The great Greek poets of the eighth century did not owe a debt to contemporary Near Eastern texts.1 They were not the beneficiaries of ‘migrant charismatics’ or foreign poets who had come west, let alone of eastern ‘defectors’ from the Assyrian conquests in the Near East. Their poems’ major ‘eastern’ debt was to a technique adapted by other Greeks, the alphabet. Neither Homer nor (possibly) Hesiod depended on the new alphabetic writing in order to compose his hexameters. The Iliad and Odyssey were essentially oral poems, the last in the ‘oral phase’, but the new ‘Phoenician letters’ enabled both poets’ works to be written down, arguably as dictated versions, and thus survive.2
In the later eighth and especially seventh centuries BC mainland Greek painters would begin to represent monsters and lion-like or snaky figures on Greek pottery in a new ‘Orientalizing’ phase.3 They used the impetus of figures seen on Near Eastern objects and imports to help them to represent figures which existed in Greek myths. They were not copying eastern prototypes exactly so as to bring new non–Greek imports into Greek stories. They were Orientalizing in the full sense, using eastern details in a free way without asserting their underlying meaning, like our painters of Chinese cups for export or makers of furniture in a chinoiserie style. Perhaps for their viewers, such paintings had an exotic eastern feel which evoked a faraway eastern world of unknown animals and legendary monsters. It may be tempting to think that these Greek painters were only following what travellers and storytellers had already done some sixty years earlier, as if the word, here too, preceded the image in early Greek culture. However, Euboeans were not Orientalizing when they amplified the Greek tales of struggles and successions in heaven. They were adding details, they believed, which were told in the east about their same gods and which were supported by the landscape from Syria to Italy. They were not exotic: they were true.
Nonetheless, Near Eastern writers, the Greek poets and their Euboean contemporaries shared a more general way of thinking, one which is visible in the best-known religious text of the eighth-century Near East. Neither culture derived it from the other. It was not Orientalizing. It was a parallel way of making sense of the eighth-century world.
The Euboeans’ mythical thinking was a reasoned attempt to explain and understand. There was no opposition in it between ‘myth’ and ‘reason’. When they relocated myths and interpreted objects and landscapes in mythical terms, they did so on the strength of evidence which they had seen, heard and creatively misunderstood. Sometimes they reasoned from analogy, especially from verbal analogy. In southern Asia, Muksas–Mopsu was the very Mopsus whom they knew already: his religious hesty must be their Greek hestia, or hearth. They were impressed by identical place names, the Luwian–Hittite Erimma or Arimmatta in Cilicia and the Etruscans’ Arim(a) out in the west. They encountered these similarities as Greeks in a culture in which like-sounding words were taken to be omens, good signs from the gods. They were not just playing with puns.
They also inferred the origins of this or that from its name or physical appearance. In Greek literature and religious writings we know this practice as ‘aetiology’, the telling of a story of how something came to be, what we know nowadays as a ‘just so story’.4 The origin described in the story might be the origin of a name or a religious practice, a settlement or a people, a social custom, an object or even a feature of the visible world. The just so story tends to be a story of mythical origins: it does not describe any of its subject’s history or subsequent development over time. Aetiology typifies so many of the Greeks’ hymns to their gods, the stories they tell about their festivals and rituals, the foundation-myths of their cities and their explanations of place names and landscapes connected with their god and his cult. In the eighth century BC, throughout the Greek world, choirs were already singing hymns to their gods and in them, as later, they too would have been telling stories of the ‘origin’ of this or that practice or monument in honour of the god whom they celebrated. Likewise, the Cretans at Delphi told a just so story about their wondrous stone, a story which made it the western world’s first holy relic. However, the first known Greek authors of aetiologies are travelling Euboeans, from c. 780 to 720 BC. Hitherto unrecognized, they stand at the head of a centuries-long sequence of Greek aetiological poems and travel texts, ethnography and antiquarian writings which use just so stories as an appropriate part of their genres.
At Corcyra and Zancle, these Euboeans heard that the pre–Greek place name meant ‘sickle’. Which sickle, then, was it? Surely, they reasoned, it was the ‘sickle of Cronos’, the Great Castrator. On Ischia, they saw clouds of hot steam coming up through the crust of the earth: they heard subterranean, pre-seismic rumbling and on nearby Sicily they saw Etna smoking and flaming. What were they? Their origin was Typhon, who had been transferred from one Arima to another and was the continuing victim of punishment by Zeus. In the plain of Unqi, the Chalcidic peninsula of Pallene and the Bay of Naples, they saw vast bones, the debris of dinosaurs, which lay on or near the surface of the earth. Why were they so big? They were bones of the Giants. Why, then, was the ground by the Bay of Naples so scorched and steaming and why did a spring near the tip of Italy’s heel smell so sulphurous and foul? The Giants had fought there and lost to the gods. Beneath the ground their wounds were oozing.
Once again Homer stands apart. Conspicuously there are no such just so stories in his epics. When the legendary Phaeacians return from transporting Odysseus, their ship is turned to stone by the sea-god Poseidon. The very ship was later claimed to be visible in the harbour at Corcyra, a self-styled candidate for the Phaeacians’ mythical island. In the Odyssey, this miracle is not linked to the future, to explain a Corcyrean landscape which is said to be visible ‘even now’: instead, it is said to conform to an ancient prophecy, looking backwards, not forwards, in the poem’s horizons.5 In Hesiod, by contrast, just so stories proliferate. They explain particular names, the names of the Titans or Pegasus or Aphrodite, who was born from aphros, father Heaven’s foam. They also explain social practices: how mankind received fire, why only the fat and the bones are offered when animals are killed for the gods, how diseases and troubles entered man’s life (they were released on the all-male world by the first woman, heedless Pandora).6 Here, too, Hesiod and his prize-giving Euboeans shared a similar way of looking at the world.
Aetiologies were a very much older feature of Near Eastern texts, and in the eighth century BC they were teeming in one of the texts which underlies our edited book of Genesis. Far from Hesiod, far from these Euboeans’ trail, a way of thinking in terms of origins characterized the Genesis author whom biblical scholars now know as the Yahwist, J. His (not, surely, her) date and place remain disputed, but a widely defended view, which I share, is that J lived and wrote in Jerusalem in the southern kingdom of Judah and that his career belonged in the mid- to late eighth century BC, while the northern kingdom of Israel still existed and thus before 720 BC.7 If so, J is the exact contemporary of the travelling Euboeans and a slightly older contemporary of Hesiod, although he was wholly unknown to them both.
In J’s contributions to the book of Genesis there is the same concern to show the origins of names and places and peoples. Sometimes these origins are secondary to their accompanying story. The siting of Jacob’s vision of the ladder to heaven at Bethel (meaning ‘house of God’) is perhaps an example. So is ‘Babel’, the place of ‘confusion’, where God scattered the peoples of the world and ‘confused’ their speech into separate languages.8 These names’ explanations are parts of the story, but they did not cause the entire story to arise. There would probably have been a story anyway of Jacob’s dream or of the origin of multi-lingual man. Sometimes, however, the story’s existence depends solely on the origin behind it.9 The need for mankind to labour accounts for the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. The names of particular wells in the desert account for the story that Isaac had dug them out on his travels.10
Like Hesiod, J tells just so stories to account for social practices: why men do not speak the same language, or why the pharaoh of Egypt, after Joseph’s advice, still takes a fifth of the harvest in his country.11 There are even scriptural just so stories for antique objects and the smouldering landscape. Just as the Euboeans looked in wonder at an ancient sickle which they discovered in Sicily, so Jews looked in wonder at primitive cutlery and tried to explain it. In the book of Joshua, the Lord God tells Joshua to ‘make thee sharp knives and circumcise the people of Israel’: during their years of wandering in the wilderness their men had escaped the operation. So Joshua ordered a mass circumcision at the place which is now called Gilgal, a name meaning ‘rolling away’, like the rolling back of their foreskins.12 The place name was not solely responsible for the story. In our Greek text of it, translated from a fuller Hebrew text now lost to us, we are told that, when Joshua died, the very knives used in this surgery were buried in his grave at Timnath-serah and ‘remained there unto this day’. Indeed they did: the site was eventually explored and ‘the discovery in 1870 of Stone Age artefacts at Timnath–Serah, the burial-place of Moses’ successor [Joshua], give us a clue to the origins of this tale’.13 Stone knives from the distant past had been found near the presumed site of Joshua’s grave and had intrigued their ancient discoverers. What was their ‘origin’? Why, they must be the very knives with which Joshua had ordered the returning male Israelites to be made into proper Jews.
There are no biblical tales of the bones of Giants, but there is the tantalizing report of Og of Bashan’s gigantic bed: it was a bed of iron, ‘nine cubits long and four cubits wide’. It must, then, have been visible somewhere, perhaps as a platform in the rocks: ‘is it not in Rabbah’, the book of Deuteronomy insists, ‘among the children of Ammon?’14 There was also a famous scorched landscape near the Dead Sea which J had already pondered, the site of ruined Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever had caused this landscape’s destruction? A story of origin arose to explain it. The landscape was a witness to God’s wrath, but why had God been so angry? Because the men of Sodom had been exceptionally sinful. What, then, had been their sin? It must have been sodomy, and not just sodomy but an attempt to force this practice on unwilling strangers. Who were those strangers? They were not any old visitors; they were messengers, surely, of God with whom the men of Sodom had clamoured to have sex.15 The just so story points to different emphases in Greek and Israelite culture. Euboeans explained a burnt landscape by Zeus’s battering of a cosmic monster and his thunderbolting of insolent Giants. J, their contemporary, explained such a landscape in terms of God’s punishment of mortals for attempted male sex with an angel. A visiting Greek god, a Zeus with his male ‘catamite’ Ganymede or an Apollo with his beloved Hyacinthos, would not have been so shocked by the attempt.
From Zancle to Timnath-serah, from the Bay of Naples to Sodom, eighth-century men explained oddities they found in the landscape by inventing just so stories. In scriptural sources those oddities were said to be persisting ‘even unto this day’. Euboeans, too, had had a sense of the prehistory of what they saw, believing them to be items which were persisting from an earlier phase of Zeus’s rule. It is only the accident of survival that not until the ‘Homeric’ hymn to Hermes (perhaps c. 500 BC) do we first meet the phrase ‘as still nowadays’, the phrase which marks out later Greek aetiologies, including those which occurred to the travelling soldier Xenophon as he invented stories of origins (‘still so, even now’) for customs and styles of dress which he had seen personally in the east during his campaigns in the Persian empire.16
The same personal inquiry or historiē, the same appeal to evidence, the same trust in like-sounding names and places were to characterize stories told about foreign items to Herodotus, the ‘father of history’, c. 450–430 BC.17 But this type of Greek story had a longer, unrecognized Greek ancestry, stretching back to Euboeans who had applied its way of thinking across the Mediterranean in an age when aetiology was a way of understanding the world from Ischia to Sodom, from Pallene to the ‘cities of the plain’. This way of thinking was to have a long Greek afterlife, above all in Greek ethnography and subsequent travellers’ tales. Significantly, Herodotus did not construct such just so stories himself. When he included them, it was only on the authority of some of his informants. Some of the tales they told him were tales of origins whose setting was mythical, like the trail which Euboeans traced from east to west. It was not from this trail that history took its origin. They were not tales of a chain of events, extending in explanatory sequences through time.18 Just so stories about origins are not the origin of history, of the telling and writing what really happened, and why.
‘I wish I was here, or I wish I was there’: no Greek minds in the age of Homer had travelled further than eighth-century Euboeans’ but their trail of myths and travel from east to west was a feature only of their lifetimes. After 700 BC the west was no longer so new to the Greeks and the settlers in it did not come with Near Eastern contacts, stories and women still fresh in their company. In the later eighth century BC, while Sargon was building his palaces and garden, Euboea’s two main city-states, Chalcis and Eretria, fought long and hard, unknown to him, and weakened themselves in the major war on their island’s Lelantine plain. In 696 BC Sennacherib’s Assyrians defeated the ships of Euboeans and other ‘Ionian Greeks’ at the battle of the Pyramus river. The Euboean pre-eminence at Al Mina declined and never again were Greek founders in the west to be those who were leaders in the east. The freshness of such contacts had gone, until Alexander extended them into yet more eastern worlds. On the lower slopes of Mount Kasios, cult was still paid, but only to the Greek hero Triptolemus, located there as a ‘searcher’ for the legendary Io. Like her, he was a Greek imposition on a landscape which had formerly been ruled by a very different god.
In this one eighth century, just so stories and lateral thinking had been possible for particular Greeks, the contemporaries of our great Greek epic poems. A rare life was therefore possible, rarer than a life with Isaiah in Israel or with Phoenicians travelling from Tyre to Huelva or even the planters of King Sargon’s Garden Mound. It suggests a final just so story of its own under the care of the goddess Hera in flight.19
A Hipposthenes could have been born then, around 750 BC, to a Euboean father and a non-Greek mother on the site of Mende up in northern Greece, in land which, centuries later, would be filled with Macedonian settlers, the contemporaries of Alexander the Great. As a boy he would learn to sing and play music, dance and ride and begin to use a sword. He would go inland on walks to Pallene to see the vast bones of the Giants, evident relics of their heavenly wars. But then his father Dorippos died and, just as Homer’s Andromache had feared so poignantly for her child, Hector’s son, in the Iliad, Hipposthenes was ‘pushed away’ from the banquets and dinners by boys still more fortunate than himself and sent packing, a wanderer, to his father’s mother’s kin at Chalcis on Euboea.
When he had grown up, in the apsidally shaped house of Hippochares his uncle, he was consigned, as an outsider, to a boat which was to carry wine and oil to his Euboean kin on Chios. It was there, after selling the cargo, that he sat with his family for two successive nights and heard the elderly Homer singing an epic of Odysseus in the megaron hall on the hill at Emporio, pointing with his hand to Euboea across the sea when his Alcinous described it as the furthest point on earth.
He made new guest-friends from Chios who gave him gifts in Homeric style, on the strength of hearing Homer himself. Hipposthenes then travelled on to Cyprus, to the harbour and royal acropolis at Amathus, where he first saw ‘purple-people’, Phoenicians from the Levant. Curious, he sailed on east with the next Euboean ship which visited, carrying the simple, two-handled drinking-cup which his uncle Hippochares had told him to treasure always, a cup with a bird painted near the rim of its brown-orange clay. From Amathus, in less than a day, the boat with the wind behind it put in on the shore of Unqi, at the ‘royal storehouse’ by the Orontes river where yet more wine was unloaded, greetings were exchanged and Hipposthenes was left to fend for himself in the settlement.
He worked the land and he helped with the horses. In the spring he rowed out on piratical raids against the passing Phoenicians and in the summer he joined the troops who fought for Assyria on the route to Hamath. In the autumn he bought fourteen-year-old Anas from his proceeds of the spoils. He made love with her on the seashore and whenever he left on horseback, driving herds of horses to Kinalua and its court inland, she would call him her Master of the Animals and laughingly hold her breasts like the bronze ladies, attendants of the goddess Ishtar, on the brow-band of his horse’s harness, trophies from his raids inland. When he returned she would lie with him and tell him stories of how her family had once been kings of Carchemish but Assyrians had sold her mother into slavery at Kinalua on the Orontes, whence she had been brought for sale at Ahta by the sea. On stormy nights she told him the stories of the gods on the mountain Hazzi beneath which they lay. She had sung them in choirs as a girl on the hill-slopes, the ‘song of kingship’ and the ‘song of the sea’. They were stories of the battles by which Tarhunta–Zeus had come to reign in heaven and of the Great Castrator which had once parted Heaven from Earth, in a way (she promised) in which she would never part him from her.
Sometimes they travelled for a day to the foot of the Box-tree Mountain where bones as big as those of Pallene’s Giants caused Hipposthenes, too, to tell stories of his own. They went down to Greek Posideion on the bay and, by boat, across to the Pyramus river, to a land whose family of kings seemed to be the ‘sons of Mopsus’ and where Anas learned of the rituals which were still performed at a ravine in Arima by the sea. They went down to its awesome cave in autumn, past the flowering saffron crocuses, to see for themselves the lair of the monster in the local songs.
In the next year self-satisfied Assyrian officers arrived on the shore of Unqi and started to talk of ‘assessment’ and demand payments from what they called the king’s ‘karu(n)’. Anas and Hipposthenes decided to leave, following reports of a new home in the west where the people were less aggressive, where wine and oil were readily sold for metals and anyone with skilled, deft fingers could twist and sell gold and silver for kerdos, gain. In the spring, while the cries for ‘Adonai/Adonis’ were being heard in the city of Byblos, they took a Phoenician ship westwards, in return for rowing and payment. They passed the south-west corner of Crete and beached in the bay where ‘a small rock holds back the great waves’ from the protected beach. They went up to the little shrine where they drank wine and poured libations, the Phoenicians to Melqart, the Greeks to Poseidon. They then risked the open sea to Cythera and up to the Ionian islands to Ithaca (not Cephallenia), the home of Odysseus and the suitors of whom Homer had once sung.
It was Hipposthenes’ turn now to tell Anas stories, the stories of Eumaeus and Penelope, while they waited and traded their Near Eastern finger-rings and seals. Like Homer, he amazed her with tales of a neverland beyond, of the Cyclopes and Circe who once turned men into swine. They took a passage into the world beyond them with the next Euboean crew who were travelling north to Corcyra, across to Italy and Sicily and on through the straits to the bay, our Bay of Naples. At Cumae they stopped and sold Anas’ jewellery to the strange Wild Men who came down from the Tiber valley. They bought a plot of land and a horse: they went over to Monkey Island and heard the restless, rumbling Typhon in his second Arima; beyond Cumae they saw the scorched landscape with yet more debris of the Giants. It was here that Anas give birth to a son, Chairippos, who died while still an infant after only three months. They took a spare wine-jar from a batch sent over from Ischia, knocked a hole in its side and inserted their baby’s small body. On it Anas laid the lyre-player seal she had been given in Cilicia, the ‘land of Mopsus’, an amulet against evil spirits as her own north Syrian mother had taught her. They put the jar in a grave and Hipposthenes laid his ‘one-bird’ cup beside it, a tribute to the life which his son would never grow to enjoy.
A cloud lay over Cumae now, and in the following spring Hipposthenes took his Anas off to see Euboea, knowing he could sell the rings of her gold-working and the studded iron belts and helmets which he had looted from Etruscan war-bands in the west. On the straits between Italy and Sicily they stopped at Zancle with thoughts of Odysseus and monstrous Scylla and Charybdis on their minds. A Chalcidian cousin of Hipposthenes had led the Euboean settlers and it was he in person who showed them the site’s most holy relic, the Great Castrator in its pit protected by wooden towers and walls. Returning to the Gulf of Corinth they went up to Delphi to dedicate one of the Etruscan helmets in return for their safe journey. At Delphi they saw the missing link in Anas’ stories, the stone which had once been consumed by Kumarbi–Cronos, and as they looked in amazement they heard the Cretic rhythm of Apollo’s Cretan priests and their chants of ‘Iē Paiēon’.
From Delphi they returned home, across the swirling currents of the narrow Euripus channel to Chalcis where the morale of the fighters was high and ‘one last push’ was expected to end the Lelantine war by Hippion (the month of July). First, there were the funeral-games for Hipposthenes’ young cousin Amphidamas, killed in the recent sea-battle in the gulf. There was a poetic contest in his honour, and Hipposthenes shouted with the best of them for a prize for the ‘boy from Ascra’, Hesiod, and his poem which brought order and hexameter poetry into so much which he and Anas had seen and discussed in the past six years.
The day after, it was back to the battlefield, with Hipposthenes mounted on his fiery horse Phosphoros, his bronze north Syrian harness fixed for him by Anas, his long hair flowing from the back of his head in true Abantic fashion and a fine Chalcidian sword in his hand. He rode into battle, reliving the valour of an epic hero, no longer the sailor but the warrior in combat. He died, killed by an illicit Eretrian archer, but his life had combined ideals of the Iliad and the Odyssey, uniting valour and cunning, shown in combat and journeys by sea.
His companions brought his body home and Anas and his female kin began to mourn him for fourteen days. On the eighth day of distress, Anas died too. The two of them were buried, she in a pit-grave with her family’s antique pendant from Carchemish around her neck, he, after cremation, in two cauldrons of bronze with his bones wrapped in purple cloth and his horse Phosphoros killed and buried in a pit beside him. They lie, as yet unfound, by the East Gate of Chalcis which leads out onto the Lelantine plain.
‘If, indeed, he was ever so…’, as Homer’s Helen and Priam remark so poignantly of their lost loved ones. ‘Ei pot’ eēn ge…’, as if the past might be an illusion. But Hipposthenes’ life was a possible life, not a ‘buried life’, one in which new worlds seemed to open and attest to the stories of the heavenly past, a life indeed, not ‘life, as it were…’