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FOREWORD
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 ca. 1450 to ca. 1200 BC. Sir Moses Finley, in The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking, 1954), demolished that idea and considered Homer a product of the ninth or tenth century BC. For a clear and comprehensive discussion of the current orthodoxy that considers Homer an eighth-century poet and his use as “an archaeological artifact,” see Ian Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,” Classical Antiquity 5, no. 1 (Apr. 1986), 81–138. Gregory Nagy, in Homeric Questions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 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 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 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 farther. In the “social fluidity and instability” of that deep past were stories and questions that 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).
Epic’s purpose: See the many essays in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
a revelatory fresco: This is the watercolor 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 60, no. 2 (Apr. 1956), 95–101, plate 41 (b&w). Mabel L. Lang, in The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, Vol. 2, The Frescoes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), after a decade of heroic work with burned 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 52, no. 4 (Dec. 1970), 428–30, was skeptical about Mabel Lang’s reconstruction.
leaving Homer’s own: See 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, edited by Casey Dué (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 19–30.
“the neon edges”: Christopher Logue, War Music (London: Faber, 2001), 54.
“Warm’d in the brain”: Alexander Pope, Iliad XX.551.
“like furnace doors”: Logue, War Music, 193.
“sometimes travels beside”: George Seferis, “Memory II,” lines 5–9, from Logbook 3, in Complete Poems, trans. and ed. by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard (1995; reprint, Greenwich: Anvil Press, 2009), 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 Apollō, 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 (Cambridge, Mass: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1914), vol. 57, p. 395ff.
“as the wings”: Seferis, “Memory II,” line 10, p. 188.
1: MEETING HOMER
Robert Fagles: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Penguin, 1996).
“Who would want”: Odyssey V.100–101.
what he thinks: Ibid., X.472–74.
“sea-blue”: Ibid., VIII.84.
“the man of twists”: Ibid., I.1.
“starred with flowers”: Ibid., XII.173. The Greek adjective anthemoenta means strictly no more than “flowery,” and it is Robert Fagles who has poeticized 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 entirely legitimate.
“We know all”: Ibid., XII.189–91, Fagles XII.205–7.
That is what: Carol Dougherty, in The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 71–73, has a wonderful discussion of Odysseus’s “metapoetic ship” as a vehicle for the heroic life.
Matthew Arnold’s famous lectures: Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1861), available online at http://www.victorianprose.org/.
2: GRASPING HOMER
“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 (1962; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 83–85, 118–19.
“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.
Almost at the beginning: Odyssey II.337–70.
“far from battle”: It can also mean “fighting at a distance,” like an archer, and so it was an appropriate name because archery was one of Odysseus’s skills and he might have wanted to pass it on to his son.
“Ah dear child”: Odyssey II.363–70 (with parallel translation by A. T. Murphy, revised by G. E. Dimock [Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb / Harvard University Press, 1999]).
“Each time I”: Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited (New York: New Directions, 1968), 7.
“a jumbled heap”: John Keats, sonnet, “O Solitude,” lines 2–3.
“the barbarous age”: Quoted in Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber, 1997), 10.
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Spenser, Faerie Queene, book 2, canto 12, line 204; Motion, Keats, 52.
“The tide!”: Motion, Keats, 93.
“both a lovely”: Ibid., 63.
“a parallel universe”: Ibid., 41.
“The conscious swains”: Pope’s translation of the Iliad, VIII.559.
the 1780s: This point is brutally addressed by Matthew Arnold in On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1861), available online at http://www.victorianprose.org/.
“No man of true”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq (London: W. Baynes and Son, 1824), 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 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
“What he writes”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, 4.
“In Homer”: Ibid.
“Virgil bestows”: Ibid., 12.
“unaffected and equal”: Ibid., 18.
“In vain his youth”: Iliad XX.537–46.
“It is not to be doubted”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, 17.
“a treasure of poetical elegances”: Samuel Johnson, “Life of Pope” (1779), in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London: J. Johnson, 1810), vol. 12, p. 112.
“money-mongering”: Sonnet to Haydon, quoted in Motion, Keats, 119.
“the ocean”: Keats, “Sonnet I. To My Brother George,” Aug. 1816, from Margate.
“the fine rough”: Motion, Keats, 109.
“turning to some”: Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollections of Keats” (1861), in Recollections of Writers (London: 1878), 120–57.
“There did shine”: Quoted in Andrew Laing, The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (London, 1880), vol. 1, p. 510.
“loose and rambling”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, 17.
“now totally neglected”: Johnson, “Life of Pope,” 112.
“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 (London: Pickering, 1849), vol. 2, p. 231.
“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.
“One scene I could not fail”: Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollection of Keats” (1861) in Recollections of Writers (London, 1878), 130.
“Just as when”: Odyssey V.328–30.
“he then bends both knees”: Ibid., V.453–57.
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) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136.
“his knees no more”: Pope, Odyssey V.606–10.
“For the heart”: Ibid., V.454 (Murray/Dimock, parallel text).
“Odysseus bent his knees”: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu (1946; reprint, London: Penguin, 1991), 83.
“his very heart”: Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), V.454.
“The sea had beaten”: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 1996), V.502.
“beastly place”: Quoted in Motion, Keats, 74.
“On the first looking”: This early draft, differing from the published version, is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Keats 2.4 A.MS.
“The troops exulting”: Pope’s Iliad VIII.553–65.
“the cockney Homer”: J. G. Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. V,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Apr. 1819, 97.
“A thing of beauty”: Keats, Endymion, book 1, 1–5.
Andrew Motion: Motion, Keats, 162.
“And such too”: Keats, Endymion, book 1, 20–21.
“That question has no answer”: Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, foreword, 7.
3: LOVING HOMER
they don’t eat bread: Odyssey IX.191.
Grilled meat: Ibid., XX.25–28.
no moment was happier: Ibid., IX.10.
“all professional athletes”: Plato, The Republic, book 3.
fish was: The classical Greeks were baffled by Homer’s dislike of fish; they thought fish the ultimate delicacy and couldn’t understand why Homer’s heroes ate beef when they were so often sitting next to a prime fishing spot. This contempt for fish was perhaps a steppeland inheritance, from the time when a large herd of meaty animals was one of the identifying marks of a king or hero.
Mindjack: “Mindjacking” is a term invented by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson.
“I am conscious”: Plato, Ion, 380 BC, trans. Benjamin Jowett; see also Penelope Murray and T. Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2000), 1.
“The gift which you possess”: Plato, Ion; see also Murray and Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism, 5.
“There is no invention”: Plato, Ion; see also Murray and Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism, 5.
“1 panegyrick poem”: See Macaulay’s History (London: Penguin, 1989), 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 see David Stevenson, Highland Warrior: Alasdair Maccolla and the Civil Wars (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980), for the reemergence 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 repeated phases of human social and political arrangements, when there is no overarching authority in control.
the people of Pylos: Odyssey III.5–6.
Odysseus weeps: Ibid., V.151.
he finds Nausicaa: Ibid., VI.1ff.
draw up their ships: Ibid., XI.20.
Odysseus lands: Ibid., XIII.195ff.
“The way they take”: Lattimore, Iliad IX.182, Fagles IX.217–20; a mixture of the two.
“To wander in anguish”: Adapted from Fagles, Iliad XXIV.14–15.
“on her golden throne”: Odyssey X.541.
“her veil the colour”: Iliad XXIII.227.
“that bellows”: Odyssey II.421.
He spreads his sail: Ibid., V.268.
“and the wind”: Ibid., XI.10.
“So these two”: Lattimore, Iliad VIII.1–8.
“Back towards home”: Ibid., XXIII.229–30.
“the black ship”: Odyssey XI.1–14.
red-painted bows: Lattimore, Iliad II.637.
“The wind catches”: T. E. Shaw, The Odyssey (1932), quoted in Rodelle Weintraub and Stanley Weintraub, “Chapman’s Homer,” Classical World 67, no. 1 (Sept.–Oct. 1973), 16–24.
“Thus with stretched sail”: Ezra Pound, “Canto 1,” 9–10.
4: SEEKING HOMER
“germana et sincera”: Joh. Baptista Caspar d’Ansse de Villoison, Homeri Ilias ad Veteris Codicis Veneti Fidem Recensita (Paris, 1788), xxxiv.
“I will send”: Robert Southey, ed., The Works of William Cowper (London, 1836), vol. 6, p. 266.
Friedrich August Wolf: Wolf, a highly irritable man, claimed never to have had a dream in his life. See Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 265.
“No such person”: Thomas De Quincey, “Homer and the Homeridae,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Oct. 1841, 411–27.
“sovereign poet”: Dante, Inferno IV.88.
“was dumb to me and I am deaf to it”: E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 136.
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. (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 2003), 296ff.
brought to Italy: L. Labowsky, Bessarion’s Library and the Biblioteca Marciana—Six Early Inventories (Rome: Sussidi Eruditi, 1979).
Flinders Petrie found: William M. Flinders Petrie, Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe (London, 1889). Plate xix shows many of these objects.
“The floating sand”: Ibid., chapter 5, on the papyri, written by Archibald Sayce, p. 39.
“The roll had belonged”: Ibid., p. 35.
This Hawara Homer: P. Hawara 24–28 (Bodleian Libr., Gr. Class. A.1 (P)). Iliad I.506–10, II.1–877, with many lacunae. http://ipap.csad.ox.ac.uk/Hawara-bw/72dpi/Hawara_Homer%28viii%29.jpg.
“the grandeur of the dooms”: Keats, Endymion, book 1, 20–21.
Phaeacians: A mythical people, not to be confused with the Phoenicians, an ancient civilization with its origins on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in modern Lebanon and Syria. Odyssey IX.8–10.
“Homer is the greatest”: Plato, The Republic, 607 a 2–5.
“Just as a poppy”: Iliad VIII.306–8.
“to a place”: Ibid., VIII.491.
In Troy itself: The Venetus A scholia on this passage are analyzed by Graeme Bird in “Critical Signs—Drawing Attention to ‘Special’ Lines of Homer’s Iliad in the Manuscript Venetus A,” in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, ed. Casey Dué (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 112–14.
“dogs, carried by the fates”: Iliad VIII.526–40; combination of Murray/Dimock and Fagles VIII.617–28.
“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.
Alexandrian scholars: See Richard P. Martin, “Cretan Homers: Tradition, Politics, Fieldwork,” Classics@ 3 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012).
“The further back”: Casey Dué, “Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad,” in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, 25.
“young, headstrong”: S. Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1922), 142.
Would a man: Ibid., 9, referring to Odyssey IX.483, 540. But see the footnote on pp. 350–51 of The Odyssey, Murray/Dimock (1999), which justifies Homer’s apparent mistake by explaining that between the two mentions of the rudder on Odysseus’s ship, the Greeks had turned the ship around. The ship of course only had a rudder, or steering oar, at the stern, but within the course of the story, the ship was facing in two different directions.
“killed many men”: David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), letter no. 431, January 31, 1931, pp. 709–10.
in fact the Baltic: Felice Vinci, Omero nel Baltico, with introductions by R. Calzecchi Onesti and F. Cuomo (Rome: Palombi Editori, 1998).
guidebook to the stars: Florence Wood and Kenneth Wood, Homer’s Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded (London: John Murray, 1999).
Homer was from Cambridgeshire: Iman Wilkens, Where Troy Once Stood, 2nd ed. (London: Rider, 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 (Brussels, 1883).
Henriette Mertz: Henriette Mertz, The Wine Dark Sea: Homer’s Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic (Chicago: self-published, 1964).
everywhere and nowhere: M. L. West, ed. and trans., Lives of Homer, 433.
“The people of Ios”: Ibid., 435.
“For you were born”: Ibid., 413. Pseudo-Plutarch is quoting the epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica, writing ca. 20 BC.
He is the embodiment: See, for example, ibid., 429.
“U re u re na-nam”: Quoted in M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61.
“attend to what”: J. Black, “Some Structural Features of Sumerian Narrative Poetry,” in Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural?, ed. M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 71–101.
One more story: See West, Lives of Homer, 399, 411, 421–23, 437–39, 441–43, 447–49, for versions of this story.
“Here the earth”: Ibid., 448.
5: FINDING HOMER
“the purple on account”: Eustathius VI.8, quoted in M. L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75; impossibly expensive editions of Eustathius commentaries are M. van der Valk, ed., Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem Pertinentes ad Fidem Codicis Laurentiani Editi, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1971–1987).
“Remember me”: H. G. Evelyn-White, trans., Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1914), vol. 57, pp. 165ff.
“a well-girt man”: John Boardman, Excavations in Chios, 1952–1955: Greek Emporio (London: British School at Athens, 1967), supplementary vols., no. 6, pp. iii–xiv, 5.
“wretched throughout”: Ibid., pp. iii–xiv, 4.
If Homer was an ancient inheritance: It may feel a little awkward referring to Homer as “it,” but that awkwardness reflects the question at the heart of this book. Is Homer to be thought of as an author or a cultural phenomenon? A man or a society? Or a sequence of societies? The discomfort we feel is the point. If he is an ancient inheritance, then “he” must be an “it.”
“For masterpieces are not single or solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”—Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.
Giorgio Buchner: Giorgio Buchner, “Recent Work at Pithekoussai (Ischia), 1965–71,” Archaeological Reports 17 (1970–1971), 63–67; D. Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); G. Buchner and D. Ridgway, Pithekoussai, La necropoli: Tombe 1–723. Scavate dal 1952 al 1961 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1993).
“to monkey about”: Catherine Connors, “Monkey Business: Imitation, Authenticity, and Identity from Pithekoussai to Plautus,” Classical Antiquity 23, no. 2 (Oct. 2004), 179–207.
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.
“will lick the blood”: Iliad XXI.122–27.
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 shoulder blade 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 106, no. 2 (Apr. 2002), 187–227.
“someone whose name”: From Kate Monk, Onomastikon (1997). http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/Ancient-World/Greece/Male.html.
Eighth-century inscriptions: Rufus Bellamy, “Bellerophon’s Tablet,” Classical Journal 84, no. 4 (Apr.–May 1989), 293.
but witty remarks: Ibid., 299.
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 orcheston 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 27 (1988), 65–86.
during a passage: Iliad XI.632–37.
giant unliftable cups: M. L. West, “Grated Cheese Fit for Heroes,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998), 190–91.
bronze cheese graters: D. Ridgway, “Nestor’s Cup and the Etruscans,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16 (1997), 325–44.
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 15, no. 1 (Apr. 1996), 77–112.
6: HOMER THE STRANGE
essentially oral: M. S. Edmondson, Lore: An Introduction to the Science of Folklore and Literature (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 323.
“a sequel of songs”: R. Bentley, Remarks Upon a Late Discourse of Free Thinking (London, 1713).
“quiet in manner”: William C. Greene, “Milman Parry (1902–1935),” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 71, no. 10 (Mar. 1937), 535–36.
the first to develop: Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), vol. 1, p. x.
“an aura of the Latin Quarter”: Harry Levin, “Portrait of a Homeric Scholar,” Classical Journal 32, no. 5 (Feb. 1937), 259–66.
“How can we grasp”: Renan’s essay on L’Avenir de Science (Paris, 1892), 292, quoted in Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2, 409.
Here … is an English hexameter: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), line 1.
Just under a third: There are 9,253 repetitive lines out of a total of 27,803.
and so on through the whole cast: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 39.
“The poetry … was not one”: Ibid., 425.
“Darwin of Homeric scholarship”: Ibid., xxvi.
“a machine of memory”: James I. Porter, “Homer: The Very Idea,” Arion, 3rd ser., 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002), 57–86.
up to 494: Steve Reece, “Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory,” Classical World 93, no. 2, Homer (Nov.–Dec. 1999), 185–99; M. M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena (Hildesheim: 1984), 206; M. W. Edwards, The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), vol. 5, p. 55.
But for Parry: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 21.
“The tradition is”: Ibid., 450.
“One’s style should”: Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1404 b 10.
“genuine poetry”: T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber, 1999), 238.
not originally a written: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, xxiii–xxiv.
You have your formulas: Ibid., 448.
the overused recourse: Ibid.
almost exactly a ton: http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html.
“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.
“Finally Avdo came”: Ibid.
“It takes the full strength”: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 457.
Each singer sang: Ibid., 458, 460.
In June 1935: Halil Bajgoric, “The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey,” Parry, no. 6699. www.oraltradition.org/static/zbm/zbm.pdf.
“The moment he cherished”: Harry Levin, “Portrait of a Homeric Scholar,” Classical Journal 32, no. 5 (Feb. 1937), 259–66.
“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.
“The verses and the themes”: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 449.
They asked one singer: John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 43–44.
“What is, let’s say”: Ibid., 44.
“Plato thought nature”: W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” VI. 1–2, The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928).
“The more I understand”: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 451 (written in Jan. 1934), quoted in Richard Janko, “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts,” Classical Quarterly, new ser., 48, no. 1 (1998), 1–13.
written much later: Lord, The Singer of Tales.
“It was the wet spring”: A conversation I reported before, in Sea Room (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 292.
everything in his songs: Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 44; Parry, Conversation 6598 (same conversation as the words/phrases).
“making the wince”: http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_NOTOPOULOS1.html; G. N. Antonakopoulos, “Mia Agnosti Seira Diskon Ellinikis Mousikis” (in Laïko Tragoudi, no. [2005], 16–19); see turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/files/arion_odysseus.doc.
He found Sfakia: James A. Notopoulos, “The Genesis of an Oral Heroic Poem,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 3 (1960), 135–44.
the opposite conclusion: Maartje Draak, “Duncan MacDonald of South Uist,” Fabula 1 (1957), 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 27, no. 1 (2012), 109–60.
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.”
“polished, shapely”: http://calumimaclean.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html.
On analysis: Draak, “Duncan Macdonald of South Uist.”
ethnographers have discovered: Douglas Young, “Never Blotted a Line? Formula and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod,” Arion 6, no. 3 (Fall 1967), 279–324.
“had in his head”: Ibid.
7: HOMER THE REAL
“the terrible noise”: Iliad VI.105.
“As the generation”: From E. R. Lowry Jr., “Glaucus, the Leaves, and the Heroic Boast of Iliad VI.146–211,” in The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to E. Townsend Vermeule, ed. J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris (1995; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 193; combined with Fagles, Iliad VI.171–75.
“as many as the leaves”: Iliad II.468.
“Near the city”: Ibid., II.811–14 (Murray/Wyatt, slightly adapted).
Epic poetry serves us: Jonas Grethlein, “Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and the Odyssey,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 128 (2008), 27–51.
“such as will remain”: Iliad III.287.
the Muse provides: Odyssey VIII.479–81.
in the same class: Iliad IX.364.
Achilles’s iron heart: Ibid., XX.372. This is a translation of the phrase aithōni sidērō, which might also mean more prosaically “shining iron.”
a profoundly ancient world: See Susan Sherratt, “Archaeological Contexts,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 119–42.
his team had found six hundred: C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, vol. 1, The Buildings and Their Contents (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 6, 95–100; C. W. Blegen and K. Kourouniotis, “Excavations of Pylos, 1939,” American Journal of Archaeology 43 (1939), 569.
No one could guess: Ione Mylonas Shear, “Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World? A Tale of Seven Bronze Hinges,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998), 187–89.
A piece of firewood: Christoph Bachhuber, “Aegean Interest on the Uluburun Ship,” American Journal of Archaeology 110, no. 3 (July 2006), 345–63.
a moment from the Iliad: Iliad VI.119–236.
“he quickly sent”: Ibid., VI.168–70.
What does this description: T. R. Bryce, “The Nature of Mycenaean Involvement in Western Anatolia,” Historia 38 (1989), 13–14; Rufus Bellamy, “Bellerophon’s Tablet,” Classical Journal 84 (1989), 289–307; Shear, “Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World?”; Byron Harries, “‘Strange Meeting’: Diomedes and Glaucus in Iliad 6,” Greece and Rome 40 (1993), 133–47; T. R. Bryce, “Anatolian Scribes in Mycenaean Greece,” Historia 48 (1999), 257–64.
It is a tiny: 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 with elaborate and comfortable set-ups at Pylos and Sparta, full of warmth and ritualized 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 colored by its transmission through the palace centuries of the Mycenaean period, where the cultural expectations of a great man’s equipment had come to include a palace establishment.
It is not the world: 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” (Iliad 2.569–70), polychrysos, “rich in gold” (Iliad 11.46) and, like Troy, euruaguia, “with broad streets” (Iliad 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 they 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 dramatizes.
“floats all through”: Emily Townsend Vermeule, “Jefferson and Homer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137, no. 4, 250th anniversary issue (Dec. 1993), 689–703.
in many parts earlier: M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988), 151–72.
but the Iliadic words: Ibid.
“There are in all”: Quoted in Ernst Meyer, “Schliemann’s Letters to Max Müller in Oxford,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 82 (1962), 24, 92.
he identified the warriors: Schliemann claimed in a telegram to a Greek newspaper that on exposing one of the jewel-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: Profile, 2006], 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, mustachioed 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, The Tomb of Agamemnon, 79, for an illustration of the gold mask from Shaft Grave IV of Grave Circle A, Mycenae, 1550–1500 BC.)
very like the world: 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 form of interment is found all over the Indo-European world but not in Greece, at least until the eighth century BC (see H. L. Lorimer, “Pulvis et Umbra,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 53 [1933], 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 J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, eds., Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1997), 151.
“the slayers and the slain”: Iliad XI.83–162.
“ungentle is”: Ibid., XI.137: ameiliktos d’op akousan.
“more loved by the vultures”: Ibid., XI.162.
“And just as when”: Ibid., XI.269–72 (Murray/Wyatt, adapted).
“As when the open sea”: Ibid., XIV.16–20 (Lattimore, adapted).
“Philologists often dislike”: Vermeule, “Jefferson and Homer.”
“He speaks”: Iliad XVI.856–57, XXII.362–63.
The difference: Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Oakland: University of California Press, 1979), 9, 10. “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, December 19, 1972. The claim that the weight of the soul is twenty-one grams was first made in 1901 by a group of American doctors, most prominently Duncan MacDougall of Massachusetts, who carried out experiments reported in the New York Times in March 1907.
8: THE METAL HERO
Parys Mountain: For a full account of Parys Mountain, see Bryan D. Hope, A Curious Place: The Industrial History of Amlwch (1550–1950) (Wrexham: Bridge Books, 1994).
In about 8000 BC: B. W. Roberts, C. P. Thornton and V. C. Piggott, “Development of Metallurgy in Eurasia,” Antiquity 83 (2009), 1012–22.
Only then did someone: Evgenii N. Chernykh, Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: The Early Metal Age, trans. Sarah Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
It became a world: Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 108–9, 114, 123–24.
“The broad picture”: Richard J. Harrison, Symbols and Warriors: Images of the European Bronze Age (Bristol: Western Academic and Specialist Press, 2004).
patterns that recur: See Kristiansen and Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society, passim.
Were these movements: Ibid., 142–250.
The teeth of an early Bronze Age man: A. P. Fitzpatrick, The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen (Salisbury: Trust for Wessex Archaeology, 2011).
Chemical analysis: See online report at www.wessexarch.co.uk/projects/kent/ramsgate.
It seems inescapable: Stephen Oppenheimer, “A Reanalysis of Multiple Prehistoric Immigrations to Britain and Ireland Aimed at Identifying Celtic Contributions,” in Celtic from the West, ed. B. Cunliffe and J. T. Koch (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 142.
A different, nonurban: Philip L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126ff.
“They clothe their bodies”: Iliad XIV.384ff.
“as snug as a gun”: Seamus Heaney, “Digging,” from Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber, 1966).
“doupēsen de pesōn”: E.g., Iliad IV.504, XVII.50.
their life dependent: See Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Oakland: University of California Press, 1979), 99–101, 112–15.
Adolf Schulten: A. Schulten, Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae (Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 1922), vol. 1, p. 90.
Inner and outer landscapes: Circe’s description at Odyssey X.510. Odysseus comes to the shores of Hades at Odyssey XI.22.
“flutter through his fingers”: Ibid., XI.206–8.
“Never try to sweeten death”: Ibid., XI.408ff.
the ghost says through his tears: It’s not certain that the hero was weeping—olophuromai usually means “lament, be sad”—but this is likely to be the sense.
“like consuming fire”: Iliad XX.372.
“But tell me”: Odyssey XI.491.
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,” which 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 II.ii.457–61)
“So I spoke”: Odyssey XI.538–40 Fagles, XI.613–16.
“Set up your mast”: Ibid., X.506–7 (Murray/Dimock, adapted slightly).
“But when in your ship”: Ibid., X.508–12 (Murray/Dimock).
“There into the ocean”: Ibid., X.513–15 (Murray/Dimock).
“they stowed their gear and laid the mast in the hollow hulls”: Odyssey XI. 20.
there is a museum: www.parquemineroderiotinto.com/.
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), 41–62; for bronze mining, see Ben Roberts, “Metallurgical Networks and Technological Choice: Understanding Early Metal in Western Europe,” World Archaeology 40, issue 3 (2008), 354–72; Anthony F. Harding, European Societies in the Bronze Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–241.
In Cornwall: M. A. Courtney, “Cornish Folk-Lore,” part 3, Folk-Lore Journal 5, no. 3 (1887), 177–220; James C. Baker, “Echoes of Tommy Knockers in Bohemia, Oregon, Mines,” Western Folklore 30, no. 2 (Apr. 1971), 119–22.
“called the little miners”: Georgius Agricola, De Animantibus Subterraneis (Freiburg, 1548).
“represent man’s inner universe”: Ronald Finucane, Appearances of the Dead (London: Junction Books, 1982).
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.”
“When it comes to”: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 18–20.
in his catalog: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors. The stelae in the Archaeological Museum in Badajoz represent perhaps the richest of all collections. Others are in Córdoba, Huelva, Seville and Madrid, and in Portugal.
topped and mended with thorns: Odyssey XIV.10.
None of this is different: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, 12, 24.
“red with the blood”: Iliad XVIII.538.
“fruit in wicker baskets”: Ibid., XVIII.568.
“the perfect circle”: Menelaus’s, for example, in Iliad XVII.6.
obsessed with male beauty: M. Eleanor Irwin, “Odysseus’s ‘Hyacinthine Hair’ in Odyssey 6.231,” Phoenix 44, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 205–18.
“who held his head”: Iliad VI.509–10.
“His strength can do nothing”: Ibid., XXI.316–18.
“Great Priam entered in”: Ibid., XXIV.477–79.
“roused in Achilles”: Ibid., XXIV.507–8.
“And they come”: Ibid., IX.185ff.
Archaeologists working: http://www.aocarchaeology.com/news/the-lyre-bridge-from-high-pasture-cave.
It seems unlikely: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, 104.
A huge warrior figure: Ibid., 298–99; Catalog number C80, found at Ategua, Córdoba. Now in the Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Córdoba.
“Ah Sokos”: Iliad XI.450–55 (Lattimore, adapted).
“He is a unique”: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, 116.
“Hector … talk not”: Iliad XXII.261–67.
“There are no oaths”: Iliad XXII.262–67.
“the heroes gave orders”: Harrison, Symbols and Warriors, 116.
9: HOMER ON THE STEPPES
The origins of the Greeks: J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989).
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 62 (1967), 77–105.
Right in the middle: Odyssey XI.119–37.
“You must go out”: Ibid., XI.121–30, Fagles, XI.138–49.
“in the ebbing time”: Odyssey XI.136.
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, 95.
“Our land”: Plato, Critias.
it is possible: M. L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42.
“the smoke ascending”: Lattimore, Iliad XXI.522–23.
the speech he makes: Iliad IX.308–409.
“rich with fat”: Ibid., IX.205–8.
Odysseus then lists: Ibid., IX.264–98.
“Let him submit”: Ibid., IX.160.
“the greediest”: Ibid., I.122.
“As I detest the doorways”: Lattimore, Iliad XI.312–14.
“Hateful in my eyes”: Iliad IX.378ff.
“All the wealth”: Ibid., IX.401–2.
“Cattle and fat sheep”: Lattimore, Iliad IX.405–9.
These questions: See: Adam Parry, “The Language of Achilles,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 87 (1956), 1–7; M. D. Reeve, “The Language of Achilles,” Classical Quarterly, new ser., 23, no. 2 (Nov. 1973), 193–95; Steve Nimis, “The Language of Achilles: Construction vs. Representation,” Classical World 79, no. 4 (Mar.–Apr. 1986), 217–25; W. Donlan, “Duelling with Gifts in the Iliad: As the Audience Saw It,” Colby Quarterly 24 (1993), 171; Dean Hammer, “Achilles as Vagabond: The Culture of Autonomy in the ‘Iliad,’” Classical World 90, no. 5 (May–June 1997), 341–66.
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 and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 138, especially 220ff.
“phrater”: This word, from the same root as the others, in fact means something like “clansman” in Greek. The usual Greek word for brother is adelphos, meaning “from the same womb.”
words that have been transmitted: For an overview of the Indo-European world, see Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
the same word at root: See Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European, 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.
A verb for the driving: J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 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,” for which the Greek word is a hecatomb.
It seems as if: Ibid., 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 (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1973).
The word for marry: Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, 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.”
That original compound word: Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European, 323.
In other languages: Bernard Comrie, Tense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
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, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
both descended from: Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European, 134.
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 142 (1995), 372–78. Images of horses on Celtic Iron Age coinage (the illustration is of a gold stater coined by the Gaulish Parisii ca. 70–60 BC) draw as much on that tradition as on Mediterranean examples.
a place called Sintashta: Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language, 371–411.
they might have been: Ibid., 371–411, 452–57.
it is possible for one man: Iliad X.505.
at the funeral games: The chariot race at Patroclus’s funeral games is at ibid., XXIII.286–534.
camp build for many days: They took nine days bringing in the timber for Hector’s funeral pyre. Ibid., XXIV.783–84.
both Poseidon and Athene: M. Detienne and A. B. Werth, “Athena and the Mastery of the Horse,” History of Religions 11, no. 2 (Nov. 1971), 161–84.
“a prize-winning horse”: Iliad XXII.22.
whiter than snow: Ibid., X.436, 547.
“like a horse”: Ibid., XV.263ff.
The Trojans sacrifice: Ibid., XXI.132.
the horse dominates the names: Grace H. Macurdy, “The Horse-Taming Trojans,” Classical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Jan. 1923), 50–52.
tells Telemachus: Odyssey IV.271ff.
“dear, steadfast heart”: Ibid., IV.240.
The second time: Ibid., VIII.499ff.
“his whole body”: Aeneid VI.497–99.
“As a woman weeps”: Odyssey VIII.523–32 (Lattimore, fundamentally).
“Those who had dreamed”: Simone Weil, L’Iliade ou le poème de la force. See Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 3.
the word Homer uses: Iliad XIII.393.
“We did not dare”: Edwin Muir, “The Horses,” from One Foot in Eden (London: Faber, 1956).
Sleep sits: Iliad XIV.290.
beautiful as a star: Ibid., VI.399–403.
like cattle stepping: Ibid., XX.495.
“a snowy mountain”: Ibid., XIII.754.
Usatovo, near Odessa: D. Ya. Telegin and David W. Anthony, “On the Yamna Culture,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 3 (June 1987), 357–58.
a world not of palaces: Katarzyna Ślusarska, “Funeral Rites of the Catacomb Community: 2800–1900 BC: Ritual, Thanatology and Geographical Origins,” Baltic-Pontic Studies (Poznań) 13 (2006).
Scholars have pursued: For many of these references, see M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988), 151–72.
as Nestor tells: Iliad II.362.
phrase that recurs repeatedly: Iliad II. 159, Odyssey III.142.
ep’ eurea nota thalasses: Ibid., XX.228, et cetera.
“He harnessed to the chariot”: Ibid., XIII.23ff.
When Aeneas is remembering: Ibid., XX.217.
“They would play”: Ibid., XX.225.
“It is by cunning”: Ibid., XXIII.316–18, 325.
fast-running ships: Odyssey IV.707–8.
“Just as in a field”: Ibid., XIII.81ff.
beautiful metal dogs: Ibid., VII.91–94.
robotic golden girls: Iliad XVIII.372ff.
“and the spearhead”: Ibid., V.65ff (Lattimore and Fagles combined/altered).
“Who understands how”: Iliad V.60ff (Lattimore and Fagles combined/altered).
At this most fundamental level: 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, 371–411, 452–57.
They can only have arrived: Thomas F. Strasser et al., “Stone Age Seafaring in the Mediterranean, Plakias Region for Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Habitation of Crete,” Hesperia 79 (2010), 145–90.
“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: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
And above all: Ibid., 345.
Topsail, Riptide: Fagles, Odyssey VIII.130–39.
“Our ships can sail”: Odyssey VIII.556–63.
“drastically shrunk”: Broodbank, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades, 345.
Menelaus remembers: Odyssey III.158.
It was fast ships: Iliad VII.467–75.
It is the ships: Ibid., XV.502ff.
10: THE GANG AND THE CITY
“the abandoned weapons”: Iliad X.469.
dog-eyed: Ibid., I.159.
“the most savage man alive”: Ibid., I.146.
“shaggy breasts”: Ibid., I.189.
“black blood”: Ibid., I.303.
“the wives and daughters”: Ibid., VI.237–38 (adapted from Murray/Dimock, Loeb).
“that most beautiful house”: Ibid., VI.242–49 (adapted from Fagles).
“Let no man”: Ibid., II.354–55 (adapted from Fagles).
formulaic adjectives: Ibid., II.540; rocky Aulis is at II.496, Eteonus has many ridges at II.479 and Orchomenos is very sheepy at II.605.
They love their land: Ibid., XIV.120.
phrase that is repeated: See, for example, Iliad XII.243, XXIV.500.
“And now sweeter”: Ibid., II.450–54.
“Beware the toils”: Ibid., V.487–88, Fagles V.559–60.
264 people: C. B. Armstrong, “The Casualty Lists in the Trojan War,” Greece and Rome 16 (1969), 30–31, gives 238 named casualties and twenty-six unnamed, sixty-one of whom are Greek and 208 Trojan.
“they limp and halt”: Fagles, Iliad IX.502–6.
“Of all that breathe”: Iliad XVII.441–47, Fagles, XVII.509–15.
“Patroclus keeps on sweeping”: Iliad XVI.397–98.
“Hah! look at you!”: Ibid., XVI.745–50.
“Erymas and Amphoterus”: Ibid., XVI.414–18.
“Next he goes”: Iliad XVI.401ff, Fagles, XVI.472ff; see Fagles, Odyssey XII.271–75.
“Ahead, Patroclus”: Christopher Logue, “The Iliad: Book XVI. An English Version,” Arion 1, no. 2 (Summer 1962), 3–26.
The first fighting: Iliad IV.446.
a cause for rejoicing: Ibid., VII.189.
“Now the sun”: Ibid., VII.421–29.
Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright: Bruce A. Jacobs and Richard Wright, Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld, Cambridge Studies in Criminology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
“This desire for payback”: Ibid., 25.
“urban nomads”: Ibid., 12.
“maintaining a reputation”: Ibid., 32.
“Everyone was watching”: Ibid., 76.
“two lions”: Iliad X.279.
“like two rip-fanged hounds”: Ibid., X.360.
The two Greeks: Ibid., X.400.
“strikes the middle”: Ibid., X.454.
Odysseus laughs aloud: Ibid., X.565.
calling them fools: Ibid., II.870, XI.450–55, XVI.833.
“I got your punk ass”: Jacobs and Wright, Street Justice, 35.
“I felt like I was”: Ibid., 36.
“When he smiles”: Colton Simpson with Ann Pearlman, Inside the Crips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 14.
“No one forgets”: Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 140–41.
Neither rape nor fighting: Ibid., 79.
“Troy must have been”: D. F. Easton, J. D. Hawkins, A. G. Sherratt and E. S. Sherratt, “Troy in Recent Perspective,” Anatolian Studies 52 (2002), 75–109.
It sat at one: A city at Troy, at the southern end of the narrows between the Aegean and the Black Sea, might be seen as a strategic alternative to a city on the site of Istanbul, at the other end. Byzantium was founded as a colony by the Greek city of Megara only in 667 BC, by which time the ruined site of Troy was also occupied by a small number of Greek colonists, probably from Lesbos.
The great Trojan treasures: D. F. Easton, “Priam’s Gold: The Full Story,” Anatolian Studies 44 (1994), 221–43.
The silver and gold vessels: Christoph Bachhuber, “The Treasure Deposits of Troy: Rethinking Crisis and Agency on the Early Bronze Age Citadel,” Anatolian Studies 59 (2009), 1–18; Mikhail Treister, “The Trojan Treasures: Description, Chronology, Historical Context,” in The Gold of Troy, ed. Vladimir Tolstikov and Mikhail Treister (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 225–29.
from the very beginning: Susan Heuck Allen, “A Personal Sacrifice in the Interest of Science: Calvert, Schliemann, and the Troy Treasures,” Classical World 91, no. 5, The World of Troy (May–June 1998), 345–54.
“the ruins and red ashes”: E. Meyer, “Schliemann’s Letters to Max Müller in Oxford,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 82 (1962), 75–105.
“three different sets”: D. F. Easton, “Heinrich Schliemann: Hero or Fraud?,” Classical World 91, no. 5, The World of Troy (May–June 1998), 335–43.
Schliemann’s suggestion: J. B. Carter and S. P Morris, eds., The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to E. Townsend Vermeule (1995; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 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.”
The Boston treasure: MFA 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 gotten it from. It may have been looted from an otherwise unknown tomb in Turkey.
four Trojan hammer-axes: James C. Wright, “The Place of Troy Among the Civilizations of the Bronze Age,” Classical World 91, no. 5, The World of Troy (May–June 1998), 356–68.
stolen by Schliemann: Susan Heuck Allen, “A Personal Sacrifice in the Interest of Science: Calvert, Schliemann, and the Troy Treasures,” Classical World 91, no. 5, The World of Troy (May–June, 1998), 345–54.
his son Agamemnon: He became a member of the Greek Chamber of Deputies and briefly the Greek minister in Washington, D.C.
a linen fabric: Elizabeth Wayland Butler, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York: Norton, 1994), 212.
tiny gold beads: Ibid., 213.
“a great cloth”: Iliad III.125ff. The word for cloth can mean “web,” “loom-beam” or even “mast.”
shimmering linen: Ibid., III.140.
“how terribly like”: Ibid., III.158.
“Come over here”: Ibid., III.160.
“The queen herself”: Ibid., VI.287ff.
women and womanliness: See ibid., XVI.100, where the Greek warriors refer to the battlements of Troy as its “veil.”
A woman and a tripod: Ibid., XXII.262–64.
twelve oxen: Ibid., XXIII.702–5.
Hera … prepares herself for love: Ibid., XIV.165ff.
“the whispered words”: Ibid., XIV.217.
“He goes down”: Ibid., II.870.
kill Trojan babies: Ibid., VI.57–60.
Zeus accused Hera: Ibid., IV.35.
“Idomeneus stabs”: Ibid., XVI.345–50.
“like wolves”: Ibid., XVI.156–62.
“Patroclus, you have thought”: Ibid., XVI.825ff.
soaked and clotted: Ibid., XVII.51.
“mauling the kill”: Ibid., XVII.64.
“and give the rest”: Ibid., XVII.125–27, 241.
He promises: Ibid., XVII.241.
the straps of his shield: Ibid., XVII.290.
“oozes out from the wound”: Ibid., XVII.297–98.
under the collarbone: Ibid., XVII.309.
“so that he claws”: Ibid., XVII.315.
a spear in the liver: Ibid., XVII.349.
“with so many pulling”: Ibid., XVII.389–97.
“as on some lion”: Ibid., XVII.540–42.
“who though it is”: Ibid., XVII.570.
“a tawny lion”: Ibid., XVIII.162.
“cut the head”: Ibid., XVIII.175.
wants more than anything: Ibid., V.863. See Tamara Neal, “Blood and Hunger in the Iliad,” Classical Philology 101, no. 1 (Jan. 2006), 15–33.
wants to feast on the body: Iliad XIX.305.
he pops out death: Ibid., XX.386ff.
“These bewildered boys”: Ibid., XXI.29–32 (Lattimore cum Fagles).
“an unlooked for evil”: Iliad XXI.39.
“Now there is not one”: Ibid., XXI.125.
“Die on”: Ibid., XXI.128–29.
“I will not leave off”: Ibid., XXI.225.
“The aged Priam”: Ibid., XXI.525.
“fierce with the spear”: Ibid., XXI.540.
“For they dare”: Ibid., XXI.608.
“shackled by destiny”: Ibid., XXII.5.
“Come into the walls”: Ibid., XXII.57.
“I have looked upon evils”: Lattimore, Iliad XXII.61–76.
“Sweet branch”: Ibid., XXII.87, 82.
like a dream: Ibid., XXII.199.
“and forces him”: Ibid., XXII.198.
“to hack your meat”: Ibid., XXII.346–48.
“and clean out”: Ibid., XXII.327.
“gasping the life breath”: Ibid., XXII.440.
“All of these”: Ibid., XXII.510.
robes, mantles, blankets: Ibid., XXIV.228, 580.
“kisses his hands”: Ibid., XXIV.478ff.
“Priam weeps freely”: Ibid., XXIV.509ff (Fagles, XXIV.594ff).
“They reach down”: Iliad XXIV.630ff.
11: HOMER’S MIRROR
the Egyptian city of Thebes: A place, incidentally, known to Achilles for its riches: Iliad IX.381–84.
fragments of papyrus: For an illustration from Papyrus Chester Beatty IV, see A. H. Gardiner, Hierat Papyri in the British Museum, Third Series: Chester Beatty Gift (London: British Museum, 1935), 41.
Sinuhe’s story: R. B. Parkinson, ed. and trans., The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Egyptian Poems, 1940–1640 BC (1997; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.
“Be a scribe”: Quoted in Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation (London: Routledge, 2007), 163.
Peace had prevailed: Ibid., 62.
“makes those born”: Parkinson, Sinuhe, 31.
It is Indo-European: Carleton T. Hodge, “Indo-Europeans in the Near East,” Anthropological Linguistics 35, no. 1/4, A Retrospective of the Journal Anthropological Linguistics: Selected Papers, 1959–1985 (1993), 90–108.
“numberless are its cattle”: Parkinson, Sinuhe, 31.
“rushy place”: Ibid., 46.
“This is the taste”: Ibid., 29.
“milk in every cooked dish”: Ibid., 32.
“each man subjugating”: Kemp, 32.
“What can establish”: Parkinson, Sinuhe, 33.
“What matters”: Ibid., 34.
“the enduring security”: Kemp, Ancient Egypt, 24.
“I was appointed”: Parkinson, Sinuhe, 42–43.
Timē and Aretē: See Margalit Finkelberg, “Timē and Aretē in Homer,” Classical Quarterly, new ser., 48, no. 1 (1998), 14–28, for a long and elegant discussion of this core Homeric tension.
the bath is always beautiful: J. M. Cook, “Bath-Tubs in Ancient Greece,” Greece and Rome, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (Mar. 1959), 31–41; Steve Reece, “The Homeric asaminthos: Stirring the Waters of the Mycenaean Bath,” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 55, fasc. 6 (2002), 703–8.
“washing his long hair”: Gilgamesh, Epic XI.239–55, trans. in Gary A. Rendsburg, “Notes on Genesis XXXV,” Vetus Testamentum 34, fasc. 3 (July 1984), 361–66.
“wash yourselves”: Genesis XXXV.2.
“daughters of the springs”: Odyssey X.350.
“brought in the water”: Odyssey X.357–67 (Lattimore/Murray/Dimock).
“mind wandering”: Ibid., X.374.
The Hittites were: See J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
“in the city of Urikina”: Gary Beckman, ed., Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed., SBL Writings from the Ancient World series (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999), 113.
“never suffer strangers gladly”: Odyssey VII.32.
ptoliporthos Odysseus: Ibid., VIII.3.
prēktēres: Ibid., VIII.162.
“Strangers, who are you?”: Ibid., IX.252–54.
“much-wandering pirates”: Ibid., XVII.425.
“From Ilium the wind”: Ibid., IX.39–42.
In about 1350 BC: Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 26.
“a low-born”: Ibid., 31.
“Furthermore this sister”: Ibid., 32.
“When you see a palace woman”: Ibid.
“If the King”: Ibid., 106.
it is now generally accepted: Hans G. Güterbock, “Hittites and Akhaeans: A New Look,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 128, no. 2 (June 1984), 114–22.
“The father of My Majesty”: Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 154.
“the untrembling”: Martin L. West, “Atreus and Attarissiyas,” Glotta 77 (2001), 262–66.
A letter also survived: Adrian Kelly, “Homer and History: ‘Iliad’ 9.381–4,” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 59, fasc. 3 (2006), 321–33.
Hittite scholars: Güterbock, “Hittites and Akhaeans: A New Look,” 128 (1984), 114–22.
“People are treacherous”: Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 90.
it is clear: T. Dothan, The Philistines and Their Material Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); T. Dothan and M. Dothan, People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992); L. E. Stager, “The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185–1050 BCE)” in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, ed. T. E. Levy (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995), 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).
at its symbolic climax: The David and Goliath story is in 1 Samuel, chapter XVII. For a brilliant discussion of it, see Azzan Yadin, “Goliath’s Armor and Israelite Collective Memory,” Vetus Testamentum 54, fasc. 3 (July 2004), 373–95.
six feet nine inches tall: See J. Daniel Hays, “Reconsidering the Height of Goliath,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, no. 4 (Dec. 2005), 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 was 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 104 (2009), 233–77.
“Why do you”: 1 Samuel XVII.8–10 (New English Bible).
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.
“When Saul and the Israelites”: 1 Samuel XVII:11.
“Morning and evening”: Ibid., XVII.16 (New English Bible/King James Bible).
“Who is he”: Ibid., XVII:26.
“I cannot go”: Ibid., XVII.39–40 (New English Bible/King James Bible).
“And the Philistine came on”: Ibid., XVII. 42–44 (New English Bible/King James Bible).
“and all the world”: Ibid., XVII.46–47 (New English Bible).
“And David put”: Ibid., XVII. 49 (King James Bible).
12: HOMER’S ODYSSEY
“fall like winter snowflakes”: Odyssey XII.187.
“tossing backwards and forwards”: Ibid., XX.25.
“at which any immortal god”: Ibid., V.72–73.
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,” PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011, online at http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2670/; David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34–35.
“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.
“swooping down”: Odyssey V.50–53 (combination of Fagles, Lattimore).
Hermes does everything: Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and Geographical Distance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 111ff.
“Sleep never falls on his eyelids”: Odyssey V.271.
“the axis always fixed”: Ibid., V.274.
“reaching towards him”: Ibid., V.281.
“death’s decision”: Ibid., V.326.
Seabirds are too beautifully present: For birds in Homer, see J. MacLair Boraston, “The Birds of Homer,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 31 (1911), 216–50; Sylvia Benton, “Note on Sea-Birds,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 92 (1972), 172–73; Paul Friedrich, “An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer’s Odyssey,” American Anthropologist, new ser., 99, no. 2 (June 1997), 306–20.
“the most beautiful ankles”: Odyssey V.33.3.
“like a diving tern”: Odyssey V.353.
The earth shaker: Ibid., V.367.
“Just like the kind of joy”: Ibid., V.394–99.
kai dē doupon akouse: Odyssey V. 401–3.
“Spent to all use”: George Chapman’s translation of Odyssey, V.454–55.
“heartsick on the open sea”: Odyssey I.4.
“from his thigh”: Odyssey X.321.
“her surpassingly beautiful”: Ibid., X.347.
“lay in the sea-Lord’s loving waves”: Odyssey XI.306.
“his story held them”: Ibid., XI.334 (Fagles translation, XI.379).
“Many were the people”: Odyssey I.3.
“for his return”: Ibid., I.13.
“the fascinating imaginative realm”: Quoted by Richard Rorty in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (1992), from Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999).
“the sweetest place”: Odyssey IX.34 (Fagles translation, IX.38).
“rocky Ithaca”: Odyssey XXI.346.
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 91 (1996), 301–17.
“bends to kiss”: Odyssey XIII.354.
an Assyrian relief: See, e.g., Julian Reade, Assyrian Sculpture (1983; reprint, London: British Museum, 1998), fig. 57, p. 54.
“there is nothing sweeter”: Odyssey IX.28.
“She withers”: Ibid., XIII.430–33.
“Knossos, where Minos reigned”: Ibid., XIX.172–78.
When she appears: Ibid., XVI.415 for Penelope standing by column; XX.42 for her shining among women.
Artemis and Aphrodite: Ibid., XVII.37, XIX.54.
“the nightingale”: Ibid., XIX.518–24.
Like all the great women in Homer: Penelope with well-balanced mind, ibid., XVIII.249; weeping, XIX.209; weaving, XVII.97, XIX.128; with cloths, XIX.232, 255; and veil, XX.65.
a queen regnant: Penelope as governor, ibid., XIX.106ff.
“grow in goodness”: Ibid., XIX.114.
“Just as a bitch”: Ibid., XX.14–16.
swimming in blood: Ibid., XXII.307.
are repeated here: Ibid., XXII.325.
“like a lion”: Ibid., XXII.401–3.
“He finds them”: Ibid., XXII.383–88.
“They lead him out”: Ibid., XXII.474–77.
“the cable of a dark-prowed ship”: Ibid., XXII.465.
“Just as when”: Ibid., XXII.468–73.
“the well-built bridal chamber”: Ibid., XXIII.178.
“her knees are loosened”: Ibid., XXIII.205–8.
“As when the land”: Ibid., XXIII.233–40.
CONCLUSION: THE BRIGHT WAKE
“spirit of cruelty”: Note to Iliad IV.75 in Pope’s translation; see, for this and the following valuable references to William Blake and Joel Barlow, Michael Ferber, “Shelley and ‘The Disastrous Fame of Conquerors,’” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002), 145–73.
Blake blamed Homer: David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 270.
“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, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), 39.
“There are certain ages”: Susan Sontag, review of Simone Weil, Selected Essays (1962), trans. Richard Rees, New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963.
“Nietzsche, at his worst”: Richard Rorty, “Against Belatedness,” London Review of Books, June 16, 1983, 3–5, a review of Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (1983).
“praised Homer’s enargeia”: Alice Oswald, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (London: Faber, 2011), 1.
“a telling out”: See Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 27.
