By Donna F. Wilson
Wilson examines the character of compensation--ransom and revenge--in the liad, supplying a essentially new interpreting of the quarrel among Agamemnon and Achilles. She offers a close anthropology of reimbursement in Homer, positioned within the wider context of agonistic alternate, to illustrate how the fight over definitions is a relevant characteristic of elite festival for prestige within the zero-sum and fluid score process of Homeric society. The examine therefore asserts the imperative function of repayment within the conventional, cultural and poetic matrix of this foundational epic.
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Additional info for Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad
Example text
The exchange between victor and father is implicitly about their relative status at the same time that it is explicitly about their relations to the son/captive, who is cast as a passive object. This may explain why 30 Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad fathers, unlike the victims, are not shown as suppliants in the discrete themes. Priam’s supplication in Book 24 presents Achilleus and the Homeric audience with a spectacular reversal of the pattern of fathers who bring apoina in the discrete themes and, moreover, of Agamemnon’s commandeering of paternal authority when he offers apoina in the monumental one.
104 Warrior society itself emerges as a significant environment that conditions compensatory exchange. 105 That rank might be established by means of conflict with the enemy implies an analogous ranking system among the Trojans. The fluid economy presumes a cultural strategy of misrecognition by which prestige goods and cultural wealth are disposed to be converted into symbolic capital. Hence what is gained and lost in social-symbolic transactions is not merely or even primarily economic advantage, but tim¯e and therefore status.
34 Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad A provocative biblical analogy to this story may be found in the song of Lamech, representative of the last generation before the flood in ancient Israelite tradition: Lamech said to his wives: “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say: I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. 23–24) Lamech boasts that he has killed a man just for striking him and has thus been avenged seventy-sevenfold – far beyond the limits of talio as they are elsewhere codified (Ex.