Estetica suferinței în epopeea antică: de la Iliada la Odiseea
The aesthetics of suffering in ancient epic: from the Iliad to the Odyssey

Summary/Abstract: The article examines suffering in the Homeric epics as both ethical experience and formal principle. It combines philological analysis of the vocabulary of affects with classical narratology and an ethical reading of heroic values. In the Iliad, suffering turns violated honor and failed speech into collective plague, bodily wound, and funerary ritual; the encounter between Priam and Achilles briefly converts violence into shared mourning. In the Odyssey, suffering is internalized as duration, memory, and delayed recognition. Hospitality, disguise, storytelling, the scar, the bow, and the rooted bed gradually restore identity and the household. The two poems thus configure complementary regimes of pain: a public law of blood and ritual, and a domestic law of memory and signs. Together, they demonstrate that both public and individual order are restored not by erasing suffering, but by acknowledging it, narrating it, and integrating it into the life of a community.

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