Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

Hamilton organizes this section around four heroes associated with Trojan war mythology: Achilles and Aeneas with the war itself, and Odysseus and Aeneas with its aftermath. The section is divided into four parts shaped around Hamilton’s primary sources, Homer and Virgil. The first two sections follow the narratives of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, the third Homer’s Odyssey, and the last Virgil’s Aeneid. Hamilton draws on a variety of additional sources, some she mentions (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Apollodorus) and others that she does not (potentially Statius’s Achilleid, Ovid’s Heroides, and fragments of the Epic Cycle). Whether she does not name these sources because she was not familiar of them or because the plot points they cover also appear in Apollodorus is not clear.

That Hamilton privileges naming Homer and Virgil speaks to the central importance of both in the “literary” canon. Unlike in other sections, where she mentions her sources for reference, in these sections she emphasizes that the plots come from two celebrated epic poets. For example, at the end of her first section on the Trojan war, she writes, “This was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses,” which almost exactly parallels the last line of the Iliad, as she notes herself: “And with it the Iliad ends” (267).

At the same time, to stick exclusively to the Iliad would present a problem for Hamilton because Homer treats a relatively short period of time at the end of the war, and Hamilton’s intention is to provide an overview of the entire conflict. To do this, it is necessary to reach into other sources. Unlike Apollodorus, who indicates when he is summarizing the Iliad and when he is presenting plot points outside the scope of Homer’s epic, Hamilton stitches together plot points from across her various sources. Unless they are familiar with the primary sources, her readers cannot differentiate which plot elements belong to the Iliad and which to other poems. As a result, the meaning of Homer’s Iliad in its own context is obscured in the service of Hamilton’s intention to create a foundation story of Western civilization.

As previously mentioned, Homer’s epics are now believed to bear remnants of orally composed verse. Oral composers work very differently than do poets within a literate tradition, a distinction that is entirely overlooked by Hamilton, perhaps because she was not aware of it. In a Homeric context, “epic” and “mythos” mean “words,” but Homer’s “words” have no written counterpart. Words are always utterances. Spoken language is given to digression, another feature of the poetry of Homer as well as Hesiod, and spoken poetry occurs within a larger storytelling tradition the audience already is aware of. Central to this tradition is thematic patterns that repeat in various ways. In the Iliad, a repeating pattern is conflict resulting from the abduction of a women: Helen’s abduction is the pretext for the Trojan war, and Agamemnon’s abduction of first Chryseis then Briseis is the pretext for conflict within the poem itself. Wrapped around these events is a larger cosmic pattern, the creation of Pandora (told in Hesiod) that the poet may be understood to be tapping into through the particular events. The particular and the universal are always circling around one another.

The structuring of real-life rituals around these “stories” may be what Hamilton means when she says that the Greeks “believed in what they wrote” (17), but because Hamilton treats the works of Homer and Hesiod as discrete texts composed by individual authors, she misses the ways these texts reflect a larger tradition. This is reflected in three critical details from Homer’s Iliad that Hamilton excludes from her narrative: 1) that Helen in Greek tradition is not the daughter of Zeus and Leda but Zeus and Nemesis (the goddess of retribution), 2) that both Patroclus and Achilles are anointed with ambrosia, associating them with divine forces, and 3) Patroclus’s funeral games, in Homer possibly a “model” for the kind of ritual festivals held in the ancient Greek world. Helen’s parentage reflects that she, like Pandora, was created with a punitive intention. The omitted details around Patroclus and Achilles reflect their ritual significance. Both are heroes, meaning superhuman forces honored in ritual.

Other important diverges from the Iliad are that Hamilton characterizes Thetis as “angry” and Achilles’ heel as vulnerable because it was what Thetis held when she dipped him into the river Styx (255). Homer characterizes Thetis as grieving—which the poem implies is connected to the mortality of her son—and as the goddess who preserved Zeus’s rule. Homer also makes no mention of Achilles being invulnerable. The vulnerable heel is a much later detail. Its earliest appearance is in Statius’s late first century epic Achilleid, which survives only in fragments. Apollodorus notes that Achilles died by an arrow to the ankle but omits the detail of invulnerability. Homer also notably omits Iphigenia and her sacrifice; Hamilton’s source for that plot point is Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, a tragedy performed at Athens’ City Dionysia in honor of the god Dionysus. According to Hamilton, Iphigenia “died,” but Euripides is less clear on this point, suggesting that at the last moment Artemis spirited her away, replaced her with a deer, and, as told in his Iphigenia Among the Taureans, became a priestess of the goddess.

The habit of selective details extricated from their context continues with Hamilton’s ensuing three sections. For “The Fall of Troy,” she offers Virgil’s Aeneid as a primary source. The Aeneid was composed early in the reign of Augustus Caesar, a time of instability and civil war as Republic gave way to Empire. At this time, the Greek-speaking world had come under the control of Rome. Virgil’s crafting of a Roman Empire origin story via the figure of Aeneas frames conquest of the Greeks in karmic terms. The pathos of Aeneas’ flight for his life is tied to a cosmic destiny to found the Roman Empire, which would impose civilization on the known world. 

In Aeneid, Aeneas narrates his journey to Dido in Carthage. The events thus follow his singular perspective, requiring Hamilton to pull from other sources to supplement it, as she does with Homer. For these, she turns to Sophocles and Euripides, whose tragedies were performed in the context of religious rituals within a democracy. The only nod to context that Hamilton provides is in noting the shift of narrative stance between Virgil, who she believes glorifies war, and Euripides, whose Trojan Women takes a much gloomier view that this “far-famed war” left only “a ruined town, a dead baby, a few wretched women” (267, italics in original). Throughout her narrative of the Trojan war, Hamilton adopts Virgil’s “the Greeks” rather than Homer’s “Achaeans,” “Danaans,” and “Argives.”

For Odysseus’s “adventures,” Hamilton’s primary source is Homer’s Odyssey as well as Euripides’ Trojan Women. Homer’s epic is structured around a familiar story pattern, that of the homecoming husband. Hamilton focuses primarily on Odysseus, though Homer devotes significant attention to Penelope and Telemachus, who are portrayed in “heroic” terms in the Greek sense. Hamilton omits a crucial plot point in the homecoming husband theme, Penelope’s test of Odysseus as well as all the events of the Odyssey’s book 24. Hamilton’s assumption that Homer is a “poet” of “literature” loads her interpretation of the scene in which he spares Phemius, who Hamilton refers to as a “poet,” and kills the priest. Homer’s Phemius is a bard not a poet; he performs his poems orally in performance, according to the whims of his audience. In addition, Homer characterizes Phemius performing under compulsion, unlike the priest.

Hamilton’s source for “The Adventures of Aeneas” is Virgil’s Aeneid, which she notes was written to glorify Rome. Composed during the first generation of Augustus’s rule, it had a patriotic purpose “to create a hero for Rome that would make all other heroes seem insignificant” (308, italics in original). Virgil operated within a literate tradition that Hamilton seems to relate to and understand. Perhaps for this reason, she is able to account for the context of the Virgil’s poem and to incorporate it into her discussion, as she is unable to do with the oral culture in which Homer’s epics are believed to have taken shape.