The Politics of Position: Localization and Disruption in the Homeric Hexameter

This paper argues for a politics of position within Homeric verse by exploring the ways in which names struggle to occupy the end of the line and so the more important position within the social order. Accounts of localization tend to present metrical position in Homer as unideological and apolitical, a simple function of the hexameter and its constraints. This paper argues instead that where a character stands in the line tells us something about their place in the social rhythms and metrical hierarchies of epic. These politics of metrical position become particularly pressing, I suggest, in shared lines where two characters—two names—with the same localization tendency come into conflict in ways that inevitably result in disruption, irregularity, and displacement. This paper uses such moments to argue for the interpretability of metrical localization and its disruptions, and for the politics that lurk within this formal feature of the epic hexameter. It thus attempts to reframe our approach to Homeric verse form not as inert or functional but rather as a productive site of interpretation.