The Anger of Achilles: Menis in Greek Epic [Hardcover ed.] 0801432308, 9780801432309

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THE ANGER OF ACHILLES Menis in Greek Epic LEONARD MUELLNER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

1/;.i , AUG 1 9 \996 r; "'':1rs1 T'Y Copyright© 1996 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

0 The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence ofPaper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Muellner, Leonard Charles. The anger of Achilles : m~nis in Greek epic I Leonard Muellner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-3230-8 (cloth: alk. paper) I. Epic poetry, Greek-History and criticism. 2. Anger in literature. 3. Achilles (Greek mythology) in literature. 4· M~nis (The Greek word) 5. Hesiod. Theogony. 6. Homer. Iliad. I. Title. PA301 5.A58M84 1996 883 I .OI09-dC20

Contents

I 2 3 4 5

Foreword, by Gregory N agy Acknowledgments Introduction: Approaching Anger M~nis and Cosmic Status in the Hierarchy ofPeers Mlnis and the Social Order The Narrative Sequence of the Hesiodic Theo._~ony The M~nis of Achilles and the First Book of the Iliad The M~nis of Achilles and Its Iliadic Teleology Appendix. The Ety1nology of M~nis References Index of Sources Index ofSubjects

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Foreword GREGORY NAGY

The Anger ofAchilles) Mtnis in Greek Epic) by Leonard Muellner, seeks to redefine mtnis) the first word of the Homeric Iliad. When Homer prays to his own Muse to sing the mtnis of Achilles son ofPeleus, he sets in motion the entire story, invoking the driving theme and heading releg~~lessly toward the inevitable conclusion and self-realization of the story. 'fhe subject of the Iliad is mtnis. Conventionally translated as 'anger' or 'wrath', nttnis means much more. The fulfillment of the word's rneaning is the teleology of the story. !To understand the meaning of the Iliad) Muellner argues, is to follow the s·~quence of the narration, starting with the word mtnis: getting the meaning right is getting the sequence right. The semiotic system reconstructed by M uellner as he traces the meaning of mtnis through the Iliad turns out to be typical of oral traditions. From the experience of fieldwork in living oral traditions it has becorne clear that meaning is ultimately determined by the rules of performance. The essence of meaning in oral traditions-to restate the formulation of Albert B. Lord-is that the process of composition takes place in performance. As Muellner sees it, the actual performing of mtnis as the first word of the Iliad drives the meaning of the entire composition. The interpretive power of Muellner's insight, in all its simplicity, is astonishing. His book rebuilds the ancient listener's cognitive process of understanding a story through its sequence. . Perhaps even more astonishing is Muellner's discovery that the patterning of mtnis in the Homeric Iliad is matched in the Hesiodic Theogony. In addition to striking parallels between the contexts of mtnis in Homer and Hesiod, he even finds an interlocking of narratives, which works both "'~:).,

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Foreword

forward and backward, through the themes of m~nis. The themes of the Hesiodic I11eogony lead into the themes of the Ho1neric Iliad; a narrative logic connects the Theogony with the Iliad. Muellner's discovery lays the foundation for a redefinition of intertextuality in oral traditions. It also leads to a powerful new understanding of the main epic theme of the Iliad; the baneful anger of its pren1ier hero is authorized, almost authored, by the cosn1ic sanction of the premier god, who claims to be the plot's ultimate executive-Zeus himself. Muellner's reading of the Iliad thus becomes the ultirnate exercise in the interpretation of traditional poetry in performance.

Acknowledgments

During the gestation of this book, I have not lacked for support and material assistance from many people. My sincere thanks go to the following persons who have contributed to, corrected, and encouraged my work: Chris Dadian, Carol Dougherty, Judith Feher-Gurewitch, Alien Grossman, Carolyn Higbie, Stephanie Jamison, Teresa Jesionowski, Claudine Kahan, Leslie Kurke, Franyoise Letoublon, Hotze Mulder, Dan Petegorsky, Ian Rutherford, Richard Sacks, Dana Shelley, Rae Silberger, Charles Stewart, Douglas Stewart, Brent Vine, Nick Wallerstein, Calvert Watkins, and Jed Wyrick. I owe special gratitude to Richard Martin and Steven Lowenstam, superb critics who read the manuscript in its final stages with creativity, tact, and understanding. Finally, there are some people without whom there would be no book to begin with: first of all, Greg Nagy, who should have abandoned his faith in me long ago, and whose brilliance and loyalty have been my inspiration; Tim and his friends, whose idealism and companionship have been crucial to my morale; Jacopin, who taught me more about myths and performers than I can ever acknowledge; and Mimie, to whom I dedicate this work, who defended my time with it, and from whom I continue to learn about anger, friendship, and waiting until the end. L.M.

IX

THE ANGER OF ACHILLES

INTRODUCTION

Approaching Anger

The subject of the Iliad is the anger of Achilles, not Achilles hitnself. But what is this anger ofhis? It is a fair question, since few terms are more complex than those for strong en1otions like anger. In fact, the study of emotional terms in modern American English makes it clear that as children acquiring a language we also acquire an elaborate, internally consistent, and widely held set of conventional metaphors to describe emotions. 1 Nor are these metaphors innocent. They embody implicit moral messages from society about the content, differentia, and expression of emotions, and we acquire these embedded messages along with the language itself whether we want to or not. One society may share some of its elaborate metaphors and moral rules with other societies, but there is no reason to assume that the metaphors, the rules, and therefore the emotions that they represent and that we tend to ~xperience as inherent in human nature are actually universal. Consequently when we read the first book of the Iliad, it is possible or even likely that we are "recognizing" manifestations of Achilles' anger, consistently named with the word mtnis, that in their proper cultural setting have nothing to do with his anger or are at best tangential to it. Correspondingly, features that are central to the epic notion of anger may in fact · be invisible to us. Furthermore, the moral rules about the expression of 1

See Lakoff and Kovecses 1987 on anger (thanks to Charles Stewart for this reference). They have contributed an effective way of presenting the systematic, culture-specific metaphorical components of emotional terms, and their work implies an anthropology of emotions. For a study of the complexity and diversity of another emotional term in Greek epic, see Latacz 1966 on Homeric words that we translate as "happy" or the like. I

The Anger of Achilles

2

anger that are built into our language may well be inappropriate to the poetic "society" of the Iliad, which is more than likely to abide by rules that are probably more conventional and widely held than those embedded in our own conventional social discourse, given the traditional nature of epic poetry and the society in which it arose. Needless to say, attempting to articulate the precise meaning of the word for Achilles' anger is not a new scholarly pursuit. More than two thousand years ago, Aristarchus, the Hellenistic editor of Homer (second century B.c.), defined m~nis as "long-lasting rancor (k6tos)," citing an etymological link between m~nis and the verb mhzo 'ren1ain' that is spurious from the standpoint of modern historical linguistics. 2 His definition was transmitted in the twelfth century A.D. by the archbishop ofThessalonica, Eustathius, who reports in his co1nn1entary on the Iliad that "according to the ancients, m~nis is the rage that re1nains, from the verb meno." 3 It was subsequently enshrined in the nineteenth-century German lexicographic tradition, where it appears as the basic definition in the standard reference works of]. H. H. Schmidt (andauernde Zorn [persisting anger]) and H. Ebeling (ira memor, inveterata [inveterate and unforgetting anger]). 4 Schmidt, however, elaborates a little on the nature of the emotion. For him, m~nis and its derivatives differ fro1n the epic word k6tos 'rancor' that Aristarchus used in his definition by virtue ofboth the persistence of the anger and its righteousness, and he points out a peculiar fact about the distribution of the word: it is generally gods who have m~nis, except for Achilles. But he does not try to explain why Achilles is an exception or what it signifies that he is one. Although the content of the discussion has changed considerably, the points on which Schn1idt elaborated his definition still constitute the terms of the modern debate on m~nis. 5 First, in what way does ndnis differ from other epic words for anger, such as k6tos? The answers focus on the inner qualities of the emotion and its aspect as a religious or moral concept. Second, why is m~nis restricted to gods and Achilles?-if it is so restricted. Although the simple noun m~nis is confined to Achilles among mortals in epic, the verb derived from it, men{o, is also applied to Aeneas, Agamemnon, and Odysseus. Current dictionary definitions still classify the meaning 2

Cited in the first- or second-century A. D. Homeric Dictionary of Apollonius Sophistes (Bekker) I I2, 24. The A scholia to the first line of the Iliad present Aristarchus's etymology in the form of an analogy: as mflzi5 'remain' is to m~tzis, so enos 'year' is to ~tzis 'yearling'. The ancient lexicographic testimonia are accessible in Ebeling I885, I:ro95-96 s.v. !JllVl~. 3 Eustathius Commetztary on Homer~ Iliad" r. I 3. ro (Van der Valk). 4 Schmidt I879, 3:I42, 565, 566; Ebeling I885, I:I095 s.v. !JllYl~. 5 For a more detailed discussion of modern scholarship on these issues, see the Appendix. 11

Introduction: Approaching Anger

3

of minis as either 'of gods' or' of Achilles I mortals', but there is no common explanation for the distinction. Lastly, what is the etymology of minis, and what does its etymology contribute to our understanding of its meaning in epic? The chief problem has been to provide a convincing account of the form of the word, and the search for solutions has recently added a new facet to the semantic issues with one scholar's suggestion that the word was tabu and therefore deformed, not the object of predictable sound changes. That idea has not met with general agreement. 6 Rather than enter this debate on the limited terms that have long since defined it, I choose to make a fresh start. The extent of the disagreement among scholars points to a crisis in methodology. The problems are harder than the tools being used to chip away at them. Yet none of those who have taken up the study of minis recently has explicitly invoked and employed the results of the most important research on Homeric language in this century, the contributions of Milman Parry and Albert Lord to our understanding of the compositional technique of Greek epic. 7 The conventional nature of epic diction, in which the tendencies of natural speech have become the constants of a high style, is an especially rich and relatively unexploited resource for the study of the meaning of epic words in general. It is also essential that a semantic analysis take account of the formal features of the verbal behavior it is investigating. 8 My primary goal is to use the insights of Albert Lord on epic themes, compositional units on a higher level than the verse constituents known as formulas, to arrive at a more rigorous and sustainable notion of the word's meaning. 9 To understand the function of a word within a given traditional theme is to discover the contextual consistency (or, it may be, inconsistency) that is built into its use by the poet and its apprehension by the audience. Doing so considerably 6

Calvert Watkins (I977a) suggested that the word was tabu, but all subsequent treatments (Considine I986; Redfleld I979; Turpin I988; Snell and Meier-Brugger I955, s.v. ~1lvt8~6