Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad

From beginning to end of the Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilleus are locked in a high-stakes struggle for dominance based on their efforts to impose competing definitions of loss incurred and the nature of compensation thereby owed. This typology of scenes involving apoina, or ''ransom'' and poine, or ''revenge'' is the basis of Donna Wilson''s detailed anthropology of compensation in Homer, which she ...