Blood and Hunger in the Iliad

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.