all the Homer things

This is not the same Polydorus.

Have been working away steadily for the last week but not updating, because I have to give a paper on Oswald next week and haven't got time to work, teach, write the paper and update too.  I've got 8 more death scenes and about 16 similes to nail down.  Whenever I see a new simile my heart sinks because I know it will likely be hard to find where Oswald has transplanted it from.  On the other hand it's rewarding work.  She did something particularly cool with the death of Polydorus as his father Priam looks for him, which she juxtaposed with the simile of Ajax guarding Patroclus' body like a lion guarding its cubs.

Still, it really is time to stop researching and start actually putting it together as a paper.  But I'm so close to being done!  This is a mistake I always make mind you - I always think that once the research is done the paper will write itself, possibly overnight while I'm sleeping, if I leave out a bowl of milk for the fairies...

In fact once the research is done the paper will take every bit as long to write as the research took to do, something Mac Wallace told me (frequently; over and over; in the hope that someday I would take note), and something I tell my students all the time as well.

 I don't know if my students pay attention.  I know I never do because there's always this One! Last! Thing! I want to find out first ... which of course will lead to another interesting thing ... but I must stop now.  It's not as if I don't have enough material.

But I'm so close!

Epeigeus the exile

English: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Achilles and Priam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm trying to follow Oswald's sequence here.  

In Homer, Hector kills Epeigeus as he's about to strip the corpse of Sarpedon, and crushes his skull with a big rock and he falls dead on the corpse.  He was a prince in Budeion, until he "stripped the corpse" of a cousin, and was sent off as a suppliant to Peleus, and then to Troy, and then died as he stripped the corpse of Sarpedon,or tried to, on the battlefield.  So his life story, in Homer, begins and ends with two corpse-strippings; one successful, one attempted.

Oswald charts this as changes - Epeigeus went from well-regarded prince to runaway, beggar, soldier, and corpse.  And then she uses the astonishing simile used of Priam when he kisses Achilles' bloody hands, and everyone was as astonished to see him, 

"as when strong folly (ἄτη) takes a man, who in his fatherland

having killed someone leaves to the country of others

into (the house) of a rich man, and wonder holds those looking at him,

so Achilles was astonished seeing Priam, like a god".  

But Oswald says "like anger that ... can change any man into a murderer" - but what's like anger? As far as I can tell, here, it's the rock; anger changes a man into something entirely different, a beggar seeking shelter, a different person, the way the rock turned Epeigeus into something different, a shade, a corpse, someone he wouldn't recognize himself as.  

But what does it bring to Oswald's poem that this is the simile used of Priam when he comes to Achilles as a suppliant? Because Epeigeus actually IS a murderous suppliant, where Priam is not; Achilles is the one who has killed, and Priam is the suppliant to him; the blood is printed on Achilles' hands. Anger changed Epeigeus into a killer and ultimately a corpse; it turned Priam into a suppliant and ultimately into a corpse; I'm still not getting this.  

Related articles

• The Next-to-Last Scene of the Iliad

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.

Myth on the Map

English: Map of Homeric Greece with English labels Česky: Mapa homérského Řecka s anglickými popisky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Organizational day for the website project, "Myth on the Map".  I have enough money to get a functioning website up with 2 works mapped, Apollodorus and the Catalog of Ships. Question: should I then map the rest of the Iliad, or map a test book of Pausanias?  If so, which book?  Not sure yet.  Would link to the project but it doesn't appear to be working yet. The plan is, at any rate, to finish Apollodorus and the Catalog by the end of the summer, and have a map which, when one searches for stuff, finds it and displays it.

Tweaked the outline for the "sacrificial virgins" conference paper, and resolved another Oswald simile: a list of five (dead) Greeks, followed by the simile of the eagle attacking the geese by the river.  In Homer, it's about Hector, who's the eagle.  In Oswald, the geese are named but the eagle is not; the attacker is impersonal; the war.

THE WAR! RAHR! (Source)

(Okay, so I am foolishly reminded of Loki, leaping from the upper level upon Thor. "There is only - THE WAR! RAHR!" The only truly awful line in the Avengers...)

Related articles

• 2012.06.05

  ---

• 2012.06.08

  ---

Medon the donkey

Cover of How to Read a Poem

Oswald skips several Trojan deaths here, and then attaches the simile of the island town on fire from invaders, lighting beacon fires asking for help, which Homer uses of the light from Achilles' head when he terrifies the Trojans by his scream alone, to the deaths of Stichius and Arkesilaus; but instead of the light (of the beacon fires) being like the light from Achilles' head, it is the smoke from the fires Oswald uses as a comparison, that vanishes from the earth like Stichius and Arkesilaus.

Then Aeneas kills off Medon and Iasus, with a line of description for each of them; Oswald concentrates on Medon, bastard son of Oileus, who killed his stepmother's kinsman, fled to Phylace, and wound up (after Philoctetes was abandoned) leading the Phthians at Troy.  Oswald adds that he then went on to Troy, and died in the 9th year.  To him she attaches the simile Homer uses of Ajax attacked by a flock of Trojans, who can't be moved by them any more than a sluggish donkey who's gotten into a cornfield and just keeps eating until he's had his fill and decides to move on, utterly unresponsive to the blows of the boys trying to drive him out with clubs.   Only she attaches this to Medon. How? Medon stubbornly killed a man, fled, fled on to Troy, kept fighting until he'd decided in his own sweet time that he was ready to die?

The translation, as always, is wonderful.  Oswald amplifies the mention of his father's wife (μητρυιῆς Ἐριώπιδος) to "grew up under the smile of a slim respectable stepmother", for example.  And the description of the donkey, who "thinking good I will wade and eat sideways/ ... does just that eats and eats sunk in a pond of corn".

I've begun reading Terry Eagleton "How to Read a Poem", since it's not something I've been trained in really (nor indeed something my teachers were trained in I think).  Eagleton identifies this problem in his students, that modern work tends to be content analysis which is largely oblivious to whether the "content" comes encased in a novel, a poem, or a real-life happening.  He says (instead of dealing with the 'literariness' of the work),

"... they treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page.  Maybe the computer got stuck." 

                                    (Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem; Blackwell, Oxford 2007: 3.) 

That, embarrassingly, would be me; but Memorial makes me want to really up my game, and be able to say precisely what's so cool about it, which isn't just content, or even just its relationship to Homer.

Related articles

• Terry Eagleton on close analysis of language | The Oxonian Review

  ---

Archelochus and the changing will of Zeus

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)

In Homer, the gods decide to kill Archelochus, so a spear flung at someone else hits him.  In Memorial, the spear decides of its own free will to miss the other guy and hit Archelochus.

But then Oswald continues (p. 52),

Like the changing mind
That moves a cloud off a mountain
And makes rocks and cliffs appear
Pushing the landscape's sharp edges up
Through more and more air

This simile comes from Bk 16, where Patroclus has just suited up in Achilles' armour and is leading the Greeks to fight back the Trojans, who have just set fire to Protesilaus' ship.  The Greeks take heart and beat back the Trojans and put out the flames, the way (says the Iliad) Zeus lightning-gatherer moves a cloud etc etc., but (says the Iliad) not forever; this gives them a breather, but the war doesn't stop.  ("Changing mind" I take as a translation of στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς, since nothing changes more quickly than lightning.) 

So in the Iliad, Greeks pushing back the Trojans and putting out the flames = Zeus (temporarily) moving a cloud off a mountain. In Oswald, a spear decides to kill one man rather than another, the way a "changing mind" moves a cloud off a mountain and reveals the (sharp, clear) landscape.  Oswald highlights the changeability of the spear and of the mind; one man could have been killed just as easily as another.  And where the Iliad's simile focuses on those who are benefitting by the divine choice (of the moment) - the Greeks are forcing the Trojans back and putting out the flames - Oswald's simile, as always, focusses on the one that did not benefit; Archelochus, who died because of the will of the gods, rather than Poulydamas who lived.

A further point of context: Zeus' favour is not going to rest with Patroclos forever, either; this simile, in the Iliad, also foreshadows his eventual death.  Its use here in Oswald grants the all but unknown Trojan Archelochus' death the importance of Patroclus's eventual death. Finally: I have yet to find anywhere in Oswald that the gods get a mention. But should re-check that.

I need to start collecting these points, and decide what matters most, and what article to write.  I'd like to just write an article on the similes, and how they work in Oswald.  I would need to talk about how they work in Homer, for comparison.

Antilochus, the Iliad's Mary Sue

Antilochus. Side A from an Attic red-figure neck-amphora, ca. 470 BC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald lists seven deaths that, in Homer, are given in 120 lines of hard fighting: Oinomaos, Askalaphos, Aphareus, Thoon, Antilochus, Deipuros, and Peisander.  Except one of these things is not like the others: Antilochus doesn't actually die here.  This is the second time she's killed Antilochus, quietly embedding him in a list of dead warriors,  when in fact Antilochus killed someone else in this passage (who isn't listed among the dead).  And here she's done it again: Adamas, son of Asios (who has just died), attacks Antilochus, but Poseidon likes Antilochus and saves him.  Adamas ducks in behind his friends but Meriones follows him and kills him particularly painfully (spear in the gut, midway between the navel and the privates, and he writhes around painfully until Meriones pulls out the spear and he dies).  Oswald skips all this and lists Antilochus among the dead.

The first time Oswald did this I thought it was a mistake, but this isn't a mistake.  Why does she keep killing off Antilochus?  He doesn't even die in the Iliad.  (He's killed later, by Memnon, or possibly by Paris at the same time as Achilles, or according to Hyginus Hector kills him, which would be a surprise to Homer, because Antilochus is still alive in the next book of the Iliad to put in a mediocre performance in the funeral games for Patroclus).  And everyone likes him, and he's Achilles' good buddy, and everyone likes his dad, and he's always up to fight some Trojans, bouncy and courageous and gay,  he is, in fact, the Mary Sue of the Iliad, the one that has puzzlingly been made way, way too likeable, as if Homer (or the entirety of the oral tradition really really liked him and thought the rest of us should too for no obvious reason.

But she keeps killing him off.  As if we should get in our mourning for Antilochus now, because he keeps being mentioned, but he doesn't get a proper death scene in the Iliad, but the fact is he is going to die before he makes it home, so let's mourn him in advance, as the only Greek warrior that everybody really likes, and she wants to remind us that he doesn't make it either?

Or, I don't know.  I wonder if Antilochus' inclusion in Memorial might be my way into writing about the poem.  It's odd in so many ways.  I could talk about the ways.

Related articles

• Mary Sue Litmus Test (Daily Dose)

  ---

• Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles wins last ever Orange sponsored Prize for Fiction

  ---

Hippodamos and Hypeirochos

Diomedes and Athena attacking Ares (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are in the middle of Hector's interrupted aristeia.  He has killed a list of people, and now the Greeks are regrouping, or at least Diomedes and Odysseus are. Odysseus kills these two.

Homer gives one line for both: "Ἱππόδαμον δ’ Ὀδυσεὺς καὶ Ὑπείροχον ἐξενάριξεν" - "and Odysseus stripped Hippodamos and Hypeirochos" - and only half a sentence at that, with the other half taken up by Diomedes.  Oswald gives each of the dead a line ("And Hippodamos died ... And Hypeirochos died ...".  She doesn't say who killed them or which side they were on, and each one gets his own simile, but (unusually) not repeated.

The similes are interesting.  One is drawn from the break in Diomedes' aristeia, Iliad 5.596-600, where Diomedes, after he's been wounded by Pandaros, sees Hector coming with Ares beside him and like any sensible man, is brought up short - like a man crossing a plain who stops and steps back at the bank of a foaming river.  The second is drawn from Achilles' fight with the river Scamander, Iliad 21.281-283:  he's calling on the gods as the river chases him and threatens to overwhelm him (Oswald has already used the simile just previous to this one, about a man gardening and loosening a stream). He complains that he wishes he was going to get killed by a hero instead of being swept away in a river like a swineherd's boy trying to cross in a storm.

Diomedes and Achilles escape their rivers, metaphoric and real; Hippodamos and Hypeirochos do not.

Related articles

• The Death of King Rhesus of Thrace

  ---

• Book Review: The Song of Achilles

  ---

• Tracing Odysseus's footsteps

  ---

Wanted short term: a charioteer for Hector

Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus (Photo credit: rjhuttondfw)

Hector's lost two charioteers in 200 lines now, Eniopeus and Archeptolemos, both when someone took a shot at Hector and missed, and he will lose Cebriones in book 16 in the fight around Patroclus.  Might as well just paint a target on their armour (the breastplate, just under the nipple; that's how the first two went, at least). 

Oswald uses a "burning city" simile here, which she imports from the battle around Patroclus, which I couldn't place until I had a look at Bruce Louden's book, "The Iliad: Structure, Myth and Meaning" (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2006).  Thank you,  Google Books.  Must read the rest of it.

Oswald has already used the following simile from this scene, in which Menelaus & Meriones are compared to mules, dragging a heavy log from a mountain.  But the Trojans and the battle they bring are fire engulfing them like a city; and of course like the fire that is going to engulf their city as a result of the death of Patroclus, because now Achilles is going to kill Hector, and after that, all falls.  I must take a look at how many of the similes she uses are drawn from the fight around the body of Patroclus, the one whose death is the most greatly mourned of all, if you measure by "causing more deaths that are described in the Iliad".  Beginning to wonder if where I started - that the whole Iliad can be read as a lament for Hector - was a misreading, and actually it can all be read as a lament for Patroclus, from which Hector's death (among others) results.

I am stunned as always by the brilliance of Oswald's retranslation.  Here's a literal translation:

And the battle was stretched against them savage as fire
That rushing on a city of men rising up suddenly burns it up, and the houses diminish
in a great blaze; and the force of the wind makes it roar.

Now here's Oswald (p. 32):

Like fire with its loose hair flying rushes through the city
The look of unmasked light shocks everything to rubble
And flames howl through the gaps 

So why this simile here? I think because she talks about Archeptolemos' absence, and then moves to the gaps in the walls caused by the fire, and the flame roars through the gaps; Archeptolemos' death is one of the gaps that's been created by the fire/war, and we can see the war through the gap in the defenses he's left behind.  I think.

(Thinking about this next morning): The flame has fed on Archeptolemos, and can now burn even hotter and brighter, because it's been fed by his death, and because he is not there to help defend against it; so there's a gap in the wall for the fire to get in. But this is all in Homer too, whom I am daily appreciating more.

(After conversation with Lauren) Completely missed the coolest thing about this simile: the "loose hair flying" rushing through the city is an image of a woman in mourning; the "unmasked light" is the anakalupsis of the bride.  The fire, like a woman in mourning, like a bride whose husband is lost, rushes through the city, howling.  And so Oswald reintroduces women, and mourning women, into a part of Homer that only has men.

Abarbarea

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".

Related articles

• 2012.03.46 (bmcreview.org)

Axylus is Hector

Scene from Book XXIV of the Iliad: Hector's corpse brought back to Troy (detail). Roman artwork (ca. 180–200 CE), relief from a sarcophagus, marble. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here's Oswald on Axylus (Memorial p. 26):

Axylus son of Teuthras

Lived all his life in the lovely harbour of Arisbe

Looking down at the Hellespont

Everyone knew that plump man

Sitting on the step with his door wide open

He who so loved his friends

Died side by side with Calesius

In a daze of loneliness

Their conversation unfinished

She follows it up with a simile which is drawn from the scene in Iliad Bk 22, where Achilles is pursuing Hector around the walls as a hawk pursues a dove.  I can't see a more significant connection than simply that giving Axylus the simile from that famous pursuit of Hector by Achilles raises the death of Axylus, who is mentioned only here, to the status of the death of a hero.  A couple of other minor things, but they are touches that really show the subtlety of her understanding of the Greek and her ability to manipulate it:  "He who so loved his friends" is a translation of "πάντας γὰρ φιλέεσκεν" - she has translated "φιλέεσκεν" twice, so as to make the point that could be made with a single word in Greek.  And "that plump man" translates "ἀφνειὸς βιότοιο", which is perfect.  Homer says that none of Axylus' friends were there to stand between him and his doom, which Oswald translates economically as "in a daze of loneliness".   

And she's doing this all the time.  Everything is as carefully thought out as this small passage.  I need to learn a lot more about the rearrangement of traditional material in poets generally.  Perhaps I can start with Hellenistic poets.  Or Virgil.  Because she's doing the same thing they did.  Well, maybe not Virgil, who added to his sources from elsewhere, something I haven't caught Oswald doing, yet.

Related articles

• Homer Encyclopedia (rogueclassicism.com)