ABSTRACT
Very early in the main story of the Mahābhārata, King Drupada brutally rebuffs his childhood friend, the priest Droṇa, who takes his revenge, relying above all on the help of Arjuna. Right at the start of the Iliad, King Agamemnon brutally rebuffs Apollo’s priest Chryses, who responds by calling on the help of the god he serves, to punish the king and rectify the situation. The two stories are here compared detail by detail, in light of the theory that the two epics are independent developments from an early Indo-European proto-narrative. Where feasible, the argument also draws on the pentadic theory of Indo-European ideology.
