The victor, vanquished: desecration of corpses in the Iliad and its consequences (original) (raw)

Saying that one of the Iliad's main topics is death will come as a surprise to no one. After all, it is set during the siege of Troy. However, there are many ways in which death is portrayed in this poem. Although many warriors are killed as the poem progresses, not all of them die in the same fashion nor are treated in death with the same respect. The Greek idea of the Afterlife involved a fair number of rituals which the dead body should receive in order to be able to enjoy passage into Hades, chief amongst them was proper burial, thus the importance of retrieving the bodies of the fallen after or in a lull in the fighting. However, some particular examples of the opposite behaviour are portrayed in the Iliad, in which the corpse of the dead opponent is desecrated and mistreated in the hopes of inflicting an irreparable damage to their honour (Il. 16.556-61, 24.33-54 amongst other). But this was not always how it turned out.