A number of factors determine the fates of individual characters during battlefield scenes in the Iliad. In terms of sheer body count, most of those that perish in battle seem to have been created simply in order for others to kill them.1 Typical of this group is the Trojan Cleoboulus, who receives neither dying words nor patronymic nor homeland, and appears only long enough to fall to Oileian Ajax (16.330–334). As for the more developed characters, life or death in battle is, to begin with, a function of the plot: major heroes by definition survive through most or all of the narrative, and lesser ones at least until they have performed their subsidiary roles. Hector, for instance, must remain alive until the dramatic climax of the plot in Book 22, while the Trojan ally Pandarus is killed soon after he performs the necessary function of restarting the war following the duel between Menelaus and Paris in Book 3 (4.85–222, 5.243–296). The fates of at least some of these more developed characters are also influenced by the fact that they were already or were becoming established in other contexts at the time when the Iliad was taking shape. Odysseus, to take an obvious example, cannot die in the Iliad because he was a widely recognized figure best known for a successful return from Troy, as is attested in the Homeric Odyssey and non-Homeric poetry, artistic representations, cult activity on his native Ithaca, and so on. Inclusion of heroes who like Odysseus are linked to other, in most cases regional, contexts helped poems like the Iliad appeal to audiences that came from across the Hellenic world to attend festivals such as the Panathenaea and Olympic games. Since regional, or “epichoric,” myths could vary a great deal – as is the case for instance with the contradictory accounts of Odysseus’ life after his homecoming – the inclusion of such heroes came at a certain cost. On the one hand, audiences would at times be required to set aside other accounts