What's Religious about the Iliad?

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.