That Would Have Been Better

Abstract

Abstract While contrary-to-fact conditions in Homeric narrative have already received considerable attention, those that occur in character speech, which potentially share some of the important and even metapoetic qualities as narrative conditions, have been understudied. This paper begins by offering a new classification of different kinds of counterfactuals that occur in direct speech, incorporating some of the methods of pragmatic linguistics. By building on this classification, it becomes possible to see new resonances in the way that Homeric characters speak and present themselves.