The Duel and the Daïs: Iliadic Warfare as Spectacle

Chapter 2 explores how the Olympians and the Iliad’s audience are positioned as viewers for the warfare in Books 1–4, and their roles defined. The first section focuses on the gods. Homer initially defines the gods’ role as viewers by drawing on two specific paradigms of live event: entertainment at a daïs (banquet), and the formal duel. Each of these paradigms carries its own suggestions as to the nature of the event, its stakes, and the relationship between viewer and action. As entertainment accompanying a daïs, the warfare may generate pleasure (terpein) for viewers whose critical role is to praise or blame the dramatic figure pulling the strings. As a spectacle modelled on the formal duel, the warfare is observed by implicated, partisan viewers, who are themselves a part of the conflict, and can become actors by entering the central space. Rich tension is generated by the combination of these paradigms. The chapter’s second section reads the opening of Book 4, in which the gods watch a duel from their daïs, as a mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered by the Iliad to its listeners. On the one hand, the combination of duel and daïs shapes audience understanding of the kind of spectacle that they, too, are witnessing, and their own relationship to the action. On the other hand, the gods’ particular responses—both to the events on the ground and to their staging and direction—dramatize possible responses on the part of Homer’s audience.

‘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.

‘Let Us Cease’: Early Reflections on the Spectacle’s End

Chapter 3 focuses on the two major episodes of Book 7, both of which have often been criticized as ill-motivated and disconnected, and both of which feature prominent scenes of divine viewing and discussion: the formal duel between Hector and Aias; and the truce for the burial of the dead, during which the Achaeans build a defensive wall. The chapter shows that the two episodes can in fact be read as both well-motivated and connected, if seen in metaperformative terms: as an extended reflection on how the Iliad’s battlefield spectacle ends. The second duel offers a mise en abyme, by which the poet dramatizes tension between two types of response to the conflict at this point: desire for Achaean victory, and pity for the doomed Trojans. The duel is normally seen as the second of two formal duels, but is best understood as the second of three ‘spectacular duels’, the third being between Hector and Achilles in Book 22. Then, through the building of the Achaean wall as viewed by the gods, the poet reflects upon tension between (a) the Iliad’s insistence that its central spectacle is playing out in real time, before our eyes, and (b) its equally powerful investment in the idea that its action is not ephemeral, but permanent.

Introduction: ‘With What Eyes…?’

The Introduction considers the key concepts ‘divine perspective’, ‘divine audience’ and ‘Homer’s audience’. It discusses parallels and differences between the divine perspectives that Homer depicts (i.e. of the Olympians), and the divine perspective he adopts (as narrator). It asks what it is in the text of the Iliad that has moved so many critics to liken the gods to the ‘audience’ for an arranged, public event of one sort or another. It shows Jasper Griffin’s widely accepted answer—that the gods sometimes watch passively, with pity or pleasure—to be insufficient. It then proposes that a comprehensive study is needed, which will assess how divine viewing relates to divine control, and analyse the way that Homer builds his ‘divine audience’ in association with three culturally specific contexts: the formal duel, the daïs (banquet), and funeral rites. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ‘Homer’s audience’, laying out the study’s basic assumptions about the audience and performer implied by the text.

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.

‘A Man Having Died’: Watching Achilles and Hector

Chapter 5 focuses on the poem’s two final prominent scenes of divine viewing: when Achilles pursues Hector around Troy, and when he drags Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’ burial marker. The first sections argues that the confrontation between Hector and Achilles is presented so as to make audiences feel that they are attending an event that resembles both a formal duel and an athletic competition (aethlos). The second section shows how the gods’ viewing can be read as a mise en abyme that brings to the surface the tensions latent in this hybrid spectacle. The third and final section argues that the funerary imagery in the Iliad’s final representations of the contests of the Trojans and Achaeans suggests ‘suspension of temporal verisimilitude’. Ann Bergren has used this phrase to describe moments when the Iliad not only depicts multiple moments of mythic history at once, in defiance of temporal naturalism, but draws attention to the fact that it is doing so. Given the prominence of the divine gaze in these final scenes, the point of the reflexivity is not so much to emphasize the poem’s human artistry, but rather to seduce audiences with the sense that what they are seeing is something like what the gods must see: a spectacle at once ephemeral and eternal, the most absorbing moments of which are inextricably linked to each other through time.

Zeus, the Poet, and Vision

Chapter 1 argues that the Iliad’s proem anticipates certain key elements of the battlefield spectacle to come: its central action (warfare and the desecration of corpses), and its staging and direction (with Zeus and the poet as joint orchestrators of the battlefield conflict). While the agency of Zeus and that of the poet are highlighted in various ways throughout the text, they overlap specifically in respect to their control of the warfare. Such moments of overlap heighten excitement during performance, as the ‘now’ of performance and the ‘now’ of mythic Troy become momentarily indistinguishable. The chapter concludes by bringing the lessons of its close readings together, to motivate and describe a new approach to the metapoetics of the Iliad’s gods, in place of the prevalent tendency to describe Zeus and the gods as drivers of ‘plot’. Instead, the chapter suggests, divine control should be seen as the flip side of divine viewing, and Zeus recognized as a figure who controls the course of the battle (not the whole plot). One should ask not just how Zeus’ role and the poet’s relate, but also what difference it makes for the Iliad as a performance event. Where textual cues are sufficient, certain scenes of divine viewing can be usefully read as a mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered by the poet to his listeners.