A Companion to Greek Mythology

Ken Dowden, Niall Livingstone, Ken Dowden, Niall Livingstone

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444396935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

A Companion to Greek Mythology presents a series of essays that explore the phenomenon of Greek myth from its origins in shared Indo-European story patterns and the Greeks' contacts with their Eastern Mediterranean neighbours through its development as a shared language and thought-system for the Greco-Roman world.

• Features essays from a prestigious international team of literary experts
• Includes coverage of Greek myth's intersection with history, philosophy and religion
• Introduces readers to topics in mythology that are often inaccessible to non-specialists
• Addresses the Hellenistic and Roman periods as well as Archaic and Classical Greece

PART I

ESTABLISHING THE CANON

CHAPTER TWO

Homer’s Use of Myth

Françoise Létoublon

Epic and Mythology

The epics of Homer ¹ are probably the oldest Greek literary texts that we have, ² and their subject is select episodes from the Trojan War. The Iliad deals with a short period in the tenth year of the war; ³ the Odyssey is set in the period covered by Odysseus’return from the war to his homeland of Ithaca, beginning with his departure from Kalypso’s island after a seven-year stay.

The Trojan War was actually the material for a large body of legend that formed a major part of Greek myth. But the narrative itself cannot be taken as a mythographic one, unlike the narrative of Hesiod (see CH. 4) – its purpose is not to narrate myth. Epic and myth may be closely linked, but they are not identical, and the distance between the two poses a particular difficulty for us as we try to negotiate the mythological material that the narrative on the one hand tells and on the other hand only alludes to. ‘Allusion’will become a key term as we progress.

The Trojan War, as a whole then, was the material dealt with in the collection of epics known as the ‘Epic Cycle’, but which the Iliad and Odyssey allude to. The Epic Cycle, however, does not survive except for a few fragments and short summaries by a late author, but it was an important source for classical tragedy, and for later epics that aimed to fill in the gaps left by Homer, whether in Greek – the Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna (maybe third century AD), and the Capture of Troy of Tryphiodoros (third century AD. – or, in Latin, Vergil’s Aeneid (first century BC), and Ovid’s ‘Iliad’ in the Metamorphoses (first century AD). It also fuelled the prose accounts of ‘Diktys of Crete’(first century AD. and ‘Dares of Phrygia’(unknown date AD), allegedly eye-witnesses to the Trojan War and particularly popular from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. So our task is to study how Homer uses Greek myth even though we have no direct evidence of Greek myth before Homer, rather an uncomfortable and paradoxical challenge.

Evidently, a body of Greek myth did exist in the oral tradition before the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were in the process of composition, and the oral tradition itself may be seen depicted in the epic through such figures as Demodokos. The epics even show us that some divergent traditions circulated about some episodes of the Trojan War: the Odyssey alludes to a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles (8.75) ⁴ instead of the Iliad’s quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles; an expedition of Odysseus with Diomedes to the town of Troy is alluded to in the Odyssey, but is rather different from the spy mission to the camp of the Trojan allies of Iliad 10, where the Trojan spy Dolon and the king Rhesos are killed and Rhesos’horses stolen.

Scholars such as Kakridis (1949) and Severyns (1928) ⁵ paved the way for the critical approach we refer to as ‘Neoanalysis’(see further CH. 22), which is based on the idea that Homer already knew the traditions which later authors told – in the Kypria, Aithiopis, Iliou Persis and other cyclic epics. This means that he may be alluding to ‘texts’we do not know, for instance an Argonautika, as we can see from the Odyssey’s mention of the ship Argo, pasi melousa ‘known by everybody’(Odyssey 12.69–70). A significant proportion of this mythology may only be known to us in written form through late texts, but its presence in vase paintings guarantees that it was already told in the Archaic Age.

So this chapter starts from the mythological material which the Iliad and the Odyssey exploit and begins with the episodes of the Trojan War in chronological order (as known from the whole ancient tradition, from the summary of the Epic Cycle by Proclus, via the Byzantine patriarch Photius in the ninth century AD, to Tryphiodoros and the Latin authors mentioned above). At the same time we will do well to remember that there is a certain methodological inconvenience in this approach: we are not sure that such or such events were told in one part of the Cycle rather than in another. Furthermore, it is not even agreed that the different parts of the Epic Cycle – whether oral or written – existed in the Archaic Age (before the Iliad and the Odyssey) in the form that they later took and that we know.

Cosmogony and Beginnings

The difference between how Homer and Hesiod narrate myth can best be seen in their presentation of cosmogony and cosmology. In Homer, because her son Achilles needs her help, we ‘see’the goddess Thetis living in the sea with her aged father (the ‘Old Man of Sea’) (Iliad 1.357–63). Then we learn from her that Zeus is not currently in his usual home on Mount Olympos, but engaged in a twelve-day feast amongst the Ethiopian people (1.423–4). Later, when Hera gives an excuse to Zeus for going to the limits of the Earth, we discover that Okeanos (Ocean) is the ‘origin (genesis) of the gods’(14.201) and is constantly quarrelling with his wife Tethys (14.205). This is an alternative cosmogony to that told in the Theogony (106, see CH. 3): Okeanos has taken the place of Ouranos, and Tethys that of Gaia.

In Book 15, Zeus’s commands to Poseidon through the messenger Iris and Poseidon’s answer (15.158–67, 185–99) remind the audience how the three sons of Kronos once parted the world, ‘but the earth and Olympos’heights are common to us all’(193, tr. Fagles 1990), which scarcely seems consistent with the account of Zeus’s law on Earth in Hesiod’s Theogony. One may suspect that the needs of the argument influenced Poseidon’s discourse. Another mythical variant may be found in the Iliad’s account, in a simile, of Earth suffering from Zeus’s onslaught on Typhōeus (Iliad 2.780–3, told somewhat differently at Hesiod, Theogony 821–46). ⁶ In any case, we find ourselves here in territory with a seriously Near Eastern feel and most scholars now think in terms of borrowing from Near Eastern tradition rather than the common Indo-European inheritance (on these possibilities, see Part IV of this book). ⁷

Preliminaries to the Trojan War

It is not easy to decide how Homer’s narrative relates to pre-existing myths of Troy, not least because the poems have their own narrative strategy, one focusing on the anger of Achilles and the plan of Zeus, the other on the return of Odysseus. This strategy does not follow the events of the Trojan War, or only a very limited part of them. Rather, the poet treats those events, well known to his audience, as a kind of mental map for locating the places, the people, and the events of his narrative – they are situated relative to the whole Trojan myth. The narrative is concerned with chronological order only in respect of Homer’s own epics: the chronology of the Iliad begins with the anger of Apollo and ends with the burial of Hektor. The mythic elements are only taken into account when they are useful for the frame of the narrative itself. Of course, if we take Hesiod’s Theogony as the standard for Greek mythology, we might speak of a Homeric ‘deviation’from the traditional narrative concerning the first ages of the world. The myth of the ages of mankind explicitly told in Hesiod (Works and Days 109–201), usually considered as a borrowing from Near Eastern myth (see M. L. West 1966, 1997), may rather correspond to the Homeric evidence if we believe Most (1997).

Turning to the events before the war, we know through other texts that Zeus took the form of a swan to seduce Leda, who then gave birth to Helen, Klytaimestra, and the Dioskouroi, be it from one or several eggs. We find no mention of these specific details in Homer, but Helen is sometimes called ‘Zeus’s daughter’: she is (in rather archaic Greek) Dios ekgegauia, ‘sprung from Zeus’(Iliad 3.418) or kourē Dios aigiochoio, ‘the maid of aegis-bearing Zeus’(3.426). ⁸ So we may suppose that Homer does know the myth of Helen’s birth but does not need to mention it explicitly, probably because it was generally known. It is not that it is suppressed by Homer in order to avoid extraordinary details, as some scholars have thought, but rather that he does not foreground magical and fantastic detail (see Griffin 1977b) or, more generally, irrational events.

The foundation of Troy was probably an important part of the myth, given the number of allusions to it in Homer. The whole genealogy of its kings is proudly uttered in Aeneas’challenge to Achilles (Iliad 20.215–40). First, Dardanos founded Dardania in the mountains; then he was succeeded by Erichthonios, whose name seems to imply a myth (one of birth from the Earth itself: a chthonic myth) parallel to the Athenian myth. ⁹ Next comes Tros whose name clearly points to the name of the Trojan land, Troiē, whereas his son’s name Ilos points to the city, Ilios or Ilion; then, after Ilos, comes Laomedon, Priam’s father – and Aeneas’great-grandfather (see below for the use of this genealogy in argument). The walls of Ilion (we tend, inaccurately, to call the city Troy) play an important role in the narrative, even if the war is not shown as a siege: if the enemy enters the city, it is thereby lost, as is shown by Andromache when she learns that Hektor is dead and throws her veil down (Iliad 22.467–72). The building of these walls of Troy by the two gods Apollo and Poseidon employed as thētes (serfs) by King Laomedon is told by Poseidon (Iliad 21.441–60), again to buttress an argument (see below). Earlier in the Iliad (7.452–3) we find another allusion to their building of the walls of Troy for Laomedon, again in a speech by Poseidon, where the fame of these walls is threatened by a new construction, this time by the Greeks – which Zeus encourages Poseidon to overwhelm by sea and sand after the Greeks return home (459–63).

Homer mentions the abduction of the beautiful youth Ganymede to become the wine-bearer on Olympos and the horses given as compensation (Iliad 20.232–5). In comparison with later poetry and literature (symposium poetry, Socratic dialogues, Hellenistic epigram, and pastoral), Homer seems as discrete about homosexual love as he is about magic.

The topography of Troy shows, amongst other landmarks, the Skaian gates and the fountains where Trojan women used to wash the linen in peacetime – and Hektor prophesies that Achilles will be killed there (Iliad 22.360). We also see the tomb of Ilos (the king who gave the city its name Ilios or Ilion) used in the narrative as a landmark. Thus we meet formulae (standard units of Homeric verse) such as ¹⁰

• para sēmati Īlou (‘by the tomb of Ilos’, Iliad 10.415)
• par’ Īlou sēma palaiou Dardanidāo (‘by the tomb of Ilos the ancient son of Dardanos’, Iliad 11.166)
• epi tumbōi | Īlou Dardanidāo (‘on the tomb | of Ilos son of Dardanos’, Iliad 11.372).

The story of Paris, son of Priam and Hekabe, which we know from later authorities (especially Apollodoros 3.12.5 §§ 147–50), is not mentioned e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• To the Reader
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• APPROACHING MYTH
• PART I ESTABLISHING THE CANON
• PART II MYTH PERFORMED, MYTH BELIEVED
• Part III NEW TRADITIONS
• Part IV OLDER TRADITIONS
• Part V INTERPRETATION
• Part VI CONSPECTUS
• Bibliography
• Index of Texts Discussed
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects