Ransom, Revenge, and the heroic Identity in the iliad

by: Wilson, D.F.

Price: 85,00 EURO

1 copy in stock

From beginning to end of the Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilleus are locked in a high-stakes struggle for dominance based on their efforts to impose competing definitions of loss incurred and the nature of compensation thereby owed. This typology of scenes involving apoina, or 'ransom' and poine, or 'revenge' is the basis of Donna Wilson's detailed anthropology of compensation in Homer, which she locates in the wider context of agonistic exchange. Wilson argues that a struggle over definitions is a central feature of elite competition for status in the zero-sum and fluid ranking system characteristic of Homeric society. This system can be used to explain why Achilleus refuses Agamemnon's 'compensation' in Book 9, as well as why and how the embassy tries to mask it. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad thus examines the traditional semantic, cultural and poetic matrix of which compensation is an integral part.

Offers a reading of the quarrel in the Iliad, combining oralist and anthropological approaches to Homer
Contains a catalogue of Greek texts with commentary and a comprehensive anthropology of compensation in Homeric society
Relates the literary discussion of Homer to wider cultural frameworks and issues of social formation in Archaic Greece

Table of Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction: compensation and heroic identity
1. Ransom and revenge: poetics and politics of compensation
2. Agamemnon and Chryses: between king and father
3. The quarrel: men who would be king
4. The embassy to Achilleus: in the name of the father
5. Achilleus and Priam: between king and father
6. Unlimited poine: poetry as practice
Appendices
Notes
Abbreviations
References
Index of Homeric passages
General index.

Ransom, Revenge, and the heroic Identity in the iliad

by: Wilson, D.F.

• ISBN-13: 9780521806602 / 978-0-521-80660-2
• ISBN-03: 0521806607 / 0-521-80660-7
• Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002

Price: 85,00 EURO

1 copy in stock