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. 

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

Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk.  Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths.  Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death.  Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out.  "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance.  First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos.  They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter.  Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries.  I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.

Related articles

• Play review: 'Iliad' a mesmerizing lament

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

  ---

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.

a simile was left in place!

Statue of Teucer by Sir William Hamo Thornycroft (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald lists the 8 Trojans killed by Teucer in the same order Homer does, with rather less focus on Teucer and no mention of Ajax' name; then  moves to Gorgythion, and this is the first place where she uses a simile that Homer uses of the same person Homer uses it for.  But it is so perfect it's not surprising; and it is used of the sort of character that interests Oswald, that is, one who is never mentioned before or after.  Teucer is aiming at Hector, misses, and hits Gorgythion, "someone's darling son", in the breast.  Homer tells us his father was Priam and his mother Kastianeira, but Oswald doesn't follow her practice until now and record the mother's name.  She moves on to the simile:

8.306-308 μήκων δ’ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ’ ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ’ ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν

As a poppy in bloom in a garden drops its head to one side, 

weighed down by the spring rain,

so his head sank down, weighed down by his helmet  

(my translation: Oswald's is much better).

Really one thing reading Oswald so carefully is doing for me is renewing my appreciation of Homer.  This passage can't be matched; it's perfect; and it's thrown away, in Homer, on a redshirt, on someone we will never hear of again.  In Oswald, that's the whole point; the similes are not thrown away, but pointedly attached to the redshirts, the ones that otherwise went unmourned.  But here she and Homer agree; Gorgythion should be remembered too.

The article I've linked below is thoughtful and interesting, and reminds me why I should stop reading only for historical and social context, as I tend to, because it's easy.

Related articles

• Reading through allegory and metaphor

the rainbow

Greeks and Troyans fighting for the corpse of Patroklos - detail (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No more men die in book 6, so Oswald jumps to the beginning of Book 7, where Paris and Hector re-enter battle after visiting their wives and Paris has killed his man, Menesthius, in the first 10 lines.   She mentions his mother Phylomedusa but not his father, here as elsewhere emphasizing women wherever they're named (and it's rare enough) and describes Paris as "running in a love-rage towards him/ With the smell of Helen still on his hands".  And it's here that she uses the simile from book 17, of Athena coming to the Greeks like a rainbow, a "bright banner of disruption" sent by Zeus, to stir them up to fight for Patroclus' body.  And again, what?

In context, aside from (again) assimilating a simile from a famous death, Patroclus, to the death of someone who gets 3 lines in the Iliad and that is all, ever, his name is mentioned only here once at his death - but in context, it seems as if Paris, or perhaps indeed Helen, is the rainbow, the one that perhaps only portends a minor disruption of work, a summer storm; or perhaps portends a war.  If Paris, he portends both a war, and the death of Menesthius; more than a minor disruption.  you can't tell until the omen, a rainbow, Helen, Paris running across a field towards you, is fulfilled.

Or ... (later thought) ... obviously Helen is an interruption to Paris' work, a 'bright banner of disruption' - as we are reminded by Hector, scolding him for running off to shag Helen when he should be out here killing people.  As we are reminded by Oswald, who has Paris running towards poor Menesthius with Helen still on his hands.  Duh. Helen is Paris' rainbow; Paris is Menesthius'; Athena has not yet come to the Greeks.

Related articles

• Rainbow! Quick get the camera!

• A Trojan Love Story (thedailybeast.com)

death of Adrestus; axe and spear

Antalya Archaeological Museum. Ancient Roman sarcophagus of Aurelia Botania Demetria ( 2nd century AD ): Aphrodite is concealing Paris who is defeated by Menelaos. Odysseus is looking at the szene. Deutsch: Archäologisches Museum in Antalya. Römischer Sarkophag der Aurelia Botania Demetria ( 2.Jhdt.n.Chr. ): Aphrodite verbirgt Paris, der von Menelaos geschlagen worden ist. Odysseus sieht zu. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More and more I'm finding that the use of the similes is engaging me; when I originally read this poem I barely noticed them and couldn't figure out what they were for.  Here Oswald tells us about the death of Adrastus at Menelaus' hands; he begged for his life and nearly persuaded Menelaus but Agamemnon came up and told him to show Trojans no mercy; after all, had Trojans been good to his house?  Better to kill them all.  And that was that. Menelaus' spear swung like a sundial indicator, the decision wavering in the balance, but then it fell.

 She continues with the simile of an axe, that a shipwright uses to cut timbers for a boat, and it swings his arm for him as "an iron decision", as Menelaus' spear is an 'iron decision' for Adrestus, and swung Menelaus' wavering heart.  But the interesting thing is that the simile of the shipwright's axe shows up in the Iliad, only this time it is unwavering and unflinching; Paris uses this image to describe Hector's heart, constantly under Hector's control, adding force to his will - and how unlike Paris' heart, which tends to lead him to sneak off home to shag his wife.  But then, Aphrodite's like that, and there's no point complaining.

So the simile, originally spoken by Paris, to describe another Trojan hero's unwavering heart, is used by Oswald to describe the wavering weapon of Helen's last (Greek) husband, who has to be talked into killing by Agamemnon; eventually the axe/spear makes the decision for the man.  How does this fit the overall strategy?  That Adrastus could have lived; it underlines how indecisive and impotent Menelaus is, rather like Paris in fact; huh - got it - in both cases we are looking at 2 brothers, and the leader/warrior one has to talk the other one into fighting.  And in both cases the second brother is or has been married to Helen.That's the association that connects the two.

Related articles

• Troy Director's Cut (2007) Blu-Ray review
• Heinous Acts, Homeric and Otherwise