The research day

I was not going to do this, but just this once:

Scheduled:
an entire free day with no scheduled interruptions! I can get some work done at last!

Actual events of the day
9:00 am - 9:45 am phone call & conversation with family member
10:00-10:05 am  Pet clinic calls re: cat test results.
10:30 am - 10:40 am Vet from pet clinic calls with options re: cat treatment.  None really palatable, all very expensive except option where cat dies in pain.
11:00-11:15 am Perimeter drain cleaners show up; prices outrageous; negotiation not possible; leave, perimeter drains uncleaned
11:30 am roofer calls to schedule repair
12:00-12:15 pm drugstore calls re: cat medication, for some reason requires all my biographical data
12:15-1:15 pm answering urgent email.  Then distracted into answering less urgent email.
1:30 pm son home from school (PD day) and suggests that he is hungry now. Is there lunch?
1:45 pm phone rings AGAIN. Car-related.
2:15 pm realize I'm missing guest lecture at 2:30.
2:30 pm drug store phones again. Apparently cat's heart medication is urgent.  Must go and pick it up NOW NOW NOW.
3:05  back home; can finally start work ... but the phone rings again; I don't answer, but waste time worrying that it might have been important ...
3:30 pm children's piano lesson ... It's time to go for a walk anyway.
4:30-6:00 pm ferry child to Aikido class, wait in parking lot with laptop answering email, ferry child home.

And that is it for the research day.

Solution:
Work in the library, or unplug the phone.

Patroclus' aristeia, not

Ulysses (with a pilos) and Greek warriors around the body of Patroclus. Detail of a silver oinochoe dedicated ,by Q. Domitius Tutus, made in Italy, first half of the 1st century AD. From the Berthouville treasure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Homer now gives us 200 lines of Greeks slaughtering Trojans.  First every Greek leader kills his own Trojan, a kind of bring-your-own-(dead)-Trojan buffet; then Patroclus starts slaughtering them wholesale.  We get descriptions of how each one died as long as they're being killed by different Greek chieftains, but when Patroclus steps in we just get a list of names of the Trojans he slaughters.  Oswald gives us nothing but a list of 21 names; we aren't told who killed each one and she doesn't differentiate between the ones killed by other Greeks and the list of those killed by Patroclus.  The list ends with the name of Sarpedon's charioteer, Thrasymelos, which in Homer is preceded by the lengthy discussion between Zeus and Hera about the coming death of Zeus' son Sarpedon, which Zeus would like to avoid (and which is important because he is Zeus' son).

The importance of the slaughter in Homer is that the tide of battle has now turned back, and the Greeks are winning again; and that Patroclus may be primarily important as Achilles' close friend and companion, but he is a formidable warrior in his own right.  Since he's going to die soon he needs to be given weight and importance of his own, and this aggregation of deaths gives him that.  Even the Trojans killed by the other Greeks redound to Patroclus' credit because they occur after his arming scene and because his appearance has heartened the Greeks to go back on the attack.  Oswald elides the foreshadowing of the death of Sarpedon, which gives weight to all the deaths, and to the death of Thrasymelos, because here as elsewhere she lets individual deaths stand on their own.

After this list Oswald gives us this simile:

Like hawk wings cut through a sheet of starlings
Like wing-scissors open and close
Through a billow of jackdaws

This comes from a simile that actually shows up fairly close to this scene in Homer.  After Patroclus kills Sarpedon, a Trojan kills a Greek (whom we've never heard of before) over his body, and Patroclus, enraged at his sudden new BFF's death, returns to the Sarpedon's corpse:

"And he went straight through the fore-fighters like a hawk
swiftly, who terrifies the jackdaws and starlings;
so you, horse-driving Patroklos, drove off the Lykians and Trojans,
and your heart was angered for your companion."

I initially thought that Oswald was using the simile exactly the same way, and even about the same person (Patroclus), but actually not quite.  In Homer, the hawk is the subject.  In Oswald, the hawk doesn't appear; only the hawk wings, the hawk's effect, like scissors, cutting through a sheet of starlings, a billow of jackdaws.  Homer's hawk is Patroclus; Oswald's hawk is death, impersonal; the starlings and jackdaws are the living beings here.

Pyraikhmes and Paeonian bison (?)

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Prolonged absence during which I discovered I have arthritis in one hip and moped about it. However, I have bought an expensive chair that makes my hip hurt less, so, back to work.

So: death of Pyraikhmes. (I've worked through a few others since I last posted, but today was Pyraikhmes.) He's important, in the Iliad, because his is the first death after the Greeks are actually chased back to the ships - apparently with very little loss of life, since about a dozen Trojans die for every Greek. Antilochus gets another Trojan, just before the Greeks retreat with the Trojans in headlong pursuit. The Trojans actually manage to set fire to a ship. And at this point, Patroclus persuades Achilles to let him suit up in Achilles' armour and chase off the Trojans. Achilles sacrifices (in vain) to Zeus for Patroclus' safety. Pyraikhmes is the first of the many Trojans Patroclus kills in his subsequent aristeia, culminating, of course, in his own death.

None of this context matters to Oswald; we don't know which side Pyraikhmes is on or that his death is made significant, in Homer, by the fact that Patroclus is the one who kills him. Here's Homer:

"(Patroklos) hit Pyraikhmes who had led his Paeonian horsemen from the Amydon and the broad waters of the river Axios; the spear struck him on the right shoulder, and with a groan he fell backwards in the dust; on this his men were thrown into confusion, for by killing their leader, who was the finest warrior among them, Patroklos struck panic into them all." (Perseus translation.)

Now here's Oswald:

The River Axius has the silverest sweetest water
It flows through Paeonia
Where there are bison in the hills
And men make curved bows from their horns
To get there you have to go miles over mountains
Some of his men might make it
But not Puraichmes

Some of this she got from the Catalog, where Pyraikhmes and the Paionians are again described, with the addition of the 'crooked bows" (ἀγκυλότοξος) they use and the beauty of the water in the Axios river. I was distracted however by the bison. Homer does not, as far as I can find, mention any bison or mountains anywhere. However, an increasingly obsessed search eventually brought me to Aristotle's History of Animals, which tells me

Aristotle, History of Animals,630a20

Ὁ δὲ βόνασοϛ γίνεται μὲν ἐν τῇ Παοιονία ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ Μεσσαπίῳ, δ'ὁρίζει τὴν Παοιονικὴν και τὴν Μαιδικὴν χώραν, καλοῦι δ'αὐτὸν οἱ Παίονεσ μόναπον.". "The 'βόνασος' (bison) lives in Paionia on Mt. Messapion, which borders the lands of Paionia and Media, and the Paionians call it a "monapos".

So as far as I can tell, Oswald takes the 'crooked bows" from the Catalog, adds them to the bison mentioned in Aristotle, and throws in the mountain as well, in a casual display of naked erudition. Pyraikhmes' men get a mention (actually not many of them are going to make it).

A puzzling thing: she then uses the most famous simile in the Iliad, the one where Achilles is chasing Hector around the walls of Troy:

Like a man running in a dream
Can never approach a man escaping
Who can never escape a man approaching (Oswald p. 58)

But here, it's about how Puraichmes is never going to make it home.  But why use it here?  It leaves Puraichmes, and all the other warriors, and us, trapped in the limbo of constant combat, in which no one, including Puraichmes, will ever make it home.   Perhaps that's the point. And also, of course, to increase the significance and magnitude of Puraichmes' death by attaching such a famous simile to it.

In breaking things down into such small bits I am missing such overarching patterns as Oswald's poem has.  But I'll continue doing this for now; I don't have that much farther to go with it; and then go back, and see if I notice larger patterns.

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