Immortal Armor: the Concept of Alkē in Archaic Greek Poetry

Abstract

Although military concepts in Homeric poetry have been studied since Alexandrian times, there has not been until now an extended study of the concept of alke, 'defensive strength,' as it unfolds intertextually within the Iliad and the Odyssey and archaic Greek poetry in general. Derek Collins uses evidence from Homeric poetry to reveal that alke, unlike other concepts of strength in archaic Greek, plays a central role in defining a warrior at the peak of his prowess, which can be related in turn to alke's application to kings and to its use by Zeus and Athena as a divine emblem of warfare. Collins also shows how alke functions poetically as a plot device for the Odyssey as the poem retrospectively views the Iliad. Finally, by integrating evidence from linguistics, anthropology, and comparative literature, Collins argues that the meaning of alke cannot be divorced from the oral traditional media from which it emerges and that alke's conceptual structure depends as much on archaic Greek as it does on the poetic demands of the Iliad and the Odyssey.