Collin Moat, University of California, Los Angeles
In this paper, I will explore how the harvesting of wood in Homeric poetry is inextricably linked to the topic of human mortality. In particular, while scholarship has explored how Iliadic tree similes use tree death and the production of wood for craft production to highlight the ambivalence of heroic death, I will focus on how the harvesting of wood for heroic funerals associates wood with a different component of human mortality, collapsing the simile’s boundaries between vehicle and tenor by uniting the mortal material of humans and trees in a process of cremation.
Among the many types of similes used to describe heroic death in the Iliad, the tree similes are some of the most impactful (Moulton 1974: 56–58). While there is variability in the similes, the poet usually likens the collapse of a hero on the battlefield to the felling of a tree, which is destined to become some craft object. The pathos of the tree death is counterbalanced by the fact that the tree’s material will find a new existence as something of exquisite craftsmanship, which resembles the conferral of kleos upon the hero through the poetic description of his death.
Another locus in which tree death is described is the formulaic funerary ritual which occurs several times throughout the Homeric epics (e.g., Il. 24.777–804; Od. 12.8–15). The harvesting of wood for the pyre begins the funerary process and happens in tandem with the collection of and ritual care for the corpses of slain heroes. On the level of language, the poet even marks these as parallel processes (Il. 7.417–20), echoing the association between tree death and human mortality constructed by the tree similes. Yet, in contrast to the Iliadic tree similes, the Homeric funerary ritual offers a different analog for wood because of the alternative role intended for the material. While the destiny of wood as craft medium in the tree similes speaks to poets’ crafting of kleos, Homeric funerary ritual associates wood with the combustible substance of the human body. Instead of becoming some craft object, the wood will become the structure and fuel for the funeral pyre. In a process that echoes the characteristic destructiveness of Early Iron Age warrior burials (Antonaccio 1995, Whitley 2002, 2006, Crielaard 2016), the amalgamation of the wood and the human body disintegrates and is transformed through fire, until only the bones are left in a recognizable form (cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 1995: 110). On one hand, the ashes of the human body and of the wood are mixed, becoming nearly indistinguishable. They symbolize the ephemeral part of embodied existence and are therefore swept away and buried with little care. On the other hand, the bones are freed from the organic composite of the human body and become the objects of ritual washing and careful and meaningful deposition. Becoming artifacts themselves, the bones of the Homeric heroes are subjected to artistic assemblage, for instance the poetic union of Achilles’ and Patroclus’ bones in an urn of divine craftsmanship (Od. 24.73–79).