comment on the goal of the second to last segment of the poem, books 17-20, Achilles’ return to battle, and their relationship with the final segment

By now Achilles has a new set of armor, and he is ready to fight the Trojans. But his first major opponent seems to be a distraction. At least, our initial impression may lead us to think that there is a distraction going on here. The first major opponent of Achilles in Iliad 20 is Aeneas, hero of epic traditions that eventually became absorbed into the Aeneid of Virgil. Is this hero, we may ask, a truly worthy opponent of Achilles? Are the epic traditions that figure this son of Aphrodite / Venus truly worthy of the epic that is the Homeric Iliad? Once we examine more closely the oldest Greek epic traditions of Aeneas, it will become clear that this hero is indeed a most important opponent of Achilles, in that he represents ancient Greek epic traditions that are different from and antithetical to the epic tradition that prevailed in the Homeric Iliad as we know it. Not only does Aeneas challenge Achilles: even the epic traditions that figure Aeneas will challenge the epic traditions that figure Achilles. To say it another way, Aeneas represents a proto-Aeneid that challenges the proto-Iliad of Achilles. What makes Aeneas and his Aeneid—or, better, Aeneids—such a formidable challenge to Achilles is the enormous political prestige of the epic tradition that backs up Aeneas. By virtue of being the son of Aphrodite/Venus, Aeneas possesses a genealogical and dynastic charisma that threatens to overshadow the purely epic charisma of his Iliadic opponent Achilles.

“Venus preventing her son Aeneas from killing Helen of Troy,” Luca Ferrari, circa 1650. Luca Ferrari [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

In this speech, Achilles speaks to Aeneas from the standpoint of an epic tradition that glorifies primarily Achilles. On the other hand, in the corresponding speech of Aeneas to Achilles, I.20.200–258, we will see that Aeneas speaks to Achilles from the standpoint of a different though related epic tradition. This different traditions, as we will see, glorifies primarily Aeneas himself.

Achilles tells about a past encounter with Aeneas in an epic story that is situated outside the time-frame of the Iliad, I.20.187–194. The story supplements what Aeneas says at I.20.089–098 about such an encounter, where that hero tells a different though related version of the same story. The differences are highlighted in the story as told by Achilles here at I.20.187–194, where we find additional details about the escape of Aeneas from Achilles. According to this version of the story, Aeneas seems to have escaped from Achilles not once but twice: after Aeneas ran down from the highlands of Mount Ida and reached the coastland without getting caught by Achilles, he found refuge in the city of Lyrnessos, which Achilles then destroyed—but without catching him, since Aeneas somehow escaped, I.20.190–194. In this narrative, Achilles knows that it must have been the gods who made it possible for Aeneas to escape, but he does not know the exact identity of the god who actually rescued that hero: the wording of Achilles is ostentatiously vague when he refers at I.20.194 to the action of ‘Zeus and other gods’ in rescuing Aeneas from the besieged city of Lyrnessos before Achilles destroyed it. This vagueness about the interference of the gods is relevant to what will happen in the upcoming encounter between Aeneas and Achilles. As we will see in the comment on I.20.290–352, Achilles will be literally kept in the dark about the identity of the god who will rescue Aeneas from being killed when the two heroes finally engage in mortal combat. That said, I return to my focus on the second escape of Aeneas from Lyrnessos—following his first escape when he ran down to that city from the highlands of Mount Ida. The details we have seen about the second escape explain why only Lyrnessos is mentioned in the version of the story as told by Achilles, unlike the version as told by Aeneas, where both Pedasos and Lyrnessos are mentioned. The second escape of Aeneas, from a besieged city, could only have happened at one of the two cities of Pedasos and Lyrnessos, which were both ultimately destroyed by Achilles. Aeneas could not have been present in two besieged cities at the same time. I propose, then, that Pedasos and Lyrnessos were alternative places of refuge for Aeneas in alternative versions of his story, just as these same two cities had been alternative places of residence for Briseis in alternative versions of her own story, as I noted in the comment on I.16.057. In yet another story, there was yet another city from which Aeneas escaped before it was completely destroyed. The dramatic time of this other story, unlike the stories we have just considered about the cities of Pedasos and Lyrnessos, comes after rather than before the dramatic time of the Iliad. This other story is about the city of Troy itself, and, in this story as well, Aeneas managed to escape before the city was completely destroyed. The story was told in an Ionian epic that belonged to the epic Cycle, and the name of this epic was the Iliou Persis ‘Destruction of Ilion’, attributed to Arctinus of Miletus, Proclus summary p. 107.24–26 ed. Allen 1912. On the epic Cycle, see the inventory of Words and Ideas.

comment on the expression ē ou memnēi in the context of analysis of the presence of other traditions in the Iliad, here the Capture of Lyrnessos and Pedasos, and Aeneid tradition vs. one of Achilles and the vocabulary of poetry of blame and kleos

In the wording of Achilles here, his boast about his swift-footedness is a paraphrase, as it were, of the epithets that describe him as swift-footed. There are over 30 occurrences of the epithet podas ōkus ‘swift-footed’ and over 20 occurrences of podōkēs ‘swift-footed’.

In this speech, Aeneas speaks to Achilles from the standpoint of an epic tradition that glorifies primarily Aeneas, not Achilles. At I.20.200, Aeneas uses the word epea ‘words’ in referring negatively to the earlier speech of Achilles, I.20.178–198, where Achilles had spoken from the standpoint of an epic tradition that glorified primarily Achilles. This word epea—pronounced as epē in prose—normally means simply ‘words’ when it is used inside of epic diction, but it can also mean ‘words of poetry’ when it is used outside of such diction in contexts referring to poetry, especially to epic poetry. In prose, this kind of usage leads to the explicit meaning of epē as ‘epic poetry’. And, exceptionally, such a meaning of epē can even occur within the diction of epic poetry itself. That is what seems to be happening in the context of I.20.200, where epea refers to the words of Achilles as if they were the ‘poetic words’ of epic—that is, as if these words were the equivalent of epic itself. Do not try to intimidate me, Aeneas says to Achilles at I.20.200–201, by telling epea ‘words’ about past epic events like our mutual encounter in the highlands of Mount Ida and beyond. Yes, some epics will glorify you, but there are other epics that will glorify me instead. See further in the comment below on I.20.248–250. By implication, Aeneas is saying here that he has access to a different though related version of epic events, and that such a version will glorify him at the expense of Achilles. In fact, the entire speech of Aeneas at I.20.200–258 is a glorification of this hero by way of an epic tradition that is different from though related to the tradition that glorifies Achilles. This different tradition, as Aeneas goes on to demonstrate, glorifies primarily Aeneas himself. Meanwhile, the poetic implications of the word epea as ‘epic’ now become more explicit at I.20.203–205. Aeneas says here that he and Achilles know stories about each other not because they have been eyewitnesses to these stories, I.20.205, but because they both have heard, as other listeners have also heard, the epea that are the stories, and these epea are pro-kluta ‘glorious’, I.20.204. In this context, then, the word epea comes close to meaning ‘epics’, since the idea of pro-kluta as poetically ‘glorious’ is linked with the etymology of this adjective as ‘prominently heard’, just as the idea of kleos as a poetic kind of ‘glory’ is linked with the etymology of this noun as ‘the thing that is heard’. See the comment on I.02.484–487. Also relevant to the sense of epea as ‘words of poetry’ is the mutual negativity of the rivalry that is ongoing here between the two different epic traditions about Aeneas and Achilles. For example, there is an insulting reference that Aeneas makes at I.20.211 to the epea as recounted by Achilles about Aeneas. Those epea or ‘words of poetry’, as a veritable ‘epic’ told by Achilles, were certainly negative about Aeneas, just as Aeneas is now speaking negatively about Achilles and about that hero’s role in those same epea. Such mutual negativity is expressed by way of using words of blame poetry as contained within the epic, even though epic sees itself as a form of poetry that engages primarily in words of praise. The negativity of blame poetry is actually signaled in the words of Aeneas at I.20.251, who uses the noun neikea, plural of neikos ‘quarrel’, in referring to the mutual negativity that the two heroes express in their speeches to and about each other. See further in the comment on I.20.244–256.

analysis of cases where speeches introduced/concluded by formulas (X) = introduce speech – Greek speaker – dead Trojan, or (Y) = conclude speech – Trojan speaker – dead Greek, are challenges to a confrontation with another hero, and as here, genos-speeches as in fact challenges

Aeneas' words to Achilles at 20.203-204—"We know each other's genealogy, we know the parents, from hearing the famous epea of mortal men"—illuminate the fundamental distinction between muthos and epos. The adjective proklut' literally means "heard before"; only in the context of oral tradition can this word come to mean "famous," as happens also with the noun kleos, "glory." Gregory Nagy has shown that epea here refers to poetic utterances in the form of traditional narratives about Aeneas. What the passage underlines is the significant distinction between "telling" blameful things (oneidea)—an act described with the verb muthēsasthai—and "hearing" utterances (epea): muthos is associated with the speaker's action in giving a message, while epos refers to the transmission of the message, the end-product of the speech process (Martin 1993:16-17).

In the same speech at 20.246-50, Aeneas develops the contrast further: muthoi are figured as heavy, tangible goods—"nor could a ship with a hundred benches bear the load"—while epea "travel about here and there in a wide field," like small objects that can be batted to and fro, part of a general system of exchange: "whatever epos you say, you hear in return." Muthoi are the large units, epea the small (Martin 1993:17-18).

References

Martin, R. P. 1993. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.