Reversal of Fortune and Immortality: Tradition and Intertext in Babylonian and Greek Epic

The heroic – and tragic – trajectories of Gilgamesh and Achilles have long been appreciated in conjunction. Homeric indebtedness to Babylonian epic remains debatable, and this paper probes a different, analogic-comparative approach to intertextuality. It ex- plores how the Iliad and the Gilgamesh Epic each create meaning in relation to pre-existing poetry in their own tradition, and seeks to elucidate aspects of narrative execution and conceptions of mythical history. The questions raised by early Greek and Babylonian epic intertextuality are arguably complementary. Homerists debate how one should model allu- sion in a largely oral-compositional milieu: did poems reference other poems or just the wider tradition of song and legend? Assyriologists routinely refer to ‘the stream of tradi- tion’, but recent intertextual studies have, in the main, tended to focus on text-to-text con- nections. I argue for the co-existence of two distinct, but complementary strategies: poem- to-poem allusion and a broader, non-specific re-use of the mythical tradition. I address two case-studies. The first involves dramatic irony, error and reversal of fortune. Here I explore how the Gilgamesh Epic deploys Sumerian poetry to cast a sinister light on the Humbaba expedition (potential text-to-text reuse) and on Ishtar’s rejection (potential re-use of mythico-religious traditions). I compare how the Iliad evaluates Achilles’ error – resulting in Patroclus’ death – against earlier precedents such as the Meleager legend (re-use of mythi-co-religious traditions); and how Homer may be re-casting an earlier narrative about Achil- les’ – rather than Patroclus’ – death (potential song-to-song allusion). The second test-case concerns the mythical history of human mortality. SB Gilg. XI redeploys Atra-hasis (text-to-text) to advance an ethics of moderation, but the pithy reference to how the divine assembly defined death (SB X 319–22) does not, I argue, index the Flood poem: it is best elucida- ted through various instances of the gods deliberating on life and death (potential re-use of mythico-religious traditions). Meanwhile, Achilles’ doomed destiny, predicted by Thetis (Il. 9.410–16), may or may not echo earlier poems (potential song-to-song allusion); it certainly resonates with stories about the end of the ‘Age of Heroes’, a traditional mythico-religious complex that Homer largely submerges. Besides proposing that ‘traditional inter- textuality’ and ‘direct allusion’ may both be operative in Greek and Babylonian epic, the paper also contributes to the Rencontre’s general theme, inasmuch as these intertexts ulti- mately establish religious and paradigmatic limits to the behaviour of rulers.