WINTER TORRENTS: LANDSCAPE AND THE SCALE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Above I sketched out the premise that the winter torrents simile of Book 4 sweeps the listener away from the narrative context of the battle to a spatially and temporally removed mountainside. From this new perspective, the battle is minimized, and the soldiers’ lives appear brief and fragile. We can appreciate how jarring this shift might have been when we look back at the narrative context of the battle, and how the text encourages the listener to experience narrative space from an embodied perspective. Consider the lines directly preceding the simile (4.446–51):

The phenomenological concept of ‘embodiment’—the immersive experience of the sensing, moving body in landscape—is useful here because it helps us to move away from the traditional idea that we experience or imagine space as something static and disconnected, as though we were looking at a painting or a screen.Footnote ¹² By looking at cues which encourage an embodied experience of space, such as references to the senses or movement, we can understand how an engaged audience member could experience narrative space as an atmosphere of ‘infinitely diverse phenomena that simultaneously affect all our senses and emotions’.Footnote ¹³ The battle scene here activates several aspects of embodied experience. The dynamism between sound and movement is striking: shields, spears and armour are thrown together (ἔβαλον), and a great din arises (ὀρυμαγδὸς ὀρώρει). Triumphant cries and the wailing of the slain, delineated by the repetition of ὄλλυμι, ‘I destroy’, in its active and passive forms (ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων), are heard together, with ἅμα emphasizing the simultaneity of countless sounds and actions.Footnote ¹⁴ We do not see an individual death or an individual victor, but we are surrounded by them, in such numbers that they are heard as one multitude. Even verbs for the appearance of sound—ὄρνυμι (4.449) and πέλω (4.450)—have a sense of motion about them.Footnote ¹⁵ The multiplicity of sources of sound and movement positions the listener somewhere just above or in the midst of the battle, surrounded by whirling violence.

This sense of position and movement helps listeners to imagine the experience of being present within space more vividly. Part of this vividness comes from the way in which movement within space evokes movement within time—phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that ‘at each successive instant of a movement, the preceding instant is not lost sight of. … [Movement draws] together, on the basis of one's present position, the succession of previous positions, which envelop each other.’Footnote ¹⁶ Here, successive instants of movement—the armies assembling, the clash of their meeting, the killing and dying—rush the listener from moment to moment, sweeping them into the adrenaline-spiked urgency of battle. It stands to reason that, when the listener can more clearly imagine themselves occupying the same space and time as narrated events, they feel more closely connected to those events.Footnote ¹⁷ In this case, the listener might feel more emotionally invested in the battle, and more captivated by the scale of the war as a whole. The deaths of the soldiers are terrible but also necessary and heroic in the context of this historic undertaking.

Having foregrounded the way in which the poet positions his listener within the space and time of the battle, we can now appreciate the imaginative whiplash that the listener might experience when the poet suddenly transports them to an isolated winter mountainside. Indisputably, there are analogies between the battle and the simile—between the violence of the armies and the torrents meeting, emphasized by the verbal echo of μισγάγκειαν (453) and μισγομένων (456), and between the roar of the battle and the water which can be heard from afar. However, the disanalogies are more arresting.Footnote ¹⁸ The simile shifts first from the battlefield to the rivers, and then from the rivers to a herdsman who hears the thundering, and the details of these two shifts highlight the difference in experience rather than the similarity. Let us consider the first shift in more detail. The first three lines of the simile compare the clashing of the armies to the meeting of two rivers (4.452–4):

After immersion in the battle, the listener is immediately spirited away to a mountain scene which is cold, distant and unwitnessed. Like the battle scene, the description of the mountain landscape encourages an embodied perspective; while no one watches the crashing of the rivers, and there is no description of bodily movement, the movement of the rivers allows the listener to imagine the landscape from a traveller's perspective. Linguistic and cognitive studies indicate that our ability to visualize space is improved when movement through space is described as a journey rather than as, for example, a map or a floorplan.Footnote ¹⁹ This is called a ‘hodological perspective’.Footnote ²⁰ The simile follows the journey of the torrents, guiding the mind's eye from a broad view of the rivers rushing down the mountains (4.446), briefly encompassing the springs from which the rivers flow (4.447), and then to a closer view of the hollow ravine where the rivers meet (4.448). The evocation of swift passage through landscape encourages the listener to experience the mountain scene as vividly as they had experienced the battlefield. This level of embodiment in two vastly different spaces and situations introduces subtle dissonance to what might otherwise have been a straightforward comparison between violent sounds.Footnote ²¹

The second shift provides a human perspective for the listener to take up: τῶν δέ τε τηλόσε δοῦπον ἐν οὔρεσιν ἔκλυε ποιμήν, ‘And in the distance a herdsman in the mountains hears their thundering’ (4.455). The listener might now imagine themselves distant from the rivers, in the position of the herdsman standing, sitting, or walking with his flocks.Footnote ²² There are also analogies between this new space and the narrative context—the comparison to a sound heard from a distance magnifies the sound of the armies meeting, and if we were to take the ancient vulgate reading of φόβος, ‘panicked flight’, in place of Aristarchus’ πόνος, ‘toil’, (4.456), then we could link the army's panic to the subtle fear that a herdsman might feel, hearing the distant roaring.Footnote ²³ Again, however, the embodied aspects of the scene reveal that striking disanalogies are also at play. The herdsman's surroundings are described in a single line, but it evokes a vivid impression of his position within an extensive landscape—τηλόσε invites the imagination to travel across the mountains from the rivers to the herdsman, and ἐν οὔρεσιν evokes the mountain where the herdsman is situated as well as a surrounding mountain vista. The resulting image is a marked contrast from the battle scene—after the crowded position in the middle of a battlefield, the audience now hears a distant sound from the perspective of a herdsman in a vast, wild landscape.

But the spatial contrasts between narrative context and simile only account for part of the dissonance which an engaged listener might feel.Footnote ²⁴ There is an additional shift in the experience of time, which casts the narrative context of the battle in a more poignant light. In the reading of the battle scene above, I established that the swift sequence of movements and sounds as the armies meet emulates the fast-paced frenzy of battle. The embodied elements of the simile have the opposite effect. While there is swift, violent movement in both the meeting of the army and the meeting of the rivers, there is a temporal contrast between the two which affects the atmosphere of the scene. While the meeting of the armies is a singular event, occurring across a few moments, the movement of the rivers is a continuous event, occupying hours, days, perhaps even months. As a scene in narrative, it is naturally drawn out. The spatial view of the landscape facilitates this open-ended experience of time. The journey-perspective of the rivers rushing down the mountains from their springs to the ravine encourages a view of landscape not at a particular instant but as a space which exists continually.

The traditional opening of the simile contributes to this sense of continuity: ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε, ‘and just as when …’, indicates a timeless, recurrent event. The reference to the torrents as χείμαρροι, ‘winter-flowing’, implies that the rivers are swollen every spring by snowmelt, emphasizing the seasonal recurrence of natural events. The scene might occur deep in the past, or far into the future, but the sense is that this event has always happened and always will. This opens up a range of possible reflections. The limitlessness of natural time contrasts with the instantaneousness of battle. From the cyclical perspective of time which the rivers and the mountains evoke, the battle might suddenly seem fleeting. The lives of the soldiers might seem brief and fragile, and this reflection might momentarily eclipse the sense of glory. The Trojan War, in which listeners were immersed on an immediate, personal level in the previous lines, might now seem long ago and far away, with little impact on the world of rivers, mountains and herdsmen.Footnote ²⁵ Alternatively, or perhaps even simultaneously, the battle might be elevated to the level of the natural world, with the implication that war is inevitable and eternal. Both reflections rely on spatial and temporal distance to frame emotional distance. This is not to suggest that the simile presents the battle or the soldiers’ deaths as irrelevant but that the new distance adds poignance to the chaos of battle, in what might otherwise be little more than an action scene. Different listeners would doubtlessly have responded to this web of possible associations on different levels, but the text contains sufficiently prominent cues for a shift in the experience of narrative space and time that it is reasonable to suggest that this shift was intended to have an emotional and thematic effect on its audience.

SNOWFALL: LANDSCAPE BETWEEN HUMAN AND DIVINE AGENCY

The winter torrents simile of Book 4 is not the only simile which manipulates spatial and temporal perspective in order to colour the emotional undertones of the main narrative. In Book 12, the flight of missiles as the Trojans threaten the Greek wall is likened to Zeus sending a snowfall which covers mountains, plains and seashores (12.279–89):

Like the winter torrents simile, this scene zooms in on a vast, quiet landscape to describe a crowded, noisy battle scene.Footnote ²⁶ The analogy here is between the density and speed of the snowflakes falling and the missiles flying across the battle for the Achaean wall. But, as in the case of the winter torrents simile, a closer look at the sensory and perspectival details reveals powerful contrasts. A straightforward comparison between missiles and weather might stress the violence and force of snowfall, agreeing with the narrative context on the level of the δοῦπος, ‘din’, that arises from the battle. Instead, this scene is silent and soft. Zeus lulls the winds (κοιμήσας … ἀνέμους), the waves are warded off (κῦμα … ἐρύκεται), prevented from breaking by the snow.Footnote ²⁷ Hainsworth specifies that this is not a blizzard but a steady snowfall, ‘diverg[ing] … remarkably from the narrative’.Footnote ²⁸ Like the winter torrents simile, the cold, wintry scene does not quite recall the furious heat of battle.

Unlike the winter torrents simile, there is no human perspective from which the audience might visualize the scene. The phrase ἀνθρώποισι πιφαυσκόμενος τὰ ἃ κῆλα, ‘showing forth to men these arrows of his’ (12.281), hints at human witnesses, but only hypothetically. Zeus, conversely, is not only able to see the sweep of mountains, fields and shores which he covers with snow; he is active in causing and controlling the snow. Zeus ‘calls forth’ or ‘bestirs’ the snow (ὄρνυμι), and the following verbs continue to refer to Zeus's action—πιφαύσκω, κοιμάω, χέει, καλύπτω. These verbs express agency but not bodily action. For Zeus, thought is immediately motion, as closely connected as thought and bodily motion are to mortals, but played out on a cosmic scale. This scale becomes visible as the simile sweeps over the mountains, headlands, plains and seashores, all visible as one vast, unpopulated landscape from the perspective of Zeus. Mapping onto the narrative context, the battle scene of flying missiles is framed from a great distance above. Again, from the middle of a chaotic battle scene, the audience is suddenly whisked away to view the action from a great, cold distance. From this vantage point, the audience's attention is redirected towards the gulf between the agency of Zeus, who covers the world in snow with a thought, and the agency of humans, who risk their lives in a hail of missiles.

As well as divine agency, the simile emulates a divine experience of time. This temporal perspective, with which the audience has, of course, no personal familiarity, is made available by spatial perspective. It moves across mountains, plains and seashores in a single sweep—encompassing space which would take hours or days for humans to cross—and encapsulates in a few sentences the process of snow falling from its beginning until (ὄφρα) the whole landscape is covered. The effect is a pause in the narrative, from the rush of battle to a quiet contemplation of an open temporal space. Zooming out to this wider spatial and temporal world, a world governed by the thought of Zeus, might remind the audience of the divine machinations behind the Trojan War, and the limited ability of humans to effect meaningful changes. This troubling theme is present throughout the Iliad,Footnote ²⁹ and here landscape creates a subtle tension in the narrative by reminding its audience of human limitations in the middle of a scene centred on human action.

MOUNTAINTOPS: LANDSCAPE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN PERSPECTIVE

The previous sections have explored the way in which landscape similes can interrupt the main narrative, reminding the audience of the precariousness of human lives and the limitations of human agency. This final example will demonstrate a closely related theme: the potential for landscape to reflect the limitations of human perspective. The theme of disparity between divine and human perspectives is clear in direct addresses to the Muses or to the audience, where the poet reminds his listeners that the Iliad's comprehensive view is only available thanks to his artistic skill and divine assistance.Footnote ³⁰ But landscape can offer a more concrete image of the differences between divine and human perspectives. At the end of Book 8, after the Trojans have gained ground during the day's fighting, Hector gathers the Trojans in an open space by the river (8.485–96). Contrasting elements of light and darkness draw the listener into this limited space: the light of the sun falls into the ocean (8.485), black night is drawn across the earth (8.486), and Hector's bronze spearpoint blazes (8.493–6). Nightfall and the suspense of waiting for morning also draw the audience into the Trojans’ experience of time. Here, they cannot know what will happen the next day—they can only reflect, hope and plan.Footnote ³¹ Hector instructs the Trojans to burn fires to guard their position, and they spend the watchful night with high spirits (μέγα φρονέοντες, 8.554), believing that the Greeks may flee in the night (8.510–11).Footnote ³² The following simile describes the Trojan fires (8.555–9):

Here, the Trojans believe that the fires and the nocturnal sight they afford will allow them to secure their advantage. This image of nocturnal sight over a distance illustrates their hope for security and control over the future, linking sight across time with sight across space.Footnote ³⁴ The description offers access to the embodied experience of space as atmosphere—it evokes a phenomenon in progress.Footnote ³⁵ The ether becomes (πέλω) calm, inviting the listener to imagine the wind dropping; the distant places are revealed (φαίνω) and the ether is cleft from beneath (ὑπορρήγνυμι), inviting the image of clouds parting and revealing the clear sky, rather than a static sky which is already clear. ὑπορρήγνυμι also directs the listener to imagine themselves below the parting ether, just as the surrounding features of lookout places, headlands and glens place the listener at the centre of the landscape. Finally, the poet allows his audience to experience the sense of security more vividly by providing another herdsman as an embodied witness, and prompting them to rejoice alongside him. The dynamism of this scene, as an atmosphere revealing itself around its subject, demonstrates the role that an embodied description of landscape can play in projecting possible outcomes. Embodiment involves the imagination of how we or others might move within or interact with an environmentFootnote ³⁶—in the context of war, landscape is a space across which enemies might approach, particularly at night. The palpable openness of the simile's nocturnal landscape emphasizes the security which comes with sight across a great distance, as does the term σκοπιαί which casts the mountaintops specifically as places from which one can look out for danger.Footnote ³⁷ While the winter torrents simile of Book 4 and the snowfall simile of Book 12 used spatial perspective to change the flow of narrative time, the clear night simile uses the visibility of landscape to frame the characters’ and the audience's imagination of the narrative future, encapsulating the hope that sight across space will allow control across time.

However, the dissonance between this scene and the larger context of Book 8 prompts the listener once again to consider the vulnerability of human characters. At the beginning of Book 8, Zeus goes to Mount Ida to oversee the war (8.47–52). From this vantage point, the audience can share Zeus's long-distance view, taking in Troy and the Greek ships at once. As Zeus watches the battle, the narrative quickens: both sides prepare for battle (8.53–7), the gates open and the Trojans flow from the city with a great din (8.59–60). The meeting of the armies is described again with the line ἔνθα δ᾽ ἅμ᾽ οἰμωγή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν | ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων, ῥέε δ᾽ αἵματι γαῖα, ‘and then at once arose the wailing and the triumph-cry of men, the slaying and the slain, and the earth flowed with blood’ (8.64–5).Footnote ³⁸ Hours of fighting and falling are compressed into three lines, with the sun rising from morning to midday with an effect comparable to watching a clock sped up in a film (8.66–8).Footnote ³⁹ Like Zeus's perspective in the snowfall simile, this view from the mountain makes a divine perception of space and time available to the audience, and the gulf between divine and human perception prompts the question of whether humans are capable of fully comprehending their situations. Furthermore, Zeus does not only see from the mountain—he controls from the mountain.Footnote ⁴⁰ At midday, Zeus lifts a pair of scales to weigh the fates of the armies: the Greek side falls to the earth, while the Trojan side rises to heaven (8.73–4), spanning the vertical limits of the world.Footnote ⁴¹ While the audience know that Zeus is supporting the Trojans because of his oath to Thetis, the scales cast Zeus's support more prominently as the result of chance. This provides a concrete image of the powers at work behind the scenes of mortal experience, and suggests that these powers can have arbitrary motivations. From this perspective, the optimism of the clear night simile for the Trojan fires rings false.

It is not difficult to imagine why such a consideration might increase the foreboding in the Iliad's narrative. Greek literature and religion evidence a desire to be able to understand the will of the gods, and to use physical phenomena as a means of insight.Footnote ⁴² Book 8 gains much of its emotional power from this desire, and often questions whether insight is possible: the signs which Zeus sends from Ida during the battle are sometimes helpful, allowing the Greeks to avoid risky encounters, but sometimes misleading, allowing the Trojans to believe that Zeus's support will be lasting.Footnote ⁴³ Such signs in the Iliad often function more as an ominous signal to the audience than as intelligible information for characters.Footnote ⁴⁴ This tension between the world of human perception and the unknowability of divine purpose culminates in the clear night simile. The dynamic, open atmosphere invites the audience into an embodied experience of Trojan optimism—but it is a tragic experience. Having borrowed Zeus's perspective earlier in Book 8, the audience know what the Trojans cannot know: that their advantage is temporary, and that their city will still fall. Zeus on Ida controlled all that he saw, and the Trojans falsely believe that they might do the same.