Tobias Myers’ Homer’s Divine Audience: The Iliad’s Reception on Mount Olympus masterfully presents the complexities of viewing in the Iliad. The ‘divine audience’ of the title refers both to the gods, who become audience-like in the poem, and to the mortal listeners of the poem, who become godlike in their vicarious viewing. Myers offers a compelling new account of the gods’ role in the Iliad by delineating their ‘metaperformative’ function (2), through which the poem’s live audience faces ethical quandaries about enjoying the spectacle of death. Where previous scholarship explored divine viewing in terms of fate, mortality and immortality, or the dramatic effects of delay and foreshadowing, Myers’ book opens a new horizon. As his discerning analysis of these scenes demonstrates, the poet continuously aligns gods and audience throughout the Iliad, an alignment which subtly alters and complicates our sympathies as ‘viewers’ of the poem’s events.
After an engaging introduction (‘With what eyes …?’), which deals lucidly with previous scholarship, Chapter 1, ‘Zeus, the poet, and vision’, turns to how the poem presents itself as performance. The Iliad’s proem sets its audience on a path of viewing, shaped by enargeia and poetic self-consciousness (that is, how it emphasizes its ability to compel viewing). Myers cuts through vexed questions of the proem’s significance with his ‘metaperformative’ reading: the mini-narrative of Il. 1.2–5 sets us on a path whereby Zeus and the poet ‘staging’ and ‘direction’ the Iliad’s action, death on the battlefield (cf. 65), thereby drawing the audience into twofold reactions of ‘emotional response and viewer complicity’ (60).
Chapter 2, ‘The duel and the daïs: Iliadic warfare as spectacle’, elucidates two paradigms of viewership: the divine viewing from the daïs (banquet), which involves collective entertainment, and that of the duel, in which viewers are implicated and partisan to what they observe. Book 4’s opening scene forms a key text: Zeus’s conversation with Athena and Hera about ending the war takes place at a banquet, suggesting aloofness, yet we are drawn into the goddesses’ partisan engagement when Zeus challenges their desire to ensure (and enjoy) Troy’s sack, the very story we have set out to ‘view’ as the Iliad’s audience.
Chapter 3, ‘“Let us cease”: early reflections on the spectacle’s end’, develops the idea of audience engagement through the duel of Book 7. Myers discerns how Athena and Apollo’s presence on the battlefield during this duel brings the duel-and-daïs paradigm into greater tension: on the one hand, the two gods together take pleasure in the entire spectacle (Il. 7.60); and yet their partisan responses to the fighting set the audience up to experience various types of engagement: desire for Achaean victory, and pity for the doomed Trojans.
Chapter 4, ‘“Many contests of the Trojans and Achaeans”: the Iliad’s battle books’, ramps up the tensions of these viewing models over the next three days of battle (books 8, 11–18 and 19–22). Zeus (and the poet) position the audience in a challenging liminal space: participative watching (duel paradigm) in tension with our desire for the known outcome (daïs paradigm). Additionally, in scenes like the extended fighting over Sarpedon’s or Patroklos’ corpse, battle narrative blends with funeral rites: a third paradigm of viewing, which entails honouring the dead from a communal viewpoint. Zeus stages these great contests over his son and over his son’s killer to maximize the spectacle and thereby honour the dead. In such ‘funeral rite’ spectacles, the audience finds itself aligned with the community honouring each dead warrior, further complicating their position as viewers of the war.
The last chapter is my favourite. Chapter 5, ‘“A man having died”: watching Achilles and Hector’, shows how the poet’s nuanced configuration of gods as audience affects our evaluations of Hector and Achilles. The chase in Book 22 is a duel (Achilles and Hector) and also an athletic contest, as if at a funeral, with a common audience. Myers offers a nuanced interpretation of the critique embedded in the chase scene: they run not like men in a foot race for prizes, since they run for the life of Hector. The audience is subtly invited to question our enjoyment of this dramatic contest, fought for a man’s life, not a prize. The shift to Zeus capitalizes on audience excitement: Zeus ponders whether it is the right time to kill Hector, and the audience shares his pity for Hector and, uncomfortably, recognizes its complicity in wanting the story’s necessary end. The story of Troy’s fall is a spectacle, with attendant pleasure and pity. Led by Zeus’s stage directions, we watch the contest, engaged, removed, horrified, entertained, and ponder the ethics of our viewing.
Homer’s Divine Audience reads beautifully, with clear prose and persuasive arguments. Each section brings a new bit of interpretive light. Every Homerist, scholar or person with interests in performance studies, divine-human interaction or the ethics of war poetry must read this book.
