Introduction: The Power of Thetis, 30 Years On

And there came the daughter of Nereus, silver-footed Thetis, The fair-tressed sepia, dread goddess with mortal voice, Who alone, being a fish, knows both white and black.

(Matro, Attikon Deipnon fr. 1.33–35 ap.

Ath. 4.135c, trans. Aston 2009, 59)

Laura Slatkin’s The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (1st ed. 1991; 2nd ed. 2011) was seminal in revitalizing oralist and neo-analytic approaches to the study of the Homeric poems by showing that Homeric poetry, the Iliad in particular, not only moulds its story from and projects its plot against a wider mythological background, but also actively alludes to such a background, playing with traditions which its audience would have been able to recognize and appreciate. This perspective has the advantage of putting the emphasis firmly on the ‘power of the poet’ to craft a dense and layered poem from a rich mythological heritage, thus creating an interpretatively productive and aesthetically pleasing tension between the creative poet and his far from monolithic myths, rather than viewing him as a conveyor of more or less traditional, but pre-existing tales, or an inventor of ‘ad hoc’ stories.1 At the same time, since they merely are two faces of the same coin, such an approach enhances the ‘power of the reader’ to appreciate the poet’s clever selection, manipulation and recombination of various elements from those traditions, the μῦθον καὶ σύστασιν πραγμάτων (Arist. Po. 1450a32–33).2 It also lends itself particularly well to other approaches grounded in intertextual, semiotic and reception theory, as the essays collected in this volume demonstrate.

As a mythological figure in her own right, Thetis has not received much sustained attention beyond the Iliad. In that poem her appearances are limited to a handful of occasions, but her impact is great. Where she does appear outside the Iliad, often tangentially, she mostly features as the mourning mother, a reminder that even the greatest of heroes must and will die as her son did. In the Odyssey’s second Underworld-episode or deuteronekuia (Od. 24.47–62, ed. Allen), Agamemnon before Achilles recalls how the latter’s demise was lamented by Thetis, the Nereids and the nine Muses. The emphasis on Thetis’ everlasting sorrow is one of the principal threads in her reception in later art and literature. One might say, however, that the attention to Thetis’ overwhelming and unmitigated grief has drowned out many of the peculiar or contradictory aspects of her mythology, which are already present in the Iliad, albeit sometimes merely in nuce. Slatkin’s work has done the Iliadic Thetis a great service by highlighting some of the submerged aspects lurking in the epic’s murky background. We believe that these aspects may be pinpointed elsewhere too, if one is willing to look.

Slatkin’s findings are the starting point for the essays in this volume, which span a wide variety of genres across almost three millennia. Our contributors have applied Slatkin’s conclusions and readings to other authors, genres and objects, often supplementing her methodology with pragmatic considerations or theoretical approaches of their own. This introduction serves two main goals: first, to introduce the essays within this volume and to place them in dialogue with each other, thus pointing out recurring themes across space and time; second, to fill in parts of the picture that are addressed only piecemeal or tangentially. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that Slatkin’s reconstruction of the ‘power of Thetis’ is borne out by other texts also and so provide a trans-historical underpinning for her argument. For that reason, it will be useful to begin this Introduction with a précis of Slatkin’s argument before moving on to the contents of this collection.

Slatkin draws attention to Thetis’ somewhat incongruous appearances throughout the Iliad. In the poem, the goddess stands out due to her agency and lack thereof: grieving Achilles’ doomed fate, Thetis stresses that she cannot meaningfully help him — and yet, she intervenes quite acutely in the war and the divine machinery behind it on her son’s behalf. To bring this inconsistency into focus, Slatkin turns to Hesiod, the Epic Cycle, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar’s Isthmian 8 and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. This simultaneously allows her to reconstruct older traditions upon which Homer was drawing (at least partially), while at the same enabling us to see how he diverges from those traditions. So, in the first chapter, Slatkin (2011, 30–51) explores the parallelism between Thetis and Achilles in the Iliad on the one hand and Eos (Dawn) and Memnon in the Aethiopis on the other. The two demigod warriors reportedly faced each other in battle, with the scene of their fight becoming a popular motif in vase painting.3 In the Aethiopis, Eos bestows immortality upon Memnon after his death, which stands in stark contrast to the unavoidable death of Achilles and Thetis’ inability to ward it off in the Iliad — Thetis even provides the very armour that will allow Achilles to re-enter battle which inexorably will lead to his death. This contrast heightens Achilles’ heroism, which inextricably is linked with mortality, and thus the depth of his tragic fate and his mother’s unending grief.

In her second chapter, Slatkin (2011, 52–71) examines why Thetis succeeds when she appeals to Zeus to grant the Trojans’ temporary supremacy in battle so that Achilles’ star may shine all the brighter when the Greeks truly need him and all hope seems lost (Il. 1.503–510). Thetis’ plea to Zeus follows Achilles’ request for help from his mother (at 1.352–356, 393–412 and recalled at several later points in the epic), with Achilles hinting at favours owed to Thetis by Zeus. Why would Zeus risk upsetting Hera and the other gods in supporting the Trojans? The answer, as Slatkin points out, is that Thetis in the past had rescued Zeus ‘when the other Olympians wanted to bind him — Hera, Poseidon and Athena’ (1.399–400, Achilles’ words) and thereby helped him maintain his rule over the cosmos, ‘warding off unseemly destruction’ (398). Since Achilles knows of Thetis’ feat, other gods probably do as well, none more so than Thetis’ two former wards, Dionysus (Il. 6.130–137) and Hephaestus (18.394–398), the latter fashioning Achilles’ new panoply in Iliad 18 at Thetis’ request. Throughout the epic, then, there is an all-pervading sense of ‘services once rendered’ by Thetis to the gods who have then surpassed her in the Olympian hierarchy, but also of ‘debts and favours owed’ that Thetis might call in, as she does with Zeus and Hephaestus. In this way, Thetis’ grief for her son’s untimely death underscores her once-great power among the gods.

The Iliad ascribes Thetis’ awesome power to successfully ‘ward off unseemly destruction’ (cf. Il. 1.398: ἀεικέα λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι) only to the Nereid, Zeus, Achilles and Apollo, the latter two precisely the figures of μῆνις (wrath) in the poem. Seeing that Achilles’ ‘ἄχος [grief] leads to μῆνις leads to the ἄχος of others’, Slatkin in Chapter Three poses the question: ‘why does the Iliad not predicate a μῆνις of Thetis?’ (Slatkin 2011, 74). How does she reconcile herself to her son’s death? Why does she not use whatever remains of her former power to act out her μῆνις? Slatkin argues that there is, in fact, a μῆνις of Thetis in the Iliad, which, given the epic’s focus on mortal, heroic κλέος (fame), can only be mentioned piecemeal, through allusion and digression, as part of the poem’s wider mythical backdrop. Slatkin masterfully juxtaposes Thetis’ grief for the imminent death of her son with Demeter’s over Kore in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In that poem, Demeter responds to the loss of her daughter by leaving Olympus: she isolates herself from the gods that caused her grief, and starves the world into submission, which eventually brings the Olympians to their knees. Slatkin underscores parallels between Demeter and Thetis, who both don a κάλυμμα κυάνεον or ‘black cloak’ (cf. Hymn. Hom. Cer. 38–44 and Il. 24.93–96) to express that their ἄχος teeters at the point of its transformation into active μῆνις. Donning the shadowy garment signals the goddess’ ominous potential. Whereas Demeter might starve the mortal world unless propitiated, the Iliadic Zeus knows that Thetis’ abiding grief can endanger both gods and mortals, since her loss is beyond repair (cf. Il. 24.104–105: πένθος ἄλαστον ἔχουσα μετὰ φρεσίν, ‘you who have unforgettable grief in your heart’). Yet, in Book 24, Thetis arrives at Olympus and finally accepts both Achilles’ mortality and her inability to better his lot, since to contest it would equal uprooting the cosmic order. By relinquishing her μῆνις towards a...