Achilles' last stand: Institutionalising dissent in Homer's Iliad

Debate in the Iliad – what form it takes, what significance that might have, whether or not it even exists – has been a matter of some controversy. One approach has been to examine debate in terms of a formal social context and to extrapolate from this some kind of political or – according to other accounts – pre-political community that the Iliad preserves. Scholars have, however come up with very different ideas about how to describe that society, how to interpret that depiction, or whether such attempts are even fruitful. An alternative approach focuses on the form of the speeches and analyses them as the production of thesis and antithesis: in these terms the cut-and-thrust of debate is understood as a form of proto-rhetorical theory. All this seems far removed from debate as it is represented in the narrative, which is the subject of this paper. I begin with four preliminary propositions. Previous approaches have tended to homogenise different scenes of debate, with little regard to differences in structure or context.