ABSTRACT
Although the story of the removal of Cressida from Troy to the Greek camp does not appear in Homer’s Iliad, her transfer so closely iterates the legend of the kidnapping of Helen that Shakespeare is able to use the triangular character structures precipitated by Cressida’s story-the fi rst consisting of Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus, and the second made up of Troilus, Cressida, and Diomedes-to join his text to a series of Homeric fi gures that refl ect upon the central themes of the Iliad. The challenges faced by Troilus, where he must fi rst deal with a substitute father-fi gure, Cressida’s uncle Pandarus, and then with Diomedes, a coeval rival, refl ect the multiple pressures faced by Agamemnon in the opening episode of the Iliad, where the demand for the forfeiture of Agamemnon’s war bride Chryseis by her father, the priest Chryses, leads to Agamemnon’s confl ict with Achilles over Achilles’ war bride Briseis. Homer never hints that these triangular structures are metonyms for the war over Helen, but seeing them as such places a subtle frame over the entire Iliad. Just as the fi nal image of Hector’s funeral pyre foreshadows the fi re that will consume Troy at the war’s conclusion, the rivalries that inform the opening scene of the Iliad present a condensed fi gure for the cause of the war: a recurrent structural formation in which two men cannot resolve a dispute over the possession of one woman.1
