Ulysses’ Wounds in the Contest over the Arms of Achilles

Barbara Pavlock

Classical World, Volume 102, Number 2, Winter 2009, pp. 178-181 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/clw.0.0066

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1 See, for instance, J. D. Ellsworth, “Ovid’s Iliad (Metamorphoses 12.1–13.622),” Prudentia 12 (1980) 23–29, on Ovid’s rejection of the mindless brutality of war-fare.

2 Ajax insists, for instance, that the Greeks have seen his deeds: “vidistis enim” (14).

3 N. Hopkinson, ed., Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 9 (Cambridge 2000), 262. 4 M. Leigh, “Wounding and Popular Rhetoric at Rome,” BICS 40 (1995), 195–216,

discussing the Roman custom of publicizing their battle scars for advantage when running for public office, cites cases of ambitious novi homines, such as Cato the Elder and Marius, and more radical types, such as L. Sicinius Dentatus, boasting of their wounds as claims to the success in public life which men of high status fail to respect. The scar thus served as a “mark of authentication,” which seems to have been especially exploited in the late Republic.

ulySSeS’ WoundS in the conteSt over the armS of achilleS

ABSTRACT: In the contest for Achilles’ arms in Metamorphoses 13, Ulysses exploits the significance of a warrior’s wounds. Responding to Ajax’s criticism that his shield has no spear marks, Ulysses boasts of his chest wounds but simultaneously casts doubt on their existence by playing on the meaning of the word pectora. Ulysses furthermore calls the significance of battle wounds into question by offering opposing positions, including his claim that Hector emerged from his contest with Ajax unscathed. Through conflicts with Iliad 7 and Odyssey 11, Ovid has Ulysses as well as the poet himself undermine traditional heroic values.

Throughout the Trojan War section of the Metamorphoses, Ovid insistently undermines traditional views about the epic hero.1 In the lengthy narrative of the contest between Ajax and Ulysses over the arms of Achilles in Book 13 (1–398), the poet provides Ulysses with the rhetorical skill to undercut the heroic achievements of his opponent and, conversely, exposes the fallacious bases of the cunning Greek’s own claims to superiority. This paper will ex-amine one element of Ulysses’ argument, his manipulation of the importance of wounds, by which he inflates his own contribution to the Greek cause and ultimately subverts the significance of valor. Ulysses’ deviations from Homer’s epics align him with Ovid, who repeatedly challenges the authority of earlier epic poets, especially Homer, in his Trojan War narrative.

After elaborating on his successes on the battlefield (255–262), Ulysses re-sponds to Ajax’s assertion that his own shield is so full of spear marks that he actually needs a new one (116–118). Presumably unable to refute his opponent’s sarcastic reference to his unblemished shield, Ulysses boasts of the wounds on his body: sunt et mihi vulnera, cives / ipso pulchra loco (“And, citizens, I have wounds splendid by their very location,” 262–263). In a gesture mimicking Ajax’s bluntness,2 he insists on the superiority of facts to mere words: nec vanis credite verbis / aspicite en! (“Don’t trust empty words: just look!” 263–264). The poet then comments: vestemque manu diduxit (“And he pulled open his garment with his hand,” 264). Ovid’s contemporary reader would have been attuned to the importance of this gesture. In his recent commentary on Book 13, Neil Hopkinson suggests that with the address to his comrades as cives, Ulysses casts himself in a sympathetic light as “a falsely accused Roman war veteran.”3 Matthew Leigh, moreover, has observed that by drawing his garment open and revealing the wounds on his chest, Ulysses employs a strategy not uncommon in the Roman political arena, especially when candidates for public office wished to capitalize on their service to the state in warfare.4

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As he elaborates on the chest that he has bared, Ulysses uses suggestive language: “haec sunt / pectora semper” ait “vestris exercita rebus” (“This chest,” he said, “has always been engaged for your interests,” 264–265). The semantic range of pectus includes “mind” or “spirit” as well as “chest.” Ulysses himself uses the word in the mental sense when he refers to Ajax as rudis et sine pectore miles (“a rough soldier without a brain,” 290). The verb exerceo, with its primary meaning “to exercise” or “busy” something, would fit well with pectora in a double sense.5 As much as his body is subjected to external forces, his calculating mind is ever at work.

This verbal ambiguity may suggest that Ulysses has no real wounds on his chest to show as he quickly opens and then, presumably, repositions the upper part of his tunic. While the internal audience listens to the hero, Ovid’s reader recalls relevant passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the single episode in which Odysseus receives a wound in the Iliad, a spear shot from Socus hits his shield and penetrates through to the ribs (11.435–438). In the Odyssey, moreover, the hero displays his chest in contexts that sug-gest a lack of scars from wounds. When the naked Odysseus appears before Nausikaa and her companions on Scheria, no mention is made of wounds; only the grime from his prolonged exposure to the elements masks the physical appeal that a bath and Athena’s attention to his looks soon restore (6.224–237). Similarly, in the games with the Phaeacian youth, Laodamas comments extensively on Odysseus’ physique, with a negative reference only to the effects that a long period at sea have presumably had (8.134–139). Later, Odysseus’ exposed body elicits no reference to chest wounds in his fight with the beggar Irus. Homer even mentions that after revealing his large thighs, wide shoulders, chest, and thick arms, the hero makes a strong impression on the suitors (18.66–71).

Ovid suggests the fluidity of Ulysses’ position about the importance of wounds both within and outside of the contest over Achilles’ arms. Ulysses not only points with pride to his chest wounds; he even openly dispar-ages Ajax for lacking wounds: at nihil inpendit per tot Telamonius annos / sanguinis in socios et habet sine vulnere corpus! (“But the son of Telamon has shed no blood for his comrades through so many years and has a body without a wound!” 266–267).

Since a total lack of wounds would be unusual in a ten-year war, Ovid may wish to remind the reader of the post-Homeric tradition that made Ajax invulnerable.6 Yet Ulysses takes a different position about Hector when he criticizes Ajax for failing to kill or disable Hector in their individual contest. After claiming that the duel fell to Ajax only by the luck of a lottery system (praelatus munere sortis [“preferred by the favor of a lottery”], 277), Ulysses complains not only that Ajax failed to win the contest, but also that Hector walked off without even being wounded (violatus vulnere nullo [“violated by no wound”] 279). The lack of wounds in that case clearly makes Hector the superior warrior. In addition to this reversal of perspective on the significance of wounds, Ulysses contradicts the relevant passage of the Iliad, where Aias does in fact wound Hector in the neck (7.260–262), but the contest is then stopped by heralds at nightfall (279–282).

5 Hopkinson (above, n.3) on 265, also attributing mental as well as physical implications to Ulysses’ words, cites the hero’s later contrast between pectora and manus (369).

6 F. Bomer, P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoseon, Buch XII–XIII, (Heidelberg 1987) 266, cites Pindar, Isthmian 6.45–46 and Aeschylus, frag. 292b Mette, as the earliest extant references to the tradition of Ajax’s invulnerability, which was presumably unknown to Homer.

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Ulysses’ emotionally charged expressions of the enormous loss felt by the Greeks at Achilles’ death recall a scene in the Odyssey in which the hero greets the shade of the great warrior and again raises the issue of wounds. The poet has Ulysses refer twice in plangent tones to the absence of the owner of the arms for which he and Ajax now compete. Ulysses in fact begins his speech with an apostrophe to the dead hero as the true possessor of the arms: if he and his fellow Greeks had their prayers answered, tuque tuis armis, nos te poteremur, Achille (“And you would possess your arms, while we would possess you, Achilles,” 130). Toward the end of his speech, as he recalls his grief at seeing Achilles dead, Ulysses cries out in elegiac language: Me miserum, quanto cogor meminisse dolore (“Wretched me, with what great grief I am compelled to remember,” 280). When Odysseus meets with Achilles in the underworld, he addresses the hero’s shade by claiming that he was honored like a god among the Greeks (Od. 11.484–485). After his emotional display of deference to his great comrade, Odysseus responds to Achilles’ inquiries about his son Neoptolemus. He recounts in detail Neop-tolemus’ courage in the front lines and his boldness once the Greeks got into Troy in the wooden horse (513–532). Odysseus concludes by emphasizing that after the sack of Troy Neoptolemus embarked on his ship completely unscathed: he had never been wounded by a spear shot from a distance or by a sword in close combat (534–538).

The inconsistency in the positions that Ulysses adopts in his speech in the Metamorphoses is brought into sharp relief by the glorification of the unwounded Neoptolemus by his Homeric counterpart in Odyssey 11. That passage reflects the ethos of the Iliad, which would rate a warrior highly for avoiding wounds from—and, conversely, for inflicting them upon—the enemy.7 By twisting the significance of wounds (their presence positive for himself and their absence negative for Ajax, yet positive for Hector), he both cleverly uses and inverts the traditional heroic value system. Ulysses’ cunning deviations reflect the shifting mentality of his grandfather Autolycus, the son of Mercury who, Ovid asserts, turns black to white and vice versa (11.314–315).

The very conception of chest wounds, presumably Ovid’s invention, cannot help but recall Odysseus’ famous thigh wound in the Odyssey.8 That single scar, the mark by which his old nurse Eurykleia recognizes him (19.467–475), symbolizes the Homeric hero’s unique nature.9 Ovid’s representation

7 See, for instance, S. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley 1984) 68, on the necessity for Homeric heroes to win kleos in battle through “the brilliance and efficiency with which they kill.”

8 N. Gross, “Allusion and Rhetorical Wit in Ovid, Metamorphoses 13,” Scholia n.s. 9 (2000), 57, notes that Ulysses carefully avoids mentioning his maternal grandfa-ther, in spite of the fact that Autolycus is closely linked with the hero’s very identity, manifested by the scar that he acquired in the boar hunt (Odyssey 19.390–466). Gross, however, takes a very different point of view from mine about Ovid’s Ulysses; con-trasting him with the Homeric Odysseus, he finds his rhetorical skill undermined by his prolixity and by his inclusion of inappropriate material, such as his discovery of Achilles on Scyros and his participation in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.

9 I refer, of course, to G. E. Dimock’s seminal article, “The Name of Odysseus,” Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), G. Steiner and R. Fagles, eds. 106–21, on the twofold meaning of Odysseus’ name, receiving and inflicting pain, emblematized by the scar. More recent studies have emphasized a greater degree of complexity, a destabilizing significance, in Odysseus’ scar, which Ovid himself may have perceived. J. Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton 1991) esp. 156–58, discusses the difference between

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of Ulysses’ wounds reinterprets the indelible scar from the boar in Homer. Multiple rather than single, mirroring the shield of the hero’s very rival, ambivalent even in their existence, the wounds are emblematic of the in-herent instability of Ovid’s Ulysses, who redefines himself throughout his speech, especially in relation to Achilles, and ultimately seems more Roman than Greek. Through Ulysses, the poet reveals that Homer’s poems cannot claim authoritative status on the Trojan War. Even Odysseus’ heroic quest for truth in the underworld can be inverted to satisfy the needs of the moment. Ulysses serves as Ovid’s exemplar of the slipperiness of identity and of the malleability of “truth” in the hands of a creative power.

Lehigh University BARBARA PAVLOCKClassical World 102.2 (2009) bp01@Lehigh.edu

Eurykleia’s acceptance of the scar as an “unequivocal sign” (23.77) and Penelope’s resistence to such a superficial and untrustworthy physical token over “unapparent signs” (23.110). The term “unequivocal sign,” as earlier used in Tiresias’ prophecy of the journey in which Odysseus will have to plant an oar that will be mistaken for a winnowing fan, reflects “the sign’s unstable relation with what it signifies.” P. Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), esp. 88–89, discusses the problematic nature of Eurykleia’s recognition of Odysseus through the scar in the hero’s disguise as a beggar and comments on the narrative function of the scar in revealing the relation of Odysseus to Autolykus and, figuratively, to Hermes. Noting the hero’s odd forgetfulness of the scar when his old nurse bathes him, Pucci suggests an inevitable loss incurred by disguise.

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