ABSTRACT
This essay explores The Iliad’s presentation of its emplotment as a set of internal tensions or counter-pressures – a simultaneous pushing and pulling at the narratological level. Athena’s inhibition of Achilles’s move to kill Agamemnon can be seen as an inaugural, generative gesture of Iliadic emplotment, with contending plots (and not merely contending warriors or gods) ceaselessly at stake. “Inhibition” and “indirection” emerge as structuring principles of the course of the tragedy they set in motion. I suggest that this constitutive struggle over the epic plan emerges in counterfactuals at the level of syntax, theme and plot.
