While the Trojans are mourning Hector in Troy, I.23.001, Achilles and his fellow Achaeans have all returned to the ships beached at the Hellespont, I.23.001–002, and the hero now calls on the Myrmidons, whose leader he is, to perform special funerary rituals in mourning for Patroklos. The Myrmidon warriors are to mourn Patroklos while driving their chariots around his dead body three times, I.23.007–009, I.23.013–014, after which they are to unharness the chariots and join in a funeral feast arranged by Achilles. The ritual act of mourning while driving, as performed by the Myrmidons, is described overall as a góos ‘lament’, I.23.010, for which Achilles himself is the principal performer, as signaled by the verb arkhein ‘lead off [in performing]’, I.23.012. The words of his lead-off lament are quoted at I.23.019–023. In this lament, Achilles addresses the dead Patroklos and repeats to him at I.23.20–23 the two deeds that he had promised at I.18.334–337 to perform before the funeral could take place. First, Achilles had promised to bring back, together with the dead body of Hector, the armor that Hector had stripped from the dead body of Patroklos, and now he reiterates that promise, adding two ghastly details about the dead body of Hector: he has dragged the corpse behind his chariot and intends to feed it to the dogs, I.23.021. And, second, Achilles had also promised to slaughter twelve captive Trojan youths on the funeral pyre of Patroklos and then to cremate their bodies together with the body of Patroklos himself, I.23.022–23. After repeating these promises to Patroklos within the wording of his quoted lament, I.23.020–023, Achilles now prepares for the funeral feast—but not before displaying the dead body of Hector, lying face down in the dust, I.23.024–026, next to the stand where the dead body of Patroklos is lying in state. Then, after the Myrmidons unharness their chariots, I.23.026–027, they sit down next to the ship of Achilles in order to partake of the feast, I.23.028, and the slaughter of the sacrificial animals to be eaten at the funeral feast gets underway, I.23.029–034. Nothing is said here about cooking the meat. Instead, the last thing said about this funeral feast of the Myrmidons is that the blood flowing from the mass slaughter of sacrificial animals is streaming all around the corpse of Patroklos, I.23.034. It seems as if the Myrmidons were feasting on raw meat, just as their leader Achilles had expressed the ghastly desire to cut up the mortally wounded Hector and to eat him raw, I.22.346–347. See the comment on I.22.346–348. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Achaeans come to the ship of Achilles and persuade him, with some difficulty, to leave behind the funeral feast of the Myrmidons and to come along with them to the headquarters of Agamemnon, I.23.035–038, where the order is given to prepare for Achilles some hot water for him to wash off all the blood that still covers him, I.23.039–041. Evidently, Agamemnon is preparing for an all-Achaean feast to be attended by Achilles, who is now expected to wash up before the feast begins. And it is only at this moment that we see for the first time that Achilles is still covered in gore. The blood of all the Trojans he has slaughtered on the battlefield is still on him and with him. Already before, Achilles must have been covered in gore when he had hosted the feast for that sub-set of Achaeans who were his own people, the Myrmidons. Back then, neither Achilles nor any of his Myrmidons had washed off the human blood of the killing fields before the shedding of the animal blood at the sacrifice that preceded their funeral feast. But now, for the all-Achaean feast, Achilles is expected to wash up. Not surprisingly, Achilles refuses, declaring at I.23.043–044 that he will remain covered with gore and will refrain from washing off the blood until he performs three sacred tasks. He now names these tasks at I.23.045–046: first, he will cremate Patroklos, I.23.045, and, second, he will make a tumulus that will be a sēma ‘tomb’ for Patroklos, I.23.045, and, third, he will at an earlier point cut off a long lock of his own hair as a sacrifice to be burned on the funeral pyre of his friend, I.23.046. That said, however, Achilles goes on to urge Agamemnon to continue with the plan for an all-Achaean feast, I.23.048—provided that the Achaeans follow up on their nighttime feasting by going out next morning in order to gather firewood for constructing the funeral pyre that will be used for the cremation of Patroklos, I.23.049–053. The Achaeans proceed to indulge in their feasting and then return to their shelters for a night’s sleep, I.23.054–058, while Achilles goes off without having had anything to eat, mourning Patroklos, and he finds a solitary spot on the beach, where he lies down, exhausted, and falls into a deep sleep, I.23.059–064. What will happen next, at I.23.071-076, is the apparition of the spirit of Patroklos. Before commenting on the apparition scene, however, I must pause to note that the narrative has already indicated five salient points of dysfunctionality in the preparations of Achilles for the funeral of Patroklos:

Point 1. The intent of Achilles to slaughter twelve captive Trojan youths as a human sacrifice is understood to be ritually incorrect. See the comment on I.23.163–183. And the fact that he will go through with it and will actually perform the deed will in retrospect be understood to be morally incorrect as well. See the comment on I.23.163–183. In myth, human sacrifice is a pollution, both ritually and morally. And such pollution is typical of what can perhaps best be described as a traditional pattern of dysfunctionality in myth—as opposed to functionality in ritual, where animal sacrifice is understood to be a salvific replacement of human sacrifice. As we see from the myth of Pelops as narrated in Pindar’s Olympian 1, for example, the slaughtering of Pelops is a dysfunctional sacrifice in the heroic world of myth, but it becomes an aetiology for the functional sacrifice of rams in the post-heroic world of ritual as practiced in Olympia during the archaic and Classical periods and beyond (detailed analysis in PH 116–135). In this connection, I offer a working definition of aetiology (background in PH 118, 125–130; 141–142; 386; 395–397; also Nagy 2011a§68): an aetiology focuses on a foundational catastrophe in the mythologized past that explains and thus motivates continuing success in the ritualized present and future.

Point 2. The dragging of Hector’s corpse by Achilles is likewise understood to be ritually incorrect, and such incorrectness is in this case noted by Homeric poetry, which signals also the moral incorrectness of mistreating a corpse. See the comment on I.23.163–183. Here I invoke a general principle at work in myths about ancient Greek heroes: whenever heroes commit deeds that clearly violate moral codes, such deeds are not condoned by the heroic narrative. See H24H 1§52, where I work out an analysis of such a principle, to be summarized in this formulation: the pollution of a hero in myth is relevant to the worship of that hero in ritual. Especially relevant to this formulation, as we will see in later comments, are myths that aetiologize rituals of seasonally recurring athletic competitions: the ritual of competing in an athletic event is thought to purify the original pollution of the hero in myth (analysis in H24H 7a§14).

Point 3. The intent of Achilles to feed Hector’s corpse to dogs and birds is clearly understood to be a blatant abomination both ritually and morally. In this case, however, Achilles will never get to perform such a horrific deed.

Point 4. There is something wrong about the funeral feast of the Myrmidons as arranged by Achilles. The blood of sacrifice is not offset here by any mention of cooking the meat to be eaten.

Point 5. Achilles is ritually incorrect in not purifying himself of human blood before he undertakes the three ritually correct actions of cutting his hair, cremating the body of Patroklos, and entombing his bones.

All five of these points, as we will see retrospectively in the anchor comment at I.23.184–191, are examples of pollution.

The funeral that Achilles arranges here for Patroklos in the Iliad is in some ways a preview of the funeral that the Achaeans will arrange for Achilles himself beyond the time-frame of the Iliad. A high point of the funeral in Iliad 23 is a spectacular chariot race arranged by Achilles to honor his dead comrade Patroklos. But an earlier high point is a comparably spectacular cremation of his friend’s body. But this cremation of Patroklos, as a ritual, is far from perfect: it is in fact polluted, and the pollution will make Achilles look bad, at least for the moment. The polluted thoughts of the hero, as evidenced by his dragging the corpse of Hector behind his speeding chariot, will drive him to extremes that will challenge the cosmic order. But the Master Narrator of the Iliad will remedy the pollution, and the remedy will take the form of actually narrating the grim story. In the process of this narration, a great lesson will be learned about life, death, and a hoped-for recovery of life.

Achilles dragging the body of Hector. Copperplate etching (1795) by Tommaso Piroli, after a drawing (1793) by John Flaxman. Image via Wikimedia Commons.