himself to grant Priam’s plea for Hector’s body, and their mutual discovery of each other’s humanity. For me, nothing beats the utterly surprising conclusion of the Iliad in Book 24, the greatest, most powerful thing I’ve encountered in Homer, in all Greek literature, in all literature.
Does Achilles really have “foreknowledge of his impending death if he goes back into battle”? What he says Thetis told him is not what she had in fact told him in bk.1, and we have to register the discrepancy. (No use saying Well maybe she told him on a different occasion.) He’s making it up, to suit the occasion (much as Homer himself does). It’s in his rhetorical interest to play up the risk to him involved in rejoining the fighting, to present his choice as between dying and living—which we know doesn’t jibe with Thetis’ revelation of his fate. His purporting to opt for living (at the cost of glory) demonstrates just how angry he is. He doesn’t seem to anticipate being killed in the event that Hector approach the Myrmidon encampment, nor does he betray any awareness subsequently, either before or after Patroklos’ death, that he is fated to die at Troy.
There’s a chance of it, obviously; that’s in the lap of the gods, as always (while being at the same time quite predictable). But I don’t myself see his actions here or later as determined or affected by an alleged knowledge that he will die if he accedes to the pleas. I think there’s a danger of reading too much in, and over-psychologizing. Any gifts from Ag would be rejected, because he is very very angry, and he is very very angry (irrationally so, as he himself eventually acknowledges) because of Ag’s dishonoring of him. He’s an intense sort of guy, with one thing on his mind. And then of course there are the demands of the plot, which needs to defer his return.
Anything that’s fated, of course, happens. But what is fate? It’s what happens. In poetic terms it’s put back to front. Events determine fate rather than the other way around. What Ach ought to know is that his life will be short. An audience will have no difficulty in foreseeing he will die (though not until he’s killed Hector)—it’s clearly the culmination towards which the entire poem is headed. They might well be surprised when it doesn’t actually happen.
Ameis-Hentze-Cauer is always very keen to indicate discrepancies or improbabilities in the Homeric text. Regarding Phoenix, who makes his first appearance in line 168 of book IX during the assembly of Greek leaders in the tent of Agamamnon, it remarks dryly in a footnote → Φοινιξ, der Erzieher des Achill, tritt hier zu erst auf. Wie es kommt, dass derselbe trotz des innigsten Verhältnisses zu Achill und obwohl er diesem die Berechtigung seines Grolles ausdrücklich zugesteht (523), nicht etwa nur vorübergehend in Agamemnons Zelte verweilt, sondern sich von Achill getrent hat, wird nirgends erklärt.
Old Ameis has a point, of course, but as a literary device, Phoenix is highly effective.
I agree with Qimmik’s views above and also I think I share mwh’s reservation about Agamemnon’s sincerity, or the lack of it. As to Achilles’ foreknowledge of his death, I have no opinion, it’s too long since I read the relevant passages.
Anyway, I don’t think Homer’s characters or his audience were so concerned about sincerity as we are. I think that’s a modern idea that goes with our obsession with individuality. Think for example how suspicious we are about arranged marriages, which were the norm then (and actually still are for the majority of the world). What really mattered was appearances; and since (in mwh’s words) Achilles is very very angry, no gift in the world from Agamemnon could win him over at this stage, nothing could make up for humiliation he had suffered from Agamemnon. The distinction between bribes and sincere gifts is a modern one. In the Odyssey this ancient obsession with gifts is even more evident and pretty surprising at times too. Though if Agamemnon really had humiliated himself – which was totally contrary to his nature – by grasping Achilles’ knees in public or the like, then perhaps it might have been different. But even then, I think it’s more the external appearances that count.
If you are excited by remarks of this sort, you should consider reading M.L. West’s book The Making of the Iliad – whether you believe his theories or not, it’s a thrilling modern attempt to explain these problems.
About concordances: there’s a nice online concordance at Chicago Homer that includes Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns.
For those of you who have used the Prendergast-Dunbar concordances: do they have some clear advantage over Chicago Homer? I’ve seen one of the two at a local antiquarian bookstore a couple of years ago, and I’m sure he still has it. I’d like to support him for having such great books that no one wants anymore, if there’s any sense in getting the book…
Well, you are probably right about Achilles’ foreknowledge–and his angry rhetorical exaggeration. When Achilles kills Hector, even after Hector has specifically told him that he is going to die at the hands of Paris and Apollo at the Scaean Gate, this is what Achilles responds to Hector’s dead body is (22.365-6):
I find the hard copy concordances easier to use than an on-line search engine, but the Chicago Homer site includes Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, so you don’t need to “liberate” the LfgE, fascicule by fascicule.
Quite so. Of course that sort of thing is only said by characters who are doomed, and pretty well know it, though they have to score what points they can, and they cling to the slim chance that a supportive god will step in, as Apollo did to save Croesus from the pyre or Artemis to save Iphigeneia from the altar (not to mention Aphrodite Paris in Il.3). The audience knows that won’t be the case with Achilles. These finals words of Ach to Hector point forward to his death no less than do Hector’s final words to him.