Abstract
As a poem centered on war, the Iliad is not considered to be endowed with the element of the fantastic as is the Odyssey. There are, however, mentions or allusions to some creatures fought by heroes of previous generation, like Heracles and Bellerophon, along with some brief mentions to other fantastic creatures, like the Gorgon, the centaurs, Briareus and Typhon. This paper aims to locate those brief presences in the broader narrative frame of the Iliad.
Highlights
As a poem centered on war, the Iliad is not considered to be endowed with the element of the fantastic as is the Odyssey
That alleged caution towards the fantastic comes as a yardstick for judging the ‘exceptional genius’ behind the Iliad to the detriment of the cyclic poets, whose poems are ‘still content with monsters, miracles, metamorphoses, and an un-tragic attitude towards mortality, all seasoned with exoticism and romance, and composed in a flatter, looser, less dramatic style’ (Griffin, 1977, p. 53)
The present paper focuses on those instances in the Iliad in which the poet does provide us with a particular kind of the so-called ‘fantastic’: the creatures usually regarded as monsters
Summary
In his ‘The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer,’ Jasper Griffin (1977) sets the different attitudes relating to the fantastic as a criterion for establishing the superiority of Homer’s poems over the Epic Cycle. Fantastic creatures and where to find them in the iliad of an enchanted world in which the poets lived and that did not separate the gods from the immediate daily life of its inhabitants.. The creatures we regard as monsters are among the extraordinary elements that inform those poems They do not take part in the main narrative of the Iliad, they appear mostly in embedded narratives within a character’s speech about the past.. Before turning to the creatures in the Iliad, I would like to make one remark about the notion of ‘monster’ in early epic poetry There is no such word in that poetry, for even the ones usually translated as ‘monster’ – τέρας (teras) and πέλωρ (pelōr) – do not mean ‘monster’, but ‘prodigy’ or ‘portent’, referring to something extraordinary shown or sent by the gods, usually to convey a message to humans.. Typhon is not in character’s speech either, I categorize him with Briareus as they are both part of the story that accounts for Zeus’ ascension to power, narrated in Hesiod’s Theogony
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