In his absence first Diomedes and then Patroklos step up to save the Greeks from the Trojan onslaught. Achilles is the acknowledged “best of the Achaeans” ( Iliad 1.244, 2.769), the best fighter at Troy. But at the same time these epic tales were traditional, in that they were told as they had been handed down by previous generations of singers, who composed their songs in performance using a formulaic diction that had evolved over centuries for this purpose (Dué 2019).Īchilles’ wrath, initiated in book 1 of the Iliad, causes him to withdraw from battle, resulting in great losses for his Greek comrades. These song traditions were multiform they did not exist in a fixed form until very late in their evolution. In its earliest phases, this system included the song traditions of the (now lost) epics known collectively as the Epic Cycle and still further epic traditions to which the Iliad and Odyssey sometimes allude, such as the voyage of the Argo. The Iliad and Odyssey-attributed in antiquity to an almost certainly legendary poet named Homer-are synoptic representatives of an entire system of traditional songs that developed over many hundreds of years, and possibly thousands of years.
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