Homer's Filliad

An epic experiment

Some time around 400 BC, a Greek literary humorist called Pigres of Halicarnassus decided to rewrite Homer’s Iliad, roughly 15000 hexameter verses, by inserting after each line a slightly shorter line (a pentameter). The only record of this demented project is the opening couplet which survives as follows (Homer’s original in bold, Pigres’ insertion in italics):

Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus
     Muse, for you hold the bounds of all poetry.

Not a marvellously inspired addition, perhaps, but we can see how Pigres picks up Homer’s address to the Muse and offers some kind of explanation for why the goddess is invoked.

The first seven lines of the Iliad lay out the programme of the epic:

Sing goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus 
The accursed anger, that laid countless sorrows on Achaeans 
And hurled many mighty souls down to Hades 
Of heroes, and made them prey for dogs -
And for all birds - and the will of Zeus was fulfilled.
From the moment when the two men parted in strife (diastêtên) -
Atreides, king of men, and godly Achilles.

How might Pigres have continued with his insertions? Assuming that he was something of a literary critic as well as a humorist, perhaps he wrote something like this:

Sing goddess, of the anger of Achilles son of Peleus 
      Muse, for you hold the bounds of all poetry -
The accursed anger, that laid countless sorrows on Achaeans 
       For frequent sorrows are what the gods give mortals.
And hurled many mighty souls down to Hades                                5
      Who could say how many of them Anger hurled?
Of heroes, and made them prey for dogs -
      What, loathsome corpses? I suppose that’s what dogs ate.
And for all birds, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled 
      ‘For all’ sounds weak; better 'a banquet for birds’.                             10
From the moment when the two men parted in strife (diastêtên) -
      How “on account of Stete”? Was she Briseis then?
Atreides, king of men, and godly Achilles.
      One you see as 'the best', perhaps, the other as 'strongest'.

Notes:

6 Greeks were often curious about the precise details and numbers in Homer’s story.

10 A stern critic, Zenodotus, was to change the text from ‘a banquet for birds’ to the weak ‘for all birds’ because he thought that a banquet was something that only human beings might be said to have. The original reading is clearly preferable.

11 Ancient readers noted that the rare dual form diastêtên, ‘the two men parted’, could be misread as dia stêtên, “on account of stete”, and semi-humorously suggested that ‘stete’ was a Homeric coinage for ‘a woman’, since the quarrel over Briseis was the cause of Achilles’ anger.

14 There was a stand-off between Agamemnon and Achilles, as both had a claim to be the ‘best’ and the ‘strongest’ of Achaean warriors. Pigres might have reflected a line from Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (405 BC) in which Dionysus says of two rival playwrights ‘one has spoken wisely, one clearly’, leaving us to decide which one he means in either case.

I recreate the Greek version of Pigres’ cheeky ‘Filliad’ as follows:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
   Μοῦσα· σὺ γὰρ πάσης πείρατ᾽ ἔχεις σοφίης.
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
   ἄλγεα γὰρ θνητοῖς πυκνὰ δίδουσι θεοί.
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
   τίς κὲ λέγοι ψυχὰς μῆνις ἴαψε πόσας;
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
   ἆρα νέκρους βδελυρούς; ἀλλʼ ἔφαγόν γε κύνες
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
   πᾶσι δοκεῖ φαυλόν, δαῖτἀ γε μᾶλλον ἔχοις.
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
   πῶς τὸ διὰ στήτην; ἥ δὲ Βρισηὶς ἄρʼ ἦν;
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
    τὸν μὲν ἄριστον ἴσως, τὸν δὲ κράτιστον ὁρᾷς.