The Iliad and Odyssey—attributed in antiquity to an almost certainly legendary poet named Homer—are synoptic representatives of an entire system of traditional songs that developed over many hundreds of years, and possibly thousands of years. In its earliest phases, this system included the song traditions of the (now lost) epics known collectively as the Epic Cycle and still further epic traditions to which the Iliad and Odyssey sometimes allude, such as the voyage of the Argo. These song traditions were multiform; they did not exist in a fixed form until very late in their evolution. But at the same time these epic tales were traditional, in that they were told as they had been handed down by previous generations of singers, who composed their songs in performance using a formulaic diction that had evolved over centuries for this purpose (Dué 2019).

Achilles’ wrath, initiated in book 1 of the Iliad, causes him to withdraw from battle, resulting in great losses for his Greek comrades. Achilles is the acknowledged “best of the Achaeans” (Iliad 1.244, 2.769), the best fighter at Troy. In his absence first Diomedes and then Patroklos step up to save the Greeks from the Trojan onslaught. Patroklos is the closest comrade of Achilles, and his death in book 16 is the reason that Achilles sets aside his wrath and comes back to battle, even though he knows that he himself will die if he does. The deaths of Patroklos at the hands of the Trojan prince Hektor, of Hektor at the hands of Achilles, and of Achilles at the hands of Paris (beyond the confines of the poem) are fundamentally interconnected in the Iliad. Achilles’ death is foreshadowed repeatedly after the death of Patroklos and prophesied by various characters, including by his mother, the goddess Thetis, who tells Achilles at Iliad 18.96: “Your own death awaits you straightaway after that of Hektor.” With his dying breath Patroklos foretells the death of Hektor, who in turn with his dying breath foretells the death of Achilles. This interconnectedness is made manifest in the exchange of armor that takes place among these three characters (Whitman 1958:199–203). Patroklos goes into battle wearing Achilles’ famous divinely crafted armor precisely in order that he be mistaken for Achilles. Hektor strips Patroklos of this armor upon killing him and puts it on himself. Achilles must get a new set of divinely made armor, in which he confronts Hektor, who is still wearing his old set. Each of these characters then becomes an embodiment of Achilles; in killing Patroklos, Hektor arguably kills Achilles as well, and in killing Hektor, Achilles kills himself.

The killing of Hektor in Iliad 22 is a victory and a moment of extreme satisfaction for the central hero of the Iliad, Achilles, and yet the epic camera immediately shifts, as we witness the gut-wrenching reactions of Hektor’s mother, father, and wife to his death. Similarly the Iliad ends with the funeral, not of Achilles, but of Hektor. Achilles’ own short life and coming death resonate throughout the laments that are sung for his deadliest enemy. The Iliad ends with the haunting songs of women who are soon to be the Greeks’ captive slaves—widowed, foreign, old and young, they are the antithesis of the Greek citizen ideal, the ultimate other. But the grief they initiate is a communal grief, a communal song of mourning that on the surface laments Hektor, but, from the perspective of the Iliad’s Greek audience, is even more fundamentally Achilles’ own song of sorrow (Nagy 1979:94-117).

First and foremost there is the lament of Andromache, Hektor’s wife and chief mourner (Iliad 24.719-776). Andromache’s words are reproachful, as is typical of Greek laments for the dead, and tell Hektor of the suffering that she and their son will have to endure now that Hektor has abandoned them in death. All of the things that Andromache fears come true (as we know from the surviving summaries of the now lost poems of the Epic Cycle and other attested myths). But at the same time her lament establishes the memory of Hektor as the guardian and sole protector of Troy for all time. His death means the city’s destruction, the death of the men, and the enslavement of the women and children. These same words initiate his heroic kleos, his glory that will live on in song. Her grief, and the city’s grief, are Hektor’s glory. The laments of Andromache and the other women of the Iliad therefore have a dual function. On the level of narrative they are laments for the dead, the warrior husbands and sons who inevitably fall in battle. They protest the cruel fate of the women left behind and narrate the bitter consequences of war. The grief expressed by these women is raw and real. But for the audience of ancient epic the laments for these husbands and sons are also the prototypical laments of heroes, who, for them, continue to be lamented and mourned as part of ancient Greek religion. As Thomas Greene has argued, the lamentation in epic collapses the boundaries between the audience and the heroic past, producing “a hallowed communion between the two.” He argues that in fact the goal of most of the European poetry known as epic is tears, and that through tears the communion between past and present is most accessible (Greene 1999:195).

In the Iliad, grief spreads quickly from individual to community. As each lament comes to a close, the immediately surrounding community of mourners antiphonally responds with their own cries and tears. It is not insignificant then that the final lament of the Iliad and indeed the final lines of the poem, sung by Helen (whose abduction by the Trojan prince Paris is the cause of the war), ends not with the antiphonal wailing of the women (as at Iliad 6.499, 19.301, 22.515, and 24.746), but of the people: “So she spoke lamenting, and the people wailed in response” (Iliad 24.776).

The Iliad looks at humanity without ethnic or any other distinctions that make people want to kill each other. It is not a poem that is anti-war: war was a fundamental and even sacred part of Greek culture. But it is a poem that can transcend ethnicity and lament the death of heroes in battle, whether they are Greek or Trojan, and it can even lament the death of the greatest Greek hero of them all, Achilles, by lamenting the death of his greatest enemy. It is a poem that can view Achilles through the eyes of his victims, through the sorrow that he generates, and at the same time experience and appreciate his own never-ending sorrow.

The Iliad is, ultimately, Achilles’ kleos. One of the primary metaphors for epic song in the Iliad is that of a flower that will never wilt, as Achilles himself tells us when he again refuses to return to battle in book 9 (Nagy 1979:174-184):

My mother the goddess Thetis of the shining feet tells me
that there are two ways in which I may meet my end.
If I stay here and fight around the city of Troy,
my homecoming is lost, but my glory in song [kleos] will be unwilting.
If I reach home, my kleos is lost, but my life will be long,
and the outcome of death will not soon take me. (Iliad 9.410-416)

Here Achilles reveals not only the crux of this choice of fates around which the Iliad itself is built, but also the driving principle of Greek epic song. The unwilting flower of epic poetry is contrasted with the necessarily mortal hero, whose death comes all too quickly.