Crisis Management in Homer

Scott Garner (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

With its opening discussion among the Olympians about the plights of Odysseus and his son, the Odyssey begins its narrative by presenting us with a scenario of extreme crisis.  Similarly, the Iliad takes as its starting point another crucial moment of crisis by proceeding from the origins of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles.  Both epics then continue their action through various problematic situations until they reach epic-ending scenes that provide the final resolution of the problems ultimately deriving from these original difficulties.  Indeed, much of the power of Homeric epic would seem to be wrapped up in the extraordinary ability of the poet to move his characters repeatedly from one hardship to another while always maintaining an effective modulation of the physical, emotional, and social tensions that develop from scene to scene.

In this paper I will discuss one of the narrative techniques that Homer uses to weave together this tapestry of dangerous predicaments, perplexing quandaries, and onerous tasks so seamlessly.  Specifically, even though there are a few instances in the epics of a difficulty being rectified through a single intervention (either by a divinity or a mortal) that then leads the narrative off in a new direction, the much more common tendency in Homer is to complicate the action by placing these crises and interventions into a larger pattern that occurs more than seventy times in the epics.  The basic schema for this “crisis management pattern” (CMP) is as follows:

1. Crisis arises
2. Intervention/mediation attempt #1 occurs
3. Crisis is either lessened or changed, but some problem still exists
4. Intervention/mediation attempt #2 occurs
5. Result

Though this double-crisis pattern is quite simple in nature, a close analysis of the texts reveals that in addition to any aesthetic aspects and mechanical utility that might be associated with the CMP, it is often the structure of the pattern itself that is at the forefront of what the poet is trying to convey to his audience at a given instant.  Just as audience members would have comprehended and appreciated the poet’s skillful manipulation of traditional units such as formulaic phraseology, type-scenes, or even overarching story-patterns, so too would they have recognized the important variations on this particular pattern as the poet employed it to provide nuanced meaning to his words.  Accordingly, the observation of this pattern allows us to understand more deeply several important Homeric scenes that employ the CMP as a structuring feature.  In particular, this paper will focus on the assembly scenes of Iliad 1 and 2 (in order to provide a poetic rationale for Agamemnon’s testing of the troops), the Embassy to Achilles (including its usage of the duals and the meanings behind Phoinix’s speech), and the ending of the Odyssey (with its double divine intervention to cease Ithakan hostilities) in an attempt to move closer to interpreting these scenes in a way similar to that of the earliest Greek audiences themselves.