TFBT: The Doloneia

 I finished reading “Interpreting Iliad 10: Assumptions, Methodology, and the Place of the Doloneia within the History of Homeric Scholarship” by Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott.  If I hadn’t thought there was something fishing about the Doloneia before, I do now.  The gist of the article is that every Homeric expert since the beginning of written history (and maybe a few experts before then) doubt the appropriateness of the Book X of the Iliad.  The exception to this rule seem to be less than a handful. 

For those that don’t know the story; Odysseus and Diomedes sneak across enemy lines in the dark, capture and slay a Trojan trying to do the same, kill King Rhesus and his companions in their sleep and steal their horses. 

Hour 25 discussed the “Poetics of Ambush” during the “Nagy and Friends” dialogue yesterday.  As listened, I wondered what the whole point of the Doloneia was plot wise.   I recalled something Warren Beatty said.  Yeah,  Warren Beatty. 

During the filming of the documentary “Truth or Dare” Madonna chose to talk to her doctor on camera rather than privately.  “Beatty chides ‘You don’t want to talk off camera.  You don’t want to live off camera.  There’s nothing to say off camera.  Why would you say something off camera?”  (“Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op” by Kiku Adatto)

Likewise, why would Odysseus and Diomedes do anything “off-camera”?  If the point of epic is “unwilting glory” what is the point of doing anything in the dark.  The Muses can’t see in the dark, even Hecate who lives in darkness carries around a torch or two.  If the poets and your peers can’t see you in action and immortalize the event in word and son, what is the point of doing it?  What is the point of the Doloneia in the song about Achilles building a name, “whose short-lived splendor shall outlast the world.“  (A. G. Butler)

TFBT: Random Notes Hour 13

I am taking The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours online from Harvard with Professor Gregory Nagy.  Here are a few random notes from Hour 13 of the wonderful class.

Od 12:334  “therefore, I (Odysseus) went up inland that I might pray the gods to show me some means of getting away. When I had gone far enough to be clear of all my men, and had found a place that was well sheltered from the wind, I washed my hands and prayed to all the gods.”    Meanwhile his men at 359 “...killed the cows (of the sun-god Helios)and dressed their carcasses; they cut out the thigh bones, wrapped them round in two layers of fat, and set some pieces of raw meat on top of them. ".   Seems like Odysseus and Moses had some of the same issues with the troops and cattle . Ex 24.18 “ And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the mount”  Meanwhile Ex 32.8 “They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto.”  What is it about unsupervised mobs and cows?

Nagy’s translation of Od 24.59 "weeping piteously, and they [the Nereids] clothed you [ Achilles] in immortalizing clothes... You were burning while clothed in the clothes of the gods, ".   I read once that God gave Adam and Eve animal skins to wear, represents giving their souls bodies.  Hence, Nagy’s “immortalizing clothes”  would represent the gods giving Achilles a body for his immortal life

Solon speaking to Croesus " just as no land is self- sufficient in what it produces. Each country has one thing but lacks another; whichever has the most is best. Just so no human being is self-sufficient; each person has one thing but lacks another. Herodotus 1.32

And Pontos begat trusty and truthful Nereus, eldest indeed of his children, but men call him old, because he is unerring as well as mild, neither does he forget the laws, but knows just and gentle purposes.  Theogony 234

“   "Where, from the standpoint of Homeric poetry, we never find out who's right

and who's wrong, because Homeric poetry doesn't use those criteria, those critical ways of judging things of what's right and what's wrong, what's dikaion, and what's not, what is dike, and what is hubris. In Homeric poetry, you don't have that.”
Nagy 13.CB22.1  in the textbook;  The Ancient Greek Hero In 24 Hours 

 

 

 

TFBT: Random Notes from Readings in Preparation for CB22.1

I am joyfully reading “The Ancient Greek Hero in 24  Hours” in preparation for  CB22.1x  which is the Fall 2013 presentation of this great on-line open course from Harvard.  Here are some of my random notes.

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours 10§22. “Granted, the stratagem of crafting the false name Outis succeeds in saving the life of Odysseus...In fact, the stratagem of Odysseus in calling himself Outis 'no one' produces just the opposite effect: it erases any previous claim to any kleos that the hero would have had before he entered the cave of the Cyclops. ..Such erasure means that someone who used to have a name will now no longer have a name and has therefore become a nobody, a no one, ou tis. ". The danger of denying who you are.  Nagy explained that is why Odysseys returned to Ithaca as a beggar.
“the audience of Homeric poetry are presumed to be near and dear. The word philoi, which I translate here as 'near and dear', can also be translated simply as 'friends'”  (H24H 2.5-6  Nagy)  Here I recall Casanova’s comments in the preface to his memoirs, “I pretend to the friendship, to the esteem, to the gratitude of my readers.”  He also warns prudish readers that   everyone ought to know that a preface is to a book what the play-bill is to a comedy; both must be read.”
 

The sirens proclaim once and or always that "No man has ever yet sailed past us with his dark ship without staying to hear the sweet sound of the voices". (Od 12:186-187)  "No man" is an alias of Odysseus.  So they predicted rightly that Oysseus would,  unlike many others,  sail by.

“Rather than being ignorant of color, it seems that the Greeks were less interested in and attentive to hue, or tint, than they were to light. As late as the fourth century BC, Plato named the four primary colors as white, black, red, and bright.”  Caroline Alexander.  A Winelike Sea. Lapham's quarterly

“…introduced by way of a special word houtōs “this is how”  (is) signaling the activation of a special form of speech known as the ainos. Here is my working definition of this word: an ainos is a performance of ambivalent wording that becomes clarified once it is correctly understood and then applied in moments of making moral decisions affecting those who are near and dear.” ( H24H 2§60-61, Nagy)  This sound a lot like Biblical Wisdom literature which is introduced by; as, than, how much more so, and like.  Further on this topic; (H24H; 2§72 Nagy ) The ainos as told by Phoenix, to which he refers as klea andrōn at Iliad IX 524, connects with the overall klea andrōn as told by the master Narrator. The connection is made by way of poetic conventions distinguishing the ainos from epic. One of these conventions is a set of three features characterizing the rhetoric of the ainos. Unlike epic, the ainos requires three qualifications of its listeners in order to be understood:

1. The listeners must be sophoi 'skilled' in understanding the message encoded in the poetry. That is, they must be mentally qualified.

2. They must be agathoi 'noble'. That is, they must be morally qualified.

3. They must be philoi 'near and dear' to each other and to the one who is telling them the ainos. That is, they must be emotionally qualified. Communication is achieved through a special sense of community, that is, through recognizing “the ties that bind.”   

11§45. Here we see once again the same coincidence of opposites that we saw in... Odyssey xi 127-131, where Odysseus must make a sacrifice to Poseidon, god of the sea, at a place that is removed as far away as possible from the sea... where we have just read the report of Pausanias (8.44.4) about a sacred space in Arcadia that Odysseus established in honor of Poseidon, point to the existence of hero cults for Odysseus...Odysseus will put an end to the antagonism that exists between him and Poseidon by performing sacred act in a place that is made sacred by the act itself. And this idea of a sacred space that is somehow shared by a god and a hero whose relationship is mutually antagonistic, as in the case of Poseidon and Odysseus, is typical of hero cults where the body of the hero is venerated within a space that is sacred to the god who is antagonistic to that hero. In the context of hero cults, god-hero antagonism in myth - including the myths mediated by epic - corresponds to god-hero symbiosis in ritual. A classic example is the location of the body of the hero Pyrrhos, son of Achilles, in the sacred precinct of Apollo at Delphi  in the myth about the death of this hero Pyrrhos, it is the god Apollo who causes this death .

TFBT:Homer Says the World is Round

Gregory Nagy in his odyessean volume “The Best of the Achaeans” presents some excellent Homeric arguments that the world is round. [i] Nagy lays these gold crowns at the reader’s feet and then strolls away without comment.

First Nagy begins by discussing Memnon; son of rosy-fingered Eos and King of the Aethiopians. As he puts it, “king of the realms along the banks of the Oceanus in the extreme East and West”

“the Aithiopes, who are divided in two, the most remote of men: Some where Helios sets, others where he rises “ - Odyssey I 23-24
I would like to pick up this argument by posing a question for the imaginative reader, but first two points. 1) If you travel West from holy Delphi for quite a ways, you will discover a happy people called the “Hawaiians”. They live on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and are ruled by Governor Linda Lingle. 2) If you travel East from holy Delphi for some time you will arrive among a group of islanders also called the “Hawaiians”. This happy race also lives on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and is shepherded by the same Governor Linda Lingle. So here is my question wise reader, with the two facts above disclosed do you assume that I’m talking about two different states of the union or that the world is round? Hint; there is no great freshwater river girdling the ancient world. The earth is not flat. Likewise, Memnon ruled on group of people. The world is round.[ii]

The second of Nagy’s points is that “from the overall plot of the Odyssey, we know that Odysseus is wandering in the realms of the extreme West when he come upon the island of Aiaia …Later on the way back the from the underworld, the ship of Odysseus has to leave the Oceanus before returning to Aiaia, which is now described as situated not in the extreme West but in the extreme East.

“the island Aiaia – and there are the abode and dancing places of early-born Eos and the sunrises of Helios” Odyssey XII XXXX
Aiaia can easily be in the far West and the extreme East at the same time if the world is round.

Thirdly, Homer describes tireless Helios as he rises in the East from Oceanus. (Iliad VII 421) Later poets tell of a most magnificent palace of Helios in the east a gift from his grateful friend Hephaestus. Homer speaks only of the gates of Helios in the west, later writers mention a second palace in the west and the golden barge in which the sun god slumbers upon the earth girdling river in route to the east again. Apparently, for Homer Helios’ only home is Aiaia.

And finally to use a non-Homeric example; Jason’s adventures with Medea take place on the eastern edge for the known world, followed quickly by adventures on the far western edge of the world. Later authors came up with some incredible explanation of how this was possible. Robert Graves explains these theories;
“…at first, to have returned from the Black Sea by way of the Danube, the Save, and the Adriatic; then when explorers found that the Save does not enter the Adriatic, a junction was presumed between the Danube and the Po, down which the Argo could have sailed; and when later, the Danube proved to be navigable only up to the Iron Gates and not to join the Po, she was held to have passed up the Phasis into the Caspian Sea and thus into the Indian Ocean and back by way of the Ocean Stream and Lake Tritonis. The feasibility of this third route too, being presently denied, mythographers suggested that the Argo had sailed up the Don, presumed to have its source in the Gulf of Finland from which she could circumnavigate Europe and return to Greece through the Straits of Gibraltar.”[iii]
An easier explanation is that they simply sailed back into the known world by sailing around the smaller Homeric planet. In short, the world is round.

[i] “coincidentia oppositroum” pages 205-207
[ii] Roll up a map by Anaximander or Hecataeus of Miletus. Compare two points on that map to a world atlas for a ratio. My estimate is a circumference of 3700 miles
[iii] Robert Graves, The Greek Myths Vol. 2 pages 243-244