In ancient Greek culture of all periods, the notion of kleos is linked in a fundamental way to the poet’s voice, and no adequate discussion of that voice could ignore this topic. Itranslate kleos by ’fame’, ’glory’ or ’renown’, but some further glossing of this complex term is immediately necessary. Kleos is etymologically and semantically related to the verb kluo (’I hear’) – kleos is ’that which is heard’, ’a report’, even ’rumour’. So Telemachus, when he returns to Ithaca, asks Eumaeus for the kleos from town. Kleos is applied to what people talk (of), and an object like Nestor’s shield has a ’kleos which reaches heaven’, and heroes’ armour is often described as kluta (’with kleos’, ’talked of’). ’Things, places and persons acquire kleos as they acquire an identity in the human world, as stories are told about them.’

This chapter brings Sappho fr. 44V into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism. As part of its represention of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (aphthiton kleos) when this eminently heroic commodity is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. It is argued that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out.

Kleos represents the “fame” of the hero as specifically transmitted through epic poetry, and functions as compensation for the hero’s untimely death. The Greek adjectives used to modify kleos in epic express its range and durability.

The Odyssey is a tale of a hero of exceptional endurance and metis (cunning intelligence) who wins kleos (fame) by achieving a successful nostos (return home). The poem establishes the oikos (home) as a locus for heroic activity by portraying hospitality (xeneia) as sacred to Zeus and by investing all domestic guardians with ethical and intellectual superiority over the perpetrators of bia (brute force) who would destroy the hero’s house and family and bring anarchy on his kingdom.

The Homeric epics are the Ur-texts in Western culture that encapsulate and convey what happens to human beings (soldiers and civilians) and human societies (Greek and Anatolian) when they are at war. Here we discuss how the Homeric poems function as central enculturating stories about war from their formative period as diverse oral songs in the late Greek Bronze Age (1500‒1200 b.c.e.) through their coalescence eventually as canonical texts in the Greek historical period (800‒500 b.c.e.) and the qualities in the Iliad and Odyssey that have given rise in modern times (1870 to the present) to wonder, horror, admiration, bewilderment, cynicism, and idealism in war veterans, war poets, storytellers, and prominent thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil to Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Allen Ginsburg, Tim O’Brien, and Alice Oswald.