Mortals at Play in the Homeric World

This dissertation investigates representations of games and play in Homeric poetry and their afterlife in the visual arts. I argue that games function as crucial narrative junctures, opening a discursive space for reflection on heroic identity and poetic remembrance. Chapter 1 examines the funeral games of Patroclus in Iliad 23 and proposes a “restorative poetics of play”: a structured yet constrained negotiation of conflict, loss, and heroic kleos. By foregrounding the flexibility of game rules and the authority of the game master, the games effect a transition from agon to reconciliation, serving as a site of both retrospective contemplation of past conflict and anticipation of final resolution. Chapter 2 argues that games in the Odyssey are not incidental to the nostos but constitutive of it—a mechanism by which identity is suspended and restored. Two registers of play—embodied contests and structures of strategic concealment and recognition—organize the return into a series of encounters marked by Odyssean metis. These scattered episodes gain their cumulative force from an overarching marriage game: the contest for Penelope’s hand and the reclaiming of the household. Chapter 3 turns to a ludic afterlife of the Homeric world in Attic vase painting through the motif of Ajax and Achilles at a board game, traditionally credited to Exekias. Examining versions by Exekias and the Berlin Painter, I argue that these images participate in the same reflexive, world-building labor as epic: the board game becomes a meditation on the conditions of heroic life itself, figuring the agon not only between the two heroes but between mortal and heroic time.