Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad

From beginning to end of the Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilleus are locked in a high-stakes struggle for dominance based on their efforts to impose competing definitions of loss incurred and the nature of compensation thereby owed. This typology of scenes involving apoina, or \'ransom\' and poine, or \'revenge\' is the basis of Donna Wilson’s detailed anthropology of compensation in Homer, which she locates in the wider context of agonistic exchange. Wilson argues that a struggle over definitions is a central feature of elite competition for status in the zero-sum and fluid ranking system characteristic of Homeric society. This system can be used to explain why Achilleus refuses Agamemnon’s ‘compensation’ in Book 9, as well as why and how the embassy tries to mask it. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad thus examines the traditional semantic, cultural and poetic matrix of which compensation is an integral part.

• Offers a reading of the quarrel in the Iliad, combining oralist and anthropological approaches to Homer • Contains a catalogue of Greek texts with commentary and a comprehensive anthropology of compensation in Homeric society • Relates the literary discussion of Homer to wider cultural frameworks and issues of social formation in Archaic Greece

Preface and acknowledgements; Introduction: compensation and heroic identity; 1. Ransom and revenge: poetics and politics of compensation; 2. Agamemnon and Chryses: between king and father; 3. The quarrel: men who would be king; 4. The embassy to Achilleus: in the name of the father; 5. Achilleus and Priam: between king and father; 6. Unlimited poine: poetry as practice; Appendices; Notes; Abbreviations; References; Index of Homeric passages; General index.

\'This book offers a rich feast of theory and literary analysis. Wilson\'s scholarship is first rate and her analysis, though subtle and with many strands, is clear and coherent … It is a noteworthy contribution both to the study of power and dominance in Homeric society and to the poetics of the Iliad.\'

– Walter Donlan, University of California, Irvine

\'… Donna Wilson succeeds brilliantly in untangling an interpretive knot that has bound up the exegesis of the Iliad for centuries. … [She] provides a sensitive and sophisticated analysis of the cultural poetics of compensation, showing that the crucial terms … are not major structuring concepts with the Iliad, but within Greek society, and not just static concepts, but ones essentially open to constant rhetorically charged renegotiation.\'

– Richard Martin, Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics, Stanford University