Document Type
Book
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Description
This book is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way and to explain its relationship to the epic’s narrative structure and audience reception. It offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters’ desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters’ desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as erōs, himeros, pothē, menos, thumos, boulē, and eeldōr as well as through the epic’s thematic emotions of grief and anger. This book shows how the mortals’ and gods’ triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus’ withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the “superplot” of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener’s—or reader’s—own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad’s full story, sympathetic desire for characters’ welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.
ISBN
9780192866516
Publication Date
1-6-2023
Publisher
Oxford University Press
City
Oxford
Department 1
Classics
Copyright Note
This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad: The Force that Moves the Epic and Its Audience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Required Publisher's Statement
This book is available from the publisher's website, and the excerpt made available here in accordance with the publisher's policies.
Included in
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, Classical Literature and Philology Commons