Poetry Criticism | Homer Circa Eighth Century B.C. - Martin Mueller (essay date 1984)

Martin Mueller (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: "Fighting in the Iliad" in The Iliad, George Allen & Unwin, 1984, pp. 77-107.

[In the following excerpt, Mueller discusses ways in which individual warriors are represented fighting, dying or exulting over the bodies of their enemies in the Iliad.]

[My purpose in this essay] is to survey the representation of battle in the Iliad, moving from the components that make up the individual encounter to the devices by which larger narrative units are created from such encounters."… Here my chief aim is to classify phenomena and to convey a sense of their relative frequency. It is in the battle scenes that the modern reader is most likely to be wearied by the seemingly endless succession of virtually identical incidents and to experience the 'formulaic style' at its stereotyped worst. For this reason there is some virtue in sorting out the frequency of typical incidents and in establishing...

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