14 Psalms 103:15f.
15 Ecclesiasticus, or Sirac, 14:18; see M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997), 364ff., for this and other Eastern elements in the Bellerophontes story.
16 For the symbols and Greek Bronze Age knowledge of Hittite scripts, see Trevor R. Bryce, “Anatolian Scribes in Mycenaean Greece,” Historia 48, no. 3 (1999); 257-64, especially 261f. For the shipwreck and its contents, see George F. Bass, “Oldest Known Shipwreck Reveals Splendors of the Bronze Age,” National Geographic (December 1987), 693-733. More recently, the tablet and other finds from the shipwreck are beautifully revealed and discussed in Cemal Pulak, “The Uluburun Shipwreck and Late Bronze Age Trade,” in Joan Aruz, Kim Benzel, and Jean M. Evans, eds., Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. (New York and New Haven, CT, 2008), 288-385. For the Bellerophontes story and some of its implications in the epic, see Murray, 175f. For a detailed commentary on the story’s many obscure features, see Kirk, The “Iliad,” vol. 2, sub. vv. 152-211, 177ff.
17 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York, 2007), 4, 135. Recitation of her grand-mother’s clan lineage later saved her from assault at knifepoint by establishing that she was a “sister” of her assailant.
18 Some scholars have seen in Paris’ characteristic absence from the field of battle the remnant of a tradition of the “wrath of Paris,” akin to that of Achilles. See Johannes Th. Kakridis, Homeric Researches (Lund, 1949), 43ff.; and Leslie Collins, “The Wrath of Paris: Ethical Vocabulary and Ethical Type in the Iliad,” American Journal of Philology 108 (1987), 220-32.
19 Aristarchus (Arn/A) is quoted by Kirk, The “Iliad,” vol. 2, sub. vv. 433-39, 217.
20 S. Farron, “The Character of Hector in the Iliad,” Acta classica 21 (1978), 39-57, gives a brief survey of scholarly attitudes toward Hektor and presents the argument that Homer deliberately underscored Hektor’s military weaknesses in order to make him a sympathetic character.
21 Little Iliad, West, Greek Epic Fragments, fragment 29, 139ff.
22 On Astyanax in early epic and art, see Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001), 65ff. and appendix C, 186. For the argument that the death of Astyanax may reflect the Near Eastern practice of child sacrifice in time of siege, see Sarah P. Morris, “The Sacrifice of Astyanax: Near Eastern Contributions to the Siege of Troy,” in Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris, eds., The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule (Austin, TX, 1995), 221-45; the chapter also gives moving examples of Near Eastern poetry mourning the fall of cities.
23 This harsh reality was recognized even by ancient commentators who remarked on the “indecent violence” suffered by captive women. Immanuel Bekker, Scholia in Homeri Iliadem (Berlin, 1825), sub. v. 22.62, p. 589.
Land of My Fathers
1 About the value of ten oxen according to scholarly estimate, see W. Ridge-way, Journal of Hellenic Studies 8 (1873), 133.
2 On the lyre itself, see Bryan Hainsworth, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume III: Books 9-12 (Cambridge, 1993), sub. vv. 186-87, 87f.
3 For internal evidence that “the Embassy is among the latest of the ideas and episodes built into the Iliad,” see ibid., sub. v. 609, 289f. On the competitive response of a poet like Homer to his tradition in general, see James V. Morrison, “Alternatives to the Epic Tradition: Homer’s Challenges in the Iliad,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1992), 61-71.
4 For sources pertaining to the life and career of Peleus, see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1993), 222ff.; and for his marriage with Thetis, see ibid., 228ff.
5 The slaying by Peleus of Phokos, his half brother, is attested in fragments of the Alcmeonis, a lost epic uncertainly dated to the sixth century B.C.: “There godlike Telamon hit him [Phokos] on the head with a wheel-shaped discus, and Peleus quickly raised his arm above his head and struck him in the middle of his back with a bronze axe.” Alcmeonis 1, in M. L. West, ed. and trans., Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries B.C. (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 59. The story is alluded to, obscurely, by Pindar, Nemean 5.7ff. in C.M. Bowra, trans., The Odes of Pindar (London, 1969). Another tradition related by Apollodorus, The Library 3.13.1-3, also has Peleus as the inadvertent killer of his first father-in-law, Eurytion, in the course of the legendary Kalydonian Boar Hunt. In this tale, after Peleus has been received and purified by Eurytion in Phthia for the murder of Phokos, he marries Eurytion’s daughter and has a child with her, Polydore. Although the source is late—Apollodorus wrote in the second century B.C.—the Iliad also hints at the tradition, citing “the daughter of Peleus, Polydore the lovely” (16.175).
6 On the remarkable number of sons exiled by their fathers who later become kings in exile, see Margalit Finkelberg, “Royal Succession in Heroic Greece,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 41, no. 2 (1991), 303-16.
7 Pindar, Nemean 3. 33ff. On the historic as well as mythic implications for Peleus’ sack of Iolkos, see M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 108 (1988), 151-72, and especially, 160.
8 Possible implications of Peleus’ court of outlaws are discussed in the chapter “Man Down.” The approved treatment of fugitive exiles in Bronze and Iron Age Greece can only be surmised. The Bronze Age Anatolian record, on the other hand, is clear: “If some subject of the king of Ugarit, or a citizen of Ugarit, or a servant of a subject of the king of Ugarit departs and enters the territory of the hapiru [semi-autonomous bands of freebooters] of My Majesty, I, Great King, will not accept him but will return him to the king of Ugarit.” “Edict of Hattusili III of Hatti concerning Fugitives from Ugarit,” in Gary Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (Atlanta, 1999), no. 33, 178.
9 The Library, 3.13.5, in J. G. Frazer, trans., Apollodorus. The Library, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 67. Apollodorus’ account, late as it is, is quoted for its vividness. Pottery evidence from Crete gives evidence of Peleus’ capture of Thetis as far back as the mid-seventh century B.C.; Gantz, vol. 1, 229. The earliest literary reference is found in Pindar, Nemean 3.33-36 and 4.62-65.
10 See, for example, appendix X in Frazer, 383-88.
11 Some accounts attribute Zeus’ decision to other causes. The lost epic Cypria held that “it was to please Hera that Thetis shied away from the union with Zeus; and he was angry, and swore to make her live with a mortal man.” West, Greek Epic Fragments, Cypria fragment 2, 83. In the Iliad, however, Hera speaks of Thetis as one “ ‘whom I myself / nourished and brought up and gave her as bride to her husband / Peleus, one dear to the hearts of the immortals’ ” (24.59-61), and her words imply that this was a loving, not a punitive, transaction.
12 That there was a tradition of a happier union is supported by a fragment of Alcaeus, writing in the sixth century B.C.: “and the love of Peleus and the best of Nereus’ daughters flourished; and within the year she bore a son, the finest of demigods”; Alcaeus 42, in David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric I: Sappho. Alcaeus (Cambridge, MA, 1982), fragment 42, 257ff.
13 So Pindar:... And forthwith he [Peleus] scorned her embraces—
He was afraid of his Father’s anger, the God of Guests.
But cloud-mover Zeus, King of the Immortals,
Marked well and promised from the sky that soon
He should have for wife
A sea-maiden from the golden-spindled Nereids.
From Nemean 5.33ff., in Bowra, The Odes of Pindar 39f.
14 Pindar refers to Aiakos’ righteousness in Isthmian 8.25ff. For his role as a judge of the dead, see Plato, Gorgias, 524a.
15 Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, 58f., in Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans., Hesiod: Volume 2, The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments (Cambridge, MA, 2007), fragment 152, 217ff.
16 See, for example, T.B.L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (New York, 1964), 186, who posits that “it is still possible to see behind Diom
ede’s account of Lycurgus, Glaukos’ account of Bellerophon, and Achilles’ account of Peleus a shorter poem in which the three heroes were listed probably with others as instances of prosperity which turned to adversity.”Notable parallels between Thetis and Eos, the goddess of the dawn, offer additional insight into the Iliad’s depiction of Peleus as a man defined by sorrowful old age. Linguistic and thematic studies have shown that both goddesses (along with Aphrodite) exhibit attributes of the Indo-European Dawn Goddess prototype. To reduce this comparison to its simplest elements, both Thetis and Eos are associated with the sea, both have unions with mortal men, and both bear mortal children who fight at Troy (for parallels between Thetis and Eos, see Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the “Iliad” [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991], 21ff. and 40-41); the Indo-European origin and traits of the Dawn Goddess are explored in Deborah Dickmann Boedeker, Aphrodite’s Entry into Greek Epic (Leiden, 1974). According to the Greek tradition, Eos, falling in love with the mortal Tithonos, implored Zeus to grant her lover immortality, which he did; the goddess neglected, however, to ask also for eternal youth on his behalf—in the Iliad, Tithonos is mentioned as the brother of Priam and Laomedon of Troy; Iliad 20.237. (See Gantz, vol. 1, 36f., for the list of ancient sources of this legend.) The earliest citation, “The Hymn to Aphrodite,” dating from the seventh century B.C., relates that while Tithonos was young, “he took his delight in Dawn of the golden throne, the early-born, and dwelt by the waters of Ocean at the ends of the earth; but when the first scattering of grey hairs came forth from his handsome head and his noble chin, the lady Dawn stayed away from his bed.” “Hymn to Aphrodite” 5.225ff., in M. L. West, ed. and trans., Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 177. The Eos paradigm that Thetis shares may explain the striking absence in the Iliad of Thetis from the bed and home of Peleus, as well as the Iliad’s portrait of this formerly robust hero as being perpetually “on the door-sill of sorrowful old age”: Peleus’ youth has passed, and his eternally youthful wife has left him to his aging mortality.
17 Gantz, vol. 1, 229f., for both literary and artistic attestations.
18 Cypria, respectively, fragment 4, 85; and argument 1, 69, in West, Greek Epic Fragments. Hera’s words appear at Iliad 24.61-62.
19 Most, Hesiod: The Shield, fragment 237, 309. The burning by fire is described, obscurely, in Lykophron, Alexandra, 177-79.
20 The tradition of Achilles’ being dipped into the Styx by his heel is directly attested only in the works of the first-century-A.D. Roman writer Statius; Statius, Achilleid 1.133-34, 1.268-70, and 1.480-81, but see chapter “Everlasting Glory,” note 41.
21 For the story of Demeter, see “Hymn to Demeter,” vv. 231ff., in West, Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer, 51f. For the story of Meleager, see Bacchylides 5.136ff., in David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric IV: Bacchylides, Corinna, and Others (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 149. In an examination of Hittite rites of divine appeasement, Calvin Watkins demonstrates that fire and firebrands are associated with divine anger and that these ritual elements can be discerned behind the story of Meleager. If this is true, it also has bearing on the attempts to appease the anger of Achilles: Calvin Watkins, “L’Anatolie et la Grèce: Résonances culturelles, linguistiques et poé tiques,” Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes rendus des séances 3 (2000), 1143-58; see especially 1146ff.
22 Of Peleus per se, the Iliad knows of two offspring: his son, Achilles, and a daughter, Polydore: “One battalion was led by Menesthios of the shining / corselet, son of Spercheios, the river swelled from the bright sky, / born of the daughter of Peleus, Polydore the lovely, / to unremitting Spercheios, when a woman lay with an immortal; / but born in name to Perieres’ son, Boros, who married / Polydore formally (16.173-78). The elaborate explanation of the family circumstances—i.e., divine union and human marriage for the sake of appearances—also suggests other now lost traditions about her. One ancient commentator identifies Polydore as the daughter of another Peleus, not the son of Aiakos, although the reference to Spercheios, the landmark river of Peleus’ kingdom, belies this. Later writers held her to be the daughter of Peleus’ union not with Thetis but with an earlier wife: Polydore “is surely a child of Peleus’ first marriage, which Homer suppresses in favor of his union with Thetis; [Achilles] must remain, for him, an isolated figure.” Richard Janko, The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16 (Cambridge, 1992), sub. vv. 173-78, 341.
23 M. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1973), 101 and 103f.
24 Both interpretations are advanced in, respectively, L. R. Palmer, The Interpretation of Mycenaean Texts (Oxford, 1963), 79; and expanded by Gregory Nagy, “The Name of Achilles: Etymology and Epic,” in Studies in Greek, Italic, and Indo-European Linguistics, Anna Morpurgo Davies and Wolfgang Meid, eds. (Innsbruck, 1976), 209-37; and Gary B. Holland, “The Name of Achilles: A Revised Etymology,” Glotta 71 (1993), 17-27.
25 Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (Norman, OK, 1963), 271.
26 Others have regarded Peleus’ shadowy presence, evoked only as a reminder of the day Achaeans mustered for the war, as evidence that “Peleus emerges as a kind of communal conscience, who spurs the Achaeans to live up to their warrior ideals”: Kevin Crotty, The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 28.
27 Later in the Iliad, an extended description is given of Achilles’ great spear hewn from an ash tree grown on the Pelion Mountains, “the Pelian ash spear which Cheiron had brought to his father / from high on Pelion to be death for fighters” (16.143-44). According to the Cypria, Cheiron gave this spear to Peleus as a wedding gift: Cypria, fragment 4, in West, Greek Epic Fragments, 85.
28 “The Precepts of Chiron,” fragment 218, Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans., Hesiod: The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 297.
29 Comparisons have long been drawn between the approximately 1700 B.C. Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, which share certain broad themes, a pair of heroic friends, and an evocation of the hero’s tragic and futile strategies to thwart mortality. In such comparisons, it is usually supposed that Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, is the counterpart of Gilgamesh, the hero of the Akkadian epic. In fact, Achilles’ wild and strangely innocent upbringing in the mountains is more suggestive of Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s comrade.
30 For the suitors’ wooing of Helen and oath to her father, see Hesiod, Catalogue of Women or EHOIAI, in Most, fragment 155 (continued), 231ff.; and Stesichorus, fragment 190, in David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others (Cambridge, MA, 2001), fragment 190, 91. The Cypria relates how Thetis arranged a rendezvous between Achilles and Helen at an early stage of the war; Cypria, argument 11, in West, Greek Epic Fragments, 79.
31 Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley, 1979), 190f. Thetis’ father, Nereus, is famously prophetic.
32 Reference is made to Achilles’ son at Iliad 19.326-27.
33 Cypria, fragment 19, in West, Greek Epic Fragments, 97ff.
34 Achilles “vixdum exuta pueritia”—“pueritia,” or “boyhood,” usually ending at age seventeen. J. van Leeuwen, Commentationes Homericae (Leiden, 1911), 112.
35 Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction, Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958), 72 and, for Peleus in general, 71ff.
36 Interestingly, in the Aethiopis, Achilles is absent from the war not on account of a quarrel with Agamemnon but because he killed Thersites in anger and had to leave Troy to be purified in Lesbos; Aethiopis, fragment 1, in West, Greek Epic Fragments, 111. For one reason or another, Achilles in epic, then, is characteristically absent. The story with Thersites also recalls Peleus’ striking association with murder and purification.
37 For a summation of distinctive late features in Achilles’ characterization, see also M. L. West, “Greek Poetry 2000-700
B.C.,” Classical Quarterly, n.s. 23 (1973), no. 2, 179-92.
38 M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 402ff.
39 Homer “confronted traditional epic with his own new work—the realization of a fundamentally and completely different conception of epic poetry”: Alfred Heubeck, “Homeric Studies Today,” in Bernard C. Fenik, ed., Homer: Tradition and Invention (Leiden, 1978), 13.
40 Paraphrased from Dale S. Sinos, Achilles, Patroklos and the Meaning of “Philos” (Innsbruck, 1980), 19f.
41 For the childhood deeds of Herakles, see, for example, Pindar, Nemean 1.35f.; and Gantz, vol. 1, 377ff. The deeds of young Achilles are described by Pindar, Nemean 3.45ff.
42 For the widely held view that Phoinix was a Homeric invention, see, for example, Frederick E. Brenk, S.J., “Dear Child: The Speech of Phoinix and the Tragedy of Achilleus in the Ninth Book of the Iliad,” Eranos 84 (1986), 77-86, and especially 82; Bruce Karl Braswell, “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 21, no. 1 (1971), 16-26, especially 22f. On Phoinix’s reshaping of the Meleager story, see Lowell Edmunds, “Myth in Homer,” in Ian Morris and Barry Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997), 425ff.
43 Phoinix’s parable is also wildly tactless. We have met Meleager in passing once before; he is the hero of legend who, as Homer’s audience would undoubtedly have known, shared certain fateful circumstances with Achilles. In the well-known story Phoinix does not tell, Meleager’s mother had custody of a firebrand, or log, to which her son’s life was magically attached; angered with her son, the mother threw the brand on the fire, and Meleager died (see note 21 of this chapter). Meleager’s story is a variation on the same theme that has Achilles’ mother attempting to render the children of Peleus immortal by laying them in the fire—a deed that in fact killed them. In short, Phoinix’s story serves to underscore the thought now uppermost in Achilles’ mind—his mortality. The parallels between the story of Achilles’ anger and the earlier story of the anger of Meleager are explored in a classic work by Johannes Th. Kakridis, Homeric Researches (Lund, 1949), 18ff.
The War That Killed Achilles Page 28
