tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81062073652751746342024-02-06T18:51:31.617-08:00Oral PoetryCasey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-85909942304475179312017-08-18T15:30:00.000-07:002017-08-18T15:30:02.048-07:00Multiformity, Tradition, and the Aktorione Molione in early Greek Poetry and Art<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[615] Those who inhabited Bouprasion and radiant Elis,<br />[616] as much as Hyrmine and Myrsinos on the furthest edge<br />[617] and the Olenion rock and Alesion contain with them,<br />[618] of these there were four leaders, and ten for each man<br />[[619] swift shifts followed, and many Epeians embarked on them.<br />[620] Of these Amphimakos and Thalpios were the leaders,<br />[621] sons, the one of Kteatos, and the other of Eurytos, the two sons of Aktor. </span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNQ9xVOXSD-NPsSTx3PTXtcrbsj3gjLfGl_inqTlMSpjGWVvNfT3At_vNGrJYPifoibzfj6Yvvn2NYpYCTycAMIJk-_2cTINHHAoV2CsxH7DfOMncYsJAIDqc-ssDh41tStVmeaDRTD8Bp/s1600/Boiotische_Plattenfibel_%2528Bronze%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="436" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNQ9xVOXSD-NPsSTx3PTXtcrbsj3gjLfGl_inqTlMSpjGWVvNfT3At_vNGrJYPifoibzfj6Yvvn2NYpYCTycAMIJk-_2cTINHHAoV2CsxH7DfOMncYsJAIDqc-ssDh41tStVmeaDRTD8Bp/s320/Boiotische_Plattenfibel_%2528Bronze%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boiotische_Plattenfibel_(Bronze).jpg" target="_blank">A line drawing of the fibula discussed in this post (Public Domain)</a></td></tr>
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<span id="caption"><a href="http://www.namuseum.gr/collections/bronze/archaiki/arch01-en.html" target="_blank">A large bronze fibula in the National Museum in Athens</a>, described as being of the so-called Attic-Boeotian type and from the Idaean Cave on Crete, and dated to 700-675 BCE, appears to show the Aktorione Molione fighting another figure. The Aktorione Molione are conjoined twins in Greek myth who were evidently formidable opponents in battle. Eventually killed in an ambush by Herakles, they fought Nestor in his youth, as Nestor recounts in books 11 and 23 of the <i>Iliad</i>. Their mother was Molionē, but they seem to have had both a divine father, the god Poseidon, and a mortal father, Aktor. Although they each had a name (Kteatos and Eurytos), the twins are frequently referred to in the dual with the patronymic and matronymic Aktorione Molione. </span>The scholia in the Venetus A manuscript of the <i>Iliad</i> refer to the twins' paternity as being ambiguous <span id="caption">in a comment on 11.709, where Nestor refers to them as simply the Molione:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span id="caption">Μολίονε: Ἄκτορος καὶ Μολίνης παῖδες Κτέατος καὶ Εὔρυτος. Κατά τινας δὲ, Μολιόνης καὶ Ποσειδῶνος...</span><br />
<span id="caption"><br />Molione:
Kteatos and Eurytos were the children of Aktor and Moline. But
according to some, [they were the children] of Molione and Poseidon...</span></blockquote>
<span id="caption">(The note goes on to discuss why Nestor might be referring to them only as the Molione, instead of the Aktorione Molione.) </span><br />
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<span id="caption">A fragment of the Hesiodic <i>Catalogue of Women</i>, however, recounts their conception (the following partially reconstructed text and translation come from Most's 2007 Loeb edition of the Hesiodic fragments, this is </span><span id="caption"><span id="caption">fragment 17A in Merkelbach and West's edition</span>):</span><br />
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<span id="caption">καὶ τὴν μέν ῥ' Ἄ]κτωρ [θαλ]ερὴν ποιήσατ‘ ἄκοι[τιν</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span id="caption"> ]εος γαιηό̣χ̣ου ἐννοσιγαίου·</span><br />
<span id="caption">ἣ δ' ἅρ' ἐνὶ μεγ]άροις διδυ̣μάονε γείνατο τέκ[νω </span><br />
<span id="caption">Ἄκτορι κυσαμ]ένη καὶ ἐρικτ̣ύ̣π̣ω̣ι̣ ἐννοσιηγαί̣[ωι,</span><br />
<span id="caption">ἀπλήτω, Κτέα]τ̣ό̣ν τε καὶ Εὔ̣ρυτον, οἷσι πόδες [μ]έ̣ν̣.[</span><br />
<span id="caption">ἦν τέτορες, κ]εφα̣λ̣α̣ὶ̣ δ̣ὲ̣ δ̣ύ̣ω̣ ἰ̣δ̣ὲ̣ χ̣εῖρες εεισ̣[. .]ν̣</span><br />
<span id="caption"> ὤ]μων δ̣.φ̣υ̣[. .]κ̣α̣π̣ι̣σ̣χι[. . . . .]μ̣ε̣ν̣[</span><span id="caption"> </span><br />
<span id="caption"><br /></span>
<span id="caption">Actor made her his [vigorous] wife. </span><br />
<span id="caption"> ] of the Earth-holder, Earth-shaker;</span><br />
<span id="caption">she] bore [in the] halls two twin sons, </span><br />
<span id="caption">pregnant by Actor] and by the loud-sounding Earth-shaker,</span><br />
<span id="caption">dreadful both, Cteatus] and Eurytus, whose feet</span><br />
<span id="caption">were four in number,] and their heads two, and hands [</span><br />
<span id="caption"> ] from shoulders</span></blockquote>
<span id="caption">The <i>Iliad</i> never indicates explicitly that the Aktorione Molione are conjoined twins (and other closely associated figures are referred to in the dual in this way in the poem), but the Hesiodic passage certainly appears to be depicting them as being conjoined. Moreover, in <i>Iliad</i> 23.638–42, Nestor tells a story in which he loses a chariot race to the Aktorione Molione. Snodgrass [1998:29] has pointed out in connection with this passage that both twins participate in what seems to be a one-man race with Nestor, and indeed their conjoined nature seems to be (at least in part) why they are so formidable: they are two men fighting as one (and one of those two is the son of a god!). It is difficult to be absolutely sure as to what the Hesiodic fragment is saying about their paternity, but other figures in Greek myth have both a mortal and a divine father: </span><span id="caption">Helen, for example is biologically the daughter of Zeus, but was raised as the daughter her mortal "father" Tyndareus, and her twin brothers, Kastor and Polydeukes, are biologically the sons of Tyndareus and Zeus respectively, one mortal, one divine. </span><span id="caption">The Hesiodic text then may be saying that both Aktor and Poseidon are the biological fathers of the twins, in a pattern found elsewhere in Indo-European myth, as Douglas Frame has explored in his work <i>Hippota Nestor</i> (2009): </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Molione, who are rescued from Nestor’s path by Poseidon, are another
pair of Indo-European twins with clear distinctions between them. Like
the Dioskouroi they have dual paternity, being sons of a god, Poseidon,
and a mortal, Aktor: their patronymic <i>Aktoríōne</i> contains their mortal father’s name.<span class="noteref"> </span> <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="noteref_n.9"></a>
In the Catalogue of Ships, where two of the four leaders from
Bouprasion and Elis are sons of the Molione, the Molione themselves are
given individual names, Kteatos and Eurytos.<span class="noteref"> </span> <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="noteref_n.10"></a> Pindar <i>Olympian</i> 10.26–27 calls Kteatos the son of Poseidon, and Eurytos must therefore be the son of Aktor. (<a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5480#noteref_n.9" target="_blank">Frame, <i>Hippota Nestor</i>, Part II Chapter 2</a>)</blockquote>
In addition to the early Greek poetic references we have noted so far, there are numerous depictions of the <span id="caption">Aktorione Molione</span> in Late Geometric art: Snodgrass notes that there are at least fourteen from this time period. As Coldstream has pointed out, their presence on ceramic vases and elsewhere allows us to find narrative in early Greek art where we might otherwise assume a representation of daily life. For example, a monumental vase attributed to the workshop of the "Dipylon master"<span style="font-family: inherit;"> (<span style="font-size: small;">Louvre A519</span>), </span>used as grave marker, shows warriors in battle. If it weren't for the discernable presence of the Aktorione-Molione, we would not know that this a mythical, epic scene (see <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NOsHLwaRUZIC&lpg=PA37&ots=M18dMFI-8l&dq=About%20one%20kilometer%20north%20west%20of%20the%20Acropolis%2C%20a%20small%20cemetery%20of%20Athenian%20nobles&pg=PA50#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">the drawing in Coldstream 1991</a>, p. 50). Here are some of my own photos of another similar vase in the Louvre, where once again a four-legged figure appears to be fighting (and once again, we only seem to have the legs preserved!):<br />
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<span id="caption">Other surviving examples are far more clear in their depiction of two men fighting as one (<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=al1eYDK9n5kC&lpg=PA28&dq=lying%20both%20%5Bwith%20Aktor%5D%20and%20with%20the%20glorious%20Earth-Shaker&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">see examples in Snodgrass 1998</a>). These vases are telling a story, and an epic one at that. </span><br />
<span id="caption"><br /></span>
<span id="caption"><span id="caption">The popularity of the Aktorione Molione as a subject
in art may have to do with the way that their distinctive conjoined body allows
the artist to invoke a recognizable story, rather than because of any poetic fad. </span>Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether or not Late Geometric artists knew their Homer, and the differences between Nestor's tales about the Aktorione Molione in the <i>Iliad</i> and surviving visual representations have been extensively analyzed. I submit that of course the artists knew their Homer. What they might not have known is <i>our</i> Homer—that is to say, the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> as we now know them. As I have argued in my published work and in previous posts, the oral epic poetic tradition in which our <i>Iliad</i> was composed predates these works of art by at least a thousand years, but the tradition was a dynamic and multiform one. The <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> surely existed as recognizable songs by this time, but they were being composed anew in performance every time within a system that was still very creative and generative. The myths that were being narrated by the poets in epic songs existed in multiple, at times competing versions, and they were being performed by competing epic poets who did not all sing the story in exactly the same way. The painters too must have had their own traditional ways of telling these stories visually (handed down as they were from master to apprentice over generations) that did not depend on what the poets were doing. What seems clear is that when Nestor recalls the Aktorione Molione as part of his youthful exploits, he alludes to what would have been a well established mythological tradition known to poets, artists, and their audiences. He refers to them hypertextually as it were, activating in the audience's mind their knowledge of another epic cycle of tales now largely lost to us. (For more on the concept of "hypertextual" references in Homer, see previous posts.)</span><br />
<span id="caption"><br /></span>
<span id="caption">But the tales of the Aktorione Molione are not entirely lost; multiform though those tales seem to have been, they can be at least partially reconstructed from the surviving references to them. </span><span id="caption">Here are the key passages from <i>Iliad</i> 1<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">1</span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">.707ff concerning the Aktorione Molione (in which Nestor
is telling a story about a battle he fought when he was still
a youth): </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">[707]</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> οἳ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δὲ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">τρίτῳ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἤματι</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πάντες</span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[708] ἦλθον</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὁμῶς</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">αὐτοί</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">τε</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πολεῖς</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">καὶ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μώνυχες</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἵπποι</span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[709] πανσυδίῃ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">: </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μετὰ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δέ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">σφι</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Μολίονε</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">θωρήσσοντο</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[710] παῖδ᾽</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἔτ᾽</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἐόντ᾽</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">οὔ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πω</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μάλα</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">εἰδότε</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">θούριδος</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἀλκῆς</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">...</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[717] οὐδέ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">με</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Νηλεὺς</span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[718] εἴα</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">θωρήσσεσθαι</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἀπέκρυψεν</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δέ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μοι</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἵππους</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">:</span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[719] οὐ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">γάρ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πώ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">τί</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μ᾽</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἔφη</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἴδμεν</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πολεμήϊα</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἔργα</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[720] ἀλλὰ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">καὶ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὧς</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἱππεῦσι</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μετέπρεπον</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἡμετέροισι</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">[721] καὶ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πεζός</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">περ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἐών</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἐπεὶ</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὧς</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἄγε</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">νεῖκος</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Ἀθήνη</span><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">...</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[737] ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ Πυλίων καὶ Ἐπειῶν ἔπλετο νεῖκος,<br />[738] πρῶτος ἐγὼν ἕλον ἄνδρα, κόμισσα δὲ μώνυχας ἵππους,<br />[739] Μούλιον αἰχμητήν: γαμβρὸς δ᾽ ἦν Αὐγείαο,<br />[740] πρεσβυτάτην δὲ θύγατρ᾽ εἶχε ξανθὴν Ἀγαμήδην,<br />[741] ἣ τόσα φάρμακα ᾔδη ὅσα τρέφει εὐρεῖα χθών.<br />[742] τὸν μὲν ἐγὼ προσιόντα βάλον χαλκήρεϊ δουρί,<br />[743] ἤριπε δ᾽ ἐν κονίῃσιν: ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἐς δίφρον ὀρούσας<br />[744] στῆν ῥα μετὰ προμάχοισιν: ἀτὰρ μεγάθυμοι Ἐπειοὶ<br />[745] ἔτρεσαν ἄλλυδις ἄλλος, ἐπεὶ ἴδον ἄνδρα πεσόντα<br />[746] ἡγεμόν᾽ ἱππήων, ὃς ἀριστεύεσκε μάχεσθαι.<br />[747] αὐτὰρ ἐγὼν ἐπόρουσα κελαινῇ λαίλαπι ἶσος,<br />[748] πεντήκοντα δ᾽ ἕλον δίφρους, δύο δ᾽ ἀμφὶς ἕκαστον<br />[749] φῶτες ὀδὰξ ἕλον οὖδας ἐμῷ ὑπὸ δουρὶ δαμέντες.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[750] καί νύ κεν Ἀκτορίωνε Μολίονε παῖδ᾽ ἀλάπαξα,<br />[751] εἰ μή σφωε πατὴρ εὐρὺ κρείων ἐνοσίχθων<br />[752] ἐκ πολέμου ἐσάωσε καλύψας ἠέρι πολλῇ.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">[707] On the third day they all<br />[708] came, both the many men themselves and the solid-hoofed horses,<br />[709] at great speed. And with them the two Molione armed themselves,<br />[710] although they were still young, not yet knowing much about rushing combat [<i>alkê</i>]...<br /><br />[717] Neleus did not<br />[718] allow me to arm myself, but hid my horses;<br />[719] for he said that I did not yet know the deeds of war at all.<br />[720] But even so I stood out among our horsemen,<br />[721] although I was on foot, for so Athena led the fighting [<i>neikos</i>]... </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />[737] But when the fighting [<i>neikos</i>] began between the Pylians and the Epeians,<br />[738] I was the first to slay a man, and I took his solid-hoofed horses,<br />[739] the spearman Moulios; he was the son-in-law of Augeias<br />[740] and had his oldest daughter, golden-haired Agamede,<br />[741] who knew as many drugs as the wide earth grows.<br />[742] Him I hit with my bronze-tipped spear as he advanced,<br />[743] and he fell in the dust; and I, leaping onto his chariot,<br />[744] stood with the champions in front; and the great-hearted Epeians<br />[745] fled in all directions when they saw that man fallen,<br />[746] the leader of their horsemen, who was the best at fighting.<br />[747] But I rushed ahead, same as a dark whirlwind,<br />[748] and I seized fifty chariots, and on either side of each two<br />[749] men bit the ground with their teeth, subdued by my spear.<br />[750] And I would also have destroyed the young Aktorione Molione<br />[751] if their father, the wide-ruling earthshaker,<br />[752] had not saved [<i>sôzô</i>] them from the battle, covering them with a great mist.* </span></span></blockquote>
In these passages we learn that the young Aktorione Molione, like the
young Nestor, were eager for war even before they were properly of age
to fight. During Nestor's tremendous <i>aristeia</i>, in which he destroys
fifty chariots and their warriors among many others, the Aktorione
Molione are held up as the only ones Nestor couldn't stop, and that only
because their father Poseidon covered them in a mist—to which we can
compare Apollo's of preservation of Hektor by similar means in <i>Iliad</i> 20
(as well as Poseidon's preservation of Aeneas in that same book and
Aphrodite's rescue of Alexander in <i>Iliad</i> 3). Likewise in <i>Iliad</i> 23, the
Aktorione Molione are the only ones who can defeat Nestor in a chariot
race: </div>
<blockquote style="text-align: left;">
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[638] οἴοισίν μ᾽ ἵπποισι παρήλασαν Ἀκτορίωνε<br />[639] πλήθει πρόσθε βαλόντες ἀγασσάμενοι περὶ νίκης,<br />[640] οὕνεκα δὴ τὰ μέγιστα παρ᾽ αὐτόθι λείπετ᾽ ἄεθλα.<br />[641] οἳ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔσαν δίδυμοι: ὃ μὲν ἔμπεδον ἡνιόχευεν,<br />[642] ἔμπεδον ἡνιόχευ᾽, ὃ δ᾽ ἄρα μάστιγι κέλευεν.</div>
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[638] Only with horses did the two Aktorione surpass me,<br />[639] surging ahead because of their greater number, ever so eager for victory<br />[640] because the biggest prizes were left for that event.<br />[641] They were twins, you see; the one steadfastly held the reins,<br />[642] steadfastly held the reins, and the other urged on with the whip.*</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span id="caption">Obviously, Nestor has reason to portray them as formidable, but he/the poet could have chosen any number of opponents to fill the narrative function for which the Aktorione Molione are used here. It seems likely that the Aktorione Molione were traditionally associated with fearsome prowess, and that in the poetic traditions in which Nestor featured as a youth they were traditionally opposed to him. Those traditions are primarily known to us now through Nestor's memories related in the <i>Iliad</i>, but they may well have been at one time the subject of their own songs. </span><br />
<span id="caption"><br /></span>
<span id="caption">The Aktorione Molione were heroes of an earlier generation than those of the Trojan War, much like Herakles, who was one of the Argonauts and who was responsible for an earlier sack of Troy (alluded to in <i>Iliad</i> 7.451-453, 20.145-148, and 21.442-45) amidst his other labors, but who did not fight in the later Trojan War. So it is not surprising that in fact the Aktorione Molione and Herakles did fight each other, and indeed it is Herakles who ultimately kills them. The story is preserved in Pindar (</span><span id="caption"><span id="caption"><em>Olympian</em> 10.26–34</span>) and Apollodorus (</span><span id="caption">2.7.2). (See also </span><span id="caption">Ibycus fr. 4.) Here are the relevant verses from Pindar:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἐπεὶ </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Ποσειδάνιον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πέφνε</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Κτέατον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἀμύμονα</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">,</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πέφνε</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δ᾽</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Εὔρυτον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὡς</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Αὐγέαν</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">λάτριον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἀέκονθ᾽</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἑκὼν</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μισθὸν</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὑπέρβιον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πράσσοιτο</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">λόχμαισι</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δὲ</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δοκεύσαις</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὑπὸ</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Κλεωνᾶν</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">δάμασε</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">καὶ</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">κείνους</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Ἡρακλέης</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἐφ᾽</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὁδῷ</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">,</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὅτι</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">πρόσθε</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ποτὲ</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Τιρύνθιον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἔπερσαν</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">αὐτῷ</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">στρατὸν</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">μυχοῖς</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ἥμενον</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Ἄλιδος</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Μολίονες</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">ὑπερφίαλοι.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">when he [Herakles] had slain the son of Poseidon,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">the faultless Kteatos,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">and he had slain Eurytos, in order that from the unwilling Augeas,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">who was overwhelming in his might, his servant's wages </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">he might willingly recover;</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Herakles overcame them after keeping a lookout for them in a thicket below Kleonai</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">and slew them by the roadside,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">because once before they had destroyed</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">his Tirynthian army,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">when it was encamped in an innermost recess of Elis,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">the excessively arrogant Moliones.</span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Mary Ebbott and I discuss Herakles' ambush of the Aktorione Molione as an example of the epic pattern in which a formidable enemy who can't be defeated in battle is taken down instead by ambush tactics (</span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">see <a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4166#noteref_n.8" target="_blank">Dué and Ebbott 2010:98</a></span></span>). Rhesos, who is killed by Odysseus in and Diomedes in <i>Iliad</i> 10, is one such hero, but there are quite a few other examples. Apollodorus adds additional details to the story as told in Pindar: Herakles had made a truce with the Aktorione Molione because he was ill, but they attacked his army and killed many while Herakles retreated. He then ambushes them on their way to the Isthmian games. The key sequence is that Herakles ambushes them because earlier he could not defeat them in a standing battle. Within the tradition of the Trojan War, the primary example of this kind of ambush is the use of the wooden horse to ambush and defeat the Trojans when ten years of <i>polemos</i> alone cannot.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The surviving sources, some poetic and some visual, strongly suggest that the Aktorione Molione were at one time deeply embedded in the mythological and poetic system in which the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> were composed, and that they were featured in epic songs about events that take place chronologically prior to the Trojan War. Their sons are included in the Catalogue of Ships, and one of them, </span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="caption" style="font-size: small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Amphimakhos, son of Kteatos, son of Aktor</span></span></span></span>, is killed by Hektor in <i>Iliad</i> 13.185. Nestor can refer to them, and the poet can expect his audience to know their backstory, and how frightening and skilled they were, whether in battle or chariot racing. The Aktorione Molione had a story, and although our evidence suggests that there were some variations on that story (such as the exact nature of their paternity) in antiquity, it was a story that was known to tradition and could be invoked in the process of composition in performance. For that reason, Nestor could not have killed them during his youthful <i>aristeia</i>. Poseidon <i>had</i> to rescue them, <a href="http://homermultitext.blogspot.com/2017/06/summer-2017-iliad-20-multiformity-and.html" target="_blank">because, much like Aeneas in his encounter with Achilles in <i>Iliad</i> 20, death at the hands of Nestor would have have been ὑπερ μόρον</a>. (See also <a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5480#noteref_n.12" target="_blank">Frame 2009</a>, citing Cantieni 1942:76.)<br />
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<span id="caption">And now finally I return to the bronze fibula with which I began. We now know that the Aktorione Molione are depicted, and we know why they look as they do, with seemingly one body, four arms and four legs. But who are they fighting? The museum's description says they are fighting Herakles. But if indeed the Aktorione Molione, like Rhesos, could only be killed by ambush, it is much more likely that they are fighting Nestor (or another warrior) in conventional battle. </span><br />
<br />
<span id="caption">Works cited</span><br />
<br />
Cantieni, R. 1942. <em>Die Nestorerzählung im XI. Gesang der Ilias (V. 670–762)</em>. Zurich.<br />
<span id="caption">Coldstream, J. 1991. "The Geometric style: the birth of the picture." In T. Rasmussen and N. Spivey, eds.,<i> Looking at Greek Vases</i>. Cambridge.</span><br />
<span id="caption">Dué, C. and M. Ebbott, eds. 2010. <a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4278" target="_blank"><i>Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush</i></a>. Washington, DC. </span><br />
<span id="caption">Frame, D. <a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4101" target="_blank"><i>Hippota Nestor</i></a>. 2009. Washington, DC</span><span id="caption">.</span><br />
<span id="caption">Snodgrass, A. 1998. <i>Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art</i>. Cambridge. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span id="caption">*My translations from <i>Iliad</i> 11 and 23 were made together with Douglas Frame, Mary Ebbott, Leonard Muellner, and Gregory Nagy. See also Frame, <i>Hippota Nestor</i> (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), Part II chapter 4: <a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5480">https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5480</a>.</span></span></span></div>
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Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-52068944705524351302015-05-19T20:00:00.000-07:002015-05-20T08:34:30.194-07:00Archaeology and the Homeric Question, Part 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px;">[511] Those who inhabited Aspledon and Minyan Orchomenos</span></h1>
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In this post I propose to explore the relationship between the discipline of archaeology and the Homeric Question, taking Orchomenos as a jumping off point. In so doing my aim is not so much to show something new about this relationship or to offer a new interpretation of the verses concerning Orchomenos, but rather to take this opportunity to give an overview of an important topic within the history of Homeric scholarship that has many implications for our understanding of the oral tradition in which the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Odyssey</em> were composed. This post will focus on the history of the relationship between archaeology and the Homeric Question; future posts will address more theoretical aspects. </div>
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As I have noted in a <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/06/walk-on-characters-in-iliad.html" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">previous post</a>, the work of scholars such as E.S. Sherratt and Gregory Nagy demonstrates that we should not be searching for a single era of history or a single political reality to be reflected in the Catalogue of Ships. The Catalogue of Ships—its content, its formulaic diction and structure, and its poetics—evolved as the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> evolved. But in fact it has been common in the history of Homeric scholarship to attempt to link the Catalogue to particular historical eras. These attempts have been closely linked to developments in archaeology, which have offered the possibility of connection between material reality and the poetry that has come down to us. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzcL8yObB4s4BTLo2SJRL2StK05cH10qiOGugwTP9C1SVeD29ruoSrbXWF0lvDLhVtWBeSQeP-jadUcKpZPsJZiwDwLOedbBWo0SwWdRAcjMb4HJiOd_8Z_-EhkLWfgEiI17tKYX49xz4d/s1600/Orchomenos_boar_tusk_helmets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzcL8yObB4s4BTLo2SJRL2StK05cH10qiOGugwTP9C1SVeD29ruoSrbXWF0lvDLhVtWBeSQeP-jadUcKpZPsJZiwDwLOedbBWo0SwWdRAcjMb4HJiOd_8Z_-EhkLWfgEiI17tKYX49xz4d/s1600/Orchomenos_boar_tusk_helmets.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fragment of a 13th century BCE fresco from <br />
Orchomenos depicting warriors in boar tusk helmets.</td></tr>
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Boiotian Orchomenos makes an excellent case in point. Orchomenos was an important Bronze Age palatial center with frescoed walls and tholos tombs. Its first excavator was none other than Heinrich Schliemann, the first excavator of Hisarlik, which is the site believed by many to be the Homeric Troy. Schliemann went looking for Orchomenos precisely because he remembered Orchomenos as one of only three places in the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> said to be "rich in gold" (Schliemann 1884:303). The other two places are of course Troy and Mycenae, both of which, as we will see, Schliemann himself excavated with spectacular results. We will turn to these more famous excavations momentarily, but let us note for now that Schliemann seems to have been mistaken about the text of Homer. I can find no passage where Orchomenos is described as being <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">polukhrusos</em> ("rich in gold"), though Achilles does cite it as one of the two cities, along with Egyptian Thebes ("where the greatest amount of possessions lie stored in the houses"), whose riches he would reject if Agamemnon offered them to him (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> 9.381). And its so-called "treasury of Minyas" (a Bronze Age tholos tomb like those found at Mycenae), was said by the Greek travel writer Pausanias to be one of the greatest wonders of the world (9.38.2). (For more on the Minyans, stay tuned for the next post!) In any case, Schliemann's excavations revealed Orchomenos to have been in fact a wealthy Bronze Age center, thus making it an important early example of a phenomenon that has caused scholars to want to understand the Catalogue of Ships as having its origins in Bronze Age. Like Orchomenos, many places in the Catalogue seem to have been at the height of their power and prominence in the Bronze Age, but were significantly less so in later eras. Orchomenos continued to be inhabited after the Bronze Age, but many other places in the Catalogue were not. Simpson and Lazenby (1970: 38-39) point out, however, that the Catalogue's description of Orchomenos does not actually capture it at the peak of its power when it controlled a series of settlements on the Northern shore of Lake Copais. In the Catalogue, these places appear to be in the domain of the Boiotians. Achilles' comment about the wealth of Orchomenos perhaps hearkens back to Orchomenos' heyday, but in the Catalogue at least, Orchomenos is not characterized as the wealthy and powerful place it once was. We have, it seems, more than one chronological reality for Orchomenos reflected in our <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Orchomenos<br />
Image by Gerhard Haubold via Wikimedia Commons</td></tr>
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I would like to emphasize already now how closely poetry and archaeology have been intertwined in the case of Orchomenos. Schliemann wanted to excavate it precisely because it was spoken of as a wealthy city in the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. The prospect of Bronze Age gold was certainly a motivation, but so too was the desire to find a historicity in the poem. By finding and excavating the major cities featured in the poem, Schliemann hoped to prove the truth of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. His excavations at Hisarlik were inextricably bound up in this same desire, and so too have all subsequent excavations been - even, I would argue, contemporary excavations that profess not to be. The result is that we cannot separate the archaeology of the Troad, nor even the Greek Bronze Age more generally, from the Homeric Question. They have gone hand in hand from the beginning.</div>
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Schliemann and his excavations at Troy, Mycenae, and Orchomenos</h2>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Heinrich Schliemann<br />
Image from <i>Selbstbiographie</i> (Leipzig, 1892)</td></tr>
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In the late nineteenth century a wealthy businessman, Heinrich Schliemann, took it upon himself to excavate the mound known as Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey. Schliemann, who was born in 1822 and died while excavating at Hisarlik in 1890, was explicitly searching for the Troy of the Homeric poems, claiming to have had a desire since childhood to find the walls of a historical Troy. (See, for example, the "Autobiographical Notice" included in Schliemann's 1875 account of the first excavations at Hisarlik, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Troy and its Remains</em>.) Few people believe Schliemann's romantic tale about this childhood dream, as Schliemann had a well documented gift for embellishing the events of his life in his letters and diaries. (The evidence for embellishment and outright falsification of events and discoveries has been gathered primarily by William Calder and David Traill; see Calder and Traill 1986 and Traill 1993. A balanced account of Schliemann's life may be found in Moorehead 1997. For more critical views, see Traill's 1995 biography and Allen 1999, with further bibliography ad loc.) In fact, when Schliemann first visited the Troad in 1868, the precise location of Troy was being hotly debated by scholars throughout Europe, and it is in that context that Schliemann likely first conceived of digging up the "real" Troy. </div>
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The <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> is full of topographical details that invite us to imagine Troy as a real place. It is clearly situated in the northwest corner of the Troad just across the Hellespont from what is now known as the Peninsula of Gallipoli, i.e. the Thracian Chersonnese (where the sanctuary of the Greek hero Protesilaos, the first to die at Troy, was located in later times). The city is depicted as being near the Scamander and Simoeis rivers, and within view of various islands such as Samothrace, Tenedos, and Imbros as well as Mt. Ida. (For more on the topographical details present in the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>, see Cook 1973 and Luce 1998.)</div>
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The ancient Greeks themselves believed the Trojan War to be a historical event (as we find it discussed for example in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides), and they dated it to around 1250 BCE (though there were competing alternatives). The ancients also believed they knew where Troy was located: a place called New Ilium (which was inhabited from approximately 700 BCE to 500 CE) was said to have been built from the ruins of Troy. This city was founded at a time when many different groups were staking claims to epic poetry and the Trojan War. Probably the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Odyssey</em> were crystallizing into the forms in which we now read them around this time, and this development may explain the intense interest in the region. (For scholarly arguments, see Nagy 2010: 142-146. For a more general overview of the topic, see Wood 1998: 19-46.) Multiple tumuli in the area were believed to be the tombs of heroes such as Achilles and Ajax (Burgess 2006). In antiquity this presumed site of Troy was visited by Xerxes, Alexander the Great (“He ran naked to the tomb of Achilles and laid a wreath there, while his close friend Hephaistion performed similar rituals at a nearby mound identified as the tomb of Patroklos.” [Burgess 2006]), Julius Caesar, Constantine, Julian, and Mehmet II. </div>
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But in Schliemann's day debate about the true site of Troy was fiercely raging. The modern search for Troy has its origins in the work of Robert Wood, whose <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade</em> (1769) made deductions about changes in topography since ancient times (it was also one of earliest formulations of arguments concerning oral composition and transmission of the Homeric poems). Wood's speculation on the possible historicity of the Trojan War and the location of Troy itself inspired countless others, including Jean Baptiste Lechevalier (1791) who argued that the site of Troy must be at a place called Burnabashi [Pinarbaşı] and asserted the historicity of Trojan War, which sparked fierce debate. Although some scholars had singled out the mound of Hisarlik, the acropolis at New Ilium, as the most likely candidate for the Homeric Troy, few seem to have given it serious thought, and when Schliemann visited the Troad in 1868, Burnabashi was the focus of his attention (Allen 1999: 5-9).</div>
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It was only after visiting Burnabashi that Schliemann encountered Frank Calvert, an Englishman from a diplomatic family that lived in Turkey. Calvert had conducted small scale excavations all over the Troad and was convinced that Troy was located at Hisarlik (near New Ilium), and attempted to persuade the British Museum to fund systematic excavations there. He was not successful, but eventually he bought some of the mound himself and conducted trial excavations beginning in 1865. These excavations, while preliminary, convinced Calvert that he found an important Bronze Age city and very likely Troy itself. When Schliemann visited in 1868, Calvert discussed his theories with him. Schliemann became determined to dig there, and after negotiations with Calvert and the Turkish authorities, he began digging in 1870. (For more on Calvert as the inspiration for Schliemann's work and their difficult relationship, see Allen 1999.)</div>
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Because Schliemann was specifically looking for the Troy of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>, he had no interest in the Classical and other ruins present at the site. We now know that Hisarlik was continuously occupied for 4000 years, from approximately 3000 BCE to 1000 CE. (For an overview of all nine layers of occupation see Bryce 2006: 29-86 and 151-179.) It is one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in human history, which should not surprise us given its strategic location. Schliemann assumed that the Homeric Troy would be at the bottom of the mound, not realizing that the site had been occupied for nearly two millennia before the traditional date of the Trojan War. He therefore proceeded to plough through the upper layers, destroying much of the Bronze Age remains (and everything else). At the second layer from the bottom (contrary to current archaeological practice, Hisarlik's layers are numbered from the bottom up) Schliemann found a fortified citadel that arguably resembled the Homeric Troy. Troy II (as it is now conventionally called, on the assumption that Hisarlik is indeed Troy) was a highly prosperous community with advanced metal technology. The city had two main gates, a steeply rising monumental ramp, stone walls, impressive, sloping fortifications, and a large megaron style building. Elites lived in spacious buildings on the citadel, while others probably lived outside the walls. </div>
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These details fit with the image of Troy that Schliemann had from the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>, as we find in such passages as this one from <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> 21:</div>
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The old man Priam stood on a wondrous tower and took note of huge Achilles as the Trojans fled panic-stricken before him, and there was no resolve left in them. He came down from the tower with a groan, and went along the wall giving orders to the exceedingly glorious warders of the gate. “Keep the gates wide open till the people come fleeing into the city, for Achilles is hard by and is driving them in rout before him. I see we are in great peril. As soon as our people are inside and have respite, shut the closely fitted gates, for I fear lest that terrible man should come bounding inside along with the others.” (21.526-536; translation adapted from that of Samuel Butler)</div>
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Troy II, moreover, was destroyed by fire. For Schliemann, all the pieces fit together to support his thesis that a Trojan War had taken place on this site and given birth to a monumental epic poem that chronicled its events with historical accuracy. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Schliemann's wife, Sophia,<br />
wearing the "Jewels of Helen"</td></tr>
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Schliemann was convinced that he had found the Homeric Troy and began to publish his findings, but the scholarly world was skeptical. Troy II is only 100 yards in diameter. Could such a small place be the Troy of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>? In 1873, with criticism mounting and the third and final full season of excavation coming to a close, Schliemann astonished the world with a spectacular discovery. On a day when the Turkish overseer was working at another part of the site Schliemann claims to have found in the remains of Troy II a horde of precious objects that he termed the “treasure of Priam,” or as they came to be quickly known, the “jewels of Helen.” (Let us note once again the immediate connection made between the archaeology and the poetry here. Schliemann never seems to have doubted that a real king Priam ruled at Hisarlik, or even that Helen was a real individual with jewels that could be found.) It is abundantly clear that Schliemann fabricated many details of his various conflicting accounts of the discovery and even the exact find spot, though most scholars accept the finds as genuine (Allen 1999: 3 and Bryce 2006: 50). Some have expressed doubt that the objects come from a horde; they may have been discovered over the course of several weeks or months and assembled to make a more impressive find. (See especially Traill 1995: 110-124.) In any case, the publicity surrounding the treasure caused public opinion to turn in Schliemann's favor, and it seemed the Homeric Troy had been found. </div>
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We now know that this level at Hisarlik (the so-called Troy II) dates to 2500-2200 BCE, a thousand years before the conventional date of the Trojan War, or, as the scholar Trevor Bryce puts it, "far too early for Priam's Troy" (Bryce 2006: 50). Of course, there is no reason why we must assume a Trojan War occurred at this site at all, or that it took place, if it took place, circa 1250 BCE. As we will see, however, later excavators who, like Schliemann, were looking for the Homeric Troy found another level of habitation that is a far more likely candidate for the setting of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. This layer, known as Troy VI, flourished for approximately five hundred years between 1700 and 1200 BCE, temptingly in range of the dates given in antiquity for the Trojan War. Unfortunately, most of the remains of Troy VI were destroyed by Schliemann's excavations. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The so-called "Mask of Agamemnon" <br />
from the shaft graves at Mycenae<br />
Image via Wikimedia Commons</td></tr>
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Ignorant of this chronology and in deep trouble with Turkish authorities after smuggling "Priam's Treasure" out of Turkey, Schliemann turned his attention to Greece. He had found Troy, so why not excavate Mycenae as well, the home of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces at Troy? Unlike Troy, there had never been any question as to the location of Mycenae; its ruins, including the massive "Cyclopean" walls and lion gate had been described by Pausanias and visited by modern travelers before Schliemann, including Lord Elgin. But no one had dug it up, and during excavations in Fall of 1876 once again Schliemann made spectacular finds that stunned the world, this time in the form of shaft graves containing large amounts of gold and other precious materials. These tombs were immediately associated with the Homeric heroes, as they had been already in Pausanias' day. A particularly spectacular funerary mask came to be known as the "mask of Agamemnon" and an impressive tholos tomb was called the "treasury of Atreus" (as they are still called to this day). </div>
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It is clear that Schliemann had uncovered an important Bronze Age civilization, one that was previously unknown in modern times. He discovered it because he was looking to prove the historicity of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>, and in the sense that he proved the existence of a palatial civilization at the end of the Bronze Age in Greece, one resembling the wealthy and powerful Mycenae of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>, he was arguably successful. The Homeric world of kings and palaces, so foreign to later eras of Greek history, was shown to have once existed. But as always, Schliemann's archaeology was skewed by his desire to match up the archaeological remains with the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. In fact the gold of the shaft graves, which have since been dated to the 16th century BCE, postdates Troy II by more than seven hundred years, and predates the traditional date of the Trojan War by three hundred years. </div>
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It is in the wake of these spectacular finds at Mycenae that Schliemann went on to excavate Orchomenos and Tiryns. Tiryns proved to be another spectacular and massively fortified Bronze Age citadel in keeping with it's Iliadic description (it is called "walled" at <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> 2.559, one of only two cities so designated.) Orchomenos he left after only a few weeks, not having found any gold after all despite what the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> has to say. What he <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">did</em> find at Orchomenos was a type of pottery that he called "Minyan Ware" (after the Minyans of Greek myth). Schliemann himself did not make the connection, but this type of pottery had also been found at Troy, at a level that Schliemann did not believe to be prehistoric (Wood 1998: 71-72). This level would turn out to be Troy VI, the one now regarded by many as the Homeric Troy.</div>
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Schliemann also attempted to get permission to dig at the site of Knossos on Crete, where he might have uncovered the Minoan civilization later discovered by Arthur Evans, but he was not able to get permission to dig there, as Crete was fighting for independence from Turkey. And so Schliemann returned to Troy, this time with the architect Wilhelm Dörpfeld, with whom he had excavated at Tiryns. He was determined to prove that there were links between Mycenae, Tiryns and Troy II. But it seems that even he had doubts that so small a place could be the subject of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. In his account of Schliemann's excavations, Michael Wood quotes a letter in which Schliemann writes: "I thought I had settled the Trojan question forever... but my doubts increased as time wore on. ... Had Troy been merely a fortified borough, a few hundred men might have taken it in a few days and the whole Trojan War would either have been a total fiction, or it would have had but a slender foundation." (See Wood 1998: 87.) These words reveal a great deal about Schliemann's hopes and assumptions concerning the relationship between the archaeological remains, the history of the Bronze Age, and the poetry of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. To discover that the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> was an entirely poetic creation, with no basis in historical fact, would have been a tremendous disappointment to Schliemann. Even the idea that the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> might contain a kernel of historical fact that had been embellished by time and poetry was unacceptable. Schliemann's sentiments are in keeping with an often quoted diary entry of Lord Byron, who wrote: “We do care about ‘the authenticity of the tale of Troy’… I still venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise it would have given me no delight” [written in his diary in 1821].</div>
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After Schliemann: Troy as Dream and Reality in the 20th Century and Beyond</h2>
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Subsequent excavators of Hisarlik have likewise sought to provide this same historical authenticity to the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> via their excavations. In the final weeks of Schliemann's life, Dörpfeld began to uncover what was left of the remains of Troy VI, and to believe that he had found the historical Troy. Here is how Troy VI is described in Trevor Bryce's (2006) <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Trojans and Their Neighbors</em>:</div>
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From the ashes of Troy V a splendid new settlement emerged, which, at the height of its development, far overshadowed its predecessors in size and magnificence, and provided the setting for the most famous epic in Western literary tradition. For this was the place where Homer located the kingdom of Priam. Before its walls, Greek and Trojan forces repeatedly clashed, and Achilles and Hector fought to the death. At least that is what tradition tells us. </div>
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Impressive new fortifications built of squared limestone blocks protected the citadel of Troy VI. The walls, surmounted by mudbrick breastwork, once reached a height of over 9 metres. Several watchtowers were built into these walls, the most imposing of which is the huge north-eastern bastion, which served to reinforce the citadel's defences as well as affording a commanding view over the Trojan plain. It calls to mind Homer's great watchtower in the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. Five gateways provided access to the citadel, the most important of which was the southern gate, 3.3 metres wide, protected by a tower and giving access to a broad way ascending steeply into the citadel. Archaeologists have suggested that this was the famous Scaean Gate, where Hector bade his wife Andromache farewell and where Paris inflicted the fatal wound upon Achilles' heel. (Bryce 2006: 58)</div>
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Bryce was writing more than a century after Dörpfeld, but his description captures the spirit with which Dörpfeld conducted his work, following in the footsteps of Schliemann himself. Poetry and archaeology are made to reinforce one another in order to create a vivid historical picture of a real Homeric Troy at Hisarlik, where the events of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> could have actually occurred. (For the ecstatic reception of Dörpfeld's findings among academics of the time, see Wood 1998: 89-93.) After Dörpfeld came Carl Blegen, an American archaeologist who excavated at Hisarlik from 1932-1938. He too was looking for a Troy at which the events of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> and the Trojan War of the larger epic tradition took place and he believed that Troy VIIa, the level immediately following Troy VI, was the Homeric Troy. Unlike Troy VI, which showed little evidence of war as a cause for destruction, Troy VIIa was a town arguably destroyed by siege some time around 1180 BCE. As Bryce notes, however, this would be "too late to be linked with a concerted Mycenaean invasion from the Greek mainland" (Bryce 2006: 67). The Mycenaean palaces had collapsed by this point, as had many power centers around the Mediterranean and the Near East. Once again the reality of the archaeological remains of Hisarlik fails to match our preconceived poetic and historical narratives. </div>
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And yet we continue to look. Because Troy VI seems so tantalizingly like the city of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>, we can't let it go. And so the excavations have continued. In 1988, fifty years after Blegen, new excavations began under the direction of Manfred Korfmann and continued after Korfmann's death in 2005 until 2012. Korfmann's team identified a a previously unknown extensive lower town surrounding Troy VI, fortified by mudbrick walls and ditches. (We should note, however, that there has been considerable revisions to the dates and renaming of the various levels.) These findings suggest that Troy VI was much bigger even than previously thought and an important regional power. Korfmann stated repeatedly in interviews and on the <a href="http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/kontroverse.html" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">project website</a> that his team was not interested in proving or disproving the historicity of the Trojan War. It is noted in his <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times</em> obituary, for example, that for Korfmann, the Trojan War “was merely an illustrative and metaphoric episode in a series of many wars that undoubtedly were waged through the centuries in the power play at this strategic place” (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times</em> Obituary, 8/19/2005). Korfmann urged us to see Hisarlik as an archaeological site well worth studying in its own right. </div>
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But it is a fact that Korfmann's findings were seized upon by Homeric scholars wishing to prove the historicity of the Trojan War, as narrated in the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. Joachin Latacz, described as "one of Korfmann's closest collaborators" on the back of his 2005 book <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">,</span> argues forcefully on the basis of Korfmann's evidence that the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad </em>transmits historical events from the late Bronze Age. </div>
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In 2001, the findings of the excavation were the subject of a special exhibition in Germany entitled <a href="http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/ausstellung.html" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Troia: Traum und Wirklicheit</a> ("Troy: Dream and Reality"). The title alone perfectly encapsulates the problem of separating fact and fiction when it comes to the site of Hisarlik: Troy is a dream that archaeologists have time and again sought to prove a reality at Hisarlik. The exhibit was fantastically well attended and ignited a <a href="http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/kontroverse.html" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">media firestorm</a> after one of Korfmann's own colleagues at the University of Tübingen, Professor Frank Kolb, accused him of falsifying his results and deliberately misleading the public. While I do not endorse Kolb's accusations, I can understand his skepticism. Once again the archaeological site of Hisarlik was being used to support century old arguments about the historicity of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em>. </div>
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Indeed, I would argue that modern scholars are no less romantic than Schliemann himself when it comes to the archaeological aspects of the Homeric Question. How far have we come since the days of Schliemann in our understanding of the relationship between the archaeology of the mound called Hisarlik in Northwestern Turkey and the Homeric poems? An instructive example can be found in Trevor Bryce's 2006 book, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Trojans and their Neighbours</em>, which is an excellent scholarly treatment of what we know about the archaeological evidence at Hisarlik, situated in the wider context of the Bronze Age Mediterranean and the Near East. It is one of the latest, most up to date textbooks on this subject and I use it in my own classes. </div>
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The book is full of problematic assumptions about the relationship between Hisarlik and the Homeric epics, including the following. </div>
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Homer was an individual living in the 8th century BCE on the coast of Anatolia. He may have seen Troy. His compositions were known as such by his contemporaries. (Bryce 2006: 9-16)</div>
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Troy was a real place. (Bryce 2006: passim) </div>
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The Trojan War happened, though not necessarily exactly as the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> describes. (Bryce suggests "the Trojan War story was the outcome of a whole raft of traditions reflecting conflicts spread over a number of centuries and finally distilled into a single ten-year episode" but then goes on to warn against being "too skeptical" about the abduction of Helen as a cause for the war [Bryce 2006: 186-187].)</div>
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The Trojan War happened at roughly the time that was guessed by writers in the Classical period and later, all living more than 800 years after the event they were attempting to date. (See examples cited above.)</div>
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The site of Hisarlik (as opposed to Burnabashi or anywhere else) contains the remains of Troy. (Bryce 2006: 181) </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAX09KtZ0QTM38yklNTFOMlRe2U0PcAaxdWJL04uOvxjpMBiB4QbX-0pnkWI2_QCc7TtBjfcmGdILGlHau85-UIui0p1cbqU69b1-JL5bJ5GW0dT440TP8RZJ5jG2p8S1cqn3RC_exPJsv/s1600/Wooden_horse+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAX09KtZ0QTM38yklNTFOMlRe2U0PcAaxdWJL04uOvxjpMBiB4QbX-0pnkWI2_QCc7TtBjfcmGdILGlHau85-UIui0p1cbqU69b1-JL5bJ5GW0dT440TP8RZJ5jG2p8S1cqn3RC_exPJsv/s320/Wooden_horse+copy.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A modern Trojan Horse at Hisarlik</td></tr>
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It is important to understand that all of these are assumptions, and all have a chance (in some cases a very strong chance) of being incorrect. So why does Bryce assume them? He does so for the same romantic reasons that all scholars and archaeologists who research the site of Troy have, in varying degrees. It is the reason there is a monumental wooden horse at the site of Hisarlik today. <a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/1334" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Elsewhere I have argued</a> that contemporary notions of poetic genius have influenced our understanding of the authorship of the Homeric epics in profound ways (Dué 2006). As I conclude in the article I have just cited, "Our evidence is such that however we dream up Homer it is of necessity a matter of faith and will always be rooted in current conceptions of poets and poetry." The archaeological search for Troy, I submit, is similarly wrapped up in modern conceptions about not only poetic genius but also the weight and significance of history, and a desire to find a kind of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">gravitas</em> in the Homeric epics that we moderns do not typically associate with myth.<br />
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I would like to conclude this lengthy meditation on the history of Bronze Age archaeology and the Homeric Question by quoting an article I have already cited by Jonathan Burgess, "<a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/1312" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Tumuli of Achilles</a>," in which he surveys the history of our understanding of where Achilles’ tomb was in antiquity, and shows how it was imagined to be in different places in different time periods, noting that a real Bronze Age tomb of Achilles has never been found. In his conclusion, Burgess argues that we shouldn’t be looking for such a tomb - that it in fact diminishes the poetry of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> to do so rather than enhances it:</div>
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The larger issue raised by my survey of the localization of Achilles' tumulus is the relation between myth and reality. The spectacular discoveries of Schliemann gave license to a historicist approach to the myth of the Trojan war that turned out to be unwarranted, even if much valuable historical evidence was uncovered in the process. The Homeric poems are not guides to Bronze Age history and their allegiance is to mytho-poetic narrative, not reality. Especially troubling has been a disrespect for myth displayed by some explorers and archaeologists, an attitude that is readily applauded by our modern culture. The search for the “truth” behind the Trojan war is essentially a reductionist exercise designed to transform myth into a more valued reality. The oft-quoted comment by Byron, “We do care about ‘the authenticity of the tale of Troy’… I still venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise it would have given me no delight”, is emblematic of this attitude, all the more regrettable because it is the expression of, astoundingly, a poet. It is depressing to face the constant pressure from the media and our students to play the antimythology historicist game. For these reasons we should resist attempts to identify a “real” tumulus of Achilles (and, I would argue, a “real” Trojan war). </div>
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Yet topography and archaeology provide important contexts for philological research. It would be unnecessarily limiting for philologists to consider the Trojan war narrative an exclusively notional construct. In terms of origins, it is significant that there was a Bronze Age city of Troy, in existence when Mycenaeans were prominent and war was common… The ancients valued their direct experience of the actual world featured in Greek mythology. The viewing of topography provided a very strong and immediate contact with a traditional past that was immanent within the physical landscape. Any opportunity for us in the modern world to see topography associated with myth should always be illuminating. </div>
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The middle ground that Burgess offers here seems absolutely right to me. What is important for fully appreciating not only the poetry itself but also the reception of that poetry in ancient times is not whether or not the Trojan War really happened or precisely when. As the poetic tradition evolved, the Trojan War came to be associated with a particular landscape and topography and the ruins of a particular place, and likewise that particular place became imbued with the poetry, such that they became over time inseparable for the poets and their audiences. It is for that reason that we should look for Troy. A better understanding of the topography of the Troad and the ruins of Hisarlik gives us insight into what ancient composers imagined when they sang songs about the Trojan War, and what the ancient audiences imagined when they heard them. What actually happened there seems beside the point, at least from the point of view of understanding the poetic tradition. (From the point of view of understanding the workings of the Hittite Empire and it's relationship with the Mycenaean Greeks in the Late Bronze Age, obviously the archaeological remains are of great historical value.) </div>
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Schliemann's Legacy</h2>
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Schliemann’s methodology, naiveté, and shady dealings have been fiercely and rightly criticized by modern archaeologists and historians, but his accomplishment, namely the discovery of a previously unknown Bronze Age world not unlike that depicted in the Homeric epics—the world now known as Mycenaean Greece—had a lasting and profound impact on our understanding of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Odyssey</em> and the historical context in which they were generated. In future posts I plan to explore how our knowledge of some the reality of Bronze Age Greece affects our understanding of the poetry. But on an even more fundamental level, we can now appreciate the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Iliad</em> and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Odyssey</em> as works that spans many centuries of composition and reception. What philologists and linguists have observed in the diction of Homeric poetry (namely, that there are very old forms alongside much newer forms of words) can now be observed on a material level, thanks to Schliemann and those who have succeeded him. In terms of the Catalogue of Ships, we can now understand it to be the product of, or at least have its origins in, a Bronze Age world. As I have already suggested in the case of Orchomenos, the Catalogue entries do not only reflect the Bronze Age, or even a single era within the long span of time that we call the Bronze Age. But understanding the Catalogue to be the product of such a long evolution helps us to appreciate why the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">poetic</em> significance of a place like Orchomenos can shift within the poem, and why we should not look for a single reality to inform our understanding of the poetry.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8CUbncgeBQSm-t7xq-SWO32DA_UUax0x2rc5Z15Ha8pq0AnVzUPw5Lbkemm0aZ_0ZRUx64-tJY84N8ixj159VLOdvB4nZTUvOKAsEYq-sR95rriEa9Woi28arBoMwa-eF6Rz5DU2bB7Ms/s1600/Ruins_of_Orchomenos.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8CUbncgeBQSm-t7xq-SWO32DA_UUax0x2rc5Z15Ha8pq0AnVzUPw5Lbkemm0aZ_0ZRUx64-tJY84N8ixj159VLOdvB4nZTUvOKAsEYq-sR95rriEa9Woi28arBoMwa-eF6Rz5DU2bB7Ms/s400/Ruins_of_Orchomenos.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Ruins of Orchomenos<br />
Edward Dodwell, <i>Views in Greece </i>(London 1821)</td></tr>
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Works Cited</div>
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Allen, S. 1999. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik</em>. Berkeley.</div>
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Bryce, T. 2006. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Trojans and Their Neighbours</em>. New York.</div>
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Burgess, J. 2006. "<a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/1312" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Tumuli of Achilles</a>." <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Classics@</em> 3. Eds. R. Armstrong and C. Dué. Center for Hellenic Studies.</div>
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Calder, W. and D. Traill. eds. 1986. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Myth, Scandal, and History: The Heinrich Schliemann Controversy</em>. Detroit. </div>
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Cook, J. 1973. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Troad: An Archaeological and Topographical Study.</em> Oxford.</div>
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Dué, C. 2006. "<a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/1334" style="border: 0px; color: #0099cc; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">The Invention of Ossian</a>." <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Classics@</em> 3. Eds. R. Armstrong and C. Dué. Center for Hellenic Studies.</div>
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Latacz, J. 2005. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery</em>. Oxford. </div>
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Lechevalier, J. 1791. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Description of the plain of Troy with a map of that region, delineated from an actual survey</em>. Edinburgh.</div>
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Luce, J. 1998. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Celebrating Homer's Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited</em>. New Haven.</div>
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Moorehead, C. 1997. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Lost and Found: Heinrich Schliemann and the Gold That Got Away</em>. </div>
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Nagy, G. 2010. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Homer the Preclassic</em>. Berkeley.</div>
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Schliemann, H. 1875. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Troy and its Remains: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries Made on the Site of Ilium, and in the Trojan Plain</em>. London.</div>
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Schliemann, H. 1881. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Orchomenos</em>. Leipzig.</div>
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Schliemann, H. 1884. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Troja: Results of the Latest Researches on the Site of Homer's Troy</em>. London.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; font-family: Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 9px; padding: 0px;">
Traill, D. 1993. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Excavating Schliemann</em>. Illinois Classical Studies supplement 4. ed. W. Calder. Atlanta.</div>
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Traill, D. 1995. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit</em>. New York.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; font-family: Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 9px; padding: 0px;">
Wood, M. 1998. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In Search of the Trojan War</em>. Berkeley. </div>
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Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-56282355641092237432015-01-23T16:08:00.000-08:002015-01-24T10:00:00.582-08:00Dancing Places and Doves: Place-names and their Epithets in the Catalogue of Ships<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[495] and Arkesilaos and Prothoenor and Klonios</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[496] who inhabited Hyria and rocky Aulis</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[497] and Skhoinos and Skolos and many-peaked Eteonos</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[498] and wondrous Graia and Mykalessos with its broad dancing places</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[499] and those who inhabited Harma and Eilesios and Erythrai</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[500] and those who held Eleon and Hyle and Peteon</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[501] Okalea and Medeon the well-built citadel,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[502] Kopai and Eutresis and Thisbe of the many doves</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In my <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/06/walk-on-characters-in-iliad.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">previous post</span></a> I explored the notion of "walk-on characters" in the <i>Iliad</i>, those characters who appear in the narrative seemingly only to die or who fade from view after only a brief mention. In that post I argued that such characters are as integrated into the traditional system in which the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> were composed as more prominent characters, and that the Catalogue of Ships in particular functions much like an index to the totality of the epic tradition. I conclude by quoting Mabel Lang (In Carter and Morris, <i>The Ages of Homer</i> [1995], 161): "Speculative in the extreme? Yes, but sensible if ones sees the Catalogue of Ships not as a survey of actual political geography, but as a poetic attempt to list as many famous heroes as might possibly have fought in the Trojan War, although in the <i>Iliad</i> at least, several have little or no part. These heroes must have been known to the bards, complete with epithets and epitheted place-names, from their local exploits."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In this post I want to explore the much vexed question of the "epitheted place-names" to which Lang refers. Was there a real place named Mykalessos and did it actually have broad dancing places? Why is Medeon a "well built citadel" but Okalea is not described at all? Did Thisbe really have many doves, and if so how do we know? How did such places and epithets make it into the epic tradition to begin with? I don't expect to be able to thoroughly answer all of these questions in one blog post, but I would like to at least make a start by exploring further the epithets used of Mykalessos and Thisbe. In so doing I will build on previous work in which I have discussed the poetics of various other kinds of noun-epithet combinations, and here as always I am much indebted to the work of Milman Parry, whose first doctoral thesis was entitled <i>L’Épithète traditionelle dans Homère; Essaie sur un problème de style homérique</i> (= The Traditional Epithet in Homer). (See especially <a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4171" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Dué and Ebbott 2010</span></a> <i>ad</i> 10.3 and 10.283 for definitions and the history of scholarship on epithets.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Lang's work suggests that the walk-on characters in the <i>Iliad</i> are in fact local hero heroes whose deeds in the Trojan War and/or other epic narratives would have been sung in particular places. At some point what had previously been local songs came to be performed more widely and by other, non-local singers, or at the very least, their heroes came to be incorporated into a wider narrative tradition that eventually resulted in our <i>Iliad</i>. By making it into the <i>Iliad</i>, these local heroes became part of a Panhellenic poetic tradition at some distance removed from the local songs from which they originated. If this conceptualization is correct, we have to understand that different singers and different audiences may have known more or less specific information about these heroes and the towns from which they hailed, depending on their familiarity with the local traditions that formed these characters' back-stories. And yet, as a notional totality at least, the full biography of these more local heroes was at some point known to the epic tradition as a whole.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Likewise, this notional totality that I am invoking had a broad knowledge of the geography of Greece, though it is clear that much as the dialect of the Homeric epic evolved to incorporate Aeolic and Ionic and even Attic elements, so too did new places come into the system, sometimes (no doubt) at the expense of other places which fell out of circulation. I have argued with reference to the character of Briseis that some audiences (e.g., archaic or earlier, Aeolic) would have had a clear understanding of her own unique life story, while other, later, and more Panhellenic audiences would have understood her story only paradigmatically (Briseis as a typical captive woman from a town sacked by Achilles, the daughter or wife of the local king). (See <a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4311" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Dué 2002</span></a>.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A place like Mykalessos or Thisbe then may have had syntagmatic associations, that is details that were true and specific to the actual towns, as well as paradigmatic associations (characteristics that they share with other epic places, details that may or may not have had anything to do with their "real" geographical features). Each place may have at one time had a set of particular epithets and formulas that were used of that place in particular by bards familiar with that place. Some or all of that formulaic language may have at one point become a part of the larger, more Panhellenic epic tradition, but not all of what came into the system stayed in the system. As the tradition and its formulaic diction evolved so too did the poets' and audiences' understanding of those places evolve.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is this evolution that explains at least in part why the political geography of the Catalogue of Ships cannot be tied to one particular era. Some towns mentioned in the Catalogue (e.g., Eutresis in 2.502) were uninhabited after the end of the Bronze Age (though Eutresis was reoccupied beginning in the 6th Century BCE; see Simpson and Lazenby, <i>The Catalogue of Ships in Homer's Iliad </i>[1970], 27), suggesting a Bronze Age date for the Catalogue (as argued by Simpson and Lazenby), but others, such as Sparta, were not particularly important in the Bronze Age and flourished only in later times. (Sparta seems to have displaced the Bronze Age Therapne completely; see O. Dickinson, "Catalogue of Ships," in <i>The Homer Encyclopedia</i> [ed. M. Finkelberg, 2011].) Athens, so important a city from archaic times onwards, was a relatively minor fortified citadel in the Bronze Age, which might explain why Athens is barely featured in our <i>Iliad</i> and might be another indication of a Bronze Age date for the Catalogue. And yet the geographical evidence preserved in the Bronze Age Linear B tablets often does not match up with that of the Homeric texts. (An example would be Pylos, whose territory as revealed by the Linear B tablets does not match what is described in the Catalogue; see again Dickinson 2011.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The work of E. S. Sherratt noted in <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/06/walk-on-characters-in-iliad.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">my last post</span></a> suggests that we should not be looking for a single political reality reflected in the Catalogue of Ships, and that it would be fruitless to attempt to separate Bronze Age geographical details from later ones. Elements from more than one reality entered the system of formulaic diction and were seamlessly integrated over time. At the same time, as this process was on-going, the reality of any particular location (its particular natural features, precise geographical location, etc) faded in importance, and instead its poetic/epic identity superseded it. A place like Mykalessos was understood within the tradition to have broad dancing places, and it may well have had them at one time, but poets of later eras need not have known whether or not this was this was the case. Within the poetic tradition, Mykalessos had broad dancing places.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mykalessos was not the only place to have broad dancing places, however; Sparta and two other cities as well are described this way in the <i>Odyssey</i> (Elis 4.635, Thebe 11.265, Sparta 13.414 and 15.1). Archaeological remains are not sufficient to tell us whether these places actually had broad dancing places. A place that certainly did have them was Knossos on Minoan Crete, which is intriguingly remembered on the shield of Achilles as having a dancing place made by Daidalos for Ariadne (<i>Iliad</i> 19.590-592):</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">ἐν δὲ χορὸν ποίκιλλε περικλυτὸς ἀμφιγυήεις,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">τῷ ἴκελον οἷόν ποτ᾽ ἐνὶ Κνωσῷ εὐρείῃ</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Δαίδαλος ἤσκησεν καλλιπλοκάμῳ Ἀριάδνῃ.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And on it a dancing place was wrought by the very famous god who was lame in both legs,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">like the one which once in broad Knossos</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Daidalos made for Ariadne of the beautifully braided hair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here the dancing place is not said to be broad; instead Knossos itself is described as broad (εὐρείῃ).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I see two possibilities here. One is that Mykalessos really did have a spacious dancing place, more so than other places, and this detail about the town has been preserved in the epic diction. Another is that the memory of great cities of the Bronze Age past such as Knossos (whose preserved frescoes and seals from the Mycenaean period depict what appears to be choral dancing) has resulted in the creation within the poetic diction of a generic and ornamental epithet analogous to "good at the war shout" (βοὴν ἀγαθὸς), which Mary Ebbott and I have discussed extensively in connection with <i>Iliad</i> 10.283. (See <a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4171" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Dué and Ebbott 2010</span></a> <i>ad loc</i>.) As we write there:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But let us notice first that Parry does not say here that this epithet has no meaning at all; he says only that it does not specify one hero in a way that it specifies no other hero. In other words, the heroes designated βοὴν ἀγαθός are, indeed, good at the battle shout. The fact that more than one hero is so designated suggests that such a skill would have been considered a good and useful one for a warrior, just as the formula itself is good and useful for the singer who is composing in performance.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Just as being good at the war shout was considered a good quality for the epic hero to have, so too it seems that having broad dancing places was a quality associated with ancient cities. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(For more on Bronze Age connections to the dancing place for Ariadne see S. Lonsdale, "A Dancing Floor for Ariadne [<i>Iliad</i> 18.590-592]: Aspects of Ritual Movement in Homer and Minoan Religion" in Carter and Morris, <i>The Ages of Homer</i> [1995].)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Geoffrey Kirk, in the section of his commentary on the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Iliad</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that introduces the Catalogue of Ships, argues that all of the epithets used to describe cities in the Catalogue, "save about eight can be divided into one or other of four general categories of meaning" (Kirk, </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The Iliad: A Commentary</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, vol. 1, p. 175). The categories are as follows: well-built town; rocky, steep, high; fertile, broad, by sea/river; lovely, holy, rich. I have some disagreements with Kirk's classification (for example, he groups πολυτρήρωνά ["of the many doves," on which see below] with adjectives meaning rocky or steep and he does not include εὐρύχορον in his groupings at all) but I can see his point. Most cities in the Catalogue are described in ways that might be considered generic and ornamental, that is to say, not particular to any real city of any particular era. They have characteristics that would be good and useful for any city. Mykalessos may have at one time been renowned for its dancing places, but later audiences more likely understood the epithet along the lines of "having broad dancing places, in the way that all good cities do" or possibly "having broad dancing places, in the way </span>that<span style="font-family: inherit;"> all cities of the heroic past did." Whatever syntagmatic meaning the epithet once had has given way to a more paradigmatic one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Thisbe on the other hand is an example of a place with a particular natural feature that seems to have been preserved within the tradition, not unlike the way that the very ancient vestiges of the Arcado-Cypriote dialect have been preserved within formulaic diction. (See the work of Milman Parry on the Homeric dialect cited in <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/06/walk-on-characters-in-iliad.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">my last post</span></a>.) Modern travelers (James Frazer in his edition of Pausanias [vol. 5 p. 162], Michael Wood in his book and documentary <i>In Search of the Trojan War</i>) have observed that the place believed to be ancient Thisbe (as evidenced by inscriptions) is indeed inhabited by many doves, as its epithet πολυτρήρωνά suggests. (See also Strabo 9.411, who observed them near the port.) Could this be an example of an epithet with syntagmatic meaning — meaning specific to the real Thisbe — that has persisted within the system? If so it is not the only such place: Messe (in the region of Sparta) is likewise designated πολυτρήρωνά at <i>Iliad</i> 2.582 in the same metrical position. Messe too has been observed by modern travelers to be a home to birds: "The identification of Messe with the site at Tigani receives some support from the constant din created by the 'pigeons and seafowl' in the cliffs of Thyrides to he south, which calls to mind the Homeric epithet πολυτρήρων" (Simpson and Lazenby 1970, 77).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have been suggesting that places, like heroes, and, at a more basic level, formulas, had to enter the system of Homeric diction at some point, and that the formulaic diction associated with those places evolved as the system evolved. Some formulas persisted and may have retained something of their original meaning for centuries, until the epics crystallized into the form in which we now have them, while most other formulas evolved to become more generic, in that they were associated with cities in general. Mykalessa and Thisbe are just two examples of places whose traditional epithets underwent this evolution. Singers from those regions or the towns themselves may have indeed known them to have particular characteristics, but later singers and later audiences from other places most likely only knew them by their poetic identities, which may or may not have maintained characteristics particular to them. The fact that only a handful of places are described as εὐρύχορον and πολυτρήρωνά in our surviving evidence is suggestive that the formulas were created and used because they were indeed true of those places, but we must be aware of the limitations of our evidence. As Mary Ebbott and I note with reference to βοὴν ἀγαθὸς, if the <i>Iliad</i> did not survive and we had only the <i>Odyssey</i>, we might think that only Menelaos was ever so described. If more epic poetry survived, and especially if more catalogue poetry survived, we might find many such cities described as having dancing places and being full of doves. Even so, as I have tried to argue here and elsewhere, the fact that multiple cities are described as εὐρύχορον and πολυτρήρωνά does not make these traditional descriptions devoid of meaning, it just gives them meaning of a different kind, a kind that is quite typical of oral poetry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Note: For more on the identification of Mykalessa and Thisbe and other named towns with actual historical places see Simpson and Lazenby (1970), though not all identifications of places mentioned in the Catalogue are universally accepted.</span></div>
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Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-83828304719539958462014-07-25T09:57:00.000-07:002014-07-25T10:42:09.958-07:00Haven’t we had this discussion before? Iris’s message and the Trojan assembly<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just as the Catalogue of Ships is much longer and more elaborate than the catalogue of the Trojans and their allies, so it seems that my posts will be shorter than Casey’s. But the <i>Iliad</i>’s oral, traditional poetry shows us that such compression for what comes second is part of the poetics. In addition to the example of the two catalogues, we can also compare the version in the Venetus A of the arming of Paris and Menelaos for their duel. (Lord used this example for illustrating compression and expansion, Lord 1960/2000: 89–91.) Paris’s arming scene is composed in 11 lines (<i>Iliad</i> 3.328–338), detailing each piece of equipment he dons, while Menelaos’s is summed up in just one line “Similarly Ares-like Menelaos put on his war gear as well” (<i>Iliad</i> 3.339). [I specify the Venetus A’s version has only one line because P40 records three partial lines following this one in which Menelaos putting on some war gear is described!] The benefit for me in going second is that I can likewise refer back to Casey’s masterly explanations in what I am addressing. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For example, Casey noted in her latest post that the evolution of the epic over time allows for it to organically recompose themes and episodes that in other ways of telling the story would happen earlier within the narrative than the tenth year of the war. Thus the Catalogue of Ships, or any roster of fighters, might be though of as appropriate to the beginning of the war, but it can be (and has been!) recomposed to become a integral part of the <i>Iliad</i>. I of course agree completely with what Casey is saying, and I want to extend the discussion by noting that the traditionality of the theme or episode allows it to evoke those other ways of using it as well. That is, the Catalogue of Ships certainly is integrated into the narrative of the <i>Iliad</i> in the tenth year of the war, but if it was ever sung as part of the telling of the beginning of the war, it can also maintain that trace of those earlier events within the current performance. The Catalogue comes at a point in this tenth year when the Achaeans could have left, but instead they renew their commitment to the war and resume the fighting. Thus the war “restarts” and the contingents fighting for both sides are recomposed into this action sequence. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/05/introducing-trojans.html" target="_blank">my last post</a>, I examined the lines in which the Trojans are introduced to us with the arrival of the divine messenger Iris and looked at the meanings of the formulas “ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες” (2.789) and “ἀγγελίῃ ἀλεγεινῇ” (2.787) and the deeper connections they create by way of their other uses in the epic. Now I will continue looking at the message Iris brings, to see how it, too, is both organic within this narrative and also possibly evokes ways of singing such an episode at the very beginning of the war. So what I hope to show here is that (1) Iris’s message to and about the Trojan assembly both belongs to the tenth year of the war and evokes the very beginning of the war through its deployment of its traditional language, And (2) that it can do both simultaneously adds depth of meaning (a phenomenon we see frequently with traditional language). Here is the fuller passage, again using the Venetus A manuscript’s version:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">786 Τρωσὶν δ᾽ ἄγγελος ἦλθε ποδήνεμος ὠκέα Ϊ῀ρις</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">787 παρ Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο σὺν ἀγγελίῃ ἀλεγεινῇ·</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">788 οἱ δ᾽ ἀγορὰς ἀγόρευον ἐπὶ Πριάμοιο θύρῃσι</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">789 πάντες ὁμηγερέες, ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">790 ἀγχοῦ δ᾽ ἱ¨σταμένη προσέφη πόδας ὠκέα Ϊ῀ρις·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">791 εἴσατο δὲ φθογγὴν· υἱέϊ Πριάμοιο Πολίτῃ</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">792 ὃς Τρώων σκοπὸς ΐζε ποδωκείῃσι πεποιθὼς.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">793 τύμβῳ ἐπ ακροτάτῳ Αἰσυήταο γέροντος</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">794 δέγμενος ὁππότε, ναῦφιν ἀφορμηθεῖεν Ἀχαιοί·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">795 τῷ μιν ἐεισαμένη προσέφη πόδας ὠκέα Ϊ῀ρις·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">796 ὦ γέρον. αἰεί τοι μῦθοι φίλοι ἄκριτοί εἰσιν·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">797 ὥς ποτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ εἰρήνης. πόλεμος δ᾽ ἀλίαστος όρωρεν·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">798 <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"> </span></span><span style="font: 8.0px 'Gentium Plus'; letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #ff3923;"><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">ἤδη μὲν</span></sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> ῆ μὲν δὴ μάλα πολλὰ μάχας εἰσήλυθον ἀνδρῶν.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">799 ἀλλ᾽ οὔ πω τοιόνδε τοσόνδέ τε λαὸν ὄπωπα·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">800 λίην γὰρ φύλλοισιν ἐοικότες ἢ ψαμάθοισιν</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">801 ἔρχονται πεδίοιο μαχησόμενοι περι </span><span style="font: 8.0px 'Gentium Plus'; letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #ff3923;"><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">προτι</span></sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> ἄστυ·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">802 Ἕκτορ· σοὶ δὲ μάλιστ᾽ ἐπιτέλλομαι· ὧδε δὲ ῥέξαι·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">803 πολλοὶ γὰρ κατὰ ἄστυ μέγα Πριάμου ἐπίκουροι</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">804 ἄλλη δ᾽ ἄλλων γλῶσσα πολυσπερέων ἀνθρώπων·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">805 τοῖσιν ἕκαστος ἀνὴρ σημαινέτω οἷσί περ ἄρχει·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">806 τῶν δ᾽ ἐξηγείσθω κοσμησάμενος πολιήτας·</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[786] To the Trojans Iris with wind-swift feet came as a messenger</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[787] from aegis-shaking Zeus with a troubling message. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[788] They were speaking in assembly at the doors of Priam,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[789] all of them gathered together, both young men and old.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[790] Swift-footed Iris stood close by and spoke,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[791] and she likened her voice to that of the son of Priam, Polites,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[792] who was sitting as a lookout for the Trojans, confident in the swiftness of his feet,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[793] on the highest point of the burial mound of the old man Aisyetes</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[794] awaiting the time when the Achaeans would make a start from their ships.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[795] Resembling him, swift footed Iris spoke:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[796] “Old man, always dear [philos] to you are words [muthos] without decision,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[797] so it was once in peacetime, but unavoidable war has come about.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[798] Indeed [v.l. Already] so many times I have entered battles with men,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[799] but not yet have I seen so many and such great warriors.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[800] As numerous as leaves or grains of sand</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[801] they come across the plain to fight around [v.l. against] the city.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[802] Hektor, to you most of all I give commands: do the following.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[803] Since there are throughout the great city of Priam many allies,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[804] and the language of one group differs from the language of the other men from all over,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[805] let each man give signals to those whom he rules.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[806] And once he has arrayed his citizens, let each be the leader of them.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Iris comes in the guise of Polites, son of Priam, who is acting as a lookout. It certainly makes sense to have lookouts posted for the movements of the Achaeans even now in the tenth year of the war, so that the Trojans can be alerted when they are on the attack, but the details of what Iris says evoke the Achaeans’ very first landing at and attack against Troy. She contrasts “peacetime” with the fact that war is now upon them (<i>Iliad</i> 2.797)—a contrast easily made at the beginning of a conflict with a call to action. Another detail that recalls the beginning of the war is when she says that she has never seen so many or such great warriors (<i>Iliad</i> 2.799). Since the Trojans, including Polites, have been seeing these warriors for over nine years now, this description of the overwhelming force of the Achaeans, like the renewed commitment to the war on the Achaeans’ part earlier in Book 2 that prompts the Catalogue of Ships, similarly conjures up the beginning of the war, when the arrival of the Achaeans could have been announced in this same language. As Casey was pointing out about the Catalogue itself, this statement’s evocation of the beginning of the war does not mean it is inappropriate or poorly integrated here, but rather that traditional language can operate on both levels simultaneously. (David Elmer [2013: 102] also shows how the poetry can operate at the levels of the past and present at the same time when he argues that the Catalogue of Ships becomes the “ultimate emblem” of order and the epic tradition as it “appears to describe not just the various components of Agamemnon’s fleet when he sailed for Troy but also the units into which the leaders divide the army on the present occasion.” The Catalogue, Elmer goes on to say, “also exhibits the poetic order imposed by the narrator with <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/04/invoking-muses.html" target="_blank">the help of the Muses</a>.”)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One other aspect of Iris’s speech also suggests the way the language here could have been used to sing the beginning of the war, and, if it had been used in such a way, could for a traditional audience bring to mind that episode. David Elmer’s work brought my attention to Iris’s opening description of this Trojan assembly, where their words are ἄκριτοι (2.796, “without decision” in my translation, “that do not arrive at a result” in Elmer’s, 2013: 134). Elmer contrasts this habitual lack of consensus and decision-making among the Trojans that Iris describes (instead, right after her speech, Hector alone makes a decision and takes action) with the collective decision making of the Achaeans (Elmer 2013: 134–135). (Elmer also notes the communication problem of speaking different languages that Iris points to at 2.803–806 as part of the problem for “true collective action” among the Trojans.) This contrast, Elmer points out, is similarly seen in <i>Iliad</i> 7 when both the Achaeans and the Trojans hold assemblies after the day’s battle has been concluded. The Achaean leaders all express their approval of Nestor’s suggestion to build their defensive wall (<i>Iliad</i> 7.344), and meanwhile, the Trojans hold an assembly that is “angry and full of discord” (<i>Iliad</i> 7.345–346, Elmer’s translation of δεινὴ τετρηχυῖα, 2013: 133). </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What the Trojans discuss at that discordant assembly in <i>Iliad</i> 7 brings me back to how Iris’s characterization of Priam’s speeches as “without decision” can evoke the beginning of the war. In the assembly in <i>Iliad</i> 7, the proposal discussed (and rejected by Paris) is the return of Helen to the Achaeans. If the Trojans were in assembly when Polites or Iris brought the message that the Achaeans had arrived (for the first time) to make war on Troy, we can imagine that the subject of deliberation was whether or not to return Helen. That their public speeches (μῦθοι) then were also ἄκριτοι is evidenced by the fact that they are still in the tenth year considering whether they should return Helen, as seen both in the assembly in <i>Iliad</i> 7 and in the words of the Trojan elders in <i>Iliad</i> 3, who when they see Helen say that she is worth fighting for, but even so, she should go back in the ships and not remain with them (<i>Iliad</i> 3.154–160). We are not told in this scene in <i>Iliad</i> 2 what the Trojans were discussing in their assembly—but its associations with other Trojan assemblies (such as that in <i>Iliad</i> 7) and the whole scene’s associations with the beginning of the war draw our attention to that crucial decision that the Trojans could <i>never</i> make, even to save themselves. Iris’s message therefore gives not only a sense of that first landing of the Achaeans at Troy but also fulfills her opening description— it tells us that no matter how many times the Trojans deliberate over how to prevent or to end this war, their speeches are always without a collective agreement, without a final decision about what to do about Helen. Thus the assembly in the past, when the Achaeans first arrived, and this assembly in the present when the war is renewed, can use the same traditional language and themes and thereby give us a sense of the war at those two points in time—and even as a repeating continuance from the beginning to the “now” of the story. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Work cited:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Elmer, David F. 2013. <i>The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making & the </i>Iliad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.</span></div>
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Mary Ebbotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12023866039225910709noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-50483303274141094732014-06-29T15:49:00.000-07:002019-09-23T13:49:13.859-07:00Walk On Characters in the Iliad<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
[494] Of the Boeotians Peneleos and Leitos were the leaders...<br />
<br />
The first entry in the Catalogue takes us immediately into questions that have fascinated and confounded scholars since ancient times. It would be impossible for me to address all of the controversies in one post, so I will just note a few here and will plan to focus on these and other questions in more depth in other posts. Since my primary interests are in the poetics of the catalogue, its relation to the larger epic tradition, and the workings of oral poetry, I will be devoting most of my commentary to aspects of the catalogue that touch on those themes.<br />
<br />
While I am less interested in the relationship between particular eras of history and the composition of the Catalogue, we will see (here, but more so in subsequent posts) that how we think about such questions does affect our understanding of the poetics and the oral traditional system within which the Catalogue was composed. In addition to my debt to the scholarship of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, my thinking on this topic has been most influenced by the work of two particular scholars, namely E. S. Sheratt, and her article “‘Reading the Texts’: Archaeology and the Homeric Question” (<i>Antiquity</i> 64 [1990]:807-24) and Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model for the crystallization of the Homeric epics over time. (See, e.g., Nagy, <i>Homeric Questions</i> [Austin 1996]. Nagy has continued to refine the theory in subsequent publications.) Both scholars conceive of the <i>Iliad</i> as a work that evolved (with no teleology implied) over many centuries in a song tradition that dates at least as far back as the early palatial period of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, if not earlier. The work of both authors makes clear that the process by which earlier and later material became incorporated into and integral to the oral formulaic diction resulted in a system from which it would be impossible to separate out and isolate poetry of different eras. Sherratt vividly illustrates that even within a single passage of the <i>Iliad</i> (for example an encounter on the battlefield) different eras of material culture are inextricably intertwined. Likewise the diction of Homeric poetry cannot be separated into distinct layers, even though it is clear to linguists that some formulas are earlier than others and were composed in different dialects at different eras. (See especially the classic treatment by Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Versemaking. II. The Homeric Language as the Language of Oral Poetry” [<i>Harvard Studies in Classical Philology</i> 43 (1932):1–50]; Reprinted in A. Parry, ed., <i>The Making of Homeric Verse</i> [Oxford, 1971], 325–64.)<br />
<br />
I would like to begin my investigation of how the Catalogue fits in to such a system with a preliminary exploration of the function of the Catalogue. Why narrate a roster of the combatants in the tenth year of the war? It is a question that has been posed time and again of various episodes in the <i>Iliad</i>, such as the duel between Paris and Menelaos for Helen in Book 3 and the <i>teikhoskopia</i> (“viewing from the walls,” also in Book 3), in which Helen points out and describes, as if for the first time, the Greek soldiers fighting before the walls of Troy. Scholars (especially by those of the Analyst and Neo-Analyst school of thought) have wanted to see such episodes as borrowings by the poet of our <i>Iliad</i> from the poems of the Epic Cycle. (On the relationship between the <i>Iliad</i> and the Epic Cycle from the perspective of Neo-analysis see Jonathan Burgess, <i>The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle</i> [Baltimore, 2001]. For more on how such borrowings would work within an oral tradition, see Burgess, “Neoanalysis, Orality, and Intertextuality: An Examination of Homeric Motif Transference” [<i>Oral Tradition</i> 21 (2006):148–189].)<br />
<br />
Mabel Lang has offered a different explanation for these seeming chronological inconsistencies. In her argument, the <i>Iliad</i> has its origins in a linear telling of the Trojan War. Over time it came to be a song about Achilles’ wrath, and parts of the earlier tradition were arranged to fit it. For example, the so-called <i>teikhoskopia</i> by Helen and Priam seems to belong more naturally to the beginning of the war than its tenth year, according to Lang, but this scene was then fitted to the “restart” of the fighting after Achilles’ withdrawal. (See “War Story into Wrath Story.” In J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris, eds., <i>The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule</i> [Austin, 1995], 149-62.)<br />
<br />
Lang's arguments are more in keeping with my own understanding of the <i>Iliad</i> as a poem that evolved over the course of many centuries—one that is not the creation of one particular poet, who "borrows" material from other poems, but is rather the collective creation of the sum total of generations of singers, all composing in performance within the same traditional system. I would formulate the process slightly differently than Lang, in that I see the transformation of the linear narrative as being natural and organic, occurring gradually as the poem was recomposed in performance over the course of centuries, rather than an inorganic process by which earlier episodes were "made to fit." (In saying this, I don't mean to deny that certain cultural forces or institutions, such as the regulated performances of the <i>Iliad</i> at the Panathenaia, contributed to the shaping of the <i>Iliad</i> as we now have it.)<br />
<br />
Another episode whose placement has troubled scholars is the building of the Achaean wall in <i>Iliad</i> 7 and the fight that takes place before it in <i>Iliad</i> 12 (see, e.g., Leaf's introduction to book 12 in his <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=6uwdAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">commentary on the <i>Iliad</i></a> [New York, 1900]). Even professed oralists have speculated that the episode of the wall has been somehow artificially inserted into its present place (see Timothy Boyd, "<a href="http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/10i/boyd" target="_blank">A Poet on the Achaean Wall</a>" [<i>Oral Tradition</i> 10/1 (1995): 181-206] and James Porter, "<a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=1322" target="_blank">Making and Unmaking: The Achaean Wall and the Limits of Fictionality in Homeric Criticism</a>" [<i>Classics@</i> 3]). But as Corinne Pache has demonstrated, the poetics of the building, battle before, and future destruction of the wall are both deeply ingrained in the <i>Iliad</i> itself and also resonate powerfully with those of the larger epic tradition. (See Pache, "Theban Walls in Homeric Epic," forthcoming in C. Tsagalis, ed., <i>Theban Resonances in Homeric Epic</i>, <i>Trends in Classics</i> 6 [2014].) She writes:<br />
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"The Theban tradition may also be key to understanding the role of the wall in the narrative. The <i>Iliad</i> may be deliberately vague about the number of gates, but, as others have noted before, the wall is crucial in allowing the poet to turn the longest day of battle at Troy (books 11-18) into an unexpected kind of narrative, one that portrays the Greeks as defenders rather than besiegers, an obvious connection with Theban epic: the Greeks, like the Trojans, and like the Thebans before them, are put in the position of defending their wall. The building, and eventual destruction, of the Achaian wall are also both included in the poem, transforming the few days of battle witnessed by the <i>Iliad</i> into a narrative of a city’s symbolic foundation, siege, and destruction."</blockquote>
What Pache shows is that the building of the Achaean wall is not an earlier episode that has been awkwardly (or inventively, depending on the scholar) worked into a later poem, but a traditional theme that would have deeply resonated with an ancient audience. So too do I think we need to try to understand the Catalogue of Ships, regardless of how it may have functioned in an earlier stage of the tradition, as an organic component of the <i>Iliad</i> as we have it, and one that evolved as the poem evolved over the course of many centuries.<br />
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As many have noted, our Catalogue is aware of what has come before and what will come after in the narrative. The entry for Achilles is a perfect example:<br />
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Νῦν, αὖ, τοὺς ὅσσοι, τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἔναιον<br />
οἵ τ᾽ Ἄλον οἵ τ᾽ Ἀλόπην· οἵ τε Τρηχῖν’ ἐνέμοντο<br />
οἵ τ᾽ εἶχον Φθίην ἠδ᾽ Ἑλλάδα καλλιγύναικα<br />
Μυρμιδόνες δὲ καλεῦτο καὶ Ἕλληνες καὶ Ἀχαιοὶ.<br />
τῶν αὖ πεντήκοντα νεῶν ἦν ἀρχὸς Ἀχιλλεύς.<br />
ἀλλ᾽ οἵ γ᾽ οὐ πολέμοιο δυσηχέος ἐμνώοντο·<br />
οὐ γὰρ ἔην ὅς τί σφιν ἐπὶ στίχας ἡγήσαιτο·<br />
κεῖτο γὰρ ἐν νήεσσι ποδάρκης δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς<br />
κούρης χωόμενος Βρισηΐδος ἠϋκόμοιο<br />
τὴν ἐκ Λυρνησσοῦ ἐξείλετο πολλὰ μογήσας<br />
Λυρνησσὸν διαπορθήσας καὶ τείχεα Θήβης·<br />
καδ δὲ Μύνητ᾽ ἔβαλεν καὶ Ἐπίστροφον ἐγχεσιμώρους<br />
υἱέας Εὐηνοῖο, Σεληπιάδαο ἄνακτος·<br />
τῆς ὅ γε κεῖτ᾽ ἀχέων. τάχα δ᾽ ἀνστήσεσθαι ἔμελλεν·<br />
(<i>Iliad</i> 2.681-694)<br />
<br />
[681] Now however many inhabited Pelasgian Argos,<br />
[682] and those who possesed Alos and Alope and Trachis,<br />
[683] and those who held Phthia and Hellas of the beautiful women,<br />
[684] and were called Myrmidons and Hellenes and Achaeans,<br />
[685] of these Achilles was the leader of fifty ships.<br />
[686] But they did not have in mind grievous war.<br />
[687] For they did not have anyone to lead the troops.<br />
[688] For swift-footed radiant Achilles lay among his ships<br />
[689] furious over the girl Briseis with the beautiful hair,<br />
[690] whom he took from Lyrnessos with great toil,<br />
[691] when he sacked Lyrnessos and the walls of Thebe<br />
[692] and he slew the spear-fighters Mynes and Epistrophus,<br />
[693] the sons of the lord Euenus, who was the son of Selepius.<br />
[694] He lay grieving because of her, but he was soon to rise up.<br />
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<a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/1267" target="_blank">I have written about these lines elsewhere</a> (Dué, <i>Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis</i> [Lanham, 2002]) as an illustration of the way that epic narratives can be greatly expanded (to a poem the scale of the <i>Iliad</i>) or highly compressed (as here) within an oral performance tradition. If the <i>Iliad</i> did not survive and these lines were found in another epic about another warrior at Troy, today’s readers would find the references to Achilles’ anger and the capture of Briseis at Lyrnessos obscure. But for a traditional audience, the <i>mênis</i> of Achilles would be called before their eyes, and that compressed narrative would resonate within its context. Briseis' own personal history is now largely lost to us, but it was the aim of my 2002 book to show that ancient audiences most likely knew at least one expanded version, and possibly more than one version, of her story.<br />
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We can see that, as in the episode of the Achaean wall, the entry for Achilles within the Catalogue of Ships connects both backwards and forwards and outwardly to the larger tradition. The Myrmidons are without a leader because of the events of <i>Iliad</i> 1. It is also noted that he is going to return - an event that will not occur for another seventeen books. At the same time, events outside the scope of our <i>Iliad</i> are likewise referenced, namely the sack of Lyrnessos and the capture of Briseis. The sack of Lyrnessos and the taking of Briseis were narrated in the <i>Cypria</i> according to our ancient sources. The <i>Iliad</i> can refer to this poetic tradition and it can be assumed that the audience will be familiar with the expanded narrative.<br />
<br />
I find it helpful to think of each entry in the catalogue—and indeed all named figures in the <i>Iliad</i>—as being like an index entry, with the epic tradition as a whole being the work to which it refers. (Compare, for example, Milman Parry on πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεὺς: “δῖος and πολύμητις, for the audience, describe the Odysseus of all the epic poems which sang his deeds” [Parry 1971:171]. See also Dué, “Agamemnon’s Densely-packed Sorrow in <i>Iliad</i> 10: A Hypertextual Reading of a Homeric Simile” [In C. Tsagalis, ed., <i>Homeric Hypertextuality</i>, <i>Trends in Classics</i> 2 (2010)], especially pp. 280-281.) The audience has, at least as a notional entity, read the entire “book.” Because we are so far removed from the historical performance contexts of the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> – and all other epics that existed in antiquity – we modern readers of the epics have, in most cases, read only the index entry.<br />
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And so I'd like to turn now then to the first named characters in the Catalogue, the leaders of the Boiotians, Peneleos and Leitos. These heroes play only a small role in the <i>Iliad</i> as a whole, they are walk on characters, if you will. They appear again together in Book 13 (91–125), where Poseidon, after first inspiring the two Ajaxes, exhorts Peneleos and Leitos to fight, along with Teucer, Thoas, Deipyros, Meriones, and Antilokhos, all of whom are resting near the ships. Their inclusion among some of the foremost fighters of the Achaeans is suggestive, but there is otherwise little to be learned about them in this passage.<br />
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In 14.487ff., however, Peneleos avenges the death of the warrior Promakhos at the hands of Akamas. (It would appear that Promakhos and Peneleos are related, on which see the scholia of the Venetus B <i>ad</i> 2.494 [urn:cite:hmt:msB.31v] and Kirk's commentary <i>ad</i> 14.449.) Akamas retreats unharmed, but Peneleos kills the Trojan Ilioneus, an only son whose head Peneleos lifts up "like the head of a poppy" and boasts over it:<br />
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Πηνέλεῳ δὲ μάλιστα δαΐφρονι θυμὸν ὄρινεν:<br />
ὁρμήθη δ᾽ Ἀκάμαντος: ὃ δ᾽ οὐχ ὑπέμεινεν ἐρωὴν<br />
Πηνελέωο ἄνακτος: ὃ δ᾽ οὔτασεν Ἰλιονῆα<br />
υἱὸν Φόρβαντος πολυμήλου, τόν ῥα μάλιστα<br />
Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε:<br />
τῷ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπὸ μήτηρ μοῦνον τέκεν Ἰλιονῆα.<br />
τὸν τόθ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ὀφρύος οὖτα κατ᾽ ὀφθαλμοῖο θέμεθλα,<br />
ἐκ δ᾽ ὦσε γλήνην: δόρυ δ᾽ ὀφθαλμοῖο διὰ πρὸ<br />
καὶ διὰ ἰνίου ἦλθεν, ὃ δ᾽ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας<br />
ἄμφω: Πηνέλεως δὲ ἐρυσσάμενος ξίφος ὀξὺ<br />
αὐχένα μέσσον ἔλασσεν, ἀπήραξεν δὲ χαμᾶζε<br />
αὐτῇ σὺν πήληκι κάρη: ἔτι δ᾽ ὄβριμον ἔγχος<br />
ἦεν ἐν ὀφθαλμῷ: ὃ δὲ φὴ κώδειαν ἀνασχὼν<br />
πέφραδέ τε Τρώεσσι καὶ εὐχόμενος ἔπος ηὔδα:<br />
εἰπέμεναί μοι Τρῶες ἀγαυοῦ Ἰλιονῆος<br />
πατρὶ φίλῳ καὶ μητρὶ γοήμεναι ἐν μεγάροισιν:<br />
οὐδὲ γὰρ ἣ Προμάχοιο δάμαρ Ἀλεγηνορίδαο<br />
ἀνδρὶ φίλῳ ἐλθόντι γανύσσεται, ὁππότε κεν δὴ<br />
ἐκ Τροίης σὺν νηυσὶ νεώμεθα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν.<br />
(<i>Iliad</i> 14.487-505)<br />
<br />
But he [Akamas] especially stirred the heart [<i>thumos</i>] in keen-spirited Peneleos<br />
and he started for Akamas. But he [Akamas] did not wait for the onrush<br />
of the lord Peneleos. And he [Peneleos] wounded Ilioneus,<br />
the son of Phorbas of many flocks, whom especially<br />
of the Trojans Hermes loved and granted property.<br />
To him his mother had born Ilioneus as an only child,<br />
and him at that moment he [Peneleos] wounded under the eye-brow in the roots of the eye<br />
and he pushed the eye-ball from it. Right through the eye came the spear<br />
and it went through the occipital bone, and he [Ilioneus] sat down, stretching out his hands,<br />
both of them, while Peneleos drew his sharp sword<br />
and drove it in the middle of his neck, and to the ground he struck off<br />
his head together with its helmet. The mighty spear still<br />
was in his eye. And he [Peneleos] holding it up like the head of a poppy<br />
signaled to the Trojans and boasting spoke a word:<br />
"Tell for me, Trojans, illustrious Ilioneus'<br />
dear father and mother to lament in their halls.<br />
For the wife of Promakhos the son of Alegenor<br />
will not be gladdened by her dear husband coming home, whenever<br />
the sons of the Achaeans return from Troy with their ships."<br />
<br />
Even though the account of Ilioneus' death is followed by a boast, in which the grief of his parents is treated as just compensation for the grief of the widow of Promakhos, we can see in that account a kind of mourning for Ilioneus and great compassion for the suffering of his Trojan parents. This passage closely resembles others found throughout the <i>Iliad</i> that introduce warriors just before they die. As Mary Ebbott and I have argued elsewhere (C. Dué and M. Ebbott, <i><a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4278" target="_blank">Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush</a></i> [Center for Hellenic Studies 2010], 322–323) these highly compressed biographies would likely have served a commemorative function, and, compressed though they are, often share themes and imagery (especially botanical imagery) with traditional female laments, such as those sung by Andromache, Briseis, and Achilles’ mother Thetis in the <i>Iliad</i>. Many of these passages seem to be focalized through the eyes of a mother or widow. In <i>Iliad</i> 11.221–228, we hear the story of Iphidamas, who leaves behind his bride and half-built house to “go after the <i>kleos</i> of the Achaeans.” In <i>Iliad</i> 4.473–489, we learn how Simoeisios comes to be named by his parents, and that he dies before he can repay their care in raising him. He is compared to a felled poplar, a use of plant imagery that is also common in lament. The death of Gorgythion at <i>Iliad</i> 8.302–308 is another particularly beautiful example of this kind of passage, for which we cite the evocative translation of Samuel Butler:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>ὃ δ’ ἀμύμονα Γοργυθίωνα<br />
υἱὸν ἐῢν Πριάμοιο κατὰ στῆθος βάλεν ἰῷ,<br />
τόν ῥ’ ἐξ Αἰσύμηθεν ὀπυιομένη τέκε μήτηρ<br />
καλὴ Καστιάνειρα δέμας ἐϊκυῖα θεῇσι.<br />
μήκων δ’ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ’ ἐνὶ κήπῳ<br />
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν, <br />
ὣς ἑτέρωσ’ ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν.<br />
<br />
The arrow hit Priam’s brave son faultless Gorgythion in the chest. His mother, fair Kastianeira, lovely as a goddess, bore him after she had been married from Aisyme, and now he bowed his head as a garden poppy in full bloom when it is weighed down by showers in spring—even thus heavy bowed his head beneath the weight of his helmet. (translation based on that of Samuel Butler)<br />
<br />
We can easily imagine these words spoken in the first person by Kastianeira upon learning of the death of her son in battle. Indeed, epic poetry is infused with the imagery, themes, and language of lament, so much so that a number of scholars have speculated that women’s lament traditions played a crucial role in the development of epic. Epic poetry narrates the glory of heroes, the <i>klea andrōn</i>, but it also laments their untimely deaths and the suffering they cause. That these lament-filled passages are more often than not sung for the death of the Trojans and their allies is a testament to the remarkable parity of compassion that underlies the <i>Iliad</i>. Both sides are mourned equally. (See Dué and Ebbott 2010: 323 for additional bibliography on the relationship between lament and epic, women’s songs and men’s songs, the mortality of the hero as a central theme of epic, and passages that lament the death of heroes in a highly compressed form, such as the one quoted from <i>Iliad</i> 8 here).<br />
<br />
I have dwelled for so long on Peneleos' killing of Ilioneus simply to point out that we have ample evidence for the traditionality of such passages, and that though his role is small, Peneleos is as integrated into the system as any other warrior. We may compare Book 6.35–36, where this time Leitos kills Phylakos in the midst of a list of warriors who get their man (Φύλακον δ᾽ ἕλε Λήϊτος ἥρως/φεύγοντ᾽). And much as in the Ilioneus passage, in the lines just before the death of Phylakos we find yet another highly compressed biography for a fallen warrior:<br />
<br />
Ἔλατον δὲ ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Ἀγαμέμνων:<br />
ναῖε δὲ Σατνιόεντος ἐϋρρείταο παρ᾽ ὄχθας<br />
Πήδασον αἰπεινήν.<br />
<br />
And Lord of men Agamemnon killed Elatos<br />
who inhabited, by the banks of the wide-flowing river Satnioeis<br />
sheer Pedasos.<br />
<br />
Here we are not told anything about Elatos' parents or any other details of his life (such as we find in the other passages cited here), but his home town is remembered along with some geographical details that connect him to a particular place and add to the sense of loss that accompanies his death.<br />
<br />
In Book 16 (335–344) Akamas and Peneleos are once again to be found in close proximity to one another on the battlefield. This time Peneleos kills Lykon, while Meriones chases down Akamas and kills him. In Book 17 (597–621), however, Peneleos and Leitos' role in the fighting comes to an end: both Peneleos and Leitos are wounded, one right after the other. Leitos, wounded at the wrist, is permanently disabled from fighting, while Peneleos is struck by Polydamas with a deep wound to the shoulder. Neither warrior is mentioned again in our <i>Iliad</i>.<br />
<br />
Like Briseis, Peneleos and Leitos each have a story, one that is known to the larger epic tradition, from which the poet draws the details of his narrative. Neither is a major character in our <i>Iliad</i>, but that does not mean that they never were—or that they did not play a larger role in other epic narratives. And in fact, it seems very likely that these two <i>did</i> play such a role in another epic tradition: they are included in a list of the Argonauts at Apollodorus 1.9.16 (See Lang 1995: 161). If the Argonautic epic tradition (referred to as "a concern for [i.e., known to] all" at <i>Odyssey</i> 12.70) survived for us today along with the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>, we would no doubt have a much better understanding of their expanded story, and we would not have to wonder why these two of all the warriors who fought at Troy are named first in the Catalogue. And so once again I return to the idea of the index. A traditional audience, like the oral epic poet, has access to the notional totality of the Epic Tradition, and unconsciously connects to the expanded narrative each time that Peneleos and Leitos appear, however briefly. Without knowing more about their Argonautic exploits, it would be difficult for us modern readers to reconstruct how such knowledge on the part of the audience would have affected the poetics and the reception of the scenes in which they appear, but I would argue that they are necessarily affected. (Cf. C. Tsagalis, "The Dynamic Hypertext: Lists and Catalogues in the Homeric Epics" [in Tsagalis 2010], who writes: "By selecting a name the bard opens a path to the hypertextual web of myth" [Tsagalis 2010: 323]. Tsagalis concludes: "catalogues have no end, only 'endings', whose plurality is an invitation to the audience to go on in their own mind, to conjure up more information from other traditions or sources, to be alert to the existence of a totality that song can never fully achieve" [Tsagalis 2010: 347].)<br />
<br />
Returning then to the Catalogue of Ships, I'd like to conclude by suggesting once again that this roster of names and places is the closest thing that the <i>Iliad</i> has to an index for itself, and for the larger tradition on which it draws. Each entry signals to the audience an awareness of and respect for a whole host of epic narratives associated with those names and places. (See also Lang 1995, 161: "Speculative in the extreme? Yes, but sensible if ones sees the Catalogue of Ships not as a survey of actual political geography, but as a poetic attempt to list as many famous heroes as might possibly have fought in the Trojan War, although in the <i>Iliad</i> at least, several have little or no part. These heroes must have been known to the bards, complete with epithets and epitheted place-names, from their local exploits.") Not every warrior named will play a major role in this epic, but the role they play in other traditions, be they local or more Panhellenic in nature, adds to the richness of the narrative and the poetic resonance of every scene in the <i>Iliad</i> in which they appear.<br />
<div>
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Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-76679539724198852962014-05-30T07:46:00.000-07:002014-08-04T12:31:23.829-07:00Introducing the TrojansCasey’s last post beautifully examined <a href="http://oralpoetry.blogspot.com/2014/04/invoking-muses.html">the invocation of the Muses</a> that launches the catalog of the Achaeans and their ships and how this traditional language is used elsewhere in the poem. She inspired me to look at how the Trojan catalog in <i>Iliad</i> 2 is introduced. I will make a few initial observations on this introduction now, and follow up with further thoughts in subsequent posts. I will also look at the various contingents in this Trojan catalog as we continue to explore the oral poetics of <i>Iliad</i> 2.<br />
<br />
As the Achaeans, once again assembled for battle, move from the ships toward the city of Troy in their attack, our view of the action moves along with them and then keeps on moving into the city of Troy itself. (This Greek text of <i>Iliad</i> 2.784–789 is a transcription of the lines as they appear in the Venetus A manuscript.)<br />
<br />
784 ὡς ἄρα τῶν ὑπὸ ποσσὶ μέγα στεναχίζετο γαῖα<br />
785 ἐρχομένων· μάλα δ᾽ ὦκα διέπρησσον πεδίοιο·<br />
786 Τρωσὶν δ᾽ ἄγγελος ἦλθε ποδήνεμος ὠκέα Ϊ῀ρις<br />
787 παρ Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο σὺν ἀγγελίῃ ἀλεγεινῇ·<br />
788 οἱ δ᾽ ἀγορὰς ἀγόρευον ἐπὶ Πριάμοιο θύρῃσι<br />
789 πάντες ὁμηγερέες, ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες·<br />
<br />
[784] Just so the earth groaned loudly under their feet<br />
[785] as they went. And they were swiftly crossing the plain.<br />
[786] To the Trojans Iris with wind-swift feet came as a messenger<br />
[787] from aegis-shaking Zeus with a troubling message. <br />
[788] They were speaking in assembly at the doors of Priam,<br />
[789] all of them gathered together, both young men and old.<br />
<br />
The swiftness of the motion of the Achaeans is transferred to the swift motion of Iris. If we think of a cinematic “tracking shot” as we watch the massive forces of Achaeans rush toward Troy, we then easily continue our view over the walls into Troy to the place of assembly in front of Priam’s doors, taking on the motion of Iris herself arriving in Troy. (It comes as no surprise, then, that I disagree with Kirk [1985:244, at 2.786–787] that this change of scene is “abrupt”: there has to be a transition to the Trojans at some point, and the motion described helps move us along with it.) <br />
<br />
This is the first time that we see the Trojans in the sequence of our <i>Iliad</i>. In <i>Iliad</i> 1, there is both an assembly of the Achaeans and a meeting among the gods, so our first glimpse of the Trojans in assembly creates a parallel among the three groups involved in this war, illustrating the balance that Lord observed oral poets strive for in their compositions (see especially Lord 1960/2000: 68–98). When we look at how the formula used to describe the assembly of Trojans as composed of “both young men and old men” (2.789) is used in other contexts, we find that it designates “all men of a certain group who count.” In <i>Iliad</i> 9 Diomedes uses this formula to say that all men of the Argives who count know how Agamemnon spoke to Diomedes earlier (ταῦτα δὲ πάντα / ἴσασ’ Ἀργείων ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες, <i>Iliad</i> 9.35–36). And Odysseus reminds Achilles that his father Peleus advised him to avoid strife so that all the men of the Argives who count would honor him (ληγέμεναι δ’ ἔριδος κακομηχάνου, ὄφρά σε μᾶλλον τίωσ’ Ἀργείων ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες, <i>Iliad</i> 9.257–258). Although the Trojans who count are said to be all there, we will see (in later posts) that there will be a need to gather and draw up the allies, who are not at this assembly.<br />
<br />
I will also have more to say about Iris in subsequent posts, but I want to note now that her message is characterized as “troubling” or “painful,” ἀγγελίῃ ἀλεγεινῇ in 2.787. A wide variety of things can be described as ἀλεγεινός in Homeric epic, including the waves of the sea (κύματα, <i>Iliad</i> 24.8; <i>Odyssey</i> 8.183, 13.91, 13.264), a spear point (αἰχμὴ, <i>Iliad</i> 5.658), battle (μάχη, <i>Iliad</i> 18.248, 19.46, 20.43), and the transgression of the suitors (ὑπερβασίη, <i>Odyssey</i> 3.206). But there is another message in the <i>Iliad</i> that is qualified this way, and that is the message that Antilochos brings to Achilles that Patroklos has been killed (τόφρά οἱ ἐγγύθεν ἦλθεν ἀγαυοῦ Νέστορος υἱὸς / δάκρυα θερμὰ χέων, φάτο δ’ ἀγγελίην ἀλεγεινήν· <i>Iliad</i> 18.16–17). Both troubling messages portend death for the one receiving it: the renewed commitment of the Achaeans to the war ultimately means the deaths of those Trojans hearing the message from Iris, just as the news that Patroklos is dead will make Achilles himself return to battle, sealing his own death at Troy. Lord describes how themes and formulas of oral traditional poetry, such as this of delivering a troubling message, gain meaning through repeated use and the experience of both poet and audience with them (Lord 1960/2000: 148). The resonance between these two uses of the formula of a “troubling message,” where the first troubling message begins the war again without Achilles and the second sets in motion his return, leading to his own death as well as the death of Hector, and eventually the death of Priam and the destruction of Troy, is an example of the deep meaning formulas can accrue through their recurrences.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Works cited<br />Kirk, G.S. 1985. <i>The Iliad: A Commentary</i>, Vol. 1. Cambridge.<br />Lord, A.B. 1960/2000. <i>The Singer of Tales.</i> Cambridge, MA. (2000, 2nd edition, eds. S. Mitchell and G. Nagy. Cambridge, MA).</span><br />
<br />Mary Ebbotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12023866039225910709noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-29210147516563969472014-04-21T08:26:00.001-07:002014-07-01T13:04:11.401-07:00Invoking the Muses<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Iliad</i> I-2.484ff. (Greek text is that of the Venetus A manuscript)<br />
<br />
484 ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι·<br />
485 ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε πάρεστέ τε ἴστε τε πάντα·<br />
486 ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν·<br />
487 οἵ τινες ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν·<br />
488 πληθὺν δ᾽ οὐκ ἂν ἐγὼ μυθήσομαι οὐδ᾽ ὀνομήνω<br />
489 οὐδ᾽ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι· δέκα δὲ στόματ᾽ εἶεν·<br />
490 φωνὴ δ᾽ ἄρρηκτος. χάλκεον δέ μοι ἦτορ ἐνείη·<br />
491 εἰ μὴ Ὀλυμπιάδες Μοῦσαι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο<br />
492 θυγατέρες μνησαίαθ᾽ ὅσοι ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθον·<br />
493 ἀρχοὺς αὖ νηῶν ἐρέω νῆάς τε προπάσας.<br />
<br />
[484] Tell me now, Muses who have homes on Olympus,<br />
[485] for you are goddesses and are present for all and know all things,<br />
[486] whereas we only hear the fame [kleos] and do not know anything,<br />
[487] who were the leaders of the Danaans and their commanders?<br />
[488] I do not have the words [muthos] to describe the multitude nor could I name them,<br />
[489] not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,<br />
[490] and an unbreakable voice, and the heart in me was made of bronze,<br />
[491] if the Olympian Muses who of aegis-shaking Zeus<br />
[492] are the daughters did not remind me how many came beneath Ilion. <br />
[493] I will speak then the leaders and all the ships.<br />
<br />
The Catalogue of Ships is preceded by an invocation of the Muses, which seems to have been a traditional feature of catalogues, as for many types of Archaic Greek hexameter poetry, including the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> themselves. The ἔσπετε of verse 2.484 is an aorist form of the same verb that we find in the first verse of the <i>Odyssey</i>: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε μοῦσα... . The ἔσπετε formula does not seem to be a random variation, but actually serves a different purpose from the verses that open the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>. Whereas the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> each signal the driving theme of the entire epic by means of the very first word, a noun in the accusative singular (μῆνιν and ἄνδρα), the ἔσπετε formula, with the verb in first position, seems specially suited to asking a question that begins a catalogue.<br />
<br />
The Muses were the immortal daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne; see Hesiod, <i>Theogony</i> 53ff.) and had the power to recall everything that has ever happened and put it in the poet's mind, as here. (The name Muse may be etymologically connected to words with the root <i>men-</i>, but the connection is by no means certain. For the linguistic difficulties, see Chantraine ad μοῦσα.) The enormous task of correctly recalling and narrating the catalogue only becomes possible with the Muses' mnemonic help. At the same time, the process is depicted as an oral and aural one: unlike the Muses who know all and have witnessed the events, the poet "hears the <i>kleos</i>" and would need an unbreakable voice in order to be able to name everyone who fought at Troy. (See <a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/nagy/BofATL/chapter15.html" target="_blank">Nagy, <i>Best of the Achaeans</i>, chapter 15</a> §7.) <br />
<br />
As Kirk has pointed out, verse 2.484 can be found in three other places in our <i>Iliad</i>, two of which involve catalogue-like lists. In <i>Iliad</i> 11.218 Agamemnon's <i>aristeia</i> begins:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι<br />
ὅς τις δὴ πρῶτος Ἀγαμέμνονος ἀντίον ἦλθεν<br />
ἢ αὐτῶν Τρώων ἠὲ κλειτῶν ἐπικούρων (<i>Iliad</i> 11.218-220) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Tell me now, Muses who have homes on Olympus,<br />
who was the first to come face to face with Agamemnon,<br />
either of the Trojans themselves or their allies in fame?</blockquote>
Likewise at 14.508 we find the formula used to begin a list of those who are successful against their Trojan opponents once Poseidon has turned the tide of battle in favor of the Achaeans:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι<br />
ὅς τις δὴ πρῶτος βροτόεντ᾽ ἀνδράγρι᾽ Ἀχαιῶν<br />
ἤρατ᾽, ἐπεί ῥ᾽ ἔκλινε μάχην κλυτὸς ἐννοσίγαιος. (<i>Iliad</i> 14.508-510)</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Tell me now, Muses who have homes on Olympus,<br />
the bloody spoils: who was the first of the Achaeans<br />
to take them, once the famous earth shaker had turned the battle?</blockquote>
The passage at 16.112, however, seems to be of a different sort. Here the Muses are asked to tell how fire fell on the Achaean ships:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι,<br />
ὅππως δὴ πρῶτον πῦρ ἔμπεσε νηυσὶν Ἀχαιῶν. (<i>Iliad</i> 16.112-113) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Tell me now, Muses who have homes on Olympus,<br />
how fire first fell on the ships of the Achaeans.</blockquote>
Kirk reconciles the anomaly by saying that the formula is "used to mark a solemn moment (or one that needs to be made solemn), usually involving a list of some kind" (Kirk 1985 ad 484).<br />
<br />
If we broaden our perspective, however, and look at what immediately follows verses 16.112-113, we can see that there is a resemblance to the previous instances:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι,<br />
ὅππως δὴ πρῶτον πῦρ ἔμπεσε νηυσὶν Ἀχαιῶν.<br />
Ἕκτωρ Αἴαντος δόρυ μείλινον ἄγχι παραστὰς<br />
πλῆξ᾽ ἄορι μεγάλῳ αἰχμῆς παρὰ καυλὸν ὄπισθεν (<i>Iliad</i> 16.112-115) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Tell me now, Muses who have homes on Olympus,<br />
how fire first fell on the ships of the Achaeans.<br />
Hektor, standing close, the ash spear of Ajax<br />
struck with his great sword behind the spear-point, at the end of the shaft</blockquote>
The name of Hektor in the nominative in the first position, as if in answer to the question posed by 16.113, resembles 11.221 and 14.511 respectively:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ἰφιδάμας Ἀντηνορίδης ἠΰς τε μέγας τε<br />
ὃς τράφη ἐν Θρῄκῃ ἐριβώλακι μητέρι μήλων (<i>Iliad</i> 11.221-222) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[It was] Iphidamas, the son of Antenor, good and tall,<br />
who was raised in fertile Thrace the mother of sheep </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Αἴας ῥα πρῶτος Τελαμώνιος Ὕρτιον οὖτα<br />
Γυρτιάδην Μυσῶν ἡγήτορα καρτεροθύμων (<i>Iliad</i> 14.511) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ajax [was] the first, the son of Telamon—he wounded Hyrtios<br />
the son of Gyrtios, the leader of the strong-hearted Mysians.</blockquote>
If Kirk's interpretation is correct, the solemnity of the occasion has called for an invocation of the Muses, which in turn leads to the use of a verse structure that is often found in catalogues (which are likewise preceded by invocations of the Muses). A slightly different way to look at it is to say that the poet here is signaling that the difficulty of narrating the burning of the Achaean ships is akin to the difficulty of correctly narrating a catalogue (as we find it expressed in the <i>Iliad</i> 2 passage). The daunting task causes the poet to ask the Muses for help, as he would with a catalogue, which in turn naturally leads to the use of formulaic diction associated with catalogue poetry. (For a discussion of other places in which catalogue poetry and battle narrative overlap in Homeric diction, see C. R. Beye, “Homeric Battle Narrative and Catalogues” [<i>Harvard Studies in Classical Philology</i> 68 (1964): 345-73].)<br />
<br />
If this is indeed the case, we can view the verse ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι (and the ensuing question and answer) as essentially a compression of the more expanded invocation that we find in <i>Iliad</i> 2. As I have written about elsewhere in connection with similes (see especially “Agamemnon’s Densely-packed Sorrow in <i>Iliad</i> 10: A Hypertextual Reading of a Homeric Simile” in C. Tsagalis, ed., <i>Homeric Hypertextuality</i>, [<i>Trends in Classics</i> 2 (2010): 279-299]), for a traditional audience even a highly compressed formula has the power to evoke more expanded versions of that same formula. (Mary Ebbott and I have also discussed expansion and compression in terms of theme: see the discussion of arming scenes in <a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/workbench.woa/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=4165" target="_blank">Dué and Ebbott 2010: 54-55</a>.) In these examples from <i>Iliad</i> 11, 14, and 16 a single verse conjures for the ancient audience (and, of course, the singer) more expanded invocations and catalogues of the larger epic tradition, including the Catalogue of Ships. </div>
Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-41882399200984768622014-04-16T05:02:00.000-07:002014-04-16T05:02:12.304-07:00"Live" blogging the Catalogue of Ships<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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About eight years ago I began translating Book 2 of the Homeric <i>Iliad</i> as part of a translation project I was working on together with Mary Ebbott, Doug Frame, Lenny Muellner, and Greg Nagy at the Center for Hellenic Studies. These were the operating principles we set for ourselves:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. Same word translated the same way each time [except in the case of glossary words, which are included in brackets]. 2. For glossary words in brackets, one form of the Greek word for all derivatives 3. Include plus verses. 4. We try to follow Greek word order. 5. We substitute names for pronouns when the reference is not obvious. 6. We respect the integrity of the line even at the expense of the distinction between active and passive voice.</blockquote>
Here is a sample that illustrates these principles and several other practices we adopted:<br />
<br />
SCROLL I-1<br />
<br />
[1] The anger [me>nis] of Peleus' son Achilles, goddess, perform its song --<br />
[2] disastrous anger that made countless sufferings [algos pl.] for the Achaeans,<br />
[3] and many steadfast lives [psukhe> pl.; n:v.l. heads] it drove down to Hades,<br />
[4] heroes' lives, but their selves [note needed about body vs. soul and identity] it made prizes for dogs<br />
[5] and for all birds [n: v.l. a feast for birds], and the plan of Zeus was being fulfilled [telos] --<br />
[6] sing starting from the point where the two first clashed [eris],<br />
[7] the son of Atreus, lord of men, and radiant Achilles.<br />
<br />
We wanted our translation to reflect the oral traditional system within which the <i>Iliad</i> was composed, and we were willing to compromise, within reason, on many things (meter, English word order, elegance) in order to make this happen.<br />
<br />
We managed to translate several books of the <i>Iliad</i> this way as a group, but eventually we decided, because of our slow rate of progress, that we would each take on individual books, and then submit them to the group for approval. I can't remember how or why I came to be assigned Book 2, but the fact is I never finished my translation. I didn't even come close.<br />
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I would like to return to this project, but in a way that goes beyond translation. I'd like to take the opportunity to better understand the place of the Catalogue of Ships within the oral epic tradition. <a href="http://homermultitext.blogspot.com/2012/02/catalogue-of-ships.html" target="_blank">I have written about the textual transmission of the Catalogue here</a>, but what I would like to do now is approach the text that has been transmitted to us as an organic part of the system that is Homeric poetry, exploring its interconnections with the rest of the <i>Iliad</i> and the epic tradition as a whole (to the extent that we can reconstruct it).<br />
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I am happy to report that Mary Ebbott will once again be my partner in this work. Each of us will contribute individual posts on the oral poetics of <i>Iliad</i> 2 to this blog, as we have the time and inclination, and we will no doubt also collaborate on particular entries as we have in the past. It is our hope that in working together in this way we will be able to learn more about the poetics of <i>Iliad</i> 2 and its place in the epic tradition than we otherwise could have on our own.<br />
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Our plan is to translate brief passages in the order they have been transmitted, and then to research those passages as we go along, drawing on previous commentaries and scholarship (such as the commentaries of Leaf and Kirk, important monographs such as Hope Simpson and Lazenby 1970, and more recent discussions of Catalogue poetry by other scholars) and our own knowledge of the epic tradition. To what extent we can contribute new research on the many questions raised by the Catalogue, we will, but where we will most noticeably depart from the work of previous scholars is in our approach. Much as we did in connection with the so-called Doloneia in our book <i><a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=4172" target="_blank">Iliad 10: and the Poetics of Ambush</a></i>, we will approach the Catalogue as oral traditional poetry composed within the same system that gave rise to the rest of the <i>Iliad</i>. In other words, rather than seek to show how the Catalogue is different from the rest of the <i>Iliad</i>, we will emphasize the commonalities, and attempt to understand the Catalogue organically. As always, the comparative fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, and the work of subsequent scholars who have built upon that fieldwork, will serve as the foundation for our understanding of how oral poetry operates.<br />
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There is still a tendency in Homeric Studies, inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries, to look at the <i>Iliad</i> as an assemblage of pieces, and to perceive some of the pieces as being more "Homeric" than others. Even scholars that see a single oral poet as being responsible for the version of the <i>Iliad</i> that has come down to us speak of the Catalogue as being a separately composed piece that has been reworked for its present place. (See e.g. Kirk ad 2.494-495.) We see the text as layered, linguistically and poetically and in its references to material culture, but the layers cannot be separated from one another, so perhaps layered is not the best metaphor to use. (See especially E.S. Sherratt, "'Reading the Texts': Archaeology and the Homeric Question," <i>Antiquity</i> 64 [1990]: 807-824.) As formulaic language entered the system and displaced other language and the poem evolved, these formulas became inextricably bound up with one another. We feel that it is worth studying particular passages and formulas within those passages as individual units in order to learn more about the oral tradition, how our <i>Iliad</i> came to be, and how various passages might have been understood in particular ways in different times and places, but we do not seek to show that some parts of the poem are somehow more valid than others on the basis of antiquity of the formulaic language or any other criteria. In focusing in on particular parts, we seek to better understand the system of Homeric poetry as a whole.<br />
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In the next few months I plan to return to my translation work after a long break, and I will be posting my preliminary translations and research findings here, as I go along. I hope it won't be another eight years before I have completed my translation of <i>Iliad</i> 2, but I am not making any promises. Mary plans to start posting on the poetics of <i>Iliad</i> 2 later this year.<br />
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Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-62479563472414583592010-05-26T23:01:00.000-07:002010-06-15T10:59:04.383-07:00C.I.T.E - The Infrastructure of the Homer Multitext (Part 1 - Introduction)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">The Infrastructure of the Homer Multitext</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">C · I · T · E</span></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Homer Multitext (HMT) is a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University (CHS). It is best described in the words of its editors, Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott:</span><br />
<blockquote>“The Homer Multitext project, the first of its kind in Homeric studies, seeks to present the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. Such a framework is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time. These changes, as reflected in the many texts of Homer, need to be understood in their many different historical contexts. The Homer Multitext provides ways to view these contexts both synchronically and diachronically.” (<a href="http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=1169">From the CHS website</a>)</blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Dué and Ebbott, in collaboration with the Director of the CHS, Gregory Nagy, and the CHS’s Head of Publications, Leonard Muellner, initiated research toward this project with an eye to advancing particular arguments about the nature of Homeric poetry. But anyone interested in epic poetry, Greek poetry in general, and the intellectual history of the Greco-Roman world, the cultures that came into contact with it, and those that succeeded it, stand to profit from the project.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Overview</b></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The HMT aims to collect, as comprehensively as possible, all of the sources for our knowledge of the Homeric epics, and to publish these online, freely accessible to any interested reader.</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Warriors_Nereid_Monument_BM_859.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Warriors_Nereid_Monument_BM_859.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">These sources include versions of the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>, and the surviving pieces of lesser-known epic poems born in the Greek Bronze Age. These versions may be fragments of papyrus found in the sands of Egypt or manuscripts produced under the Byzantine Emperors of Constantinople. These sources also include texts of later Greek and Roman writers who quote from Homer, writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Thucydides. A particularly rich body of evidence comes from the writings of the literary scholars who worked in the Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum; the works of these writers do not survive intact, but thousands of excerpts from them and references to them do survive, as comments written in the margins of manuscripts.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Dué and Ebbott are committed to providing the most useful access possible to these sources. This means offering texts of those sources in the original Greek and translated into modern languages where possible. It also means providing high-quality digital facsimiles of the actual manuscripts wherever possible.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It is impossible to overstate the value of digital facsimiles. The Greek and Latin texts that we can check out of libraries, or find online, are highly processed documents. Editors will compare different manuscripts of a work – which always differ – and produce a uniform text that is identical to no single medieval or ancient “witness” to the work. Responsible editors will provide notes explaining in what ways their edited text differs from particular manuscripts, but these notes – even the most meticulous – fall far short of providing the depth of information that can be gleaned from direct access to good images of the manuscripts themselves.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Scholarship based entirely on edited texts is <i>fundamentally handicapped</i>. However brilliant the scholars working from these texts may be, their insights will be limited by the absent editors of their source-texts, by their assumptions, and by the innumerable details that disappear on the journey from the hand-written manuscript, through generations of editions, to the shelves of the library. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">For the past century, scholars of Greece and Rome have been content for the most part to work from edited texts. There were justifiable reasons for this – practical, technological, and economic reasons. None of those justifications survived the turn of the 21st Century.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In addition to texts and images, other kinds of data might shed light on Homeric poetry: morphological and lexical data, lists of persons, geographic information (where is "Sandy Pylos” or “Horse-rolling Thessaly”, is a reference to Thebes pointing to Seven-Gated Thebes, or Hundred-Gated Thebes in Egypt?), and so forth.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><b>The Challenge</b></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To bring these disparate materials online in a useful way posed a challenge. The collaborators on the HMT wanted an all-purpose infrastructure that would both contribute to end-user applications for browsing, searching, and reading, but would also make the raw data available for discovery and retrieval. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Some kind of digital library infrastructure was necessary, but the complexity of the anticipated contents of that library posed another problem. A digital library containing highly diverse data, which is expected to expand indefinitely must be exposed through protocols that define requests and responses. Those requests and responses should allow discovery of contents, access to objects, retrieval of parts of objects – passages of texts, data elements, parts of images – and querying, manipulation, and other kinds of processing.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Since the data is highly varied and the possible uses of the data potentially infinite, should the protocol become correspondingly complex, then the infrastructure would become, essentially, an end-user application, useable only to its creators, fragile and difficult to maintain, and increasingly vulnerable to obsolescence as time goes by.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Almost a decade of thinking and experimentation went into defining a generic, scaleable protocol that enables scholarly access to and use of these materials in a networked environment, as simply as possible.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This was mainly the task of the HMT’s Project Architects, Neel Smith and me, Christopher Blackwell.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Our answer is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">C.I.T.E.</span>, that is, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">C</span>ollections, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">I</span>ndices, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">T</span>exts, and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">E</span>xtensions.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This looks like four things, but it is really only three: texts, collections, and indices. In our conception of the requirements of the Homer Multitext, we have reduced scholarship to these three kinds of digital object, have defined protocols for working with each, and have working code that implements each.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the next installments of this series of postings, I will describe each element in the C.I.T.E. architecture in some detail. Finally, I will describe how they can be brought together to build rich applications for sholarship.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">A Final Note</span></b></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Any discussion of a “generic infrastructure for scholarship” will inevitably sound like the beginning of an evangelical spiel about how everyone needs to adopt the speaker’s pet approach to data. That is not our intention here. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Our dear friend, the late Professor Ross Scaife, was once playing <i>advocatus diabli</i> as I was describing our protocol for texts. “How many other projects need to adopt this protocol for it to be useful?” My colleague Neel had the answer: “One, ours.”</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Seated_warrior_Altemps_Inv8603_n2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Seated_warrior_Altemps_Inv8603_n2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We have developed C.I.T.E. because we needed something like it in order to do what we want to do with the history of Homeric texts. I am describing it here because it is the foundation for much of the ongoing research of the HMT team, which we will also document here, and it might be of interest to other scholars working on similar projects.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">All computer code developed for the HMT is free and open-source; all data published by the project is open-content under a Creative Commons or similar license.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Next… Part 2 - Texts</span></b></span><br />
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</b></span>Christopher W. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05166294569909760943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-49947422220099759852010-05-25T21:29:00.000-07:002010-05-26T05:24:20.369-07:00Ongoing Research, Summer 2010Christopher Blackwell here: <br />
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<a href="http://blogpress.w18.net/photos/10/05/25/2027.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img align="right" border="0" height="187" src="http://blogpress.w18.net/photos/10/05/25/s_2027.jpg" style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 5px;" width="281" /></a>I have begun a series of blog posts aimed at describing and narrating one corner of the constellation of research that surrounds the Homer Multitext. These posts will appear on my blog: <a href="http://nobleswineherd.blogspot.com/">http://nobleswineherd.blogspot.com</a> .<br />
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They will focus on the work of this summer, 2010, both the projects in Europe, and what my undergraduate collaborators are doing in Greenville, SC.<br />
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I am hoping to use these as tools for recruiting good students to study <a href="http://classics.furman.edu/">Classics at Furman Universit</a>y, so they wil tend to have a local focus.<br />
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However, I also want to give an overarching view of how the Homer Multitext is progressing, what we have done, and what we hope to do in the near term. I will post those pieces here, and link to them from my “Eumaeus, the Noble Swineherd” blog.<br />
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- Posted using BlogPress from my iPadChristopher W. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05166294569909760943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-24517914012790763792010-01-22T10:14:00.000-08:002010-01-22T10:30:52.900-08:00Homeric Papyri Service Online<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; border-collapse: collapse; "><em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; ">Homer and the Papyri</em>, was first created by Professor Dana Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, to be a database of fragments of the Homeric <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> that survive on papyrus from Graeco-Roman Egypt. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;">The <a href="http://chs.harvard.edu">Center for Hellenic Studies</a> inherited this valuable data, and the project is now under the editorship of Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, as part of the ongoing Homer Multitext project.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;">We are pleased to announce the first publication of a new service for scholars and readers interested in Homeric papyri: <a href="http://homericpapyri.appspot.com/home">The Homeric Papyri Canonical Text Service</a>. This is an application hosted on <a href="http://appengine.google.com">Google AppEngine</a>. While the service is intended primarily to allow other online applications to discover and retrieve texts and passages of text, it does provide a human-readable interface to these papyri.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;">The texts as delivered by this service include full editorial markup, in TEI-P5-compliant XML. The human-readable form (visible by default) intentionally hides any text that is not physically present on the papyrus. Future versions of the user-interface to this service may give the option to show or hide editorially supplied text at the user’s discretion.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;">For more information on the <a href="http://cts3.sourceforge.net/">Canonical Text Services Protocol</a> (“CTS”), see the project’s <a href="http://cts3.sourceforge.net/">Sourceforge site</a>.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px;">— Christopher W. Blackwell</span></span></div>Christopher W. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05166294569909760943noreply@blogger.com0