TFBT: Thucydides on the Trojan War

The Kosmos Society is welcome again Jeffrey Rusten of Cornell University, Department of Classics, for a CHS Online Open House on Thucydides on Early Greece and the Trojan War.  The event will be streamed live on Thursday, January 11, at 11 a.m. EST, and will be recorded.  You can view the event on the CHS YouTube channel.

For the Open House Professor Rusten invites us to think about and discuss the following questions:

·      How does Thucydides approach the Iliad and think it has historical value?

·      Is his analysis flawed in any way?

·      Is it anachronistic?

·      Is it in any way modern or “scientific”?

I would remind the reader that the Ancient Greeks thought of The Iliad as history.  It was used in court cases.  Thucydides seems to step back and forth across the line of it being fiction or not.  Some of his analysis conforms to similar discussions and his style and analysis is very similar to what I have seen modern scholars do.  He also makes the mistake occasionally of judging bronze age warriors and their civilization by “modern” standards. Specifics below.

 (1.1.2) “And (the Peloponnesian War) was in fact the largest mobilization by Greeks as well as a considerable number of non-Greeks, extending over virtually the entire population. (1.1.3) Preceding ones, including those of the more distant past, although impossible to determine clearly after so much time, were probably not important either as wars or anything else.” Weren’t the Persian Wars (499 – 449 BC) before the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC)?

1.2.5) “Attica on the other hand, because of its barrenness remained free from factions since the most distant past, and had a stable, unchanging population.”  Didn’t Athenians brag of being the only autochthonic population in Greece?

(1.3.1) “I think Greece’s past weakness is demonstrated especially by the fact that, prior to the Trojan War, Greece probably did not unite in any common venture.”  Theban Wars?

(1.8.1) “The island populations were pirates as well, evidently Carians and Phoenicians, because these had settled most of the islands. There is proof: when Delos was purified by the Athenians during this war and all the graves of the dead on the island were removed, more than half were revealed to be Carians”  Interesting, have to learn more about the Carians.

1.9.1) “Agamemnon collected his expedition not so much as the leader of suitors constrained by oaths to Tyndareus in my opinion, but as the preeminently powerful man in Greece at that time;”  I thought that was what everyone thought.

(1.10.4) “He has written that out of 1200 ships those of the Boeotians had 120 men each, those of Philoctetes 50. In my opinion, he is showing the largest and smallest crews, since there is no mention in the Catalogue of Ships of the size of any other ships…(1.10.5) If one contemplates an average between the largest and the small ships it becomes clear that those who went were not many,”  1200 x (120+50/2) = 102,000.  Hundred thousand plus fighting men seems like “many”.

(1.11.1) “The reason was not so much a lack of manpower as a lack of money. Because of inadequate provisioning they not only led too small a force to live off the land while fighting, but even when they had won a victory after landing (because otherwise they would not have built the fortification for their camp) they obviously were unable to use their full fighting strength, but took up farming in the Chersonnese and piracy…”  Well this is all wrong. Piracy is mentioned off-handedly throughout the epic and I don’t’ recall anything about farming.  Plus they were only three days from home.  “T.’s statement is a famous problem for scholars, since In Iliad 7.382-482 this fortification was built only in the tenth year of the war, as the result not of a victory but a military setback. “

(1.11.2) “they would easily have taken the city by winning an open battle … or else by blockading it with a siege they could have conquered Troy with even less time and trouble.”  Well there is a little armchair quarterbacking about the open battle strategy.  As to the blockade idea, this  is an example of the present judging the past by current standards, because it appears from the text of  The Iliad that siege-craft hadn’t been invented yet or that the Greeks had no experience with it.

 

TFBT: Commentary on Pausanias 10.8.1-2

Over at the Kosmos Society the Attican study group just started translating Pausanias 10.8. 1-2.  It is about the formation of the Amphictyonic League.  As in the case of most eponymous heroes, the question is always whether the hero came first or the institution named in his honor .  Pausanias covers both options by saying the league was formed by Amphictyon. Or it got its name from the Greek phrase, ἀμφικτίονες,  “they that dwell round”.

 

The league was a collection of Hellenic (Greek) tribes neighboring Delphi dedicated to the protection and administration of the temple of Apollo there  (and according to Wikipedia,  the temple of  Demeter in Anthele near Thermopylae.) 

 

Amphictyon was the son of Deucalion (the Noah of Greek Mythology), the grandfather of Triptolemus, who Demeter made the daemon presiding over the sowing of grain. (7. 18. 2)  Amphictyon was also the brother to Hellen, ancestor of all the Hellenic tribes.

Greg Nagy from the Center for Hellenic Studies theorizes in “A sampling of comments on Pindar Isthmian 8” that after the European-Greeks victory over the Persians and their Ionian allies (480 BC) we should consider the word “Hellenes” to only apply to non-Ionian Greeks.  However Pausanias writing much later in history (130AD?) includes the Ionians as one of the groups of “Hellenes” in the league.

 

TFBT: Graves and the Judgement of Paris

Over at the Kosmos Society  we were discussing some of Robert Graves' theories (The Greek Myths) I made some passing reference to what was really happening at the “Judgement of Paris” according to Graves.  It occurred to me that I should probably explan that comment.

Graves, following Apollodorus 1.6.3 in a myth that seems to be otherwise unknown. Says at  “ Zeus returned to Olympus and, mounted upon a chariot drawn by winged horses, once more pursued Typhon with thunderbolts. Typhon had gone to Mount Nysa, where the Three Fates offered him ephemeral fruits, pretending that these would restore his vigour though, in reality, they doomed him to certain death…(footnote 3) the Cadmeians of Boeotia (Thebans) seem to have been concerned with preserving the Zeus cult. Typhon’s ‘ephemeral fruits’, given him by the Three Fates, appear to be the usual death-apples. In a proto-Hittite version of the myth the serpent Illyunka overcomes the Storm-god and takes away his eyes and heart, which he recovers by stratagem. The Divine Council then call on the goddess Inara to exert vengeance. Illyunka, invited by her to a feast, eats until gorged; when upon she binds him with a cord and he is despatched by the Storm-god.”    (Graves, The Greek Myths, Typhon, e.)

“All the gods brought gifts to the wedding; notably Mother Earth gave Hera a tree with golden apples, which was later guarded by the Hesperides in Hera's orchard on Mount Atlas…(footnote) 5. A hero, as the word indicates, was a sacred king who had been sacrificed to Hera, whose body was safely under the earth, and whose soul had gone to enjoy her paradise at the back of the North Wind. His golden apples, in Greek and Celtic myth, were passports to this paradise.” (Graves, The Greek Myths; Hera and Her Children, b.)

The problem with Graves’ line of logic on golden apples is that many of his arguments are preceded by the phrase; “the misreading of an icon” (Ganymede 1).  So for example “Similarly, the waiting bride has been misread as Eos by a mythographer… This icon would equally illustrate Peleus’s marriage to Thetis.”  (Ganymede 1), “the myth of Arne’s being blinded… is apparently deduced from the familiar icon that yielded the myths of Danaë, Antiope, and the rest. (Sons of Hellen’s. 2) “The anomaly is perhaps due to a misreading of an icon-sequence” (Alope 1).  And these are just a few examples of a phrase.  Even as a child studying Graves in the reference section of my school library I found the phrase suspciously over-used.

So, Graves interpretation of what is really happening in the Judgement of Paris is that a triad of death-goddesses is giving Paris the gold-apple of immortality, his ticket to the Isle of the Blest.  The price of his unwilting fame, is the destruction of his home-land.

TFBT: Senecas Phaedra III

The Kosmos Society is going to have a reading of the Phaedra  Here are some of my random notes on the play by Seneca.

Observation;

• "835] At last I escaped the realm of eternal night, the dark world which in vast prison-house o’ershades the dead, and scarcely do my eyes endure the longed-for light. Now for the fourth time is Eleusis harvesting the bounty of Triptolemus, as many times has Libra made day equal unto night,"  So Theseus sat on the bench four years? 
• No gods on stage.  Is that a Roman thing?  Senecan thing?   No evidence or mention that Diana (Artemis) cared about Hippolytus.  
• One commentator suggests if Theseus has escaped Pluto, Hippolytus has gone to fill his place.
• “THESEUS: Who—say it!—has upended my  honor?”   Not, are you okay?  Not, who did this to you? But, who offended my honor.  Not a nice guy, but we know that from the way he treated Phaedra’s sister, Adriane

Beautiful;

• 1128 Seldom does the moist valley suffer the lightning’s blast; but Caucasus the huge, and the Phrygian grove of mother Cybele, quake beneath the bolt of high-thundering Jove. For in jealous fear Jove aims at that which neighbors on high heaven; but the low-roofed, common home ne’er feels his mighty blasts. Around thrones he thunders. 
• Grieving and tears and woe, and on my very threshold sad lamentation? – auspices that well befit a guest from hell.
• And something in its burdened womb this pregnant surge was bearing.  

Hearth vs. Altar

 No more justly did ever any hearth see blood spilled to the bow-holding goddess! Translated by Mark Damen (mark.damen@usu.edu)

 Never has blood been more justly spilled upon thy altar, O goddess of the bow. Translated by Miller, Frank Justus

Hated of Half-breeds

Probably the most despised “barbarian” in Greek mythology is Medea daughter of Aeëtes, king of Colchis.  Medea is also Phaedra’s first cousin.  But  Medea was more than a barbarian princess; she betrayed her father and country, diced up her little brother, convinced the daughters of Pelias to do the same to their father, sacrificed her children on Hera’s altar and tried to poison Phaedra’s husband.  So maybe the classical dislike of Medea had more to do with what she did rather than where she was raised. 

Medea and Phaedra’ mother were raised in Colchis.  The kingdom lies at the back end of the Black Sea up against the Caucasus Mountains.  Alexander Dumas¹ says that Mt. Elbruz of this range “is, says mythological tradition, the rock to which Prometheus was chained”.  This was the eastern edge of the universe in Ancient Greek thinking. 

To the North of this distant,  barbarian land lays the home of the barbarian women called the Amazons.  Hippolytus mother was an Amazon, as we are regularly reminded in the play.  Generally, when a Greek character prays to or swears by some obscure river god, it was the river back home on whose banks they were raised ²   Hence, it is notable that when Hippolytus calls upon a river god to witness Phaedra’s monstrous behavior he doesn’t call upon a local river god, but rather the Tanais of his mother’s homeland. 

I wonder if Seneca’s is hinting at Hippolytus’ mixed ancestry when Hippolytus discusses Phaedra’s mother Pasiphae and her brother the minotaur; “thy monster-bearing mother… did but pollute herself with her shameful lust, and yet her offspring by its two-shaped infamy displayed her crime, though long concealed, and by his fierce visage the hybrid child made clear his mother’s guilt.”  Is there a subtle comparison between the half-breed Hippolytus and the half-breed Minotaur?

Phaedra and then Theseus easily slander the half-breed Hippolytus, “Whence came this infection of infamy in our stock? Was that man nurtured by the land of Greece or by the Scythian Taurus and Colchian Phasis? The breed reverts to its progenitors and debased blood reproduces the primal stock.”

I can think of no “barbarian” other than Medea that is despised in Greek myth nor any prejudice against characters of mixed Greek/Barbarian blood.  Is this hatred of half-breeds a Roman thing? Asenecan thing?

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1.  Adventures in Caucasia, Alexander Dumas,
2. The most famous example being Achilles and the river-god Spercheus n (Iliad 23.141)