‘Many Contests of the Trojans and Achaeans’: The Iliad’s Battle Books

Chapter 4 charts the continued use of the divine perspective to shape and reflect upon the dynamics of performance between Books 8 and 22. In these books, Homer continues to draw on the duel, daïs, and funerary paradigms to construct the battlefield contests as a live event commanding audience participation. The chapter’s first section examines patterns of divine and poetic ‘staging’, to demonstrate that the next three days of battle (in Books 8, 11–18, and 19–22 respectively), like the first day’s battle, are not only viewed from Zeus’ house on Olympus, but also closely patterned on the formal duel. The second section considers the significance of this strategy for the listening audience whom the poet is attempting to engage: they are invited to participate vicariously in the fighting, and also to reflect on their responses to the figure pulling the strings. The chapter’s third section focuses on the poet’s use of Zeus, primarily, to develop a perspective from which the contests trigger associations with funerary ritual. The chapter concludes with a metaperformative reading of the theomachia (‘battle of the gods’): the theomachia draws in new ways on both the duel and daïs paradigms, to present a provocative dramatization of poet-audience dynamics.