Conclusion: The Iliad and the Odyssey
The Conclusion contrasts the Odyssey’s treatment of performance dynamics, which has been well studied, with that of the Iliad, the focus of the book. In doing so, it also sums up key phenomena that make the Iliad’s gods seem the ‘audience’ for a live event. They mostly view a limited geographical area, from the city to the ships. Divine viewing is only actually mentioned in the context of military or funerary spectacle, or both. This specificity is in line with the initial vision of the song of Achilles’ wrath as articulated in the proem: a song of death and corpses, as the realization of poetic and divine intentions. Divine viewing and divine decision-making come in the same passages, so that Zeus’ control of the ‘plot’, as it is often called, can be usefully described in terms of his staging and direction of the warfare. At the same time, the poet situates his gods in a setting, the daïs at Zeus’ house on Olympus, which he associates with the performance and enjoyment of poetry. In this way, the gods’ viewing develops a perspective from which the Iliad’s core subject matter is a live spectacle involving and joining actors and audiences from across time.