Here the battle is compared to a carpenter’s chalkline (στάθμη), a line drawn even, to allow a true measurement for hewing δόρυ νήϊον—timber that will be used to build the “balanced ships.”

Here an introductory simile of the kind that introduces the image in the earlier passages is elided or else has been displaced into the subsequent verses in which Zeus stretches out a rainbow as a portent of war.

and at Iliad XVI 661–662:

as well as at Iliad XVII 400–401:

The war is drawn out into equilibrium, yet not attenuated; on the contrary, it is intensified in its evenness. Hector and Poseidon, from opposite sides, are said at Iliad XIV 388–391 to stretch to its deadliest (αἰνοτάτην) the conflict of battle:

The figure of the stretched rope may recall a powerful metaphor earlier in the poem, in which Zeus and Poseidon pull and tie a cable around both armies. Paradoxically, it loosens or “unstrings” the limbs of many warriors: {169|170}

Apollo admonishes as if to correct a misapprehension or to dispel a familiar illusion—such as the one embodied in the very appellation δαίμονι ἶσος.

Yet the narrative describes the duel inevitably doing what it must, progressively revealing the superior might of Ajax over Hector. Hector’s spear fails to penetrate Ajax’ shield, while Ajax successfully pierces Hector’s shield completely, so that blood gushes from his wound. Hector retaliates by striking Ajax’ shield with a stone, but Ajax hurls a far larger one, which crushes Hector’s shield and Hector with it. The narrative leaves no doubt that, while they may have met on equal ground initially, Ajax would overpower Hector and kill him were their contest to take its natural course. The wished-for ἴση βίη, an ideal resisted by the intrinsic capacities of the antagonists, grows more and more remote. It is a notion that can be made to correspond to reality only by the intervention of a truce, diplomatically arranged and superimposed. The enforced stalemate that concludes their encounter suggests not only that equilibrium is fragile and fleeting, but that, if it is to be maintained even temporarily, it must be socially constructed. Or it may, in rare instances, be divinely manipulated. Thus Aeneas in his confrontation with Achilles uses the narrative’s metaphor to voice the hope that he might stand a chance against Achilles if only Poseidon were to stretch out an ‘equal outcome’ (ἶσον τέλος) to the war:

And indeed it is only the intervention of Poseidon that allows Aeneas to emerge intact from a meeting remarkable for its elaborate, competitive rehearsal of claims to superior genealogical status and worth but, in the event, predictably familiar in its demonstration of the superiority of Achilles’ native ability. As a function of the intrinsic abilities of individuals, equilibrium between those at war appears fugitive, at best.

The image recurs in the climactic account of the confrontation between Hector and Achilles in Book XXII, as though the weighing were itself the decisive event:

Zeus holds the scales, as the balance shifts between Achaeans and Trojans, but does not intervene; destinies are calibrated independent of divine favor, according to an impartial principle of discrimination that allows them, as it were, to find their own level. The scales tip, ineluctably; never do they remain in equipoise.

Here what it means to “know” or “recognize” the scales of Zeus is clear. Although his image is not easy to decipher precisely, for Odysseus the scales of Zeus are part of a metaphor, one that coincides with the narrative’s representation, in which Achaeans and Trojans are poised as seemingly indistinguishable counterweights. Here they are sheaves of wheat—resources in a process of winnowing and weighing that, when complete, will finally, irre- {176|177} vocably, discriminate between them. We are made to see the act of weighing set within broader procedures of harvesting, husbanding, and dispensing, in which Zeus performs as steward (ταμίης) of war.

Armed conflict becomes the striking of a bargain in which the terms are continually subject to reevaluation as elements are added and subtracted, though the goal is a constant one. The poem’s figurations of parity and disparity participate in a representation of the war, not as random and chaotic disintegration, but as an economy of reciprocal exchanges—coherent, encompassing, self-perpetuating.

But ποινή generates a metaphor that encapsulates the economy of the battlefield, recalling the kind of negotiation Idomeneus questions Deiphobus {180|181} about, in which one death is weighed against another with the question “is this a suitable exchange?” When Patroclus enters the battle in Achilles’ place, he is said to kill many Trojans to exact ποινή for many Achaean deaths:

Achilles, by the end of the poem, exposes the deficiencies of a conventional calculus expressed in the language of exchange—in metaphors of trading with weights and measures. As he explains to Priam in the description of the two πίθοι, suffering mortals share what is distributed unequally—and they suffer alike.