One question remains: How surely do we know that to which we have so readily agreed? For all our certainty about Homeric anger, our studies have produced only a few substantial works devoted to analyzing this important concept. Indeed, the semantics of the entire range of anger terms in Homer remains obscure, despite a number of promising excursions into this area of study. In 1879, J. H. H. Schmidt discussed the Greek synonyms for anger in Synonymik der griechischen Sprache. Table 1 groups the Homeric words as they are cited by Schmidt.

What remains to be done is to make clear the syntagmatic relationship between anger terms and their immediate context and the paradigmatic relationships they have with one another; without such study, the relationship that obtains between, for example, khólos and khṓomai remains invisible; without a commitment to the system in which these terms have their function, it is difficult to arrive at the hypothesis that drives Feuding Words and Fighting Words, that khólos and kótos are distinct from one another.

Before addressing my own method, I want to suggest that as difficult as the problem of studying a large lexical field is for the Homerist, it is even more so {4|5} for the cultural historian who tries to sort out from the galaxy of Homeric vocabulary the notions that best characterize Homeric anger in order to establish large-scale cultural trends of great importance. A cultural historian may, with understandable dismay, balk at the suggestion that a full-scale formulaic analysis is in order before anyone may venture into the terrain of Homeric narrative.

My emphasis on Homeric matters steers the discussion away from later Greek material. Indeed, the reader will notice that missing from this book is an extended analysis of the literature on anger in the ancient world after the early Greek period. Fortunately, as this book went to press an important book on ancient anger appeared, one that provides just such an extended analysis. W. V. Harris’s Restraining Rage (2001), focusing on the restraint of anger, exhaustively covers a vast panorama of Greek and Roman thinking about anger, with a central aim of examining Greco-Roman antiquity’s yearnings for the repression of anger. The importance of this project goes without saying, especially given the philosophical tradition’s tenacious speculation on this topic (Harris 2001, 84-128).

In contrast, I focus my discussion of anger on Homer in order to fill what seems to me a lacuna. As can be surmised from my comments above, the study of anger in antiquity has often taken Homeric anger for granted or at least as worthy only of being confined to a review-chapter serving as background for the rest of antiquity. Despite this drawback, the studies of anger in the later literature {5|6} have been admirably vigorous (as now with Harris and with even more recent work [Braund and Most 2003]); we Homerists should emulate that vigor.

The student of Homeric poetry is left with a struggle if not a dilemma: to use the methods of linguistics, anthropology, and the other intellectual disciplines for studying human culture and at the same time maintain sharp focus on the poetry, a task the social scientist sees as secondary. Thus, the student of Homeric poetry must keep in mind the poetic object in question, all the while avoiding the siren- song of the applied methodology. This act balances the real and the fictional, and it is indeed difficult to draw documentary evidence about a culture from its creative narrative art.

Because I have suggested that this study will turn to anthropological and linguistic cultural inquiries in order to understand the poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and because it will be evident that this process will be engaged after we have addressed formal issues, it is wise to ask whether social or literary perspectives have priority in my work. The methodological distinction between a social study and a textual one demands more theoretical rigor than I intend to apply here. But it will become evident that I am not trying primarily to reconstruct archaic or bronze-age social structures by combing through the evidence of the Homeric texts. Since I begin my analysis with close readings of {8|9} words, passages, and texts, my focus is primarily on those texts, the aim being to draw out of the cultural categories examined, such as the notion of “feud” or “aggression,” a conceptual field that will be of value to students of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Thus, even if an archaic Greek cultural practice is found out by sheer hard work, it is placed immediately into the service of the text. In sum, this is a work of poetic analysis using the tools at our disposal—which include social theory—to organize evidence and give shape to conclusions. But those conclusions remain, unflinchingly, about the text.

In terms of method, then, we need three approaches. First, we must focus on anger itself as a semantic field in Homeric poetry. Second, we need to study closely the specific diction for anger in the medium of Homeric verse. And third, we need to set this research within the context of anthropological and social research into the formation and expression of emotions in human groups. The main methodological focus of this book depends upon the first two approaches, especially as they relate to the system of anger displayed in the two words kótos and khólos, in the course of which the third approach is drawn into service for a thorough study of the linguistic and poetic evidence. But how then should we approach that poetic evidence?

Where has that kind of work been done with respect to anger in Homer? It should not surprise us that the most rigorous examination of anger has been produced in the study of mênis, especially since that word initiates Homeric discourse. I introduce the material on mênis here because in the study of this important word, method has made all the difference for our coming to terms with anger in Homer. {11|12}

Given the success of this method as applied to mênis, the other words in the lexicon of Homeric anger should receive the same rigorous attention that has been given to the first word of the Iliad. In Feuding Words and Fighting Words, then, I focus on two of those words for the following two reasons: first, in order to expand our understanding of the range of anger terminology in early Greek epic; and second, because a specific passage in Book 1 of the Iliad singles these two words out for special consideration.

In this book, my approach, then, is to gather and discuss all the examples of two terms (khólos and kótos), in order to examine them with reference to Homeric diction. In the process of doing this, the anthropological, linguistic, and social topics that arise are to be treated insofar as they are helpful toward understanding Homeric narrative. Note that even as I adhere to the principle of collecting all the examples, the collection is ultimately grounded in an observation from within the culture. Rather than producing an abundance of linguistic data that would be true to lexical completeness while capsizing the central goal of coming to terms with the productive use of anger in this poetry, I ground my arguments in the words of the prophet Calchas in Book 1 of the Iliad. I emphasize that the group of words selected for study is not arbitrary but can be said to stem as a group from an interpretation in the text.

Now it is time to introduce the passage that will be often in the foreground and always in the background of this book. In this Introduction, the passage highlights the intricacy of Homeric diction for anger. The final four verses of this passage provide the original stimulus for this book.

Near the opening of the Iliad, the Achaean prophet, Calchas, requests that Achilles protect him from Agamemnon’s wrath once the source of the plague is revealed:

In line 75 the text shows that mênis signifies the anger of Apollo represented by the plague that ravages the Achaean camp. Quite rightly, Calchas worries that his revelation of the source of Apollo’s anger will lead to a mortal’s anger (ándra kholōsémen, Il. 1.78). This observation may be true of anyone, but Calchas is concerned about the political power this man wields: hòs méga pántōn / Argeíōn kratéei kaí hoi peíthontai Akhaioí “Who has mighty rule over all the Argives, and the Achaeans obey him,” Il. 1.78-79. Next, Calchas introduces yet another word for anger (khṓsetai).

Finally, Calchas opposes one kind of anger to another in a systematic fashion, that is, in a way that implies some regular difference between the two: khólos is immediate (autêmar “on this very day,” Il. 1.81) and is related metaphorically with the physiological process of digestion (katapépsēi “swallows down, digests,” Il. 1.81). In addition, khólos is surpassed in its consequences by the last kind of anger here cataloged, kótos; for kótos has consequences that reach out far beyond the present (metópisthen “in the future,” Il. 1.82), and kótos may, in the course of things, reach some end to which it by nature tends (óphra teléssēi “until he brings it to pass,” Il. 1.82).

I will be looking closely at the issues that arise from my selecting these two words for anger as exemplary of Homeric culture’s construction of anger. To close this Introduction, however, let us consider a feature of Calchas’s speech that might independently indicate to us the speaker’s value for the study of Homeric language: Calchas presents us with a folk definition of anger terms.