Having shown that Calchas’s distinction between khólos and kótos depends for its demonstration on the differing contexts and the complexities presented to the reader by those contexts and having argued for widely different meanings for the kinds of anger represented by these two words, I still have left some crucial features of Calchas’s original words. What does he mean by “digesting” anger when he tells Achilles that a king khólon autêmar katapépsēi (Il. 1.81) “digest his anger that day”?

For our purposes, I accept, for the sake of argument, that the metaphors we examine can be either “creative” or ordinary. Now I am not going to provide a distinction between a “poetic” metaphor and one imbedded in the language, because on the view adopted here all such cases are metaphorical; what is important is to see how a concept such as “anger” or khólos is structured on the basis of a coherent cultural system of metaphor before we attempt a poetic analysis of the results of such processes. The notion of coherence is developed in Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 87-105), where numerous examples show that a group of statements can be inconsistent among themselves but coherent in terms of the metaphors being presented. In our case, we have a number of inconsistent metaphorical schemes, such as that khólos can be digested and that it can be quenched; on the surface these seem to be different ways of conceptualizing anger. The theory I adopt shows that these different conceptualizations of khólos, inconsistent though they be, come to form a coherent part of the metaphorical system that underlies khólos. This conjunction of difference and coherence fits Lakoff and Johnson’s view that “in general, complete consistency across metaphors is rare; coherence, on the other hand, is typical” (1980, 96).

But this is not the only metaphor involved in the understanding of khólos in the Homeric poems. The early Greek complex of ideas involved in health maintenance features khólos as a form of disease. In this case khólos is seen as something that is or causes a disease:

This particular metaphor has a relationship to the metaphor anger is food, as can be seen from the context of Il. 4.36. Zeus, vexed as he is (még’ okhthḗsas, Il. 4.30 “having come to be greatly vexed”), characterizes Hera’s anger through the hyperbolic suggestion that she would cannibalize the Trojans if she were left to her own devices: {208|209}

Here the digestive metaphor is picked up by bebrṓthois, and we have a pair of metaphors working together:

In this way there is a correspondence between the seemingly inconsistent metaphors anger is food and anger is a disease, which is also present in the simile of the serpent that eats kakà phármaka and induces khólos (Il. 22.94); that is to say, besides the “evil drugs” there is the possibility of consuming “good drugs” that would produce the opposite (and hence curative) result. Here Zeus, in a hyperbole, suggests that cannibalism would be the only cure for Hera’s khólos. Moreover, the metaphor anger is a disease can be further connected to eating through these elaborations:

A disease can be cured thoroughly and finished (in both examples above, where we find the preverb ex – used to indicate completeness). Thus, although both metaphors are inconsistent with respect to their surface meaning (disease is a different category from the category food), the metaphorical system turns out to be coherent because khólos, in both instances, is seen as being able to be brought to a conclusion through the natural course of time, through physiological processes such as digestion or healing. In this way, Zeus’s seeming mixed metaphor makes perfect sense as part of the extensive metaphorical system in Homer for khólos. The metaphorical system is coherent, though inconsistent.

In the speech by Zeus, khólos depends on a correspondence between the medical meaning of khólos and the digestive meaning:

The use of smûxai (“to burn down”) in Achilles’ response to Ajax points forward to the death of Hector where Homer will liken the turmoil in Troy at his death to the turmoil that would ensue—that will ensue—with the city ablaze:

Given such stark examples of the importance of fire to the thematics of aggression in the Iliad, khólos, as the most frequent word for heroic wrath, often comes into play with notions of fire. For example, we can return to the beginning of Phoenix’s speech, where he collates the fire that threatens the Achaean existence with Achilles’ khólos:

Now this khólos phrase was found in position 11, in the formula khólos émpese thumôi. It occurs four times (once in a doublet):

Fire is a source domain for anger because of the destructive force of fire on the Trojan plain, where fire is indeed a weapon. Thus at Il. 21.342, Hephaistos poises to cast his fire against Scamander as if it were a spear: Hēphaistos dè titúsketo thespidaès pûr “and Hephaestus took aim with his divine fire.” Moreover, fire metaphorically comes down from above like a missile, as can be seen from the Book 4 of the Iliad:

A similar effect can be seen in Book 15:

both of which are comparable to {215|216}

Now fire is in particular related—through the conceptualization that it falls down and in (émpese)—to weapons that pierce the body and remain in it until a surgeon can come to remove it as happens at Il. 4.217.

Thus, we can begin to see an emerging metaphoric system for khólos and fire in relationship to weaponry.

To summarize, the metaphorical uses of khólos are part of a coherent system involving three major metaphor types, (a) khólos is food; (b) khólos is disease; and (c) khólos is fire (as a weapon). Each of these types implies other predications which then can interact, so that khólos as something that enters the body from the outside is coherent across the three metaphors. Virtually all the metaphorical uses in Homeric poetry for khólos depend on the digestive, medicinal, or combustatory systems and the various ways in which they cohere.

This poetic artistry linking khólos with other fundamental cultural elements is nowhere more delicately handled than in Achilles’ words to Thetis, in response to her very short two-line lament emphasizing the shortness of Achilles’ life and the link between the fate of Hector and her son’s death:

And Achilles repeats the idea of immediacy, but hyperbolically curses himself:

Here, Achilles immediately (autíka) responds to Thetis’s use of the word, as hetaírōi responds to Thetis’s hetoîmos (Il. 18.96) with a severe comparison poised between Achilles’ death and that of Patroclus (tethnaíēn, kteinoménōi, as reinforced by the enjambement). Achilles parses his mother’s speech, extracting the notion of companionship and immediacy in order to throw an ironic spin on both. And thanks to Richard Martin’s (1989) solution to the myriad problems presented by the language of Achilles we have a way of thinking about these linguistic feats by the hero of the Iliad: {217|218}

What Martin teaches us here is a potent lesson to learn, since I am about to suggest that the most extravagant use of the metaphorical possibilities available to khólos are performed by Achilles in this speech to his mother.

Here is part of Achilles’ renunciation of his anger, at Il. 18.98-126, where he comes to curse wrath:

That Achilles should speak these words to Thetis presents us with a stark contrast to his account of the quarrel in Book 1. Although in Book 1 he could not admit to his khólos, instead saddling Agamemnon with the entire emotional weight of it, here he comes to admit that his khólos is the problem and that it is his, even though he still—and, to my mind, rightly—emphasizes the provocation of Agamemnon. Thus, Achilles is the polúphrōn (“a thoughtful one”) who succumbs to a kind of temptation presented by khólos, which he seeks to motivate, we will see, by elaborating on the special sense provided to khólos by its systematic conceptual structure.

An interpretation adequate to the complexity of this passage (Il. 18.107-111) can profit from a glance at the etymology of khólos. But since such a procedure has been doubted often in literary critical circles, it is worth establishing what is involved in using etymology as a tool for literary explanation.

On the contrary, a review of etymological research regarding khólos helps demonstrate that the historical background is indeed crucial for revealing the poetics of Achilles’ comparison between khólos and honey. The wealth of data {219|220} here gives depth to the primary assertion of this analysis: that historical linguistic method supplies acute tools for understanding the poetics of Homeric discourse.

Now the root *ǵhel- is widely distributed over the Indo-European world. Since the extensive distribution of the etymon is necessary to my argument, the forms may be recapitulated here with particular emphasis on their relation to khólos. Besides Greek, there are forms of *ǵhel- in Indic, Iranian, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic.

In the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European, Sanskrit shows the color word hári- “yellow,” “golden,” and the derivative hárita- “yellow,” “green.” Metonymic derivatives include, with the animatizing suffix -ina, harináh “gazelle.”

The Germanic branch of the Indo-European family is also rich in derivatives from *ǵhel- that witness the color meaning. Modern English “yellow” goes back to the Old English geolu, the equivalent of Old Saxon gelo, Old High German gelo. “Gold” shows a to- suffix, for which see again Sanskrit hárita-. In Old Norse, gulr means “yellow”; “golden,” and, also from *ǵhel- see glamr, “moon.” Compare here the animal name golthorskr, n. “yellow cod.” Germanic also shares the predilection of Greek, Lithuanian, and Latin to identify bile with forms of *ǵhel-: beside Modern English see Old Norse gall (neuter), Old English gealla, Old Saxon galla, etc., all based on an n- suffix as in Latin fel, fellis < *fel-nis.

Slavic shows Russian žolti- “yellow,” with Old Church Slavic preserving “gall” (Pokorny 430) in zlbcy. Russian also has želć “bile.” As for Baltic, {221|222} Lithuanian continues the color meaning from *ǵhel- in želvas “green,” žalias “green,” with verbal derivative žaliuoti “grow with a green color,” “display green foliage.” Lithuanian shows the meaning of “gall” in tulžìs from metathesis of *žultìs (Pokorny 430).

This impressive body of derivatives from Indo-European *ǵhel- demonstrates that the situation in Greek, with this root originally designating a color coming to represent “bile,” is paralleled within the historical semantics of Indo- European. Greek shares with Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Iranian, Celtic, and Italic a relationship between this color and “bile.” The same metonymic process is at work here as is at work in the naming of animals or plants after the color-term *ǵhel-. That bile is so often represented in this group need not so much testify to an inherited lemma for these words (although that possibility should not be ruled out), as much as to a consistent tendency in the manner of naming this product of the human body.

We have seen that Indo-European *ǵhel- in Greek yields two results of significance to this book. As in Lithuanian, Celtic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian, derivatives continuing the color-reference are numerous: khlōrós, khlóos, khlóē, khloerós, melí-khlōros, etc. And Greek has derivatives further attesting to the meaning “gall” or “bile”: kholṓdokhos “gall bladder”; kholṓdēs “full of gall,” “zornig”; and finally kholikós (Plutarch) and kholaîos “biliary” (Suda), and, of course, kholḗ.

It is reasonable to infer two things from the preceding data. First, Proto- Indo-European *ghel-, through metonymy, often comes to refer to an object marked in some distinct way by the color to which *ghel-refers. Second, Greek shows “gall” or “bile” where other Indo-European languages independently show the same result.

The pair (khólos and khol) thus represents two distinct stages in the historical semantics of Indo-European *ǵhel- in Greek. But more important for Calchas’s definition than these observations about the Greek lexicon is that the Greek poetic record in the epic displays this semantic history in a way that has literary consequence. This display, in fact, is crucial to the meaning of the simile where Achilles compares khólos to honey and smoke.

Yet, as we will shortly see, these distinct semantic stages coexist, even as different dialectical forms or different points in phonological, morphological, and syntactic linguistic history in the poetry of Homer. In other words, just as phonological and morphological linguistic features from distinct stages live side by side in Homeric poetry, so can semantic features created at different times exist simultaneously because of the traditional nature of the poetic art language.

It remains to be asked what kind of mechanism, within the oral medium, caused this figure to be preserved and to be available in the Iliad. For Gadamer’s objection still has not been adequately addressed. If the evidence thus far indicates that the “real” etymology—established, verified, and demonstrated through the methods of historical linguistics—has literary value of an unmistakable kind, how can it be that an oral performer should be able to make use of what amounts to a knowledge belonging to his or her own linguistic past? {224|225}

I respond to Gadamer’s challenge in this way: the etymology of khólos in Il. 18.107-11 is an “essential idea” of the kind Parry suggested lies at the heart of oral formulaic discourse. But the term “formula,” so often problematic, has usually referred to a synchronic mechanism, the kind of thing that would make this performance performable by an oral bard. For diachronic poetics one is in need of a diachronic notion of the formula, one that accounts for more than the production of phrases in a convenient and competent manner.