Patroclus' aristeia, not

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.

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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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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death of Adrestus; axe and spear

Antalya Archaeological Museum. Ancient Roman sarcophagus of Aurelia Botania Demetria ( 2nd century AD ): Aphrodite is concealing Paris who is defeated by Menelaos. Odysseus is looking at the szene. Deutsch: Archäologisches Museum in Antalya. Römischer Sarkophag der Aurelia Botania Demetria ( 2.Jhdt.n.Chr. ): Aphrodite verbirgt Paris, der von Menelaos geschlagen worden ist. Odysseus sieht zu. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More and more I'm finding that the use of the similes is engaging me; when I originally read this poem I barely noticed them and couldn't figure out what they were for.  Here Oswald tells us about the death of Adrastus at Menelaus' hands; he begged for his life and nearly persuaded Menelaus but Agamemnon came up and told him to show Trojans no mercy; after all, had Trojans been good to his house?  Better to kill them all.  And that was that. Menelaus' spear swung like a sundial indicator, the decision wavering in the balance, but then it fell.

 She continues with the simile of an axe, that a shipwright uses to cut timbers for a boat, and it swings his arm for him as "an iron decision", as Menelaus' spear is an 'iron decision' for Adrestus, and swung Menelaus' wavering heart.  But the interesting thing is that the simile of the shipwright's axe shows up in the Iliad, only this time it is unwavering and unflinching; Paris uses this image to describe Hector's heart, constantly under Hector's control, adding force to his will - and how unlike Paris' heart, which tends to lead him to sneak off home to shag his wife.  But then, Aphrodite's like that, and there's no point complaining.

So the simile, originally spoken by Paris, to describe another Trojan hero's unwavering heart, is used by Oswald to describe the wavering weapon of Helen's last (Greek) husband, who has to be talked into killing by Agamemnon; eventually the axe/spear makes the decision for the man.  How does this fit the overall strategy?  That Adrastus could have lived; it underlines how indecisive and impotent Menelaus is, rather like Paris in fact; huh - got it - in both cases we are looking at 2 brothers, and the leader/warrior one has to talk the other one into fighting.  And in both cases the second brother is or has been married to Helen.That's the association that connects the two.

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