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Abstract The present study focuses on an episode attested only in Proclus' summary of the now-lost epic poem Cypria, a suggestively erotic 'rendezvous' between Achilles and Helen that appears to heighten the hero's appreciation of her as a driving force, convincing him to persist in the war for her sake. This most prominently contradicts Homer's portrayal of an Achilles whose choices are fundamentally motivated by his quest for personal honour. As this paper argues, however, the story, though probably post-Homeric in itself, still has a traditional basis in the way it depicts Achilles' susceptibility to eros. On the other hand, and more importantly, Homer does seem to tacitly acknowledge this less standardised aspect but at the same time agonistically suppresses it, thus achieving an advantageously idiosyncratic coalescence between tradition and individuality.

A commonly attested episode in ancient art and literature is the brutal death of Troilus at the hands of Achilles. Priam's son is mostly depicted as a defenceless pais (‘young man’ or ‘boy’), slain in a cruel ambush outside Troy while on horseback on some non-military business. The Iliad makes no reference to the slaying of Troilus. The only mention of him is in Book 24, where Priam, after a visit from Iris, the divine messenger, becomes determined to go and visit Achilles in order to ransom the body of Hector. It is at this moment that in an emotional outburst the Trojan king berates his surviving sons for the mere fact that they still live, while Mestor, Troilus, and Hector, his three ‘most excellent sons’, have lost their lives as a result of the war (Il. 24.255–60):

Neoanalysis long ago employed a \"source-and-recipient model\" to claim that the conflict scene between Thersites and Odysseus in Iliad 2 is composed of elements taken from an identifiable context in the Aethiopis, the Achilles-Penthesileia episode. However, though highly suggestive, this approach, in focusing on specific intertextual echoes, misses the larger dialogue between the Iliad and the Aethiopis and the reciprocal and complex dynamics in play between them. This paper, revisiting all the available evidence, proposes a specific cross-reference between the Iliad and the Aethiopic tradition in which Homer uses the figure of Thersites as part of a sophisticated and self-reflexive type of poetic interaction that includes both compliance and contestation with the wider epic tradition.