Homeric Poetry and the Construction of Humane Understanding

DiscentesResearch
Photo: Achilles Besought by Priam for the Body of His Son Hector by Giovanni Battista Cipriani; in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Achilles-Priam scene in Iliad 24 has a strong claim to being the earliest-known representation of empathy. What can it teach us about intergroup understanding today?

Homeric Poetry and the Construction of Humane Understanding

By Eden Riebling

 

In recent years, an interdisciplinary subfield sometimes called Empathy Studies has become central to the literature on diversity, equity and inclusion.1 Yet empathy remains an elusive concept, more easily praised than implemented or understood. The Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc.”; that ultimate hedging “et cetera,” unusual for the OED, reflects a longstanding lack of consensus on empathy’s components, processes, and outcomes.2 Sigmund Freud could add little to the discussion beyond calling empathy a blend of “obscure emotional forces.”3 Another psychologist laments that there are “no complete accounts of empathic understanding which might serve as models for detailed analysis.”4 Moral philosophers regret that “empathy … has now been mixed up with technology, morality, and even politics,” creating a “conceptual confusion” that we can surmount only “by returning to the original meaning of empathy,” if we could but know it.5 

But in fact, we do have a fulsome archetypal model for detailed analysis. In Book 24 of the Iliad, when King Priam of Troy kisses the hands of Achilles, “the man who killed my son,” Achilles breaks down and cries with Priam, seeing things from his enemy’s point of view.6 The two hundred lines of the Achilles-Priam scene have often been called one of the most moving moments in all of literature,7 and the episode has a strong claim to being the earliest representation of empathy.8 Although the ancient Greeks lacked a term for empathy,9 some classicists have recently argued that the ancient Greek word eleos, often translated as “pity,” really means something more like empathy.10 Priam’s supplication of Achilles, in any case, provides a model that is empathic, early, and detailed.11 What, then, might a study of this episode tell us about the psychodynamics of humane understanding?

This paper addresses that question. It explores what I propose to call empatheosis of Achilles. By this I mean the human achievement of a godlike empathic perspective, or what Virgil’s Aeneas, contemplating Achilles and Priam, calls “tears that connect with the universe.”12 In brief, the analysis yields a five-fold model of empathy. The five parts are: (1) Morality; (2) Epiphany; (3) Proximity; (4) Similarity; and (5) Solidarity. While all five elements catalyze Achilles’ empathy for Priam, Homeric epic weights the creaturely solidarities common to humans at most places and times. And so, after delineating the five elements,  I consider these cross-cultural affinities and assess their promise for the promotion of intergroup understanding. 

 

Morality

Empathy is a virtue in the universal moral code that Zeus enforces as king of the gods. The Olympians themselves feel eleos, and—compared to humans, who empathize only with family and close friends—the gods have empathic superpowers.13 They can understand and appreciate mortals’ feelings because they know everything.14 The gods not only empathize with humans,15 but love those on both sides of a war in which the gods themselves take sides.16 They find the violation of funeral rites especially offensive, because it shows lack of empathy for the feelings of the deceased’s families and friends.17 When Achilles desecrates the corpse of Hektor and denies him burial, moral outrage prompts the gods to intervene.

The resulting change in Achilles is remarkable, because for most of the poem he has been a merciless man. When his king, Agamemnon, offends him, Achilles shows a deadly lack of pity for his own people.18 And after Hektor kills his best friend, Patroklos, Achilles goes berserk.19 By taunting those he kills and refusing them burial,20 by cutting the throats of twelve Trojan children,21 by abusing Hektor’s corpse22 and wishing even to eat him raw,23 Achilles puts himself outside human culture.24 He is “like some inhuman being,”25 with “no decency in his heart,” 26 for “there is no feeling in him, not even a little.”27 So dehumanized is Achilles that he can be swayed only by a trumping principle, such as the appearance of a god.

In due course a god appears: Apollo, a divinity concerned especially with things which induce or require empathy. He is the god of poetry, music, moral law, the telling of stories, the making of cities, and the healing of souls.28 Seeing Achilles drag Hektor’s body around the walls of Troy from the back of a chariot, Apollo is moved with compassion.29 He protects the corpse from harm, covering it with a magic shield,30 and implores the other gods to intervene, indicting Achilles like a prosecutor.31 Because Achilles has become a beast and “murdered eleos,” the Olympians should help Hektor’s father, Priam, retrieve the corpse for proper burial and memorialization.32 Zeus hatches a plan to do just that.33 Not even Athena and Hera, who favor Achilles, can defend his abuse of Hektor’s corpse.34 The assembly of the gods in Book 24 thus establishes empathy as a divinely mandated moral imperative.35 

But for humans to actually empathize with each other, it is not enough for empathy to be right in general. Humans must also see it is right to empathize with a particular person in a particular case. This brings us to the second principal aspect of Homeric empathy: epiphany.

 

Epiphany

The Achilles-Priam meeting is arranged through epiphanies of the divine will, conveyed by Iris, a personification of the rainbow.36 At Zeus’ behest, Iris launches a double action which will bring together Achilles and Priam.37 In other words, for empathy to occur, both parties must be summoned to it by the angels of their better nature.

A first epiphany is triggered when Iris discloses Zeus’ will to Achilles’ goddess-mother, Thetis.38 Because her son is doomed to a short, if glorious, life, Thetis is grieving in a grotto beneath the sea.39 Prefiguring the influence that parenthood will have in creating empathy,40 Thetis appears to Achilles and tells him he must return Hektor’s corpse to his parents.41 Achilles instantly agrees,42 but does not yet feel empathy.43 So, something more is needed. 

The second epiphany comes when Iris visits Priam. He, too, grieves, because he cannot bury his son. This scene models empathy in two key ways. First, Iris says that Zeus “feels eleos for you,” anticipating an insight of later moral philosophers: one who suffers will crave others’ empathy.44 Second, an instruction to “soften” Achilles’ heart with gifts embeds empathy in a semaphore of social cues.45 

A final epiphany occurs before Priam travels to the enemy camp, when he prays to find eleos there.46 The object of empathy must be vulnerable but cannot display that weakness without some reason to hope. Zeus gives Priam that reason in a bird of omen, affirming that a mission to Achilles will succeed.47  

 

Proximity

As psychologists know, empathy occurs most readily when people meet face-to-face.48 The ancients, too, understood this: Aristotle noted that eleos presupposes proximity.49 Yet proximity is a fraught part of the process, because people who do not empathize with each other will try to avoid contact. 

For that reason, empathizing in the present means getting over the past. Approaching the enemy camp, Priam must pass the sēma, or tomb, of his grandfather Ilus, the founder of Troy.50 To ransom his son, Priam must literally “get past the past.” Achilles, likewise, must stop mourning his dead friend, Patroklos, whose name means “he who has the glory of the ancestors.”51 Here, as elsewhere in Homeric poetry, a desire to live in the past correlates to death.52 

Recognizing the difficulty of what Priam does, Zeus sends help. Appearing as a young prince,53 the god Hermes addresses Priam as “father,” and Priam calls him “dear child,” underscoring again the humane influence of parent-child relations.54 Hermes then uses his magic wand to put Achilles’ guards to sleep, suggesting that we must overcome psychological “defenses” to achieve empathy.55 Scholars have deemed this journey a katabasis, suggesting that something must “die” in us before we can empathize with those who are radically “other.”56

At Achilles’ hut, Hermes leaves Priam to face Achilles alone.57 Hermes says that a god cannot receive a human welcome,58 but this is not true: Telemachos, for instance, entertains Athena.59 Hermes must leave the scene because two men, brought into proximity, must now do work which only men can do.60 

 

Similarity

The Achilles-Priam encounter involves supplicating weeping, comforting, fraternizing, remonstrating, giving, accepting, caring, reconciling, consoling, eating, and sleeping. All of these actions establish or ratify the fourth condition for empathy: similarity.

Eleos requires seeing another’s troubles as similar to one’s own.61 Aristotle noted that we empathize with those we resemble, because we infer that what befalls them can befall us.62 Recent research concurs that we empathize most with those of our own class or with similar experiences.63 Yet empathy can also arise from analogy.64 As Gregory Nagy puts it: “Achilles really hates Priam, and really hates Hektor even more. But … he starts thinking, well, Hektor has a father, and I have a father. Look at the way that father is grieving. So analogies are ways in which you can connect.”65  

“Think of your father,” Priam says as he clasps Achilles’ knees, “an old man like I am, at the cruel edge of old age. … Have eleos for me, remembering your own father. … I have endured to do what no other mortal man on earth has done. I have brought to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”66 With these words Priam breaks the wrath of Achilles. Achilles takes the old man by the hand, and both men weep in remembrance. As Priam cries for his son, and Achilles cries for his own father and for Patroklos, the sound of their wailing house fills the house.67 Achilles then helps Priam to his feet and consoles him by discoursing on their common humanity.68 

He begins by echoing and sympathizing with Priam’s description of his misfortunes, showing that Priam’s feelings are intelligible to him.69 “Poor man, you have surely endured many sorrows in your heart. How could you bear to come … into the eyes of a man who has killed many of your brave sons?”70 This intelligibility of another’s emotions is precisely what the moral philosopher Olivia Bailey has recently suggested as a defining feature of empathy.71 

Achilles then notes their shared human vulnerability, contrasting the fates of mortals and the carefree gods. Human beings, in order not to threaten to be greater than their divine parents, must die.72 Achilles is the cardinal case of that: he had to be born to a mortal father in order not to be able to overthrow Zeus. This is an epitome of the human condition more generally: we are the only animals who know we will die, and that knowledge makes us more than animals; it makes us humans. Acceptance of this similarity in predicament conduces to empathy. When our projects are equally futile, and all lives ultimately tragic, we might as well be kind to each other while we can. 

Finally, Achilles backs his words with empathic actions. He oversees the washing of Hektor’s body, and personally places it on Priam’s wagon.73 For Achilles to achieve empatheosis, only one last element remains. 

 

Solidarity

Achilles cooks Priam a meal. What is more, he personally carves and serves the meat—an honor reserved for the “the men I love best.”74 Sharing this meal symbolizes the fifth element of empathy, a feeling of human solidarity. This solidarity is a function of what Michael Nagler calls the “creatural enjoyments,” or what Michael Lynn-George calls the “purely creatural” aspects of our condition.75 Homeric empathy typically emerges just after ritual feasting marked by the phrase, autar epei posios kai edêtuos ex eron hento, “when they had put aside their desire for eating and drinking.” This phrase appears twenty-one times in Homeric poetry—seven times in the Iliad, fourteen in the Odyssey—and each occurrence prefigures a representation of empathy.76

The correlation is striking. In the Iliad, empathy is induced, on average, seven lines after the satiety-phrase; in the Odyssey, nine lines after it.77 An example is in Iliad 9, where, after sharing a meal with Ajax, Achilles nearly accedes to his plea for moderation, saying: “All that you have said seems much after my own feeling.”78 For Homeric humans, the quickest way to a kind heart is through the stomach.79 Eating cooked meat is, further, a signature of our common humanity, since animals eat but do not cook.80 As Nagy says, table manners are a good way of conceptualizing cosmic order;81 or, as the Ithacan herald Medon says in the Odyssey: “There’s much to be said for a meal at the right time.”82 The archaic Greeks and their gods knew that a shared meal induces empathy, something neuroscience only proved seven years ago.83  

And so, just one line after they put aside their desire for eating and drinking, the two men seal their solidarity with stares of mutual wonder.84 The empatheosis is complete. Achilles and Priam view each other as Hephaestus promised that mortals would view the shield of Achilles—as if they were products of divine art.85 The analogy is apt. Because divine morality and epiphany have brought Achilles and Priam into proximity, they grasp their similarity and feel solidarity. 

 

Conclusions

These archaic moral dynamics delineate three aspects of empathy that remain relevant today. First, empathy is a transcendent ethical principle. When we lose our empathy, we lose moral standing and metaphysical favor. Second, when achieved, empathy is wondrous. Humans are most divine when most humane. 

But third, empathy between humans is not easy. Both parties to it require external priming, or moral messaging. It takes two to empathize—and for Achilles and Priam, it takes more than that. It takes five gods to make these two humans empathize.86 If we take Milette Gaifman’s formulation and see divine attributes as visual epithets, then the empatheosis of Achilles involves a bow and a lyre; a rainbow; silver feet; gold sandals; a magic staff with two snakes curled around it—and all the superpowers those attributes imply.87 The Olympians are working together like the Justice League. This is a heavy lift. 

But why should it not? If we accept the views of Simone Weil, Cedric Whitman and others on Iliad 24, the gods are bringing a new moral order to man.88 These bloodthirsty warriors have been taunting their victims as they send them down to Hades, dragging their corpses through the dirt—and now they are weeping together and cooking each other dinner. Moses Finley, Gregory Nagy, and others have suggested that the moral revolution in the Achilles-Priam scene is so profound that it will take another epic, the Odyssey, to work out the implications.89

Perhaps we still have not worked out the implications even now. For in fact, the metaethics of empathy in Iliad 24 might bear on our own society’s efforts to improve intergroup understanding. The following points are perhaps among those which merit further study.

First: Did Homeric polytheism conduce to empathy? Dark Age Greece was a period of great religious diversity,90 in which each person prayed to her own particular deities.91 It was also an epoch without religious or ideological crusades, as far as we know. Some have argued that our own cultural habit of “othering” originates in monotheistic religion, which divides the world into the saved and the chosen versus the infidel and the damned.92 Does monotheism undermine empathy in its structure, even while preaching empathy in its content? Would reversion to a multipolar moral system make us more humane to those who believe differently?

Second: What is the relation between diversity and empathy? If empathy requires similarity, but diversity decreases similarity, are the two goals at odds?  If so, that need not mean that we must choose one over the other. But it might mean that we must manage the tension between them.93

Finally: What can we make of the Homeric connection between eating and empathy? It seems plain that equality in feasting could have addressed social anxieties in diverse ancient communities.94 Is there a lesson here that we can apply today? For instance, could some part of the $15 billion which our institutions spend annually on diversity training be productively allocated by today’s Olympians—our corporate executives—to give people from different backgrounds money to just go out and share a meal?95 

With classics as a discipline pressed to prove its relevance, the relevance of Homeric poetry to current debates has an obvious utility. Yet any neo-Homeric model of empathy must bridge some archaic concepts whose contemporary relevance is not self-evident. One is the model of human behavior implicit in Iliad 24. Today, we often model human agency with reference to external structures, such as economic interests or systemic racism. But the role we ascribe to outside forces was attributed by Homer’s contemporaries to the gods of Greek mythology, as Simone Weil noted. Writing as a Jew in Hitler’s Europe, she added bitterly: “There is no need of gods or conspiracies to make men rush headlong into the most absurd disasters. Human nature suffices.”96 

But in Iliad 24, human nature alone cannot suffice to repair the disastrous damage it has created. At least, not until human nature is seen as human nature—an element common to all mortals because of our mortality.97 This is just what Achilles says to Priam to console him, and it is what moves Achilles to empathize with his enemy. Attaining this transcendent perspective makes Achilles godlike. 

Why the gods themselves must be involved in this process raises an interesting final point. The Olympians are necessary but not sufficient. Even if they lead Achilles to this empatheosis, it is still Achilles himself who must realize his humanity in becoming humane. But, as is so often in life, the hardest part of any hard thing is just getting started. In this sense, divine intervention in Iliad 24 supplies what Ralph Waldo Emerson called our chief lack in life: “Somebody who shall make us do what we can.”98 

 

Eden Riebling is a senior at the Horace Mann School in Bronx, New York. She is the builder-owner of Sing O Muse, an Open AI workspace reconstructing the Cypria and other fragmentary texts of the Epic Cycle, and the president of Classics Unplugged, a service-and-scholarship initiative applying ancient wisdom to contemporary issues.

 

Acknowledgments

The Society for Classical Studies generously supported this research with an Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities mini-grant. I thank Peter Struck, Karolina Sekita, and Egbert Bakker for comments on versions of this paper, and Alethea Lam and Alexander Larrow for their editing and suggestions.

 

Endnotes

  1. Hammond and Kim, Rethinking Empathy through Literature, 14. Coplan notes the centrality of empathy in topics including political campaigns, autism-spectrum disorders, psychopathy, political ideology, medical care, ethics and moral development, justice and the courts, gender differences, engagement with art and media, therapeutic methods in clinical psychology, mirror neurons, and theory of mind (“Understanding Empathy,” 4–5). In 2016, Paul Bloom found “over fifteen hundred books on amazon.com with empathy in their title or subtitle” (Against Empathy, 19); my JSTOR search on 9 March 2024 identified 1642 academic journal articles with “empathy” in the title.
  2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “empathy, n.” 
  3. Freud, Heimlichkeit 275, quoted in Katz, Empathy, 75.
  4. Katz, Empathy, 39; he notes also that there are “no formulas [of empathy] which have been validated” (186). 
  5. Englander and Ferrarello, Empathy and Ethics, 8; Coplan, “Understanding Empathy,” 4.
  6. Homer, Iliad 24.468–672. Line references are from the Oxford Greek text, ed, Monro, Third Edition (1902), accessed at https://homer.library.northwestern.edu/html/application.html.
  7. Sandstrom calls the Achilles-Priam encounter “one of the sublimest scenes” (Ethical Principles, 30); Weil calls it “a miraculous thing” (Poem of Force, ¶ 81); to Glenn it is “undoubtedly one of the most moving scenes in the Iliad, or, indeed, in all literature” (“Two Notes on Iliad 24,” 20–21); to Nagler, it is not only “among the greatest achievements in Greek literature,” but “the best and historically most important consolatio in Western literature” (Spontaneity and Tradition, 250, 272); for Redfield, “there is no more poignant moment” (Vacca, “Sophrosyne,” 124); Mueller lauds “the sublimity of the scene, which virtually every reader of the Iliad has acknowledged (Iliad, 71); to Richardson, the “satisfying and moving” scene is among those aspects of the Iliad “which lead us to regard this as one of the greatest works of European literature still today” (Commentary, 273, 15–16); Knox offers that “no one doubts the emotional coherence of this great scene,” (Iliad 24.547–549, “Blameless Achilles,” 1); to Nagy, it contains “one of the most beautiful passages in the Iliad” (HeroesX, “Hour 8 Text H: Discussion”); Brügger (Basel Commentary, vii) calls it “undoubtedly one of the most touching and stimulating sections of heroic epic.”
  8. We may have mentions of empathic understanding prior to the Iliad, but in the works examined for this study I found no earlier sustained representations. The most fulsome earlier mention would seem to be a single-sentence Egyptian inscription recording a Hittite princess’ marriage to Ramses II, who died in 1213 BCE: “They ate and drank together, being of one heart like brothers … for peace and brotherhood were between them” (ANET3, 358, quoted in Griffin, Life and Death, 16). A still earlier but even briefer mention of humane understanding may exist in the older Akkadian epic Gilgamesh: In Sandars’ translation, for instance, the defeated forest-monster Humbaba “took [Gilgamesh] by the hand and led him to his house, so that the heart of Gilgamesh was moved with compassion” (24). Yet because Sandars’ text is “is not a fresh translation from the cuneiform,” as he allows, but blends the work of “scholars who have made the translations out of cuneiform” (KL 202), neither we nor Sandars knows what Assyrian word the cuneiform translator renders as “compassion,” or whether it accords with our understanding of empathy. In the more recent translations by Mitchell and Davis, Gilgamesh does not show compassion toward Humbaba: He is “appalled” by Humbaba’s appeals and threats but then “came to himself” (Mitchell, Gilgamesh, 127); or he is “dismayed by the curse of Humbaba” but otherwise resolute (Davis, Gilgamesh, 43). Even in Sandars’ version, Gilgamesh’s behavior in the scene suggests that he did not, in fact, feel toward what Achilles felt for Priam: after hearing Humbaba beg for his life, Gilgamesh “took the axe in his hand, he drew the sword from his belt, and he struck Humbaba with a thrust of the sword to the neck” (20–21). The killing of Humbaba suggests that Achilles’ “love and solidarity” toward Priam offers not an appropriation of Akkadian ethics, but a “distinctively Iliadic vision” (Moral Hero, 153), perhaps even “an index of new values” (Mueller, Iliad, 74).
  9. The later Greek word empatheia, from which the English word empathy derives (via German), means much affected by or at a thing, rather than with or for it (Liddell and Scott, Lexicon, 254, q.v., empathís), and thus (e.g., in Plutarch) has negative rather than positive connotations: Being impassioned, or empassioned, is ethically dangerous, for, as Heraclitus says, “it is hard to fight against impulse; whatever it wishes, it buys at the expense of the soul” (Frag. 85, tr. Freeman, Ancilla 30). The earlier Homeric empazoumi is closer to our conception of empathy but still different, meaning more broadly “to care about, regard, concern oneself with,” i.e., to have in mind (Cunliffe, Lexicon, 126). Thus Iliad 16.50: oute theopropiês empazomai hên tinaoida, “I have not any prophecy in mind that I know of.” The term appears more often in the Odyssey; e.g., oute theopropiês empazomai, hên tina mêtêr, “nor care about any prophecy” (1.415); oute theopropiês empazometh’, hên su, geraie, mutheai akraanton, “nor do we care about an oracle that you, old man, may tell of” (2.221); rhapteis, oud’ hiketas empazeai, “and pay no regard to suppliants” (16.422); and especially in the form empazeo muthôn, “care about words”: soi d’ autôi meletô, kai emôn empazeo muthôn, “keep this in your mind and concern yourself with my words” (1.305); ei d’ age nun xuniei kai emôn empazeo muthôn, “come now, hear and care about my words” (1.271); hôs ar’ ephan mnêstêres, ho d’ ouk empazeto muthôn, “so said the suitors, but he didn’t care about their words” (17.488); hôs ephat’ Antinoos: ho d’ ar’ ouk empazeto muthôn, “so said Antinous, but Telemachus didn’t heed his words” (20.275); hôs ephasan mnêstêres: ho d’ ouk empazeto muthôn, “so said the suitors, but he didn’t heed their words” (20.384).
  10. Platt notes “Priam’s surprising empathy for Peleus,” adding that “Achilles shows particular empathy” for Priam in the Niobe parable (“Book 24,” 280, 281); Walton contends that “the Greek concept [of eleos] seems more like what we would call empathy or sympathy than [pity]” (Appeal to Pity, 51); Nagy expresses a similar opinion, discussing the meaning of eleos in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy (Poetics 1449b24–28). “I’m a little worried about the English translation, pity … Maybe if we thought about all of this in terms of empathy it would be better … Empathy is putting emotion from one place to another. So if a hero, who is a larger than life person, is experiencing larger than life emotions … then we the notional group who come together in Athenian drama … have empathy for the hero” (Nagy, HeroesX, Hour 8, “Mentality of Re-enactment at Festivals”). Cf. Nagy, Ancient Greek Hero, 230; Crotty, Supplication, 9, 11; Konstan, Pity Transformed, 8, 29, 42, 78; Planalp, Communicating Emotion, 64; cf. Richardson, Commentary, 272, and, much earlier, before the term empathy came into wide English use, the expansive construction of pity in Sandstrom, Ethical Principles, 24, 27, 43.
  11. The empathic content of the Achilles-Priam scene is widely remarked in the ample literature on Iliad 24. Priam finds an Achilles who can “feel empathy for his fellow creatures” (Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition, 274); the scene’s primary elements are “ethical evaluation and empathy” (Hogan, “Epilogue of Suffering,” 121); Iliad 24 conveys “empathy for different sides of an experience,” since “these hard-bitten heroes … have an empathetic side that’s important” (Nagy, HeroesX, Hour 9, “Echoes of Lament”); one takeaway from “the end of the Iliad, where Achilles and Priam are sharing their stories,” is that “if an epic cannot make you empathize with the suffering of people… it’s not a real epic” (Nagy, HeroesX, Hour 9, “Return of Odysseus”). Among synonymic interpretations, Achilles feels “love and solidarity” (Schein, Mortal Hero, 153); he can “understand and feel for human suffering” (Macleod, Iliad XXIV, 8); he can “appreciate the similarity of another’s experience to his own” (Crotty, Supplication, 79).
  12. Aeneid 1.462: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt; the translation is Nagy’s (Ancient Greek Hero, 230). I have in mind apotheosis, the human transformation to a godlike state, but in terms of empathy. Empatheosis is humane understanding to a divine degree. 
  13. Menelaos “knew in his heart how his brother [Agamemnon] was suffering” (Iliad 1.409); Agamemnon knows the loyalty of Odysseus’ intentions in his breast: “Your thoughts are my thoughts” (4.360–361); terrible pain for his dead charioteer clouds Hektor’s heart (8.124).
  14. As both Achilles and the poet-narrator note (Iliad 1.395, 2.485).
  15. Poseidon feels pity for the Achaians being broken by the Trojans and intervenes to rouse them and spur their battalions to strength (Iliad 13.15–125); the river-god Skamandros pities the murdered Trojans clogging his shoals and whips up his waves against Achilles (21.205–327), justifying Apollo’s strophe that Achilles offends the earth itself (24.154). Zeus, moved by Agamemnon’s tears, decides that the Achaians should “be safe, and not destroyed” (8.245–246), and his heart is so “saddened for Hektor” that he asks the other gods “to consider whether we shall save him from death” (22.174–175). 
  16. Athene intervenes to prevent Achilles killing Agamemnon because Hera “loved both men alike in her heart and cared for them equally” (Iliad 1.195–96) and heralds intervene stop the duel between Hektor and Ajax, because “Zeus the cloud-gatherer has love for both of you” (7.280). Zeus so pities both parties in deliberation over the fates of Sarpedon (16.431–161) and Hektor (22.166–187) that he considers overriding fate to save them; and at key junctures, the king of the gods can only decide between the Achaians and Trojans, or Hektor and Achilles, by weighing their fates in his golden scales (8.68–74, 22.208–213).
  17. Redfield, Nature and Culture, 221; Segal, Mutilation, 59; Muellner, Anger of Achilles, 32–33, 169.
  18. Achilles sulks in his tent for most of the epic, though his people can hardly win without him; indeed, that is precisely the point he wants to make in asking Zeus to “pen the Achaians back by the shore and the stems of their ships amid much slaughter” (Iliad 1.409–410).
  19. Setting up his later reversal, Achilles explicitly states that no amount of ransom will induce him to return Hektor’s body (Iliad 22.349–354). After the reversal, after caring for Hektor’s body, Achilles cries out to Patroklos in reassurance and apology (24.592–595).
  20. Quintessentially, Achilles to Lykaon at Iliad 21.91–114, and to Hektor at 22.345-348.
  21. Achilles addressing the deceased Patroklos at 23.21–23. Perversely, cutting the children’s throats may have seemed to wrathful Achilles an act of empathy, wishing Patroklos would do the same for him: “All that Achilles can do to express his love is express his hatred” (Schein, Moral Hero, 154).
  22. At Iliad 24.15–18.
  23. Achilles to Hektor at Iliad 22.347.
  24. The Cyclops episode in the Odyssey presents cannibalism as the antithesis of civilization and Hesiod (Works and Days 276-280) distinguishes humans, who have justice (dike), from “fish and wild beasts and winged birds” who “eat one another”; cf. Schein, Mortal Hero, 15.
  25. As the poet-narrator says of Achilles at Iliad 21.227, calling him “daimoni.”
  26. Apollo to the other gods at Iliad 24.39–40.
  27. Poseidon to Agamemnon at Iliad 14.141.
  28. The connection between Apollo and Achilles goes deeper than the god eventually causing his death: Apollo is the god of both poetry and medicine and Achilles the only mortal in the Iliad who is represented both as singing poetry and practicing medicine. Beyond his links to Achilles, Apollo is the god of the founding of cities, at least according to Callimachus. And if his name derives from apéllai, meaning speech-act, as some contend, this would explain why Apollo is the god of the word, who enunciates the will of Zeus. See Richardson, Commentary, 276; Iliad 9.186–191; Dunbar, “The Medicine and Surgery of Homer,” 48–51; Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, tr. Jon Solomon, in Kerényi, Apollo, 25; Nagy, “The Name of Apollo: Etymology and Essence,” 3–4.
  29. Iliad 24.18–21.
  30. Iliad 24.18–20.
  31. At Iliad 24.18–54. 
  32. Apollo to the Olympians at Iliad 24.40.
  33. At Iliad 24.65–76.
  34. Iliad 24.53–64.
  35. Redfield, Nature and Culture, 221; Segal, Mutilation, 59; Muellner, Anger of Achilles, 32–33, 169.
  36. Knight, Many-Minded Homer, 109.
  37. Iliad 24.143–87; Richardson, Commentary, 284.
  38. Iliad 24.77–122.
  39. Sandstrom, Ethical Principles, 26.
  40. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 219.
  41. Notes, Iliad, tr. Wilson, 706.
  42. “So be it. The man who brings the ransom can take the body, if the Olympian himself in all earnest wishes it” (Achilles to Thetis at Iliad 24.138–139).
  43. Iliad 24.139–140.
  44. Iliad 24.174; cf. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 22.
  45. Iliad 24.172–176.
  46. Iliad 24.299–313.
  47. Iliad 24.314–321.
  48. The postulation of proximity as an ingredient in empathy is generally called Contact Theory. See Allport, Prejudice, 262–279; Gurin and Nagda, “Getting to the What, How, and Why of Diversity,” 20–24; Wagner, et al., “Prejudice and Minority Proportion: Contact Instead of Threat Effects,” 380–390; McClendon, “Interracial Contact and the Reduction of Prejudice,” 47–65; Katz, Empathy, 40;  Lynch, “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” Cf. Cicero, De Amicita, v. 19: “For it seems clear to me that we were so created that between us all there exists a certain tie which strengthens with our proximity to each other. Therefore, fellow countrymen are preferred to foreigners and relatives to strangers, for with them Nature herself engenders friendship, but it is one that is lacking in constancy” (Sic enim mihi perspicere videor, ita natos esse nos, ut inter omnis esset societas quaedam, maior autem, ut quisque proxime accederet. Itaque cives potiores quam peregrini, propinqui quam alieni; cum his enim amicitiam natura ipsa peperit, sed ea non satis habet firmitatis).
  49. “It is when the sufferings of others are close to us that they excite our eleos … the setting of their misfortunes before our eyes, makes their misfortunes seem close to ourselves” (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1386a28–1386b1, tr. Roberts). Fortenbaugh notes that Aristotle groups eleos with indignation and attributes both to good character, a reading that accords with Apollo and Zeus condemning Achilles for lacking eleos (Aristotle on Emotion, 83).
  50. Iliad 20.232; Willcock, Companion, KL 1968.
  51. Nagy, Ancient Greek Hero, KL 1699.
  52. Both in Odysseus’ visit to the underworld and in his temptation by the Sirens, “he has to get over Troy” (Nagy, HeroesX, Hour 10, on Odyssey 12.184–191). “It was in the land of the dead that [Odysseus] could relive the saga of Troy, with his fellow-veterans … Those days are over, and he must look forward to the future, not backward to the past” (Knox, “Introduction,” 42, on Odyssey, Book 11).  
  53. Iliad 24.331–348.
  54. Iliad 24.358–371.
  55. Iliad 24.343–344, 445–446.
  56. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 217; Mueller, Iliad, 74; Willcock, Companion, KL 4578; Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition, 270; Jáuregui, “Priam’s Catabasis.”
  57. Lynn-George, “Structures of Care,” 12.
  58. Iliad 24.463–464.
  59. Odyssey, Book 1.
  60. Macleod, Iliad, 1; Lynn-George, “Structures of Care,” 12; Prier, Thauma Idesethai, 173.
  61. Macleod, Iliad, 5, citing Sophocles, Ajax 121–126; Oedipus at Colonus 560–568; Herodotus, 1.86.6; Thucydides 5.90–91; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1385b13ff. 
  62. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1386a25–7; cf. Thucydides 3.40.3: “It is right to render eleos to those who are similar.”
  63. Katz, Empathy, 56; Konstan, Pity Transformed,138–140; Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 207. 
  64. Aristotle, in Poetics 1459a, calls metaphor “an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” 
  65. Nagy, HeroesX, Hour 9, “Echoes of Lament in a Song about Homecoming.” On metaphor and empathy, see also Cohen (Thinking of Others; “Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative”; and “Identifying with Metaphor”).
  66. Iliad 24.484–506.
  67. Iliad 24.507–551.
  68. Iliad 24.518–571, 24.598–620.
  69. Iliad 24.493–501.
  70. Iliad 24.518ff.
  71. Richardson, Commentary, 23.
  72. Slatkin, Power of Thetis, 85.
  73. Iliad 24.480–517, 572–597.
  74. Exactly the same language is used at 9.216–17 and 24.625–26 (and only in these two scenes): The therapon (Patroklos/Automedon) “took the bread and set it out on the table in fair baskets, while Achilleus served the meats” (trapezêi kalois en kaneoisin atar krea neimen Achilleus). In the earlier case, Achilles had carved, plated, and served the meat, for “those who have come beneath my roof are the men that I love best, who even to this my anger are dearest of all the Achaians” (ê philoi andres hikaneton ê ti mala chreô, hoi moi skuzomenôi per Achaiôn philtatoi eston, 9.197–198). By serving the meat to Priam personally, while his therapon serves the bread, Achilles is honoring Priam—the enemy leader—as only his philoi (“the men I love best”) have been honored. 
  75. Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition, 286; Lynn-George, “Structures of Care,” 17.
  76. I analyze the satiety-phrase in a research note accepted for delivery at the annual meeting of the Classical Studies in Philadelphia, Jan. 4, 2025. My arguments therein build on the insights of John Miles Foley, who postulated that Homeric feasting has a mediatory and conciliatory function, because sharing a meal results in a particular emotional closeness (Immanent Art, 174–189). 
  77. The phrase also occurs once in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 3.514, where empathy emerges 18 lines after the satiety-phrase. On the psychology of empathy in the Hymn, via choral song and dance, see Peponi, “Choreia and Aesthetics in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo,” 60–68; Nagy, Poetry as Performance, 80–81, and Homer the Classic, 2§27 2ⓢ5.  
  78. panta ti moi kata thumon eeisô muthêsasthai, Iliad 9.645.
  79. I thank Egbert Bakker for drawing my attention to the importance of the éron in the satiety-phrase, in the sense of a craving that has been eliminated, and for noting that gastḗr itself connotes a craving/urge/need antithetical to empathy, so that removal of the need conduces to a positive disposition.
  80. Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners; idem, The Raw and the Cooked, 335. 
  81. Nagy, “Longing for Achilles,” HeroesX, Hour 14.
  82. Odyssey 17.176.
  83. Tuulari et al., “Feeding Releases Endogenous Opioids in Humans,” 8284–8291. 
  84. Iliad 24.628–632.
  85. Schein, Mortal Hero, 141–162.
  86. Some scholars, like Cedric Whitman (Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 217–218), would even say it takes six gods to resolve the wrath of Achilles, seeing Achilles himself in the Priam scene as a figuration of Hades, Lord of the Dead. Cf. Jáuregui, 37–68.
  87. Milette Gaifman, “What Do Attributes Say About Apollo?” 250.
  88. Cf. Graziosi and Haubold: The Homeric poems “depict a crucial moment in the development of human society” (Homer: The Resonance of Epic, 119).
  89. Finley, World of Odysseus, 140; Nagy, “Introduction;” Crotty, Supplication, x; Konstan, Pity Transformed, 159; Lynn-George, Epos, 252; Macleod, Iliad, viii, 45; Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition, 264; Redfield, Nature and Culture, 286 n. 81; Richardson, Commentary, 19, 22–23, 273; Crotty, Supplication, 23, 70. 
  90. Whitley, “Social Diversity,” 342.
  91. Kirk, Commentary I, 157, citing Iliad 2.401.
  92. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 104.
  93. Cf. Katzenstein, “Diversity and Empathy”; Boisjoly, “Empathy or Antipathy?”; Cameron, et al.,“Empathy is Hard Work.”
  94. Rundin, “A Politics of Eating,” 211.
  95. McKinsey and Company, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Lighthouses 2023.”
  96. Weil, Selected Essays, 270.
  97. Cf. Graziosi and Haubold, Homer: The Resonance of Epic, 131–132, 141–142, stressing that Apollo’s speech to the Olympians (Iliad 24.33–54), and Achilles’ speeches to Priam (24.528–538, 24.635–642), codify an emergent universal morality. 
  98. Emerson, Considerations by the Way.  

 

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