Akhos

Ἄχος is the Homeric term for the personal wound of grief — the felt sting of loss, where penthos names the ordered ritual carrying of it. The two run together in Homeric diction so closely that Nagy treats them as a coupled pair, akhos / penthos, the inward affect and its ritual outward form (Nagy 1979).

The pun Akhi-lāwos — “the one whose lāos (people, war-host) has akhos” — is, on Nagy’s reading, the etymological signature of Achilles himself. The Iliad turns on the convertibility of one hero’s akhos into another’s kleos: “Because of Patro-kleēs, Achilles gets kleos. Conversely, because of Akhi-lāwos, Patroklos gets akhos / penthos from the Achaeans” (Nagy 1979). When Menelaos tells Telemachus that Odysseus’ absence leaves him with an akhos alaston, an “unforgettable akhos always” (Odyssey iv 108), Telemachus weeps; the affect transfers by recognition of involvement. Akhos is thus the experiential gate to penthos: the wound opens, and ritual catches what flows out.

The cult of Demeter Akhaiâ — “Demeter of the akhos” — preserves the goddess’ grief over Persephone’s kathodos as a communal liturgy. The community’s binding of itself to the goddess’ wound through ritual lamentation is, for Nagy, the deep form of all hero-cult: the lāos makes itself a single body by sharing the akhos (Nagy 1979).

Relationships

• penthos
• kleos-penthos-axis
• thumos
• pathos
• demeter-persephone
• hero-cult

Primary sources

• iliad (Homer, esp. XVI 21–22, XVIII 22–73, XXIII 47)
• odyssey (Homer, esp. iv 100–113, viii 541)
• nagy-best-of-achaeans (Nagy 1979)