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1 ‘poet of a boom’: For most of the early twentieth century, in the wake of the discoveries at Troy and Mycenae made by the romantic German businessman/archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, Homer was thought to describe the palatial Mycenaean world of c.1450 to c.1200 BC. Sir Moses Finley, in The World of Odysseus, London, 1954, demolished that idea and considered Homer a product of the ninth or tenth centuries BC. For a clear and comprehensive discussion of the current orthodoxy which considers Homer an eighth-century poet and his use as ‘an archaeological artifact’, see Ian Morris, ‘The Use and Abuse of Homer’, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Apr. 1986), pp.81–138. Gregory Nagy in Homeric Questions, 1996, argued that the poems did not reach their definitive form until the sixth century BC, but the archaeologist Susan Sherratt’s ‘Archaeological Contexts’ in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic, Blackwell, 2005, pp.119–42, insists on the syncretism of early Mediterranean cultures. Their core characteristic was the fusion of stories and ideologies. The Homer poems, she says, are the clearest example of ‘the ideological bricolage’ of different cultures spread across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and over a time period that stretches from at least 1800 to 800 BC (p.139). In the Mediterranean everything was borrowed and shared, and that meeting of cultures is both Homer’s subject and his method. Sherratt’s point is that no picture of Homer can be pinned to a particular moment in that long millennium, nor could it be complete without looking for a deep prehistory to the epics, back to the beginning of the second millennium BC, or further. In the ‘social fluidity and instability’ of that deep past were stories and questions which would have appealed to the audiences of the equally troubled ninth and eighth centuries BC more than the steady bureaucratic calm of the intervening palatial period of the late Bronze Age (p.138).
2 ‘Epic’s purpose’: See the many essays in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic, Blackwell, 2005
3 ‘a revelatory fresco’: This is the watercolour reconstruction made for Blegen by the Anglo-Dutch artist and architect Piet de Jong, first published in Carl W. Blegen, ‘The Palace of Nestor Excavations of 1955’, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Apr. 1956), pp.95–101, plate 41 (b&w). Mabel L. Lang, in The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, Volume 2: The Frescoes, Princeton, 1969, after a decade of heroic work with burnt and intransigent materials, reconstructed the fragments differently, and separated the bard from the bird. But there is no certainty here. Emily Vermeule, in her review of that book in The Art Bulletin, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Dec. 1970), pp.428–30, was sceptical about Mabel Lang’s reconstruction.
4 ‘leaving Homer’s own’: See Casey Dué, ‘Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad’, in Casey Dué, ed., Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights From the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, 2009, pp.19–30
5 ‘the neon edges’: Christopher Logue, War Music, 2001, p.54
6 ‘Warm’d in the brain’: Alexander Pope, Iliad 20.551
7 ‘like furnace doors’: Christopher Logue, War Music, 2001, p.193
8 ‘sometimes travels beside’: George Seferis, ‘Memory 2’, lines 5–9, from Logbook 3, in Complete Poems, trans. and ed. E. Keeley and P. Sherrard, 1995 (2009), p.188. Seferis may have been thinking of the cosmic power of Apollo himself, the god of truth and poetry, becoming a magical dolphin in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo: ‘In the open sea Apollo sprang upon their swift ship, like a dolphin in shape, and lay there, a great and awesome monster, and none of the crew gave heed so as to understand; but they sought to cast the dolphin overboard. But he kept shaking the black ship every way and made the timbers quiver. So they sat silent in their craft for fear, and did not ease the sheets throughout the black, hollow ship, nor lowered the sail of their dark-prowed vessel, but as they had set it first of all with oxhide ropes, so they kept sailing on; for a rushing south wind hurried on the swift ship from behind.’ Eventually the god-driven ship grounded on the beach at Crisa, not far from Delphi, and ‘like a star at noonday, the lord, far-working Apollo, leaped from the ship: flashes of fire flew from him thick and their brightness reached to heaven’. As translated by H.G. Evelyn-White in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 57, Harvard University Press, 1914, pp.395ff.
9 ‘As the wings’: George Seferis, ‘Memory 2’, line 10, from Logbook 3, Complete Poems, p.188
10 ‘Robert Fagles’: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, New York, 1996
11 ‘Who would want’: Odyssey 5.100–1
12 ‘What he thinks’: Odyssey 10.472–4
13 ‘sea-blue’: Odyssey 8.84
14 ‘the man of twists’: Odyssey 1.1
15 ‘starred with flowers’: Odyssey 12.159, Fagles 12.173. The Greek adjective anthemoenta means strictly no more than ‘flowery’, and it is Fagles who has beautifully poeticised this phrase. But if Homer is, in the end, neither a pair of poems nor the single author of them, but a living tradition, then that kind of enrichment of the inherited text seems the right thing to do.
16 ‘We know all’: Odyssey 12.189–91, Fagles 12.205–7
17 ‘That is what’: Carol Dougherty, in The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, Oxford, 2001, pp.71–3, has a wonderful discussion of Odysseus’s ‘metapoetic ship’ as a vehicle for the heroic life.
18 ‘Beauty is always’: The following scenes are based on, but expanded and adapted from, The Goncourt Journals by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick, New York Review of Books, 1962 (2007) pp.83–5, 118–19
19 ‘I can’t remember’: The point that Renan failed to remember may have been that the word usually translated as ‘unharvestable’ was said by the second-century AD Graeco-Roman grammarian Herodian, in a marginal comment on Homer’s text, to mean ‘never worn out’, or ‘unresting’, and so in several nineteenth-century translations the phrase became ‘the restless sea’. Most modern translations prefer ‘barren’ or ‘unharvestable’, perhaps on the grounds that Homer doesn’t do cliché.
20 ‘Almost at the beginning’: Odyssey 2.337–70
21 ‘Ah dear child’: Odyssey 2.363–70 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
22 ‘Each time I’: Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited, 1968, p.7
23 ‘a jumbled heap’: John Keats, sonnet, ‘O Solitude’, lines 2–3
24 ‘the barbarous age’: Quoted in Andrew Motion, Keats, 1997, p.10
25 ‘Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene’: Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto xii, line 204; Motion, Keats, p.52
26 ‘The tide!’: Motion, Keats, p.93
27 ‘both a lovely’: Ibid., p.63
28 ‘a parallel universe’: Ibid., p.41
29 ‘The conscious swains’: Pope’s translation of the Iliad, 8.559
30 ‘No man of true’: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, W. Baynes & Son, 1824, p.4. For an illuminating modern discussion of translation as a kind of alchemical process, see Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue, 2011
31 ‘What he writes’: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, p.4
32 ‘In Homer’: Ibid.
33 ‘Virgil bestows’: Ibid., p.12
34 ‘unaffected and equal’: Ibid., p.18
35 ‘In vain his youth’: Iliad 20.537–46
36 ‘It is not to be’: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, p.17
37 ‘a treasure of’: Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Pope’ (1779), in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, J. Johnson, 1810, Vol. 12, p.112
38 ‘money-mongering’: sonnet to Haydon, quoted in Motion, Keats, p.119
39 ‘the ocean’: Keats, ‘Sonnet I. To My Brother George’, August 1816, from Margate
40 ‘the fine rough’: Motion, Keats, p 109
41 ‘turning to some’: Charles Cowden Clarke, ‘Recollections of Keats’ (1861), in Recollections of Writers, 1878, pp.120–57
42 ‘There did shine’: Quoted in Andrew Laing, The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward, 1880, Vol. 1, p.510
43 ‘loose and rambling’: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, p.17
44 ‘now totally neglected’: Johnson, ‘Life of Pope’, p.112
45 ‘Chapman writes & feels’: S.T. Coleridge, ‘Notes on Chapman’s Homer’, in Notes and Lectures Upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists: With Other Literary Remains of S.T. Coleridge, Vol. 2, p.231
46 ‘cool their hooves’: A phrase later borrowed by Christopher Logue for the moment when the two armies sit down to watch the duel between Paris and Menelaus:
Now dark, now bright, now watch –
As aircrews watch tsunamis send
Ripples across the Iwo Jima Deep,
Or, as a schoolgirl makes her velveteen
Go dark, go bright –
The armies as they strip, and lay their bronze
And let their horses cool their hooves
Along the opposing slopes.
47 ‘Just as when’: Odyssey 5.328–30 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
48 ‘he then bent both knees’: Odyssey 5.453–7
49 ‘As a hero’: See J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford Linguistics), 2006, p.136
50 ‘his knees no more’: Pope, Odyssey 5.606–10
51 ‘For the heart’: Murray/Dimock, parallel text, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1919 (1995, 2002), Odyssey 5.454
52 ‘Odysseus bent his’: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu, revised by D.C.H. Rieu, 1946, 1991, p.83
53 ‘his very heart’: Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, University of Chicago Press, 1951, 5.454
54 ‘The sea had’: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, New York, 1996, 5.502
55 ‘beastly place’: Quoted in Motion, Keats, p.74
56 ‘On the first’: This early draft, differing from the published version, is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Keats 2.4 A.MS.
57 ‘The troops exulting’: Pope’s Iliad 8.553–65
58 ‘the cockney Homer’: J.G. Lockhart, ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. V’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Apr. 1819), p.97
59 ‘A thing of beauty’: Keats, ‘Endymion’, Book I, 1–5
60 ‘And such too’: Ibid., 20–1
61 ‘they don’t eat bread’: Odyssey 9.191
62 ‘Grilled meat’: Odyssey 20.25–8
63 ‘no moment was’: Odyssey 9.5–11
64 ‘all professional’: Plato, The Republic, Book 3
65 ‘Mindjack’: ‘Mindjacking’ is a term invented by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson
66 ‘I am conscious’: Plato, Ion, 380 BC, trans. Benjamin Jowett; see also Penelope Murray and T. Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism: Plato: Ion; Republic 2–3, 1; Aristotle: Poetics; Horace: The Art of Poetry; Longinus: On the Sublime, 2000, p.1
67 ‘The gift which’: Plato, Ion, 380 BC, translated by Benjamin Jowett; see also Murray and Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism, p.5
68 ‘There is no invention’: Plato, Ion, 380 BC, trans. Benjamin Jowett; see also Murray and Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism, p.5
69 ‘1 panegyrick poem’: See Macaulay’s History, Vol. 2, p.32, describing the Homeric world of the late-seventeenth-century Highlands and islands: ‘Within the four seas and less than six hundred miles of London were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armour bearers, by musicians, by an hereditary orator, by an hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties.’ Also David Stevenson, Highland Warrior: Alasdair Maccolla and the Civil Wars, Edinburgh, 1980, for the re-emergence of a warrior society in the power vacuum created by the failure of the Scottish crown. The warrior world emerges not at a moment in history, but at a certain phase of human social and political arrangements.
70 ‘the people of Pylos’: Odyssey 3.5–6
71 ‘Odysseus weeps’: Odyssey 5.151
72 ‘he finds Nausicaa’: Odyssey 6.1ff
73 ‘draw up their ships’: Odyssey 11.20
74 ‘Odysseus lands’: Odyssey 13.195ff
75 ‘So Ajax and’: Iliad 9.182–4, Fagles 9.217–21
76 ‘wander in’: Iliad 24.12–13, Fagles 24.15–16
77 ‘on her golden throne’: Odyssey 10.541
78 ‘her veil the colour’: Iliad 23.227
79 ‘that bellowed’: Odyssey 2.421
80 ‘He spreads his sail’: Odyssey 5.268
81 ‘and the wind’ Odyssey 11.10
82 ‘So these two’: Iliad 8.1–8
83 ‘Back towards home’: Iliad 23.229–30 (Lattimore, adapted)
84 ‘the black ship’: Odyssey 11.1–14
85 ‘red-painted bows’: Iliad 2.637
86 ‘The wind caught’: T.E. Shaw, The Odyssey, 1932, quoted in Rodelle Weintraub and Stanley Weintraub, ‘Chapman’s Homer’, The Classical World, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Sep.–Oct. 1973), pp.16–24
87 ‘Thus with stretched’: Ezra Pound, ‘Canto 1’, 9–10
88 ‘germana et sincera’: Joh. Baptista Caspar d’Ansse de Villoison, Homeri Ilias ad Veteris Codicis Veneti Fidem Recensita, 1788, p.xxxiv
89 ‘I will send’: Robert Southey, ed., The Works of William Cowper, 1836, Vol. 6, p.266
90 ‘No such person’: Thomas de Quincey, ‘Homer and the Homeridae’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, No. 312 (Oct. 1841), pp.411–27
91 ‘sovereign poet’: Dante, Inferno 4. 88
92 ‘Medieval Odysseys’: For the most illuminating account of the early texts of Homer see M.L. West, ed. and trans., ‘Lives of Homer’, in Homeric Hymns etc., Harvard University Press, 2003, pp.296ff
93 ‘Flinders Petrie found’: William M. Flinders Petrie, Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe, London, 1889. Plate xix shows many of these objects.
94 ‘The floating sand’: Ibid., Chapter 5, on the papyri, written by Sayce, p.39
95 ‘The roll had belonged’: Ibid., p.35
96 ‘This Hawara Homer’ (photograph): P. Hawara 24–28 (Bodleian Libr., Gr. Class. A.1 (P)). Iliad 1.506–10, 2.1–877, with many lacunae. Found in the cemetery at Hawara in the Fayum on 21 February 1888 by W.M. Flinders Petrie. http://ipap.csad.ox.ac.uk/Hawara-bw/72dpi/Hawara_Homer%28viii%29.jpg
97 ‘Phaeacians’: Odyssey 9.8–10
98 ‘Homer is the greatest’: Plato, The Republic, 607 a 2–5
99 ‘Just as a poppy’: Iliad 8.306–8
100 ‘to a place’: Iliad 8.491
101 ‘In Troy itself’: The Venetus A scholia on this passage are analysed by Graeme Bird in ‘Critical Signs – Drawing Attention to “Special” Lines of Homer’s Iliad in the Manuscript Venetus A’, in Casey Dué, ed., Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights From the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard, 2009, pp.112–14
102 ‘dogs, carried by’: Iliad 8.526–40, Fagles 8.617–28
103 ‘We go to liberate’: BBC News, 20 March 2003: ‘UK Troops Told: Be Just and Strong’, originally from a pooled report by Sarah Oliver, Mail on Sunday
104 ‘Alexandrian scholars’: See Richard P. Martin, ‘Cretan Homers: Tradition, Politics, Fieldwork’, Classics@ 3, © 2012, The Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC
105 ‘The further back’: Casey Dué, ‘Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad’, in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights From the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, Harvard, 2009, p.25
106 ‘young, headstrong’: S. Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, 2nd edn 1922, p.142
107 ‘Would a man’: Ibid., p.9, referring to Odyssey 9. 483, 540. But see the footnote on pp.350–1 of The Odyssey, Murray/Dimock (1999), which justifies Homer’s apparent mistake.
108 ‘killed many men’: David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, London, 1938, letter no. 431, 31 January 1931, pp.709–10
109 ‘in fact the Baltic’: Felice Vinci, Omero nel Baltico, with introductions by R. Calzecchi Onesti and F. Cuomo, Rome, 1998
110 ‘guidebook to the stars’: Florence and Kenneth Wood, Homer’s Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded, 1999
111 ‘Homer was from Cambridgeshire’: Iman Wilkens, Where Troy Once Stood, 2nd edn 2009; a theory first developed by Théophile Cailleux, a Belgian lawyer, in Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère. Ibérie, Gaule, Bretagne, Archipels, Amérique, Paris, 1878 and Théorie nouvelle sur les origines humaines. Homère en Occident. Troie en Angleterre, Bruxelles, 1883
112 ‘Henriette Mertz’: Henriette Mertz, The Wine Dark Sea: Homer’s Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic, 1964
113 ‘everywhere and nowhere’: M.L. West, ed. and trans., ‘Lives of Homer’, p.433
114 ‘The people of Ios’: Ibid., p.435
115 ‘In the first lines’: See ibid., p.413. Pseudo-Plutarch is quoting the epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica, fl. c.20 BC
116 ‘He is the embodiment’: See for example ibid., p.429
117 ‘U re u re na-nam’: Quoted M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon, 1999, p.61
118 ‘attend to what’: J. Black, ‘Some Structural Features of Sumerian Narrative Poetry’, in M.E. Vogelzang and H.L.J. Vanstiphout, eds, Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural?, Lampeter, 1992, pp.71–101
119 ‘one more story’: See M.L. West, ‘Lives of Homer’, pp.399, 411, 421–3, 437–9, 441–3, 447–9, for versions of this story
120 ‘Here the earth’: See ibid., p.448
121 ‘the purple on account’: Eustathius 6.8, quoted in M.L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary, Oxford, 2011, p.75; impossibly expensive editions of Eustathius’s commentaries are M. van der Valk, ed., Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem Pertinentes ad Fidem Codicis Laurentiani Editi, 4 vols, 1971–87
122 ‘Remember me’: H.G. Evelyn-White, trans., Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 57, Harvard University Press, 1914, pp.165–6
123 ‘a well-girt man’: John Boardman, Excavations in Chios 1952–1955: Greek Emporio, The British School at Athens. Supplementary Volumes, No. 6, 1967, pp.iii–xiv, 5
124 ‘wretched throughout’: Ibid., pp.iii–xiv, 4
125 ‘Giorgio Buchner’: Recent Work at Pithekoussai (Ischia), 1965–71’, Archaeological Reports, No. 17 (1970–71), pp.63–7; D. Ridgway, The First Western Greeks, Cambridge, 1992; G. Buchner and D. Ridgway, Pithekoussai, La necropoli: Tombe 1–723. Scavate dal 1952 al 1961, Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1993
126 ‘to monkey about’: Catherine Connors, ‘Monkey Business: Imitation, Authenticity, and Identity from Pithekoussai to Plautus’, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Oct. 2004), pp.179–207
127 ‘Much of their pottery’: For images and information on the exhibits in the Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae in the Villa Arbusto on Ischia see http://www.pithecusae.it/colonia1.htm
128 ‘will lick the blood’: Iliad 21.122–7
129 ‘voracious monsters’: In 1934, part of the scapula of a young fin whale (average adult length sixty feet) was found in a well in the area that would later become the Agora in Athens. The pottery alongside it was slightly earlier than the Attic cratēr found in Ischia. Terrifyingly vast fish undoubtedly swam in the Odyssean world. This shoulderblade was probably used as a cutting surface, perhaps by a butcher or fishmonger. John K. Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo, ‘A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World’, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 106, No. 2 (Apr. 2002), pp.187–227.
130 ‘someone whose name’: From Kate Monk, Onomastikon, 1997. http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/Ancient-World/Greece/Male.html
131 ‘Eighth-century inscriptions’: Rufus Bellamy, ‘Bellerophon’s Tablet’, Classical Journal, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Apr.–May 1989), pp.293, 299
132 ‘the first joke’: Another scratched inscription on a mid-eighth-century wine jug unearthed in Athens may be slightly older. It was probably given as a prize in a dancing competition, and carries the beautiful verse ‘hos nun orchēston panton atalotata paizēi’: ‘Whoever of all these dancers now plays most delicately’ – would, the implication is, receive this jug as a prize. This Greek Renaissance writing begins with dance and delight and competition. B. Powell, ‘The Dipylon Oinochoe Inscription and the Spread of Literacy in 8th Century Athens’, Kadmos, Vol. 27 (1988), pp.65–86.
133 ‘during a passage’: Iliad 11.632–7
134 ‘dove-decorated cup’: D. Ridgway, ‘Nestor’s Cup and the Etruscans’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 16 (1997), pp.325–44
135 ‘giant unliftable cups’: M.L. West, ‘Grated Cheese Fit for Heroes’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 118 (1998), pp.190–1
136 ‘the joke and invitation’: Not everyone agrees it was a joke. See Christopher A. Faraone, ‘Taking the “Nestor’s Cup Inscription” Seriously: Erotic Magic and Conditional Curses in the Earliest Inscribed Hexameters’, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Apr. 1996), pp.77–112
137 ‘essentially oral’: M.S. Edmondson, Lore: An Introduction to the Science of Folklore and Literature, New York, 1971, p.323
138 ‘a sequel of songs’: R. Bentley, Remarks Upon a Late Discourse of Free Thinking, London, 1713
139 ‘quiet in manner’: William C. Greene, ‘Milman Parry (1902–1935)’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 71, No. 10 (Mar. 1937), pp.535–6
140 ‘the first to develop’: Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, Vol. 1, 2000, p.x
141 ‘an aura of’: Harry Levin, ‘Portrait of a Homeric Scholar’, The Classical Journal, Vol. 32, No. 5 (Feb. 1937), pp.259–66
142 ‘How can we’: Renan’s long essay on L’Avenir de Science, Paris 1892, p.292, quoted by Milman Parry in Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp.2, 409
143 ‘This is the forest’: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, 1847, line 1
144 ‘and so on through’: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p.39
145 ‘The poetry was’: Ibid., p.425
146 ‘Darwin of Homeric scholarship’: Ibid., p.xxvi
147 ‘a machine of memory’: James I. Porter, ‘Homer: The Very Idea’, Arion, Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp.57–86
148 ‘up to 494’: Steve Reece, ‘Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory’, The Classical World, Vol. 93, No. 2, Homer (Nov.–Dec. 1999), pp.185–99; M.M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena, Hildesheim: 1984, p.206; M.W. Edwards, The Iliad: A Commentary, Cambridge, 1991, Vol. 5, p.55
149 ‘But for Parry’: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p.21
150 ‘The tradition is’: Ibid., p.450
151 ‘One’s style should’: Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1404 b 10
152 ‘genuine poetry’: T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn 1999, p.238
153 ‘not originally a written’: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, pp.xxiii–xxiv
154 ‘You have your formulae’: Ibid., p.448
155 ‘almost exactly a ton’: http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html
156 ‘a tall, lean’: From the draft of a text intended for a popular audience written in 1937 by Parry’s youthful assistant Albert Lord. http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/about/intro.html
157 ‘Finally Avdo came’: Ibid.
158 ‘It takes the full’: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p.457
159 ‘Each singer sang’: Ibid., pp.458, 460
160 ‘In June 1935’: Halil Bajgorić, ‘The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey’, Parry no. 6699: www.oraltradition.org/static/zbm/zbm.pdf
161 ‘The moment he’: Harry Levin, ‘Portrait of a Homeric Scholar’, The Classical Journal, Vol. 32, No. 5 (Feb. 1937), pp.259–66
162 ‘But why did you’: From Parry, Conversation 6698, in An eEdition of ‘The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey’, as performed by Halil Bajgorić, ed. and trans. John Miles Foley, on www.oraltradition.org
163 ‘The verses and’: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p.449
164 ‘They asked one’: John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song, University of California Press, 1993, pp.44
165 ‘Plato thought nature’: W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, 6 1–2, The Tower, 1928
166 ‘The more I understand’: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p.451 (written in January 1934), quoted in Richard Janko, ‘The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts’, The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 1 (1998), pp.1–13
167 ‘written much later’: Lord, The Singer of Tales
168 ‘It was the wet spring’: A conversation I have described before, in Sea Room, 2001, p.292
169 ‘everything in his songs’: Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, p.44; Parry, Conversation 6598
170 ‘making the wince’: See http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_NOTOPOULOS1.html
171 ‘bitter and heroic resistance’ See turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/files/arion_odysseus.doc
172 ‘He found Sfakia’: James A. Notopoulos, ‘The Genesis of an Oral Heroic Poem’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, Vol. 3 (1960), pp.135–44
173 ‘the opposite conclusion’: Maartje Draak, ‘Duncan MacDonald of South Uist’, Fabula, Vol. 1 (1957), pp.47–58; William Lamb, ‘The Storyteller, the Scribe, and a Missing Man: Hidden Influences from Printed Sources in the Gaelic Tales of Duncan and Neil MacDonald’, Oral Tradition, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2012), pp.109–60
174 ‘heir to the great traditions’: See The Calum Maclean Project, Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, http://www.calum-maclean-project.celtscot.ed.ac.uk/home/; Lamb, ‘The Storyteller, the Scribe, and a Missing Man’
175 ‘polished, shapely’: http://calumimaclean.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html
176 ‘On analysis’: Maartje Draak, ‘Duncan MacDonald of South Uist’
177 ‘ethnographers have discovered’: Douglas Young, ‘Never Blotted a Line? Formula and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod’, Arion, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Autumn 1967), pp.279–324
178 ‘had in his head’: Ibid.
179 ‘the terrible noise’: Iliad 6.105
180 ‘Like the generations’: Iliad 6.146–50, Fagles 6.171–5
181 ‘as many as the leaves’: Iliad 2.468
182 ‘Near the city’: Iliad 2.811–14 (Murray/Wyatt, slightly adapted)
183 ‘epic poetry is’: Jonas Grethlein, ‘Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and the Odyssey’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 128 (2008), pp.27–51
184 ‘such as will remain’: Iliad 3.287
185 ‘the Muse provides’: Odyssey 8.479–81
186 ‘in the same class’: Iliad 9.364
187 ‘Achilles’s iron heart’: Iliad 20.372. This is a translation of the phrase aithōni sidērō, which might also mean more prosaically ‘shining iron’.
188 ‘a profoundly ancient world’: See for example Susan Sherratt, ‘Archaeological Contexts’, in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic, Blackwell, 2005, pp.119–42
189 ‘had found six hundred’: C.W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, Vol. I: The Buildings and Their Contents, Princeton, 1966, I, 6, pp.95–100; C.W. Blegen and K. Kourouniotis, ‘Excavations of Pylos, 1939’, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 43 (1939), p.569
190 ‘No one could guess’: Ione Mylonas Shear, ‘Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World? A Tale of Seven Bronze Hinges’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 118 (1998), pp.187–9
191 ‘A piece of firewood’: Christoph Bachhuber, ‘Aegean Interest on the Uluburun Ship’, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 110, No. 3 (Jul. 2006), pp.345–63
192 ‘a moment from the Iliad’: Iliad 6.119–236
193 ‘He quickly sent’: Iliad 6.168–70
194 ‘What does this description’: T.R. Bryce, ‘The Nature of Mycenaean Involvement in Western Anatolia’, Historia, Vol. 38 (1989), pp.13–14; Rufus Bellamy, ‘Bellerophon’s Tablet’, Classical Journal, Vol. 84 (1989), pp.289–307; Shear, ‘Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World?’; Byron Harries, ‘“Strange Meeting”: Diomedes and Glaucus in Iliad 6’, Greece & Rome, Vol. 40 (1993), pp.133–47; T.R. Bryce, ‘Anatolian Scribes in Mycenaean Greece’, Historia, Vol. 48 (1999), pp.257–64
195 ‘a tiny glimpse into’: Not everyone agrees with this view of Homer’s Greeks – or in this distinction between Greek and Trojan. From the Odyssey comes all kinds of evidence that the Greeks were at home in palaces: Nestor and Menelaus live in elaborate and comfortable set-ups at Pylos and Sparta, full of warmth and ritualised hospitality. Even Odysseus’s home on Ithaca, while clearly not a major citadel, has megara skioenta, ‘shadowed halls’, like the rich Near Eastern palace of Alcinous in Scheria. These hints and suggestions can be taken as a sign that the Odyssey was deeply coloured by its transmission through the palace centuries of the Mycenaean period, when the cultural expectations of a great man’s equipment had come to include a palace establishment.
The Iliad, perhaps because the circumstances of war did not encourage it, remained more resistant to these later influences. It is true that even in the Iliad Mycenae is described as euktimenon ptoliethron, a well-founded citadel (2.569–70), polychrysos, ‘rich in gold’ (11.46), and elsewhere, like Troy, euruaguia, ‘with broad streets’ (4.52). But these are no more than marginal suggestions. The poetic weight of warriorhood in the poem remains firmly on the Greek side, and the poetic weight of civility and urbanness firmly on the Trojan. Hector is undoubtedly a ferocious warrior, but he is nearly alone as such among the Trojans, who do not entirely admire him for it. Paris and Priam on the other hand represent two contrasting dimensions of urban civility – wise government and a tendency to foppishness – and appear as they do, not because of the circumstances in which they find themselves, but because of their essential natures. The same is true of Achilles: he will be the unaccommodated man in whatever circumstances he finds himself. For all the surrounding realism and nuance, these are the polarities the Iliad dramatises.
196 ‘floats all through’: Emily Townsend Vermeule, ‘Jefferson and Homer’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 137, No. 4, 250th Anniversary Issue (Dec. 1993), pp.689–703
197 ‘in many parts earlier’: M.L. West, ‘The Rise of the Greek Epic’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 108 (1988), pp.151–72
198 ‘but the Iliadic words’: Ibid.
199 ‘There are in all’: E. Meyer, ‘Schliemann’s Letters to Max Müller in Oxford’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 82 (1962), p.92. Letter dated 24 November 1876
200 ‘he identified the warriors’: He claimed in a telegram to a Greek newspaper that on exposing one of the gold-encrusted kings he felt that ‘This corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon’ (Cathy Gere, The Tomb of Agamemnon: Mycenae and the Search for a Hero, London, 2006, p.76). He never said, as is usually reported, that he had ‘gazed on the face of Agamemnon’, nor was he referring to the wonderful gold face-mask now universally referred to as the Mask of Agamemnon. That handsome, moustachioed, boulevardier king, the most famous face of the Bronze Age, belonged to another grave. Immediately before sending his telegram, Schliemann had looked at a dead body ‘whose round face, with all its flesh had been wonderfully preserved’, eyes and teeth all there. That face had also been covered in a gold mask, but it is a strange thing, clean-shaven, as round as a football, fat-cheeked and pig-eyed, an image of regality that has never been explained. (see Gere, p.79, for an illustration of the gold mask from Shaft Grave 4 of Grave Circle A, Mycenae, 1550–1500 BC.)
201 ‘Nothing of that’: Homer does not describe burials of the kind that are found in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. The Homeric hero is always cremated on a pyre, and his remains put in a container that is then buried within a large tumulus. That is a form of interment that is found all over the Indo-European world, but not in Greece, at least until the eighth century BC (see Miss H.L. Lorimer, ‘Pulvis et Umbra’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 53 (1933), pp.161–80). Different Indo-European peoples at different times both cremated and buried their dead. So this is a conundrum: are the burial practices in Homer evidence of their being very late poems, no earlier than the eighth century BC? Or is this evidence of some deep memory of early Indo-European traditions which also gave rise to cremation for heroes in Scandinavia, and to people in India and Iran? See Mallory and Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, p.151.
202 ‘the slayers and the slain’: Iliad 11.83–162
203 ‘ungentle was’: Iliad 11.137: ameiliktos d’op akousan
204 ‘And just as when’: Iliad 11.269–72 (Murray/Wyatt, adapted)
205 ‘As when the open sea’: Iliad 14.16–20 (Lattimore, adapted)
206 ‘Philologists often dislike’: Emily Townsend Vermeule, ‘Jefferson and Homer’
207 ‘He spoke, and’: Iliad 16.856–7, 22.362–3 (Lattimore, adapted)
208 ‘The difference’: Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Pottery, University of California Press, 1979, p.9: ‘Now a doctor in Düsseldorf has succeeded in quantifying the soul by placing the beds of his terminal patients on extremely sensitive scales. “As they died and the souls left their bodies, the needles dropped twenty-one grams.”’ She was quoting Dr Nils-Olof Jacobson, ‘Life After Death’, Boston Globe, 19 December 1972. The claim that the weight of the soul is twenty-one grams was first made in 1901 by a group of American doctors, including Duncan MacDougall of Massachusetts, who carried out experiments reported in the New York Times in March 1907.
209 ‘Parys Mountain’: For a full account of Parys Mountain, see Bryan D. Hope, A Curious Place: The Industrial History of Amlwch (1550–1950), Wrexham, 1994
210 ‘In about 8000 BC’: B.W. Roberts, C.P. Thornton and V.C. Piggott, ‘Development of Metallurgy in Eurasia’, Antiquity, Vol. 83 (2009), pp.1012–22
211 ‘Only then did someone’: Evgenii N. Chernykh, Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: The Early Metal Age, trans. Sarah Wright, Cambridge University Press, 1992
212 ‘It became a world’: Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.108–9, 114, 123–4
213 ‘The broad picture’: Richard J. Harrison, Symbols and Warriors: Images of the European Bronze Age, Bristol: Western Academic and Specialist Press, 2004
214 ‘patterns that recur’: See Kristiansen and Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society, passim
215 ‘Were these movements’: See ibid., pp.142–250
216 ‘The teeth of’: A.P. Fitzpatrick, The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen, Salisbury: Trust for Wessex Archaeology Ltd, 2011
217 ‘Chemical analysis’: Pippa Bradley, ‘Death Pits at Cliff End’, British Archaeology, Vol. 131 (Jul.–Aug. 2013)
218 ‘It seems inescapable’: Stephen Oppenheimer, ‘A Reanalysis of Multiple Prehistoric Immigrations to Britain and Ireland Aimed at Identifying Celtic Contributions’, in B. Cunliffe and J.T. Koch, Celtic from the West, Oxford: Oxbow, 2010, p.142
219 ‘A different, non-urban’: Philip L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp.126ff
220 ‘They clothed their’: Iliad 14.384 ff
221 ‘as snug as’: Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging’, from Death of a Naturalist, Faber, 1966
222 ‘Doupēsen de pesōn’: e.g. Iliad 4.504, 17.50
223 ‘their life dependent’: See Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, pp.99–101, 112–15
224 ‘Adolf Schulten’: A. Schulten, Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae, Vol. 1, 1922, p.90
225 ‘Inner and outer landscapes’: Circe’s description at Odyssey 10.510. Odysseus comes to the shores of Hades at Odyssey 11.22
226 ‘dissolving like’: Odyssey 11.208, Fagles 11.237
227 ‘Never try to’: Odyssey 11.408ff
228 ‘through his tears’: It’s not certain that he’s weeping – olophuromai usually means ‘lament, be sad’ – but this is likely to be the sense.
229 ‘like consuming fire’: Iliad 20.372
230 ‘But tell me’: Odyssey 11.491
231 ‘murdering Priam’: This was the scene, transmitted through the Aeneid, when Neoptolemos was slaughtering his way through Troy, ‘And all his father sparkled in his eyes’, that caught Hamlet’s imagination: the young Greek was
total gules; horridly trick’d
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Bak’d and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord’s murder. (Hamlet 2.ii.457–61)
232 ‘So I spoke’: Odyssey 11.538–40, Fagles 11.613–16
233 ‘Set up your mast’: Odyssey, 10.506–7 (Murray/Dimock, slightly adapted)
234 ‘But when in’: Odyssey 10.508–12 (Murray/Dimock)
235 ‘There into the ocean’: Odyssey 10.513–15 (Murray/Dimock)
236 ‘The extraction’: http://www.parquemineroderiotinto.com/
237 ‘at a place called Chinflón’: The mine at Chinflón is at 37°40'N, 6°40'W; see B. Rothenberg and A. Blanco-Freijeiro, ‘Ancient Copper Mining and Smelting at Chinflón (Huelva, SW Spain)’, British Museum Occasional Paper, 20 (1980), pp.41–62; for bronze mining see Ben Roberts, ‘Metallurgical Networks and Technological Choice: Understanding Early Metal in Western Europe’, World Archaeology, Vol. 40, Issue 3 (2008), pp.354–72; Anthony F. Harding, European Societies in the Bronze Age, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.197–241
238 ‘In Cornwall’: M.A. Courtney, ‘Cornish Folk-Lore’, Part 3, The Folk-Lore Journal, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1887), pp.177–220; James C. Baker, ‘Echoes of Tommy Knockers in Bohemia, Oregon, Mines’, Western Folklore, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr. 1971), pp.119–22
239 ‘called the little’: Georgius Agricola, De Animantibus Subterraneis, 1548
240 ‘represent man’s inner’: Ronald Finucane, Ghosts, Prometheus, 1996, p.1
241 ‘their ancient beliefs’: Agricola, De Animantibus Subterraneis; Courtney, ‘Cornish Folk-Lore’, Part 3; Finucane, Appearances of the Dead; Baker, ‘Echoes of Tommy Knockers in Bohemia, Oregon, Mines’
242 ‘When it comes to’: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1958 (1994), pp.18–20
243 ‘a catalogue’: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors. The stelae in the Archaeological Museum in Badajoz represent perhaps the richest of all collections. Others are in Cordoba, Huelva, Seville and Madrid, and in Portugal.
244 ‘topped and mended’: Odyssey 14.10
245 ‘None of this is different’: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, pp.12, 24
246 ‘red with the blood’: Iliad 18.538
247 ‘fruit in wicker’: Iliad 18.568
248 ‘the perfect circle’: Menelaus’s, for example, in Iliad 17.6
249 ‘obsessed with male beauty’: M. Eleanor Irwin, ‘Odysseus’s “Hyacinthine Hair” in Odyssey 6.231’, Phoenix, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn 1990), pp.205–18
250 ‘who held his head’: Iliad 6.509–10
251 ‘His strength can do’: Iliad 21.316–18
252 ‘Great Priam entered in’: Iliad 24.477–9 (Murray, adapted)
253 ‘roused in Achilles’: Iliad 24.507–8
254 ‘And they came’: Iliad 9.185–91 (Murray/Wyatt)
255 ‘Archaeologists working’: http://www.aocarchaeology.com/news/the-lyre-bridge-from-high-pasture-cave
256 ‘It seems from’: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, p.104
257 ‘A huge warrior figure’: Ibid., pp.298–9; Catalogue number C80, found at Ategua, Cordoba. Now in the Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Cordoba
258 ‘Ah Sokos’: Iliad 11.450–5 (Lattimore, adapted)
259 ‘He is a unique’: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, p.116
260 ‘Hector … talk not’: Iliad 22.261–7
261 ‘the heroes gave orders’: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, p.116
262 ‘The origins of’: J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth, London, 1989
263 ‘And before that’: N.G.L. Hammond, ‘Tumulus-Burial in Albania, the Grave Circles of Mycenae, and the Indo-Europeans’, Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 62 (1967), pp.77–105
264 ‘Right in the middle’: Odyssey 11.119–37
265 ‘You must go out’: Odyssey 11.121–30, Fagles 11.138–49
266 ‘recorded from Sophocles’: R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, trans., Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007, Fabula, p.95
267 ‘Our land’: Plato, Critias
268 ‘It is possible’: M.L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary, Oxford University Press, 2011, p.42
269 ‘the smoke ascending’: Iliad 21.522–3 (Lattimore)
270 ‘the speech he makes’: Iliad 9.308–409
271 ‘rich with fat.’: Iliad 9.205–8
272 ‘Odysseus then lists’: Iliad 9.264–98
273 ‘Let him submit’: Iliad 9.160
274 ‘the greediest’: Iliad 1.122
275 ‘As I detest’: Iliad 9.312–14 (Lattimore, adapted)
276 ‘Hateful in my eyes’: Iliad 9.378ff
277 ‘All the wealth’: Iliad 9.401–2
278 ‘Cattle and fat sheep’: Iliad 9.405–9 (Lattimore)
279 ‘But alongside that’: Iliad 9.400
280 ‘These questions’: See: Adam Parry, ‘The Language of Achilles’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 87 (1956), pp.1–7; M.D. Reeve, ‘The Language of Achilles’, The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Nov. 1973), pp.193–5; Steve Nimis, ‘The Language of Achilles: Construction vs. Representation’, The Classical World, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Mar.–Apr. 1986), pp.217–25; W. Donlan, ‘Duelling with Gifts in the Iliad: As the Audience Saw It’, Colby Quarterly, Vol. 24 (1993) p.171; Dean Hammer, ‘Achilles as Vagabond: The Culture of Autonomy in the “Iliad”’, The Classical World, Vol. 90, No. 5 (May–Jun. 1997), pp.341–66
281 ‘Those connections’: For these and many of the examples in the following pages of reconstructed and inherited words in the Indo-European family, see the outstanding J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto Indo-European, Oxford, 2006
282 ‘words that have been’: For an overview of the Indo-European world see Benjamin W. Fortson 4, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Chichester, 2010
283 ‘the same word at root’: See Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto Indo-European, p.138. The reconstructed root for ‘otter’ in PIE is udrós, with descendants in Latin, English, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, Iranian and Sanskrit. That reconstructed word is itself formed from the word for ‘water’, wódr.
284 ‘A verb for the driving’: J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, London, 1989, pp.117–18: ‘the frozen expression “to drive cattle” is found in Celtic, Italic and Indo-Iranian’. Sanskrit and Greek share a word for the special sacrifice of ‘one hundred cows’: the Greek word is a hecatomb; gauzatika is the Sanskrit adjective that means ‘possessing one hundred cows or oxen’ (with thanks to Paul Cartledge).
285 ‘It seems as if’: Ibid., p.118: ‘It has long been regarded as reasonable that there was an irreversible semantic development that led from a word “to comb” and a noun “sheep” (the woolly animal) to livestock in general and finally to wealth, hence German Vieh “cattle” and English fee. More recently, however, this was challenged by Emile Benveniste who argued that the semantic development should indeed be reversed and begin with the concept of “movable possessions” which, under the influence of later cultural development, was gradually specified to sheep.’ The PIE root is reconstructed as péku. See Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, Florida, 1973.
286 ‘The word … applied’: Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, p.123: ‘Many Indo-European languages do employ the same Proto-Indo-European verb wedh – “To lead (home)” when expressing the act of becoming married from a groom’s point of view.’
287 ‘That original compound’: Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto Indo-European, p.323
288 ‘In other languages’: Bernard Comrie, Tense, Cambridge, 1985
289 ‘It was probably domesticated’: For the transforming role of the horse in steppeland life see David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, 2007
290 ‘both descended from’: Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto Indo-European, p.134
291 ‘or in hill-figures’: The White Horse at Uffington (illustrated), not merely scratched into the turf but deliberately constructed with chalk rammed into deep trenches, nearly in the form it still maintains, has been dated to the Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1400 BC, and has been regularly maintained ever since. David Miles and Simon Palmer, ‘White Horse Hill’, Current Archaeology, Vol. 142 (1995), pp.372–8. Images of horses on Celtic Iron Age coinage (the illustration is of a gold stater coined by the Gaulish Parisii c.70–60 BC) draw as much on that tradition as on Mediterranean examples.
292 ‘a place called Sintashta’: Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language, pp.371–411
293 ‘they might have been’: Ibid., pp.371–411, 452–57
294 ‘it is possible for’: Iliad 10.505
295 ‘at the funeral games’: The chariot race at Patroclus’s funeral games are at Iliad 23.286–534
296 ‘build for many days’: They took nine days bringing in the timber for Hector’s funeral pyre. Iliad 24.783–4
297 ‘both Poseidon and Athene’: M. Detienne and A.B. Werth, ‘Athena and the Mastery of the Horse’, History of Religions, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Nov. 1971), pp.161–84
298 ‘a prize-winning horse’: Iliad 22.22
299 ‘whiter than snow’: Iliad 10.436, 547
300 ‘like a horse that’: Iliad 15.263ff
301 ‘The Trojans sacrifice’: Iliad 21.132
302 ‘dominates the names’: Grace H. Macurdy, ‘The Horse-Taming Trojans’, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan. 1923), pp.50–2
303 ‘tells Telemachus’: Odyssey 4.271ff
304 ‘The second time’: Odyssey 8.499ff
305 ‘his whole body’: Aeneid 6.497–9
306 ‘As a woman weeps’: Odyssey 8.523–32 (Lattimore, adapted)
307 ‘The gods did this’: Odyssey 8.579–80 (Lattimore, fundamentally)
308 ‘Those who had dreamed’: Simone Weil, ‘L’Iliade ou le poème de la force’, in Les Cahiers du Sud (1940). See also Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy, New York Review of Books (2005), p.3
309 ‘the word Homer uses’: Iliad 13.393
310 ‘We did not dare’: Edwin Muir, ‘The Horses’, from One Foot in Eden, 1956
311 ‘Sleep sits’: Iliad 14.290
312 ‘beautiful as a star’: Iliad 6.399–403
313 ‘like cattle stepping’: Iliad 20.495
314 ‘a snowy mountain’: Iliad 13.754
315 ‘Usatovo, near Odessa’: D.Ya. Telegin and David W. Anthony, ‘On the Yamna Culture’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jun. 1987), pp.357–8
316 ‘a world not of palaces’: Katarzyna Slusarska, ‘Funeral Rites of the Catacomb Community: 2800–1900 BC: Ritual, Thanatology and Geographical Origins’, Baltic-Pontic Studies, Vol. 13 (2006), Poznań
317 ‘Scholars have pursued’: For many of these references see M.L. West, ‘The Rise of the Greek Epic’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 108 (1988), pp.151–72
318 ‘as Nestor tells’: Iliad 2.362
319 ‘ep’ eurea nota thalasses’: Iliad 20.228, etc.
320 ‘He harnessed to’: Iliad 13.23–31 (Lattimore)
321 ‘When Aeneas is remembering’: Iliad 20.217
322 ‘They would play’: Iliad 20.228–9 (Lattimore, slightly adapted)
323 ‘It is by cunning’: Iliad 23.316–18, 325
324 ‘fast-running ships’: Odyssey 4.708–9 (Lattimore)
325 ‘Just as in a field’: Odyssey 13.81–5 (Lattimore)
326 ‘beautiful metal dogs’: Odyssey 7.91–4
327 ‘robotic golden girls’: Iliad 18.372ff
328 ‘the point pounding’: Iliad 5.66–8, Fagles 5.73–5
329 ‘Who had the skill’: Iliad 5.60–14, Fagles 5.66–70
330 ‘At this most fundamental’: For these transitions see Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World; and Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language, pp.371–411, 452–7
331 ‘They can only have’: Thomas F. Strasser et al., ‘Stone Age Seafaring in the Mediterranean, Plakias Region for Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Habitation of Crete’, Hesperia, Vol. 79 (2010), pp.145–90
332 ‘the colossal vortex’: For the transforming arrival of the sailing ship, see the concluding chapter of Cyprian Broodbank, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades, Cambridge University Press 2000, p.345
333 ‘And above all’: Ibid., p.345
334 ‘Topsail, Riptide’: Odyssey 8.130–9, Fagles
335 ‘Our ships can’: Odyssey 8.556–63
336 ‘drastically shrunk’: Broodbank, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades
337 ‘Menelaus remembers’: Odyssey 3.158
338 ‘It was fast ships’: Iliad 7.467–75
339 ‘It is the ships’: Iliad 15.502ff
340 ‘the abandoned weapons’: Iliad 10.469
341 ‘the most savage’: Iliad 1.146
342 ‘shaggy breasts’: Iliad 1.189
343 ‘black blood’: Iliad 1.303
344 ‘the wives and daughters’: Iliad 6.237–8 (adapted from Murray/Wyatt)
345 ‘that magnificent’: Iliad 6.242–9, Fagles 6.289–97
346 ‘Let no man’: Iliad 2.354–5 (Murray/Wyatt, slightly adapted)
347 ‘formulaic adjectives’: Iliad 2.540, etc.
348 ‘They love their’: Iliad 14.120
349 ‘And now sweeter’: Iliad 2.450–4
350 ‘Beware the toils’: Iliad 5.487–8, Fagles 5.559–60
351 ‘264 people’: C.B. Armstrong, ‘The Casualty Lists in the Trojan War’, Greece and Rome, Vol. 16, pp.30–1, gives 238 named casualties and twenty-six unnamed, sixty-one of whom are Greek and 203 Trojan.
352 ‘they limp and’: Iliad 9.502–6, Fagles 9.610–17
353 ‘Of all that breathe’: Iliad 17.441–7, Fagles 17.509–15
354 ‘Patroclus rampages through’: Patroclus begins his tragic and destructive drive at Iliad 16.284
355 ‘Next he went’: Iliad 16.401–10, Fagles 16.477–89
356 ‘Ahead, Patroclus’: Christopher Logue, in ‘The Iliad: Book 16. An English Version’, Arion, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1962), pp.3–26; a revised version in Logue’s War Music, Faber, 2001, p.154, is subtly different from this.
357 ‘The first fighting’: At Iliad 4.446
358 ‘a cause for rejoicing’: Iliad 7.189
359 ‘Now the sun’: Iliad 7.421–9 (Lattimore)
360 ‘Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright’: Bruce A. Jacobs and Richard Wright, Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Criminology, 2006
361 ‘This desire for’: Ibid., p.25
362 ‘urban nomads’: Ibid., p.12
363 ‘maintaining a reputation’: Ibid., p.32
364 ‘Everyone was watching’: Ibid., p.76
365 ‘Book 10 of the Iliad’: This book, the Doloneia, is widely thought to be an addition to the Iliad which does not belong naturally with the rest. It doesn’t fit easily into the story, and is written in an often bizarre Greek. One possible conclusion is that ‘it was added to the epic not long after its monumental composition by a different poet, who knew the Iliad as a fixed text and took care to fit his tale to the Iliad situation, but had his own distinctive way of using the poetic materials’ (M.M. Willcock, ‘The Poet of the Doloneia: Studien zur Dolonie by Georg Danek’, Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 39, No. 2 (1989), pp.178–80). The ‘Homer’ of the Iliad and the ‘Homer’ of the Doloneia were different poets, but both can only have been drawing on the same braided tradition.
366 ‘two lions’: Iliad 10.297–8 (Lattimore)
367 ‘like two rip-fanged’: Iliad 10.360–1 (Lattimore)
368 ‘The two Greeks’: Iliad 10.400
369 ‘struck the middle’: Iliad 10.455–7 (Lattimore)
370 ‘calling them fools’: Iliad 16.833, 11.450–5, 2.870
371 ‘I got your’: Jacobs and Wright, Street Justice, p.35
372 ‘I felt like I was’: Ibid., p.36
373 ‘When he smiles’: Colton Simpson with Ann Pearlman, Inside the Crips, St Martin’s Press, 2005, p.14
374 ‘No one forgets’: Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society, University of California Press, 1991, pp.140–1
375 ‘Neither rape nor’: Ibid., p.79
376 ‘Troy must have’: D.F. Easton, J.D. Hawkins, A.G. Sherratt and E.S. Sherratt, ‘Troy in Recent Perspective’, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 52 (2002), pp.75–109
377 ‘The great Trojan treasures’: D.F. Easton, ‘Priam’s Gold: The Full Story’, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 44 (1994), pp.221–43
378 ‘The silver and gold’: Christoph Bachhuber, ‘The Treasure Deposits of Troy: Rethinking Crisis and Agency on the Early Bronze Age Citadel’, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 59 (2009), pp.1–18; Mikhail Treister, ‘The Trojan Treasures: Description, Chronology, Historical Context’, in Vladimir Tolstikov and Mikhail Treister, eds, The Gold of Troy, 1996, pp.225–9
379 ‘from the very beginning’: Susan Heuck Allen, ‘A Personal Sacrifice in the Interest of Science: Calvert, Schliemann, and the Troy Treasures’, The Classical World, Vol. 91, No. 5, The World of Troy (May–Jun. 1998), pp.345–54
380 ‘the ruins and red’: Meyer, ‘Schliemann’s Letters to Max Müller in Oxford’
381 ‘three different sets’: D.F. Easton, ‘Heinrich Schliemann: Hero or Fraud?’, The Classical World, Vol. 91, No. 5, The World of Troy (May–Jun. 1998), pp.335–43
382 ‘Schliemann’s suggestion’: J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, eds, The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to E. Townsend Vermeule, p.5. Burkert: ‘The Greeks knew no date for the Trojan war. This makes modern attempts to match ancient Greek dates with archaeological remains an exercise in illusion.’
383 ‘The Boston treasure’: MFI Boston, Inv 68116–68139, Centennial Gift of Landon T. Clay. The museum bought it in 1968 from George Zacos, a Greek dealer in antiquities, based in Basel, who could not say where he had got it. It may have been looted from an otherwise unknown tomb in Turkey.
384 ‘four Trojan hammer-axes’: James C. Wright, ‘The Place of Troy Among the Civilizations of the Bronze Age’, The Classical World, Vol. 91, No. 5, The World of Troy (May–Jun. 1998), pp.356–68
385 ‘stolen by Schliemann’: Susan Heuck Allen, ‘A Personal Sacrifice in the Interest of Science’
386 ‘his son Agamemnon’: He became a member of the Greek Chamber of Deputies, and briefly the Greek Minister in Washington, DC
387 ‘a linen fabric’: Elizabeth Wayland Butler, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times, Norton, 1994, p.212
388 ‘tiny gold beads’: Ibid., p.213
389 ‘a great cloth’: Iliad 3.125ff. The word for cloth can mean ‘web’, ‘loom-beam’, or even ‘mast’.
390 ‘shimmering linen’: Iliad 3.140
391 ‘Come over here’: Iliad 3.161–5 (Lattimore)
392 ‘The queen herself’: Iliad 6.287–95 (Murray/Wyatt, slightly adapted)
393 ‘women and womanliness’: See Iliad 16.100, where the Greek warriors refer to the battlements of Troy as its ‘veil’
394 ‘A woman and a tripod’: Iliad 23.262–4
395 ‘twelve oxen and’: Iliad 23.702–5
396 ‘prepares herself for’: Iliad 14.165ff
397 ‘the whispered words’: Iliad 14.217
398 ‘He went down’: Iliad 2.870
399 ‘kill Trojan babies’: Iliad 6.57–60
400 ‘Zeus accused Hera’: Iliad 4.35
401 ‘Idomeneus stabbed’: Iliad 16.345–50 (Lattimore, adapted)
402 ‘like wolves’: Iliad 16.156–62 (Lattimore, adapted)
403 ‘Patroclus, you thought’: Iliad 16.830–7 (Lattimore, adapted)
404 ‘soaked and clotted’: Iliad 17.51
405 ‘mauling the kill’: Iliad 17.64
406 ‘and give the rest’: Iliad 17.125–7, 241
407 ‘He promises’: Iliad 17.241
408 ‘the straps of his shield’: Iliad 17.290
409 ‘oozed out from’: Iliad 17.297–8
410 ‘under the collarbone’: Iliad 17.309
411 ‘so that he clawed’: Iliad 17.315
412 ‘in the liver’: Iliad 17.349
413 ‘with so many’: Iliad 17.393–7 (Lattimore, adapted)
414 ‘as on some lion’: Iliad 17.540–2
415 ‘who though it is’: Iliad 17.571–2 (Lattimore, adapted)
416 ‘a tawny lion’: Iliad 18.162
417 ‘cut the head’: Iliad 18.177 (Lattimore)
418 ‘he pops out death’: Iliad 20.386ff
419 ‘He dragged them’: Iliad 21.29–32, Fagles 21.33–8
420 ‘an unlooked for evil’: Iliad 21.39
421 ‘Now there is not’: Iliad 21.103–9 (Lattimore, slightly adapted)
422 ‘Die on’: Iliad 21.128–9 (Lattimore, slightly adapted)
423 ‘I will not leave off’: Iliad 21.225
424 ‘The aged Priam’: Iliad 21.525ff
425 ‘fierce with the’: Iliad 21.540
426 ‘shackled by destiny’: Iliad 22.5
427 ‘Come into the’: Iliad 22.56–7 (Lattimore, slightly adapted)
428 ‘I have looked upon’: Iliad 22.61–76 (Lattimore)
429 ‘Sweet branch’: Iliad 22.87, 82
430 ‘like a dream’: Iliad 22.199
431 ‘and forces him’: Iliad 22.198
432 ‘to hack your meat’: Iliad 22.347–8 (Lattimore)
433 ‘and clean out’: Iliad 22.327
434 ‘gasping the life’: Iliad 22.440
435 ‘All of these’: Iliad 22.510
436 ‘robes, mantles, blankets’: Iliad 24.228, 580
437 ‘kisses his hands’: Iliad 24.478ff
438 ‘Priam wept freely’: Iliad 24.509–12, Fagles 24.594–9
439 ‘They reached out’: Iliad 24.628–32, Fagles 24.738–44
440 ‘the Egyptian city of Thebes’: A place, incidentally, known to Achilles for its riches: Iliad 9.381–4
441 ‘Sinuhe’s story’: R.B. Parkinson, ed. and trans., The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Egyptian Poems 1940–1640 BC, Oxford University Press, 1997 (2009), p.1
442 ‘Be a scribe’: Quoted Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation, Routledge, 2007, p.163
443 ‘Peace had prevailed’: Ibid., p.62
444 ‘It is Indo-European’: Carleton T. Hodge, ‘Indo-Europeans in the Near East’, Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 35, No. 1/4, A Retrospective of the Journal Anthropological Linguistics: Selected Papers, 1959–1985 (1993), pp.90–108
445 ‘the enduring security’: Kemp, Ancient Egypt, p.24
446 ‘I was appointed’: Parkinson, Sinuhe, p.42
447 ‘It is his majesty’: Ibid., p.43
448 ‘Timē and Aretē’: See Margalit Finkelberg, ‘Timē and Aretē in Homer’, Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 1 (1998), pp.14–28 for a long and elegant discussion of this core Homeric tension.
449 ‘The bath … is always’: J.M. Cook, ‘Bath-Tubs in Ancient Greece’, Greece and Rome, Second Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Mar. 1959), pp.31–41; Steve Reece, ‘The Homeric asaminthos: Stirring the Waters of the Mycenaean Bath’, Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 55, Fasc. 6 (2002), pp.703–8
450 ‘washing his long hair’: Gilgamesh Epic 11: 239–55, trans. A. Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, Chicago, 1949, p.90
451 ‘When Jacob returns’: Gary A. Rendsburg, ‘Notes on Genesis XXXV’, Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 34, Fasc. 3 (Jul. 1984), pp.361-6
452 ‘wash yourselves’: Genesis 35.2
453 ‘brought in the water’: Odyssey 10.357–67
454 ‘mind wandering’: Odyssey 10.374
455 ‘The Hittites were’: See Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
456 ‘in the city of Urikina’: Gary Beckman, ed., Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd edn, SBL Writings from the Ancient World series, Society of Biblical Literature, 1999, p.113
457 ‘never suffer strangers’: Odyssey 7.32
458 ‘ptoliporthos Odysseus’: Odyssey 8.3
459 ‘prēktēres’: Odyssey 8.162
460 ‘Where do you’: Odyssey 9.252–4
461 ‘much-wandering pirates’: Odyssey 17.425
462 ‘There I destroyed’: Odyssey 9.39–42
463 ‘In about 1350 BC’: Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, p.26
464 ‘Given that they’: Ibid., p.31
465 ‘Furthermore this sister’: Ibid., p.32
466 ‘And for what reason’: Ibid.
467 ‘If the King’: Ibid., p.106
468 ‘it is now generally accepted’: Hans G. Güterbock, ‘Hittites and Akhaeans: A New Look’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 128, No. 2 (Jun. 1984), pp.114–22
469 ‘The father of’: Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, p.154
470 ‘the untrembling’: M.L. West, ‘Atreus and Attarissiyas’, Glotta, 77. Bd., 3./4. H. (2001), pp.262–6
471 ‘A letter also survived’: Adrian Kelly, ‘Homer and History: “Iliad” 9.381–4’, Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 59, Fasc. 3 (2006), pp.321–33
472 ‘Hittite scholars’: Güterbock, ‘Hittites and Akhaeans’
473 ‘If rumours circulate’: Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, p.90
474 ‘it is clear’: T. Dothan, The Philistines and Their Material Culture, 1982; T. Dothan and M. Dothan, People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines, 1992; L.E. Stager, ‘The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185–1050 BCE)’, in T.E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, 1995, pp.332–48; Seymour Gitin, Amihai Mazar and Ephraim Stern, eds, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries B.C.E., Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1998
475 ‘at its symbolic climax’: The David and Goliath story is in 1 Samuel, Chapter 17. For a brilliant discussion of it see Azzan Yadin, ‘Goliath’s Armor and Israelite Collective Memory’, Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 54, Fasc. 3 (Jul. 2004), pp.373–95
476 ‘six feet nine inches tall’: See J. Daniel Hays, ‘Reconsidering the Height of Goliath’, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec. 2005), pp.701–14. In the Septuagint manuscripts and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Goliath’s height is given as ‘four cubits and a span’, which is six feet nine inches. Later versions make it six cubits and a span, which is nine feet nine inches. The average height of Semites in the ancient Near East was about five feet. One warrior in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae has been measured at five feet five inches. See A.J.N.W. Prag, Lena Papazoglou-Manioudaki, R.A.H. Neave, Denise Smith, J.H. Musgrave and A. Nafplioti, ‘Mycenae Revisited: Part 1. The Human Remains from a Grave Circle’, Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 104 (2009), pp.233–77.
477 ‘Why do you’: 1 Samuel 17.8–10 (NEB)
478 ‘Shouted aggression’: For the continuing emotional power of the battle shout, in attack or mourning, see the New Zealanders grieving the death of their companions in Afghanistan http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10829992.
479 ‘Morning and evening’: 1 Samuel 17.16 (NEB/KJB)
480 ‘I cannot go’: 1 Samuel 17.39–40 (NEB/KJB/AN)
481 ‘And the Philistine came on’: 1 Samuel 17.42–4 (NEB/KJB/AN)
482 ‘and all the world’: 1 Samuel 17.46–7 (NEB)
483 ‘And David put’: 1 Samuel 17.49 (KJB)
484 ‘tossing backwards and forwards’: Odyssey 20.25
485 ‘at which any’: Odyssey 5.72–3
486 ‘but was called Thapsos’: For Thapsos in the Bronze Age see Anthony Russell, In the Middle of the Corrupting Sea: Cultural Encounters in Sicily and Sardinia Between 1450–900 BC, 2011 PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, online at http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2670/; David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.34–5
487 ‘at a loss’: P. Leigh Fermor, Letters to D. Devonshire; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 5.3.2, online at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5A*.html
488 ‘swooping down’: Odyssey 5.50–3 (combination of Fagles, Lattimore and AN)
489 ‘Hermes does everything’: Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and Geographical Distance, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp.111ff
490 ‘the axis always fixed’: Odyssey 5.274
491 ‘reaching towards him’: Odyssey 5.281
492 ‘death’s decision’: Odyssey 5.326
493 ‘Seabirds are too beautifully present’: For birds in Homer see J. MacLair Boraston, ‘The Birds of Homer’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 31 (1911), pp.216–50; Sylvia Benton, ‘Note on Sea-Birds’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 92 (1972), pp.172–3; Paul Friedrich, ‘An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer’s Odyssey’, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Jun. 1997), pp.306–20
494 ‘like a diving tern’ Odyssey 5.353
495 ‘The earth-shaker’: Odyssey 5.367
496 ‘Just like the kind’: Odyssey 5.394–9
497 ‘Spent to all use’: George Chapman’s translation of Odyssey 5.454–5
498 ‘heartsick on the open sea’: Odyssey 1.4
499 ‘her surpassingly beautiful’: Odyssey 10.347
500 ‘His story held them’: Odyssey 11.334, Fagles 11.379
501 ‘Many were the people’: Odyssey 1.3
502 ‘for his return’: Odyssey 1.13
503 ‘the fascinating imaginative realm’: Quoted by Richard Rorty in ‘Trotsky and the Wild Orchids’ (1992), from Philosophy and Social Hope, 1999
504 ‘rocky Ithaca’: Odyssey 21.346
505 ‘the kind of island’: This point, in connection with the Iron Age, is made by Helen Waterhouse in ‘From Ithaca to the Odyssey’, Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 91 (1996), pp.301–17
506 ‘bends to kiss’: Odyssey 13.354
507 ‘an Assyrian relief’: See e.g. Julian Reade, Assyrian Sculpture, 1983, 1998, fig. 57, p.54
508 ‘there is nothing sweeter’: Odyssey 9.28
509 ‘She withered’: Odyssey 9.28
510 ‘Knossos, where Minos reigned’: Odyssey 19.172–8
511 ‘When she appears’: Odyssey 16.415 for Penelope standing by column; 20.42 for her shining among women
512 ‘Artemis and Aphrodite’: Odyssey 17.37, 19.54
513 ‘the nightingale’: Odyssey 19.518–24 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
514 ‘Like all the great women in Homer’: Penelope with well-balanced mind Odyssey 18.249; weeping 19.209; weaving 17.97, 19.128; with cloths 19.232, 255; and veil 20.65
515 ‘a queen regnant’: Penelope as governor 19.106ff
516 ‘grow in goodness’: Odyssey 19.114
517 ‘Just as a bitch’: Odyssey 20.14–16 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
518 ‘swimming in blood’: Odyssey 22.307
519 ‘are repeated here’: Odyssey 22.325
520 ‘like a lion’: Odyssey 22.401–3 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
521 ‘He found them’: Odyssey 22.383–8 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
522 ‘They led him out’: Odyssey 22.474–7 (Murray/Dimock)
523 ‘the cable of’: Odyssey 22.465
524 ‘Just as when’: Odyssey 22.468–73 (Murray/Dimock, adapted)
525 ‘the well-built bridal chamber’: Odyssey 23.178
526 ‘her knees were loosened’: Odyssey 23.205–8 (Murray/Dimock)
527 ‘As when the land’: Odyssey 23.233–40
528 ‘spirit of cruelty’: Note to Iliad 4.75 in his translation; see, for this and the following valuable references to Blake and Barlow, Michael Ferber, ‘Shelley and “The Disastrous Fame of Conquerors”’, Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 51 (2002), pp.145–73
529 ‘Blake blamed Homer’: David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revised edn, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, p.270
530 ‘but he has given’: From David B. Davis, ed., Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, in a chapter on ‘The Military System’, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956, p.39
531 ‘There are certain ages’: Susan Sontag, ‘Simone Weil, Selected Essays, translated by Richard Rees’, New York Review of Books (1 Feb. 1963)
532 ‘Nietzsche, at his worst’: Richard Rorty, ‘Against Belatedness’, London Review of Books, Vol. 5, No. 11 (Jun. 1983), pp.3–5, a review of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg, trans. Robert Wallace, 1983
533 ‘praised Homer’s enargeia’: Alice Oswald, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, 2011, p.1
534 ‘a telling out’: See Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence, 2012, p.27
