the dog boswell, of the great war bark

on homeric epithets

I think it’s fair to say that most people who read the Iliad don’t expect to find much of it to seem “applicable” in their everyday life. I’ve never angered a river god by killing so many people that I choked the flow of water, nor do I think such an event is likely to happen, and if it did happen I think I’d probably be one of the bodies in that situation, not the Achilles killing people.

However, against all odds, there’s one moment in the Iliad that I think of all the time, in the sense of an event in my life reminding me of it. This moment comes in Book 6 when Diomedes and Glaucus meet on the battlefield, swap backstories, realize that they specifically shouldn’t be fighting each other because of their family history, and trade gifts.¹ Here’s the Lattimore translation:

Diomedes of the great war cry was gladdened.
He drove his spear deep into the prospering earth, and in winning
words of friendliness he spoke to the shepherd of the people:
“See now, you are my guest friend from far in the time of our fathers.
Brilliant Oineus once was host to Bellerophontes
the blameless, in his halls, and twenty days he detained him,
and these two gave to each other fine gifts in token of friendship.
Oineus gave his guest a war belt bright with the red dye,
Bellerophontes a golden and double-handled drinking-cup,
a thing I left behind in my house when I came on my journey.
Tydeus, though, I cannot remember, since I was little
when he left me, that time the people of the Achaians perished
in Thebe. Therefore I am your friend and host in the heart of Argos;
you are mine in Lykia, when I come to your country.
Let us avoid each other’s spears, even in the close fighting.
There are plenty of Trojans and famed companions in battle for me
to kill, whom the god sends me, or those I run down with my swift feet,
many Achaians for you to slaughter, if you can do it.
But let us exchange our armor, so that these others may know
how we claim to be guests and friends from the days of our fathers.”

Did I need to quote all that? No, but I wanted to.

Anyway—encounters between strangers online have a quality of the fields of Troy.² Everybody is wandering around with their deal, and much of the time you don’t really need to know somebody’s deal. You’re just in their comments leaving death threats and facts about them are unhelpful in that occupation. In fact, if you go out of your way to find out stuff about somebody beyond what you’re being told, that’s usually regarded as a little creepy. Sometimes, though, you do need to know somebody’s deal. Or you want people to know your deal.

People have tried to figure out a solution to this problem through various means:

• Social media bios.³

• Emojis in social media handles.

• Signatures on forum posts or emails.

• “Flairs” (Reddit specific).

• Digital cards in which you filled in things like your sexual orientation and mental illnesses (big on Tumblr).

• Labels telling you if somebody went to private school (BlueSky specific).

All of these are in some sense doing the work of our friend, the Homeric epithet, which communicates in an elegant fashion who somebody is in a manner that is easy to remember. Often, unless the subreddit is particularly focused on a single topic, the way these things communicate information is not directly. You might go to a subreddit where all the flairs are jokes and if you spend enough time lurking you learn to understand what the jokes indicate about the person and where they’re coming from.⁴ Online communication tends toward a state of total context collapse, but we keep finding ways to introduce context anyway.

Of course heroes on the battlefield of Troy don’t wander around with their epithets written on their foreheads—the epithets are for us, not for them—and Diomedes learns who Glaucus is by just asking. But online, by existing both in text and outside of it, we’re the characters in the poem and writing the poem at the same time.

Anyway, I think my cameo in the Netiad would go something like: BDM, owner of the dog Boswell. Ultimately Boswell is the most salient fact about me. But trying to pick the most salient fact about Boswell is proving to be very hard.

1. At least one of you is thinking “and Diomedes got the better of the exchange ho ho” which is true but not especially relevant here.

2. I have thought this for a long enough time that I actually searched the archive here to make sure that I hadn’t written this down before.

3. I’ve never really liked bios. My ideal bio, at the end of the piece, would say “B.D. McClay wrote the piece you just read.” However, I have learned that my preferences in this matter don’t really matter because the way that statement reads to many is “extremely rude.”

4. For instance, from r/blogsnarkmetasnark, this flair probably means the person is a swiftie, but if you were encountering it without context, you would not think that,