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

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

  ---

Harpalion, and more deer

Homer Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Didn't get far today.  Harpalion, son of Pylaemenes, gets killed by Meriones (who kills a lot of people, without ever really having much of a story himself).  His weeping father follows his body back to Troy.  Which is odd, because his father died in book 5.  Did Homer/ the bardic collective/ the oral tradition forget?  I bet someone has written a lot about this.

A simile about panic-stricken deer.  I may not have found the right one, because the deer is described as fearing her guests, and guests don't appear in the Greek (but they do, in the passage about the death of Harpalion, so maybe that's it).  Harpalion is apparently a scaredy-cat.  Like the deer. Though unlike the deer around here, who are scared of nothing, and have just eaten all our spinach.  Maybe we should import some wolves.

  I suspect I'm missing something.

Related articles

• What You Can Learn from a Deer

  ---

admin day

Helen leaving for Troy with Paris, as depicted by Guido Reni (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Made up an exam.  Deleted 200 emails, still have 700 in my inbox.  Watched Xena and Helen of Troy.  Booked transportation for a conference.  Did not indulge in any higher-order thinking of any kind. Though I liked the casting for Helen, and the clever construction of the Trojan Horse, out of wicker mats, which they could have put together pretty quickly.

Xena with Gabrielle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)