The Other Iliad: Inversion and Likeness on the Battlefield

Abstract: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.