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| Ulysses (with a pilos) and Greek warriors around the body of Patroclus. Detail of a silver oinochoe dedicated ,by Q. Domitius Tutus, made in Italy, first half of the 1st century AD. From the Berthouville treasure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Homer now gives us 200 lines of Greeks slaughtering Trojans. First every Greek leader kills his own
Trojan, a kind of bring-your-own-(dead)-Trojan buffet; then
Patroclus starts slaughtering them wholesale. We get descriptions of how each one died as long as they're being killed by different Greek chieftains, but when Patroclus steps in we just get a list of names of the Trojans he slaughters. Oswald gives us nothing but a list of 21 names; we aren't told who killed each one and she doesn't differentiate between the ones killed by other Greeks and the list of those killed by Patroclus. The list ends with the name of
Sarpedon's charioteer, Thrasymelos, which in Homer is preceded by the lengthy discussion between
Zeus and
Hera about the coming death of Zeus' son Sarpedon, which Zeus would like to avoid (and which is important because he is Zeus' son).
The importance of the slaughter in Homer is that the tide of battle has now turned back, and the Greeks are winning again; and that Patroclus may be primarily important as
Achilles' close friend and companion, but he is a formidable warrior in his own right. Since he's going to die soon he needs to be given weight and importance of his own, and this aggregation of deaths gives him that. Even the Trojans killed by the other Greeks redound to Patroclus' credit because they occur after his arming scene and because his appearance has heartened the Greeks to go back on the attack. Oswald elides the foreshadowing of the death of Sarpedon, which gives weight to all the deaths, and to the death of Thrasymelos, because here as elsewhere she lets individual deaths stand on their own.
After this list Oswald gives us this simile:
Like hawk wings cut through a sheet of starlings
Like wing-scissors open and close
Through a billow of jackdaws
This comes from a simile that actually shows up fairly close to this scene in Homer. After Patroclus kills Sarpedon, a Trojan kills a Greek (whom we've never heard of before) over his body, and Patroclus, enraged at his sudden new BFF's death, returns to the Sarpedon's corpse:
"And he went straight through the fore-fighters like a hawk
swiftly, who terrifies the jackdaws and starlings;
so you, horse-driving Patroklos, drove off the Lykians and Trojans,
and your heart was angered for your companion."
I initially thought that Oswald was using the simile exactly the same way, and even about the same person (Patroclus), but actually not quite. In Homer, the hawk is the subject. In Oswald, the hawk doesn't appear; only the hawk wings, the hawk's effect, like scissors, cutting through a sheet of starlings, a billow of jackdaws. Homer's hawk is Patroclus; Oswald's hawk is death, impersonal; the starlings and jackdaws are the living beings here.
