“Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad.” In...

4 – Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità e del Vicino Oriente – Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia

PAPERS ON ANCIENT LITERATURES: GREECE, ROME AND THE NEAR EAST

Proceedings of the “Advanced Seminar in the Humanities” Venice International University 2004-2005

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INDICE

PREFACE p. I SILVIA BARBANTANI Some Remarks on the Origin and Orthography of the “Ptolemaic Hymns” P.Lit.Goodspeed 2 p. 1 ELTON T.E. BARKER Momos Advises Zeus: Changing Representations of ‘Cypria’ Fragment 1 p. 33 JOVAN BILBIJA Ancient Dream-Books as Mirrors of Worlds p. 75 ANNA BONIFAZI Early Greek Explorations Across the Mediterranean and the Semantics of Nostos in Homer p. 105 LUCA CADILI Nimbus: Vergil, Lucretius, Sophocles and a New History of the Latin Language (Georg. 1.328-29, Lucr. 6.253-55 and Soph. frg. 538 Radt) p. 135 JOEL CHRISTENSEN Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad p. 179 CLAUDIO DE STEFANI ALWFHTOS ERWS: Anatomy of a Late Greek Poem p. 203 MARTIN DINTER Tragedy and Epigram p. 213 MYRTO GARANI The Palingenesis of Empedocles’ Calliope in Lucretius p. 231 AMIR GILAN Were There Cannibals in Syria? History and Fiction in an Old Hittite Literary Text p. 267 ERIK HAMER Horace, the Carmen Saeculare and Callimachus p. 285

PHILIP HARDIE Lucan’s Song of the Earth p. 305 JULIA NELSON HAWKINS Caesar and Caesarian Section: the Poetics of Medicine and Childbirth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses p. 331 MIGUEL HERRERO DE JÁUREGUI Orphic Mediations Between Greek and Foreign Religion p. 369 DONALD E. LAVIGNE Some Preliminary Remarks on the Persona in Hellenistic Epigram and Iambos p. 387 ANNE LÖHNERT Scribes and Singers of Emesal Lamentations in Ancient Mesopotamia in the Second Millennium BCE p. 421 ANNA NOVOKHATKO Horace’s Iambic and Satiric Poetry Within the Framework of the Ancient Greek Tradition p. 449 ANNICK PAYNE Lycia – Crossroads of Hittite and Greek Traditions? p. 471 JACK M. SASSON Time & Mortality. Creation Narratives in Ancient Israel and Mesopotamia p. 489 WILLIAM MICHAEL SHORT Clipeos an Armillas? Ambiguity in the Riddling of Tarpeia p. 511 RACHEL STROUMSA Narrative Hymns Across the Levant p. 529 MARIE LOUISE VON GLINSKI Non Sum Qualis Eram: Reflections on Horace’s Poetic Persona in Odes 4 p. 549

UNIVERSALITY OR PRIORITY? THE RHETORIC OF DEATH IN THE GILGAMESH POEMS AND THE ILIAD∗

Joel Christensen

Since the theme of Venice International University’s seminar is literature and culture

in the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, I am happy to compare a monumental work from Mesopotamia to one from Greece. Many readers have identified parallel perspectives on human mortality in the Gilgamesh poems and the Iliad.1 In this paper, I will address these poems’ rhetorical moves in the discourse of mortality and poetic fame. Both the Gilgamesh poems and the Iliad present a series of rhetorical moves concerning “heroic” death and a compensatory eternal fame that include what I identify as a primary heroic stance, a crisis of it, and a proposed alternative.2 Furthermore, both poems evince a metapoetic consciousness of their own power to convey fame as they do exactly that. An examination of these similarities, moreover, yields interesting divergences, all of which, I argue, stem from contrastive contexts. In the spirit of the seminar, I will present the parallel movements of fame separately and then outline some implications of their comparison. Before addressing the texts I will discuss the challenges and stakes of such an investigation.

A comparative project may encounter objections at its inception. Comparisons between the works in question are often justified as studies of poems of the same genre. As Piotr Michalowski, among others, has argued, calling Gilgamesh an ‘epic’ is a severe anachronism – epic is a descriptive term canonised by the post-Homeric Greeks and retrojecting it often prompts readers to misread works from very different traditions.3 Additionally, the use of the term ‘heroic’ to describe the epoch or values

∗ This paper began in a seminar co-chaired by Christoper Ratté and Lawrence Schiffman at NYU in

2001 and developed considerably during my participation in VIU’s two-year colloquium where it benefited from extensive discussion in May 2005. For its present form I am indebted to Professors Irad Malkin and Piotr Michalowski for their careful and timely responses as well as fellow seminar participant Elton Barker.

1 See WILSON 1986, 38-41; BURKERT 1992, 117-18; and HAUBOLD 2002. For a collection of presumed parallels between the two poetic traditions, see MORRIS 1997, 617-23 and WEST 1997, 334-437.

2 This study departs from earlier ones by framing the question of heroic death as one of rhetoric. I struggled with choosing a term for the opening rhetorical move. My original term ‘typical’ seemed to betray an assumption of universals at the inception of the discussion. I see this primary move as the first and most basic expression of the expectations and promises of ‘heroism’.

3 MICHALOWSKI 1992, 77 and HAUBOLD 2002.

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contained within the texts is misleading insofar as its modern connotations are foreign to Ancient Mesopotamia and often misunderstood in connection with Ancient Greece as well.4 In this paper I will use this anachronistic term to denote the culturally constructed system of values for outstanding or exceptional men of the highest social class. With this usage I do not mean to imply that the cultural constructs are identical, merely that in both literatures we may isolate a matrix of marked values that occupies similar cultural space. What I hope to do rests on the assumption that it can be mutually beneficial for both sides of a comparative equation to investigate the similarity of themes contained within works that occupy analogous places in their respective cultures.5 Hence, I propose as a starting point for comparison not common genre but a potentially shared exegetical purpose in the contemplation of mortality.6

Scholars (classicists especially) have long lacked satisfactory methodology for classifying and understanding similarities between the literatures of the ancient Near East and Greece.7 A collection of parallels, beyond being valuable for analogy alone, can appear banal without explication.8 Modern readers often turn to polar opposites for explanation, labeling parallels as coincidental, therefore universal, or, when there is provable contact or linear historical priority, derivative (the earlier is ‘original’). Both claims should provoke recoil. Classical scholars long resisted the admission of significant influence on Greece from the Near East for reasons of cultural chauvinism. Since, culturally, we endow the primary or original with authority and value, we often fear what will be lost in admitting the ‘miracles’ of Greece as something less than miraculous.9 Indeed, the work of Walter Burkert and Martin West has made great

4 See HAUBOLD 2002, 4. 5 Both works come from what Johannes Haubold has described as a system of myths that serve to

transmit an understanding of human history to the culture in question (2002, 8-12). Michalowski wonders whether or not the Near Eastern ‘epics’ should be singled out from other Ancient Near Eastern material (1992, 247). When addressing ‘historiography’ in the Ancient Near East in another work, Michalowski has also argued that there may be significance to ‘the general import of generic categories, without giving evidence to any one particular form’ (1999, 77).

6 In focusing on the social function of a given theme or motif I draw on helpful methodological advice from the structuralist approach to myth as formulated by JACOPIN 1988.

7 This problem occupies the beginning of Haubold’s article (2002, 1-7). Much of what follows has been inspired by Haubold’s careful analysis of the difficulties of this particular comparative field. Dowden (2001, 172), in his review of WEST 1997, presents five reactions to a presented parallel.

8 On the importance of the Near East to Homerists see Burkert’s brief comments (1992, 4-7 and 119-20), Haubold’s introduction (2002, 1-3), and Morris’ article (1997). Haubold cites Petriconi’s assertion that knowledge of the Near East is as essential to a Homerist as knowledge of Greek is to a Latinist – an assertion with which West agrees (1997, xi). Petriconi is unambiguous about the vertical relationship between the Gilgamesh poem and the Iliad. (1964, 329). Such a stance permeates scholarship, e.g., MORRIS 1997, 599.

9 A point of contrast emphasised by HAUBOLD 2002 and BURKERT (1992, 1-8) is the extent to which comparative work in Indo-European culture and poetics is accepted by Classicists. This interpretive move has been accepted partly because it is non-threatening. The comparative study of Indo-European literature and linguistics is both about establishing prior possibilities and cataloguing shared universals. Near Eastern material, on the other hand, represents a ‘border area’ that makes Assyriologists and Classicists alike uncomfortable: geography renders the fields not completely alien,

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progress in confronting such cultural prejudice. Nevertheless, their claims of cultural influence, often contingent on proving contact and mapping out lanes of transmission, seem specious to some.10 Michalowski, for example, as he emphasised in our seminar, cannot conceive of cultural exchange between peoples so thoroughly alienated by language and time.

On the other side, the claim of the universal quality of a motif or theme often seems empty.11 Since the birth of comparative mythology and its Anglophone popularisation through the work of J.G. Frazer, universality has often elided significant contextual differences in order to make claims of cross-cultural truths. Indeed, we often dance dangerously on a precipice insofar as in searching for parallels we find that for which we are looking to the detriment of significant elements around it. Furthermore, it is difficult to ‘read’ texts from so remote a culture when we are already imbued with the assumptions of a training in western literary aesthetics, a danger exacerbated when a classicist approaches Near Eastern literature fresh from reading Homer.

In art, architecture, and religion, the Near East exercised considerable influence on Archaic Greece – it is hard to imagine that Greek literature developed independently of the rest of its culture.12 Neither of the available polarities is dispensable or intrinsically deficient. The problem is the way that we deal with them.13 I have found it conceptually

but mysteries of transmission and the boundaries of time and language only serve to increase the opacity of their relationships.

10 In Burkert’s presentations, such speculations often seem out-of-place or excessively speculative. On the similarity of battle scenes between Egyptian literature and Greek epic, Burkert writes: ‘Considering the date of the Assyrian text, one might even toy with the idea that some Greek singer had arrived in Assyria together with his mercenaries, and that he composed this song on the battle of Halule which so much pleased the king that it was incorporated in the official annals where it forms a strange contrast to the standard dreary and dull list of battle and plundering’ (1992, 119). The thought is, indeed, interesting, but something of a dead-end. West imagines bilingual poets and entertains the notion that ‘Homer’, if not actually a non-Greek individual, is a name borrowed from the Near East (1997, 622-4). Sasson also speculates on transmission but he sees the priestly classes as the primary means or cultural intercourse – an assertion that lurks throughout Burkert’s Orientalizing Revolution (1972, 275-7).

11 This is, for me, one of the central difficulties of resorting to universalism. It is often too easy. To quote another shared heritage of the Near East and the West, we should remember the advice of Ecclesiastes: nihil sub sole novum. Claims of the universal quality of a motif or theme make contemporary scholars uncomfortable partially because so much emphasis is now put on ‘difference’ and the value of that which is unique – the sapping of universalism’s power is also a heritage of post-modern philosophy. For discussions on universalism see MOSCOVICI 2001 and ASSITER 2003.

12 On this topic, see (for starters) BURKERT 1992, PENGLASE 1994, and WEST 1997. The Homeric epics do, in fact, exhibit a ‘consciousness’ of the Near East in the form of Egyptians and Phoenicians especially. See MORRIS 1997, 609-16. Not insignificant is the fact that the alphabet received and modified for Greek is Near Eastern in origin. See POWELL 1991 for speculation on the Homeric epics’ importance in this importation.

13 Classical scholars, as it seems to me, are especially prone to thinking in terms of polarity or opposition. Part of this is an intellectual heritage but another is, perhaps, the training we receive in the field itself. Somehow, the mén and dé of classical Greek become ingrained in our systems of logic. For a now classic analysis of polarity in Greek thought see LLOYD 1966. We need to remember,

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useful to consider the postmodern approach of network theory where relationships are not conceptualised as a hierarchy akin to a tree with roots and branches, but rather to an extensive rhizome with an ‘interconnected root system’ exhibiting ‘individual leafy plants’.14 Such a model abandons a fixed order of priority and allows for discrete dissemination and re-assimilation of ideas with a potential for a multidirectional flow. If, in thinking of the cultural, symbolic and poetic theatre of the Mediterranean as such an entity, we do not treat priority and universality as mutually exclusive, we can, perhaps, better approach the ‘influence’ of Near Eastern material on Greek Epic. Furthermore, the adoption of a Mediterranean perspective can help us escape the recidivism of our fields, disciplines often caught in the academic trap of self-justification. With these two steps in mind, it is my assertion that cultural ‘borrowing’ is often a result of both utility and affinity. It is clear from Indo-European studies that a poetic tradition is one of the oldest inheritances of the Greek language.15 In whatever form this tradition became exposed to Near Eastern culture, a ‘borrowing’ of motifs, structures, and images was an extended process of assimilation made possible by basic affinities between traditions conditioned by human universals and shared geographical settings. I suggest that a poetic feature or mythical motif travels through multiple sources and obtains cultural import almost immediately. The best illustration of this possibility I can offer is the status of ‘truth’ in oral poetry as understood by some Homerists. In short, the utterance of a tale by a narrator, inspired in performance by Muses, is itself a testament to its truth.16 Myth and poetics are surprisingly flexible – as Pierre-Yves Jacopin shows in his analysis of Yukuna mythology and its adaptation to the arrival of the “white” man, completely alien themes and elements can be rapidly adapted in an oral culture to explain material or perspectival changes without drastic alteration of the system.17

With these various methods in mind, I will now turn to the two traditions in question. In order to preserve clarity, I will discuss each tradition’s rhetorical moves separately and then, after summarizing their similarities, I will explore in what ways we can consider their differences conditioned by separate contexts.

The Gilgamesh Poem(s) The Gilgamesh poem(s)18 deal almost exclusively with death. After Enkidu and

Gilgamesh reconcile their differences, they turn to the task of ridding the Cedar forest of

however, that antithesis is a basic technique of rhetoric and persuasion and in this is nearly always artificial to some degree.

14 This model is offered for Greek identity by MALKIN 2003, 56 and based on theories proposed by many, but among them GUATTARI – DELEUZE 1987.

15 On Indo-European poetics, see WATKINS 1995. 16 See, for example, PUCCI 2002, 19. 17 JACOPIN 1988. 18 Piotr Michalowski warns that it is dangerous to conflate the versions of the Gilgamesh poems

separated by temporal and linguistic gulfs. Some scholars do, in fact, take the Gilgamesh tales as part of a tradition surrounding the hero. Jack Sasson, for example, uses the analogical argument of the Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory to support a similar assertion (1972, 267-8). The positing of an oral


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fierce Huwawa, but as they begin their expedition Enkidu expresses his anxiety: ‘My friend, turn back… / do not [pursue] this journey’ (Tablet III 230).19 In the Old Babylonian version, Gilgamesh answers his friend with a primary heroic attitude:

Who is there, my friend, can climb to the sky?

Only the gods [dwell] forever in sunlight. As for man, his days are numbered,

Whatever he may do, it is but wind.

Here are you, afraid of death! What has become of your mighty valour?

Let me walk in front of you, and you can call to me ‘Go without fear!’

If I should fall, let me make my name:

‘Gilgamesh joined battle with ferocious Huwawa’. You were born and grew up in the wild,

A lion attacked you, you experienced all.

Grown men fled away from your presence, …you [in the] evening.

[Why now] do you speak like a weakling? [with your] spineless [words] you make me despondent.

Let me start out, I will chop down the cedar!

[A name that] is eternal I will establish for ever! [Come,] my friend, let us hie to the forge,

let them cast [us hatchets] in our presence. (Yale Tablet, 140-62)20

Gilgamesh makes several rhetorical moves. First, he establishes their mortality – man’s life is brief, he is not like the gods and his death is inevitable. That a man cannot scale heaven (or that apotheosis is impossible) is the leading line of his exhortation. Gilgamesh directly opposes ‘mighty valour’ to Enkidu’s fear of death; to be heroic, in Gilgamesh’s terms, precludes one from bowing to mortal anxiety. In his second move, he clarifies that, in exchange for endangering what is already limited, a hero receives fame, the ‘name’ he promised earlier. Since life is limited, fear of the inevitable is irrational, but premature or risked death, according to this proverbial calculus, is a ‘good’ trade for enduring fame. Glorious deeds, in the primary equation, secure some

tradition, however, is extremely speculative. See COOPER 1992 and MICHALOWSKI 1992 for two discussions of this problem. For a history of the Gilgamesh texts see TIGAY 1982.

19 GEORGE 1999, 29. 20 GEORGE 1999, 110-11.

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share of the immortal for mortal man.21 Gilgamesh also articulates this view in a passage from the Standard Version:

Take my hand, friend, and we shall go [on] together,

[let] your thoughts dwell on combat! Forget death and [seek] life!

…the careful man. [Let him who] goes first be on guard for himself and bring his

comrade to safety! It is they made a name [for days] long in the future. (Tablet IV 253-268)22

Here, again, Gilgamesh pairs eschewing anxiety over death with a name (future fame) as promised compensation for a life risked or lost. The primary heroic stance is thus summarised: human life is not immortal, fame is, therefore it is a fair trade to lay down our limited time for an enduring name.

Gilgamesh’s tale does not offer only this bland reflection on life and heroic death.23 The pair successfully kill Huwawa and cut down the Cedar in order to construct their own monument, but their audacity attracts divine enmity. Enkidu is awarded death for his pursuit of glory.24 When he sees that death is imminent, Enkidu cries out. Gilgamesh’s earlier exhortation is little solace as Enkidu realises that his numbered days are at an end. Although an epiphany of imminent death does not negate the possibility of limitless fame, Gilgamesh’s discourse loses its efficacy – in the face of death, the primary heroic stance is empty.

Gilgamesh cannot accept the death of his friend – he mourns over the body for a week; only when a worm crawls out of the corpse’s nose does he acknowledge what has really happened. Once he accepts his friend’s demise, however, Gilgamesh begins to grasp the precariousness of his own life: ‘I shall die, and shall I not be like Enkidu? / Sorrow has entered my heart / I am afraid of death, so I wander the wild’ (Tablet IX 3-5).25 So deeply has his confidence been shaken that the once dauntless Gilgamesh shirks at the sight of lions (Tablet IX 9). His new quest, to find immortal life, accentuates the gulf between the promise of the primary heroic stance and the reality of human death.26 A name is a name and not the person it labels.27 Gilgamesh’s quest is at once an objection to and a crisis of the heroic attitude in a search for real immortality, 21 The speech also alludes to immortality gained through children (discussed below). For this type of

immortality and the ‘seeds of a teleological discourse’ that parallel Plato’s Symposium see HELD 1983. 22 GEORGE 1999, 38-9. 23 Sasson sees the poet applying ironic foreshadowing in Gilgamesh’s comments to Enkidu (1972, 268-

70). 24 GEORGE 1999, 54. 25 GEORGE 1999, 70. 26 Michalowski writes that Gilgamesh ‘perceives the emptiness of the metaphor of fame’ (1999, 80). 27 From the standpoint of semiotics, we may envision the crisis of the promise of fame as a realisation of

the gap between signifier and signified. Indeed, a lapse in the belief of fame’s power to create a world may also be understood as a questioning of the discourse of poetry and the efficacy of language itself.


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symbolically a quest for a deeper understanding of death.28 Now that Gilgamesh has witnessed death, he wants to know what it means. A feature of this is the clear assimilation between Gilgamesh’s grief over the loss of Enkidu and his desperation over his own mortality encapsulated nicely by his words to the tavern-keeper: ‘How can I keep silent?] How can I stay quiet? / [My friend, whom I loved, has turned] to clay, / my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has [turned to clay.] / [Shall I not be like] him, and also lie down, / [never] to rise again, through all eternity?’ (Tablet X 67-71).29 Alternation between invocations of his friend and references to the first person evokes an image of the two blending together. Gilgamesh’s initial words to Enkidu, that one who risks life gloriously is rewarded with immortal fame, imply that that which is limited should be exchanged for the unlimited, a ‘name’ that will be won. Once Enkidu’s death has routed his confidence, however, Gilgamesh’s repeated lament bemoans the distance between the name that lives on and the self that simply lives.

As he runs from death, Gilgamesh searches for a way to understand it. What is death like – is it the dreamless sleep of forever or is it something like life?30 Gilgamesh’s restless journey takes him across the sea to discover the secret of immortality from deathless Uta-napishti, the only survivor of the legendary deluge. Uta-napishti instructs him to entreat the gods for immortality and, when his prayer goes unfulfilled, he offers Gilgamesh a plant that will make him young again as something of a consolation prize.31 As he returns home, however, a snake consumes the plant before he can. Gilgamesh watches the snake shed its skin and he weeps (Tablet XI 305-309).

During his quest for immortal life, Gilgamesh passes through the realm of normal, or non-heroic life. In the Old Babylonian version the tavern-keeper, Siduri, in her tavern on the edge of the sea, offers advice apart from how to find Uta-napishti:32

But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,

enjoy yourself always by day and by night! Make merry each day,

Dance and play day and night!

Let your clothes be clean, let your hair be washed, may you bathe in water!

28 Gilgamesh is ‘two thirds god and one third human’ (I 48; GEORGE 1999, 2) but like Achilles, he is not

divine enough to avoid death. 29 GEORGE 1999, 78. 30 On a journey during which he kills beasts and men, according to an Old Babylonian version,

Gilgamesh hears from the sun god Shamash that he will never find the life he is seeking. Gilgamesh responds with questions about the nature of death (Sippar Tablet I 10-15; GEORGE 1999, 123).

31 Uta-napishti tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood and then tells him to go sleepless for six days and seven nights. When he falls asleep on the first day, Uta-napishti’s wife bakes a loaf for every day that he sleeps so that he will have evidence of how much time has passed (Tablet XI 1-235; GEORGE 1999, 88-96).

32 In the Standard Version, Siduri sees Gilgamesh coming and bars the door. After she lets him in, Gilgamesh expresses his grief before she tells him how to find Uta-napishti (Tablet X 5-90; GEORGE 1999, 76-9).

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Gaze on the child who holds your hand, Let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace.’ (Sippar Tablet III 6-13)33

Gilgamesh does not want to hear what the tavern-keeper has to say – he continues to

lament his friend’s death and his own imminent demise as he asks again for the way across the sea. The tavern-keeper’s words, envisioned as an alternative to the primary heroic stance, not only offer advice on daily living, but also provide a coded message on the only type of extra-mortality possible for man. On one level, her advice is hedonistic, essentially equivalent to ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. On the other hand, the final lines offer something more. I suggest that the bar-maid’s ‘common-sense’ advice both entails how to live daily when there are no battles or monsters to subdue and implies what sort of immortality is actually available to man. To ‘gaze on the child who holds your hand’ is to contemplate your progeny – a symbol of the only type of immortality available to humans (biological reproduction) ensured by following the barmaid’s closing direction to ‘let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace’.

Although the Gilgamesh Epic presents us with a protagonist who undergoes a crisis of faith in what might be seen as the heroic, it does not leave the crisis completely unresolved. At the end of the extant tablets there is no immortal life for any man but Uta-napishti, and the epic returns to fame’s consolatory potential.34 When Gilgamesh sees Uruk from afar on his return trip, he tells Ur-Shanabi, the boatman, to carefully survey the city he built, repeating the beginning of the poem:

Climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth! Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!

Were its bricks not fired in an oven? Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?

A Square mile is city, a square mile date-grove, a square mile is clay-pit, half a square mile the temple of Ishtar:

three square miles and a half is Uruk’s expanse. (Tablet XI 323-28)35

At this moment, Gilgamesh becomes a poet in the telling, or retelling, of his own story. The city is monumental, a testament to Gilgamesh’s own efforts, a vessel for fame nearly as enduring as the poem itself. That the poem ends with its own beginning as Gilgamesh abandons his quest and takes comfort in his works has been interpreted as the enjoyment of the city as symbol of his life or as emblematic of what will remain

33 GEORGE 1999, 124. Both Sasson (1972, 274) and Beye (1984, 17) see this advice as traditional. 34 It is interesting that the poem conveys actual immortality upon the only man who actually tells his

own story, a man who participates in the creation of fame. 35 Tablet I 18-23 = XI 323-8 (GEORGE 1999, 99). The archaeological record shows that during the time

in which the ‘historical’ Gilgamesh lived frequent hostilities between growing cities led to a period of intense fortification building. The poem envisions the building from this period as testaments to an earlier heroic age – much the same way in which Archaic and Classical Greeks looked back to the immense walls of the Dark or Mycenaean ages (SASSON 1972, 261-2).


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after his death.36 I see no need to disambiguate the city’s meaning: the walls of Uruk are at once signs of life and what remains after it.37 The clay of the city walls, moreover, may evoke the clay tablets of the poem or point to the tale enclosed beneath them.38 The poet does not need to end by saying that Gilgamesh received his immortal fame – such an assertion would be tautological before Uruk’s walls and within poetry itself. Although the poem openly doubts whether immortal fame is a sufficient exchange for mortal life, in the end it is a testament that nothing but this is allowed for men.

Thus, in the discourse of fame, the Gilgamesh poem follows its eponymous hero as he articulates the primary stance, undergoes a crisis regarding the value of fame when he is faced with the death of his friend, encounters the non-heroic alternative and turns in the end to a metapoetic re-assertion of fame’s potential. The poem appropriates criticisms of the discourse of fame and incorporates them into a contemplation of human mortality from the point-of-view of its protagonist.

The Iliad In the Iliad we find a similar repertoire of rhetorical moves regarding fame. A

consideration of Homeric kleos, a term that at once refers to the fame poetry confers and epic poetry itself, is paramount for any study of the Iliad.39 The discourse of kleos pervades both sides of the conflict. Hektor often appears as an advocate of its rhetoric as when, in attempting to persuade the Achaians to accept his challenge to a duel, he promises fame to any man who dies at his hands:40

kaiv potev ti" ei[ph/si kai; ojyigovnwn ajnqrwvpwn nhi>; poluklhvi>di plevwn ejpi; oi[nopa povnton: ajndrov" me;n tovde sh'ma pavlai katateqnhw'to", o{n pot j ajristeuvonta katevktane faivdimo" {Ektwr. w{" potev ti" ejrevei: to; d j ejmo;n klevo" ou] pot j ojlei'tai.

And later someone, one of those born after us, as he sails by in his many benched ship on the murky sea, will say, ‘this is the marker of a man who died long ago; he was the best and Hektor killed him’. So one day someone will say and my fame will never perish. (7.87-91)

36 See GORDON 1965, 84 for the former assertion and SCHEIN 1984, 17 for the latter. 37 An interesting aside and possible symbolic resonance is Gilgamesh’s lament: ‘[My friend, whom I

loved, has turned] to clay, / my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has [turned to clay]’ (Tablet X 69-70, GEORGE 1999, 79).

38 Michalowski describes Gilgamesh as pointing to a tablet box under the walls that contain his tale. Of further importance is the fact that Gilgamesh echoes Uta-napishti in the telling of his own tale (1999, 80). Hope Nash Wolff believes that the poem offers two kinds of heroic glory, one that is highly personal and focused on deeds and one that is socialised and symbolised by the walls of Uruk (1969, 392).

39 NAGY 1999, 15-17 and 97. 40 Hektor also talks about glory in speeches at 6.446, 8.195, and 17.220-337. See also his prayer for

Astyanax (6.476-81) and his deliberative speech in book 22 (22.99-130). For studies of Hektor’s character in the Iliad see REDFIELD 1975 and FARRON 1979.

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Hektor asserts that he will gain an eternal fame by vanquishing his foe, but he also

attempts to allay the mortal fears of those he challenges by assuring them that they too will gain fame for their deeds, even if they lose. Here, fame is that of an actual monument – a mound or grave presents a tangible testament both to the victor and the vanquished – but Hektor’s fame manifests itself as well in the words of those who wander by the grave-marker (‘one of the men born later will say’).41 Fame, in this sense, is not restricted to those who triumph, it is granted to all who act through the renewable resource of words and tangible monuments to their deeds. This is, essentially, the simplest expression of what I consider the primary stance in the rhetoric of fame.

Hektor revises his stance in book 22 before he faces Achilles: ‘And now my fate has arrived, may I not die without a fight and ingloriously at least, but may I do something big that even men of the future will come to know.’ (22.303-5).42 Again, Hektor chooses to focus not on the fame of victory but the fame of valorous deeds. In contrast to his earlier assertion, Hektor yearns to do one last ‘big thing’ (mevga rJevxa" ti) – although Hektor never questions the arithmetic of exchanging life for glory, he searches always for more.43 In Hektor’s words, fame is men of the future talking about your ‘big deed’ but his last minute yearning for one greater deed may reflect the crisis or questioning I will address shortly. By his own logic, he has already won immortal renown, that rarest of commodities for which men should be willing to perish. By wishing for more, Hektor implies that what he has is not enough – and, truly, it never can be. Trapped within his own rhetoric, although Hektor really wishes for is more life, he can only desire that which is already his.

In Sarpedon’s famous speech to Glaukos (12.310-28) we find an elaboration of the expectations and responsibilities inherent to the primary heroic stance.44 Sarpedon first rhetorically affirms their privileged position among their countrymen and then asserts that it is this very position that obligates them to prove their noble worth through noble deeds – deeds that will earn them fame.45 The two men, according to Sarpedon, are honoured (tetimhvmesqa) as immortals by their people and this preferential treatment

41 In the Greek tradition, that the physical grave is a monument to the life of the fallen resounds in

Thucydides’ Funeral Oration of Pericles (2.43). See also Lysias’ Epitaphios 79-81. 42 … nu'n au\tev me moi'ra kicavnei. / mh; ma;n ajspoudiv ge kai; ajkleiw'" ajpoloivmhn, / ajlla; mevga rJevxa"

ti kai; ejssomevnoisi puqevsqai. See Bakker (1997, 166-9) for brief, but lucid comments on the connection between deed and song.

43 One explanation for this is that only someone who has the leisure to question the exchange will do so (Achilles; to a certain extent, Sarpedon). Hektor cannot choose to fight or not to fight and, as a part of his character, he seems keenly aware of his mortality. Despite briefly deluded assertions to the contrary (e.g., 16.859-61) Hektor seems to be all too aware of his and his city’s imminent defeat (6.447-55).

44 Adam Parry cites this passage when he asserts that ‘moral standards as values of life are essentially agreed on by everyone in the Iliad’ (1956, 3). See PUCCI 1998, 49-68 for an extended discussion.

45 On this obligation see WHITMAN 1982, 28 and PARRY 1971, 411. On the position of the Homeric king in relation to his society see ADKINS 1960, 34-5. For a criticism of Adkins’ formulation see LONG 1970 and CREED 1973. PUCCI 1998 also discusses this subject in his chapter ‘Honor and Glory in the Iliad.’ For a recent treatment of this theme see WILSON 2002.


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obligates them to attain the immortality available for men.46 The near divine honours that they receive, the very acts that require them to seek kleos, are material (food, wine, land). Following this statement, Sarpedon wishes that they were immortal so they would not have to fight, touching upon the irony of heroic immortality, an immortality that is something completely different from that of the Olympian gods.47 Since they are mortal and they will die no matter what, they should go into battle and ‘win glory or give it to someone else’ (328). It is life’s status as a limited commodity that gives those who risk it a share of the immortal in the form of fame. Sarpedon’s speech provides a presentation of the primary heroic stance but also, within the desire to be immortal, a compressed recognition that this exchange is not be perfect, a hint of a crisis. His preference would be not to die at all and to live on forever young as the gods do – allowing that the exchange of life-for-fame is far from unambiguously endorsed in the Iliadic world. I see Sarpedon as anticipating objections to his exhortation to battle and answering them with a re-assertion of man’s mortality, kleos might not be the same as life, but what else is there?

The questioning, or crisis, of the primary reaction implied in Sarpedon’s speech may operate as a subtext of Achilles’ speeches throughout the epic. While the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, and Achilles’ problematic rejection of the heroic life, can be more material than existential, the exchange of life for ever-lasting fame operates as a subtext throughout the Achaian political crisis.48 For Achilles, the issue of glory is best articulated in the famous ‘choice’ framed by his mother:

mhvthr gavr tev mev fhsi Qevti" ajrgurovpeza dicqadiva" kh'ra" ferevmen qanavtoio tevlo" dev. eij mevn k jau\qi mevnwn Trwvwn povlin ajmfimavcwmai, w[leto mevn moi novsto", ajta;r klevo" a[fqiton e[stai: eij dev ken oi[kad j i{kwmi fivlhn ej" patrivda gai'an,

46 An irony of some Iliadic passages is that the very speakers who are wishing for immortality were

worshipped in some form in Archaic and early classical Greece. L.R. Palmer shows that Sarpedon’s name might be related to Mycenaean sa-ra-pe-da, a parcel of land sacred to Poseidon (1963, 216-7). The word Sarpedon uses for ‘great piece of land’ (temenos) also describes estates under the jurisdiction of a temple, priest, or god. The distinction between Greek gods and cult-hero is oftentimes unclear. Nagy discusses the connotations of this confusion in the Iliad (1999, 67-173). On Achilles’ cult-states see HOOKER 1988. For the blurry line between ‘deity’ proper and heroic mortal, Herakles is an important figure. On this issue see GALINSKY 1972.

47 Whitman summarises this nicely: ‘The whole paradox is here: Honor is in action and self risk. It is precisely because we can die that the battle is meaningful. Death is the catalyst of the irreconcilables’. (1982, 28). Hektor also imagines himself as a god but his wishes are, curiously, opposite in tone from Sarpedon’s. In his speech from book 8, Hektor wishes he were immortal and ageless but not in order to get away from the battle. Instead he wishes to be able to fight forever. (8.54-551). Cf. 13. 824-32.

48 Whether or not Achilles rejects the heroic code has been an object of debate since Adam Parry published his seminal article (1956). REEVE 1973 challenges Parry’s assertion and insists that his use of rhetorical questions was not ‘absurd’ but an extraordinary application of the formulaic repertoire. Many others have addressed the problem. For a discussion and bibliography, see MARTIN 1989, 146-205. For an interpretation of the conflict between Agamemnon that, if accepted, has the potential to dispel much of Achilles’ inscrutability, see WILSON 2002.

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w[letov moi klevo" ejsqlovn, ejpi; dhro;n dev moi aijw;n e[ssetai, oujde kev m j w\ka tevlo" qanavtoio kiceivh.

For my mother, Thetis silver-feet, says that I carry two fates in respect to death. If I remain here and fight around the city of the Trojans, then my homecoming is lost but I will have eternal fame. But if I go home to my dear paternal country, then my noble fame perishes, but my life will be long and death’s end will not find me quickly. (9.410-416)49

Here Achilles succinctly describes the primary exchange of a short life for eternal

glory, but he does so in order to show that he has another option. His withdrawal from heroic life is, in itself, a miniature crisis – one that requires powerful speeches from close friends for Achilles to temper his reaction. In comparison with Sarpedon’s concise presentation, Achilles’ justifications for not fighting throughout book 9 do not necessarily have to do with kleos except in the condition that one’s possessions (the point of contention between Agamemnon and Achilles) bear some relation to his fame. In the Achaean community whatever one possesses that has been given for valour is an evaluation of a hero’s worth to his companions. Achilles’ objection is that this system has ceased to have any meaning.50 Although much of what he says after this may be a matter of rhetorical posturing, Achilles explains that the heroic life is not the only one and the alternative he proposes is a departure from war, a return to his homeland, and marriage. Despite his complaints and imagined ‘other’-life, Achilles ultimately resolves to wait by his ships to enter the battle only when his own ships are attacked.

Although Achilles’ crisis is multi-layered and overtly involved with his quarrel with Agamemnon, it, nevertheless, entails a partial rejection of a ‘heroic’ model and allows for an integration of the problematics of kleos into the Iliad’s story. Achilles remains concerned with fame despite his physical and ‘philosophical’ withdrawal. When he advises Patroklos (16.83-5), he tells him to listen so that he may win ‘honour and glory’ for him. Once Patroklos has died, Achilles wishes to be dead himself (18.98) and then shows that he awaits his death and will accept the fame of his deeds:51

kh'ra d j ejgw; tovte devxomai oJppovte ken dh; Zeu;" ejqevlh/ televsai hjd j ajqavnatoi Qeoi; a[lloi. oujde; ga;r oujde; bivh JHraklh'o" fuvge kh'ra, o{" per fivltato" e[ske Dii; Kronivwni a[nakti: ajllav eJ moi'ra davmasse kai; ajrgalevo" covlo" {Hrh" w{" kai; ejgwvn, eij dhv moi oJmoivh moi'ra tevtuktai, keivsom j ejpeiv ke qavnw: nu'n de; klevo" ejsqlo;n ajroivmhn...

49 On the ‘choice’ as a possible Iliadic innovation, see HAINSWORTH 1993, 116-17. 50 Cf. 9.319-324. For an illuminating view of the Iliadic struggle over timê (honor in terms of social

standing and prestige goods) see WILSON 2002. 51 Redfield puts it simply: ‘With Patroclus’ death a new clarity comes to Achilles. Life, which before

had been so puzzling, becomes lucidly meaningless’ (1975, 18).


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And I will welcome my fate whenever, indeed, Zeus and the rest of the immortals wish to fulfill it. For not even the strength of Herakles, who was most dear to lord Zeus, the son of Kronos, avoided death. Hera and her harsh wrath overcame him. So I too, if indeed the same fate is mine, will lie down when I die. But now I will seize noble fame. (18.115-22)

Following his loss, Achilles looks back to fame and recuperates its consolatory potential by saying that no mortals can escape death, not even Herakles, therefore the acquisition of kleos is the best that they can hope for. In comparing himself to Herakles, Achilles is at once anticipating future fame and contemplating the past repute of a ‘dead’ hero. The Herakles comparison is a compressed allomorph of the primary stance. Since not even the greatest man who lived could become immortal, life is inescapably limited and the best that can be done is to seek the recompense of fame, as Herakles did.

Achilles continues to connect his death with Patroklos’s, but he also extends this ‘truth’ to others. When he encounters Lykaon, a man he had ransomed earlier, he reveals his new outlook in his refusing to accept his suppliancy again:

nu'n d j oujk e[sq j o{" ti" qavnaton fuvgh/ o{n ke qeov" ge jIlivou propavroiqen ejmh/'" ejn cersi; bavlh/si kai; pavntwn Trwvwn, peri; d j au\ Priavmoiov ge paivdwn. ajlla; fivlo" qavne kai; suv: tiv h\ ojlofuvreai ou}tw"_ kavtqane kai; Pavtroklo", o{ per sevo pollo;n ajmeivnwn. oujc oJrava/" oi{o" kai; ejgw; kalov" te mevga" te_ patro;" d j ei[m j ajgaqoi'o, qea; dev me geivnato mhvthr: ajll j e[pi toi kai; ejmoi; qavnato" kai; moi'ra krataihv: But now there is no one who will avoid death, no one whom the god, at least, puts in my hands in front of Troy, no one of all the Trojans, and especially the sons of Priam. So friend, die too. Why do you mourn like this? Even Patroklos died and he was much better than you. Do you not see what kind of man I am, how fine and large? I come from a noble father and a divine mother bore me, but strong fate and death await me too. (21.103-10)

Bitterly, Achilles tells Lykaon that since he and Patroklos must die, there is nothing to distract him from his vengeance or persuade him to spare another. Achilles seems to identify with Lykaon through their shared mortality, but the absence of any mention of glory as a consolation for death underscores the harrowing effect of Patroklos’ death. This passage has been viewed as merely a justification for Achilles’ revenge, but its similarity in tone with the Herakles passage should not be dismissed.52 Achilles internalises and then generalises Patroklos’ death: these two passages reveal his acceptance of his own death but here he goes further. In denying the obligations of suppliancy, he himself becomes the instrument of death’s inevitability.

52 RICHARDSON 1993, 63.

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The Iliad also presents an alternative to the hero’s life. As I mention above, in his speech to Odysseus when he imagines forsaking his immortal glory, Achilles threatens to go home, marry, and enjoy the possessions accrued by his father (9.380-405). After he has killed Hektor and buried Patroklos, Thetis reminds Achilles that he is not yet dead:

tevknon ejmo;n tevo mevcri" ojdurovmeno" kai; ajceuvwn sh;n e[deai kradivhn memnhmevno" ou[tev ti sivtou ou[t j eujnh'" ajgaqo;n de; gunaikiv per ejn filovthti mivsgesq j: ouj gavr moi dhro;n bevh/, ajllav toi h[dh a[gci parevsthken qavnato" kai; moi'ra krataihv. My child, how long will you consume your heart with mourning and grieving, mindful neither of food nor sleep? It is also good thing to sleep with a woman, for you will not live long, since indeed death and strong fate already stand near you. (24.128-32)

Thetis’ penultimate injunction to her son is that he should enjoy the amount of life that remains for him – he should eat, sleep and have sex.53 Her solution is similar to Achilles’ alternatives in book 9, but this advice follows his heroic deeds as she encourages her son to re-enter the world of living by enjoying food and sleep. Hedonistically or not, she advises him to refresh himself with sex as well, since his time is near its end. When he responds to Priam’s supplication in book 24, Achilles shows that he understands death intimately as he advises Priam to ‘bear up’ since ‘you will not achieve anything in mourning your son, you will not restore him’ (24. 549-51).54 In offering the example of Niobe to induce Priam to eat, Achilles, perhaps, reveals what he has learned from his mother (24.599-620).

Achilles is also concerned with his progeny. Earlier in book 19, when he says of Patroklos’s death that ‘I could suffer nothing worse’, he directly connects his friend’s death with his son’s future: Achilles thought that Patroklos would be there to take Neoptolemos home once he had died (19.315-37). The theme of family and one’s offspring is even more central to the Odyssey where Achilles appears once and denies the importance of his glory, asking only for news of his son.55

The Iliad offers a very complex picture of the primary heroic attitude. Hektor best encapsulates this rhetoric in his speeches, but the pathos of his death may call the

53 Gresseth labels this the carpe diem philosophy (1975, 15). 54 a[nsceo, mhd j ajlivaston ojduvreo so;n kata; qumovn:

ouj gavr ti prhvxei" ajkachvmeno" ui|o" eJh'o", oujdev min ajnsthvsei", pri;n kai; kako;n a[llo pavqh/sqa.

55 Odyssey 11.488-503. A reader will note how little I mention the Odyssey and this is not from some prejudice against the epic. Indeed, in the system I have outlined it is far from insignificant. In short I see the Odyssey as the companion piece that contemplates man’s place outside the context of war where heroic death is an impossible or disfavored option. For the Iliad as the poem of death, see GRIFFIN 1980, 95. On the epics’ different conceptions of kleos, see NAGY 1999, 35-7 and passim.


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validity of his assertions into question.56 It is not whether or not he receives glory for his heroic deeds that is in doubt, but to what degree the Iliad presents his exchange as sufficient. Sarpedon’s compressed presentation of the stance, crisis, and resolution, along with Achilles’ complex relation to his own heroism, serves to problematise the rhetoric. Although Homeric epic is generically interested in securing the primacy of poetic fame, it allows the precious brevity of human life to stand next to it – so that the audience can contemplate the possibilities themselves.

A closer look at the epic’s end sheds some light on the question. The final three significant speeches of the epic are the funerary lamentations of Hecuba, Andromache and Helen (24.725-81) followed by the burial of Hektor and the final line of the epic w}" oi{ g j ajmfivepon tavfon {Ektoro" iJppodavmoio ‘So they heaped up the tomb of horse-taming Hektor’ (24.804). The Iliad’s closing moments are a testament to the life that is granted to heroes after death – they receive songs of mourning, the tangible grave that marks their lives and, ultimately, the kleos of poetry itself. Heroes from before the Iliad are present throughout the text in genealogies, paradeigmata and apologetic speeches – they are always on the lips of the heroes at hand.57 Most famously, even Achilles himself sings of those who came before him. In book 9, when the embassy arrives, they find Achilles playing the lyre, ‘delighting his heart by singing the klea andrōn’ – the famous deeds of men (9.186-9). In short, what we find in the Iliad is the deployment of a traditional theme, a co-option and incorporation of criticisms of and alternatives to this theme and a resolution that amounts to a recuperation of fame along with its problems. The epic secures for itself the primacy of words and poetry in the conferral and transmission of kleos through a series of metapoetic vignettes of heroes consulting songs, reflecting on fame and striving after that which they obtain from the audience as the singer performs his tale.

Discourse and Difference We have briefly surveyed how the Gilgamesh poems and Homer’s Iliad present

discourses on life and death that include a primary heroic stance, a questioning or crisis of the stance and an alternative that details a day-to-day life including the enjoyment of a man’s ephemeral pleasures and the importance of offspring. While the Gilgamesh poem’s rhetorical moves focus on the eponymous hero, the Iliad’s involve several prominent characters: the considerable weight of mortal anxiety that presses on Gilgamesh is distributed among Hektor, Achilles, and others. The Iliad incorporates reflections on mortality into a complex matrix of an individual’s value to his larger group and obligations concomitant with membership in a community. In the final portion of this paper, I will review the similarities between these two treatments of fame 56 For Hektor’s ‘antiheroic’ behavior, see FARRON 1979. 57 In the Iliad especially heroes and gods use the past as a comparison for the present. Although scholars

(Willcock) have identified only some of these as persuasive paradeigmata the phenomenon is significant for understanding the Homeric view and use of the past. See Iliad 4.370-400, 5.381-415, 6.122-233, 7.124 -60, 8.357-69, 9.433-605, 10.284-95, 11.656-802, 14.243-62, 15.14-33, 17. 19-32, 18.112-20, 19.95-133, 23.626-50 and 24.519-20. See WILLCOCK 1964 and EDMUNDS 1997 for a recent discussion and bibliography.

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and ‘heroic’ death and propose that their significant differences are all, in fact, a feature of contrasting political contexts. In closing I will return to the problems of evaluating the relationship of these poems discussed in the introduction.

Apart from rhetorical similarities in the discourse of fame, the works also share thematic resonance in the framing of the arguments. Divine women offer the heroic alternative to Achilles and Gilgamesh, both of whom, incidentally, meet them on the edge of the sea.58 Additionally, in each story a hero from an earlier age underscores the impossibility of mortals achieving immortality – Uta-napishti makes it clear that his apotheosis was one of a kind; Achilles deprives Herakles of his immortality. Furthermore, both Gilgamesh and Achilles come to face their own mortality through the deaths of their friends.59 An interesting contrast appears in the reactions these epiphanies elicit. Whereas Gilgamesh identifies with Enkidu’s passing and fears his own impending death, Achilles’ identification with Patroklos yields not the fear of death but an embrace of it. Achilles sees himself dead in Patroklos’ death and accepts it; Gilgamesh clings to life morosely and searches for a way to keep it. Indeed, Gilgamesh’s eschatological musing seems to have no place in the Iliad. Achilles does not fear his own death, but, rather, he fears living with Patroklos dead; even Hektor does not seem to fear death as he flees – he fears dishonour and the fall of Troy that will follow his death.60 Hektor’s wishes to be young and deathless forever are qualitatively different: he wants to continue fighting for his city.61

While both poems depict the difficulties in declaring that immortal fame is sufficient compensation for a shortened life, neither one offers absolute resolution, although their endings betray a certain loyalty to the poetic re-iteration of fame. In each case we may identify the incorporation of fame and its criticisms as attempts to mitigate the weaknesses of a discourse and recuperate its strengths. The discourse concedes its fallacies only to insist on the absoluteness of its truth. Thus, the closing lines of each work point to the tangible traces of men long gone – Gilgamesh indicates the walls of Uruk to the boatman and the Iliad ends with mention of Hektor’s grave (taphos). But this is not all the poems leave their audiences as each turns metapoetically to the power of language to convey fame and, possibly, their own status as vessels of immortal renown: Gilgamesh begins to recite his own story just as Achilles delights his heart in the songs of the heroes who preceded him. Even in this striking metapoetic perspective there is an essential contrast in referentiality. Gilgamesh looks to the city and the story 58 In ancient Greece especially there is a symbolic connection between women and reproduction as the

cause of death. See FALKNER 1995, 60, STEARS 1998, and SEGAL 1974. Cf. Hes. Th. 589-612 and Op. 60-105 and also Simonides of Amorgos ‘Diatribe Against Women’.

59 WILSON 1986, 38-9. 60 It is difficult to approximate the status of a fear of death in the Iliad. Surely, suppliants beg not to be

killed (6.46-50, 10.378-81, 11.131-5 and 21.74-96) but Achilles and Hektor do not clearly fear death qua death. Hektor worries about the shame of destroying the host (22. 100-8) and he does hesitate in facing Achilles, even imagining a deal to avoid the combat (22.111-22). When he pleads with Achilles, it is not to escape death but to rescue his corpse from disfigurement. Indeed, Homeric heroes are as concerned with negative fame (or shame) as much as positive kleos, a detail that may point to another significant difference between the traditions.

61 See note 47 above.


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of his own fame; Achilles rehearses the stories of men who came before. In short, I believe that Gilgamesh’s gaze reifies his own tale and Achilles’ looks outward to a larger mythopoetic tradition. The oral-background of Homeric poetry in contrast to the self-conscious textuality of the Gilgamesh poem may contribute to this difference in poetics. Gilgamesh’s story is one he can read and hold in his hands, but Achilles’ tale, and those of the heroes before him, are heard. The very word that denotes their fame (klea) is derived from a verb of listening.62

A further contrast is the extent to which the crisis of the heroic discourse is embedded or compressed in the Iliad given the central position it occupies in the Gilgamesh poems, which, I propose, follows from the most striking difference, namely the assimilation of a hero’s value in material goods in a communal context to the heroic ethos in the Iliad.63 The Iliad is the story of heroes performing their deeds in a cooperative (and competitive) socio-political context; Achilles is not a Herakles figure traveling through the wilds and defeating monsters to establish his name. That there is so little mention of material wealth in the Gilgamesh stories and, indeed, in the tales that surround Herakles, both underscores the importance of the community theme in the Iliad and marks it as a possible accretion to a heroic motif inherited from a Greek epic tradition.64

This contrast may reveal to what extent the poems reflect different cultural milieux. Even in its latest form, the Gilgamesh tale conservatively archaises and appropriates the concerns and values of a monarchic political reality where the city’s leader is closely associated with a patron god, whereas the Iliad incorporates a shifting cooperative aristocracy as a significant departure from what came before it.65 Indeed, I suggest that all of the major points of contrast I have drawn out (the absence of a fear of death in the Iliad, difference in poetic consciousness and the discreteness of the Iliad’s discourse on fame) are related to the political context of the poems’ compositions. Gilgamesh looks to the textualised version of himself, thus perpetuating his tale, not necessarily the genre

62 See note 40 above. 63 Indeed, while some have argued that mortality is the central issue of the Iliad, I suggest that it only

becomes an issue once the fabric of social relations is torn by Agamemnon and Achilles is forced to contemplate his position outside the system of social valuation. There is another connection between these two themes—as Donna Wilson explains, Achilles believes he is due honor (timê) from Zeus because he is short-lived. He is due this honor because his mother Thetis was destined to give birth to a son greater than his father and Zeus, to avoid overthrow, forced the divine Thetis to marry a mortal (2002, 64-70). On Achilles, Thetis and the theme of succession, see SLATKIN 1991.

64 A comparison between the exploits of Gilgamesh and Herakles would be equally profitable, but since we possess no complete Herakles-epic it is impossible to make similar comparisons in discourse. Although Herakles was a popular subject for epic poetry (e.g., Creophylus’ The Capture of Oikhalia, Pisander’s Heraklea and Panyassis’ Heraklea), we have only limited remains from this tradition. In the extant fragments, however, Herakles is a hero and the exclusion of his Olympian immortality parallels the Homeric epics. Nagy notes that ‘the theme of immortality is simply left outside the framework of the Oikhalias Halosis’ (1999, 168).

65 For recent evaluations of the Iliad’s politics, see HAMMER 2002, WILSON 2002, and BARKER 2004. For comments on potential political importance of Mesopotamian literature see MICHALOWSKI 1990, 390-5.

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itself. His poem is about coming to terms with a definition of self that is poetic and pragmatic, fear of oblivion fits naturally in his exploration of death. Achilles sings generic stories of epic pasts, carrying on with the support of kleos in general, an oral, living tradition. His political context is about a community, the individual is less important and there is a further consciousness of a community of kleos, a continuum of heroes. He does not want to live when Patroklos dies just as Hektor wants to live forever to continue defending his city. In Gilgamesh’s political world, there is only the king, his tale alone matters. When Enkidu passes, he passes from the story; it is when he realises that death is inevitable that Gilgamesh’s tale really begins.

In closing, what can we say about the relationship between these poems? I have, admittedly, done a certain violence to both traditions by culling a set of themes from their poetic contexts: such categories start to unravel under rigorous testing. But this, in itself, is not tragic, for methods of reading are often most telling when they fail. In my investigation, for example, it has been the realisation that the category of crisis, which fit so well in my understanding of the Gilgamesh poem, is ill-suited to the Iliad that has led me to see how different the two stories are. As some have complained, the Gilgamesh story is attractive to western scholars because its concern with mortality and individualism appears so ‘western’, a feature it may not share with other works from the region.66 In answering this complaint, we must also acknowledge the possibility that the Homeric epics take a distinctly different view of human mortality from other contemporary and earlier epics.67 For our discussion, we should admit that confronting mortality is a universal human condition and the development of rhetorical stances on mortality and human action in response a practically automatic result.

The metapoetic turns, their difference in perspective notwithstanding, may be harder to explain by universal human reaction to death. Poetic self-consciousness is part of what makes each work outstanding in its own culture and may betray a Near Eastern influence on Greek epic. The obstacles to this proposition, as it would be treated conventionally, are considerable. The idea that there was a direct influence of the poetics of Gilgamesh’s story on the development of Greek epic is attractive but requires a level of linguistic competence that is beyond the simple branching of themes and motifs.68 What points of contact can we imagine to have allowed for influence on this level? The Hittites, who possessed paraphrases of the poems and had contact with Greece prior to the composition of the Homeric epics, provide a possible vehicle for this influence, but one could argue in turn that these metapoetic turns are universals of poetics.69 Perhaps the form of the crisis of mortality in the Gilgamesh stories did influence nascent Greek epic as they were assimilated precisely because they possessed elements recognisable or attractive to their new audiences. As I discuss above,

66 HAUBOLD 2002, 3-4. See also MORRIS 1997, 606. 67 GRIFFIN 1977, 369-71. 68 While Greek epic is accepted by most modern scholars to have roots in an oral tradition, the same

cannot be asserted for the Gilgamesh tales. Long before the Trojan war the languages of the Gilgamesh poems were ‘dead’ and their transmission confined to a literate and elite minority of the population See COOPER 1992 and MICHALOWSKI 1996, 188-9.

69 For this tantalizing possibility and further information on the Hittites see PUHVEL 1983 and 1991.


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Herakles’ struggle against death in his myths provides important background material for Homer’s tale; the cycle of tales surrounding Herakles may have in turn been influenced by Near Eastern patterns, we may even see Phoenician Melqart as an intermediary between Gilgamesh and Herakles.70

The problem with the way we discuss cultural transmission is that we are conditioned to base acceptance of a proposed influence on the plausibility of a suggested avenue of transmission. One significant drawback to this approach is that everything we can say about cultural transmission is contingent on the accidents and exigencies of historical survival. If we turn to network theory in the ancient Mediterranean we may envision the two traditions as part of a matrix of themes evolving through constant cultural exchange. Furthermore, we are liberated, to a certain extent, from the demand to provide a specific avenue of transmission. Beyond the affinities I have already outlined, I believe, following Johannes Haubold, that both poems occupy similar spaces in the mythical history of their cultures – hence, each work endeavours in some capacity to deny the immortality of the gods to men and in turn to delimit cultural space that is available. The consolatory tone of the metapoetics of Gilgamesh’s poem could shift in translation from one political context to another. By this, I mean that if we accept the possibility of a poetics of fame in the Mediterranean, such a poetics would adapt to new political realities, i.e., as a larger aristocratic community eclipsed a god-related monarch in political importance the poetics of fame would shift to emphasise the values of this larger community. Additionally, the notional importance of the physical monumenta-lism of Mesopotamia (shared with Egypt) should not be dismissed. I suggest that competition through art to express understanding of human mortality through monumental creation is a conceptual link between the traditions that need not, indeed cannot, be limited to one or two modes of transmission. In short, I propose that stories of Gilgamesh and Greek heroes, when coupled with physical monuments and monumental poems, reveal a shared world view that cannot be limited to one culture or sufficiently explained through vertical transmission.

Although the results of this discussion are far from conclusive, the matter of the crisis in heroic discourse, as I have framed it, can be seen both as a feature of the subject’s clear universality and a result of Near Eastern influence. I have made several suggestions as starting points for dealing with comparative material drawn from Classical Greece and the Near East but a theme that pervades my approach is transparency. When we discuss these subjects it is important not only for individual analysis but for scholarly exchange that we admit the prejudices we bring to the material and our motivations in taking up these studies. Foremost, I believe that a depolarisation of approaches is essential: assuming that a parallel can be one thing or the other is interpretively limiting. Additionally, we must acknowledge that even when parallels

70 This connection is, of course, highly speculative. The Greeks themselves identified Melqart with

Herakles, but what interests me is that Melqart functioned partially as a god of resurrection (see METTINGER 2001, 83-90) but was also the patron god of city-kings (his name literally means “king of the city”). Aubet surmises that Melqart has his origins in the deification of an early king, which is not unlike the tales we receive about Gilgamesh (2001, 154).

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have been observed and an explanation offered, this is only the beginning of the process. Indeed, data gathered by some is often only later understood by others.

A comparative study may successfully show two things: the potency of an idea that can be assimilated from one culture and time to another and the unique or separate aspects of the two cultures combined. Emphasising the contextual operation of a heroic rhetoric that is at once similar to but unique from an earlier tradition can only enrich our understanding of both poems. Even in the case where we can come to no definitive solution on the meaning of parallels, we benefit from the interplay between a universal theme and its specific instances. In this comparison we can see how important the community is to the Iliad and, in the absence of an articulated fear of death, we see how integral the existential panic is to the Gilgamesh tale. Furthermore, a recognition of these differences validates the gathering of parallels and, for me, vindicates the exercise with the reward of a better appreciation of both poems and their contexts.

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