Blood and Hunger in the Iliad

Title
Blood and Hunger in the Iliad
Publication Date
2006
Author(s)
Neal, Beatrice Tamara
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1086/505669
UNE publication id
une:1353
Abstract
Blood and bloodshed are inevitable by-products of war, literally representative of lost life and suffering. Unsurprisingly, Homer’s Iliad embellishes numerous accounts of fighting and death with references to blood. Perhaps it is also unsurprising, given the regularity of wounding and death, that the form and function of bloody description have received little scholarly attention. The purpose of this paper is to show that blood and what I term 'bloodspill' have poetic significance by surveying the contextualdistribution of ɑἷμɑ in the Iliad. The lexeme does not appear haphazardly but is associated with certain contexts and individuals. Of particular importance is that blood is increasingly represented as a comestible. Moreover, its desired consumption by the war god Ares and the hero Achilles graphically problematizes the warrior ethic presented in the poem.
Link
Citation
Classical Philology, 101(1), p. 15-33
ISSN
1546-072X
0009-837X
Start page
15
End page
33

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