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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