Rereading Death: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Ancient Reception of Homeric Battle Narrative

In this dissertation, I examine the many famous death scenes in the Iliad and argue that their reception within antiquity reflects a lively and diverse discourse about the meaning of violence, and specifically of death in battle. As evidence of this reception, I consider later Greek epics and the exegetical tradition, viewing these texts using the methodological frameworks of intertextuality and reception studies. In the first chapter, I provide a descriptive analysis of the Iliad’s deaths and discuss the often conflicting interpretations of them advanced in modern scholarship. I argue that these deaths are underdetermined, that the text itself articulates no clear ideological framework within which to understand them, and I view this underdeterminedness as productive, in that it makes possible and even encourages dialogue among later readers. In the subsequent chapters I examine three texts that engage in this dialogue. First, I look at the death scenes in Apollonius’ Argonautica. Though these are largely constructed from Homeric motifs, I show that Apollonius consistently defamiliarizes these motifs and thus calls into question not only the formal qualities of the Iliadic narrative but also its ethical underpinnings. In Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, as I show in the following chapter, the deaths are designed to seem Homeric, and they are formally almost identical to their Iliadic counterparts. But I argue that this similarity belies subtle differences, and that Quintus is generally less interested in the ethical and emotional significance of death in battle and more interested in its aesthetic qualities. Finally, I consider the reading of the Iliad’s deaths preserved in the exegetical scholia to the epic, which represent the most direct response to these scenes available to us. Interestingly, the scholiasts respond to death not primarily as an ethical or aesthetic phenomenon, but as a locus for exploring cultural identity. They highlight ways in which Greek and “barbarian” deaths differ, and seem to take a kind of pleasure in the latter. These case studies reveal three very different ways in which ancient readers found (or made) meaning in the Iliad’s battle narratives