TFBT: The Mountain Gods and Musical Contests

It is odd, that a culture that personifies every river, creek, lake, spring, meadow, vale, city, region, and sea with a deity shows so little knowledge of the gods of the mountain peaks.  Hesiod (Theogony) lists none of the mountains by name and expends only 1 line of poetry.  He names forty-one of the three thousand Oceanides in thirty-six lines.  Searching the literature I can only find five mountains called “god”.  These are Helicon & Cithaeron both of Dorian Boeotia, Olympus of Phrygia, Oreios of Mount Othrys and Tmolos a mountain of Lydia. 

·        Othrys was the stronghold of the Titans in their contest with the Olympians. 

·        The Phrygian Olympus (not the mount of Zeus) was the father of the satyr Marsyas, who will be involved in one of musical contests under discussion here.

Only three of these gods have distinctive myths or personalities; Helicon,  Cithaeron and Tmolos.  All three are the sites of musical contests.   Cithaeron and Tmolos are associated with Dionysius.  Helicon more famously with Apollo and the Muses.   These three will be surveyed here in an attempt to determine why they were the sites of musical contests.

Helicon

Wide-spread, tawny Helicon[i] stands in western Boeotia near Phocis.  Helicon is one of the mountains of Greece with the most fertile soil and the greatest number of cultivated trees. The wild-strawberry bushes supply to the goats sweeter fruit than that growing anywhere else[ii]...  between Lake Copais and the Gulf of Corinth. He appears to be childless and is the dancing ground of the Muses (along with Apollo, the Graces and their mother Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleutheria.

He was also the site of a singing contest between the Muses and Pierides judged by the local nymphs called the Libethrides.  The Pierides were the nine mortal daughters of Pierus, King of Emathia.  The Muses were the nine divine daughters of Zeus representing the arts and sciences.  The Pierides bet the Muses they were better singers, the challenge was accepted, the local nymphs selected as judges, who “took the oath by their own streams, and sat on benches shaped form living stone.”[iii]  The leader of the Pierides chorus “sang of the great war in heaven, ascribing spurious prowess to the Giants, belittling all the exploits of the gods : how Typhon, issuing from earth's lowest depths, struck terror in those heavenly hearts, and they (the Olympians) all turned their backs and fled”  (Ovid Metamorphoses).  Zoe Stamatopoulou[iv]  points out that the Pierides pick a song belittling the gods in an attempt to bridge the distance between gods and men, thus attaining divine honors for themselves.  From my readings in  this appears to be a “shame “song in a shame/praise culture.  (See The Best of the Achaeans by Gregory Nagy (Chpter 14)  I’ve written elsewhere about the hubris, folly and possibility of challenging the gods.  As usual it didn’t work out too well for the mortals.

Excellent, clear-voiced[v]  white-armed[vi] Calliope who is the chief and eldest of   all the Muses[vii]  arose and “sings the  tale of the abduction of Persephone.”  That’s all that Ovid has to say about their performance.  After several damning lines about the Pierides song, he barely gives a line of poetry to Calliope’s.  Following Stamatopoulou’s logic I assume the Muses’ song was one of praise regarding Persephone, but what and why so short?  Something the poet couldn’t expound further on from the Eleusinian Mysteries?  Other authors say more;  “Heaven, the stars, the sea and rivers stood still, while Mount Helicon, beguiled by the pleasure of it all, swelled skyward till, by the will of Poseidon, Pegasus checked it by striking the summit with his hoof” (Anton. Lib. 9)

Calliope sang; the nymphs unanimously declare the Muses the winners.  The muses are as usual ungracious in victory and turned the mortals in various birds.  (Ovid, Metamorphoses) 

Cithaeron

 “Cithaeron in the form of a man laments the woes soon to occur on his slopes, and he wears an ivy crown (of Dionysius) aslant on his head--for he accepts the crown most unwillingly” Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 1. 14

Cithaeron is a mountain-god and his mountain range, in central Greece, standing between Boeotia in the north and Attica in the south. It is mainly composed of limestone and rises over four thousand feet above the wine dark sea.   Some authors suggest he is Nysa, the foster father of Dionysius.   He appears to be childless.  His slopes are the site of many of the tragedies befalling the house of Cadmus and visited by the Eriny Tisiphone  The god either presided over the marriage of Zeus and Plataea, nymph of the region and daughter of the river god Asopos (Homer's Epigrams 6) or arranged a mock marriage at which when the jealous Hera arrived and ripped the wedding veil from the bride discovered a wooden image instead of a nymph. [viii]

A fragment by the poetess Corinna describes a musical contest between Mt. Helicon and Mt. Cithaeron.  All we know is the Cithaeron took up the lyre and sang in honor of the goddess Rhea, mother of Zeus.  The Muses called for a voted by all the blessed gods and Hermes declared Cithaeron the victor.  “with wreaths…the blessed gods crowned him and his mind rejoiced.  But filled with harsh grief Helicon (ripped out) a bare rock and…hurled it from on high into myriad stones.”  Although we have not record of what Mt. Helicon  sings, Collins[ix] suggests that “Corinna can be seen cleverly to oppose a local Boeotian variant against a Panhellenic version centered on Ida”  I note that the god Cithaeron sang accompanied by the lyre while the mountain-god Helicon is more famous for choral music.  Maybe by definition citharoedic music is the winner on Cithaeron. 

Tmolos

"The crags of Tmolos, steep and wide and high, gazing across the sea, at one side fall to Sardis, at the other reach their end at small Hypaepae. “  Ovid, Metamorphoses 11. 150 

Some sources describe the god of Mount Tmolos in Lydia as husband of Pluto (or Omphale) and father of the cannibal Tantalus[x].  Mount Tmolos was the site of a musical contest between Apollo on lyre and Pan (or Marsyas son of Olympus) on pipes.  The mountain god is one of the judges and gives the victory to Apollo.[xi]  In the version with Pan, no great tragedy seems to follow, but in the case of Marsyas’ defeat he is skinned alive by the ungracious Loxias[xii]  “The fable evidently refers to the struggle between the citharoedic and auloedic styles of music, of which the former was connected with the worship of Apollo among the Dorians, and the latter with the orgiastic rites of Cybele (Rhea) in Phrygia.” [xiii]  “

Summary

I can gain no inspirational  insights from this survey and in finishing can only add a few more details and close with a matrix.

The Ancient Greeks apparently had three different musical modes.  I believe this term has something to do with musical scales and tuning an instrument.  They are; Dorian, Lydian and Phrygian; as in (Helicon & Cithaeron), Tmolos and Olympus. [xiv]   Echo an oread of Cithaeron  has myths set on Helicon.  And the winning lyrics honor a goddess.

Mountain	Associated with	contest	Mode
Othrys	Titans	battle for universal  supremacy
Olympus	Rhea, Dionysius	lyre/pipe	Phrygian
Helicon	Apollo, Muses	blame/praise	Dorian
Cithaeron	Dionysius,Tisiphone	lyre and PanHellenic/choral and local	Dorian
Tmolos	Rhea, Dionysius	lyre/pipe	Lydian

---

[i] Homer's Epigrams 6

[ii] Pausanias 9.28.1

[iii] Ovid, Metamorphoses 5. 662

[iv] Hesiodic Muses and Anti-Hesiodic Pierides in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Zoe Stamatopoulou

[v] Stesichorus, Fragment 240& 275

[vi] Bacchylides, Fragment 5

[vii] Hesiod, Theogony 75 

[viii]Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 3. 1)

[ix] Derek Collins Corinna and Mythological Innovation

[x] Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology

[xi] Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae

[xii] Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 24

[xiii] Dic. Of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology

[xiv] Pythagoras added an 8th string to his 7-stringed Kithara, thus completing the octave. In these times, players had a single Mode on their Aulos or their Kithara. An aulete or Kithara player from Athens would have the Dorian Mode on his instrument, one from Phrygia, the Phrygian Mode, and a third from the province of Lydia, the Lydian Mode. At the Pythian Games the various players and singers would assemble, and perhaps the Kitharists might envy one another’s scales and would like to play them also. Thus more strings were gradually added to their Kithara, so that this might come about. THE MODES OF ANCIENT GREECE by Elsie Hamilton 

TFBT: Random Notes on Hour 21

"The gifts of the gods are not to be rejected, as you no doubt know, since you have heard it from one of the devotees Calliope [epic poets]." Philostratus the Younger, Imagines 13

"as you say, filled with wine in a scene of wine-cups and tunes played on the pipe, and not at all hunting to find Aphrodite" (Bacchae 687-688)  This description reminds me of images of a symposium in Euripides’ time. 

Nagy argues that the first tragedy performed at Athens was Pentheus by Thespis and further that the shepherds in the Bacchae gathered at the foot of Cithaeron watching the maenads represents the first audience watching the first tragedy unfold. (I note the audience and actors stand at the wrong places in this primordial amphitheater.)  To add to the symbolism, apparently the Bacchae is one of the last tragedies we know of. 

" the one who is most terrifying, but, for humans, also most gentle." (Bacchae 861) Yeah, that accurately describes the effects of wine. 

Isn't the death of Pentheus the promised result to all the uninitiated who violate the mysteries?

About Euripides Bacchae 912-976;    I hate to be the one suggesting this but was Euripides going for laughs in this part of the tragedy?  This is the scene where Dionysius dresses up Pentheus as a girl so his cousin can spy on the revels of the Theban chicks gone wild.  People are terrible.  I can easily imagine the audience heckling the doomed antagonist.  If the actor played up the lewd aspect of the scene, Dionysius needing to readjust his "waistband" and the discussion of how to thrust with the phallic thyrsus could take on a titillating meaning. Plus, the dialogue is full of double meanings and inside jokes that are ironic if not even laughable.  An actor playing Pentheus as a vain, lewd fool could be quite amusing.  

“Bacchus, raising high the fiery flame from the pine torch, bursts forth from the stalk [narthex],” (Bacchae, Euripides 146-147) If Dionysius is akin to the  gift that Prometheus smuggled out of heaven in a fennel stalk, then Dionysius returning Hephaestus to Olympus is akin to fire being returned to the gods.  Which means it was stolen from Hephaestus' forge rather than Helios’ chariot. 

“equilibrium in ritual is matched by disequilibrium in myth, and this disequilibrium leads to catastrophe.”  Nagy in Hour 21 of The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.

“As those who are involved in the mysteries say, Many are the carriers of the Bacchic wand but few are the bakkhoi . (Plato Phaedo 69c-d.)  Comparable is the aphorism of Jesus in the New Testament:  Many are called but few are chosen. (Matthew 22:14)”  Nagy in Hour 21 of The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.  

 “As a divine activator, Dionysus literally ignites the singing and the dancing as he leaps out, in an elemental burst of flame, from inside the fennel stalk or narthex of the sacred wand used for Bacchic worship. The picturing of such a flaming emergence from inside a stalk or a reed is a traditional idea that can be traced back, I argue, to Indo-European”  Nagy in Hour 21 of The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.   I find it interesting that Aeschylus says Prometheus stole divine fire for mortals in a fennel stalk. 

“The story of Euripides death has tragic overtones. Euripides was returning from dinner with King Archelaus of Macedon, when he was torn to pieces by dogs set on him by some jealous rival. In the Bacchae, one of the plays in Euripides’s final trilogy, Pentheus is torn apart by his female kinsfolk”. J.C. McKeown  Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author of A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities

"So this tragic death of Pentheus...gives in a beautiful way what tragedy is all about. There is a negative hero Pentheus, a god antagonist to the hero, the hubris of the hero and finally his punishment that will lead to his kleos." Aristeagr in Hour 21

 

 

TFBT: More Random Notes from Hour 20 of the Ancient Greek Hero

“You see, I know well that you are all sick, and that, sick as you are when it comes to me,   there is not a single one of you who is as sick as I am.   You see, your pain goes into each one of you alone, all by yourself, and into no other person, but my soul   mourns for the city], for myself, and for you - it does it all together.   So, you are not awakening me from sleep; no, I want you to know that I have by now wept many tears,   gone many ways in the wanderings of my thinking.” Oedipus Tyrannous 59-67  I just think this is great.  Some politician should use this speech sometime.

 “The flaming god has swooped down. He is a most hateful plague, afflicting the city; because of him the house of Cadmus is emptied, while black Hādēs is enriched with sobs and laments”. Oedipus Tyrannous 27-30

“Where on earth are they? Where will this thing be found, this dim trail of an ancient guilt?” Oedipus Tyrannous 108-109

“It is Colonus, shining white. Here the nightingale, a constant visitor, trills her clear note under the trees of green glades, dwelling in the midst of the wine-colored ivy and the gods' inviolate foliage, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun, unvexed by the wind of any storm. Here the Bacchic reveler Dionysus ever walks the ground, companion of the nymphs that nursed him. And, feeding on heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms day by day with its fair clusters, over and over again; it is the ancient garland of the two Great Goddesses. And the crocus blooms with a golden gleam. Nor do the ever-flowing springs diminish from which the waters of Cephisus wander off. And each day this river, swift in making things fertile, moves with its pure current over the broad planes of Earth with her swelling breasts. Nor have the singing and dancing choruses of the Muses shunned this place, nor Aphrodite of the golden rein.” Oedipus at Colonus  The above is so pretty, but every other time I ever read through it, I rushed through it.  They say the world is a garden we should travel through in no haste.  Thanks to “The Ancient Greek Hero” I finally slowed down and saw this garden.

 

LEONARD MUELLNER: And he gets to be a hero of cult as well, himself.
GREGORY NAGY: And then I wish we had more accurate information.
But it's definitely the case that when Sophocles dies in his nineties, he lives to a ripe old age -- he is so respected by his city, he did just about everything that you would ever want to be able to do in Athens. He realized all his ambitions. He was a general. He was a statesman, besides being the--
LEONARD MUELLNER: A performer in tragedies.
GREGORY NAGY: --the greatest master of tragedy and a performer in tragedy.
He did everything. And then after he died, his people did transform him, so to speak, into a cult hero. And he was worshipped as a cult hero. Again, I wish we had more accurate information, because most of the references we have are anecdotal. But it's pretty clear to me that he himself became a cult hero. Imagine what it was like to go to posthumous presentation of Oedipus at Colonus. We know that he was already dead when the drama was performed. This is towards the very end of the fifth century. And I would just give anything to be present at this theatrical moment when the greatest Athenian of the Athenian democracy up to that point is speaking from the dead and describing his native place. And he himself is already a cult hero.

TFBT: Random Notes on Hour 20 of the Ancient Greek Hero

"Odysseus employs the divine authority and enchanting poetic voice which he appropriates from the Sirens” Bellum? Is it possible that the winner of musical contests gets the right to use the loser’s song? Is that how the muses became the Pierides?

“Heroes keep trying to prove to themselves that they belong somehow to a world of immortals, but, after all is said and done; heroes only end up proving that they deserve to die for trying.”

  H24H 20:63 Nagy

As I mentioned in the last posting that I consistently flunk the hourly quizzes for the Harvard on-line course I am taking.  I reviewed all the old quizzes and essays.  It ends up I always answer the questions from a secular prospective rather than the perspective of a pious 5^th century BC Athenian.  Great!  Another example for my ongoing research in the inappropriateness of secular interpretation of Greek myth and I’m the example!   It is as if I was studying the New Testaments and when quizzed about the parables I responded as if the Lord was actually talking about sheep.  Ugh!   Maybe I learned my lesson.  I got a 96% on the quiz for Hour 20.

I also witnessed a great discussion between Douglas Frame and Gregory Nagy about the symbolism of horse racing.  Famously in the Iliad Nestor gives a long speech on the strategy and tactics of winning a horse race to his son.  This is towards the end of the “the first, best thing” at Patroclus’ funeral.  Nestor’s advice involves a washed out place on the course where the younger man could force a strategic advantage over other competitors.  Nestor also discussion in great detail turning the post  for the return trip  You know rein in the left horse, let the right horse fly, don’t turn to soon, not too wide….  Next thing you know the charioteers are galloping off, and then returning with no discussion of “turning the post”.  Also we discover that when Nestor was the age of his son, he won all the contests at a similar funeral, except the chariot race. At the finish line the typical debate about the prizes breaks out and the young man’s trick at the washed out spot is argued.  So, let’s see Nestor is no charioteer to advise on turning the post and there is no talk about his son turning the post.     If you keep reading what you hear in the debates about the prizes is his son reins in this passion at the correct moment and then lets them flew when the moment is right.  Apparently Nestor's advice had nothing to do with horses.  Nagy argues that "turning the post" is the moment we learn something or is the moment of initiation.  We learn something by the time we get back to the finish line, we grow and mature or else we are doomed to repeat the course over an over until we crash and die, like Hippolytus who refused to grow up. In further discussions with Claudia Filos, Nagy points out that tragedy starts with Hippolytus’s initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries.  Gee! I guess he failed that one too!  I hope my 96% proves I didn’t!

TFBT:Hour Nineteen Studies for the Ancient Greek Hero

I enjoy participating in "The Ancient Greek Hero" an on-line course from Harvard through edX.  I also regularly flunk the bi- weekly quizzes.  I went through my quizzes. Here is what I should have learned.  

In Oedipus at Colonus the messenger was vague about how Oedipus died.  You know Oedipus! Killed his father, married his mother.  His mother's people threw him out of Thebes because he was cursed.  Tthe people of Athens finally offered to  give him a decent burial. "The Athenians in the historical present of the performance of the drama knew the story of what happened to Oedipus, once they were initiated into the mystery."  If I was pious Athenian watching the play back in the day I would have know the answer to this one.

 

"analysis of the word olbos in showed that this word refers to true blessedness only in contexts where someone is already dead and is eligible for immortalization by way of hero cult or ancestor worship." I would have gotten this one right if I recalled Solon's famous quote "Call no man lucky until his end"

Oedipus takes a long time to recognize the long running tragedy of his life and is really slow at figuring it out at the end.  You'd think he'd be a whole lot brighter having outwitted the man-eating Sphinx of the famous riddle "four legs-two legs-three legs".  The correct answer was; "since the scene dramatizes at once the unseasonal ignorance and intelligence of Oedipus. The notion of a tragic hero's flawed character is out of place, since it his not his character that is at stake, but what he knows and what he does not know at that point in the story"  Sure Oedipus has flaws  but as the tragic hero argues in Colonus he didn't know it was his father he was killing in a bit of road rage over a disputed right of way in a remote intersection.  Nor did he know his mother was the prize for defeating the Sphinx plaguing Ancient Thebes.

"there is no chorus inside the epic commenting on the justice and injustice of the deeds and characters in the drama...the heroes are behaving in ways that are both just and unjust, as they did in epic."  I keep forgetting that the ancient heroes in Greek mythology were larger than life characters, often demigods, whom Homer does not judge, but the playwrights do.

 

"Pausanias and Philostratus refer to these Panhellenic Heroes as theoi more loosely because by then the secret initiatory practices associated with Hero cult are beginning to lose their secrecy." I did not know this.

 

"there is no example of dikē meaning absolute justice in the scene on Achilles's shield" They are discussing the price a murderer must pay to the brothr of the deceased.  It is Homeric; no judgement.

 

"Justice or dikē is rarely opposed to hubris 'unregulated behavior' within the time and space frame of the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but they are ubiquitously contrasted in the Works & Days"  That is because Hesiod is a whiner.

Top of Form

"the world of the living Homeric heroes is "pre-moral" in such a way that they are exploring still blurry distinctions that are no longer so for the "contemporary" audience of the poet " I am starting to get this.

Bottom of Form

"In the ainos 'fable' of the hawk and the nightingale, the moral is:the application of overwhelming, corrupt power is the moral equivalent of cannibalism." I thought it was about the nightingale (poet) being subject to his vicious patron.  But knowing Greek myth I should have thought all they way down to this ugly truth.

 

“The people of Odysseus consider it a blessing that their king died in Ithaca,” you would come closest to the essence of the mystical prophecy of Teiresias. If Odysseus dies in Ithaca and not somewhere else, his death guarantees that his hero cult will be based in Ithaca and not somewhere else, and so it is the population of Ithaca, not some other population, that would be blessed with the fertility and the prosperity that the cult hero grants to those who are ritually correct and therefore morally just (that, as we have seen, is the mentality of hero cult)."  Once again not too nice, but the same logic that Oedipus used with Athens.

Eumaios the swineherd; Philoitios, the cowherd; and Telemachus were the three that helped Odysseus slay the suitors.

"Odysseus destabilizes his own intelligence by calling himself outis or ‘no one’... outis, sounds like another word, mētis, which refers to the ‘craft’ or ‘craftiness’ of the hero - that is, to his intelligence. So, by canceling his own identity when he calls himself outis / mētis, meaning ‘no one’, Odysseus destabilizes his own intelligence, his own mētis."  Odysseus sort of cursed himself.  I should have seen that!

"think about the motive of the master Narrator: when the audience hears something sad, they should feel sad whether or not they have experienced the same sufferings that the characters in the story have experienced... if the members of the audience became emotionally involved with the story. This formulation leaves room for imagining an audience that is not only composed of the heroes who are listening to the story told by Helen but also to the audience-at-large who are listening to the story told by the master Narrator." That means us too.  Keep in mind the Master Narrator could be Homer entertaining us or Cronion creating the drama at Troy to entertain the gods.

"Achilles will go to Hādēs, just as Patroklos will go to Hādēs. That is what the ghost of Patroklos is quoted as saying in Iliad XXIII. But the text of the Iliad, together with the pictures we saw in the vase paintings, indicates a state of permanent afterlife for Achilles." I knew this!

Your rising scale of affection should be based on how closely you are related by blood to someone, but Homer also allows for a spouse or good friend to occupy the top spot in your hert.

"The dramatic days on the battlefield of the lesser hero Diomedes that are the narrative focus of Scrolls 4 and 5...are a dress rehearsal and foil for the themes of ritual substituton (see daimoni īsos or 'equal to Arēs', V 438 and 459) and transgression (attacking the god Ares himself) that are central to the story of Achilles' therapōn, Patroclus"

"A bridegroom at an ancient Greek wedding would be ‘equal’ to Arēs just as that same man as a warrior at war would be ‘equal’ to Arēs"

"Achilles gift giving at Patrolcus funeral is showing what could have happened if the greatest warrior had also been the person in charge of the community of fighting men and the distribution of wealth among them "

 

"When Hector finally reckons with the fact that he failed to heed Polydamas' good advice and now must stand up to the fact that he has to face Achilles, and he begins to run very fast, we see him As a hero who is striving to rise to the level of his arch-enemy, is embodying the war god Ares in his prowess, but who will ultimately lose to a greater hero who exceeds him in prowess and in understanding of the human condition, Achilles."Top of Form

"Unwilting: Eternal and perpetual in human culture, though once green and vegetative," because the word aphthiton means 'not withering' and is applied to objects like sceptres and the kleos 'glory realized in epic song' which flourish in the human domain, not in the natural world."

 

"Kleopatra’s second name is Alcyone because — the penthos or ‘grief’ of the songbird known as the halcyon resembles both the grief of Kleopatra’s mother when she was abducted by Apollo and the grief of Kleopatra herself when she felt a premonition that the city of Calydon might be destroyed."

 

"the private performance of Achilles  singing and playing the lyre in the tentb is reported by Homeric poetry, it is automatically a public act and cannot be a private act. Homeric poetry, as a performance medium in its own right, is a public act. Anything reported by Homeric performance becomes public, because Homeric performance is by nature public. So it is a better answer to say that Achilles performs klea andrōn “publicly, as a way to divert his attention from his sorrow.” The public format of the hero’s singing is also indicated by the participation of Patroklos. Patroklos is intently listening to Achilles and “waiting for his own turn to sing, ready to start at whatever point Achilles leaves off singing. As Patroklos gets ready to continue the song sung by Achilles, the song of Achilles is getting ready to become the song of Patroklos.” So, this hero whose name conveys the very idea of klea andrōn, ‘glories of men (who are heroes)’, is figured here as the personal embodiment of the klea andrōn.  Achilles and Patroklos are actually performing in relay, and that relay performance is typical of the Homeric tradition as a public medium."  I missed this one because I keep forgetting that the Iliad is a play within a play and that everything has a greater meaning

 

In possibly one of the best scenes in the Iliad, the hero Hector says goodbye to his wife and son for the last time. His wife "Andromache already feels grief for Hector, as we see from the fact that she expresses her grief by way of lamenting, and the lament is the grief just as the grief is the lament. So the best answer is “she feels the same grief for Hector that she feels for her father, mother, and brothers.” Andromache is expressing all this grief at once, irrespective of the past or the future. "

 

Achilles looses some booty to the bullying lead of the Greek expedition against Troy; "Homeric poetry seldom spells out directly the moral injustice or justice of any action by any human. But the best answer is “feeling grief because you lost something that means a lot to you.” What means a lot to Achilles is his honor, and he not only does not get honor in Iliad I but he also loses the honor he already has when Agamemnon insults him. That honor has to be restored in Iliad XIX, ...shows that Agamemnon finally had to compensate Achilles for the honor that this superior hero had lost. Similarly in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddess Demeter experiences akhos or ‘grief’ when she loses her daughter Persephone, who is abducted from her by the god Hādēs. Demeter then gets angry after experiencing her akhos, just as Achilles gets angry after experiencing his akhos, and then the goddess punishes the cosmos by stopping all vegetation. Eventually, the whole world is forced to compensate Demeter for the loss of her daughter."

 

Pious interpretation, not secular!

 

"The correct answer is “to cause the Iliad.” Zeus’ will encompasses the whole of the poem through to its end or finish."

Achilles sulked in his tent most of the Iliad because “a goddess advised him to do so,” because Athena grabbed Achilles by the hair and told him to respond to Agamemnon with words and not to kill him."

Philos: "someone with whom the hero identifies more than anyone else because it taps into the idea of the hero’s self, which is in play throughout the inner story."