ῥινὸν πολιοῖο λύκοιο
There is a substantial history of reading a ritual significance to Dolon’s wolf skin, starting with Gernet (1936). Gernet (1936:190–191) argues that the tragedy Rhesos is needed to understand the meaning of the wolf skin. In that tragedy, Dolon makes the wolf skin explicitly a disguise for the purpose of deception. He implies that he will look like a wolf and says that he will walk like a wolf, too, to confuse anyone who tracks him (Rhesos 208–215; see Plate 5 for a similar visual image). Being or playing a wolf, according to Gernet, can be interpreted as a kind of liminal stage of an initiation ritual (1936:193–196). He also considers the symbolism of the wolf as an “outlaw figure” (1936:200). Gernet’s ritual interpretation is followed, in later examinations of Dolon as a wolf, by Davidson 1979, Petegorsky 1982, and Wathelet 1989. See further on 10.465–466, where Odysseus hangs the wolf skin on the tamarisk bush.
Other arguments have proposed that the wolf skin marks Dolon as a type of figure usually featured in other kinds of narratives outside of epic. Davidson (1979:65) expands on the notion of the outlaw figure and argues that this story follows a mythical pattern in which Dolon is a trickster figure who is tricked upon, and she sees a connection between trickster imagery and lone wolf imagery. Malcolm Davies argues for a folktale background, proposing that Dolon is like the “ambivalent helper” figure in quest stories and that his wolf skin is suggestive of the metamorphosis or disguise such figures often take (Davies 2005:31–32).
Schnapp-Gourbeillon (1981:112–114) questions the interpretation of the wolf skin as initiatory, and she finds “serious difficulties” with Gernet’s approach, for using another source to understand Dolon’s wolf skin in the Iliad, singling out Dolon’s animal skin alone as ritually significant, and ignoring Athena’s possible ritual role. Instead, she argues that animal skins are worn for a particular type of nocturnal action, or by a specific type of persons, or both (Schnapp-Gourbeillon 1981:119–120). She argues that the symbolism of wearing the skins of particular animals is similar to what we see of the animal’s symbolism in the similes. Dolon is above all “like a wolf” in that he is a minor predator: when Dolon, the wolf, meets Diomedes, the lion, he never has a chance (1981:120). One further question regarding an initiatory significance, which arises from the differences between the ways in which the wolf skin is presented here and in the tragedy Rhesos, is that here, the wolf skin, although worn on the mission, is not presented as a disguise for Dolon. Rather, it is connected to the ambush theme like the earlier night dressing scenes, as we have explored above (see 10.21–24, 10.29–31, and 10.177–178). Wathelet notes with an eye to the practical that the gray color of the wolf skin provides a kind of camouflage in the night (1989:220). There may also be some harbinger of failure in that Dolon goes as a “lone wolf”: Homeric similes involving wolves always refer to them as plural, hunting in packs (see Iliad 4.471–472, 11.72–73, 13.101–106, 16.156–166, 16.352–356).