Plotting the iliad
One of the oldest stories in human history are the epics of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad is about the wrath of Achilles, and about the battles that are being fought around Troy. This is also the story I have chosen to investigate; you could look at the Iliad as a epic and mythological story, but I chose to look at it as if it were the precise description of a network.
And so it is, indeed. A very complicated and extensive network. It does not only cover three major groups – Trojans, Greeks, and Gods – but also the important relatives of the heroes that are involved in the battle. Once plotted, this is what you get:
And so it is, indeed. A very complicated and extensive network. It does not only cover three major groups – Trojans, Greeks, and Gods – but also the important relatives of the heroes that are involved in the battle. Once plotted, this is what you get:
At first glance the plot does not look very organized, but actually it is. It is not the plot itself that is very complicated, but the whole story of which it is created. To start there are three groups: the Trojans are placed in a black box, the Greeks in a yellow one, and the gods have a purple box. Between those boxes there are lines and arrows in several colours. When looking more closely to the plot you can see that most people do not feel a very strong and stable hate or friendship to someone else. Some do, like Hector and Achilles who hate each other, or for example Aeneas and the goddess Aphrodite – who is his mother. You can also see that the gods do not agree with one another about which group they should support: some consistently help the Greeks, others the Trojans. The rest of the gods do not sit aside in battle, but they continuously switch sides, which made it impossible to show their alliances in a plot.
What really interested me was the question if and how the relation between all these individuals had influenced the battle. To investigate this I had to do a couple of things: choose a few fragments as case-study, and find out more about (power)relations in ancient Greece.
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Power
Ancient Greek society as described by Homer is not comparable with our society nowadays. There were many kin-groups and clans who all had their own leader – the king. This was the most powerful man of his tribe, and he was powerful because he has been given this power by the rest of the tribe. This all has to do with surplus. There were two ways of getting surplus. You could have a very productive farm, producing more than you needed for yourself. The other way was to win goods in battle. This would not only bring you wealth and goods from the plunder, but by fighting bravely you could also win honour and status.
Scarcity was common on those days, so if you managed to not only have enough for yourself, but even more than that, it meant that you could share some food or products with your friends (or ‘friends’). But because these ‘friends’ did not have surplus and thus could not give back anything in goods, they gave something else: loyalty. This loyalty is what made the leader and king of a clan powerful. This also works the other way round: if a king loses his possessions, he can’t share with his people any more, and so they will stop being loyal to him – because of which he will lose more power and eventually won’t be king anymore.
So, every tribe had their own king, and power relations were not complicated. But, in the Iliad these relations are not so simple: in this war against Troy there is not one king and his tribe, but many kings and their many tribes on Greek side, and who is the mightiest of them all? During the story this clearly is Agamemnon, but he has to take care of this power constantly. The event that causes the Iliad is actually an offence to the power of Agamemnon, to which he has to react very clearly.
Ancient Greek society as described by Homer is not comparable with our society nowadays. There were many kin-groups and clans who all had their own leader – the king. This was the most powerful man of his tribe, and he was powerful because he has been given this power by the rest of the tribe. This all has to do with surplus. There were two ways of getting surplus. You could have a very productive farm, producing more than you needed for yourself. The other way was to win goods in battle. This would not only bring you wealth and goods from the plunder, but by fighting bravely you could also win honour and status.
Scarcity was common on those days, so if you managed to not only have enough for yourself, but even more than that, it meant that you could share some food or products with your friends (or ‘friends’). But because these ‘friends’ did not have surplus and thus could not give back anything in goods, they gave something else: loyalty. This loyalty is what made the leader and king of a clan powerful. This also works the other way round: if a king loses his possessions, he can’t share with his people any more, and so they will stop being loyal to him – because of which he will lose more power and eventually won’t be king anymore.
So, every tribe had their own king, and power relations were not complicated. But, in the Iliad these relations are not so simple: in this war against Troy there is not one king and his tribe, but many kings and their many tribes on Greek side, and who is the mightiest of them all? During the story this clearly is Agamemnon, but he has to take care of this power constantly. The event that causes the Iliad is actually an offence to the power of Agamemnon, to which he has to react very clearly.
Achilles and Agamemnon
The Iliad is not solely about the Trojan war, but even more about the wrath of Achilles. Agamemnon upsets him in the first book of the story, by demanding a part of his prize, after he had to give back a part of his. The part of the gift we are speaking of is two girls: Agamemnon had Chryseïs, Achilles Briseïs. But Apollo demanded that Chryseïs was given back to her father - a priest of Apollo - and therefore Agamemnon stayed behind with less goods (and therefore less surplus, less honour, and less power). Agamemnon wants compensation for this loss from the other kings, and he chooses Briseïs, the girl that belonged to Achilles’ part. Agamemnon had several reasons to choose her: she was comparable with Chryseïs in value, and – maybe even more important – Achilles was becoming too powerful. He was the great hero of the Greeks, the warrior the Trojans feared and the Greeks honoured most for his fighting, and besides that he had started challenging the power of Agamemnon. By demanding a part of his prize, Agamemnon did not only not lose power himself, but took a part of the honour and power from Achilles. Achilles on his turn reacted by immediately stopping his loyalty for Agamemnon: from this moment on he refused to fight any battle, and kept this up until his friend Patroklos was killed and he wanted to seek revenge for him. |
Glaukos and Diomedes
Now look at the plot again. There is one group of people that might have got your attention already; the Greek warrior Diomedes, the Trojan hero Glaukos, and their forefathers, who are connected with green lines of friendship. Their forefathers are in the plot with a reason: Glaukos and Diomedes have never met each other, until the day they almost start fighting on the battle fields of Troy. Before they start fighting they first try to impress each other by summing up who their forefathers are (and how great they were, sometimes descending from gods), and during this conversation they discover that their grandfathers have been guest-friends. A guest-friend is the friendship between a guest and his host, and this friendship is transmitted from father to son and further. It is very important to have such friends, because you can rely on them for shelter when you are travelling – even if you have never even met them before. This friendship between Glaukos and Diomedes is stronger than the hate between Greeks and Trojans: they agree to not fight each other and that they won’t meet again during battle, and they exchange armour to set this agreement. |
Coming back to the question if and how much the relation between individuals have influenced the Trojan war, there are a few thing to say. On the first question the answer is yes, the relationship between individuals certainly influenced the battle. But on how much the relations influenced the battle there is hardly anything to say. This is because there is one other great strength in the Iliad, which I have not mentioned before: faith. Faith had already decided who was going to win the battle, and therefore it was inevitable that the Greeks at the end would overwhelm the Trojans. The behaviour of individuals might have changed the length and route of the path leading to this ending, but to the ending itself there was nothing to change.
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If you want to read more about this subject, I suggest to start reading the Iliad first. There are many translations, so make sure you choose one that you like reading! For Dutch readers I can recommend the translation of M.A. Schwartz.
Further reading:
- Andrewes, A., “Phratries in Homer” Hermes 89, Bd. 2 (1961), 129-140.
- Donlan, W., “Kin-Groups in the Homeric Epics” The Classical World 101, 1 (herfst 2007), 29-39.
- Donlan, W., “Reciprocities in Homer” The Classical World 75, 3 (januari-februari 1992), 137-175.
- Donlan, W., “The Social Groups of Dark Age Greece” Classical Philology 80, 4 (oktober 1985), 293-308.
- McGlew, J.F., “Royal Power and the Achaean Assembly at “Iliad” 2.83-393” Classical Antiquity 8, 2 (oktober 1989), 283-295.
- Lyons, D., “Dangerous Gifts: Ideologies of Marriage and Exchange in Ancient Greece” Classical Antiquity 22, 1 (april 2003), 93-134.
- Winsor Leach, E., “Venus, Thetis and the Social Construction of Maternal Behavior” The Classical Journal 92, 4 (april-mei 1997), 347-371.