BETWEEN PATHOS AND BLOODLUST: THE RANGE OF HOMERIC LAUGHTER

It is a far-reaching cultural fact that so much of the ancient Greek collective repertoire of behavioural paradigms and self-images (in religion, ethics, psychology, warfare, politics) was grounded in the songs of Homer. Yet it might seem surprising and counterintuitive to extend that thesis to, of all things, the manifestations of laughter. After all, there is at first sight not much opportunity for laughter, whether for characters or audiences, in the Iliad and Odyssey. But while in purely quantitative terms laughter does not bulk large in Homeric epic, its appearances in both poems are all highly charged with significance and contribute symbolically to narrative moments which were to remain powerfully resonant for later Greeks. In the Iliad, occurrences of laughing and smiling are distributed across more than half the books of the poem and divided almost equally between gods and humans. But a majority of the relevant passages are clustered in five main scenes: the gods on Olympus at the end of Book 1, the Thersites episode in Book 2, the Hector and Andromache encounter in Book 6, the fighting of the gods in Book 21, and the funeral games in Book 23.