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In this article, I argue that the Iliad uses maternal imagery in martial contexts to highlight the conflict between the Homeric hero’s obligation to protect his comrades and his imperative to win timē and kleos, “honor and glory.” Maternity in Homeric poetry is strongly associated with protection, and maternal imagery is primarily applied to warriors engaging in the defense of their comrades. In several key passages in the Iliad, however, maternal imagery is deployed either by the narrator or by characters to emphasize the ways in which heroes fail in their duty to act as protectors because of their individual desire for honor. By examining how the paradigm of the maternal warrior plays out in the thoughts and actions of Achilles, the most prominent male character in the Iliad, I demonstrate the ways in which the figure of the Homeric mother is used to expose the contradictions inherent in the normative warrior values of Iliadic society.
Previous scholarship on gender in the Iliad has tended to focus on the ways in which femininity is excluded from warfare and warrior identity (Arthur 1981; Van Nortwick 2001; Ransom 2011). In general, Homeric heroes formulate their masculine identity in opposition to women and children (Ransom 2011, 37). However, while the majority of instances in direct speech where men compare themselves or other men to women are negative and reflect the anxiety that surrounds masculinity on the battlefield, there is a series of similes spoken by both Achilles and the narrator in which men are compared to women in ways that are either neutral or complimentary (8.268–72; 9.323–7; 16.7–11; 17.1–6). In these similes, warriors are likened to mothers, and the comrades under their protection are compared to their children. Foley has stated that unlike the “reverse-sex similes” in the Odyssey, which are integral to the structural development of the poem, these reverse-sex maternal similes in the Iliad “cluster randomly around the relation of Patroclus and Achilles” (Foley 1978, 21). In what follows, I argue that these similes are not random, but that they instead illuminate a crucial aspect of warrior masculinity: the conflict between the obligation to protect one’s comrades and the desire to win glory and personal status. I suggest that these similes...