By saying ‘sing, goddess [theā]’, the Master Narrator is saying that the song that he will perform is something that he hears from the Muse. The addressing of the Muse as theā ‘goddess’ is an Aeolian signature, as it were, since the form theā is Aeolic, as opposed to the form (hē) theos, which is Ionic. See the anchor comment at I.01.463 on Aeolians as speakers of Aeolic, vs. Ionians as speakers of Ionic.

The mēnis of Achilles is a special kind of ‘anger’. The hero feels this anger after his tīmē ‘honor’ is damaged by the over-king Agamemnon. The Master Narrator says at verse 2 that this special anger caused algea ‘pains’ for the Achaeans. The name Akhaioi ‘Achaeans’ here at verse 2 refers to the heroes who were viewed by the ancient Greeks in a later age as their prototypes in an earlier age of heroes; two synonyms for ‘Achaeans’ in the Iliad are Danaoi ‘Danaans’ and Argeioi ‘Argives’. The word mēnis at verse 1 does not yet refer to the anger of persons other than Achilles in the Iliad. As the narration continues, however, it becomes clear that the god Apollo felt mēnis ‘anger’ at the Achaeans even before the hero Achilles felt his own mēnis.

On mēnis ‘anger’: see especially the comment on I.01.001–002

On eris ‘strife’: see the comment on I.01.008–012

On neikos ‘quarrel’: see the comment on I.02.221

The main theme of the narration is signaled right away. By theme I mean a basic unit of content or meaning in Homeric poetry: see the inventory of Words and Ideas. The signaling is accomplished by way of the first word of the very first verse of the Homeric Iliad. The word is mēnis ‘anger’, I.01.001, and it refers to the anger of Achilles. A definitive book on this word is Muellner 1996. The Master Narrator begins his narration by focusing on this anger: he invokes a Muse, as a goddess of inspiration whom he addresses here simply as theā ‘goddess’, and he calls on her to sing for him this anger, I.01.001. On the term Master Narrator, see the inventory of Words and Ideas; on the idea of the Muse(s) as the goddess(es) of poetic inspiration, see the general comment at I.02.484–487 and the special comments at I.02.484 and at I.02.761. The subject that the Master Narrator has chosen to narrate, the anger of Achilles, is the grammatical object of the verb aeidein ‘sing’. So, the narrative subject is the grammatical object. The Master Narrator is calling on the Muse to sing the anger, not just sing about the anger. The song is not only about the anger: it is the anger itself. The song captures the total reality of the anger. The Master Narrator proceeds to tell about this anger: it happened because of a quarrel, as signaled especially by the words erizein ‘have strife’ at I.01.006 and eris ‘strife’ at I.01.008. This quarrel in the Iliad is parallel to another quarrel that is narrated in a “micro-Iliad” that we find embedded in the Odyssey. This micro-Iliad is the First Song of Demodokos, O.08.072–083, and the quarrel there is signaled especially by the word neikos ‘quarrel’ at O.08.075. It has been debated whether the quarrel scene in this “micro-Iliad” was modeled on a quarrel-scene in the Cypria, which was part of the epic Cycle. On the terms epic and epic Cycle, see the Inventory of terms and names. But the quarrel scenes of the Iliad, the Cypria, and the “micro-Iliad” can be seen as stemming from epic traditions that were originally independent of each other. On the term epic, used here for the first time in these comments on the Homeric Iliad, see again the inventory of Words and Ideas.

The comments I offered in Classical Inquiries 2016-2017 on Iliad Rhapsody 1 through Rhapsody 24, starting here with Rhapsody 1, were based mostly on details that derive from seven books that I indicate in the Bibliography by way of these abbreviations: BA, GMP, H24H, HC, HPC, HQ, HR, MoM, PasP, PH. Each one of these books has its own index locorum. My colleague Anita Nikkanen, an Associate Editor for the online project A Homer commentary in progress, tracked the sequences of Homeric verses as listed in the indices for six of these books and then summarized my comments on those verses. Following up on her meticulous work, I am in the process of converting her summaries into a form of commentary that is being incorporated into AHCIP. My comments on the Iliad as I presented them in Classical Inquiries 2016-2017 are merely samplings of the content that I hope to contribute to the overall commentary, to which a number of other colleagues are also contributing their own comments. That said, I now proceed to offer a sampling of comments on Rhapsody 1. At this point, my comments about this beginning of beginnings need no further introduction of their own.

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“The Rage of Achilles,” by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1757, [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

This line features a syntactic formula of the type described by Milman Parry (Parry 1928:17-19 =  Parry 1971:14-16). It consists of the accusative of the noun mênis (μῆνιν, usually translated as 'rage, wrath, anger') at the beginning of the line followed by a subjective genitive name (of the person whom the mênis inhabits) with epithets that concludes the line, as in Iliad 1.75, 5.444, 16.711, 19.75 (in the last attestation, the grammatical pattern is the same except that the genitive is not subjective or objective); another multiform of this syntactic pattern occurs in Iliad 19.35, where a dative of the object of the anger (Agamemnon) occurs whereas a subjective genitive is found in the other examples. Either epithets for the name or a verb governing the accusative fill up the space between line-initial μῆνιν and the name + epithet combinations at the end of the line; the current line is the only example we have in which an imperative verb and a term of address, θεά, occur in that space, but then again, this is the prooimion of the poem, not the narrative proper. One expects variation in traditional dictional patterns when the context varies, and in this case the variation pertains exactly to the conventional content of this context. One can also say that the traditional diction points at or highlights a conventional narrative usage by placing it in an extra-narrative context.

Like every word in the epic song-generating system, mênin, the first word of the poem has expressive dimensions that were disclosed to its original audiences and performers through age-old, recurrent exposure to this poetry in performance. Those dimensions are invisible to us — unless we strive to rebuild them from the existing corpus of Homeric poetry. So this word  means potentially more and potentially different things than the English words “rage” or “anger” with which it is usually translated. A contextual analysis that this commentary will track over the course of the poem supports one point that we anticipate here. mēnis is a keyword of a 'theme' or relatively formalized, larger unit of traditional content (for a working definition of the term ‘theme’ in the study of traditional poetry, see Lord 2000: ch. 4). That theme recurs within a more or less consistent set of episodes and diction elsewhere in the Homeric corpus, so its occurrence evokes a set of narratives that have a discernible pattern or patterns. We will signal the details of the patterns and their recurring diction as they reach the reader’s eyes. However, we signal now that a most illuminating instance of the mênis theme, which would make good reading before reading or re-reading the beginning of the Iliad, occurs at Iliad 15.1-142.

References

Lord, A. 1960, 2nd ed. 2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge.

Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford. update

The mēnis ‘anger’ of Achilles at I.01.001 towards Agamemnon the over-king is parallel to the mēnis of Aeneas at I.13.459–461 towards Priam the over-king.