‘A Man Having Died’: Watching Achilles and Hector

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 focuses on the poem’s two final prominent scenes of divine viewing: when Achilles pursues Hector around Troy, and when he drags Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’ burial marker. The first sections argues that the confrontation between Hector and Achilles is presented so as to make audiences feel that they are attending an event that resembles both a formal duel and an athletic competition (aethlos). The second section shows how the gods’ viewing can be read as a mise en abyme that brings to the surface the tensions latent in this hybrid spectacle. The third and final section argues that the funerary imagery in the Iliad’s final representations of the contests of the Trojans and Achaeans suggests ‘suspension of temporal verisimilitude’. Ann Bergren has used this phrase to describe moments when the Iliad not only depicts multiple moments of mythic history at once, in defiance of temporal naturalism, but draws attention to the fact that it is doing so. Given the prominence of the divine gaze in these final scenes, the point of the reflexivity is not so much to emphasize the poem’s human artistry, but rather to seduce audiences with the sense that what they are seeing is something like what the gods must see: a spectacle at once ephemeral and eternal, the most absorbing moments of which are inextricably linked to each other through time.