Emily G. Shanahan

The Person-Object Problem in Homer’s Iliad

My project analyzes enslavement in Homer’s Iliad through the character of Briseis. Briseis, a young woman captured and enslaved by the Greek army, embodies two contradictory meanings in the eyes of her captor Achilles. First, she is his geras, meaning the prize of honor awarded to him as an important warrior; secondly, she is the “bride of his heart,” whom he claims to love. By virtue of her enslavement status, gender, and racialization, she sits in the uneasy position of both human and object: a person when the plot needs her to be, yet also a tradeable asset without agency. The person-object duality warps her role, for she lacks even the power of speech until book 19 out of 24. Her primary function in the plot is to be the subject of the property dispute between men that drives the conflict at the poem’s heart. No matter how Achilles may protest that she is more than a geras, but a like a wife to him, the plot of the Iliad would not substantially change if she were replaced with an inanimate object. In this way, her characterization neatly accords with Aristotle’s definition of a slave in the Nicomachean Ethics: ὁ γὰρ δοῦλος ἔμψυχον ὄργανον, τὸ δ᾽ὄργανον ἄψυχος δοῦλος. “For a slave is an animate tool, just as a tool is an inanimate slave” (NE 1161b). This raises the questions, Why should the poem put a person into this role at all? Why could the Iliad not hinge on some other kind of property dispute? Why include a character who almost never speaks in such a pivotal role, and what does this decision tell us about the Archaic Greek attitude towards enslavement and the people oppressed under it?

Emily G. Shanahan holds a PhD in Classics from Cornell University, and her primary interest is in Archaic Greek poetry. Her first book, Penelope and Her Maids, analyzes the characterization of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, taking aim at the oft-cited idea that Penelope’s interiority is “fragmented” and “incoherent”. Instead, Shanahan argues that Penelope is rational, and that she navigates the dangerous environment of Ithaca—a rape culture—strategically to maintain her own and her son’s safety.