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| English: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Achilles and Priam (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I'm trying to follow Oswald's sequence here.
In Homer, Hector kills Epeigeus as he's about to strip the corpse of Sarpedon, and crushes his skull with a big rock and he falls dead on the corpse. He was a prince in Budeion, until he "stripped the corpse" of a cousin, and was sent off as a suppliant to Peleus, and then to Troy, and then died as he stripped the corpse of Sarpedon,or tried to, on the battlefield. So his life story, in Homer, begins and ends with two corpse-strippings; one successful, one attempted.
Oswald charts this as changes - Epeigeus went from well-regarded prince to runaway, beggar, soldier, and corpse. And then she uses the astonishing simile used of Priam when he kisses Achilles' bloody hands, and everyone was as astonished to see him,
"as when strong folly (ἄτη) takes a man, who in his fatherland
having killed someone leaves to the country of others
into (the house) of a rich man, and wonder holds those looking at him,
so Achilles was astonished seeing Priam, like a god".
But Oswald says "like anger that ... can change any man into a murderer" - but what's like anger? As far as I can tell, here, it's the rock; anger changes a man into something entirely different, a beggar seeking shelter, a different person, the way the rock turned Epeigeus into something different, a shade, a corpse, someone he wouldn't recognize himself as.
But what does it bring to Oswald's poem that this is the simile used of Priam when he comes to Achilles as a suppliant? Because Epeigeus actually IS a murderous suppliant, where Priam is not; Achilles is the one who has killed, and Priam is the suppliant to him; the blood is printed on Achilles' hands. Anger changed Epeigeus into a killer and ultimately a corpse; it turned Priam into a suppliant and ultimately into a corpse; I'm still not getting this.
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