Antilochus, the Iliad's Mary Sue

Antilochus. Side A from an Attic red-figure neck-amphora, ca. 470 BC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald lists seven deaths that, in Homer, are given in 120 lines of hard fighting: Oinomaos, Askalaphos, Aphareus, Thoon, Antilochus, Deipuros, and Peisander.  Except one of these things is not like the others: Antilochus doesn't actually die here.  This is the second time she's killed Antilochus, quietly embedding him in a list of dead warriors,  when in fact Antilochus killed someone else in this passage (who isn't listed among the dead).  And here she's done it again: Adamas, son of Asios (who has just died), attacks Antilochus, but Poseidon likes Antilochus and saves him.  Adamas ducks in behind his friends but Meriones follows him and kills him particularly painfully (spear in the gut, midway between the navel and the privates, and he writhes around painfully until Meriones pulls out the spear and he dies).  Oswald skips all this and lists Antilochus among the dead.

The first time Oswald did this I thought it was a mistake, but this isn't a mistake.  Why does she keep killing off Antilochus?  He doesn't even die in the Iliad.  (He's killed later, by Memnon, or possibly by Paris at the same time as Achilles, or according to Hyginus Hector kills him, which would be a surprise to Homer, because Antilochus is still alive in the next book of the Iliad to put in a mediocre performance in the funeral games for Patroclus).  And everyone likes him, and he's Achilles' good buddy, and everyone likes his dad, and he's always up to fight some Trojans, bouncy and courageous and gay,  he is, in fact, the Mary Sue of the Iliad, the one that has puzzlingly been made way, way too likeable, as if Homer (or the entirety of the oral tradition really really liked him and thought the rest of us should too for no obvious reason.

But she keeps killing him off.  As if we should get in our mourning for Antilochus now, because he keeps being mentioned, but he doesn't get a proper death scene in the Iliad, but the fact is he is going to die before he makes it home, so let's mourn him in advance, as the only Greek warrior that everybody really likes, and she wants to remind us that he doesn't make it either?

Or, I don't know.  I wonder if Antilochus' inclusion in Memorial might be my way into writing about the poem.  It's odd in so many ways.  I could talk about the ways.

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Alcathous' beating heart

Poseidon holding a trident. Corinthian plaque, 550–525 BC. From Penteskouphia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Going through Oswald's translation of Alcathous' death scene line by line, the amazing thing is how much it retains of Homer, while giving us a very different version.  It begins "Somebody's husband somebody's daughter's husband" - Homer's begins "γαμβρὸς δ’ ἦν Ἀγχίσαο,/ πρεσβυτάτην δ’ ὤπυιε θυγατρῶν Ἱπποδάμειαν" "son-in-law of Anchises, he married the eldest of his daughters, Hippodamia" - and throughout, Oswald retains most of the Greek version, but what she leaves out is instructive: first, leaves out the first line (that Alcathous was the dear son of Aisyetes - usually she does give the parents, especially the mother, but this is not the mother); and throughout, leaves out the names of his wife, his father-in-law, the man who killed him (Idomeneus) and the god that charmed him so he couldn't move when Idomeneus attacked (Poseidon).

In place of this, Oswald says rather he was frozen with fear.  She then turns a simile into narrative: where Homer says he stood fixed "like a pillar or a high leafy tree", Oswald says

Like a pillar like a stunted tree
He couldn't bend his stones
He couldn't walk his roots

And so he dies, the spear swaying, ("tick tick tick" says Oswald), for a while, in his still-beating heart.

And then the simile, drawn from the beginning of book 13, where Poseidon enters the battle to ginger up the Greeks, and having given strength to the Aiantes he flies off "like a swift-winged hawk set out to fly, that having been raised up over a high rock destitute even of goats, rushes to pursue another bird of the plain" - to go ginger up some more Greeks.  And the next one he comes to is Idomeneus, who is the one who kills Alcathous, explicitly with Poseidon's help.  

Oswald's version:

Like a knife-winged hawk

Balanced on a cliff with no foothold

Not even a goat can climb there

Like when he lifts his blades and begins

That faultless fall

Through the birds of the valley 

And here as elsewhere it's perfectly clear she's going from the Greek, because no translation mentions goats; that comes from the Greek "αἰγίλιπος", "destitute even of goats" is what it actually means but it's usually translated as "sheer"; and "knife-winged and 'lifts his blades"" where translations have "swift-winged", because Oswald is not reading ὠκύπτερος, the Oxford text, but the variant ὀξύπτερος. 

This simile is wonderfully used: it is Poseidon who has fallen like a hawk knife-winged on poor Alcathous; at the same time it is Alcathous who is poised, about ("tick tick tick") to begin his fall.

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Asius the chickpea

I have forty deaths and a dozen similes after that to work through; at the rate of one a day, I'm - not going to be done by the end of May.  But what Oswald does is always interesting.  With Asius for example, she combines the four places he's mentioned in the Iliad, briefly in the Catalog and at some length in book 12 and 13, into 11 stripped-down lines that tell us everything we need.  Asius had great horses; they brought him all the way from Arisbe; but he couldn't leave them behind when he should have, and that's what killed him.

But it's the simile, once again, that really nails it.  It's the simile about beans and chickpeas getting blown away in all directions by the impact and the wind of the winnowing-shovel, and Homer uses it to describe how an arrow bounces off Menelaus' breastplate.   What's it doing here, though?  Once again, subject and object interchange.  In Homer, chickpea = object = arrow, driven by the winnower/Helenos, and bouncing off Menelaus (the subject's) breastplate.  Here, the chickpea = object = Asius, driven by his horses/the winds of fate/ his own foolish error, and bouncing off - well, in some direction, but not under his own control, and to his death.

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Cassandra the deer

Ajax drags Cassandra from Palladium (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald p. 47:

Like a deer in the hills wounded

Keeps running in pain

There are dogs following her bloodprints

But she goes on and on escaping into loneliness

To the very breaking of her being

Until it happens in some shadowy wood on a hilltop

She gives up

And the dogs set about eating her

But at last at evening a lion appears

A huge angel wandering the hills laying claim to the dead

And the dogs scatter

This is Oswald's translation of the simile from book 11 when Odysseus is fighting desperately, on his own, surrounded by Trojans, until Ajax (the greater) gets there to save his bacon.  And it's a weird simile in Homer, because the wounded deer, in Homer, has run as far as it can, and died, and is being eaten by the jackals. The lion (sent by a god, says Homer) isn't there to save the deer, which is dead anyway. The lion scatters the jackals so it can devour the deer itself.  But the deer is Odysseus, the jackals are the Trojans he's fending off, and the lion, Ajax, arrives to save, not kill him; so Odysseus is not the victim at all, and may even be the lion.

Oswald makes two changes that shift everything.  One is the placement of the simile, which Oswald puts after the death of Othryoneus, who came to Troy and offered to drive off the Greeks in exchange for the hand of Cassandra, and went off to battle and died, "and everyone laughed and laughed, except Cassandra".  And second, Oswald makes the deer feminine; in Homer it's masculine.  So the deer is Cassandra, wounded and bleeding, attacked by jackals - Ajax the lesser - and finally made a meal of by the lion, Agamemnon, who scatters the other rapists and takes her home to the slaughter.  In fact Oswald didn't have to change this simile at all, in her usual fashion; all she had to do was re-point it, towards an actual victim.

Have a look at the Poem of the Week (below).  A more sympathetic look at Penelope than Atwood gave us, but that's not hard.

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undefeated (I think)

English: Historic reconstruction of the landscape of Troy from Vol.2 of Alexander Popes The Iliad of Homer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like a stone 

Stands by a grave and says nothing

This is the first simile that I cannot locate in the Iliad.  It's too short for me to get a grip on it using Perseus, and I just don't have that encyclopedic knowledge of the Iliad that would enable me to fish it out of my own brain.  There are two stones marking a grave in the funeral games for Patroclos but they don't say nothing.  I mean, they do say nothing, but they aren't mentioned as saying nothing.

Sad now.  So far I've been batting 100%.

Several more Trojans have died, and one Greek.  Interesting simile that reveals, on close examination, that Homer knew all about Heisenberg and certainty deriving from collapsing wave formations (Bk 14).

ETA: must be Achilles' horses, standing still as a gravestone and weeping for their charioteer, because that's the only simile in the Iliad that is about gravestones.   Which makes it very interesting, because the horses are standing stock still and weeping, in Homer.  Here, it's the sea: Amphimachos has just died, who's descended from Poseidon, and you'd think Poseidon could do something, but the sea (says Oswald) just "lifted and flattened, lifted and flattened".  Doing, apparently, nothing, like a stone.  But actually Poseidon (in Homer) is very upset at Amphimachos' death; can't do anything about his death, but goes and riles up Idomeneus and other Greek warrios to go kill a lot of Trojans as a result.  So the sea/Poseidon seems to be doing nothing, but is doing a lot; and the horses seem to simply be standing there silently, but in fact they're mourning.

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and yet more Trojan dead

Trojans and Greeks from the Vergilius Romanus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another list of Trojan dead, this one even odder, because it occurs (in the Iliad) in the context of a panic-stricken rout of the Greeks desperately fleeing for their own gates.  All their best men have been wounded and withdrawn.  Hector and the Trojans are in full baying pursuit.  Two Lapiths, Peripoites and Leonteus, are holding the gates while the Greeks stream inside.  But every NAMED warrior that dies is a Trojan, and Oswald just gives them in a list, one after another, one per line.  She doesn't tell us they're Trojan or which Lapith kills them, unlike Homer; just the list:

And Pylon
Ormenos
Hippomachos
Antiphates
Menon
Iamenos
Orestes

Then a simile, based on the simile at the beginning of book 3, right after the catalog of ships and of Trojans.

Like the war cries of cranes going south escaping the rainEvery winter the clang of their wings going over usAnd the shock of their parachutes
Landing on someone else's fields

"Clang" translates κλαγγη, which appears 3 times in these lines in Greek.  "Someone else's fields" translates "bringing slaughter and death to the Pygmy men, and evil strife" in Homer.  Like the rest of this translation it is a marvel of compression. But what does it mean here?

In Homer, this simile describes the army of the Trojans and their allies, moving and calling noisily (unlike the Greeks, marching silently and, one gathers, breathing steam from their nostrils), carrying war the way the cranes carry war over the ocean to the pygmies.  But that was nine books ago.  Who is like the cranes here?  The Trojans aren't landing on someone else's fields in Book 12; they are directly attacking the Greek camp.  

But who is "us"?  "We" aren't the Greeks; we're just reading the Iliad. We're spectators.  The Trojans may be landing directly on the Greek fields and attacking their camp, but for us, they're still just flying overhead, parachuting onto someone else's fields.

And the simile isn't "like cranes"; it's "like the war cries of cranes".   The war cries of cranes sound like something: they sound like the list of names, being read out.  THOSE are the war cries; the names of the Trojan dead.  The cranes here like the cranes in the Iliad are flying over our heads, carrying, telling, the deaths of someone else.

And the cranes are out there because they've been forced out by winter storms and rain; torrent imagery again, where torrent = war. Perhaps not here though.

Not sure about why it's a regular event.  Perhaps because we know the Iliad so well.

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yet more Trojans die: Dorycles, Pandocus, Lysander, Pyrasus, Pylartes, Apisaon

In Homer, Ajax has just killed a whole whack of Trojans. Then a break in which Hector (we're told) kills a whole whack of Greeks, only we aren't given any of their names. Then one last Trojan, Apisaon, is killed by a friend of Ajax, and then the Greeks run hell for leather for the ships, pursued by ravening Trojans who don't, however, apparently manage to kill any of them. There will then be a break of a few hundred lines, well into the next book, while Nestor tells us at great length about how many Eleans he killed when he was a lad and how amazed everyone was, until finally someone else with a name dies (another Trojan). One can't help but notice that although Homer is at pains to tell us over and over either how even the battle is, or even that the Trojans are winning hands down, it's the Greeks who keep killing people with actual names.

Oswald just lists the names, doesn't tell us whether they're Greek or Trojan, or who killed them. This is only the second time she's used the same simile Homer does in the same place, of a river swollen with winter rains rushing down through the plains carrying all before it, trees, mud, everything, into the sea. She's fond of the torrent imagery; this is the 3rd or 4th such simile she's used. However Homer compares Ajax to the river in flood, carrying all before him (butchering - δαίζων, literally "cleaving" - horses and men alike in his charge across the field). (Just realised - this line must be the origin of the story that he responded to Achilles' armour being given to Odysseus at the end of the war by torturing and slaughtering a lot of sheep, under the impression they were the Greek high command; or, at least, the characterization harmonizes.  Who butchers horses?)

  Oswald just lists the names of the dead, then gives us the simile without Ajax; the river is transformed into an impersonal force, the war that charges across the plain, carrying all before it, broken and tumbled, Greeks and Trojans alike.

I am struggling with a cold here and feeling uninspired.

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more Trojans die

Achilles between Diomedes and Odysseus at Scyros. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Agastraphus, (Agastrophus in Homer), Thoon, Ennomus, Chersidamas, Charops, Socus.  


Again, we aren't told which side these men are on (they're all Trojans), or who killed them ( Diomedes killed the first one, was shot in the foot by Paris and withdrew, wounded; Odysseus, surrounded by Trojans, kills the rest, fighting desperately).  Oswald is only concerned with the deaths.


Agastraphus gets no simile, and the next three are given in a list;  they get more of a description in Homer, especially Chersidamas, whom Odysseus stabs under his shield as he leaps down from his chariot, and he falls in the dust (ἐν κονίῃσι), clutching the earth with his hand.  Oswald uses a simile to supply this bit of narrative, taking it from Book 23, Patroclos' funeral games, when Epeios strikes Euryalos so hard that he leaps up like a fish thrown out of the water by the north wind, that lands on the shore: 

" Like a fish in the wind
Jumps right out of its knowledge
And lands on the sand"    (Oswald p. 42) 

Marvellous translations as usual; for example,  Odysseus taunting the dead Socus "φθῆ σε τέλος θανάτοιο κιχήμενον, οὐδ’ ὑπάλυξας.", "The end of death got ahead of you, and you didn't evade it" turns into 

"poor Socus
Trying to get away from his own ending
Ran out his last moments in fear of the next ones". (Oswald p. 43)

Nicely encapsulates Socus running away (he was caught in the back by Odysseus' spear), trying to evade the ending that caught him anyway.


There follows a very interesting interaction between narrative and simile, and I'm struggling with it.  In Homer Odysseus taunts Socus that birds will strip his flesh, beating their wings around him, and his parents will never close his eyes for him in death.  Oswald describes the birds eating him mouthful by mouthful, and then this simile:

"Like when the wind comes ruffling at last to sailors adrift
Trying to manage the broken springs of their muscles
And lever and lift those well-rubbed oars
Making tiny dents in the ocean"(Oswald p. 43)

My first reaction is, what does this have to do with anything?  The simile comes from the beginning of Book 7, where the brothers Hector and Paris re-enter the battle, as welcome to the weary Trojans as a fresh breeze to sailors worn-out with rowing.   To add to the confusion, in context, the ruffling wind seems to refer most immediately to the vultures, gathering to strip their dead flesh.  Oswald has here done what she frequently does, and flipped the simile around, so what was subject becomes object and what was object becomes - something else entirely.  I think it goes something like this:

simile	in Iliad	in Memorial
breeze	the two Trojan brothers, Hector and Paris	the fluttering ("ruffling") of the birds around the dead Socus (and Charops)
weary with rowing	weary with fighting	weary with fighting (or running from death?)
sailors	Trojan warriors	the two Trojan brothers, Charops and Socus

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So two Trojan brothers as subject, longed-for helpers,  become two Trojan brothers as object, helpless dead; the weariness of fighting is increased and the activity is futile ("making tiny", i.e. futile, "dents in the ocean"), and the helping breeze becomes the ruffling feathers of the vultures around the bodies; the end of death is welcome.  Except not, because Socus was running, and the breeze doesn't help the sailors, though it does, I suppose, end their labour.

Inclined to wonder if I'm over-thinking.  I am assuming, for one thing, that every time Oswald uses a simile from elsewhere in the Iliad,  we can reasonably consider as significant both its present and its previous context and referents; she has placed the simile where it makes sense in her poem, but has also chosen it from a context that also casts light on its meaning in its present position.  Perhaps however she just picks similes that make sense where she puts them, and doesn't much care where they come from.  Or perhaps she doesn't always care.  I'm dubious about that, though; the context seems significant far too often.  I think the problem I'm having here is that it doesn't make a lot of sense to me in its present context in Memorial.  Well, mark for later consideration.

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Hippodamos and Hypeirochos

Diomedes and Athena attacking Ares (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are in the middle of Hector's interrupted aristeia.  He has killed a list of people, and now the Greeks are regrouping, or at least Diomedes and Odysseus are. Odysseus kills these two.

Homer gives one line for both: "Ἱππόδαμον δ’ Ὀδυσεὺς καὶ Ὑπείροχον ἐξενάριξεν" - "and Odysseus stripped Hippodamos and Hypeirochos" - and only half a sentence at that, with the other half taken up by Diomedes.  Oswald gives each of the dead a line ("And Hippodamos died ... And Hypeirochos died ...".  She doesn't say who killed them or which side they were on, and each one gets his own simile, but (unusually) not repeated.

The similes are interesting.  One is drawn from the break in Diomedes' aristeia, Iliad 5.596-600, where Diomedes, after he's been wounded by Pandaros, sees Hector coming with Ares beside him and like any sensible man, is brought up short - like a man crossing a plain who stops and steps back at the bank of a foaming river.  The second is drawn from Achilles' fight with the river Scamander, Iliad 21.281-283:  he's calling on the gods as the river chases him and threatens to overwhelm him (Oswald has already used the simile just previous to this one, about a man gardening and loosening a stream). He complains that he wishes he was going to get killed by a hero instead of being swept away in a river like a swineherd's boy trying to cross in a storm.

Diomedes and Achilles escape their rivers, metaphoric and real; Hippodamos and Hypeirochos do not.

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Adrestus and Amphius, the sons of Merops

Rainbow and storm cloud over factory in Indiana USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald  Memorial  p. 40

Also Adrestus and Amphius
Everyone knew they were going to die
They were the sons of Merops the prophet
He begged them to stay at home but they couldn't listen
Their own ghosts were calling them to Troy
Immaculate in clean linenThey set out together but Death
was already walking to meet them 

Like a goatherd stands on a rock
And sees a cloud blowing towards him
A black block of rain coming closer over the sea
Pushing a ripple of wind inland
He shivers and drives his flocks into a cave for shelter

A couple of interesting things going on here.  The "immaculate in white linen" line is a loose translation of "λινοθώρηξ", but has connotations of "walking to Troy in their shrouds", as in the cowboy in Streets of Laredo, "wrapped up in white linen and cold as the grave".  They are walking to their deaths and this is already known; they're dead men walking. Oswald gets the names from the Catalog of Ships; the rest of the lines are repeated in book 11.

The "goatherd" simile comes from Book 4 after the Paris/Menelaus incident. Agamemnon has just accused a bunch of Greeks of being like stunned fawns, and now moves on to where the two Aiantes are marshalling a bunch of boys who are dark and foreboding like a storm cloud about to bring a storm.  Here the storm cloud seen by the goatherd is the cloud Merops saw over his son's lives, the black Keres already leading them; this is the cloud that will engulf his sons, like stunned fawns,  in book 11. (Okay, they aren't actually described as stunned fawns.) Later a dozen Trojan boys "like stunned fawns" will be led out of the river by Achilles and bound to be sacrificed on Patroclus' funeral pyre.

post-conference life reboots

Robarts Library, Toronto, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia) - and I have not set foot in it this trip...

Back from the CAC, and spent the day editing my notes, adding scans of the handouts to my notes, and generally allowing perfectionism to get in the way of productivity in every possible way.  I'm surprised I didn't decide that collating and typing up all the bibliographies everyone handed out at their papers was a useful and sensible way to spend my time. Somehow I managed to draw the line.  Looking forward to reading the paper on Cherrie Moraga's Medea, and wondering if I should try to go to a European conference or two; there is some very interesting research going on there lately and I feel quite cut off from it.

The idea was that I would spend a couple of days at Robarts Library before I head back to the coast, but in fact I'm not ready to do that yet; still tracking down the Homeric references in Oswald, which I plan to resume tomorrow.  Then to revise the paper I actually gave into the Ideal Perfect Conference Paper that exists in pure form only in my mind, and which I naturally had no time to produce before the conference; and then to figure out who to send it to for comments.  Ideally someone who can tell me whether I ought to pursue the project, or just accept that it was an interesting conference paper, now get back to my regularly-scheduled Euripides research.

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secondary literature

The plasted model was exhibited at the 1802 Salon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Still working my way through the Homer references.  Oswald amplifies the scenes more later in the poem, going for greater poignancy and more vivid images.  I don't yet know if she skips any more deaths; I'll check that tomorrow.

Her treatment of Iphidamas and Coön, especially Coön, is particularly poignant; struck down as he's trying to drag his wounded (well, actually dead, but he's not thinking) brother out of the battle, calling out desperately for help, and he loses his own head.

I've put together a page with an initial list of secondary literature I mean to read as I revise the paper (in the sidebar).

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but their ghosts said nothing

Agamemnon (Photo credit: kameraadpjotr)

The death scenes are becoming more interesting as they get longer.  Oswald describes the deaths of Peisander and Hippolochus during Agamemnon's aristeia; their horses run away from them, they stand in the chariot and offer a ransom, their father is a rich man.  But Agamemnon says in case you hadn't noticed, kids, I'm having an aristeia, and kills them.  Well, no, he doesn't; he says "your father tried to get my brother killed by treachery", and then he slaughters them.  Homer is quite graphic about the method of their deaths; Oswald is not.  Oswald ends (p. 37)

But Agamemnon remembered
Their father was that sly old man
Who tried to murder Menelaus
Antimachus assured them
He had acted in good faith
But their ghosts said nothing

Simile, of rocks standing against a wild sea, is used of the Greeks fending off Hector at the ships in book 15; here it seems to be Peisander and Hippolochus, standing against Agamemnon, or standing stunned as he rushes towards them to overwhelm them, more like.

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Rhesus, Isos, and Antiphos

Odysseus (wearing the pilos hat) and Diomedes stealing the horses of Thracian king Rhesus they have just killed. Apulian red-figure situla by the Lycurgus Painter, ca. 360 BC. Stored in the Museo Nazionale Archaeologico in Naples. Français : Ulysse (portant le pilos) et Diomède volant les chevaux du roi thrace Rhésos qu'ils viennent de tuer. Situle apulienne à figures rouges du Peintre de Lycurgue, vers 360 av. J.-C. Conservé au Musée national archéologique de Naples. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The improbable exploit of Diomedes and Odysseus against Rhesus is next.  (I say improbable, because how likely is it that one man could kill thirteen men with an edged weapon, I don't care how tired they are, without the screams and thrashings of at least one of them waking up the rest? Also, Rhesus and his men were sleeping closest to the enemy ships; why on earth didn't they post a sentry? But I digress.)

Oswald's translations, as always, vivid and spot-on.  Homer describes the Thracian weapons as κάλα and κέκλιτο εὖ κατὰ κόσμον, 10.472; she translates as ""cleaned and layed down like cutlery" (κέκλιτο εὖ κατὰ κόσμον, 10.472), quite wonderful, as is her description of Diomedes killing the Thracians, "red faced quietly like a butcher keeping up with his order/Got rid of them", instead of "As a lion springs furiously upon a flock of sheep or goats when he finds them without their shepherd" as Homer has it.  (ὡς δὲ λέων μήλοισιν ἀσημάντοισιν ἐπελθὼν

αἴγεσιν ἢ ὀΐεσσι κακὰ φρονέων ἐνορούσῃ, 10.485-486),.  However then Oswald goes on to use a sheep image involving wolves for Odysseus & Diomedes; ; this one from Patroclus' aristeia and the Greeks are chasing the Trojans all the way back to Troy and the Trojans are scattering terrified.  Odysseus & Diomedes are presumably the wolves; the sheep are the Thracians, their shepherd is Rhesus; but they're all asleep.  Perhaps "wolves" rather than lions in a gesture towards the wolf-skin poor craven Dolon was wearing.

Oswald skips the first two deaths in Agamemnon's aristeia in book 11, Bienor and Oileus his charioteer, and moves on to Isos and Antiphos, whom she doesn't mention are sons of Priam, one legitimate, one not.  They're farmboys, who got taken on a great adventure once when Achilles captured them and took them to meet Agamemnon. They came home "proud as astronauts", joined the army, and were killed by Agamemnon.

The wave-simile she then uses is used in Homer of Hector at the ships in book 15, raging around the Greeks; in Oswald the focus isn't the wave, but the sailors engulfed in it, "star(ing) at mid-air"; poor Isos and Antiphos, never expecting this.

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The death of the pathetic Dolon

Dolón atrapado por Odiseo y Diomedes. Museo Británico (Photo credit: elaios2008)

Oswald condenses 150 lines of Homer (the Doloneia) into 17, and includes pretty much everything essential.  (since she isn't interested in Odysseus or Diomedes).  She's skipped ahead 2 books, but nobody has died since Archeptolemos in Book 8: in the end of Book 8 the Greeks ran back to their ships, Book 9 is the embassy to Achilles, and Book 10 begins with the night councils. Finally two scouts sent out by Agamemnon, Diomedes & Odysseus, meet the scout sent out by Hector, Dolon, and Oswald picks up at the death scene.

I haven't been saying much about the death scenes, which are the whole point, or so I thought the first time I read Memorial.  Here Oswald begins with the mourning of women ("What was that shrill sound/Five sisters at the grave/ Calling the ghost of Dolon"), tells remarkably compactly the story of Dolon, "ugly but quick", caught by Odysseus and Diomedes and desperately telling them everything he knows, where the Trojans are, where the allies are, where Rhesus and his beautiful chariot and armour and wonderful horses are, offering a ransom, offering anything, and then they kill him anyway ("And was still pleading for his head/ When his head rolled in the mud").  She doesn't mention Odysseus or Diomedes; here as frequently elsewhere, the identity of the killer is not what Memorial focusses on. 

The simile, of the fly that keeps coming back to bite some more no matter how often it's warded off, is initially from the battle over the body of Patroclus (again); Menelaus is given the courage and persistence of an especially irritating fly by Athena.  This simile is transferred to the persistent and irritating Dolon, who however gets squashed.

This is the first place where I've found Homer's use of a simile a little more interesting than Oswald's, only because giving Menelaus the courage and persistence of a fly - meant positively - is so counter-intuitive; where describing Dolon, who does keep trying, desperately, over and over, to save his own life by telling them absolutely everything, and in Homer as in Oswald is both pathetic and contemptible, an insect in his little ferret-skin cap, it's an obvious comparison. Perhaps I'm missing something.

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Wanted short term: a charioteer for Hector

Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus (Photo credit: rjhuttondfw)

Hector's lost two charioteers in 200 lines now, Eniopeus and Archeptolemos, both when someone took a shot at Hector and missed, and he will lose Cebriones in book 16 in the fight around Patroclus.  Might as well just paint a target on their armour (the breastplate, just under the nipple; that's how the first two went, at least). 

Oswald uses a "burning city" simile here, which she imports from the battle around Patroclus, which I couldn't place until I had a look at Bruce Louden's book, "The Iliad: Structure, Myth and Meaning" (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2006).  Thank you,  Google Books.  Must read the rest of it.

Oswald has already used the following simile from this scene, in which Menelaus & Meriones are compared to mules, dragging a heavy log from a mountain.  But the Trojans and the battle they bring are fire engulfing them like a city; and of course like the fire that is going to engulf their city as a result of the death of Patroclus, because now Achilles is going to kill Hector, and after that, all falls.  I must take a look at how many of the similes she uses are drawn from the fight around the body of Patroclus, the one whose death is the most greatly mourned of all, if you measure by "causing more deaths that are described in the Iliad".  Beginning to wonder if where I started - that the whole Iliad can be read as a lament for Hector - was a misreading, and actually it can all be read as a lament for Patroclus, from which Hector's death (among others) results.

I am stunned as always by the brilliance of Oswald's retranslation.  Here's a literal translation:

And the battle was stretched against them savage as fire
That rushing on a city of men rising up suddenly burns it up, and the houses diminish
in a great blaze; and the force of the wind makes it roar.

Now here's Oswald (p. 32):

Like fire with its loose hair flying rushes through the city
The look of unmasked light shocks everything to rubble
And flames howl through the gaps 

So why this simile here? I think because she talks about Archeptolemos' absence, and then moves to the gaps in the walls caused by the fire, and the flame roars through the gaps; Archeptolemos' death is one of the gaps that's been created by the fire/war, and we can see the war through the gap in the defenses he's left behind.  I think.

(Thinking about this next morning): The flame has fed on Archeptolemos, and can now burn even hotter and brighter, because it's been fed by his death, and because he is not there to help defend against it; so there's a gap in the wall for the fire to get in. But this is all in Homer too, whom I am daily appreciating more.

(After conversation with Lauren) Completely missed the coolest thing about this simile: the "loose hair flying" rushing through the city is an image of a woman in mourning; the "unmasked light" is the anakalupsis of the bride.  The fire, like a woman in mourning, like a bride whose husband is lost, rushes through the city, howling.  And so Oswald reintroduces women, and mourning women, into a part of Homer that only has men.