Why Homer Matters (44 page)

“They clothe their bodies”: Iliad
XIV.384ff.

“as snug as a gun”:
Seamus Heaney, “Digging,” from
Death of a Naturalist
(London: Faber, 1966).

“doupēsen de pesōn”: E.g.,
Iliad
IV.504, XVII.50.

their life dependent:
See Emily Vermeule,
Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry
(Oakland: University of California Press, 1979), 99–101, 112–15.

Adolf Schulten:
A. Schulten,
Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae
(Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 1922), vol. 1, p. 90.

Inner and outer landscapes:
Circe's description at
Odyssey
X.510. Odysseus comes to the shores of Hades at
Odyssey
XI.22.

“flutter through his fingers”:
Ibid., XI.206–8.

“Never try to sweeten death”:
Ibid., XI.408ff.

the ghost says through his tears:
It's not certain that the hero was weeping—
olophuromai
usually means “lament, be sad”—but this is likely to be the sense.

“like consuming fire”: Iliad
XX.372.

“But tell me”: Odyssey
XI.491.

murdering Priam:
This was the scene, transmitted through the
Aeneid
, when Neoptolemos was slaughtering his way through Troy, “And all his father sparkled in his eyes,” which caught Hamlet's imagination; the young Greek was

total gules; horridly trick'd

With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets,

That lend a tyrannous and damned light

To their lord's murder. (
Hamlet
II.ii.457–61)

“So I spoke”: Odyssey
XI.538–40 Fagles, XI.613–16.

“Set up your mast”:
Ibid., X.506–7 (Murray/Dimock, adapted slightly).

“But when in your ship”:
Ibid., X.508–12 (Murray/Dimock).

“There into the ocean”:
Ibid., X.513–15 (Murray/Dimock).

“they stowed their gear and laid the mast in the hollow hulls”:
Odyssey
XI. 20.

there is a museum:
www.parquemineroderiotinto.com/
.

at a place called Chinflón:
The mine at Chinflón is at 37°40'N, 6°40'W; see B. Rothenberg and A. Blanco-Freijeiro, “Ancient Copper Mining and Smelting at Chinflón (Huelva, SW Spain),”
British Museum Occasional Paper
20 (1980), 41–62; for bronze mining, see Ben Roberts, “Metallurgical Networks and Technological Choice: Understanding Early Metal in Western Europe,”
World Archaeology
40, issue 3 (2008), 354–72; Anthony F. Harding,
European Societies in the Bronze Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–241.

In Cornwall:
M. A. Courtney, “Cornish Folk-Lore,” part 3,
Folk-Lore Journal
5, no. 3 (1887), 177–220; James C. Baker, “Echoes of Tommy Knockers in Bohemia, Oregon, Mines,”
Western Folklore
30, no. 2 (Apr. 1971), 119–22.

“called the little miners”:
Georgius Agricola,
De Animantibus Subterraneis
(Freiburg, 1548).

“represent man's inner universe”:
Ronald Finucane,
Appearances of the Dead
(London: Junction Books, 1982).

their ancient beliefs:
Agricola,
De Animantibus Subterraneis
; Courtney, “Cornish Folk-Lore,” part 3; Finucane,
Appearances of the Dead
; Baker, “Echoes of Tommy Knockers in Bohemia, Oregon, Mines.”

“When it comes to”:
Gaston Bachelard,
The Poetics of Space
(1958; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 18–20.

in his catalog:
Harrison,
Symbols and Warriors
. The stelae in the Archaeological Museum in Badajoz represent perhaps the richest of all collections. Others are in Córdoba, Huelva, Seville and Madrid, and in Portugal.

topped and mended with thorns: Odyssey
XIV.10.

None of this is different:
Harrison,
Symbols and Warriors
, 12, 24.

“red with the blood”: Iliad
XVIII.538.

“fruit in wicker baskets”:
Ibid., XVIII.568.

“the perfect circle”:
Menelaus's, for example, in
Iliad
XVII.6.

obsessed with male beauty:
M. Eleanor Irwin, “Odysseus's ‘Hyacinthine Hair' in
Odyssey
6.231,”
Phoenix
44, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 205–18.

“who held his head”: Iliad
VI.509–10.

“His strength can do nothing”:
Ibid., XXI.316–18.

“Great Priam entered in”:
Ibid., XXIV.477–79.

“roused in Achilles”:
Ibid., XXIV.507–8.

“And they come”:
Ibid., IX.185ff.

Archaeologists working:
http://www.aocarchaeology.com/news/the-lyre-bridge-from-high-pasture-cave
.

It seems unlikely:
Harrison,
Symbols and Warriors
, 104.

A huge warrior figure:
Ibid., 298–99; Catalog number C80, found at Ategua, Córdoba. Now in the Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Córdoba.

“Ah Sokos”: Iliad
XI.450–55 (Lattimore, adapted).

“He is a unique”:
Harrison,
Symbols and Warriors
, 116.

“Hector … talk not”: Iliad
XXII.261–67.

“There are no oaths”: Iliad
XXII.262–67.

“the heroes gave orders”:
Harrison,
Symbols and Warriors
, 116.

9: HOMER ON THE STEPPES

The origins of the Greeks:
J. P. Mallory,
In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1989).

And before that:
N. G. L. Hammond, “Tumulus-Burial in Albania, the Grave Circles of Mycenae, and the Indo-Europeans,”
Annual of the British School at Athens
62 (1967), 77–105.

Right in the middle: Odyssey
XI.119–37.

“You must go out”:
Ibid., XI.121–30, Fagles, XI.138–49.

“in the ebbing time”: Odyssey
XI.136.

recorded from Sophocles:
R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, trans.,
Apollodorus'
Library
and Hyginus'
Fabulae:
Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), Fabula, 95.

“Our land”:
Plato,
Critias
.

it is possible:
M. L. West,
The Making of the
Iliad
: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42.

“the smoke ascending”:
Lattimore,
Iliad
XXI.522–23.

the speech he makes: Iliad
IX.308–409.

“rich with fat”:
Ibid., IX.205–8.

Odysseus then lists:
Ibid., IX.264–98.

“Let him submit”:
Ibid., IX.160.

“the greediest”:
Ibid., I.122.

“As I detest the doorways”:
Lattimore,
Iliad
XI.312–14.

“Hateful in my eyes”:
Iliad
IX.378ff.

“All the wealth”:
Ibid., IX.401–2.

“Cattle and fat sheep”:
Lattimore,
Iliad
IX.405–9.

These questions:
See: Adam Parry, “The Language of Achilles,”
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association
87 (1956), 1–7; M. D. Reeve, “The Language of Achilles,”
Classical Quarterly
, new ser., 23, no. 2 (Nov. 1973), 193–95; Steve Nimis, “The Language of Achilles: Construction vs. Representation,”
Classical World
79, no. 4 (Mar.–Apr. 1986), 217–25; W. Donlan, “Duelling with Gifts in the
Iliad
: As the Audience Saw It,”
Colby Quarterly
24 (1993), 171; Dean Hammer, “Achilles as Vagabond: The Culture of Autonomy in the ‘Iliad,'”
Classical World
90, no. 5 (May–June 1997), 341–66.

Those connections:
For these and many of the examples in the following pages of reconstructed and inherited words in the Indo-European family, see the outstanding J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams,
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 138, especially 220ff.

“phrater”: This word, from the same root as the others, in fact means something like “clansman” in Greek. The usual Greek word for brother is
adelphos
, meaning “from the same womb.”

words that have been transmitted:
For an overview of the Indo-European world, see Benjamin W. Fortson IV,
Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction
, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

the same word at root:
See Mallory and Adams,
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European
, 138. The reconstructed root for “otter” in PIE is
udrós
, with descendants in Latin, English, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, Iranian and Sanskrit. That reconstructed word is itself formed from the word for water,
wódr
.

A verb for the driving:
J. P. Mallory,
In Search of the Indo-Europeans
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 117–18: the frozen expression “to drive cattle” is found in Celtic, Italic and Indo-Iranian. Sanskrit and Greek share a word for the special sacrifice of “one hundred cows,” for which the Greek word is a hecatomb.

It seems as if:
Ibid., 118: “It has long been regarded as reasonable that there was an irreversible semantic development that led from a word ‘to comb' and a noun ‘sheep' (the woolly animal) to livestock in general and finally to wealth, hence German
Vieh
‘cattle' and English
fee.
More recently, however, this was challenged by Emile Benveniste who argued that the semantic development should indeed be reversed and begin with the concept of ‘movable possessions' which, under the influence of later cultural development, was gradually specified to sheep.” The PIE root is reconstructed as
péku
. See Emile Benveniste,
Indo-European Language and Society
(Miami: University of Miami Press, 1973).

The word for marry:
Mallory,
In Search of the Indo-Europeans
, 123: “Many Indo-European languages do employ the same Proto-Indo-European verb
wedh—
‘To lead (home)' when expressing the act of becoming married from a groom's point of view.”

That original compound word:
Mallory and Adams,
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European
, 323.

In other languages:
Bernard Comrie,
Tense
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

It was probably domesticated:
For the transforming role of the horse in steppeland life, see David W. Anthony,
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

both descended from:
Mallory and Adams,
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European
, 134.

or in hill figures:
The White Horse at Uffington (illustrated), not merely scratched into the turf but deliberately constructed with chalk rammed into deep trenches, nearly in the form it still maintains, has been dated to the Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1400
BC
, and has been regularly maintained ever since. David Miles and Simon Palmer, “White Horse Hill,”
Current Archaeology
142 (1995), 372–78. Images of horses on Celtic Iron Age coinage (the illustration is of a gold
stater
coined by the Gaulish Parisii ca. 70–60
BC
) draw as much on that tradition as on Mediterranean examples.

a place called Sintashta:
Anthony,
The Horse, the Wheel and Language
, 371–411.

they might have been:
Ibid., 371–411, 452–57.

it is possible for one man: Iliad
X.505.

at the funeral games:
The chariot race at Patroclus's funeral games is at ibid., XXIII.286–534.

camp build for many days:
They took nine days bringing in the timber for Hector's funeral pyre. Ibid., XXIV.783–84.

both Poseidon and Athene:
M. Detienne and A. B. Werth, “Athena and the Mastery of the Horse,”
History of Religions
11, no. 2 (Nov. 1971), 161–84.

“a prize-winning horse”: Iliad
XXII.22.

whiter than snow:
Ibid., X.436, 547.

“like a horse”:
Ibid., XV.263ff.

The Trojans sacrifice:
Ibid., XXI.132.

the horse dominates the names:
Grace H. Macurdy, “The Horse-Taming Trojans,”
Classical Quarterly
17, no. 1 (Jan. 1923), 50–52.

tells Telemachus: Odyssey
IV.271ff.

“dear, steadfast heart”:
Ibid., IV.240.

The second time:
Ibid., VIII.499ff.