Grieving Achilles

Brandeis University

[This work was originally published in Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry, eds. Franco Montanari, Antonios Rengakos, Christos Tsagalis, pp.197-220. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2012.]

My point of departure is the scholarly work of my late friend and colleague, Steven Lowenstam. His book, As Witnessed by Images: The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art, which was published posthumously by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009, builds on several articles that preceded his death in 2003. [1] It addresses the way in which vase paintings of Epic scenes so often seem to veer away from the stories that we know from the Homeric poems. His effort was to make it plausible to consider the depiction of what we see as epic scenes painted on vases from the seventh, sixth, and even into the fifth centuries BCE, as based on a corpus of multiforms – in other words, a set of myths in all their typical variability rather than of a putative fixed, original “text.” This means that vase paintings are not illustrations of epic poetry, or ad hoc inventions, or mistakes that intentionally or unintentionally disregard or misrepresent the putatively uniform Homeric versions of epic tales that served as their supposed models. Instead, the vase painter, just like a singer of tales, is engaged in a traditional, creative effort to select among myths that are by nature multiform, to use Albert Lord’s term. [2] The multiforms accessible to vase painters are part of an evolving, internally interacting song culture that encompasses all representations, verbal and visual, irrespective of genre, to include lyric and drama as well as epic per se. Another key concept for Lowenstam’s work is that by the end of the sixth and into the fifth century BCE, what we know as the Homeric versions of epic tales had not yet attained the canonical status that they would later achieve. In support of this view, his book includes extended analysis of 4th century South Italian vases depicting epic subjects side-by-side with analyses of earlier vases in order to demonstrate the difference — not a simple difference, but a tangible one — that the achievement by then, by the 4^th Century, of canonical status for Homeric multiforms made for the work of vase painters.

Specifically, I wish to exhibit and demonstrate the legitimacy, traditionality, and interest for interpretation of an early 5th Century multiform representation of Achilles, and I also wish to show how the Homeric Iliad actually acknowledges the existence of that multiform as such, though without adopting it. In other words, I wish to demonstrate the fruitfulness, especially, and somewhat paradoxically, for Homeric research, of Lowenstam’s conception of the way in which vase painters worked with an extended corpus of multiforms by an application of it to a specific, problematic instance.

The images in question were, to my knowledge, first gathered and studied as a group by a French scholar, Marcel Laurent, in 1898, though others had previously looked at subsets of them from other points of view. A series that now includes about twenty paintings on a wide range of differently shaped pots represent Achilles (who is explicitly named as such in several of them) as a seated figure who covers his body and, to varying degrees, his face and head, with a copious himation. Achilles is repeatedly so depicted 1) when the embassy of heroes come to effect his return to battle, 2) at the taking of Briseis, and 3) when his mother, Thetis, and the Nereids arrive to present him with the new armor that he requires after the death of Patroclus. Art historians have dated the first images of the embassy, the earlier members of the group, to the 490’s, and the others over the twenty years that followed. There follows a list of a selection of these paintings, in roughly chronological order, images of which appear at the end of this paper:

1. Athenian red-figure aryballos, Berlin Antikensammlung F2326/LIMC 443 (s.v. Achilleus) Embassy to Achilles — Odysseus, Achilles, Ajax, Phoinix, Diomedes (here Plate 1)
2. Boeotian black-figure pelike (miniature, 7 cm in height), Berlin Antikensammlung F2121/LIMC 455 (Plate 2)
3. Athenian red-figure hydria, Staatliche Antikensammlung, München 8770/LIMC 445Phoinix, Odysseus, Achilles, youth, attributed to Kleophrades Painter (Plate 3)
4. Athenian red-figure cup, British Museum E56/LIMC 444, Achilles and Odysseus, attributed to Douris or the Oedipus Painter (Plate 4)
5. Athenian red-figure cup, British Museum E76/LIMC 1=14 (s.v. Briseis), Achilles in shelter, Briseis being led away, eponymous vase of the Briseis Painter (Plate 5)
6. Athenian red-figure volute crater Louvre G482/LIMC 521, Achilles and Thetis with armor, attributed to Geneva Painter (Plate 6)
7. Athenian red-figure pelike, British Museum E363/LIMC 515, Achilles, Thetis, Nereids with armor, attributed by Beazley to Early Mannerist (Plate 7).

Modern scholarship has not produced a consensus on these representations of Achilles. There are two inextricably related points at issue: 1) what does the seated, more or less covered image of Achilles in these images signify? and 2) what is the origin of this way of representing the hero? Rather than resume the whole history of the responses to these questions, I will discuss a few representative recent views on these points in order to expose the difficulties that answering them entails and to propose a new set of answers to them.

In general, the representation of Achilles seated, with his face and body covered by his cloak, is an obvious problem for those who wish to conceive of these images as representations of Homeric epic, for the simple reason that at no point in our Iliad is Achilles described as striking that pose, and especially not in the scenes in which he is depicted as doing so on the vases. When the embassy comes to persuade him to return to the fight, he is singing to the lyre of Eetion, with Patroclus facing him, and he jumps up to greet the friends, the philoi, who appear in order to persuade him to return to battle. Far from sitting still and refusing to meet their eyes, as in these vase paintings, he engages intensely with them about everything that Odysseus, Phoinix, and Ajax say to him. In the earlier scene, when Briseis is led away by Agamemnon’s heralds, the Homeric Achilles’ response is to go to the seashore, to weep and invoke his mother, who appears and consoles him; he is not sitting inside his shelter nor is he covering his head. And, finally, when Thetis comes to bring Achilles his new armor in Book 19, Achilles is lying with his arms around Patroclus’s corpse, weeping, surrounded by grieving Myrmidons.

So one strategy to account for the vases has been to discover an alternative literary model, not Homeric epic but Athenian tragedy, as the source for this image, and an apparently good one was found already in the 19^th Century. The following lines are the key to this approach:

It is Euripides speaking, in the agon of the Frogs, satirizing Aeschylus’ dramatic technique. The Aristophanic scholia tell us that Euripides is alluding, in the case of Achilles, to Aeschylus’ Phrygians, also known as the Ransom of Hector, with one of the scholia recentiora suggesting that it may also refer to the Myrmidons, but since the 19^th Century, scholars have made the case that it is in fact the Myrmidons that Aristophanes had in mind; Myrmidons is a play mentioned elsewhere in the Frogs. That view was strongly argued by Bernhard Döhle in 1967 and Oliver Taplin in 1972 on the basis of the fragments and the vase paintings in the case of Döhle and on the basis of still more fragments of the play in the case of Taplin, who leaves the evidence of the vases to Döhle. [3] Although there is evidence that Achilles, like Niobe, appeared on stage for long periods as a silent, seated figure in both plays, the Phrygians seems to have actually begun with a scene in which the grieving Achilles spoke to Hermes to give his assent to the ransom of Hector, which would contradict the πρώτιστα in line 911 of the Aristophanic Euripides’s words. And there are also other details that match Myrmidons better than Phrygians, according to Taplin.

If Döhle is correct in supposing that the vase paintings are modeled on the silent, seated Achilles in Aeschylus’ Myrmidons, which would then have been performed in the 490’s, this would be the earliest example of paintings influenced by the visual aspect of an Athenian drama. If that dating of the play is correct, it is interesting or perhaps amusing that in 405 Aristophanes can have Euripides refer to the staging of the Myrmidons so vividly if it had only been performed once 85 years earlier, long before his own birth— a consideration that has made Döhle and others suggest the possibility of a more recent re-performance, under what circumstances it would be difficult to say. [4]

This approach provides something of an answer to the question of the source of the way that these vases have of visualizing Achilles, but what of its import? Döhle cites the remarks on the veiled Achilles in the comprehensive dissertation of Gerhard Neumann on gestures in Greek art: „ein ungebrochener Ausdruck des trotzigen und unversöhnlichen Grollens, welches die von jedem äußerem Bezug sich abschließende Gestalt verzehrt“ – “an unbowed expression of obstinate and intransigent resentment that consumes a figure cut off from any external contact.” [5] That highly detailed description suits Achilles in the Myrmidons, where apparently he stubbornly refused in scene after scene to speak a word in response to the pleas for help from his hard-pressed comrades-in-arms, and it also reflects the apparent lack of eye contact between the seated Achilles and the figure of Odysseus in the embassy vase paintings. It does not match the portrayal of Achilles in the same posture when Thetis brings him his new armor, however, since there he is grieving for the death of his beloved companion. So the use of the image in those vases, which are dated later than the embassy vases but not by much, must be considered by Döhle as mistaken, secondary derivatives. But it is all too clear that Neumann’s interpretation of the veiled Achilles’ gesture is not based on the history of these representations within the tradition of gestures in vase paintings, but on explicit ideas about the response of Achilles to the embassy in the Iliad and about the nature of Achilles’ mēnis, and he even speaks of the influence of tragedy in his discussion of it. He does, however, point to one (and only one) other example of a figure in a similar, albeit standing, pose: in a vase by Douris depicting the hoplōn krisis, Ajax has his head partly covered and is turned away from watching the vote, while Odysseus looks on, perhaps with an expression of surprise or pleasure at the pebbles accumulating on his side. [6]

The date of the first performance of the Myrmidons is otherwise unknown, and it has in fact only been set to the 490’s on the basis of these vase paintings, as has been pointed out recently by Luca Guiliani. [7] So the argument that the scenes of the seated, covered Achilles are based upon the performance of that play is in fact a petitio principii, and also, clearly, dependent on the principle that poetic texts are primary and that vases merely illustrate them. The former flaw is the point of departure for a recent review of the embassy paintings by Giuliani in his 2003 book, Bild und Mythos — one of a host of books published in the last ten years on the relationship between narrative myths and their visual representations. Giuliani believes that the interpretation of this image of Achilles “must be developed from the inherent possibilities of the iconographic system,” not imposed from without. In fact he hypothesizes that the way that Achilles is portrayed in Aeschylus was derived from the vase paintings rather than the reverse (a countervailing position that we may consider as misleading as its opposite). But he traces the image of Achilles seated with his head more or less covered in his cloak and his hand holding a corner of its fabric or his head to 6^th Century Attic black-figure vases that depict mourning women or the old man in the Leiden hydria who has pulled his cloak over his head. [8] I want to explore this question for a moment before returning to Guiliani’s argument, because it is an important one that has also been explored in a recent dissertation by Ingeborg Huber. [9] She has found long-term patterns of recurring and also organically evolving gestures that go back to mourning scenes on geometric vases; she believes that the gestures are originally proper to women and are regularly assumed from them by men. Included in her patterns are the representations of Achilles on these vases; I note here Achilles’ representation resembles the others closely in the gesture of his hand to his head, in holding the edge of the garment covering his head (see especially Plate 2 in this regard, where the satiric aspects of the image have perhaps made this typically feminine gesture even more apparent), but he clearly differs from other women and men who are depicted as mourning in Huber’s pattern by the cloak that covers all or part of his head. That difference may be deceiving, however. The women on the pinax of Exekias and the man with the cloak over his head precede the portrayal of Achilles, and covering the head and body with a cloak is common in Athenian white lekythoi, funerary vases that commonly depict men and women standing (not seated, as Achilles is) with their heads so covered, but these objects are dated to the second half of the 5_th Century, after the vases we are looking at. [10] In short, the place of this relatively unique image in the history of Athenian vase painting is a complex issue that needs to be addressed.

To return to Giuliani’s argument, he hypothesizes that Achilles presented a problem for vase painters, namely, to depict someone doing something negative, refusing to respond, and doing so with an anger that is not physically aggressive, that is passive. The vase painters’ solution, he claims, was to portray him as deeply mourning, actually strengthening the grieving motif by having Achilles’ head covered, and therefore projecting him as emotionally inaccessible to others. The contrastive images of Achilles and Odysseus make the point clear: while Odysseus’s stance is open and lightly clothed, Achilles is bent over, closed in upon himself in his grief and anger. So Giuliani ultimately thinks that this depiction of the embassy is in fact a faithful representation of the Homeric scene, not in detail but in its essential features and their significance.

There is merit to this approach, but one obvious problem with considering the vases as depicting the essential features of the Homeric embassy is that Achilles is not emotionally disconnected from the philoi who come to see him in Iliad 9, since he does interact with them, both verbally and otherwise. That seems to fly in the face of portraying him as someone disconnected from his society by overwhelming grief and anger. However, unbeknownst to him, strong support for Giuliani’s explanation of the significance of the veiled, seated figure appears to have been provided in 2001 by D. L. Cairns, the author of a well-known book on aidōs. [11] In an article entitled “Anger and the Veil in Ancient Greek Culture,” Cairns sets out to show that the gesture of veiling is a direct expression of anger in itself. [12] He offers a range of examples from Homer to the fifth century, but in every example but one, there are actually two emotions that accompany the act of veiling, the first being denoted by a word like akhos ‘grief, woe’, penthos ‘grief, suffering, mourning’, or algos ‘pain, suffering’; then and only then do the texts ascribe kholos ‘anger’ or kotos ‘grudge anger, enduring anger’ or mēnis ‘wrath’ to the veiled person. This sequence is a known one in epic, and Cairns knows it as well. He cites an example from Iliad 1.188-193, where Achilles feels akhos at Agamemnon’s decision to take Briseis from him, but the akhos is immediately transformed into kholos which he must decide either to exercise or restrain.

Here is another example, not cited by Cairns:

The subject of this simile is Achilles himself, and he is grieving for Patroclus. My point for the moment is that akhos and kholos are separate emotions, not overlapping ones, as Cairns would have it. The lion’s grief at the loss of his cubs leads to his determined search for the hunter who seized them, which is motivated by his anger. But the grief does not go away, and the poet uses the comparison as a parallel between those in grief, not anger, though the anger will come later. Although they often constitute a sequence, akhos can remain as is. That is why Paris can explain to Hector what motivated his withdrawal with these words:

He makes clear that his akhos has not become kholos. To say that the regularity of this sequence implies an overlap in meaning between the two, as Cairns does, is to confuse the syntax of these emotions with their semantics. It is appropriate to say that akhos can bring on kholos, but not appropriate to say that akhos actually is kholos. So also with the gesture of veiling. I would suggest that it marks the grief or pain of the person, male or female, who is veiled, and that grief can modulate into anger or remain as grief. So Demeter, who is actually called Ἀχαιά in the context of her akhos over the descent into the underworld of Kore, and who takes on a black veil, also has mēnis in the Homeric Hymn. [13] The veil itself does not betoken the anger, but rather the grief at the loss of her daughter to the lord of the underworld, a grief that entails the possibility of consequent anger. We can see this same set of steps in the one example that Cairns has found in which there is no explicit grief before the anger, in the messenger speech from Euripides’ Medea 1144-1155:

I note that Glauke actually makes two gestures — she veils her eyes and then turns away her white cheek in disgust at Jason’s children. So when Jason speaks to her in order to remove her kholos, he tells her ‘you will cease from anger and turn back your head.’ I conclude that the veiling, albeit inexplicitly, marks her immediate distress and grief, but the sideways movement of her cheek, her anger. There is no justification in this passage either for considering the veiling in itself to be a gesture of anger.