Emily P Austin | University of Chicago (original) (raw)

Books by Emily P Austin

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Grief and the Hero examines Achilles’ experience of the futility of grief in the context of the I... more Grief and the Hero examines Achilles’ experience of the futility of grief in the context of the Iliad’s study of anger. No action can undo his friend Patroklos’ death, but the experience of death drives him to behave as though he can achieve something restorative. Rather than assuming that grief gives rise to anger, as most scholars have done, Grief and the Hero pays close attention to the poem’s representation of the origin of these emotions. In the Iliad, only Achilles' grief for Patroklos is joined with the word pothê, “longing”; no other grief in the poem is described with this term. The Iliad depicts Achilles’ grief as the rupture of shared life—an insight that generates a new way of reading the epic. Achilles’ anguish drives him to extremes, oscillating between self-isolation and seeking communal expressions of grief; between weeping abundantly and relentlessly pursuing battle; between varied threats of mutilation, deeds of vengeance, and other vows. Yet his yearning for life shared with Patroklos is the common denominator. Here lies the profound insight of the Iliad. All of Achilles’ grief-driven deeds arise from his longing for life with Patroklos, and thus all of these deeds are, in a deep sense, futile. He yearns for something unattainable—undoing the reality of death. Grief and the Hero will appeal not only to scholars and students of Homer but to all humanists. Loss, longing, and even revenge touch many human lives, and the insights of the Iliad have broad resonance.

Papers by Emily P Austin

In: The Spirit of Aristophanes: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson, eds. D. Dixon and M. English, 2024

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The Sophoclean Philoctetes articulates a unique and personal type of heroism. As a person without a community, he cannot be a Homeric hero. The heroic activities of sacking Troy and winning kleos, or glory, are unavailable to him. Further, many conditions are thrust upon him against his will: isolation, sickness, desertion on an island. To sack Troy and win kleos is a form of active heroism and is out of Philoctetes' reach. The second set of conditions is passive: Philoctetes suffers things that are done to him, against his will, and he can do nothing that would remedy these horrendous conditions. But in the course of Sophocles' play it becomes clear that Philoctetes, despite his enormous sufferings and inhibited actions, is not simply a sufferer. When Neoptolemus comes to him, Philoctetes' desperate need for an alleviation of sufferings is complemented by pride in his own achievement. In order to better articulate this hero's sense of heroism, I will employ in this essay the framework of the Greek middle voice. In doing so, I am not suggesting that the grammatical category of the middle voice is identical to Philoctetes' personal view of his heroism. But using these grammatical categories gives us a way of thinking how Philoctetes both is and is not a passive sufferer; and both is and is not an Iliadic hero capable of action. What I call 'heroism in the middle', in the story of Philoctetes, is a third way between suffering and action.

Classical Journal, 2022

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The narrative and figurative inversions in the Iliad’s central battle books function like a large-scale reverse simile. Just as similes force the audience to assess likeness and difference by comparing unlike terms, so when the Achaian camp adopts features of a city under siege, the audience is compelled to consider how the Trojans and Achaians are, and are not, like one another. In building this simile-like reversal, the poem’s poetic devices are integrally at work with its narrative structure. The transposition has a universalizing effect—the story of your enemy may be like your own—even as the inversion makes the audience reconsider distinctions between the two sides at war.

Classical World, 2020

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In the Iliad’s final books, the appearance of the formula “desire for lament” echoes a key narrative arc: Achilles’ shift from cyclical grief and vengeance to releasing his relentlessness along with Hektor’s body. The formula has no stated object when Achilles desires to weep for Patroklos, but, when Priam stirs Achilles to weep for his father, desire leaves Achilles and he takes pleasure in lament. The contextual variations of the formula “desire for lament” reinforce the poem’s final insights. In the Iliad, grief drives actions that do not satisfy; satisfaction comes only when such aimless desires for action are released.

New England Classical Journal, 2015

After the death of Patroklos in Book 18, Achilles is consumed with grief. In this ... more After the death of Patroklos in Book 18, Achilles is consumed with grief. In this state he launches himself into an unparalleled killing spree against the Trojans. His anger results in a cycle of repeated vengeance on Hektor’s corpse, broken only by the intervention of the gods and his own decision to let go. Scholarship, however, has neglected the relationship between this insatiable anger and Achilles’ grief for his beloved comrade. Why does Achilles’ grief result in such vast fury, when, for example, the Trojans’ grief for Hektor does not? In this paper I argue that anger and grief are linked in Achilles’ story through the dynamic of longing. The poem vividly links the two emotions in Achilles’ first lament over the body of his dead friend. His lament is introduced with a striking simile that compares Achilles’ grief to that of a mother lioness whose cubs have been stolen, and who goes off in restless pursuit (Iliad 18.315-323). The longing that drives her transition from grief to anger emerges in parallel form in Achilles’ lament, and I argue that this link is part of the poem’s larger interest in the insatiety of Achilles’ anger and its inability to assuage his grief.