The Poetic Competitions of Funeral Games (original) (raw)

Despite the lack of poetic competition within the narrative of the Iliad, the relationship between the funeral games of Patroclus in book 23 and those of Anchises in Aeneid 5 has frequently been analyzed in (meta-) poetically agonistic terms (Sens, Dunkle, Uden). That Virgil uses the narrative occasion of athletic competition as a stage for aemulatio with his most famous epic predecessor is a metaphorical conflation of the diachronic competition between epic poets and the horizontal competition between the competitors in the narrative. This paper will begin by arguing that Virgil's choice to use funeral games as an occasion for poetic aemulatio is a commentary on an implicit function of the funeral games of the Iliad and their relationship to other traditions of early Greek hexametric poetry. There is a long tradition of analyzing the games of book 23 in terms of their allusions to characters and themes that are "cyclic" (Whitman, Kullmann, Willcock, Dowden). This paper posits that the presence of complex referentiality in the funeral games to poetic traditions outside of the Iliad reveals a strategy of the Iliadic tradition (Elmer). In short, there is poetic competition in the Iliad, but it is metaphorical. Specifically, Achilles' role as representative of the Iliad (Martin), and his organization and adjudication of the games and their competitors, present the Iliad as a dominant tradition within a diverse environment of hexametric poetic competition. Through Achilles' authority, the poem presents itself as coopting and normalizing poetic divergence. This is in line with the idea that an absence of overt poetic competition in the Iliad reflects a strategy to efface elements of the performative, agonistic origins of early hexametric poetry (Ford); tellingly, the only explicit case of poetic competition is that of Thamyris and the Muses, narrated in an aside during the catalog (2.594-600), and representing a vertical competition between poet and goddesses of poetry where the former is punished for hubris. This paper will discuss the chariot race's relationship to the plot of the first 18 books of the Iliad, the footrace's evocation of themes from the Nostoi, the wrestling match's significance in terms of the Little Iliad, and the final events' resonances with the Aithiopis. Finally, we will return to the funeral games of Anchises and contextualize elements of Virgil's narrative in terms of their Iliadic intertexts, with the conclusion that at least according to Virgil, the Iliad contains a previously unacknowledged depiction of Achilles' death.