The subject of the Iliad is the anger of Achilles, not Achilles himself. But what is this anger of his? It is a fair question, since few terms are more complex than those for strong emotions like anger. In fact, the study of emotional terms in modern American English makes it clear that as children acquiring a language we also acquire an elaborate, internally consistent, and widely held set of conventional metaphors to describe emotions. [1] Nor are these metaphors innocent. They embody implicit moral messages from society about the content, differentia, and expression of emotions, and we acquire these embedded messages along with the language itself whether we want to or not. One society may share some of its elaborate metaphors and moral rules with other societies, but there is no reason to assume that the metaphors, the rules, and therefore the emotions that they represent and that we tend to experience as inherent in human nature are actually universal.

Consequently when we read the first book of the Iliad, it is possible or even likely that we are “recognizing” manifestations of Achilles’ anger, consistently named with the word mênis, that in their proper cultural setting have nothing to do with his anger or are at best tangential to it. Correspondingly, features that are central to the epic notion of anger may in fact be invisible to us. Furthermore, the moral rules about the expression of anger that are built into our language may well be inappropriate to the poetic “society” of the Iliad, which is more than likely to abide by rules that are probably more conventional and widely held than those embedded in our own conventional social discourse, given the traditional nature of epic poetry and the society in which it arose.

Needless to say, attempting to articulate the precise meaning of the word for Achilles’ anger is not a new scholarly pursuit. More than two thousand years ago, Aristarchus, the Hellenistic editor of Homer (second century B.C.), defined mênis as “long-lasting rancor (kótos),” citing an etymological link between mênis and the verb ménō ‘remain’ that is spurious from the standpoint of modern historical linguistics. [2] His definition was transmitted in the twelfth century A.D. by the archbishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, who reports in his commentary on the Iliad that “according to the ancients, mênis is the rage that remains, from the verb ménō.” [3] It was subsequently enshrined in the nineteenth-century German lexicographic tradition, where it appears as the basic definition in the standard reference works of J. H. H. Schmidt (andauernde Zorn [persisting anger]) and H. Ebeling (ira memor, inveterata [inveterate and unforgetting anger]). [4] Schmidt, however, elaborates a little on the nature of the emotion. For him, mênis and its derivatives differ from the epic word kótos ‘rancor’ that Aristarchus used in his definition by virtue of both the persistence of the anger and its righteousness, and he points out a peculiar fact about the distribution of the word: it is generally gods who have mênis, except for Achilles. But he does not try to explain why Achilles is an exception or what it signifies that he is one.

Although the content of the discussion has changed considerably, the points on which Schmidt elaborated his definition still constitute the terms of the modern debate on mênis. [5] First, in what way does mênis differ from other epic words for anger, such as kótos? The answers focus on the inner qualities of the emotion and its aspect as a religious or moral concept. Second, why is mênis restricted to gods and Achilles?—if it is so restricted. Although the simple noun mênis is confined to Achilles among mortals in epic, the verb derived from it, mēníō is also applied to Aeneas, Agamemnon, and Odysseus. Current dictionary definitions still classify the meaning of mênis as either ‘of gods’ or ‘of Achilles/mortals’, but there is no common explanation for the distinction. Lastly, what is the etymology of mênis, and what does its etymology contribute to our understanding of its meaning in epic? The chief problem has been to provide a convincing account of the form of the word, and the search for solutions has recently added a new facet to the semantic issues with one scholar’s suggestion that the word was tabu and therefore deformed, not the object of predictable sound changes. That idea has not met with general agreement. [6]

Rather than enter this debate on the limited terms that have long since defined it, I choose to make a fresh start. The extent of the disagreement among scholars points to a crisis in methodology. The problems are harder than the tools being used to chip away at them. Yet none of those who have taken up the study of mênis recently has explicitly invoked and employed the results of the most important research on Homeric language in this century, the contributions of Milman Parry and Albert Lord to our understanding of the compositional technique of Greek epic. [7] The conventional nature of epic diction, in which the tendencies of natural speech have become the constants of a high style, is an especially rich and relatively unexploited resource for the study of the meaning of epic words in general. It is also essential that a semantic analysis take account of the formal features of the verbal behavior it is investigating. [8] My primary goal is to use the insights of Albert Lord on epic themes, compositional units on a higher level than the verse constituents known as formulas, to arrive at a more rigorous and sustainable notion of the word’s meaning. [9] To understand the function of a word within a given traditional theme is to discover the contextual consistency (or, it may be, inconsistency) that is built into its use by the poet and its apprehension by the audience. Doing so considerably broadens the task of semantic analysis, and necessarily so, nor have I shrunk from the need to test the results of my research on the meaning of mênis by applying them to an interpretation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In addition, I wish to put to use the perspective that an anthropology of emotions affords, specifically, to view emotional terms not as universal pure feelings but as culture-specific social concepts with no necessary relationship to what we may intend and comprehend by a word like anger. A basic principle of this approach is to try to avoid imposing analytic categories and distinctions from without on terms for emotions and, insofar as possible, to define them from within their cultural context, in terms of each other, as parts of a coherent and articulated set of ideas about the world. Ultimately, a wide-eyed journey into the world of epic and its mightiest feelings stands to benefit both heart and mind.