In Part I, I showed that Calchas’s definition is given support by nearly every cited form of kótos, so that this long-lasting anger verges on the status of a social institution. Indeed, when we look to the anthropological literature on the feud, it becomes clear that kótos is close in meaning to the anger appropriate to the type of aggression known as the feud. Entirely different is khólos (Part II), with its focus on the body and the bodily experience of anger. Here the warrior’s anger emerges in all its violent, aggressive and dangerous presence. Unlike kótos, it is bodied forth immediately, and for all its danger, Homeric culture thinks of it as controllable. Indeed this opposition between a controllable anger and one that is not susceptible to cultural manipulation may produce a necessary cultural strategy, a way of accommodating social actors to reality: once warriors are set loose to cultivate wrath as a kind of weapon, to bring that activity to a safe end poses a major problem for a culture. The better the warriors, the more severe the problem. For the early Greeks, to divide up the conceptual category so that there are at least two forms—one controllable so that it is limited and the second active and unstoppable until it reaches its telos—presents a strategy that seems {233|234} protective of two things: the perceived need for the violence that satisfies some perceived social necessity (such as preserving xenía [“guest-friendship”] by seeking revenge on the Trojans) and the recognition that cultivating that violence is dangerous in the extreme.

What are the comparative implications of the Greek cultural division of anger into these two forms of khólos and kótos? For comparative epic and the comparative literature of early poetry—from Gilgamesh to Orlando Furioso—are very clear that the anger of heroes is ubiquitous. The comparanda that elucidate how Homeric poetry differs from and enriches the comparative store of early poetry still need to be set out in a systematic manner. In that spirit, I will close this study with a brief look at the comparative perspective afforded us by early Irish saga. The conclusion will be that a formally parallel and diachronically related tradition displays not a kótos, not the style of feuding anger but more like khólos in its figuration of the warrior’s anger. In both cases the khólos-style anger displays a central hero whose body is the focus of aggression, both passively and actively. We will see that the Greek concern with cosmic order, so prominent in both kótos and mênis, seems absent from early Irish epic, whose focus is the material impact of a hero’s devastating wrath. {234|235}

The first combatant Cú Chulainn meets in this way is Etarcomol, a foster son of Ailill and Medb. This familial relationship (fosterage) is exploited by the text to stress the youth or vulnerability of Cú Chulainn’s first victim, as well as the emotional ties between Etarcomol, Ailill, and Medb. Moreover, Fergus, under whose protection the youth comes to Cú Chulainn, points out the danger involved. For convenience, I quote from the expressive translation of Thomas Kinsella:

Etarcomol proves to be reckless indeed in facing Cú Chulainn. The two warriors verbally challenge each other, and after he agrees to meet Cú Chulainn in single combat the next day, Etarcomol turns to go. But he cannot wait. He {235|236} turns back his chariot, approaches Cú Chulainn, and challenges him then and there:

Cú Chulainn makes three passes at killing him, and on the third one Etarcomol pays the price for his boldness: “But the fool stubbornly persisted and Cú Chulainn struck down through the crown of his head and split him to the navel” (Kinsella 1970, 120).

I suggest that in this example we have a directly comparable element between Irish saga and Greek epic narrative. In both epics, an extraordinary moment shows single combat leading to the return of the loser, whose body is maltreated by dragging it behind a war chariot. This is true not only because of typological patterns assignable to the integrity of the epic genre in a world literary context, but also because Irish and Greek tradition have a shared cultural heritage. Such narrative elements can be multiplied, but I want now to turn to the khólos of Achilles, which I will argue may be a point of cultural heritage shared between these two cultures and their Indo-European congeners.

Besides the physicality of khólos, there is one other analogy to ríastrad that suggests a more specific parallel. The most telling feature of Cú Chulainn’s ríastrad is the distortion of the face, especially the rearrangement of his eyes (as quoted above). Homer’s descriptions of Homeric khólos can also highlight a distortion of the face. {237|238}

In this regard, consider the phrase hupódra idṓn, studied in detail by J. Holoka, who comes to the following conclusion:

Indeed, I suggest that this facial gesture has a special relationship with Greek khólos.

The strong emotion that a petitioner might expect to provoke in the party he has just found is to be registered in such a gesture. To discover the rhetorical situation in which a speaker finds himself is to read out the emotional state of the addressee from the look on his face. This gesture can be a smile, as when Odysseus decides to spare Medon:

But things do not always go so well, so that the facial gesture can be the familiar glowering, as at the beginning of Odyssey 22, when, after the death of Antinoos the suitors try to rile Odysseus (neíkeion, 26) by expressing khólos (kholōtoîsin epéessin, 26, “with words of khólos”), only to have Odysseus revile them in very effective terms (cf. 42), when he speaks “glowering” (hupódra idṓn, Od. 22.34); the same line occurs when Eurymachus offers to make up for the goods that the suitors have taken (Od. 22.60), so that the phrase hupódra idṓn seems here to be a mark of Odysseus’s khólos. Finally, the same gesture and the same phrasing marks the unfortunate Leodes’ failed suppliancy to an enraged Odysseus on a rampage (Od. 22.320). Nor is it uncharacteristic of Odysseus to respond in this way. This look is the one that he gives to Thersites just before he insults him and hits him (Il. 2.245). And the phrase is not restricted to Odyssean contexts. So too Achilles comes to be hupódra idṓn prior to delivering his last speech in Iliad 1 to Agamemnon, just before Athene prevents him from letting his khólos go so far as to kill Agamemnon (Il. 1.148-49). {238|239}

I have noted before that the verbs of seeing mark the onset of khólos. This collocation is important, since such an emphasis on vision is explicit in the phrase hupódra idṓn, which contains two roots meaning “see,” or “look.”

The phrase hupódra idṓn, then, brings to the surface a powerful notion of “seeing” that involves aggression by an injured party. It emphasizes the strength of this action by using two forms from two different verbs meaning “to see.” In this sense the phrase is “over-determined.” We might ask what links seeing and the meaning of khólos.

Thus far we have observed that khólos is often marked by the sight of a disturbing person or situation and that the phrase hupódra idṓn doubly indicates through -dra- and idṓn the notion of seeing or looking. But there is one passage that clinches the relationship between sight and khólos. And that passage features prominently both khólos and hupódra idṓn.

Priam has just asked to see with his own eyes the body of Hector; so he refuses Achilles’ hospitality and demands the presentation of Hector’s body:

It is a commonplace of Indo-European studies that one needs three independently motivated examples to make a secure reconstruction. Thus, I propose to add Achilles’ khólos and its physical manifestation described in the phrase hupódra idṓn to the ríastrad of Cú Chulainn and the fit of Egil as the physical manifestation of the devastating wrath of the hero and the bequest of a long-lived poetic and cultural survival. {245|246}