SOURCE: Slatkin, Laura M. “The Helplessness of Thetis.” In The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, pp. 17-52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Slatkin concentrates on the integral role of Thetis in the development of themes of mortality, protection, and the discovery of identity in the Iliad.

In a key passage in Book 1 of the Iliad Achilles, in order to obtain from Zeus the favor that will determine the trajectory of the plot, invokes not Athena or Hera, those powerful, inveterate pro-Greeks, but his mother. The Iliad's presentation of Thetis … is of a subsidiary deity who is characterized by helplessness and by impotent grief. Her presentation of herself is as the epitome of sorrow and vulnerability in the face of her son's mortality. Consider her lament to her Nereid sisters at 18.54-62.

Ὤ μοι ἐγo δειλή, Ὤ μοι δυσαριστοτόκεια, η τ' ἐπεὶ ἂρ τἐκον υἱὸν ἀμύμονά τε κρατερόν τε, ἔξοχον ἡρώων· ὁ δ' ἀνἐδραμεν ἔρνεϊ ἐσοs· τὸν μὲν ἐγo θρἣψασα, ϕυτὸν os γουνἳ̑ ἀλωη̑s, νηυσὶν ἐπιπροἐηκα κορωνίσιν '...