What's Religious about the Iliad?

Abstract

The disconnection between contemporary understandings and ancient experiences of "religion," "theology," and the "supernatural" has plagued attempts to understand Homeric imagination for more than a century. The chasm might be measured by judgments that the theomachy of Iliad 20 and 21, for instance, must be "bad art," "black comedy," or represents a "comic agon" imitative of Near Eastern creation stories. In other words, it is not to be taken seriously. This paper defends religious sensibilities in the Iliad. It summarizes the problems of uncovering these sensibilities with an ear toward some basic issues in hermeneutics: the difficulties posed by the poem's diachronic development, conceivably over centuries, but more importantly difficulties internal to the poem, such as fickle Muses and the world they open for us. Finally, the tools of poetic extension and catachresis help to grasp the poem's sophistication in its representations of divine violence.A glance at the range of scholarly impressions of Homeric religion reveals a persistent tendency to disregard it, on the one hand, along with an occasional tendency to revere it, on the other. 1 Disregarders construe Homeric religion as a capricious affair tangential to the appeal of the Iliad, whose real drama is argued to revolve around distinct human personalities struggling with fate: wrathful Achilles, tragic Patroklos, noble Hector, wretched Priam, weak Agamemnon, wise Nestor, clever Odysseus, and so on. For some detractors, Homeric religion is a literary artifice 2 or, at worst, a curious amalgam of Greek rationality and savage superstition. 3 Defenders of Homeric religion counter with perceptive readings of divine dynamics in the plot 4 and applause for the Homeric spirit. 5 Naturally, criticism hinges on approach. 6 As Guthrie noted over half a century ago, most scholars of religion do not read Homeric Greek, whereas most Homerists do not read religion (1950:23-26), or hermeneutics. Happily, that is changing.This essay aims to provide a short overview of the Iliad's religious sensibilities, at three successively deepening levels of analysis. The first level is historical: the first section sketches the poem's performance contexts and internal religious suppositions. The second is narratological: this section explores musical artifice and the focalization of various perspectives on the gods within the poem, as well as the likely perceptions of the audience outside of it. The third level is poetic: it examines the representations of gods in battle and the compositional techniques which evoke the suspension of disbelief. Poetic extension and catachresis are argued to invite perceptions that elude linguistic categorization and immerse an audience in the poetic reality of divine violence. This essay is built on the supposition that conceptual tools restricted to rituals, doctrine, group dynamics, or historical studies are too blunt for grasping religious sensibilities in the Iliad. Poetic tools, on the other hand, reach beyond the text into its imaginative sourc...