ABSTRACT

Among the many passages in the Iliad that represent a hero's decision and a motivation in favour of a glorious course of action, those which state the hero’s reasons for accepting his death are memorable and exemplary. They are also psychologically difficult and morally enigmatic. First, all subjective motivation in Homer raises the thorny questions of the subject, of its will, and of its autonomy from the theological forces — with which the text is identified - under whose laws the hero operates. But in the specific case of an heroic prohairesis, when the king decides to take his stand and to stake his life, his motivations reflect more than ever the text’s raison d'être, and therefore its theological and edifying purposes. In those passages the Iliadic metaphysics rises to its most sublime, as it upholds the glamorous portrait of the king, his inflexible will to obtain imperishable glory (aphthiton kleos), and it develops the great consolatory themes that make death acceptable and even freely chosen.1 The monumental funeral oration that the Iliad utters through its doomed heroes contains many of these edifying passages.2 I choose Sarpedon’s speech in II 12. 310-28 in which he impresses on himself the necessity of staking his life. It is exemplary in many ways: the king has no private reasons to fight in Troy and therefore he grounds his decision on general arguments, that evoke his exalted position, his royal portrait and his human mortal destiny.3 The text therefore exposes here in the

most vivid fashion its large concerns and its most far-reachmg consolatory themes: it erects what for us is the first edifying oration that affected generations of readers and still has a tremendous power. For these very reasons, however, the passage also unveils the paradoxical aspects of the Iliadic metaphysics, and it displays what it is my goal here to demonstrate, the desultory discontinuities of the text, the supplementarity of the Iliadic writing, the occasional opacities in the reading that it offers of itself.