Broken Horses and Broken Heroes: The Last Word of the Iliad

ABSTRACT:As a bearer of meaning, the epithet that closes the Iliad has been largely overlooked. However, if we read ίππόδαμος ("breaker of horses") as a significant expression, encompassing an action and an object, we can gain appreciation of its closural (and anti-closural) force while confronting the ideological assumptions concerning humans and animals that it rests on. While such assumptions, like the epithet itself, tend to go unremarked, they come into view if we direct our attention beyond Hector, the breaker, to that which is broken or dominated: not simply nature as such but in each case an individual animal, a horse.