Dodds on Double Motivation as Homeric Grammar

Dodds‘s The Greeks and the Irrational reads the god-intervention scenes of the Iliad as the pictorial form of an inward event. Athena’s appearance to Achilles in Iliad 1 — “visible to Achilles alone” — is “the projection, the pictorial expression, of an inward monition” which the hero “might have described by such a vague phrase as [theos tis]” (Dodds 1951, p. 14–15). The apparatus of divine visitation translates what a later vocabulary would call a sudden change of mind, a loss of judgment, a surge of power. “One result of transposing the event from the interior to the external world is that the vagueness is eliminated: the indeterminate daimon has to be made concrete as some particular personal god” (Dodds 1951, p. 15).

This is double-motivation as the grammar of Homeric agency: every significant act is named twice, once as the hero’s own and once as a god’s. Menos is breathed into the chest by Athena or Apollo; ate clouds the phrenes sent from Zeus; the Erinyes attend an oath; moira spins what must be. The complex of moira–Erinys–ate is, Dodds argues, pre-Homeric in its roots — reaching into the oldest attested stratum of Hellenic speech (Dodds 1951). The self so grammared is porous by default: the boundary between interior and exterior agency is not drawn where a modern reader expects it. This is the empirical basis of the plural self — not a doctrine, but the testimony of the texts’ own formulas.

Sources

• e-r-dodds: divine visitation as the concrete form of an inward event
• dodds-greeks-and-irrational: the complex moira–Erinys–ate has deep roots
• homer: Athena plucks Achilles by the hair, visible to him alone