Wednesday, 18 April 2012

Abarbarea

Herakles (on the left) about to kill Laomedon,...
Herakles (on the left) about to kill Laomedon, king of Troy (on the right). Behind Herakles stands Hesione, raising her right hand to her chin in sign of melancholy. Side A from a terra sigillata flask by the workkshop of Felix (Southern Gaul), late 1st–early 2nd century CE. From the necropolis of Lugone in Salò. Stored in the Museo Civico Archeologico della Valle Sabbia in Gavardo (Brescia). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Euryalos kills 4 men next in book 6, but Oswald doesn't mention two of them, and concentrates on the twin brothers, Pedasus and Aesepus, he kills next.  Homer gives their father's genealogy - Boukolion, eldest-born of Laomedon, so (one assumes) should have been king, but his mother wasn't married - and Boukolion in turn mated with a naiad, whose name Homer actually gives: Abarbarea.  Oswald ignores all this, even the name of the father, except the name of the naiad, and describes her enjoying lying about as a blue pool, alone, until a young man jumped into her "in the middle of his astonished sheep".

Both the twin boys of the mother died that day, she concludes, and then follows with a simile taken from Achilles' battle with the river Scamander (book 21): a man clears out a path for a little stream and finds himself overwhelmed by a river running downhill.

What's the association?  Two river-deities, but one overwhelms (Achilles) and the other is overwhelmed; but she isn't really; she gives birth to twins, an unexpectedly strong response and not one the father had in mind when he cleared out the stream with his mattock.But the focus is the mother, and the unexpectedness of the twins, and possibly "running downstream" = "to their deaths".
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