Why Homer Matters (46 page)

“Sweet branch”:
Ibid., XXII.87, 82.

like a dream:
Ibid., XXII.199.

“and forces him”:
Ibid., XXII.198.

“to hack your meat”:
Ibid., XXII.346–48.

“and clean out”:
Ibid., XXII.327.

“gasping the life breath”:
Ibid., XXII.440.

“All of these”:
Ibid., XXII.510.

robes, mantles, blankets:
Ibid., XXIV.228, 580.

“kisses his hands”:
Ibid., XXIV.478ff.

“Priam weeps freely”:
Ibid., XXIV.509ff (Fagles, XXIV.594ff).

“They reach down”: Iliad
XXIV.630ff.

11: HOMER'S MIRROR

the Egyptian city of Thebes:
A place, incidentally, known to Achilles for its riches:
Iliad
IX.381–84.

fragments of papyrus:
For an illustration from Papyrus Chester Beatty IV, see A. H. Gardiner,
Hierat Papyri in the British Museum, Third Series: Chester Beatty Gift
(London: British Museum, 1935), 41.

Sinuhe's story:
R. B. Parkinson, ed. and trans.,
The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Egyptian Poems, 1940–1640
BC
(1997; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.

“Be a scribe”:
Quoted in Barry Kemp,
Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation
(London: Routledge, 2007), 163.

Peace had prevailed:
Ibid., 62.

“makes those born”:
Parkinson,
Sinuhe
, 31.

It is Indo-European:
Carleton T. Hodge, “Indo-Europeans in the Near East,”
Anthropological Linguistics
35, no. 1/4,
A Retrospective of the Journal Anthropological Linguistics: Selected Papers, 1959–1985
(1993), 90–108.

“numberless are its cattle”:
Parkinson,
Sinuhe
, 31.

“rushy place”:
Ibid., 46.

“This is the taste”:
Ibid., 29.

“milk in every cooked dish”:
Ibid., 32.

“each man subjugating”:
Kemp, 32.

“What can establish”:
Parkinson,
Sinuhe
, 33.

“What matters”:
Ibid., 34.

“the enduring security”:
Kemp,
Ancient Egypt
, 24.

“I was appointed”:
Parkinson,
Sinuhe
, 42–43.

Timē
and
Aretē
:
See Margalit Finkelberg, “
Tim
ē
and
Aret
ē
in Homer,”
Classical Quarterly
, new ser., 48, no. 1 (1998), 14–28, for a long and elegant discussion of this core Homeric tension.

the bath is always beautiful:
J. M. Cook, “Bath-Tubs in Ancient Greece,”
Greece and Rome
, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (Mar. 1959), 31–41; Steve Reece, “The Homeric
asaminthos
: Stirring the Waters of the Mycenaean Bath,”
Mnemosyne
, 4th ser., 55, fasc. 6 (2002), 703–8.

“washing his long hair”:
Gilgamesh, Epic XI.239–55, trans. in Gary A. Rendsburg, “Notes on Genesis XXXV,”
Vetus Testamentum
34, fasc. 3 (July 1984), 361–66.

“wash yourselves”:
Genesis XXXV.2.

“daughters of the springs”: Odyssey
X.350.

“brought in the water”: Odyssey
X.357–67 (Lattimore/Murray/Dimock).

“mind wandering”:
Ibid., X.374.

The Hittites were:
See 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).

“in the city of Urikina”:
Gary Beckman, ed.,
Hittite Diplomatic Texts,
2nd ed., SBL Writings from the Ancient World series (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999), 113.

“never suffer strangers gladly”: Odyssey
VII.32.

ptoliporthos Odysseus: Ibid., VIII.3.

pr
ē
kt
ē
res: Ibid., VIII.162.

“Strangers, who are you?”:
Ibid., IX.252–54.

“much-wandering pirates”:
Ibid., XVII.425.

“From Ilium the wind”:
Ibid., IX.39–42.

In about 1350
BC:
Beckman,
Hittite Diplomatic Texts
, 26.

“a low-born”:
Ibid., 31.

“Furthermore this sister”:
Ibid., 32.

“When you see a palace woman”:
Ibid.

“If the King”:
Ibid., 106.

it is now generally accepted:
Hans G. Güterbock, “Hittites and Akhaeans: A New Look,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
128, no. 2 (June 1984), 114–22.

“The father of My Majesty”:
Beckman,
Hittite Diplomatic Texts
, 154.

“the untrembling”:
Martin L. West, “Atreus and Attarissiyas,”
Glotta
77 (2001), 262–66.

A letter also survived:
Adrian Kelly, “Homer and History: ‘Iliad' 9.381–4,”
Mnemosyne
, 4th ser., 59, fasc. 3 (2006), 321–33.

Hittite scholars:
Güterbock, “Hittites and Akhaeans: A New Look,” 128 (1984), 114–22.

“People are treacherous”:
Beckman,
Hittite Diplomatic Texts
, 90.

it is clear:
T. Dothan,
The Philistines and Their Material Culture
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); T. Dothan and M. Dothan,
People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992); L. E. Stager, “The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185–1050 BCE)” in
The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land
, ed. T. E. Levy (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995), 332–48; Seymour Gitin, Amihai Mazar and Ephraim Stern, eds.,
Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries
B.C.E.
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1998).

at its symbolic climax:
The David and Goliath story is in 1 Samuel, chapter XVII. For a brilliant discussion of it, see Azzan Yadin, “Goliath's Armor and Israelite Collective Memory,”
Vetus Testamentum
54, fasc. 3 (July 2004), 373–95.

six feet nine inches tall:
See J. Daniel Hays, “Reconsidering the Height of Goliath,”
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
48, no. 4 (Dec. 2005), 701–14. In the Septuagint manuscripts and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Goliath's height is given as “four cubits and a span,” which is six feet nine inches. Later versions make it six cubits and a span, which is nine feet nine inches. The average height of Semites in the ancient Near East was about five feet. One warrior in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae was measured at five feet five inches. See A. J. N. W. Prag, Lena Papazoglou-Manioudaki, R. A. H. Neave, Denise Smith, J. H. Musgrave and A. Nafplioti, “Mycenae Revisited: Part 1. The Human Remains from a Grave Circle,”
Annual of the British School at Athens
104 (2009), 233–77.

“Why do you”:
1 Samuel XVII.8–10 (New English Bible).

Shouted aggression:
For the continuing emotional power of the battle shout, in attack or mourning, see the New Zealanders grieving the death of their companions in Afghanistan,
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id
=
1&objectid
=
10829992
.

“When Saul and the Israelites”:
1 Samuel XVII:11.

“Morning and evening”:
Ibid., XVII.16 (New English Bible/King James Bible).

“Who is he”:
Ibid., XVII:26.

“I cannot go”:
Ibid., XVII.39–40 (New English Bible/King James Bible).

“And the Philistine came on”:
Ibid., XVII. 42–44 (New English Bible/King James Bible).

“and all the world”:
Ibid., XVII.46–47 (New English Bible).

“And David put”:
Ibid., XVII. 49 (King James Bible).

12: HOMER'S ODYSSEY

“fall like winter snowflakes”: Odyssey
XII.187.

“tossing backwards and forwards”:
Ibid., XX.25.

“at which any immortal god”:
Ibid., V.72–73.

but was called Thapsos:
For Thapsos in the Bronze Age, see Anthony Russell, “In the Middle of the Corrupting Sea: Cultural Encounters in Sicily and Sardinia between 1450–900
BC
,” PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011, online at
http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2670/
; David Abulafia,
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34–35.

“at a loss”:
P. Leigh Fermor, letters to D. Devonshire; Diodorus Siculus,
Library of History
, 5.3.2, online at
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5A*.html
.

“swooping down”:
Odyssey
V.50–53 (combination of Fagles, Lattimore).

Hermes does everything:
Mary W. Helms,
Ulysses' Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and Geographical Distance
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 111ff.

“Sleep never falls on his eyelids”:
Odyssey
V.271.

“the axis always fixed”:
Ibid., V.274.

“reaching towards him”:
Ibid., V.281.

“death's decision”:
Ibid., V.326.

Seabirds are too beautifully present:
For birds in Homer, see J. MacLair Boraston, “The Birds of Homer,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
31 (1911), 216–50; Sylvia Benton, “Note on Sea-Birds,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
92 (1972), 172–73; Paul Friedrich, “An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer's Odyssey,”
American Anthropologist
, new ser., 99, no. 2 (June 1997), 306–20.

“the most beautiful ankles”: Odyssey
V.33.3.

“like a diving tern”: Odyssey
V.353.

The earth shaker:
Ibid., V.367.

“Just like the kind of joy”:
Ibid., V.394–99.

kai dē doupon akouse:
Odyssey
V. 401–3.

“Spent to all use”:
George Chapman's translation of
Odyssey
, V.454–55.

“heartsick on the open sea”: Odyssey
I.4.

“from his thigh”: Odyssey
X.321.

“her surpassingly beautiful”:
Ibid., X.347.

“lay in the sea-Lord's
loving waves”:
Odyssey XI.306.

“his story held them”:
Ibid., XI.334 (Fagles translation, XI.379).

“Many were the people”: Odyssey
I.3.

“for his return”:
Ibid., I.13.

“the fascinating imaginative realm”:
Quoted by Richard Rorty in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (1992), from
Philosophy and Social Hope
(London: Penguin, 1999).

“the sweetest place”: Odyssey
IX.34 (Fagles translation, IX.38).

“rocky Ithaca”: Odyssey
XXI.346.

the kind of island:
This point, in connection with the Iron Age, is made by Helen Waterhouse in “From Ithaca to the
Odyssey
,”
Annual of the British School at Athens
91 (1996), 301–17.

“bends to kiss”: Odyssey
XIII.354.

an Assyrian relief:
See, e.g., Julian Reade,
Assyrian Sculpture
(1983; reprint, London: British Museum, 1998), fig. 57, p. 54.

“there is nothing sweeter”: Odyssey
IX.28.

“She withers”:
Ibid., XIII.430–33.

“Knossos, where Minos reigned”:
Ibid., XIX.172–78.

When she appears:
Ibid., XVI.415 for Penelope standing by column; XX.42 for her shining among women.

Artemis and Aphrodite:
Ibid., XVII.37, XIX.54.

“the nightingale”:
Ibid., XIX.518–24.

Like all the great women in Homer:
Penelope with well-balanced mind, ibid., XVIII.249; weeping, XIX.209; weaving, XVII.97, XIX.128; with cloths, XIX.232, 255; and veil, XX.65.

a queen regnant:
Penelope as governor, ibid., XIX.106ff.

“grow in goodness”:
Ibid., XIX.114.

“Just as a bitch”:
Ibid., XX.14–16.

swimming in blood:
Ibid., XXII.307.

are repeated here:
Ibid., XXII.325.

“like a lion”:
Ibid., XXII.401–3.

“He finds them”:
Ibid., XXII.383–88.

“They lead him out”:
Ibid., XXII.474–77.

“the cable of a dark-prowed ship”:
Ibid., XXII.465.

“Just as when”:
Ibid., XXII.468–73.

“the well-built bridal chamber”:
Ibid., XXIII.178.

“her knees are loosened”:
Ibid., XXIII.205–8.

“As when the land”:
Ibid., XXIII.233–40.

CONCLUSION: THE BRIGHT WAKE