stymied at the last, augh! (ETA: unstymied!)

Diomedes and Glaucus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have nailed down all of the Homeric references for every single thing in all of Oswald's "Memorial", except one. I cannot find one. It has rocks, water, a dam and a marsh.  None of these terms  in any form I can think of  searching for are showing up in the appropriate combination. I think I will just leave it for now.

However, I am very pleased that I think I have figured out what the last dozen pages of "Memorial" are doing. Each page has a single simile, drawn from somewhere in the Iliad. Each one begins with "like". We are done with the death scenes now – all of them are over, ending with the death of Hector – so we only have this string of similes. Each of them is a simile involving an aggregate – a flock of wild waterfowl, or of bees, or of wasps, or of flies, or of sparks. But the first of the 12 is the famous simile of the leaves:

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves

- but what is like leaves? Well, of course it's the race of men, from the famous simile when Glaucus is talking to Diomedes, desperately – and successfully – trying to save his own life; so when you read all the rest of the similes, all of which begin with "like", they are all also about the race of men, in the aggregate. Oswald has through the rest of the poem gone one man after another, name by name by name; but now, at the end, she talks about how in the aggregate all men die, In a series of similes, each one of them drawn from a passage in which the fighters at Troy are described as a group.

(I still can't find the one about water, a dam, and a marsh though. I think I'll just ask the audience if anyone happens to know it...) - finally it occurred to me to ask a papyrologist, since papyrologists know everything.   It's from the fight over the body of Patroclus: the 2 Aiantes holding off the flood of Trojans.  So that is all the similes sorted. 

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

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• Book Review: The Song of Achilles

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• Tracing Odysseus's footsteps

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Rhesus, Isos, and Antiphos

Odysseus (wearing the pilos hat) and Diomedes stealing the horses of Thracian king Rhesus they have just killed. Apulian red-figure situla by the Lycurgus Painter, ca. 360 BC. Stored in the Museo Nazionale Archaeologico in Naples. Français : Ulysse (portant le pilos) et Diomède volant les chevaux du roi thrace Rhésos qu'ils viennent de tuer. Situle apulienne à figures rouges du Peintre de Lycurgue, vers 360 av. J.-C. Conservé au Musée national archéologique de Naples. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The improbable exploit of Diomedes and Odysseus against Rhesus is next.  (I say improbable, because how likely is it that one man could kill thirteen men with an edged weapon, I don't care how tired they are, without the screams and thrashings of at least one of them waking up the rest? Also, Rhesus and his men were sleeping closest to the enemy ships; why on earth didn't they post a sentry? But I digress.)

Oswald's translations, as always, vivid and spot-on.  Homer describes the Thracian weapons as κάλα and κέκλιτο εὖ κατὰ κόσμον, 10.472; she translates as ""cleaned and layed down like cutlery" (κέκλιτο εὖ κατὰ κόσμον, 10.472), quite wonderful, as is her description of Diomedes killing the Thracians, "red faced quietly like a butcher keeping up with his order/Got rid of them", instead of "As a lion springs furiously upon a flock of sheep or goats when he finds them without their shepherd" as Homer has it.  (ὡς δὲ λέων μήλοισιν ἀσημάντοισιν ἐπελθὼν

αἴγεσιν ἢ ὀΐεσσι κακὰ φρονέων ἐνορούσῃ, 10.485-486),.  However then Oswald goes on to use a sheep image involving wolves for Odysseus & Diomedes; ; this one from Patroclus' aristeia and the Greeks are chasing the Trojans all the way back to Troy and the Trojans are scattering terrified.  Odysseus & Diomedes are presumably the wolves; the sheep are the Thracians, their shepherd is Rhesus; but they're all asleep.  Perhaps "wolves" rather than lions in a gesture towards the wolf-skin poor craven Dolon was wearing.

Oswald skips the first two deaths in Agamemnon's aristeia in book 11, Bienor and Oileus his charioteer, and moves on to Isos and Antiphos, whom she doesn't mention are sons of Priam, one legitimate, one not.  They're farmboys, who got taken on a great adventure once when Achilles captured them and took them to meet Agamemnon. They came home "proud as astronauts", joined the army, and were killed by Agamemnon.

The wave-simile she then uses is used in Homer of Hector at the ships in book 15, raging around the Greeks; in Oswald the focus isn't the wave, but the sailors engulfed in it, "star(ing) at mid-air"; poor Isos and Antiphos, never expecting this.

Related articles

• Young Italians flock to become shepherds

• The Concept of the Hero in Modern Civilization (or, the Best of the Akheans) (delong.typepad.com)

The death of the pathetic Dolon

Dolón atrapado por Odiseo y Diomedes. Museo Británico (Photo credit: elaios2008)

Oswald condenses 150 lines of Homer (the Doloneia) into 17, and includes pretty much everything essential.  (since she isn't interested in Odysseus or Diomedes).  She's skipped ahead 2 books, but nobody has died since Archeptolemos in Book 8: in the end of Book 8 the Greeks ran back to their ships, Book 9 is the embassy to Achilles, and Book 10 begins with the night councils. Finally two scouts sent out by Agamemnon, Diomedes & Odysseus, meet the scout sent out by Hector, Dolon, and Oswald picks up at the death scene.

I haven't been saying much about the death scenes, which are the whole point, or so I thought the first time I read Memorial.  Here Oswald begins with the mourning of women ("What was that shrill sound/Five sisters at the grave/ Calling the ghost of Dolon"), tells remarkably compactly the story of Dolon, "ugly but quick", caught by Odysseus and Diomedes and desperately telling them everything he knows, where the Trojans are, where the allies are, where Rhesus and his beautiful chariot and armour and wonderful horses are, offering a ransom, offering anything, and then they kill him anyway ("And was still pleading for his head/ When his head rolled in the mud").  She doesn't mention Odysseus or Diomedes; here as frequently elsewhere, the identity of the killer is not what Memorial focusses on. 

The simile, of the fly that keeps coming back to bite some more no matter how often it's warded off, is initially from the battle over the body of Patroclus (again); Menelaus is given the courage and persistence of an especially irritating fly by Athena.  This simile is transferred to the persistent and irritating Dolon, who however gets squashed.

This is the first place where I've found Homer's use of a simile a little more interesting than Oswald's, only because giving Menelaus the courage and persistence of a fly - meant positively - is so counter-intuitive; where describing Dolon, who does keep trying, desperately, over and over, to save his own life by telling them absolutely everything, and in Homer as in Oswald is both pathetic and contemptible, an insect in his little ferret-skin cap, it's an obvious comparison. Perhaps I'm missing something.

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• 2012.05.03 (bmcreview.org)