The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece 9781107035195, 1107035198

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THE HESIODIC CATALOGUE OF WOMEN AND ARCHAIC GREECE This book examines the extant fragments of the Archaic Greek poem known in antiquity as Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women. Kirk Ormand shows that the poem should be read intertextually with other hexameter poetry from the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, especially that of Homer, Hesiod, and the Cyclic epics. Through literary interaction with these poems, the Catalogue reflects polit ical and social tensions in the Archaic period with regard to the forms of power that were claimed by members of the elite class. In particular, Ormand argues that the Catalogue reacts against the “middling ideology” that came to the fore during the Archaic period in Greece and champions traditional aristocratic modes of status. Ormand maintains that the poem’s presentation of the end of the heroic age is a reflection of a declining emphasis on nobility of birth in the structures of authority in the emerging sixth century polis. Kirk Ormand is Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. He is author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999) and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2009) and editor of A Companion to Sophocles (2012). He has pub lished articles on Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Lucan, the Greek novel, and Clint Eastwood. He is the recipient of the Basil Gildersleeve Prize from the American Journal of Philology, the Barbara McManus Prize from the Women’s Classical Caucus of the American Philological Association, and the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize. Ormand has traveled extensively in Greece and held the post of Whitehead Professor of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens during the 2007 2008 academic year. He also held a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison, in 1999 2000.

THE HESIODIC CATALOGUE OF WOMEN AND ARCHAIC GREECE Kirk Ormand Oberlin College

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107035195 © Kirk Ormand 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Ormand, Kirk, 1962– The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece / Kirk Ormand. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-03519-5 (hardback) 1. Hesiod. Catalogus feminarum. I. Title. pa4009.z5o76 2014 8810 .01 2014009860 isbn 978-1-107-03519-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Ch. 3 was first published in American Journal of Philology 125.3 (2004), 303–338. Copyright © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

For Gayle, Kevin, and Ella

Contents

page ix

Preface 1

Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women Date, Genre, Performance Toward a Theory of Archaic Poetic Political Discourse Catalogues, Genealogies, and Women Conclusion

2

The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna Hedna in Homer: Gifts, Bridewealth, Dowry Solon and Middling Ideologies of Marriage Hedna in the Catalogue of Women The Catalogue’s Portrayal of Hedna The Moment of Transfer Dôra and Hedna Disputes over Hedna Hedna as a Competition Conclusion

3

Marriage, Identity, and the Story of Mestra The Hesiodic Story of Mestra Putting Mestra in Context: Myths of Shape Shifters Putting Mestra in Context: Marriage in Sixth Century Athens

1 3 15 42 50 52 54 60 64 66 66 70 72 74 81 85 87 96 109

vii

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4

Contents

Atalanta Reflects the Iliad Atalanta in the Catalogue and Wider Greek Myth The Story Marriage and Familial Structures Atalanta as Achilles Conclusions

5

Then There Was the One Who Was Alkmene The Text and the Back Story The Plot of Zeus, Another Preview Herakles’ Other Father Recalling Odysseus Conclusions

6

7

119 120 128 133 138 151 152 154 162 168 171 179

The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

181

The Heroes as Wooers, Helen as Bride The Beginning of the End of the Age of Heroes The End of the Age of Heroes

184 196 202

Epilogue: Women, Middling Discourse, and the Polis The Other “Catalogue of Women” Dedications and the Polis Helen and Agariste

Appendix A. Dowry in the Homeric Poems? Appendix B. The Ruling Concerning the Hedna of Mestra (fr. 43a.41 43) Bibliography Index Locorum General Index

217 217 223 226 237 242 245 257 260

Preface

This work has had a long and complex history. Assiduous historians of scholarship might be able to trace its inception to a footnote in my dissertation, written at Stanford University more than twenty years ago. Since then the shape and direction of the book have changed many times. I hope that in its final form this book will help make the Catalogue of Women accessible to a new generation of readers. I owe thanks to many people who have helped me along the way, some so long ago that they may not remember their comments, critiques, and other acts of kindness. To the best of my recollection, these people are the following: Judith Barringer, Darice Birge, Ruby Blondell, Paul Boyer, Mark Buchan, Susan Cole, Joy Connolly, Lillian Doherty, Mark Edwards, Nancy Felson, Anne Feltovich, Helene Foley, Susan Stanford Friedman, Daniel Gardner, Madeleine Goh, Barbara Gold, Nathan Greenberg, David Halperin, Elizabeth Hamilton, Edward Harris, Brooke Holmes, W. Ralph Johnson, Athena Kirk, David Konstan, Leslie Kurke, Jessica Lamont, Brian Lavelle, Sara Lindheim, Nike Makris, Elizabeth Manwell, Laura McClure, Denise McCoskey, Melissa Mueller, Robin Osborne, Cynthia Patterson, Nancy Rabinowitz, Paul Rehak, Naomi Rood, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Laura Slatkin, Mario Telo, Tom Van Nortwick, Bronwen Wickkiser, Drew Wilburn, Victoria Wohl, Nancy Worman, and Ioannis Ziogas. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press provided insightful and genuinely helpful critiques; Stephanie Sakson, the copy editor for the Press, caught many errors and infelicities, and improved the book substantially. I apologize to anyone whom I have failed to recall here. I must give special thanks to Alex Purves, who read the entire book in draft form and provided invaluable comments, suggestions, and ix

x

Preface

encouragement. The project would certainly have never been finished without her help. Needless to say, neither Alex nor any of the other people listed here should be held responsible for any errors or infelicities in the work that follows. Fault for those lies with me alone. Tom Cooper has been a great friend to the Oberlin Classics Department and has provided material help in the production of this book. I am pleased to offer thanks to him here. Acknowledgment for material help is also due to various institutions. The Insitute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin Madison supported me during the writing of an initial chapter. A pre-tenure leave, funded in part by the Mellon Foundation, and a sabbatical from Oberlin College gave me time to research and write the rest of the book, and critical funding as well as superb research facilities were made available by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, in the form of a Whitehead professorship. Chapter 3 originally appeared in the American Journal of Philology, and I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint it, modified, here. As always, my spouse, Gayle Boyer, and my two children, Kevin and Ella Boyer, have provided love, support, and inexplicable good humor during the long years when I have spent too much time with Hesiod and not enough with them. There are no sufficient thanks for their presence in my life. K.O.

1 Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

Hesiod is well known as the author of two poems, the Theogony and the Works and Days. In the Classical and post-Classical worlds of Greece and Rome, however, a number of other works were also ascribed to him, among them a work known as the Catalogue of Women. This work, though not now generally considered to have been written by Hesiod, was highly regarded in antiquity, probably committed to writing by the mid-sixth century BCE, and is fundamentally “Hesiodic” in form.1 The Catalogue (as I will refer to it throughout this book) is structured in a manner familiar to readers of the Theogony: it provides a running list of women who gave birth to heroes, with brief narratives about those births. Most of these women conceive of their remarkable offspring by having intercourse (willingly or not) with a god, though some also marry mortal heroes and produce children with them. The work moves through a full set of genealogies arranged roughly within geographic areas but, like the Theogony, also contains a less clearly marked progressive plot. All the heroic genealogies culminate in the story of the marriage of Helen, which, as we will see, leads emphatically to the end of the age of heroes. In providing a comprehensive narrative of heroic genealogies, then, the Catalogue also tells the story of how the age that produced the birth of heroes came to its inevitable end, leaving humankind in its current, wretched state, divorced forever from direct social and sexual interaction with the gods. With the publication of Merkelbach and West’s 1967 edition of the fragments of Hesiod and the small new finds that have occurred over the 1

See Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 37 40, for a lucid discussion of the character istics of Hesiod’s poetry and the ancient attribution of the Catalogue to Hesiod. 1

2

Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

past forty-five years, significant passages of the Catalogue of Women are now readily available. What we must admit from the outset, however, is that we know very little about the conditions of production of this text. We do not know who wrote it or if it is appropriate to speak of a single “author.”2 We do not know when it was committed to writing or how old the traditional material in it was when that happened. We do not know where its final redactor did his work. And finally, we do not fully understand the genre that it occupies (or, perhaps, defines sui generis) and what the confines of that genre are. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that literary interpretation of the Catalogue has taken some time to develop. Each of the issues listed just above has received considerable scholarly attention, but none of them is the primary focus of this work.3 My goal, rather, is to produce a textured literary and historical reading of some of the major passages of the whole. In so doing, I also intend to place the Catalogue ideologically in the shifty historical context of the late Archaic period in Greece, specifically the mid-sixth century. To do so I have had to make assumptions and educated guesses about issues such as date, place, and genre. In this chapter, therefore, I lay out those assumptions. At the outset I should make clear that I have chosen not to engage in the difficult technical work of textual reconstruction that has been so admirably undertaken by Merkelbach and West, Casanova, Hirschberger, Most, 2

3

Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 19, point out that the name “Homer” is used by scholars to mean a range of different kinds of authors, from a single genius who composed the Iliad and Odyssey from traditional materials to the collection of oral bards who shaped those poems into their eventual fixed form. The name “Hesiod” is beset with similar difficulties: we are dealing with a set of traditional poetry, ascribed in antiquity to “Hesiod,” but clearly composed in parts over a period of centuries. Indispensable to reading the fragments of the Catalogue is West 1985, with citations to earlier studies. See particularly 1 30. Clay 2003, 161 174, has significantly influenced my understanding of the work and its place in the Hesiodic tradition. Rutherford 2000 is an excellent discussion of the genre of the work, and Rutherford 2005 offers useful discussion of its possible origin(s). See also the essays of Osborne, Haubold, Cingano, and Martin in Hunter 2005. Cingano 2009, 111 118, provides an excellent summary of the problems and suggests a much shorter original text by Hesiod that grew over time through a series of later accretions (118). See further below.

Date, Genre, Performance

3

and many others. Though it may be dismissed as no more than a convenient fiction, I have chosen instead to try to squeeze what meaning we can out of the edition produced by Merkelbach and West (with occasional modifications) and to place those bits of text into a coherent literary and social history.4

DATE, GENRE, PERFORMANCE

As with so much about the Catalogue, there is general agreement, but no certainty, about where and when it was written. Nearly all modern scholars are willing to place it at some time in the sixth century, though some later than others.5 The primary internal evidence lies with two facts: first, the episode concerning Kyrênê (fr. 215), which, West argues, “presupposes the existence of the Greek colony in Libya 4

5

The major edition is Merkelbach and West 1967, updated and revised in Merkelbach and West 1990. On occasion information is included in the major edition that did not survive into the 1990 edition. When I cite from the 1967 version I make note of it; otherwise, quotations are from the 1990 edition. Most’s new edition in the Loeb series (2007) introduces a new numbering scheme for the fragments and, given Most’s skill in reconstruction, may become the new stand ard. For the sake of scholarly convenience, however, I have chosen to quote from and refer to Merkelbach and West unless otherwise noted. Numbering of frag ments is that of Merkelbach and West. West 1985, 130 137, arguing from internal evidence, puts it between 580 and 520. March 1987, 158 159, prefers the earlier part of this range, from 580 to 550. Koenen 1994, 26, suggests that it can be no later than the early sixth century. Rutherford 2000 argues that the “canonical version” may belong to the sixth century, but he is willing to believe that some material may be much older. Fowler 1998, 1 n. 4, argues for a date before the death of Kleisthenes in 575 and suggests a date near 580. The one significant outlier is Janko 1982 (87 and 247 248 nn. 37 38), who, based on stylistic evidence, believes that the Catalogue is closely contemporary to the Theogony and Works and Days, which he puts at the end of the eighth or beginning of the seventh centuries. Solmsen 1981, 355 358, argues that the text was highly variable, and changed by local rhapsodes, until the Alexandrian period. If this is the case, it is impossible to fix either date or place of any fragment. Clay 2003, 165 n. 51, surveys previous opinions and discusses the difficulty of reaching a sure conclusion. Hirschberger 2004, 32 51, cautiously settles for a date between 630 and 590.

4

Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

founded c. 631.”6 Next, the Catalogue seems to assume throughout the divinity of Herakles, which again points to a date after 600.7 As for place, West believes that the final redactor lives in Athens, in part because of the curiously Athenian flavor of fragment 43a. Fowler, however, sees the Athenian genealogy as significantly lacking in detail and suggests that the genealogy of the Hellenes suggests rather an Aeolid author from northern Greece, and he ties the redaction of the Catalogue to the expansion of Thessalian power after the First Sacred War. Hirschberger, citing numerous local versions of specific myths, suggests that some of the stories, particularly those from the Aeolid genealogies, seem to belong more securely in Asia Minor than in Thessaly.8 While it would doubtless be reassuring to place the production of our version of the Catalogue more securely, it is not critical for my project. I am interested in locating the Catalogue not in specific political disputes, but rather in the broad ideological changes that we see throughout Greece in the sixth century. Specific topics receive further treatment in the chapters that follow, but in this chapter I provide a thumbnail sketch of the issues.9 In so doing, I tip my hand: I also believe that the Catalogue belongs in the sixth century. I have come to this conclusion both because of the internal references used by other scholars and because such a date fits with the analyses that I have produced. Such reasoning is, of course, somewhat circular; on the other hand, many of the broad social concerns that I address are not, themselves, precisely datable. If we discover at some point that the Catalogue must have been written in the seventh century, then that means the ideological anxieties that are inherent in the 6 7 8 9

West 1985, 132. West 1985, 130; cf. frs. 1.22, 25.26 33, 229.6 13. West 1985, 169; Fowler 1998, 9, 11 15; Hirschberger 2004, 49 51. Full discussion of the history of the sixth century is beyond the scope of this book. The period is fraught with difficulties, and most of our sources are written at least a century later. Good overviews can be found in Murray 1980, Snodgrass 1980, and Osborne 2009. For the role of Solon in the formation of the Athenian polis, I am particularly indebted to Manville 1990; see also Osborne 2009, 204 213. Patterson 1998 provides an excellent reassessment of the role of the oikos in the early polis. Hall 2007a makes clear just how uncertain our knowledge of the history of the period is and gives excellent discussions of various events and social changes.

Date, Genre, Performance

5

stories of the Catalogue must also have existed earlier. I see a greater preponderance of evidence for them in the sixth century. As is often the case with fragmentary texts, the ancient Greeks were much more sure than we are about the authorship of the Catalogue. It was almost universally agreed in antiquity that the work was written by “Hesiod,” that is to say, the poet to whom they also ascribed both the Theogony and Works and Days.10 Modern scholarly opinion is nearly unanimous in believing that the poet of the Theogony is not the same as that of the Catalogue; the issue is confounded by the fact that our text of the Theogony ends with a section that appears to have been written in order to form a bridge between the two works (Theogony 1019ff.). The style and diction of that last section, however, appear to be “postHesiodic.”11 Nonetheless, the judgment of ancient scholars and authors is of some importance, not for the purpose of fixing the historical identity of a particular person who wrote a particular work, but because the ascription to Hesiod indicates that the scholars of previous ages considered the Catalogue to be a certain kind of poetry. The stories contained in the Catalogue are traditional heroic tales, and the entire text falls into the broad category of oral hexameter poetry that characterizes the works of Homer and Hesiod.12 As such it contains a good deal of very old material, formed in large part by the formulaic rules of oral poetic composition. The “author” of any given line or fragment may well have lived some centuries before the text was written down. While 10

11

12

See discussion in West 1985, 127 130. A comprehensive analysis of the prob lem is provided in Schwartz 1960, 485 549. West 1985, 127 128. See also West 1966, 398 399; Clay 2003, 162 163, with references. Hirschberger 2004, 42 51, summarizes the arguments about authorship and date of composition. Dräger 1997, 1 26, argues for Hesiod as the author of the Catalogue; a useful summary is Haubold 2005, 87 n. 8. See Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 15 34, for a useful discussion of the meaning of the ancient ascription of “Homeric” authorship to a text. A useful summary of the poetic elements that characterize Homeric composition is on pp. 18 21, and the nature of oral formulae and the pioneering work of Milman Parry is discussed on pp. 48 56. It is sufficient here to indicate that the Catalogue is similarly derived from a long oral tradition, and eventually arrives in a relatively stable textual form. Rutherford 2000, 82 83 and 264 n. 10, provides a good brief discussion of some of the poem’s oral formulae.

6

Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

there is some value, therefore, in trying to fix the final “redactor” of the text and indeed, to tease out the ways that he has shaped the text the question of author, I suggest, is better approached as a generic question.13 In an essay that has not been much remarked by Classicists, Michel Foucault teased out some of the functions of ascribing a work to a particular author: [A]n author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse . . . it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.14

As Foucault goes on to argue, this classificatory function (the “author function”) is primarily an indicator of status. This discussion is particularly pertinent to the text of an Archaic author such as Hesiod, about whose life we know next to nothing with certainty. When Pausanias says that the Catalogue was written by Hesiod, in other words, that is first a statement of the type and status of the work: it is the kind of work that he associates with the author-function of Hesiod and is sufficiently similar in style to other works of the same author-function to deserve that label. We moderns, rather more obsessed with the identity of a genius behind a work, will find the Catalogue “not by Hesiod” on various grounds, but the poem is clearly “Hesiodic” in a larger sense. 13

14

See, e.g., Nagy 1990, 52 81, for a discussion of the way that “authors” in antiquity are primarily a function of the texts ascribed to them. Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 37 40, point out that the ancient Greeks saw the Catalogue as Hesiodic because they saw it as stylistically coherent with other works ascribed to Hesiod. West 1985, 30, sees the author of the Catalogue as a masterful “synthesizer” of traditional material. At 125 he boldly states, “The Catalogue is, just as much as the Iliad, the work of a single creative poet.” Clay 2003 makes the interesting argument that in dealing with poems of a traditional, oral nature, the presence of a creative poet is best discovered through the artful arrangement of material. In the case of the Catalogue, where the text is fragmentary and the arrangement necessarily provisional, this becomes a difficult task. Martin 2005 argues for a more fluid understanding of the text of the Catalogue, with the possibility of significant additions existing in some, but not all, versions. Foucault 1984 [1979], 107. Graziosi 2002 makes good use of this work; see esp. 194 n. 81.

Date, Genre, Performance

7

To start, the Catalogue, like the Theogony, provides us with an ambitiously comprehensive mythological genealogy, this time of heroes rather than of gods.15 From this similarity, no doubt, springs the attempt at some point in antiquity to link the two works as a single genealogical masterpiece. We can, however, go further than this: woven into the structure of the Theogony is also the story of Zeus’ ascension as ruler of Olympus and, with it, the separation of humans from gods.16 The arrangement of material in the Catalogue appears to have a similarly Hesiodic bent: in addition to recounting, more or less systematically, most of the heroes of Greek myth, the Catalogue also recounts a specific time in the mythical history of humans, that brief period when (primarily male) gods were sleeping with (primarily female) humans and thus producing the half-divine heroes. Both the prologue of the poem (fr. 1) and its conclusion (fr. 204.97 110) allude to the eventual end of this bracketed time, to the moment when normal humans were finally and fully separated from the gods, so that the hemitheoi, the “half-gods” of myth, ceased to be produced.17 Like the Theogony, the Catalogue tells us why life today is the way it is. Despite its thematic connection to the Theogony, however, this work clearly owes its pedigree in another way to the Works and Days. It is in that poem that Hesiod tells the story of the four declining metallic ages of humanity (gold, silver, bronze, and iron), and interjects an age of heroes in between the bronze age and the current, unhappy age of iron. How this age of heroes comes to an end, however, is not entirely consistent in the Hesiodic corpus. As Jenny Strauss Clay points out, the transition to the final age of iron is different from those that went before: “No catastrophe or sudden destruction precipitates the end of the heroic age. Instead, a gradual transition occurs as the gods withdraw from intercourse with mortals.”18 In the Works and Days, the narrative of the age of heroes ends with mention of their expedition to retrieve Helen (164 165), and then we hear that some of these heroes were settled 15

16 17 18

As Tsagalis 2009 notes: “In this respect the CW shows itself to be strongly Hesiodic, in that it abides by the built in linearity characteristic of the genea logical Hesiodic epic par excellence, the Theogony” (p. 158). See also Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 40. Recently discussed with great clarity by Clay 2003, 100 128. See Clay 2003, 169, on the “distancing” function of the term hemitheoi. Clay 2003, 93.

8

Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

“apart from humans” (dich’ anthrôpôn 167) on the Isles of the Blessed. This general schema also seems to inform fragment 204 of the Catalogue, but there the transition is marked as more abrupt and more final. The story of the suitors of Helen shifts abruptly to a change in the character of life, in which someone probably the gods, less likely their heroic offspring must now live “as before/apart from humans” (fr. 204.103).19 Though the events correspond roughly to the narrative in the Works and Days, the result here is a sudden break and return to a mode of life that does not include direct congress with the gods. The Catalogue, then, falls into the same broad contextual category as both the Theogony and Works and Days. It serves as an explanation of why our lives are as they are now, and it does so by recalling an earlier time, a time when things were, in some ways, both better and less distinctly human.20 More important, the Catalogue seems designed to fit just between these two texts, in that time after the general separation of gods from humans and up to the point when the gods are no longer sleeping with mortals and producing hemitheoi, “half-divine” heroes.21 Just as the authors of the Cyclic epics avoided retelling the stories that became monumentally known through the Odyssey and Iliad, moreover, the redactor of the Catalogue seems to have taken some care to avoid myths already staked out by the Theogony and Works and Days.22 Though Prometheus and 19

20

21

22

Ludwig Koenen writes of this troubled ending to the fragment that “the Catalogue’s version is only understandable in light of Hesiod’s story about the removal of the heroes to the Islands of the Blest (the island is not even mentioned in the Catalogue).” Koenen 1994, 26 27 n. 62. See also Clay 2003, 169 174. Clay argues correctly (166 n. 56) that the setting of the Catalogue is after the separation of humans and gods narrated in the Theogony. González 2010 also argues that the poem presents a final separation between mortals and immortals; see esp. 416 417. See Hirschberger 2004, 55, for the importance of the Trojan War as the end of the age of heroes. I am here much influenced by Clay 2003, who argues that the Theogony and the Works and Days are complementary texts that view the problem of humanity from a divine and human perspective, respectively. See also West 1985, 167. See Tsagalis 2009, 169. Haubold 2005, 96 98, argues that the story of Herakles in the Catalogue functions as intermediary between his role in the Theogony and in later epic (discussed at greater length in Chapter 5). West 1985, 128 130, discusses several places where the Catalogue appears to consciously imitate either the Theogony or the Works and Days.

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9

Pandora are present in the Catalogue, for example, the fragments that we have spend no time on that story about the introduction of sex to the world or about the initial separation of gods and humans. Rather, the poem appears to focus on their offspring, Deukalion and Pyrrha, who restart the human race after the massive prehistoric flood (frs. 2, 4).23 This emphasis makes sense, given the Catalogue’s focus on the age of heroes. As Clay points out, this narrative creates a necessary double-origin for humankind, “one half-divine, a hybrid of Olympian and Titanic, a heroic strand, sprung from Pyrrha and Deukalion and constantly reinforced through humandivine unions; and a second strand, sprung from the earth and rocks thrown by the first couple.”24 Unlike either Homeric epic, moreover, or the other works of Hesiod, the Catalogue gives us an extensive discussion of the suitors of Helen (frs. 195 204), using this episode, in fact, to frame the end of the heroic age. Although we must resign ourselves, then, to the notion that this poem is “Hesiodic” rather than “by Hesiod,” I would argue that the popular assignment in antiquity of the Catalogue to Hesiod carries a perceptive understanding of the function of the poem. Like other poems by the author-function designated as Hesiod, this poem melds a comprehensive narrative of traditional mythic stories with an overarching narrative about the end of an earlier, better time. It is “Hesiodic,” then, in the sense that it also puts the reader that is, us in our relatively wretched human place.25 If that understanding provides a general literary context for the Catalogue, it does little to tell us how and in what context the Catalogue was originally performed. Elizabeth Irwin has made the most specific case to date for a particular performance context, arguing that the Catalogue might belong to the relatively broad category of poetry performed at symposia, which is to say, drinking parties of aristocratic men. Through a careful and nuanced study, Irwin shows that much of the 23

24 25

Tsagalis 2009, 159. These fragments are fraught with difficulty, particularly regarding the mother of Deukalion; see West 1985, 50 51. Fowler 1998 provides a historical reading of the Catalogue’s construction of the line of Hellenes. Clay 2003, 167 168. See Koenen 1994, 26 n. 62, 27.

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language of the Catalogue is shared by the poets we traditionally associate with symposia.26 The difficulty with this reading is that the overall structure of the poem, as well as its use of numerous formulae and compositional features of other hexameter poetry, fits better with Homeric and Hesiodic poems, which we generally do not think of as symposiastic. Irwin is correct to note that there is a high preponderance of language in this poem characterizing the erotic desirability of the women in it, and it is entirely likely that the poem as we have it draws from the themes and vocabulary of early lyric; but this, I believe, is a function of the poem’s content, which consists of a series of erotic couplings of gods and men with aristocratic and therefore beautiful women. Irwin’s study does, however, make strong points about the aristocratic ideological content of the poem.27 This does not make it symposiastic per se, but does help make the case that the poem would appeal to those with an investment in elite status. That still leaves us, however, with no clear understanding of how and where the Catalogue, or the poems that eventually became the Catalogue, was performed. I am inclined to believe that they were performed in the same sort of contexts as poems such as the Theogony or perhaps the Iliad and Odyssey. We know from later testimonials that, at Athens, the rule for recitations at the Panathenaic festival was “only Homer,”28 but this does not exclude the possibility that Hesiodic poetry was recited at other, similar festivals.29 This tells us little enough: the poem would be considered one of many such poems performed for the public at large, which does not prevent it from glorifying a class structure that favors the aristocracy. 26 27 28

29

See Irwin 2005a, 45 49. Irwin 2005a, 57 64. See Graziosi 2002, 198, with references. Burgess 2004, 8, points out that the Homeric poems are simply too long to be performed at the Panathenaic festival and suggests that rhapsodes must have performed short set pieces from the poems, expecting the audience to be able to fill in the intervening plot points from their knowledge of the Epic Cycle. Rutherford, who favors a Thessalian origin for the core of the Catalogue, suggests that it might have been performed at the “Pylaia” at Anthela, the games at Delphi, or the festival of the Charitesia at Orchomenos (Rutherford 2005, 115 and nn. 62 63).

Date, Genre, Performance

11

Because of the subject matter of the Catalogue, however, one aspect of the audience must be considered: Was the Catalogue composed for an audience of women, or at least with female listeners in mind? With some regret, I can find no evidence for such a suggestion. Unlike the catalogue of famous and virtuous women in Odyssey 11, which Lillian Doherty has shown to be chosen in part to appeal to Odysseus’ internal narratee, the Phaiacian queen Arete, I can find no clear indication in this text that a female audience is anticipated.30 On the contrary, the women in the Catalogue are a remarkably silent group, and with a few rare exceptions (such as Tyro, discussed below) are not singled out for their virtue so much as their value as well-born and naturally beautiful objects of male desire. This is not to say that ancient women were not in the audience I assume that they probably were but only to say that this text does not seem to anticipate a primarily female narratee. Recent scholarship on the Homeric poems, moreover, has led to new insights in the way that the Iliad and Odyssey were related, not only to each other, but to the broader corpus of ancient hexameter poetry.31 Far from being entirely self-contained, the Homeric poems contain numerous references to a larger world of epic mythology, with which they are in constant contact and, at times, direct competition. As Tsagalis formulates it, “[T]here is no almighty author but an omnipotent song-tradition weaving its own nexus of associations, evoking other traditions or versions at will, immersing its listeners to an intertext of mythical crossreferences.”32 What delineates the poems that are eventually fixed in a textual tradition as those of Homer and Hesiod are particular modes of excluding this larger tradition from the main narrative. So, for example, the Iliad contains virtually no interaction between Achilles and Helen, 30

31

32

See Doherty 1995, 112. Schmidt 1996, 32 33, argues for a poet who is playing to a female audience in the suggestion that Achilles could have married Helen in fr. 204 but this argument is dependent on modern stereotypes of women as consumers of idealized romance. Such arguments are, by their very nature, circular, and I do not find them compelling. For a useful discussion of the way that character narrators in Homeric epics shape their stories for male and female audiences, see Minchin 2007. Intertextual readings of the Iliad and Odyssey are well known and include the pioneering work of Pucci 1987. In the discussion that follows, I am indebted to Graziosi and Haubold 2005, Burgess 2004 and 2009, and Tsagalis 2008. Tsagalis 2008, xiii.

12

Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

though there are suggestions that in the Cypria, they met under the guidance of Aphrodite and Thetis.33 At the same time, however, these poems acknowledge, refer to, and invoke that larger tradition in a mode that has been, somewhat problematically, considered “intertextual.”34 It is, of course, a paradox of sorts to discuss poetry that was performed orally as we think as “intertextual.” I should make clear that I do not suppose that the operations of the Catalogue poet are identical to those of a poet such as Ovid, who has been brilliantly shown to write his Heroides as specific intertextual expansions of moments from set epic texts.35 But because not only the poets of Archaic Greece but also their audience could be presumed to know the broad scope of hexameter epic, performers of individual songs were able to bring in references to episodes that existed outside their oral “text,” and thus produce new meanings and suggest, through implicit comparisons, new facets of the poem’s characters and plots. At times these external references will seem out of place, and in an earlier mode of criticism, would have been rejected as a “later interpolation” to the (usually Homeric) text; but as Burgess has argued, when we see these texts as taking place in a “fluid performance tradition,”36 we become able to see such references as an inherent feature of oral poetry. As he suggests, these slight incongruities can be understood not as unwelcome intrusions but as deliberate moments of interaction with stories from the broader tradition. The difficulty here, of course, is that the building blocks of oral hexameter poetry consist of metrical formulae on the small scale and type scenes on the larger scale, both elements that allow for considerable repetition within a work and across multiple works.37 As a result, the 33

34

35 36 37

See Tsagalis 2008, ch. 5, for a full examination of this episode and its larger context. Tsagalis 2008 uses the term explicitly; Burgess 2004, ch. 5, provides the clearest discussion that I know for reading oral hexameter poetry as intertextual. See Barchiesi 2001. Burgess 2009, 60. I assume that the features of oral hexameter poetry are well known. The fundamental work remains Lord 1960. Particularly influential has been Nagy 1996. Recent work has stressed that these features are elements not of memo rization but of composition; see Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 48 56, for a useful summary of the elements of oral hexameter poetry.

Date, Genre, Performance

13

repetition of an epithet, formula, or type scene in any given place cannot necessarily be taken as a meaningful reference to another text. As Graziosi and Haubold have argued, however, neither are such repetitions purely mechanical; as they suggest, “[F]ormulas do not develop randomly; rather, they encapsulate the most deep-seated truths, the essence of particular characters, actions and stories.”38 In producing an “intertextual” reading of hexameter epic, then, when we see the same epithet applied to two different characters, or when we see different characters engage in the same type scene (even if the two versions of the scene are not identical), then there is something about those two characters or their situation that we should consider fundamentally similar. This does not mean that every type scene deliberately invokes every other,39 but recognizing the correspondences can allow us to see something essential about the situation under consideration. We can, moreover, go still further. As Burgess has pointed out, even type scenes contain elements that belong to the specific narrative in which they appear.40 Individual poems demonstrate considerable artistry in the deployment and modification of what we might think of as “stock” moments. I argue in Chapters 4 and 5 for a set of intertextual readings, in which I believe we can discern what Burgess calls “motif transference”: moments in the Hesiodic text that share important epithets, formulas, and entire scenes with the Iliad and Odyssey. While these “intertextual” moments are never harshly jarring in their immediate contexts, they do trigger moments of sight disorientation, and, borrowing from Burgess, I consider that the “[r]esulting contextual inappropriateness is not unskillful composition but rather a trigger toward recognition of another narrative.”41 Such moments of interaction invite the reader (or listener, in the case of an ancient audience) to consider the meaning that is produced by the interaction of such narratives. Such “intertextual” readings of the Iliad and Odyssey, with some attention to the Cyclic epics and the Cypria, have proven quite fruitful 38 39

40 41

Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 53. As Burgess 2009 points out, type scenes, even if not fully appropriate to their context in a given text, do not necessarily indicate “transference.” Burgess 2009, 62. Burgess 2009, 66.

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Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

in recent years. It has been less common to explore the interactions between Homer and Hesiod, no doubt in part because, within the world of Archaic hexameter epic, these two figures stand as representatives of different types of narrative, and indeed the narrator of Hesiod positions himself as competing with the Homeric poems.42 But for all their differences, the Homeric and Hesiodic traditions can be seen as mutually exclusive but interlocking, like the mirroring foreground and background of an Escher print. As Graziosi and Haubold point out, the Homeric poems can be understood as a vast expansion of a particular moment in Hesiodic cosmogonic time.43 Similarly, in the case of the Catalogue, the worlds of the Iliad and Odyssey are never far off. For all its Hesiodic structure and mode of composition, the Catalogue is fundamentally the story of the age of heroes, the production of hemitheoi that comes to a crashing end with the Trojan War. Moments of interaction between the Catalogue and the Homeric texts, then, are almost inevitable. Beyond that, however, I see the Catalogue as deliberately invoking the Homeric texts in places and ways that are far from necessary: Achilles and Hector are recalled in the story of Atalanta, for example, and Odysseus in the story of Amphytrion. I argue here that the poet of the Catalogue is working within the broad performance tradition that has been so well described by Tsagalis, Burgess, Nagy, Graziosi, Haubold, and others. Moreover, the Catalogue invokes these Homeric and Cyclic texts in such a way that the listener is invited to produce meaning not from one text or the other but from the creative interaction between them. Neither text remains the same after such an intertextual invocation; both are perceptively shifted by comparison with the other. Whether we consider this production of meaning as the deliberate creation of an individual author or as the expressive result of a particularly effective performance in a fluid, inherently innovative tradition is, for my purposes, immaterial.44 I tend toward the latter, but my primary concern is not with the mode of production but with the end 42 43 44

See Graziosi 2002, 168 170. Graziosi and Haubold 2005, 38 40. As Burgess 2009 points out, “Classicists pursuing intertextuality have sometimes found it necessary to raise the possibility of authorial intention, usually with varying degrees of regret, embarrassment, or self justification” (pp. 66 67).

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result. If, as has been suggested to me, I am reading the Catalogue as if it were the product of a Hellenistic poet, I believe that the readings that are produced justify the method.45

TOWARD A THEORY OF ARCHAIC POETIC-POLITICAL DISCOURSE

The readings in this book are not purely literary. I am also concerned to locate the Catalogue in a particular set of political and social contexts, all visible in the late Archaic period. In this period, we can trace the effects of an ongoing conflict within the elite class regarding proper exercise of power, appropriate expenditure of wealth, and the role of the individual with regard to his or her community.46 In the broadest possible terms we can see a progression over time toward a greater emphasis on the authority of the polis over that of wealthy individuals and toward an aesthetic that privileges measured and appropriate expenditure over one of conspicuous consumption.47 As recent research has demonstrated, however, this progression was far from consistent, and elements from both sides of this conflict can be found in texts and material evidence from the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE.48 To outline the terms of this conflict in the starkest terms possible, I present two texts dating perhaps a hundred years apart. In the second book of the Iliad, during a heated council, a man named Thersites comes 45

46

47

48

It is also perhaps not incidental that Ovid, the most clearly intertextual of Roman poets, deliberately invokes Hesiod (and in particular the Catalogue) as a model repeatedly. See Ziogas 2011 for a lucid discussion. A brief overview of elite status in four subperiods is given by Fouchard 2010; much of the following discussion is indebted to Morris 1996 and Kurke 1999, both of which have come in for strong criticism in the past decade. I discuss their detractors more fully below. The bibliography on the emergence of the polis is massive. I have found the essays of Snodgrass 1993 and Raaflaub 1993 particularly helpful, as well as the collection of essays in Mitchell and Rhodes 1997. The particular elements of this complex social phenomenon that concern me receive lengthier discussion in Chapters 2 and 3. See, esp., Kistler 2004 and Duplouy 2006.

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Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

forward to challenge Agamemnon. Before he speaks, the narrator introduces him as follows: Ἄλλοι μέν ῥ’ ἕζοντο, ἐρήτυθεν δὲ καθ’ ἕδρας· Θερσίτης δ’ ἔτι μοῦνος ἀμετροεπὴς ἐκολῴα, ὃς ἔπεα φρεσὶν ᾗσιν ἄκοσμά τε πολλά τε ᾔδη μάψ, ἀτὰρ οὐ κατὰ κόσμον, ἐριζέμεναι βασιλεῦσιν, ἀλλ’ ὅ τι οἱ εἴσαιτο γελοίϊον Ἀργείοισιν ἔμμεναι· αἴσχιστος δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθε· φολκὸς ἔην, χωλὸς δ’ ἕτερον πόδα· τὼ δέ οἱ ὤμω κυρτὼ ἐπὶ στῆθος συνοχωκότε· αὐτὰρ ὕπερθε φοξὸς ἔην κεφαλήν, ψεδνὴ δ’ ἐπενήνοθε λάχνη.

The others were sitting, and were restrained in their seats, But Thersites, unchecked in his words, scolded still, He who knew many, unordered words in his mind, Foolish, who quarreled with the kings (basileis), not according to order, But (said) whatever he knew would be amusing to the Argives. He came the most ugly man under Ilion. He was bow legged and lame in one foot; his shoulders Slumped together over his breast; and above, His head was pointed, and the soft hair was piled thin. (Iliad 2.211 219)

Thersites carries several marks of being lower-class. He is physically unattractive, in ways that also suggest that he would not be particularly strong in battle: slumped shoulders, lame in one foot, hollow-chested, thinning hair. As a speaker he also lacks particular qualities: it seems that he can be amusing, but in much the same way as his behavior, his words are not kata kosmon, not “properly ordered.”49 The emphasis on his disordered words contrasts pointedly with the other men, whose restraint in their seats suggests proper respect for hierarchy. Finally, as Geoffrey Kirk points out, Thersites is “the only character in the Iliad to lack both patronymic and place of origin,” a subtle but important lack of markers of upper-class birth.50 49

50

Duplouy 2006 argues that a range of characteristics are used to denote elite class in Archaic Greece, including good birth, ability in war, physical appearance, wealth, and ability to speak well. See esp. 12 24. Kirk 1985, ad 212.

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As a result, after Thersites makes his speech, he is countered by Odysseus in terms that, famously, do little to address the substance of Thersites’ argument: τῷ δ’ ὦκα παρίστατο δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς, καί μιν ὑπόδρα ἰδὼν χαλεπῷ ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ· Θερσῖτ’ ἀκριτόμυθε, λιγύς περ ἐὼν ἀγορητής, ἴσχεο, μηδ’ ἔθελ’ οἶος ἐριζέμεναι βασιλεῦσιν· οὐ γὰρ ἐγὼ σέο φημὶ χερειότερον βροτὸν ἄλλον ἔμμεναι, ὅσσοι ἅμ’ Ἀτρεΐδῃς ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθον. τὼ οὐκ ἂν βασιλῆας ἀνὰ στόμ’ ἔχων ἀγορεύοις, καί σφιν ὀνείδεά τε προφέροις, νόστόν τε φυλάσσοις.

Shining Odysseus swiftly stood up beside him, And glancing angrily addressed him in a harsh speech: “Thersites thoughtless of speech, although you are clever in debate, Hold back, do not wish to quarrel, you alone, with the basileis. For I say that no other mortal is worse than you, of all those who came with the Atreids under Ilion, So you should not debate with the two basileis, lifting up your mouth, Nor should you bring reproach against them, nor should you guard the homecoming.” (Iliad 2.244 250)

After this, Odysseus strikes Thersites on the head with a scepter, and threatens to abuse him if he should behave this way again, provoking laughter among the rest of the troops. It is significant that Odysseus in no way counters the arguments that Thersites has brought forward; rather, he denies that Thersites has the right to make those arguments. That denial is based on the implicit information that we have already been given. Thersites is simply not of sufficient status to argue with Agamemnon and Menelaos. We can contrast that attitude with a brief but important passage from the lyric poet Archilochos, writing in the mid-seventh century: οὐ φιλ μέγαν στρατηγὸν οὐδὲ διαπεπλιγμένον οὐδὲ βοστρύχοισι γαῦρον οὐδ’ ὑπεξυρημένον, ἀλλά μοι σμικρός τις εἴη καὶ περὶ κνήμας ἰδεῖν ῥοικός, ἀσφαλς βεβηκὼς ποσσί, καρδίης πλέως.

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Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

I do not love a huge general nor one with a long stride, Nor exulting in his hair, nor half shaved; But, for me, let him be small and knock kneed to look at Around the greaves, but secure, immovable of foot, and full of heart. (Archilochos fr. 114 West)

To be sure, the kind of general that the speaker favors is not Thersites, who under no circumstances would be described as immovable of foot and full of heart. But at the same time, there is a distinct difference between the characteristics that the speaker values and those that are represented in virtually all the basileis of the Iliad. Archilochos’ preferred general does not have the handsome appearance that is both a sign and a result of high status in Homeric epic. Indeed, Campbell’s note on this passage is telling: “The short, knock-kneed commander of Archilochos’ choice cuts a very unhomeric figure . . . only the insubordinate speaker Thersites is described in similar terms. . . .”51 Put briefly, the characteristics that Archilochos’ speaker values are practical rather than aesthetic; he cares more about steadfastness in battle than about physical beauty or, perhaps, pride in personal appearance. (One thinks of Odysseus’ hyacinthine hair during his moments of amorous and personal triumph.) This is not to argue that Archilochos does not care about social status or that he has no concern for any of the qualities that mark elite status in the Homeric epics. Rather, he is engaging in a moment of persuasive redefinition, in which the elite status that both assures and depends on martial prowess in the Iliad is not required in a brave general and is not necessarily marked by aesthetic beauty. Along similar lines, we can trace subtle but important shifts in the relationship of individuals to their community in Archaic poetry. In an important article from 1993, Kurt Raaflaub begins by quoting passages from the Iliad, from Tyrtaeus, and from the poetry of Solon. Raaflaub sees a gradual shift from concern for the individual’s household (oikos) to concern for the broader community, eventually defined as the city-state (polis). It is worth quoting Raaflaub’s analysis at length, both for the point that he makes and for his acknowledgment that further nuance is possible: 51

Campbell 1967, ad loc.

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[These passages] seem to indicate a progression in the individual’s relationship to his community. In dying for his patre, Hektor says, the soldier saves his house and family. Clearly, to this fighter his oikos is at least as important as the community. In Tyrtaios the community, facing no less serious outside danger, takes center stage; the poet focuses on its collective feelings and actions; here the family appears to be secondary. Finally, in Solon’s case, the threat to the community comes from within; the poet, directly representing the community itself, addresses his audience in their function as citizens. . . . Of course, the progression is not as straight and simple as that, neither in historical reality nor in the extant sources. Moreover, throughout the archaic and classical periods, concern for family and community remained intertwined in the fighting soldiers’ thinking. . . . Nevertheless, a marked progres sion toward a stronger emphasis on the community is undeniable, and it makes eminent sense that in our surviving evidence Solon appears as the first explicit spokesperson for the polis.52

This general trend, painted in these broad strokes, is what Ian Morris and Leslie Kurke (among others) have categorized as the emergence of a “middling ideology” in the Archaic period. In a series of articles and books, Morris and Kurke have argued that within the elitist class, we begin to see the emergence of a discourse that emphasizes “a moderate style of life under the supreme authority of the polis, rejecting both extremes of excessive wealth and aristocratic display and of abject poverty.”53 This discourse is both political and aesthetic in nature: in addition to emphasizing one’s ties to the community, middling poetry emphasizes practical, tempered behavior rather than focusing on aristocratic beauty and luxury. In response to this “middling ideology,” Kurke suggests, we also see a parallel development of elitist discourse “mobilizing the heroic past, special links to the gods, and a lifestyle of Easterninfluenced luxury (habrosunê) to reassert the propriety of aristocratic preeminence.”54 Somewhat more controversially, Morris in particular has suggested that this poetic discourse has a correlative in the material record, outlining changes in burial practice that he suggests stem from the same “middling ideology” as seen in some poetic texts. By the middle of the 52 53 54

Raaflaub 1993, 41 42. Kurke 1999, 20. Kurke 1999, 20.

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Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

eighth century BCE, central Greece sees a significant increase in burials, with a wide variety of burial practices. Though most burials from this period were simple, some “were now very rich . . . or had monumental markers, like the Dipylon graves at Athens.”55 But at the end of the eighth century, we see a nearly complete disappearance of rich graves and warrior graves; by the seventh century community grave sites appear and “are characterized by monotonously normative customs.”56 Morris sees the rise of these civic cemeteries as indicative of a growing notion of polis identity, and associates inhumation burial in particular with the idea of “middling,” suggesting that this is a deliberate departure from the “heroic” cremation burials of earlier moments.57 Morris sees less ostentatious burial display as parallel to the more restrained, communityoriented aesthetic at work in poetry such as that of Archilochos and Solon, and suggests that both stem from the same mindset. Kurke, working within a similar set of assumptions, has shown at length how this ideological conflict plays itself out in a variety of Archaic Greek texts and institutions, particularly through the literary topoi of gold and coinage.58 In Kurke’s formulation, the polis centered ideology of the “middler” is associated with the short-term transactional order of commercial buying and selling and particularly the use of coins. Faced with this emerging social order, aristocratic genres of poetry demonstrate a marked tendency to champion the more elite forms of long-term transactional order, including sacrifice and gift exchange. Within such 55

56 57

58

Morris 1998, 15. In this essay, Morris provides a more nuanced view of the evidence that he presented in Morris 1996, dividing the evidence into four major regions and discussing each region in turn. Though, as Morris notes, his divisions are to some extent arbitrary, “this geographical organization of the data clarifies much more than it obscures” (Morris 1998, 11). Morris 1998, 19. See especially Morris 1998, 25. Kistler 2004 is the most detailed critique of Morris’ archaeological evidence to date; among other problems, he points out that we have inhumation burials in the Athenian Agora dating to the beginning of the eighth century BCE too early for Morris’ rise of “middling ideology” and that moreover some of these inhumation burials contain wealthy eastern grave goods (Kistler 2004, 154 155). This evidence is only problematic if we insist on a rigid, consistent pattern of behavior as a result of the ideological shift that Morris suggests. Kurke 1999.

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representations, gold in its pure form is the oppositional correlative to the shifty, untrustworthy form of coins themselves.59 The crucial aspect of the long-term transactional order is that its exchanges are always represented as social rather than commercial, and it is asserted that such social exchanges contribute to the common good. The Greek tradition of xenia (gift exchange), well represented in the Homeric poems, establishes a bond of friendship between the two parties involved. Sacrifice to the gods, similarly, creates a bond between humans and immortals beyond the value of the meat and fat that is burned. Commercial exchange, by contrast, is represented as motivated purely by desire for personal profit; it is not imagined to “perpetuate and reproduce the larger social and cosmic order.”60 As Kurke argues, in order for this representational system to work, each of the two orders of transaction requires the presence of the other.61 And indeed, already in the Iliad, we can see a conflict between the two systems at work. In Book 6 of the Iliad, Glaukos and Diomedes exchange armor in the quintessential act of guest-friendship. The two, after discovering that their ancestors were guest-friends, agree to trade arms and to avoid each other on the field of battle (Iliad 6.215 31). But once that has been done, the Homeric narrator registers a comment: ἔνθ’ αὖτε Γλαύκῳ Κρονίδης φρένας ἐξέλετο Ζεύς, ὃς πρὸς Τυδεΐδην Διομήδεα τεύχε’ ἄμειβε χρύσεα χαλκείων, ἑκατόμβοι’ ἐννεαβοίων.

But then Zeus son of Kronos stole away Glaukos’ wits, Since he exchanged armor with Diomedes, son of Tydeus, Gold for bronze, a hundred oxen (worth) for nine. (Iliad 6.234 236)

Already in the earliest of texts, the two modes of exchange are expressed as being at cross-purposes. The characters speak of the exchange only in social terms: the bond that exists between them through their families and the desire to remain guest-friends in the future. But the narrator

59

60 61

This is the briefest possible summary of a nuanced and careful argument in Kurke 1999, esp. 41 64. Kurke 1999, 14. Kurke 1999, 15.

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Introduction: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

comments on the pure economics of the exchange, in which terms Glaukos, indeed, lost significant value. Kurke and Morris’ model has come under important scrutiny, and it appears that the aristocratic opposition to coins and to the authority of the polis may not be as pronounced as Kurke has argued.62 As Seaford has shown, Kurke’s argument on this point relies largely on silence, since no elite Archaic texts explicitly express suspicion of coinage, even when they do express suspicion of the short-term transactional order. Nonetheless, it is true that texts of the elitist tradition identified by Kurke (especially monadic lyric) tend to express value in terms of the purity of metal, especially gold, and to privilege the long-term transactional order over the more mundane forms of purely commercial exchange. This is not to say that members of the elite class did not, in real life, engage in commercial exchange; as van Wees has argued, “The elite liked to stress its ability to forgo profit for the sake of honor occasionally, and looked down on those who could not afford to be so high minded. . . . But all this only confirms that competition for wealth was pervasive.”63 The privileging of the long-term transactional order is a rhetorical stance that certain elite authors take, as one mode of marking and maintaining status. The Homeric passage cited earlier raises another issue of some importance. Both Morris and Kurke argue that the long-term transactional order is supported by separate “spheres of exchange,” in which certain types of objects are considered top-ranked goods: women, slaves, cattle, and precious metals, in particular. In a fully pre-monetary society, Morris and Kurke argue, such top-ranked goods cannot, except under extraordinary circumstances, be exchanged for goods in lower spheres of exchange (e.g., foodstuffs).64 The threat that the introduction of coins poses to those of elite status is therefore twofold: since coins are issued by the polis, their introduction represents the city’s appropriation of the “distribution of precious metal.”65 More insidiously, however, coins establish a standard unit of exchange and thus “break down the 62 63 64 65

See, esp., Seaford 2002. van Wees 2009, 464. Kurke 1999, 10 11; Morris 1986b, 8 9. Kurke 1999, 22.

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distinctions of spheres of exchange entirely.”66 As van Wees has pointed out, however, cattle seem to function in the Iliad in a monetary way, serving as a unit of value that can measure even the gold and bronze armor that Glaukos and Diomedes exchange (see earlier).67 Though the armor is not actually exchanged for cattle or oxen, there appears to be no impediment to doing so. There are even a few examples in the Homeric epics of keimêlia, “treasure” of the highest sphere of exchange, being traded for everyday consumables such as wine and food.68 That said, however, we can still recognize that certain types of exchange in the Homeric epics and in later Archaic texts are regularly marked as belonging to an order of exchange different from the purely mercantile; the exchange of armor between Glaukos and Diomedes is a prime example. Marriage, in particular, though it always carries with it an economic element, is also always a social exchange, creating a tie between families and helping to establish status;69 the form of exchange depicted in the marriages in the Catalogue will be of particular importance. In broader terms, Morris and Kurke’s formulation of a conflict within elitist texts regarding the proper mode of aristocratic behavior (with, ultimately, the goal of maintaining a measure of social control) has come under considerable criticism in the last decade.70 While this is not the place for a thorough defense of the notion of “middling ideology,” I do find that the arguments of Kurke and Morris, with some modifications, provide a useful context for understanding the Catalogue of Women. With that in mind, I turn now to a consideration of some of the critiques of Kurke and Morris, with a view to developing a slightly more nuanced explanation of some of the phenomena that they observe. In much of what follows, I find 66 67 68 69

70

Kurke 1999, 22. van Wees 1992, 222 226; van Wees 2009, 458 459. van Wees 1992, 226. See Duplouy 2006, 80 116, for a thorough discussion of marriages in the Archaic period as a mode of establishing and maintaining elite status. See, esp., Hammer 2004 and Kistler 2004 for the most sustained objections; for important briefer arguments, see also Hall 2007a, 180, and Osborne 2009, 204 213. Duplouy 2006 does not address Kurke and Morris directly but provides the most subtle reading to date of the production of elite status in the Archaic period, and some of his arguments are useful in complicating the position outlined by Morris and Kurke.

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that some of Kurke and Morris’ critics seem to have selectively understood their argument and present arguments that are not as diametrically opposed to the notion of “middling ideology” as they might first appear. Kurke and Morris’ ideas have not squared well with historians of the Archaic period on three fundamental points. First, there is opposition to their inconsistent use of the term “ideology.”71 Second, various critics have found evidence, both archaeological and literary, that suggests a more nuanced understanding of the opposition of “middling” and “elitist” behavior or that provides examples that fall outside the chronological limits suggested.72 By far the most trenchant criticism, however, is the suggestion that Kurke and Morris’ model suggests a too-rigid dichotomy between groups of elitist subjects, failing, in effect, to take into account the way that different modes of establishing status might be deployed by the same individuals in different circumstances.73 These problems are, in a sense, all related. Hammer is correct when he points out that Morris’ use of the term “ideology” is not entirely consistent and that he seems to shy away from a fully Marxist sense of the term, in which ideology is figured as a mode of “legitimating or disguising inequality.”74 In general, Morris seems to use the term “ideology” as a way of referring to the putative mindset that lies behind certain social behaviors, the results of which are visible in the archaeological and literary record. Hammer overstates the case, however, in suggesting that Morris projects “a surprisingly antagonistic, coherent, pervasive, and static ideological division in Archaic Greece.”75 Here, as elsewhere, Hammer seems to overlook the fact that Morris’ understanding of “middling” men is not that they are an underclass rising from above, but rather a group of elite men who use a particular mode of discourse not entirely consistently in their quest for authority.76 71 72 73 74 75 76

Most lucid here is Hammer 2004, 481 486. Especially important here are Kistler 2004, 157 167; Hammer 2004, 497 499. Hammer 2004, 490 504; Duplouy 2006, passim. Hammer 2004, 482. Hammer 2004, 486. See Hammer 2004, 497 499, where Hammer seems to assume that the “mid dling” group consists of the lower or middle class, e.g.: “The picture is almost amusing: an aristocracy desperately attempting to distinguish itself through its refined tastes, while a middling group copies it” (499).

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Since the rigidity of Kurke and Morris’ model seems to be a sticking point for most critics, it is worthwhile to quote Morris here at length: Both traditions were “elite” in the sense that most poems were produced by and for elites of birth, wealth, and education. The hostility between the extant traditions was primarily a conflict within the highest social circles over what constituted legit imate culture.... The popular aesthetic is normally not simply a failure to grasp elitist tastes, but a conscious refusal of them, among ordinary people and among the elite.... [Aristocratic leaders] claimed leadership as special members of the polis, not as a wholly distinct aristocratic community of the kind created by the elitist tradition. There is no reason to think that the middling aristocrats struggled across the seventh and sixth centuries to create democracy. But the unintended consequence of their beliefs was that when the elitist ideology collapsed after 525, the general acceptance of middling values made democracy a real possibility. . ..77

We are not, then, to imagine a clear-cut conflict between elites and middle-class “middlers” with the latter on the side of democracy against an aristocratic regime; rather, the evidence from the literary and material records that Morris and Kurke present suggests a conflict within the elite class over the appropriate mode of aesthetic and political expression. As I read Morris and Kurke, then, the proponents of “middling” ideology are themselves members of an elite class, who are not opposed to gaining and maintaining power.78 Nor do I think that we should assume (even if Morris and Kurke sometimes appear to do so) that the “middlers” were a coherent social group whose behavior and discourse always fell into this middling mode. As various commentators have shown, the same “elitist” or “middling” authors express sentiments that sometimes fall into the other camp.79 I suggest that we should understand the elite 77

78

79

Morris 1996, 27 28, emphasis added. This passage is quoted in greater length at Kurke 1999, 20. Morris’ view here is not, as I see it, incompatible with Hammer’s reading of the evidence: “Though opposition may have existed to the luxury of the elite, associating this opposition with isonomia (and just making luxury antithetical to the foundation of a democratic polis) is not justified by the ancient texts” (Hammer 2004, 497). They are sometimes taken to be so opposed; see Hammer 2004, 491 492; Kistler 2004, 163; van Wees 2009, 449. Hammer 2004, 494 495 and n. 55. Irwin 2005b, 58 61, argues for a more nuanced understanding of the aristocratic class’s response to the developing polis

26

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class in Greece as a group of powerful people, constantly working to maintain or improve their status, constantly at risk from competition within their own group as well as opposition from those who feel excluded, and willing to use whichever mode of discourse is most suitable in a given context.80 As Duplouy puts it, “the aristocrat would increasingly appear to be an individual in an unstable position, constantly trying to improve his status, to renegotiate his authority and to exercise the financial means necessary for his social ambitions.”81 In the briefest possible terms, it might be useful to discard the somewhat troubling term “ideology,” which, on some understandings of the term, indicates a coherent and consistent mode of behavior, and instead speak of middling and elitist modes of discourse, particularly since the material that I discuss in this book is primarily literary.82 When we begin to look at the material discussed by Morris and, in considerably more detail, by Kurke as demonstrating different discursive modes, several important points come to light. First, we must realize that the different arguments presented in Archaic texts do not belong to a

80

81

82

and finds that Archaic elegy does not consistently produce the kind of middling ethic that Morris sees in it. Theognis is a particularly complex poet on this front, at times arguing for moderation by the ruling class, at other times lamenting the breakdown of a class structure guaranteed by birth. This is essentially the picture presented in considerable detail by Duplouy 2006, esp. 22 31. Duplouy 2006, 23. For a similar argument with a somewhat less approving assessment of the aristocracy, see Rose 2009, 474: “the mystification of con tinuing aristocratic domination . . . took many forms that with hindsight seem contradictory but attest perhaps better to the flexibility and adaptability of rulers vis à vis ruled than to clear cut conflicts within the ruling class.” I take my understanding of discourse from Foucault. I define discourses as various social modes of organizing language that give it meaning and insert it into specific structures of power, with a specific goal of defining what constitutes true and meaningful statements within each discursive structure. One advantage of discursive analysis is that ideologies as defined by Althusser are promoted by specific institutions (in Althusser’s formulation, “ideological state apparatuses”); discourses, by contrast, can exist across multiple institutions and, indeed, out side apparatuses of power. I should note that I do not regard the deployment of ideology as necessarily consistent; I am not certain, however, that my under standing of the term, which stems from post Marxists such as Althusser and Stuart Hall, is shared by Morris or his critics.

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clear and unmediated progression. While it is true that there are some points of increased emphasis at different moments, the conflict between a middling point of view and an elitist one can be found already in the Homeric epics, which I take to be our earliest texts. On the one hand, the valorization of aristocratic society in the epics, in which powerful basileis demonstrate their inherent worth on the battlefield and make appropriate sacrifices to the gods, can be seen as supporting elite values.83 At the same time, Peter Rose sees the Iliad as representing “the emergence of true poleis, in which citizens share some sense of collective responsibility for their community.”84 To an even greater degree, passages in the Odyssey have been read as supporting a more community-based, commercial, and less elitist ethic.85 Duplouy and others are correct, then, to see this conflict as existing throughout the Archaic period. Within this period, however, we can see moments of increased discursive emphasis. In the sixth and early fifth centuries an entire vocabulary springs up to express the idea of being well born. As Fouchard points out, this vocabulary is largely lacking from the works of Homer and even the Archaic lyric poets: eugeneis (well born), genaioi (legitimately born), eupatrides (of a good father), beltistoi (noble), chrestoi (noble), kaloi k’agathoi (beautiful and noble), gnôrimoi (well born).86 It is important to be clear about what this means. As critics have pointed out, we should not take this emerging vocabulary as unmediated evidence that there was an aristocracy defined by birth that began to be threatened by a rising middle class, with the inevitable result of an insistence on good birth as the gold standard for membership in the elite.87 But we should recognize that, among the 83 84

85 86

87

See, esp., Morris 1986a. Rose 2009, 475. See Rose 2012, ch. 2, for a reading of Agamemnon in the Iliad as an aristocrat whose actions are opposed to a notional polis of property owning warriors. As noted by Kurke 1999, 16; Rose 2009, 475; Rose 2012, ch. 3. Duplouy 2006, 40 43, demonstrates that noble birth is used as a marker of elite status in the Homeric poems; these poems simply do not use the vocabulary that emerges in the sixth centuries to do so. As always, what is at stake here is not the invention of a new idea, but rather a shift in emphasis. Duplouy 2006, 37 76, provides the most thorough rejection of this notion. See also Osborne 2009, 209; Fouchard 2010, 367.

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various modes of authority that the elite class chose to deploy toward the end of the sixth and beginning of the fifth centuries, the idea of noble birth receives new weight. As Duplouy argues, “nobility of birth in the geometric, archaic, and classical periods is nothing more, in sum, than the result of practices of affirmation, sometimes discursive, sometimes behavioral, and at times of the invention of a prestigious ancestry.”88 I am fully in agreement with this notion of discursive practice, but that should not stop us from seeing that it finds more pronounced expression toward the end of the Archaic period. I would argue that we can read an often-cited passage of Theognis within this context of increasing expression of birth as a marker of status: Theognis, a poet from Megara, writes: Κριοὺς μὲν καὶ ὄνους διζήμεθα, Κύρνε, καὶ ἵππους εὐγενέας, καί τις βούλεται ἐξ ἀγαθῶν βήσεσθαι· γῆμαι δὲ κακὴν κακοῦ οὐ μελεδαίνει ἐσθλὸς ἀνήρ, ἤν οἱ χρήματα πολλὰ διδῶι, οὐδὲ γυνὴ κακοῦ ἀνδρὸς ἀναίνεται εἶναι ἄκοιτις πλουσίου, ἀλλ’ ἀφνεὸν βούλεται ἀντ’ ἀγαθοῦ. χρήματα μὲν τιμῶσι· καὶ ἐκ κακοῦ ἐσθλὸς ἔγημε καὶ κακὸς ἐξ ἀγαθοῦ· πλοῦτος ἔμειξε γένος. οὕτω μὴ θαύμαζε γένος, Πολυπαΐδη, ἀστῶν μαυροῦσθαι· σὺν γὰρ μίσγεται ἐσθλὰ κακοῖς.

We seek out well born goats, asses, and horses, Kyrnos, and one wishes them to be bred from noble stock, but a noble man does not worry about marrying a base woman from a base father, if he (the father) gives him much money, nor does a woman hesitate to be the wife of a base man who is rich, but she wishes wealth in place of nobility. 88

Duplouy 2006, 76. This is not far from what Kurke says about Theognis: “the multiplicity of points of view in Theognis is not the result of a diachronic development from elitist to middling values (or vice versa), but rather the synchronic reflection of a period of contestation and negotiation between the two ideologies” (Kurke 1999, 28).

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They honor money. And nobility marries those from base stock, and base those from noble. Wealth has mixed begetting. Thus do not be amazed, Polypaides, that the race of the townspeople grows dim. For the noble is mixing with the base. (Theognis 182 191)

It is probably right that this passage has too often been taken as representative of an entire, putatively coherent, mindset.89 Duplouy suggests that this passage represents an extremist, almost isolationist view held by a poet who is frustrated by his inability to compete not only with a rising class of new wealth but with fellow elites who are better at manipulating symbolic capital than he is.90 The latter may be true, but Theognis is not entirely isolated, and in the terms outlined by Kurke, the poem provides a clear example of one mode, in which the speaker aligns himself ideologically with the long-term transactional order (here in the form of marriage) through a notion of nobility of birth. Implicitly, in the last two lines, the speaker suggests that his elite class is coextensive with the community (astu). Noble birth, in this construction, is a more stable form of identity than wealth-based status; as a result, the structures of short-term transactional order are criticized as unstable, impure, and untrustworthy. This may be little more than a stark example of a particular mode of discourse; as Osborne argues, “the basis for believing that Athens or any other Archaic city was ever in the grip of an exclusive hereditary aristocracy is fragile. . . . In fact, those who regarded themselves as well-born had always complained that others less well-born were infiltrating their ranks or achieving influence in a way that would not have been allowed in the past. To interpret this as evidence for actual social and political change is to mistake argument for description. . . .”91 Nonetheless, this sort of description seems to increase in prevalence and intensity during the sixth century, perhaps an indication of increased competition for elite status. Theognis here represents an old-guard mentality, digging in his heels against what he perceives as a rising merchant class.92 89

90 91 92

Hammer 2004, 490, points out that Kurke sees Theognis as professing both elitist and middling values. See, esp., Kurke 1999, 27 28. Duplouy 2006, 183 192. See the elegant summary by Power 2006. Osborne 2009, 209. Pace Duplouy 2006, 38.

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Though the evidence is far from certain, we can see a similar conflict at work in the poetry and legislation attributed to Solon at the beginning of the sixth century. Any consideration of the so-called laws of Solon must, of course, begin with a caveat. Though Solon was a real person, and though we agree that he passed a fundamental set of laws in 594/3, and though we have some poetry by him in which he speaks obliquely about these laws, it is difficult to ascertain the authenticity of any specific law attributed to him. Our sources are either very late (as Plutarch’s Life of Solon) or come from quotations or creative paraphrases of the laws in late fifth- and fourth-century legal cases.93 As many scholars have noted, there is a tendency on the part of orators to refer to laws as “the laws of Solon” in order to give their arguments greater authority even when the law in question may be more recent.94 Nonetheless, some broad outlines can be drawn. First, Solon’s own poetry suggests that he was charged to write his code of laws during a conflict between the lower and upper classes and that he tried to mediate between these two groups: δήμωι μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκα τόσον γέρας ὅσσον ἐπαρκεῖν, τιμῆς οὔτ’ ἀφελὼν οὔτ’ ἐπορεξάμενος· οἳ δ’ εἶχον δύναμιν καὶ χρήμασιν ἦσαν ἀγητοί, καὶ τοῖς ἐφρασάμην μηδὲν ἀεικὲς ἔχειν· ἔστην δ’ ἀμφιβαλὼν κρατερὸν σάκος ἀμφοτέροισι, νικᾶν δ’ οὐκ εἴασ’ οὐδετέρους ἀδίκως. . . ἔργμασι (γὰρ) ἐν μεγάλοις πᾶσιν ἁδεῖν χαλεπόν,

To the people (demos) I gave as much privilege as is sufficient, neither taking away from nor extending their honor. But those who held power and who were admired for their possessions also to these I decreed that they should have nothing inappropriate. 93

94

The standard edition of Solon’s Laws is Ruschenbusch 1966. A discussion of the sources is found at 1 11. Scafuro 2006, 175 180, provides a helpful discussion of the criteria used to identify the authenticity of individual laws. MacDowell 1978, 43. For a lucid discussion of the ways that fourth century orators invoke “the laws of Solon,” see Thomas 1994. Rhodes 2006 discusses the reinstitution of “the laws of Solon” at the end of the fifth century; on the whole, Rhodes argues for the authenticity of the laws cited in the Ath. Pol. of Aristotle and Plutarch’s Life of Solon (see esp. 252 257).

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I stood throwing my strong shield in both directions over both groups and did not allow either to win unjustly. . . . In large deeds it is difficult to please everyone. (Solon fr. 5.1 6, 11)

This self-presentation fits well with Solon’s image as the quintessential middler (or, in Kistler’s formulation, champion of “metrios ideology”), a founder of civic laws that promote the values of the wealthy and the polis without suggesting revolution against the aristocracy. Indeed, Herodotus portrays Solon as just such a civic champion in his celebrated meeting with Croesus.95 This is not to say that Solon is pro-democratic; as Foxhall has argued, his poetry “can easily be read as a viewpoint from firmly inside the elite, but with some sympathy . . . for those outside the power-holding clique.”96 Rather, he fits exactly what Kurke defines as middling: eschewing both poverty and aristocratic excess. Unfortunately, what exactly Solon did in this class conflict is not very clear.97 It appears that some system of debt bondage existed before Solon’s reforms and that Solon put an end to this.98 While he did not, apparently, give in to the call for a wholesale redistribution of land (or wealth), he did fundamentally change the nature of land possession through a series of laws on inheritance.99 Indeed, the law allowing a citizen without children to will his property to whomever he wished (Solon fr. 49a d) has been taken as the founding act of citizenship, creating an individual’s right to property that exists in the civic sphere beyond the competing interests of relatives.100 This is perhaps a crucial step in the creation of the polis as an entity whose values are at odds with that of the powerful families within the city.Even more damaging to one mode of aristocratic self-justification, however, was Solon’s creation of four classes of citizens, based on a criterion of wealth (Arist. 95

96 97 98

99 100

An excellent recent discussion is Kurke 1999, 142 151. A range of scholars see Solon as defining Athenian citizenship: see Ober 1989, 61 62; Manville 1990, 124 148; Leduc 1992, 273; Patterson 1998, 85 87. On the complex relation ship between Solon’s poetry and the polis, see Irwin 2005b. Foxhall 1997, 121. See Murray 1980, 173 191. On the seisachtheia, see Harris 1997, with references. On the difficulty of retriev ing the details of the debt bondage problem, see Foxhall 1997, 113 118. Manville 1990, 126 132; though see Foxhall 1997, 117 118. Manville 1990, 128 n. 14.

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Ath. Pol. 3 4; Plut. Solon 18.1 2). Caution should be exercised here: Foxhall has shown that the initial arrangement of classes was one that would have established a tiny and extremely wealthy elite at the top and that the lowest class, the thetes, “must have covered most of the population.”101 While these reforms surely would not have had an immediate effect on the makeup of aristocracy, they did establish a legal basis for status within the polis based on wealth, leading to unanticipated consequences in the development of the polis nearly a hundred years later. Of particular importance for the study of the Catalogue are changes to the institution of marriage within this same period. It is no surprise that marriages in Archaic Greece tended to take place within a social class, and in elite circles social status appears to have been as important as civic membership. As Gernet has shown, the tyrants of the sixth century often used marriage as a way to create alliances between their powerful families, across city lines.102 More recently, Duplouy has demonstrated the multiple social and economic concerns that surrounded any marriage within the upper classes in Archaic and, importantly, Classical Greece: “Marriage could constitute at one and the same time a method for making one’s rank known, an instrument of social promotion, a strategy of political alliance, or simply a manner of relieving tensions, resolving conflicts, or to reintegrate a partner in the game following a moment of social isolation.”103 Even after the state of Athens placed significant restrictions on marriage outside the polis in the middle of the fifth century, these kinds of considerations remain paramount for members of the aristocracy. With the advent of Solon’s law code in Athens, however, we have evidence of a competing but not exclusive form of status coming into being. That is, Solon’s laws about legitimate and illegitimate children, particularly as that status relates to inheritance, created a civic consideration to marriage: only “legitimate” (gnêsios) sons could inherit.104 At the same time, Solon is credited with some legislation that seems 101 102 103 104

Foxhall 1997, 129 132; quotation from 131. Gerrnet 1981, 294 301. Duplouy 2006, 113 114. Solonian reforms affecting marriage are detailed in Chapter 3. Duplouy’s study of the successive marriages of Cimon show how an upper class Athenian man negotiated the competing concerns of status, citizenship, and, possibly, affec tion through a series of marriages (Duplouy 2006, 94 108).

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directed at limiting the ostentation of wealth in marriage: he limited the bride’s phernê, a set of “carryable” goods that the bride brought to her new household (Plutarch, Solon 20.4).105 Whatever their intent, these laws had the effect of making marriage into a concern of the collective state, and with that concern came a new set of anxieties about women’s place. Women became valuable as producers of legitimate offspring within the polis who could inherit the household property and who would themselves be citizens, and this civic identity eventually came into competition with the identity of aristocratic nobility.106 As Duplouy has argued, this does not mean that aristocrats in the Archaic and Classical period paid no attention to matters of civic inclusion nor that they ignored issues of class and status; on the contrary, members of the elite class had to negotiate competing concerns, contracting marriages that would produce citizens, but continuing to engage in acts of xenia perhaps including marriage with daughters of aristocratic allies with members of other cities.107 We should not assume that this development is limited to the citystate of Athens. We have, of course, much more evidence for the formation of the polis and attendant social concerns from Athens than for any other city-state, even given the well-preserved and extensive law code found at Gortyn. Recent scholarship on the family, however, has argued persuasively that in those other states for which we have some evidence (especially Sparta and Gortyn), the large-scale social picture corresponds fairly closely with Athens. That is, the family relationships 105

106 107

There is considerable debate over whether this phernê was the same thing as the bride’s proix, or dowry. Leduc 1992, 286, argues that it is, following Chantraine. Gernet 1981, 162, argues, however, that the phernê are simply clothes and jewels and are not part of the legal institution of dowry. I agree with Gernet; the function of this prohibition does not seem to be a limit on financial protection for women (a key function of dowry), but rather a limit on con spicuous display of wealth. I treat the question of proix in detail in Chapter 3. See van Wees 2009, 462 463. Duplouy 2006, ch. 2; see, esp., the discussion of Cimon’s marriages, 94 108, and the concluding arguments at 114 116. Recently, Griffith has argued that Athenian elites would likely have continued to engage in a range of formal and informal relationships with elite daughters from other city states, even after Perikles’ citizenship law; see Griffith 2011, 186 189.

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that matter are those of immediate marriage and kin, and the concerns of the oikos become increasingly aligned those of the polis toward the end of the Archaic period.108 Such considerations, as we will see, are simply, and strikingly, not present in the Catalogue. It is always dangerous to argue backward from a perceived endpoint, of course, and Morris in particular has been criticized for suggesting that the middling ideology led, even if unintentionally, to democracy.109 Kistler has argued that the “strong principle of equality” that, in Morris’ view, supports many middling texts has been misunderstood: what authors such as Solon and, in later periods, Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle champion is not an absolute equality, but rather a sense of appropriateness in which the rich exercise only the amount of power to which they are naturally entitled (in Kistler’s terms, “geometric” as opposed to “arithmetic” equality).110 Given this modification to Morris’ views, however, we can still see a conflict between champions of this sort of measured use of power (whom we can continue to call the “middlers”) and those who favor a more elitist aesthetic. Although this makes it more difficult to see how, exactly, the prevalence of democracy emerged in the late sixth and early fifth centuries, we can still note the distinction between champions of “metrios ideology” (in Kistler’s formulation) and a more elitist mode of authority.111 Whatever the causes of the emerging democracy at the start of the fifth century, Kurke has argued that the new literary modes that come into being in this period, especially the epinician and tragic, are of particular importance in that they mediate between elite and middling discourse.112 Though Kurke’s subtle argument cannot be fully reproduced here, her reading of Pindar in this way has revolutionized our understanding of that poet. As she shows, competition in athletic contests clearly can be considered a mode of aristocratic exchange, an expenditure of “wealth, physical 108 109 110 111

112

Patterson 1998, 70 106. See, esp., Kistler 2004, 157 167; Hammer 2004, 497 498. Kistler 2004, 157 167. Kistler 2004, 167, points out that his modification of Morris’ theory leaves the context for emergence of democracy “largely unknown.” This point has not always been understood; Hammer 2004, 495, cites the fact that Pindar “places habros specifically in a civic context” as evidence against a consistent elitist ideology.

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exertion, and time,” all resources that only the very rich could afford to spend in this way, in return for personal fame.113 At the same time, such exertions also function within the polis as a form of public benefaction: successful athletes bring glory to their communities.114 The achievement of the athletes, moreover, has meaning and value only through the polis: “The value of achievement is the prestige it has in the eyes of that community, so that praise must come from the larger group.”115 The achievement of Pindar’s poetry, then, is to acknowledge both sides of the discursive divide: athletes are praised for their aristocratic performance as contributing to the glory and renown of the larger community. Similarly, Attic tragedy can be seen as negotiating between the two sides of the conflict, mobilizing an increasingly civic vocabulary while discussing the great aristocratic families of Homeric epic. While there has been good reason to read Athenian tragedy as “democratic” discourse, work by scholars such as Mark Griffith has shown how carefully tragedy as a whole maintains a reliance on aristocratic leadership while invoking democratic institutions. In his now classic article on the Oresteia, Griffith argues that the workings of tragedy are not very different from those of the Athenian state: The security and justice that are finally achieved are shown to depend heavily on the ability of elite families to draw on their long standing connections, to outmaneuver their opponents, and to (re)assure the rest of the non elite population of their own unquestionable legitimacy as leaders and guarantors of prosperity and order.116

In other words, the aristocratic practices of xenia and hetaireia (on which Griffith focuses throughout) tend to be mobilized in Athenian tragedy for the good of the community and sometimes curiously democratic polis represented in the drama. Almost a mirror-image of epinician poetry, in

113 114 115

116

Kurke 1991, 99. Kurke 1991, 91. Kurke 1991, 86. See also Kurke’s reading of Pindar, Pythian 7, on pp. 191 192. See also Neer 2004, 86 88: Neer reads the poem as appropriating for Athens the glory associated with the Almeonid rebuilding of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Griffith 1995, 82. For a further reassessment of Athenian tragedy and democ racy, see the collection of articles in Carter 2011; especially useful for the role of exogamy among the elite in later fifth century Athens is Griffith 2011.

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this reading tragedy presents aristocratic ideology and behavior as sustaining the interests of the polis, a mediation, as Kurke suggests, between aristocratic and middling values. We have, then, considerable evidence for a conflict in which members of an elite class in Archaic Greece deployed different modes of discourse in their quest to attain and maintain status, and manipulated those discourses as political tides shifted. On the one hand, in some contexts, members of the aristocracy engaged in behaviors and exercised an aesthetic mode that emphasized their membership in an elite class, ideally separate from, and ruling over, the population at large. In these contexts wealth tends to be figured as a natural possession of the elite class and marker of their status, and class mobility through wealth is criticized. In other contexts, these same aristocrats might expound the virtues of behaving in a measured fashion and taking into account the needs of the community as a whole; in such contexts, the aesthetics of beauty, nobility, and good birth receive less emphasis. And while we may not see a clear-cut revolution of the lower or middle classes leading inevitably to democracy, we do see, in the last century of this ongoing conflict, that in a certain set of literary texts a greater emphasis is placed on the importance of noble birth as a stable marker of status. Toward the end of this period, as Kurke has argued, we see the emergence of genres that mediate between these two modes of discourse.117 This ideological conflict is particularly important for any study of the Hesiodic genre, because Hesiod is one author (or author-function) who cheerfully resides on both sides of the divide, perhaps even more clearly than authors such as Homer, Theognis, or Pindar. That is, the Theogony clearly belongs to an aristocratic discursive tradition. The story of how Zeus came to rule the cosmos both provides a narrative for how things became the way they are and presents Zeus’ kingship as the natural order of things. With the Works and Days, however, we have the presentation of a narrator (who claims to be Hesiod himself) who is the champion par excellence of the 117

Such a reading coincides well with what we know of aristocratic families in the early Athenian democracy; as Hammer points out, “the symposium yielded a steady supply of quite different civic leaders who sought office through legal and democratic means” (Hammer 2004, 492; see also his comments on Perikles, 504).

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middling tradition.118 As van Wees points out, this Hesiod neither is poor nor has any moral objection to the acquisition of wealth.119 His concern, however, is distinctly tied up with the concerns of community, and he advocates justice and good farm management over inherent privileged status. In the narrator’s view, the kings are notoriously corruptible in their capacity as judges, thus demonstrating a concern with the potential abuses of the ruling class (Works and Days, 38 41).120 Hesiod’s answer to this concern is not social revolution, but rather appropriate behavior: a just man will do better to work hard on his farm than to rely on the kings for a favorable decision. His argument, then, is not against the aristocracy per se but rather against reliance on abuses of power rather than good, hard work. Where along this axis (middling-elite) should we locate the Catalogue? In one sense, the answer could not be clearer. As a set of genealogies of heroes (all of whom are claimed to be the ancestor of one aristocratic family or another), the Catalogue belongs to the ruling class. We should note in this context that the first fragment speaks of women who were aristai (“noble,” fr. 1.3) and that the second subject to be taken up is Zeus’ “begetting for the first time the race of glorious kings” (σπερμαίνων τὰ πρῶτα γένος κυδρῶν βασιλήων, fr. 1.16).121 In this poem, then, the 118

119 120

121

Morris 1996, 28. For an extensive discussion of the Works and Days as an anti aristocratic text, see now Rose 2012, ch. 4. Rose’s book was published too late for me to take full account of his detailed and extensive discussions of class conflict in archaic Greece. Clay 2003 argues that the Theogony and Works and Days are complementary works, showing us the world from an Olympian and a human perspective, respectively. Clay’s comments on the functioning justice in the Works and Days, 31 48 (esp. 42), are particularly acute. van Wees 2009, 445 449. See Hall 2007a, 180: “It is precisely this repugnance towards corruption and injustice rather than the principle of aristocratic rule itself that lies behind Hesiod’s criticism of the ‘bribe devouring basileis’ (WD 36 41).” Hall is correct in this assessment, but again, the “middling” position is one that champions not democracy, but rather a measured exercise of power as the most advanta geous mode for the community as a whole. See now Rose 2012, 180 186, for a reading of the Works and Days as critique of a corrupt aristocracy, and reflecting an attitude that leads to the development of tyrannies. In a recent study of the Siphnian treasury at Delphi, Richard Neer has suggested that the abduction of mortal women by divinities in order to produce heroes should be understood in precisely the terms of aristocratic gift exchange:

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coupling of mortal women with gods has a distinctly elitist character; these moments of intercourse both produce the heroes that the aristocratic class will cite as ancestors and serve as a model of sorts for upper-class, inter-polis marriages. Indeed, the fact that this poem seems to have been designed to follow the Theogony directly (and the Theogony appears to have been altered at the end to lead into it) puts it generically in the high, elite tradition.122 It is no surprise, then, that the poem does not contain the kinds of middling gnomic utterances advocating hard work and honest dealing that we see so frequently in the Works and Days. As Clay has persuasively argued, however, the Catalogue is written from the perspective of one who knows the Works and Days and appears to be written so as to fit, in a sense, between the two major works of Hesiod. This is not to say that the Catalogue adopts the middling aesthetic. But I argue that the Catalogue, like much of the poetry analyzed by Kurke, was produced in a period when middling discourses were in sharp competition with elitist modes of expression; under such pressure, elite poetry tends to develop systems of signs that clearly demarcate its own sphere.123 The Catalogue is, if anything, more consciously elitist when it comes to social practice than is its literary “predecessor,” the Theogony.124 The heroes that are born here are not middling democrats,

122 123

124

“Siphnian South asserts that even this long term economy is subordinate to yet another order of exchange: one which spans generations, in which women are the tokens, and maidenhood is offered up in exchange for glory and heroic offspring” (Neer 2001, 325). A page earlier he cites the Catalogue as a literary parallel to the sculptural program of the South Frieze of the Siphnian treasury, which depicts the orderly abduction of a mortal woman by a god or hero. Neer 2001 and 2004 provide perceptive studies of the Delphic treasuries as bridging the gap between aristocratic and emerging ideologies of the polis. See Tsagalis 2009, 158. See, e.g., Kurke’s discussion of the invention of the category of hetairai in order to distinguish aristocratic sex for hire from everyday pornê (Kurke 1999, 175 219). Hammer 2004, 503, cites early red figure vases that show com modity exchange with “women who appear to be hetairai” as evidence against this argument. But these pictorial representations do not negate the evidence Kurke raises suggesting that the elite class portrays their exchanges with hetairai as belonging to an economic order different from that of everyday commerce. They simply demonstrate that such portrayals are not all pervasive. See, esp., Chapter 2, on the practice of hedna, or bride price.

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and their mothers do not live in a state of civic consciousness. Rather, the mothers are daughters of kings and have intercourse with gods in order to produce heroes of distinct and distinctive lineage. As we will see shortly, the Catalogue produces a set of oral formulae for these women that functions as a feminine parallel to the formulaic epithets of (male) heroes in the Homeric texts. The aesthetic of the Works and Days is not just missing, but consciously and carefully excluded. This exclusion is particularly notable when we look at the structures of marriage in the Catalogue. Again, without tying the ideological aims of the Catalogue to any particular polis, it is clear that the concerns of the Catalogue are expressed in terms of noble birth rather than civic inclusion. A brief contrast to the marital advice in the Works and Days will be instructive here. In that work, Hesiod recommends marriage to a neighboring woman: παρθενικὴν δὲ γαμεῖν, ὥς κ’ ἤθεα κεδνὰ διδάξῃς,

[τὴν δὲ μάλιστα γαμεῖν, ἥτις σέθεν ἐγγύθι ναίει] πάντα μάλ’ ἀμφὶς ἰδών, μὴ γείτοσι χάρματα γήμῃς. οὐ μὲν γάρ τι γυναικὸς ἀνὴρ ληίζετ’ ἄμεινον τῆς ἀγαθῆς, τῆς δ’ αὖτε κακῆς οὐ ῥίγιον ἄλλο, δειπνολόχης, ἥ τ’ ἄνδρα καὶ ἴφθιμόν περ ἐόντα εὕει ἄτερ δαλοῖο καὶ ὠμῷ γήραϊ δῶκεν.

And marry a maiden, so that you can teach her a trusty manner, [and especially marry one who lives near you] looking carefully around, lest you marry a source of laughter to your neighbors. For a man happens on nothing better than a noble woman, nor anything colder than a base one, than a parasite, who though her husband is very strong, burns him without a brand, and makes him old before his time (lit. “gives him to unripe old age”). (Hesiod, Works and Days, 699 705)

The language here is much the same as that used by Theognis when he decries the mixing of noble bloodlines with base (cited above): the woman who one marries should be “noble,” agathê, rather than “base,” kakê. This almost sounds like an elitist aesthetic. Hesiod appears to be speaking of nobility in terms not of birth lines, however, but rather of behavior: a good woman is one who is not a parasite (deipnolochês) and

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moreover does not cause the neighbors to laugh, either through her sexual promiscuity or by bringing misfortune in the form of poverty. This is a persuasive redefinition of nobility that divorces it from social class. Indeed, as Edwards has noted, Hesiod’s rationale for endogamy here shows little appreciation for marriage even as an alliance able to secure aid from outside the immediate locale in times of need let alone as a means of building the prestige and influence of the family. He seems more interested in a wife as a source of offspring (W&D 235, 244) and labor (W&D 779) than anything else.125

Admittedly, the concern here is as much with the oikos as the polis, but we see in this passage a sense, at least as it is negatively expressed, of community. A marriage to a badly behaved woman makes a man laughable to his neighbors; this is a middler’s set of concerns. The Catalogue, by contrast, may not appear to address marriage per se at all. That is, the work is not concerned to advise the reader on how to make successful marriages, or how to maintain a successful household. Because the narrative relates the birth of famous heroes, however, marriage makes its way into the proceedings, and in some of the stories various aspects of the social transaction of matrimony are, directly or indirectly, explored. For now it is sufficient to note that the Catalogue’s project is essentially aristocratic: the births here are of heroes, the offspring of well-born and virtuous daughters and either gods or men who are themselves of divine heritage. To successfully contract such a marriage, the bridegroom often finds himself in a competition with other members of his class, trying to win the bride through implicit or exclusive contests of gift-giving or personal valor. Thus, the Catalogue presents a purely elitist picture of marriage, and one that hearkens back to the structures of marriage in the Homeric epics; nonetheless, as we will see, more mercantile concerns have a way of creeping in. Since I have now introduced the topic of marriage, a word is in order about marriage and rape. Any casual reader of the Catalogue will note that, in general, the gods do not marry the women with whom they beget heroes. For the gods, these relations are purely about “mixing in love” (as the Catalogue euphemistically describes the act of sex) and producing offspring; there is no concern here to establish a lasting 125

Edwards 2004, 75.

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household.126 When a mortal man is the bridegroom, however, marriage is always a precursor to sex, and there are sometimes social ramifications to those marriages (as in the case of Mestra). In one of the narratives that we have (fr. 141.1 6), Zeus’ relations with Europa do carry some of the signs of marriage: Zeus gives the father a gift (dôron), which the father receives.127 But this is the only such case. Again, the focus of the poem is genealogical, not familial, and once a woman has borne an important son to a god, her narrative generally comes to a swift close. When the women marry men rather than gods, their point of interest in the narrative is always the moment leading up to marriage. After the accomplishment of that deed, sex and a child swiftly follow, and the narrative moves on. In practical terms, this means that I often speak of marriage (to a man) and rape (by a god) as parallel structures in this book. This is not meant to minimize the real difference between these practices in the modern or ancient worlds but is a function of the concerns of this text. The Catalogue sees every narrative functionally as the story of how this or that hero was born; the woman’s point of view is almost never narrated and is, in any case, rarely operative in the narrative of heroic birth. We should also note here the brutal force of this overriding and repetitive structure: once the woman in question has produced the hero in question, she is done; subsequent actions, and even subsequent births, are of no interest. This, too, should be seen as a symptom of the aristocratic nature of the Catalogue. The text is concerned not with the establishment of stable households that function appropriately within a larger community, but rather with the construction of heroic genealogies. In such a context, and in stark contrast to what we know of actual aristocratic marriages in the sixth century, once the woman in a story has produced her hero, she has served her function.

126

127

There are some twenty instances of the word akoitis (“wife”) in the fragments, usually in the formula poiêsat’ akoitin (“he made [her] his wife”) or variants of it. In none of these instances is the subject of the verb a god (frs. 10a.22, 59, 67, 71; 14.5, 17a.12, 23a.31, 26.24, 33a.7, 59.17, 85.5, 105.3, 176.6, 190.6, 195.4, 195.9, 200.7, 251a.8, 280.14). See Griffith 2011, 191 192, for a useful brief discussion of the gods’ “marriages” to mortal women in Greek myth; it is pointed out that although the god usually abandons the aristocratic woman with whom he has had sex, the child is usually cared for well. For more on these issues, see Chapter 2.

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CATALOGUES, GENEALOGIES, AND WOMEN

I return now to the question of genre: What kind of poem is this? We can start by noting that the title of the Catalogue admits of some variation in antiquity. The work is referred to as a katalogos gynaikôn (Catalogue of Women) by numerous authors and scholiasts. It is also known, however, simply as the êhoiai, from the Greek formula ἠ᾿ οἵη (“or such a (feminine) one who”) that introduces many of the narratives in the work. As Ian Rutherford has pointed out, this latter formula suggests a genre that is potentially at cross-purposes with the work that we have. That is, the Catalogue appears to be a comprehensive account of the Greek heroes, arranged quite carefully in traditional genealogies. The final redaction contains significant evidence of arrangement, not least in the placement of the story of the suitors of Helen at the end of the last book, rather than discussing this story with the rest of the daughters of Tyndareos.128 The formula “or such a one who,” on the other hand, suggests rather a collection of stories about types of women, loosely connected and selected as examples of particular traits.129 The êhoiê fomula, then, should lead to a series of stories about the virtues of particularly famous women. Rutherford assumes that these two different types of texts represent different traditions, which have become successfully merged in our text, producing “a tension between surface form and true structure.”130 Neither genealogies nor catalogues are unusual literary forms in ancient Greece, of course. Perhaps the nearest parallel to the Catalogue from the Archaic period is a passage in Odysseus’ speech before Arete in Book 11 of the Odyssey (11.225 332). There, Odysseus lists the famous women whose ghosts he met in the underworld, and the list bears some resemblance both 128

129 130

See also the placement of the birth of Herakles late in the last book; Haubold 2005 has argued convincingly that this arrangement is deliberate and requires a sophisticate reading of the work as a whole. Rutherford 2000, 83. Rutherford 2000, 93. See also Tsagalis 2009, 161, 174 177. Hirschberger 2004, 51 63, provides a comprehensive account of genealogical epic known from ancient Greece. Sammons 2010 provides an incisive reading of the use of catalogues in Homeric epic and suggests throughout that Homer is at pains to distinguish his form of unified narrative from the catalogue form.

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in overall structure and in some particulars to the Catalogue.131 Here, however, the genealogical connections, though present, seem to be suppressed.132 Although the introduction of each woman in the passage in the Odyssey is fairly formulaic, moreover, nothing like the êhoiê formula surfaces. This is particularly surprising if we are looking for a correspondence of form and content, because unlike the Catalogue, the women in Odysseus’ catalogue do seem to be chosen specifically to illustrate female virtue, most likely demonstrating Odysseus’ typically canny assessment of his narratee.133 Here, then, we would expect the introductory formula of the Catalogue and we do not have it. Rutherford resolves the proposed tension between form and content by positing a schematic evolution of genres, in which the Catalogue plays an intermediary role, representing a stage after êhoiê poetry has been crossed with genealogical poems (and been “appropriated by the Odyssey”) and before the later prose genealogies and Hellenistic catalogues.134 While this kind of development cannot be ruled out, neither is it strictly necessary. Not every formal element of a genre serves a distinct purpose or a purpose related to its form. In particular, West has argued that the êhoiê formula seems to be used in the Catalogue in a specific situation: when the narrator is leaving one sub-branch of a genealogical tree and jumping to the beginning of a parallel subbranch (thus leaping backward chronologically), the poem uses the

131

132 133 134

See, esp., West 1985, 6; Rutherford 2000, 93 97. See Cohen 1989 1990, 23 24, on the differences in the ways the women are described in each text. Hirschberger 2004, 59 62, also discusses some key differences, including the fact that the Odyssey gives us more of Tyro’s perspective in narrating her story. On this point, see also Doherty 2007, 303 304, 320. Sammons argues that because the source of the stories in this catalogue appears to be the women themselves, “the catalogue of women in Odyssey 11 would be quite different from its Hesiodic counterpart” (Sammons 2010, 88; see 74 93 for a full and perceptive discussion of the passage of the Odyssey). Rutherford 2000, 94. Rutherford 2000, 94; Doherty 1995, 112. Rutherford 2000, 95 96. Tsagalis 2009 further modifies this formulation, suggesting that the Catalogue must have come into being after the heroic epic “had been consolidated and diffused, at a stage when it was not possible for women to acquire epic fame independently” (174).

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êhoiê formula.135 But there is nothing inherent in the formula that would point to such a use. The parallel to the passage in Book 11 of the Odyssey, however, does raise interesting questions. Unlike the Odyssey where both narrator (Odysseus) and narratee (Arete) are internal to the text, we have no way of determining the position of speaker and listener for the Catalogue, in whole or in the case of most individual narratives.136 While we cannot be certain of the history of the genre of the Catalogue, nevertheless ancient references to the work demonstrate a surprising range of understandings with regard to its content.137 Menander Rhetor tells us, “Many things were said by him [Hesiod] in the Catalogues of Women concerning the sexual intercourse and marriage of the gods” (πολλὰ δὲ αὐτῶι ἐν τοῖς Καταλόγοις τῶν Γυναικῶν εἴρηται περὶ θεῶν σουνουσίας καὶ γάμου, Men. Rh., Περὶ Ἐπιδεικτικῶν 628). Although the gods rarely marry

anyone in this text, that seems a fair enough description of the work and suggests that the title (Catalogue of Women) is somewhat at variance with its contents. But a Hellenistic epigram (Palatine Anthology 9.64) says, addressing Hesiod directly, “you wrote the birth and deeds of the gods in songs, and the birth of the ancient heroes” (μακάρων γένος ἔργά τε μολπαῖς/ καὶ γένος ἀρχαίων ἔγραφες ἡμιθέων). This would seem to suggest that the Catalogue is more concerned with the birth of heroes than with the women who bore them, and again, this seems a fair assessment.138 Most of the continuous narratives spend a good deal more textual space on the heroes than on their mothers. Most interesting of all, however, is the description of the humorist Lucian, who refers to Hesiod’s most famous works (Dialogue on Hesiod 1) as “describing the birth of the Gods, the virtues of women, and advice on farming” (θεῶν τε γενέσεις διηγούμενος . . . ἔτι δὲ γυναικῶν ἀρετὰς καὶ παραινέσεις γεωργικάς). Little about the Catalogue has suggested to modern scholars that it is a series of exampla of women’s 135

136

137

138

West 1985, 39. Rutherford 2000, 265 n. 42, points to West 1985, 16; this seems to be a misprint of some sort. Doherty 2007 is the most successful attempt to argue that some elements of the Catalogue may have been composed originally (if not in the form in the Catalogue) with a female audience in mind. All of the examples here have been taken from the testimonia printed in Merkelbach and West 1967, 1 3. As Tsagalis 2009, 166, notes: “one can discern a tendency to use female stories as the frame within which male stories will be narrated.”

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virtues. The vagueness of that description should perhaps not be pushed too hard. After all, there is a good deal more in the Works and Days than advice on farming, despite the impression left on generations of graduate students who have worked through the latter part of that poem. Even so, Lucian’s description is curious, given the fragments that we have. The ancient testimony is consistent in seeing the poem as a catalogue of women, and even the reason for this is not entirely clear. As mentioned above, the women rarely seem to be the most important characters in the narratives in which they appear. We should note that in none of the fragments that we have does any woman engage in direct speech (though Tyro’s quarrel with her father is mentioned).139 On the contrary, what the women do in this poem is distressingly minimal: they are introduced as the daughter of someone important, and their beauty is described in a few formulaic phrases; they are wooed by a mortal or taken by a god; they are either tamed or made pregnant or they “mix in delightful love” with the man or god in question; and then they bear important children, who generally take over the remainder of the woman’s story.140 On rare occasions the woman in question shows some agency (Tyro, Atalante, Mestra, Alkmene), usually by delaying her marriage. But beyond that, the stories do not narrate the lives, let alone the virtues, of mythological women. A brief example is typical, at least of the fragments that we have. Fragment 30 begins in the middle of the story of the unjust king Salmoneus, and we learn of his bizarre behavior: he used to drive chariots while dragging bronze kettles behind in order to imitate thunder, and then throw lighted torches at the onlookers in imitation of lightning, thereby emulating and challenging Zeus. Zeus, angered, came down and punished Salmoneus and his people; all this takes twenty lines (fr. 30.3 23). Then we learn about the virtue of Tyro, who had opposed her father’s bizarre behavior. She is praised, is married off to Krêthês, and then bears children to Poseidon, in the space of twelve lines (23 35). The story seems to be picked up in fragment 31, though there the emphasis is on the “shining children” that Tyro bears to the god (fr. 31.1 4). Now, one of these 139 140

Rutherford 2000, 88. Rutherford 2000, 264 n. 10, indexes a few of the formulae used for being wooed and climbing into her husband’s bed. See also Tsagalis 2009, 164 165. See further below.

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children is Neleus, and the story of his offspring with Chloris occupies the thirty-six lines of fragment 33. One of them, Periklymenos, has his story told at length (frs. 33.12 36, 35.1 5). Admittedly, Periklymenos is a fascinating hero, and his story is worth expanding on, not least because he is killed by Herakles.141 But when we reflect that Tyro is one of the most active and virtuous women in the Catalogue of Women, it seems clear enough that the Catalogue’s real concern is not the women but rather the famous heroes to whom they give birth.142 Lucian’s description of the poem, then, is particularly puzzling. In fact, the women in these fragments do very little and have little opportunity to display any virtuous qualities. It might be objected that Lucian’s description above is nonetheless consistent with the content of our poem. After all, a woman’s “virtue” in the ancient world is largely a question of her avoidance of sex before marriage, successful marriage, and production of masculine offspring. As Cohen has shown, the Catalogue takes some pains to describe the women’s good qualities primarily beauty even adapting new formulae for the purpose of doing so.143 Even so, it is clear that Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women is not the same kind of text as, for example, Plutarch’s Virtutes Mulierum. Although Plutarch’s text does largely define women’s virtue in terms of their conventional behavior in deference to men, the actions of women are at least the focus of the narratives.144 The same simply cannot be said of the Hesiodic Catalogue; even the fact that the genealogies seem largely to be constructed around women should not be overstressed. As Fowler has pointed out, the descendants of these women are identified without exception by their patronymics.145 141

142

143 144 145

On Periklymenos in the epic tradition, see Frame 2009, 11 14, 106, 228. For a full discussion of his story in the Catalogue and Ovid’s transformation of it, see now Ziogas 2013, 211 217. Doherty 2007, 307, expresses dismay that in her survey of recent scholarship on the Catalogue “none of these scholars even acknowledges that the Catalogue is about women,” but I am not sure that, in fact, it is. Cohen 1989 1990. For a good recent discussion of Plutarch’s text, see McInerney 2003. Fowler 1998, 6. See, however, Doherty 2007, 310: “The account of each family line begins with a woman sometimes with one who merely married into it. Usually the daughters of the couple are listed before the sons; sometimes the daughters’ children are also listed before the sons’.”

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On the other hand, if we assume that the Catalogue is primarily a poem about the birth of the hemitheoi, those particular heroes who are semidivine, we must admit that it would have been possible to arrange the genealogies (as in the Theogony) as the offspring of each of the important gods: sons of Zeus, sons of Poseidon, sons of Apollo, and so on. The fact that this is not the case, however, is less a function of the importance of women in Archaic Greece than of the local, genealogical nature of the poem. I agree with West here that our poet has synthesized a vast amount of material, taking traditions from the various regions of Greece in turn. Those geographically local genealogies could be kept in their context only by arranging them according to the women who bore the heroes, for a simple reason: many of the hemitheoi are the offspring of a potent panhellenic male god and a mortal woman. Those cases where a female deity bears offspring from a mortal man are rare and mythologically construed as dangerous to the Olympian order.146 The woman in each set of parents belongs to a geographical place and a (human) familial line; the god belongs to neither. What, then, of the genealogical structure of the poem? It is not my intent to reconstruct each of the particular genealogies (for which, see West 1985). But it is worth noting that genealogical narrative is always subject to manipulation and change according to who is ascendant at the moment of telling.147 As Fowler has argued, genealogies are regularly told by those in power in order to establish, or perhaps fix, their dominance within a local culture. Doubtless, if we could fully reconstruct all of the genealogies in the Catalogue, and if we had more information as to its exact date, the poem would present something of an ideological map of Greece in the Archaic period.148 Given our uncertainty about the date of the Catalogue, as well as the fragmentary nature of many of the genealogies, it is unlikely that we will be able to construct this map with much assurance. 146 147

148

Clay 2003, 164. See Fowler 1998, 1 5; West 1985, 11 30, presents a wealth of comparative material from other cultures. So, for example, Fowler would link the production of the Catalogue and especially the genealogy of the Hellenes to the First Sacred War at Delphi (Fowler 1998, 13 15). For a thorough discussion of the invention of the “Hellenic genealogy,” see Hall 2002, 125 172.

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The Catalogue, moreover, clearly does not have the same structure or function as the genealogical literature that is often considered as its parallel. The kinds of genealogies analyzed by Fowler, for example, are all local and exist within a specific temporal and cultural context. It is reasonable enough to see them as the result of local social conflict. The Catalogue, by contrast, is clearly “Hesiodic,” also in the sense of being panhellenic.149 That is, the redactor of the text has gone to great trouble to knit together myths from every region of Greece and to try, within limits, to find the relationships between them.150 Even more important, however, the poem subjugates the immediate political function of those genealogies to a larger architectural purpose, namely the narration to the end of the age of heroes, here marked by the wooing of Helen, the last narrative event necessary to make the Trojan War implicit. This is local genealogy writ large, recast not as an explanation for why this or that family is in power now, but as an explanation for why none of us, however pure our descent from a hero, has a hemitheos in our midst. In this context it is useful to briefly consider another “catalogue of women,” also from the Archaic period, but almost entirely different in character and tone: Semonides’ famous poem 7, in which the poet describes ten different types of women, from whom all the different phyla (“tribes”) of women are said to descend.151 This is in no way a genealogical poem; the women here are not named and in fact have no fathers (and few of them can be said to have mothers, exactly). They merely represent all the different ways that women can bring evil into the lives of men, generally through their dangerous sexual promiscuity. The poem presents an ever-present fear that a man’s wife will make him the object of the laughter of his community (see esp. 108 113). Again, this catalogue of women presents a middling aesthetic, in which all a generic man can hope for is that his wife will be of the best sort and will not bring him into a state of public shame. The best of the women in Semonides’ poem, the woman from the bee, is said to produce sons whose 149 150 151

D’Alessio 2005, 217 220. West 1985, 29 30; Hall 2002, 27 28. See Osborne 2005, 22 24, for a brief, perceptive discussion of the relation of this poem to the Catalogue. I discuss Semonides’ poem at greater length in Chapter 7.

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virtues seem aristocratic: she gives birth to “noble and famous-named offspring” (καλὸν κὠνομάκλυτον γένος, 87), but even these are generic aristocrats, unnamed and not themselves the subject of epic narrative. The contrast with the Hesiodic Catalogue could hardly be more marked, and Semonides’ poem serves to highlight just how strongly the Catalogue emphasizes nobility as a function of bloodline and heroic birthright. Let us go back, then, to the named women of the Hesiodic Catalogue. If, as Fowler has put it, the women of the Catalogue are the “glue” holding together the men who are the “building blocks” of these genealogies,152 why, then, are these stories stitched together in series organized by lists of famous women? Some of the women in these stories bear children to famous men, not gods. But not one of the genealogical narratives begins with an êhoios formula (i.e., “and then there was such a (masculine) one who . . .”).153 Far from valorizing the status of women in Archaic Greece, I suggest that this structure, in which women are the connection points of human-divine family trees, allows an essentially aristocratic construction of heroic lineages.154 That is, the women serve as intersections in the genealogical roads, linking important families from different regions or bringing a divine progenitor into an elite family line, resulting in important heroes. In order to serve this genealogical function, however, the women in the Catalogue must (and often do) marry outside their immediate polis and within their aristocratic social class. Their marriages are exogamous rather than endogamous. This exogamous view of the world is characteristic of Archaic aristocratic marriage and allows for clearly distinguished patrilinear descent.155 With the rise of the polis in the Archaic period as a relatively, and increasingly, closed system of endogamy within a city-state, inheritance and descent became 152 153

154

155

Fowler 1998, 6. See Rutherford 2005, 102. Even when the story falls in the man’s genealogy, as in the case of the story of Sisyphos’ attempt to obtain Mestra as a wife for his son, the story begins with the feminine form of the formula. As Patterson 1998, 65, notes: “Self conscious attention to lineage and ancestors seems more typical of elite families striving for preeminence in an increasingly democratic society than of earlier archaic Greek society in general.” See also 61 62 on the status of women in the Homeric poems. Gernet 1981, 294 295. On the importance of marriage as a way to create or maintain aristocratic status, see Duplouy 2006, 80 116.

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necessarily bilinear.156 The Catalogue, written in the heroic tradition of Hesiod, is ideologically situated as a defense of the aristocratic way of life (associated with the fictive past) in the face of pressures from the emerging system of poleis. In brief, the Catalogue appears to deliberately exclude the types of concerns with marriage and inheritance or a hero’s responsibility to his larger community that are present in some other Archaic texts. We do not see in the Catalogue a concern with bilateral descent or with the formation of interconnected kin-groups within a closed system of legally equal oikoi. That is the point: when the interests of the polis are being reflected in the emerging middling discourse, the Catalogue provides a canonization of exogamic, heroic descent-groups. To borrow once more from Kurke’s stimulating work, this genealogical poem “is part of a larger project of aristocratic resistance to the encroaching authority of the polis.”157

CONCLUSION

In the following chapters, I intend to read the fragments of the Catalogue in these several contexts: as part of the Hesiodic epic-didactic tradition, as an example of Greek genealogical poetry, and, most important, as reacting to the emerging conflict of elitist and middling ideologies. The structures of marriage in the Catalogue receive particular attention, because in marriage we see an institution that is inevitably bound up in the questions of class, civic membership, and family. We know, moreover, that the practice of marriage underwent significant changes in the Archaic period, in Athens and elsewhere. As a result, marriage provides a convenient and prominent lens through which to articulate the tensions of this Archaic text. At the same time, the later chapters of this book are primarily concerned with the ways that the Catalogue emphasizes, through a series of intertexts with the poems of Homer and the Theogony and Works and Days, the end of the age of heroes that is its primary subject. In producing these readings, I should make clear that I assume a 156 157

Patterson 1998, 97 100; Fowler 1998, 4 5. Kurke 1999, 18 19, speaking about aristocratic texts’ resistance to coinage.

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sophisticated author (or, perhaps, redactor) who has a distinct literary sensibility and is working within a fluid oral performance tradition. Ultimately, the test of whether this assumption is correct will depend on the success or failure of the readings that it produces. In any case, I see the repeated emphasis on the end of the heroic age, on the fact that the subject of this poem is now a thing of the past, as consistent with the more historically informed readings of the first chapters. Though this is an aristocratic poem with an elitist form of discourse, it is a poem that looks back to the heroic foundations of its own literary grounding somewhat wistfully, with a sense of loss. All acts of nostalgia are wishes for a past that never was; the Catalogue regrets both the end of the age of heroes and the imaginary time when a family’s heroic lineage was an uncontested form of political authority.

2 The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna

One of the scholia to the Odyssey 1.276 makes a valiant effort to sort out the different customs of gift-exchange that seem to abound in cases of Homeric marriage and to provide some etymology for the most problematic terms: ἕδνα δὲ λέγει τὰ ὑπὸ νυμφίων διδόμενα παρὰ τὸ ἕδραν καὶ παραμονὴν προξενεῖν τῇ νύμφῃ. τὰ δὲ ὑπὸ πατέρων κειμήλια· ἕδνα τὰ διδόμενα δῶρα ὑπὸ τοῦ γαμοῦντος τῇ γυναικί. φερναὶ δὲ τὰ ὑπὸ τῆς γυναικὸς. παρὰ τὸ φέρειν εἰς εὐνήν. δασύνεται τὸ ἕεδνα ὡς τὸ ἕεργον.

Hedna means the things given by the bridegrooms, from the words “to provide a seat and security” (hedran kai paramonên proxenein), to the bride. But the gifts from the fathers are keimêlia. Hedna are the gifts (dôra) given by the one marrying to the wife. Phernai are the things [given] by the wife, from the words “to carry into bed” (pherein eis eunên). “Hedna” is aspirated like “hergon.”

It is no wonder that the scholiast feels a need to explain these different terms. The presentation of marriage customs in Homer is complex, perhaps inconsistent, and uses terminology different from the legal and literary texts from later centuries. The most problematic term in Archaic texts, hedna, appears to have a meaning in Homer and in the Catalogue unlike its sense in post-Classical texts, and in nearly all cases refers to gifts given by the groom to the bride’s father. Even within these Archaic hexameter texts, the usage is not entirely consistent, and at some times the word seems simply to refer to marriage gifts given by either party. More troubling still, the term virtually disappears from public discourse in the literature of the fifth-century polis (though it 52

The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna

53

reappears in Hellenistic and later literature), and to date no sufficient explanation has been given for this disappearance.1 Hedna appear with considerable frequency in the Catalogue. Although the word itself appears only a handful of times, I would argue that from context we can reasonably identify seven or eight separate instances of hedna outside the long fragments (frs. 196 204) that describe the wooing of Helen. In the story of Helen, we find up to seven more instances, since much of the narrative consists of a list of heroes who competed for her hand and the hedna that they promised. This makes the Catalogue the richest source of descriptions of hedna in all of Greek literature.2 For comparison, we find twelve instances of hedna in all of Homer, most in the Odyssey where the marriage of Penelope is a central concern.3 Not a single mention appears in the Theogony or Works and Days.4 To some extent this absence in other Hesiodic works can be explained by content: despite a high rate of procreation in the Theogony, there is little mention of marriage or marriage customs (of little use to the gods). The Works and Days, though it does speak of marriage, does 1 2

3 4

See Seaford 1994, 209 210, for a brief and lucid discussion. Passages that definitely discuss hedna: fr. 26.34 38, marriage of Thestios, horses and chariots; fr. 43a.19 24, marriage of Mêstra, cattle, sheep, and goats; fr. 190.3 9, daughters of Pelops, unspecified hedna; fr. 198.9 11, Thoas, suitor of Helen, sheep and cattle; fr. 199.4 9, two men from Phylakê, suitors of Helen, unspecified hedna; fr. 200.3 9, Mnestheus, suitor for Helen, gold, cauldrons, and tripods; fr. 204.44 51, Ajax, suitor for Helen, promises cattle and sheep (which he may not yet own; see below); fr. 204.52 55, Elphênor, suitor of Helen, unspecified gifts (dôra). Less certain, but probable mentions of hedna: fr. 17a.6 12, marriage of Molionê and Aktôr, sheep and goats received by bride’s father; fr. 22.4 7, marriage of Dêmodikê, gifts (dôra) promised in pursuit of her beauty; fr. 43a.75 82, marriage of Erynome or Eurymede, cattle, called “gifts” (dôra); fr. 180.6 11, marriage of a daughter of Broteas, list of gold, horses, cattle, and sheep. Instances in which hedna or marriage gifts are specified as not given: fr. 26.22 28, Apollo takes Stratonikê as bride for his son without hedna (anahednon); fr. 198.2 8, Odysseus specifically does not send gifts (dôra) because he knows that Menelaos will win Helen’s hand. Heroic deed, possibly in place of hedna: fr. 37.5 9, Melampos woos Pêrô for his brother Bias, evidently driving out the cattle of Iphikles rather than offering hedna; cf. Odyssey 11.285 297. Osborne 2005, 18, provides a list of episodes that include hedna, with a brief discussion. Finley 1981, 293 n. 45. Patterson 1998, 69.

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not treat aristocratic marriages, to which the practice of hedna belongs. The author of the Catalogue, by contrast, presents marriage customs in formulaic type scenes; wooing, as Rutherford points out, is part of the fabric of the poem.5 Hedna, sets of gifts given in aristocratic marriages, are an important element of that wooing. Clearly, the practice of hedna has a long literary history, and it belongs in the imagined social structures of Archaic hexameter poetry. That poetry is generally assumed to reflect, in one way or another, real social structures, and here the presence of hedna in the Catalogue presents a problem. If we go looking for the institution of hedna in the historical texts of sixth-century Greece, or indeed in any historical period in Greece, we will find no mention of it. If it is part of the actual social fabric, it has remained cleverly hidden.6 This leaves us with a question similar to that which has troubled scholars of Homeric marriage: If we have in the Catalogue a consistent but unhistorical depiction of a social institution, what is the reason for that depiction? In consideration of the eventual disappearance of hedna from the literary record, I suggest that the Catalogue’s presentation of hedna is an important element of the text’s aristocratic ideological character. To highlight the features of this literary social convention, we should look briefly at the related set of problems surrounding the institution of marriage in the Homeric texts.

HEDNA IN HOMER: GIFTS, BRIDEWEALTH, DOWRY

The primary difficulty with our current understanding of hedna in the Homeric poems is that scholars have seen hedna as a form of “bride-price” and, as such, an alternative to the practice of dowry. Most scholars have also considered these two social practices to be mutually exclusive. Hedna, like many modern forms of bride-price, nearly always appear to be paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s father. Dowry, on the other hand, is money or 5 6

Rutherford 2000, 83, 269 n. 17. It is telling, however, that the word is picked up by Hellenistic authors and later, in which it appears to mean gifts from the groom to the bride. See Achilles Tatius 5.5.4, echoing Greek Anthology bk. 9 poem 451; Heliodorus 4.15.2; Moschus frag. 3.3.

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property brought with the bride to her new household, and her new husband has at least conditional use of it. Though numerous examples of hedna can be found in the Homeric poems, clear evidence for dowry does not exist until the Classical period.7 Scholars have postulated, therefore, that the practice of hedna existed in an earlier time just when is not clear and belongs to a system of marriage in which brides held greater monetary value than in the Classical period. At some point (again, not specified) a shift is posited: brides became less valuable and had to be given to a groom along with some money in the form of a dowry. This narrative misrepresents both dowry and hedna as social institutions. We must understand hedna, as Finley did long ago, as a specialized subcategory of aristocratic gift exchange and, as such, neither ideologically incompatible with nor replaced by the practice of dowry.8 Instead, hedna should be taken as a marker, in both the Homeric texts and the Catalogue, of aristocratic values and practices.9 The discussion about the system of marriage presented in Homer generally, and about hedna in particular, has been anchored in a larger discussion about the historicity of Homeric society.10 The difficulty, plainly put, is that the Homeric poems appear to present two competing forms of marriage, not only within the same social class but at times within the same marriage. Hedna, commonly translated as “bride-price” or “bridewealth,” is, in Homer, usually (and perhaps always) money paid by the prospective groom to the bride’s father. To cite only one example, at Odyssey 15.16 18, Athena urges Telemachos to return home because the suitors are pressing Penelope’s father Ikarios for her hand: ἤδη γάρ ῥα πατήρ τε κασίγνητοί τε κέλονται Εὐρυμάχῳ γήμασθαι· ὁ γὰρ περιβάλλει ἅπαντας μνηστῆρας δώροισι καὶ ἐξώφελλεν ἔεδνα·

7 8 9

10

See, however, Appendix A for a discussion. See Finley 1981, discussed further below. Kurke 1991, 118 134, demonstrates that marriage gifts, and marriage itself, become a powerful metaphor for aristocratic gift exchange in the poetry of Pindar. See further below. The most relevant recent texts are Lacey 1966, Snodgrass 1974, Finley 1981, Morris 1986a, and Perysinakis 1991. Morris 1986a provides a full bibliography of the problem, including references to modern anthropological studies. See also Vernant 1973 and Leduc 1992.

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The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna Already her father and brothers are urging that she be married to Eurymachos. For he outstrips all the suitors in gifts and he increases the hedna.

Though this is one of the more complex passages concerning hedna because of the ambiguity surrounding Penelope’s status in Odysseus’ household, the structure of hedna is clear enough: a groom, in competition with other suitors, gives or promises gifts and hedna to Penelope’s father, in exchange, he hopes, for the bride.11 At the same time, there are a few passages in the Iliad especially that seem to describe goods passing in the other direction: from the bride’s family to the bride or to the new household (and perhaps to the groom directly).12 Such movement has suggested a system of dowry to modern scholars, though the fifth-century term for dowry, proix common in later legal texts does not appear in the Homeric or Hesiodic texts. The question, then, is even more complex than that with which we started: When did the system of marriage shift from one of bridewealth to one of dowry, and why do both systems appear simultaneously if they do in Homer? For A. M. Snodgrass, the answer to the second question, at least, is fairly straightforward: the Homeric poems, he believes, contain an amalgam of social information from a range of centuries.13 The reason, then, that we see both bridewealth and dowry (or at least money paid to the bridegroom) in the poems is that the bridewealth belongs to an earlier system, of which remnants remain, preserved by the formulaic nature of oral poetry. At the same time, the more recent practice of dowry appears because that is the system that the poet knows.14 Although Snodgrass admits that there are societies in which the money or, more 11

12

13

14

See Lacey 1966, 57, for a full discussion. It is uncertain whether the hedna and the dôra in line 18 are the same thing (as Finley believes, Finley 1981, 293 n. 43) or are separate acts in the courtship ritual. Westbrook 2005, 5, argues, however, that the hedna should be understood not as a gift but as a “betrothal payment,” establishing the bridegroom’s exclusive right to marry the bride. See further below. Finley 1981, 290 n. 16, lists fourteen examples of what he calls dowry in the poems. Morris 1986a considers each of these in turn, 107 110, and concludes that none of them is, in fact, dowry in the fifth century sense. See further below. This line of argument is accepted by Stephanie West as well (Heubeck et al. 1988, ad 1.275 278). Snodgrass 1974, 118 120.

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properly, property, goes in both directions, he further bolsters his case by referring to the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who carefully distinguishes between the kinds of societies that practice bridewealth and those that practice dowry.15 The most significant challenge to Snodgrass’s reading of the Homeric poems as an amalgam is that of Morris, who has been followed and supported by I. N. Perysinakis. Morris has argued persuasively that oral poetry consistently reflects the social institutions of the poet’s own time and not the institutions of previous centuries. Indeed, he argues that “ideas that are no longer relevant to the present rapidly disappear from oral traditions.”16 Given that argument, which I believe to be largely correct, and given the assumption that hedna and dowry are mutually exclusive institutions, Morris must argue that hedna are always given by the groom (or his family) to the bride’s family, and never represent a system of dowry.17 Moreover, Morris argues that in the Homeric poems, hedna are distinct from dôra, general gifts that may be given by either side.18 In Morris’ reading, then, the Homeric marriage system as we have it is a consistent one, not, as Snodgrass had suggested, a composite of social practices from different time periods. Almost immediately, however, we run into two significant problems. First, as already noted, there is simply no evidence for the practice of hedna in the historical record. If hedna existed at the time of Homer, it is far from clear why the practice disappears or when. More pointedly, hedna is also present in large numbers in the Catalogue, a text that probably dates, at least in its final recension, to one hundred years or so after the Homeric texts achieved their final form (quite possibly in writing).19 Though the Catalogue contains a number of literary elements, it also clearly belongs to 15

16 17 18 19

On property passing in both directions, see Snodgrass 1974, 116 esp. n. 20. There are indeed societies where this takes place: see Lacey 1966, 67 68, and Patterson 1998, 245 n. 41 (on ancient Babylonian law codes). Westbrook 2005 provides the fullest comparison with near Eastern law codes to date and finds no reason for the two systems to be mutually exclusive. See, esp., 9 10. On Goody’s work, see further below. Morris 1986a, 87. Morris 1986a, 109 113. Morris 1986a, 106; Perysinakis 1991, 302 n. 19. See, esp., Jensen 2011.

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the tradition of oral poetry that lies behind the Homeric epics. If, as Morris contends, oral poetry reflects the social institutions of the time of its performance, the lack of hedna in historical records is all the more troubling in light of its pervasive presence in the Catalogue. Nonetheless, Morris suggests that aristocratic marriages in the seventh and sixth centuries look Homeric in several other respects. It is worth quoting Morris at length: And yet, down to the end of the sixth century, we find many aristocrats continuing to behave in a manner very similar to the Homeric aristoi. Women acted to some extent as ἀγάλματα, as they had done for Homer, being exchanged between house holds in different communities in order to establish political alliances. . . . With the increasing institutionalization of the polis, such exogamous aristocratic mar riages probably largely faded out after 500 B.C. . . . but for nearly two hundred years previously, class in marriage of the Homeric type had prevailed over clan in marriage of the Classical type among the aristocracy.20

Indeed, the marriages in the Catalogue demonstrate the concerns of an aristocratic elite even more clearly than those in Homer. It may be possible, then, that the presence of hedna here, despite its lack in the historical record, is a marker of idealized aristocratic marriage practices. Second, Morris’ formulation runs into a theoretical problem, and one that has not been fully addressed.21 Whatever we think hedna are, they clearly are not a form of bridewealth like those defined by Goody in his study of modern African societies, a model to which scholars on both sides of this debate have appealed. In those societies, and in direct contrast to systems of diverging devolution, the transfer of bridewealth is essentially a closed economic system. Brides are exchanged to other families in return for bridewealth, on the understanding that the father of the groom will maintain his economic equilibrium by getting roughly the same amount in return for his daughters. Under such a system, as Goody shows, the exchange rate of brides tends to be stable and not to vary with the status of the bride or bride’s family. All the pressure of the system is exerted toward maintaining a relatively static social order of equal or nearly equal families.22 This directly contrasts with the depiction of hedna in the 20 21 22

Morris 1986a, 113. On this point, see Morris 1986a, 110 113. Goody 1973, 13, 18.

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Homeric poems and, more particularly, the Catalogue, where the value of the hedna is directly affected by competition among suitors and by the status of the bride sought. Highly valued hedna is a marker of ranking within the aristocracy, and the tendency is not toward “leveling” of brideprice (to use Goody’s terms), but toward increased stratification. As we will see, the story of the suitors of Helen represents an apogee of this competitive system with potential grooms from all over the Greek world promising an ever-increasing spiral of hedna. A partial solution to this knot of problems can be found in a suggestion of M. I. Finley. Finley, as many subsequent scholars have noted, was correct in arguing that the notion of bride-price failed to take into account the most salient features of hedna, namely, that each offer of hedna far exceeds the value of any person actually purchased in the epics, and that moreover the medium of exchange (often cattle) is not used for other types of purchases.23 Payment of hedna, then, should be understood not under the rubric of sale, but rather under the long-term transactional order of aristocratic gift-exchange.24 As a result, we should not understand payment of hedna as parallel to modern systems of bridewealth or in mutually exclusive contrast to dowry. The function of these hedna is not the creation of level economic exchange as in Goody’s bridewealth societies, but rather the establishment of ties within aristocratic society between members of the social elite, facilitated by exchange of goods whose symbolic value is of greater importance than the economic rate of exchange.25 Such a reading of hedna does not explain definitively why they do not appear in the historical texts, nor why the institution appears to drop out of use in the Classical period. But if we divorce hedna from the idea of bridewealth as a form of sale (and in distinction to dowry), it allows us to see the practice of hedna as an element of aristocratic ideology. As a 23

24

25

Finley 1981, 235 237. The use of cattle for hedna offers partial support, then, for Morris and Kurke’s arguments for different transactional orders in Archaic texts, discussed in Chapter 1. Finley also argued, however, that the term hedna simply referred to marriage gifts in general and could travel in either direction. On this point I believe Finley to have been mistaken. As Kurke argues, marriage is itself a form of aristocratic gift exchange, and one that has particular force as a ritual that ensures the future of the community. See Kurke 1991, 121.

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particular form of aristocratic gift-exchange, hedna afforded an opportunity for elite men (or heroes, in the Homeric texts) to participate in marriage as a competitive event and to demonstrate their elevated worth through superior gift-giving. These competitions, as we will see, also had the force of establishing the competitors as members of a closed class. In this reading, the practice of hedna may not have disappeared completely from Archaic society but, as an elitist institution, the practice of giving hedna would have run counter to the middling ideology that began to emerge and would not have belonged in the thoroughly democratic texts of Classical Athens. Its presence in the Catalogue and absence in historical texts, then, would be a result not of the Catalogue containing an amalgamation of distant historical practices, but rather of immediate, contemporaneous conflicts in the era that saw the Catalogue take its final form as aristocratic discourse.

SOLON AND MIDDLING IDEOLOGIES OF MARRIAGE

In the late seventh and early sixth centuries in Greece, as individual poleis grew in prominence and began to exercise more influence over the conduct of their citizens, the institution of marriage also underwent important changes. Though Patterson and others have argued that a similar set of changes appear to have taken place in many poleis, our evidence is best for Athens.26 It will be useful, then, to use Athens to outline these shifts. In 594 Solon passed his series of laws, and most scholars see in his program the beginnings, if not of democracy per se, of Athenian citizenship.27 Although the legislation attributed to Solon is notoriously difficult to date with any accuracy, it is clear that among his reforms were several laws regarding rights of inheritance.28 These laws, as P. Brook Manville argues, had several effects: they made possible the 26 27 28

See Patterson 1998, 70 106. I am here much indebted to Manville 1990, 124 156. For a discussion of the authenticity of Solon’s laws, see Ruschenbusch 1966, 1 11. On inheritance, see frs. 49a 50b. I cite the laws from Ruschenbusch’s edition. See further Scafuro 2006 for a discussion of the authenticity of individual laws.

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ownership of land by private individuals, created a means (through adoption) for continuing an individual household in the event that a man had no natural sons, and created categories of sons with inheritance rights (gnêsioi) and sons without those rights (nothoi).29 Solon is also generally credited with passing laws concerning the epiklêros, whose particular situation will come under scrutiny in Chapter 3. Of particular importance here is that later Athenian orators ascribed to Solon the system of inheritance described by the term anchisteia (lit. “closeness”).30 As Patterson and others have shown, this system describes perfectly the sort of diverging devolution that Goody and others have identified in societies marked by dowry. Although inheritance always went first to sons, if a man died without sons (or daughters, who in the absence of sons became epiklêroi), then anchisteia came into play. The property went first to paternal relatives, but maternal relatives also came into the line of succession. Anchisteia “created a complex legal definition of family identity and responsibility focused more on household than on lineage.”31 All of the markers of dowry societies identified by Goody were now present: a carefully defined social stratification, an emphasis on endogamy, and an understanding of the oikos as “the economic and social foundation of the polis.”32 Perhaps most striking of all is the treatment of daughters who have no living brothers on their father’s death. In such a case, the woman became an epiklêros, and the family property would be transferred with her on the condition that she marry her kurios, a male relative from the line of anchisteia.33 While it is not certain that the idea of proix (“dowry”) 29

30 31 32

33

Ogden 1996 provides an extensive discussion (with references to previous scholarship) of the evidence presented in Aristophanes’ The Birds 1155ff. (part of which is Ruschenbusch’s fr. 50a). Ogden regards the exclusion of nothoi from succession as genuinely Solonian, as does Patterson 1990 (51 n. 46, 57). Harrison 1968, 66 68, presents the view that nothoi could inherit in Solon’s time if there were no gnêsioi sons. See Ruschenbusch’s frs. 49a 50b of Solon’s Laws. Patterson 1998, 89. Patterson 1998, 85. See Raaflaub 1993 for a discussion of the gradual shift from emphasis on oikos to polis in Archaic literary texts. See the full discussion in Cox 1998, 94 99; Harrison 1968, 9 11, 133; Patterson 1998, 91 103. The order of claimants is that of anchisteia: brothers of the dead man, then sons of brothers, then sons of sisters, then paternal uncles, then maternal uncles. While the exact form of the epiklerate in Solon’s time is in

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goes back to Solon, a later law (that the speaker ascribes to Solon) adds the further provision that if an epiklêros’ guardian does not wish to marry her, he must provide an adequate dowry for her; the monetary requirements of this dowry vary according to the social class of the guardian (Demosthenes 43.54). As numerous commentators have noted, this institution seems designed to preserve each individual oikos within the city.34 Goody provides a sociological analysis of societies that practice diverging devolution, and his terms seem particularly appropriate here: Particularly in the case of an heiress, her partner is likely to be prescribed or otherwise arranged for her; and in any case, a girl’s marriage will tend to be made within the particular social group to which she belongs. In this way, her status, and the family investment in it, will be preserved. One index of the concern over the marriage of daughters is control over their virginity. Hence it seemed probably that the prohibition on premarital sex would be linked with diverging devolution. For the same reasons, so too would endogamy and other forms of in marriage.. . .35

One has the uncannny sense that Goody is describing Classical Athens and not the modern societies of Africa and Eurasia. Not only did Athens prescribe who could be married to an heiress, but under the Athenian democracy, social contact with citizen-women was carefully regulated, as numerous legal sources demonstrate.36 With Solon and the institution of the epiklêros, then, it is clear that we are in a system of diverging devolution, and it should not surprise us that other aspects of Athenian society fit with Goody’s pattern of societies that make use of dowries. We should not assume that this society was invented out of whole cloth by the lawmaker, however much the stories about him might lead in that direction. Laws tend to be reactive rather than proactive and to formalize social structures that already exist. The question, then, is not, When did the Greeks replace the practice of hedna with that of proix? or even, When was the marriage practice regularized in the judicial system? Rather, we need to recognize that the social forces of the late seventh and early sixth centuries were pushing

34 35 36

some doubt, most scholars believe that the law governing the epiklêros is genuinely archaic. See, e.g., Seaford 1994, 207; Harrison 1968, 5. Harrison 1968, 11; Just 1989, 98; Vernant 1983, 142 146. Goody 1973, 25. See, e.g., Lysias 3.6.

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toward a system of diverging devolution. At the same time, the social structures of gift-exchange, particularly among the aristocratic classes, survived at least into the fifth century.37 If we consider hedna as a specialized form of this gift-exchange, then we should expect aristocratic texts to feature hedna in marriage as a marker of elite status. That, in effect, is what Morris argues about the Homeric poems in general: that the poems themselves are valuable ideological artifacts, in that they glorify the basileis and tend to ignore the demos.38 Even the structure of the divine world in Homer, he argues, is designed “to legitimize a desired structure of social dominance in the eighth-century world.”39 Hedna, I argue, are a part of this structure of social dominance. If such an argument is true for the poems of Homer, then it is true for the Catalogue of Women in spades. By the time the Catalogue was committed to writing, poleis were in full development.40 It is also at this time, as Morris and Kurke have argued, that the “middling” tradition becomes prominent, simultaneous with more aristocratic texts, in Greek literature.41 If we accept Morris’ thesis that the social institutions of oral poetry are those of the time of the poet, then the prevalence of the practice of hedna in the Catalogue is most easily explained in terms of active ideological concerns. The Catalogue is replete with instances of hedna not only because it is about the marriages of noble women, but also because it is an elite text in a time of middling politics. Thus, the marriages in the Catalogue and its treatment of genealogy generally are emphatically aristocratic and elitist. Little wonder, then, that the historical marriage of Agariste has been suggested as a model for the 37

38 39 40

41

See again Duplouy 2006, 23 31, for the continuation of aristocratic practices within democratic Athens. It is significant, however, that Pindar’s use of the term hedna does not correspond to that of the Archaic hexameter poems; see further below. Morris 1986a, 122 123. Morris 1986a, 125. Though our evidence is best for Athens, Patterson 1998 argues that the central ity of the oikos to the rising poleis is seen consistently across Greece at this time. In Sparta and Gortyn the position of women in the system of diverging devolution is handled differently, with drastic effects for the Spartan state (Patterson 1998, 82, 91 103). Morris 1996; Kurke 1999, 19 23, 26 27.

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story of the suitors of Helen.42 Both the historical event and the mythical text are negotiating the same ideological straits.

HEDNA IN THE CATALOGUE OF WOMEN

As far as we can tell from the extant fragments, the characteristics of hedna in the Catalogue are almost entirely consistent with those in the Homeric poems. That is, in every case where a direction can be determined, hedna are gifts given (or promised, depending on context) by the groom to the bride’s father, in hopes of winning the right to marry the potential bride. Dôra, more generalized gifts, are also mentioned in some contexts, and I argue (pace Finley) that we can distinguish between these less restrictive gifts and the more specific hedna. Hedna is usually promised in a situation of competitive bidding, in which case it appears that the highest bidder wins the bride, much like the anticipated victory of Eurymachos, the wealthiest of Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey, cited above. In some other situations, however, only one suitor is present, and he simply presents hedna of acceptable quantity and obtains the bride in return. The institution of hedna appears to apply only to humans. The male gods do not marry human women, and so do not have to concern themselves with such niceties. Not every human marriage is contracted through hedna, but as in several cases in the Iliad, marriage without hedna is often marked as such, especially when the suitor has performed a service for the bride’s father that stands in place of the more regular payment of goods. As in the Homeric poems the hedna tend to consist of cows, goats, and sheep; as Leduc puts it, “The hedna, the ‘innumerable’ presents, have hooves.”43 In return, the grooms receive wives who are themselves precious goods. In the most extensive study of the epithets attached to women in the Catalogue, Cohen finds a host of epithets that 42

43

West 1985, 133, with a note of caution, following Schwartz 1960, 488 490. This idea has been discussed at more length by Cingano 2005, 127. Irwin 2005a, 65 72, treats this marriage briefly, and then draws several parallels between the marriage of Megakles’ daughter to Peisistratos (Herodotus 1.61) and the story of Mestra in the Catalogue. I discuss this passage at length in Chapter 7. Leduc 1992, 244.

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emphasize the women’s beauty, clearly meant as external manifestation of their social value.44 The literary formulae surrounding hedna in the Catalogue are similar, but not identical, to those used in the Homeric poems. In Homer we find, in particular: (1) πόρε μυρία ἕδνα “he offered numberless hedna” (Iliad 16.190, 22.472; Odyssey 11.282). (2) πορὼν ἀπερείσια ἕδνα “offering countless hedna” (Iliad 16.178; Odyssey 19.259). In the Catalogue, we find what look like metrical variants on these two: (1) ὑπέσ]χετ[ο] μυρία ἕδνα “he promised numberless hedna” (fr. 43a.21). (2) δί[ου] δ᾿ἀπε[ρείσια ἕ]δνα “he gave countless hedna” (fr. 198.10). In addition, there are a number of lines built on a common formula, all falling at the beginning of their lines: (3a) πολλὰ δ᾿ἔεδν[α δίδον] “they gave much hedna” (fr. 199.9). (3b) πολλὰ δ᾿ἔεδνα δίδου· “he gave much hedna” (fr. 200.4). (3c) μνᾶτο· πολλὰ δὲ δῶρα δίδ[ου]· “He wooed. And he gave many gifts.” (fr. 204.54). In example 3c above, the phrase concerning hedna begins in the second foot, somewhat unnaturally since the last syllable of mnato must be lengthened to form a spondee. But otherwise the phrases are metrically equivalent, with d’ eëdna the same shape as de dôra. A further variation appears (without the lengthening of mnato) at fragment 204.45: (3d) μνᾶτο· δίδου δ᾿ἄρα ἕδνα, “He wooed. And so he gave hedna.” These last two examples are moderately troubling, as it means that in two lines only nine lines apart, the same word (mnato, “he wooed”) is scanned in two different ways.45 Nonetheless, it appears that the Hesiodic poet is employing traditional formulaic language in his treatment of hedna, and I see no compelling reason to doubt the authenticity of these formulae in the oral tradition. As with Cohen’s study of the epithets attached to the women in the poems, the poet either uses traditional formulae or creates minor variations on them. 44 45

Cohen 1989 1990, 16 20, 26. For a brief discussion, see Hirschberger 2004, ad fr. 204.54. This is perhaps what Lacey means when he refers to the “artificial, literary style” of fr. 204 (Lacey 1966, 57 n. 12).

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The Catalogue contains perhaps as many as fifteen cases of distinct hedna. Of these, eight are certain, including five that come from the story of the suitors of Helen.46 Four other cases probably describe hedna, but the word does not appear, or only the word dôra appears. Finally, there are some cases where a suitor is specified as not giving hedna or appears to perform a heroic deed in place of hedna. In particular, the catalogue of Helen’s suitors includes the interesting information that Odysseus did not send dôra, because he knew that Menelaos would win the competition for Helen’s hand. I turn now to a discussion of the general principles of hedna that this wealth of examples provides us.

THE CATALOGUE’S PORTRAYAL OF HEDNA

The Moment of Transfer One question that has plagued scholarship on the issue of hedna is when the material goods are transferred. Specifically, when we see a “bidding war” for a particularly desirable bride, are the gifts offered immediately or only after the suitor has been accepted? In several passages concerning a competition of hedna, it appears that hedna are given before the suit has been accepted. Little ambiguity appears behind the verb forms of didômi (“to give”) in fragments 199, 200, and 204, all narratives of the wooing of Helen, and the most natural reading seems to be that the hedna are offered with the real possibility that the hedna would be lost when another suitor was successful.47 On the other hand, the hedna given by Ajax when he woos Helen have an ambiguous temporal status: Αἴας δ’ ἐκ Σαλαμῖνος ἀμώμητος πολεμιστὴς μνᾶτο· δίδου δ’ ἄρα ἕδνα ἐ[ο]ικότα, θαυματὰ ἔργα· οἳ γὰρ ἔχον Τροιζῆνα καὶ ἀγ[χ]ίαλον Ἐπίδαυρον 46 47

See above, n. 1. See Lacey 1966, 57 and 57 n. 12. Lacey argues that the situation is ambiguous in Homer, but that “the fragments [of Hesiod] do, however, make it clear that all the suitors but one will in fact fail, and give their gifts in vain” (57 n. 12). On my reading the fragments are not at all clear on this point and suggest that, at least in some cases, the gifts were not given beforehand.

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νῆσόν τ’ Αἴγιναν Μάσητά τε κοῦρο[ι] Ἀχαιῶν καὶ Μέγαρα σκιόεντα καὶ ὀφρυόεντα Κόρινθον, Ἑρμιόνην Ἀσίνην τε παρὲξ ἅλα ναιεταώσας, τῶν ἔφατ’ εἰλίποδάς τε βόας κ[α]ὶ [ἴ]φια μῆλα συνελάσας δώσειν· ἐκέκαστο γὰρ ἔγχεϊ μακρῶι.

Ajax from Salamis, blameless and warlike wooed. And he was giving fitting hedna, amazing works. For they held Troizen and Epidauros by the sea and the island of Aigina and Masêta, the sons of the Achaians, and shady Megara and majestic Korinth, and Hermionê and Asinê, both settled near the sea, of these he said he would give shambling footed cattle and fat sheep driving them together; for he had excelled with the sharp spear. (fr. 204.44 51)

At first we learn that Ajax “was giving suitable hedna” (fr. 204.45). As the passage expands, however, and describes the cities from which Ajax will collect his hedna, the syntax becomes quite precise: “he said that he would give” (fr. 204.50 51). This makes the “giving” of hedna into a contractual promise and suggests that the actual transfer takes place only if the contract is accepted.48 If we accept this reading, we have to understand that the other instances of “he gave” are formulaic shorthand for “he promised to give.”49 Such a reading is consistent with the wording of fragment 43a.21 (the marriage of Mestra, daughter of Erysichthôn), where I have translated hupescheto as “he promised”:50 [ [ [ [ [ [ 48

49 50

κού]ρην ἑλικώπιδα κ[αλλ]ιπάρηον

]τ’ ἄλοχον θυμαρέ’ ἄ[γε]σθαι ]γαρο[. . . . ὑπέσ]χετ[ο] μυρία ἕδνα ἑ]κατὸν[. . . . . . . . . . . .].ημερα δω[ ].ων[..]βοῶν ἀ[γέλα]ς ἐριμύκω[ν ]ὀΐων.[. . . . .]σα. αἰγῶν[ Cingano 2005, 145 147, argues, however, that in Ajax’s case, Ajax does not yet own the properties that he claims he will round up and give. This same line is taken by Hirschberger 2004, 409. Ajax’s promise may be, in that case, exceptional. Cingano 2005, 144, translates fr. 204.45 as “he offered fitting wedding gifts.” Cf. also fr. 22.4 7.

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. . . the glancing eyed lovely cheeked daughter . . . to make [her] his delightful wife . . . He promised numberless hedna . . . a hundred . . . day . . . herds of bellowing cattle . . . of sheep . . . of goats

(fr. 43a.19 24)

This understanding of hedna receives some further support from outside the Catalogue, in a story preserved by Diodorus Siculus (4.69.3 4): οὗτος δ’, ὥς φασιν, ὑποσχόμενος ἕδνα πολλὰ δώσειν Ἠϊονεῖ ἔγημε τὴν Ἠϊονέως θυγατέρα Δίαν, ἐξ ἧς ἐγέννησε Πειρίθουν. ἔπειθ’ ὁ μὲν Ἰξίων οὐκ ἀπέδωκε τὰ ἕδνα τῇ γυναικί, ὁ δ’ Ἠϊονεὺς τὰς ἵππους ἀντὶ τούτων ἠνεχύρασεν. ὁ δ’ Ἰξίων τὸν Ἠϊονέα μετεπέμψατο ἐπαγγελλόμενος πάντα ὑπακούσεσθαι, καὶ τὸν Ἠϊονέα παραγενόμενον ἔβαλεν εἰς βόθρον πυρὸς μεστόν. διὰ δὲ τὸ μέγεθος τῆς παρανομίας μηδένα βούλεσθαι καθᾶραι τὸν φόνον.

This one [Ixiôn], as they say, having promised to give much hedna to Eïonêus, married the daughter of Eïonêus, Dia, from whom he engendered Peirithous. When Ixiôn did not give the hedna to the woman, Eïonêus took back as security in place of the hedna the horses. But Ixiôn sent for Eïonêus, saying that he would answer all the charges; and when Eïonêus arrived, Ixiôn threw him into a pit filled with fire. Because of the greatness of the transgression, nobody wished to ritually cleanse the murder.

We do not know Diodorus’ source for this story nor how old it is. It is notable that the language surrounding the hedna is consistent with that used in Homer and the Catalogue, although Diodorus presents the hedna as ultimately payable to the woman (and not her father).51 Here, quite clearly, the hedna is not paid until after the marriage; as we will see, this arrangement could lead to disputes. One significant passage from the Catalogue, however, argues against the arrangement of promising, but not giving, hedna, namely, the entry for Odysseus in the wooing of Helen. Odysseus, always a clever steward of resources, appears to have wooed Helen somewhat half-heartedly: 51

This sort of arrangement is not unusual in societies that practice bridewealth. Goody refers to it as a practice of “indirect dowry.” See Goody 1973, 1 2, 5 11; Snodgrass 1974, 119. A similar situation seems to obtain at Odyssey 6.153 159, where it certainly sounds like Odysseus thinks of hedna as payable to Nausikaa.

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ἐκ δ’ Ἰθάκης ἐμνᾶτο Ὀδυσσῆος ἱερὴ ἴς, υἱὸς Λαέρταο πολύκροτα μήδεα εἰδώς. δῶρα μὲν οὔ ποτ’ ἔπεμπε τανισφύρου εἵνεκα κούρης· ἤιδεε γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ὅτι ξανθὸς Μενέλαος νικήσει, κτήνωι γὰρ Ἀχαιῶν φέρτατος ἦεν· ἀγγελίην δ’ αἰεὶ Λακεδαίμονάδε προΐαλλεν Κάστορί θ’ ἱπποδάμωι καὶ ἀεθλοφόρωι Πολυδεύκει.

The divine strength of Odysseus wooed from Ithaka, the son of Laertes, skillful in loud ringing schemes. He did not ever send gifts (dôra) on account of the slender ankled girl; for he knew in his heart that blond Menelaos would win, for he was the most powerful in flocks of the Achaians; but he sent messages constantly to Lakedaimon, to horse taming Kastor and to prize winning Polydeukes. (fr. 198.2 8)

Here, quite clearly, the gifts that Odysseus might have sent (but chose not to) would have been lost. That can be the only point of his careful calculation regarding the competition and his chances. One point, however, remains troubling about this example, and that is the fact that what Odysseus does not send is specified not as hedna but as dôra. It is possible, though by no means certain, that this less specific word was sometimes used to specify simply gifts given in advance of hedna, in the hopes of influencing the eventual decision. It is tempting to see the poet of the Catalogue as influenced here by a moment in the Odyssey, namely, Penelope’s famous speech in Odyssey 18.274 280: “ἀλλὰ τόδ’ αἰνὸν ἄχος κραδίην καὶ θυμὸν ἱκάνει· μνηστήρων οὐχ ἥδε δίκη τὸ πάροιθε τέτυκτο, οἵ τ’ ἀγαθήν τε γυναῖκα καὶ ἀφνειοῖο θύγατρα μνηστεύειν ἐθέλωσι καὶ ἀλλήλοισ’ ἐρίσωσιν· αὐτοὶ τοί γ’ ἀπάγουσι βόας καὶ ἴφια μῆλα κούρης δαῖτα φίλοισι, καὶ ἀγλαὰ δῶρα διδοῦσιν· ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀλλότριον βίοτον νήποινον ἔδουσιν.” “But this terrible pain comes to my heart and spirit; In times past, this was not the custom of suitors,

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The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna who wanted to woo a noble woman and daughter of a rich man, and who were competing with one another; these drive cattle and fat sheep, food for the family of the girl, and they give shining gifts (dôra); But they do not eat up each others’ livelihood, without repayment.”

As often, it is not easy to tell if the dôra are an epic repetition of the cattle and sheep or if they constitute a separate category. The latter is possible, especially since we might expect “shining” gifts to refer to gold, jewelry, or cloth. More important, however, is the situation that Penelope inhabits. While her father Ikarios could conceivably speak of setting up a hedna (as discussed earlier), Penelope surely cannot. She can, however, use the more general term dôra and suggest that the suitors should try to win her favor by giving some.52 Odysseus, famously, is pleased by Penelope’s craftiness in this instance (Odyssey 18.281 283). The poet of the Catalogue, then, may be using the term dôra in fragment 199 deliberately, evoking Penelope’s well-known acquisition of “gifts” and suggesting that Odysseus is too bright to make the same mistake that Penelope’s suitors do.53 Dôra and Hedna The Catalogue appears to use dôra and hedna as synonyms, at least in the fragments treating the suitors of Helen. Even here, however, the evidence has proven inconclusive. Lacey, who sees the two words as having a distinct meaning in Homer, discounts the evidence of the Catalogue: [I]n these fragments the poet seems merely to be striving for a variety in expression in a quite unhomeric way. It is this artificial, literary, style which makes me doubt their validity as reliable documents for the language of Homer and the social customs to which he refers in the poems.54

52

53

54

Westbrook 2005, 20 n. 59, argues that Penelope is here simply winning some gifts to “recover some of the losses to Odysseus’ personal wealth.” Arguing against this proposition is the fact that two other suitors (one whose name is missing from the text) give dôra but not hedna in the wooing of Helen: 204.41 43, 204.52 55. In neither case is anything implied about the return ability of the gifts. Lacey 1966, 57 n. 12.

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Finley, however, sees no such artificiality, and simply notes that both words are used without distinction.55 Despite some unease about the rapidly multiplying institutions of gift-giving that seem to surround Homeric marriage, I am convinced hedna is a technical term that can only refer to marriage-gifts.56 Moreover, in the Catalogue even more certainly than in Homer, hedna flows in only one direction, from the groom’s family to the bride’s. The term dôra is more flexible. It may, in fact, be used at times for poetic variation when it means “hedna,” but it also appears to be used to refer to wedding gifts that are not quite restricted enough to qualify as hedna. Dôra are clearly “gifts” in general and need not be used in reference to marriage at all. In the Catalogue the word is used several times simply to refer to the “gifts” in the sense of “talents, abilities” that gods give to mortals (10a.61, 33a.13). In at least two examples, however, the word dôra seems to be a synonym for hedna: at 22.6 and 204.53, the words appear interchangeable. As we might expect with a more general word, however, the word dôra seems sometimes to be chosen because the word hedna would not quite work. In at least two instances in the Catalogue I believe that this is the case. One, discussed just above, is Odysseus’ refusal to send dôra to the Dioskuroi. There, as I have argued, the gifts must be sent in advance of a marriage agreement and are not returnable. One other passage in particular emphasizes the difference between dôra, generalized gifts, and hedna, an exchange of gifts for the bride between social equals. In fragment 141, we hear about the abduction of Europa by Zeus. In a passage that is unique in the extant text, Zeus compensates Phoinix for the loss of his daughter (fr. 141.2 7) ..... ..... ..... ...] Διὸς δμηθεῖσα δόλοισι. τῆι δὲ μίγη φιλότητι] πατὴρ καὶ δῶρον ἔδωκεν ὅρμον χρύσειον, τόν ῥ’ Ἥ]φαιστος κλυτοτέχνης ..... ..... ..... ἰδυί]ηισιν πραπίδεσσι ..... ..... ... πα]τρὶ φέρων· ὃ δὲ δέξατο δῶρο[ν· ..... ..... ... κού]ρ[η]ι Φοίνικος ἀγαυοῦ. 55

56

Finley 1981, 293 n. 43. Both Finkelberg 1988 and Cohen 1989 1990 show that in other contexts the text of the Catalogue reflects the oral tradition of the Homeric poems in an authentic way. See also Lacey 1966, Morris 1986a, Perysinakis 1991, and Westbrook 2005.

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The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna . . . having been tamed by the wiles of Zeus. And having mixed in love with her, father [Zeus] also gave a gift (dôron) a gold necklace, which Hephaistos, famous for his skill . . . with a knowing mind . . . bearing to [her] father. And he received the gift (dôron) . . . with the daughter of noble Phoinix.

This is not quite practice that usually accompanies hedna; there is no competition to the gift-giving, and in any case it seems to take place after Zeus has already effected the abduction and sex. It also appears likely that Zeus makes two separate gifts: the necklace, reminiscent of the necklace that Pandora receives in the Works and Days (73), must surely be for the bride. Line 6, however, has the father receiving his own gift. It is possible that this is compensation for the loss of his daughter, a rare honor for a mortal. In any case, it is significant that even here, where the structure of hedna seems to be invoked, Zeus does not pay hedna. That is a human institution, important to human social orders. Dôra, however, can be given to mortals by gods as a simple expression of favor. Disputes over Hedna As Gernet argued some time ago, it would be a mistake to expect a full legal understanding of marriage in the Archaic period.57 Although Solon is credited with some legislation that touches on marriage, these are laws not about matrimony per se, but rather concerning inheritance and legitimate civic membership. There seem to be no hard and fast rules determining what happens when a dispute arises over hedna, whether the question has to do with the return of the goods if the marriage is unsuccessful or merely wrangling over the amount of the hedna before the fact. One passage from the Odyssey suggests that under some conditions, hedna could be considered returnable. In Book 8, we are told the story of Hephaistos catching Aphrodite and Ares in the act of adultery, and the wronged husband suggests that he will reclaim his hedna (8.315 20): “οὐ μέν σφεας ἔτ’ ἔολπα μίνυνθά γε κειέμεν οὕτω, καὶ μάλα περ φιλέοντε· τάχ’ οὐκ ἐθελήσετον ἄμφω 57

Gernet 1981, 199 200, 289 302; cf. Finley 1981, 245.

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εὕδειν· ἀλλά σφωε δόλος καὶ δεσμὸς ἐρύξει, εἰς ὅ κέ μοι μάλα πάντα πατὴρ ἀποδῷσιν ἔεδνα, ὅσσα οἱ ἐγγυάλιξα κυνώπιδος εἵνεκα κούρης, οὕνεκά οἱ καλὴ θυγάτηρ, ἀτὰρ οὐκ ἐχέθυμος.”

“I do not expect that they will lie like this even for a little while, although they love each other very much. Swiftly they will both wish not to sleep. But my trick and my bonds will contain them, until [her] father shall give back all the hedna to me, as much as I agreed to on account of his dog faced daughter, since his daughter is beautiful, but she lacks self control.”

This suggests, certainly, that a marriage agreement could be rendered void under certain circumstances and that the husband could in such a case petition for the return of his hedna. But there is nothing in this passage that suggests a full-fledged legal provision on this point, and it appears that the return of hedna is not automatic. On the contrary, Hephaistos seems determined to hold the two lovers hostage as a negotiating point in his petition.58 One passage from the Catalogue speaks to this issue and is consistent in broad terms with the picture in the Odyssey. The story in fragment 43a tells of Mestra, a daughter of Erysichthon who simply will not stay married. Her narrative is treated at length in Chapter 3. What is notable here, however, is that a dispute arises that seems to involve the repayment or reduction of the hedna that she brings her father. The dispute is eventually settled (apparently) by Athena (cf. fr. 43a.38 43): ο]ὐδ’ ἄρα τις δικάσαι [δύ]νατο βροτός· ἀλλ’ αραπ[

..... . ἐπ]έτρεψαν καὶ ἐπήινεσαν· ἣ δ’ ἄρα τοῖ[σιν ἀ]τρεκέως διέθηκ[ε] δίκην δ.[ “ε]ὖτέ τις ἀντ’ ὤνοιο χατίζηι χ [ρῆ]μ’ ἀνελ[έσθαι, ἀ]μφὶ μάλα χρῆν ὦν[ον .......]. τῖμον [ οὐ γ]ὰρ δὴ μεταμειπ[τόν, ἐπὴν τὰ] πρῶτ’ [ἀποδώηι.” 58

This instance does not violate the rule that the gods do not give hedna; here Hephaistos is married to Aphrodite, another immortal, whose father is also a god. Given that all three members of this transaction are social equals, it is reasonable for this marriage to work in a manner parallel to aristocratic (human) marriage. Gods do not, however, give hedna to mortal fathers for mortal brides.

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And no mortal was able to judge. But to [Athena?] they turned it over, and they approved of her. And she rendered for them the judgment precisely . . . “When someone wishes to take some goods in exchange for the price Certainly the price must . . . value . . . For it clearly cannot be exchanged, once he has sold it.”59

As I argue at length later, here we see a text just on the border of the transition from Archaic aristocracy and the emerging polis. Marriage follows the elitist patterns established in Homer, but when a dispute arises, it is settled in legal language by the preeminent goddess of the Athenian state. In any case, this passage does suggest that hedna may be considered returnable in the case when the marriage does not work out. Hedna as a Competition Perhaps the single most important aspect of hedna, however, is the competition that it embodies. Although brides sometimes have only one suitor, particularly beautiful brides are said to attract a bidding war; aristocratic men, all social equals, vie for the bride’s hand in a gift-giving contest. We see this structure, for example, in fragment 22 (though the word there is dôra; see discussion above): ..... ..... ..... ..... Ἀ]γήνο[ρ]ος ἰσοθέοι[ο Δημοδίκη,] τὴν πλεῖστοι ἐπι⌋χθονίων ἀνθρώπ⌊ων μνήστευον, καὶ πολλὰ⌋ [περ]ικλυτὰ δῶρ’ ὀνόμ⌊ηναν ἴφθιμοι βασιλῆες, ἀπειρέσ⌋ιον [μ]ετὰ εἶδος. [daughter] of godlike Agênor Dêmodikê, whom most of the men on the earth wooed, and they promised many very famous gifts (dôra) the strong kings, in pursuit of [her] immeasurable beauty.

(fr. 22.4 7)

Similarly, in fragment 17, it appears that Molionê has been wooed over a length of time, by a number of suitors. As in fragment 22, it appears to be her beauty specifically that inspires this competition: 59

I provide a full discussion of the meaning of these vexed lines in Chapter 3 and in Appendix B.

The Catalogue’s Portrayal of Hedna

[ [ [ [ [ [ [

75

]ην περιτελλομένων ἐνιαυ[τῶν ]..ν πολυήρατον εἶδος ἔχουσ[αν. ]ἐκόμισσε πατήρ, ὀΐων τε καὶ αἰγ[ῶν ]..ν ἔδουσάν τε κ[ρ]έα μι.[ τι]ς ἰδεῖν δύνατο θνητῶν ἀνθρ[ώπων ].αροισ. . .νην κικλήσκεσκον[ Ἄ]κτωρ [θαλ]ερὴν ποιήσατ’ ἄκοι[τιν

. . . the years rolling by . . . she having a very desirable form . . . her father received, of sheep and of goats . . . they gave, and meat . . . . . . [no]one of mortals is able to see . . . they were continually calling on . . . . . . Aktôr made [her] his blooming wife

(fr. 17a.6 12)

Although the word hedna does not appear in this fragment, the sheep and goats certainly look like hedna, and line 12 makes it certain that the fragment is speaking of a courtship. In these competitive situations, brides bring in higher hedna when they are exceptionally beautiful. Two examples make this especially clear. In the marriage of the daughter of Broteas (fr. 180), we are told that the high value of the hedna is specifically because “she surpassed the tribe of women in beauty”:60 `. . . . . . . .]. . Βροτέαο δαΐφρονοσ[ . . . . . . . .]οτ[.]ρων καλλιπλοκαμ[ χρυσὸν τι]μήεντα καὶ ἵππων ξαν[θὰ κάρηνα . . . . . . . .]ν τε βοῶν ἀγέλας καὶ πώ[εα μήλων . . . . . . . .] εἵνεκ’ ἄρ’ εἴδει ἐκαίνυτο [φῦλα γυναικῶν ἥ οἱ γείνατ]ο παῖδας ὁμὸν λέχος εἰσ[αναβᾶσα . . . of Broteas with the warlike mind. . . . . . ? lovely haired . . . costly gold and the blond heads of horses

60

It is not certain that this fragment belongs in the Catalogue, though stylistically it seems to fit here. See West 1985, 97.

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The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna . . . herds of cattle and flocks of sheep . . . because she surpassed the tribe of women in beauty she bore to him children, going up into their common bed . . . (fr. 180.6 11)

In this fragment, we see an unusual addition to the normal list of animals on the hoof, in the form of costly gold. It seems likely that this addition is present because of the extraordinary beauty of the woman. Helen, always known for her beauty, provides the logical limit of this rule, as she commands increasing and competing offers from the future heroes of the Trojan War. Indeed, much of the story of Helen in the Catalogue consists of a “Catalogue of Suitors,” in which, as Cingano has pointed out, the êhoiê formula drops out of use altogether.61 In fragments 196 204, we have some sixty-eight lines that list who the suitors were, which gifts they brought, and what their intentions were.62 Taken together, these fragments imply a competition between women in terms of that most aristocratic and useless of features, physical beauty.63 Unlike the men’s competition, however, that between the women is indirect: each woman is the subject of her own hedna competition, in which her own worth is measured against a presumed standard. They do not compete directly against one another. To put it in these terms, however, gives the women perhaps too much subjectivity. Although every woman is, for her own narrative, the object of much attention, in the end the different hedna that are promised appear to be largely formulaic. With the exception of Helen and perhaps Broteas’ daughter, there is a competition that features cows, sheep, and goats; within each narrative the woman is praised to the skies, but when we compare each woman’s hedna value to every other’s, it becomes difficult to distinguish between them. This rhetoric of excessive beauty, I suggest, masks the real object of the hedna competition, which is to establish a 61 62

63

Cingano 2005, 131 132. Edwards 1980, 97, gives the best account of the type scene employed in the story of the suitors of Helen. See also Cingano 2005, 131. Osborne 2005, 14, points out that the emphasis on beauty is not necessary for catalogues of women and is largely lacking from the catalogue in Odyssey 11. For female beauty as aristocratic and useless, see the description of the horse woman in Semonides 7.57 70.

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hierarchy among the competing men. The woman’s beauty is both the prize of that competition and the emblem of its hypereconomic structure.64 For the men involved in a hedna competition, in other words, the operative question is not “What is the woman worth?” but rather, “How much can I pay?” And as with all Greek gift-giving, a greater expenditure reflects back on the status of the gift-giver, establishing his ascendancy in the social structure. This is most clearly expressed in the competition over Helen where, for example, the list of Ajax’s hedna becomes an opportunity to list the lands that he is dominant over or that at least he can steal from (cited in full above). In the course of his promise to give a large amount of hedna, the text tells us that his men held “Troizen and Epidauros by the sea/ and the island of Aigina and Masêta . . ./ and shady Megara and majestic Korinth,/ and Hermionê and Asinê, both settled near the sea . . .” (fr. 204.46 49).65 For a moment, our attention is taken away from the putative object of the competition, with the clear goal of drawing our admiration to Ajax, ruler over many lands. Similarly, Menestheus from Athens is described as giving the gifts that he does specifically because of the competitive situation: ἐκ δ’ ἄρ’ Ἀθηνέων μνᾶθ’ υἱὸς Π[ετεῶο Μενεσθεύς, πολλὰ δ’ ἔεδνα δίδου· κειμήλια γ[ὰρ μάλα πολλὰ ἔκτητο, χρυσόν τε λέβητάς τ[ε τρίποδάς τε, καλά, τά ῥ’ ἔνδοθι κεῦθε δόμος ύε[τεῶο ἄνακτος· οἷς μιν θυμὸς ἀνῆκεν ἐεδνώσ[ασθαι ἄκοιτιν πλεῖστα πορόντ’, ἐπεὶ ο[ὔ] τιν’ ἐέλπε[το φέρτερον εἶναι πάντω]ν ἡρώων κτήνεσσί τε δω[τίναις τε.

And of the Athenians, Mnestheus the son of Peteos wooed, and he gave much hedna. For he had acquired a great deal of goods (keimêlia) 64

65

See Osborne 2005, 18: “Given the likelihood that the poem was performed in a world where dowry was universal and bride price unknown the choice of a uniform narrative of bride price can only further emphasize the plot in which women have something irresistible to men, and which men will pay out to acquire.” Finkelberg 1988 argues that this entry for Ajax may represent an older tradition than the two lines devoted to him in the Homeric Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad. Cingano 2005 argues against this view and points out that Ajax is not said, here, to actually rule over all the areas listed; rather, “Ajax is just boasting that he can plunder other people’s property” (147). See also Hirschberger 2004, 409.

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The Catalogue and the Mystery of the Disappearing Hedna gold, and cauldrons, and tripods, good ones, and the home of king Peteos hid them. With these his spirit urged him to offer hedna (hednoumai) for the wife, providing the most, since he hoped that no one would be more powerful of all the heroes in goods and in gifts. (fr. 200.3 9)

Hedna, then, is always expressed as the correlative of the woman’s beauty. But what it really expresses is the value of the man who will win her: more is better, and the man who wins her is the man who offers the most. Odysseus, despite his unorthodox participation in the event, confirms the structure of the competition. He chooses not to send gifts, not because he is not interested or because Helen is not beautiful enough, but because he knows that he will not defeat Menelaos (discussed above). The social function of hedna, then, is to establish an economic and social hierarchy. The woman’s beauty is justification for such excessive outlay of property because it places the bridegroom’s desire on a plane that exceeds the economic. Beauty is, in itself, worth nothing; it achieves worth only in the context of competition. The winner gains both bride and the status that comes from proving that he holds the greatest resources and can afford to give so much in return for such a “prize.” Such competition, however, can exist only between relative social equals; there are no poor but virtuous suitors in these competitions. We see this principle confirmed negatively in an unusual fragment (26), in which Apollo takes Stratonikê for his son without giving hedna: ]. Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων, βῆ δὲ φέ[ρ]ων ἀνάε[δ]ν[ον ἐύζωνον ]Στ[ρ]α[τ]ονίκην· δῶκε δὲ π[αι]δὶ [φί]λωι θαλ[ερ]ὴν [κ]εκλῆσθαι ἄκοιτιν ἀ]ντιθέωι Μελ[αν]ῆϊ, [τὸν οὔρ]ε[σι] πότνια νύμφη Ο]ἰτη[ῒ]ς Προ[ν]ό[η ]ωματ[..]ου..[ τῶι δ’ ὑπ⌊οκυσαμένη καλλίζωνος Στρατονίκη Εὔρυτον ⌊ἐν μεγάροισιν ἐγείνατο φίλτατον υἱόν.

τάων μ[..].[.]με.[

Of these . . . Phoibos Apollo went bearing well girdled Stratonikê without hedna and gave her to be called a blooming wife to his dear son, to godlike Melanê, whom the powerful nymph in the mountains [bore?]

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Oitêan Pronoê. . . having been impregnated by him [Melanê], lovely girdled Stratonikê bore Eurytos, a most beloved son, in the halls. (fr. 26.22 28)

The fact that Apollo takes the girl without hedna apparently requires some explanation. The word anaednos (“without hedna”) appears three times in the Iliad, each in a recognizable social context.66 The first two (9.146, repeated at 9.288) take place in Agamemnon’s offer to Achilles. As part of his attempt to patch things up with the great hero, Agamemnon suggests that Achilles can marry one of his daughters “without hedna,” that is, without having to offer Agamemnon a compensatory gift in return. Agamemnon then offers many other goods besides; the point is that all of these gifts are meant in exchange for Achilles’ anticipated service in the war. Similarly, at 13.366, we learn that Othreoneos had married Kassandra without hedna, having offered to Priam that he would drive the Achaeans from Troy. Again, services are offered in place of the hedna, as an equivalent exchange in the long-term transactional order. The situation in the Catalogue, so far as we can tell, is different. Although Apollo’s motivations are not specified by the text that we have, it does not appear that he offers any gifts in exchange to Stratonikê’s father. Rather, I presume, he takes the young woman anaednos simply because he is a god and does not need to concern himself with gift-exchange with mortals. Had Apollo wanted Stratonikê for himself, we probably would not have heard anything about hedna. The Catalogue is filled with examples of gods simply impregnating young women at their will. Here, however, Apollo wants the young woman for his (human, if half-divine) son. Marriage considerations come into play, and as a result the text marks the fact that the regular exchange did not take place.67 As Osborne has argued, “But to mention that there was no bride-price in one case only reinforces the idea that bride-price is the standard practice.”68 66 67

68

Well treated by Lacey 1966, 59 61. Osborne 2005, 18 19, suggests further that Stratonikê may not have received hedna because by living in the mountains and having deserted both father and mother, she has become “disorderly.” Osborne 2005, 18.

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This standard practice, then, serves also to distinguish a social grouping, namely, the aristocrats of Greek poleis who are all eligible to compete for a particularly attractive (or perhaps particularly wealthy) bride. This closed competition reaches its peak, of course, in the wooing of Helen, and therefore also contains the famous moment of the suitors’ oath: πάν]τας δὲ μνηστῆρ[ας] ἀπ[ήι]τεεν ὅ ρκια πιστά , ὀ]μνύμεναί τ’ ἐκέλευσ[ε] και [..]π.. ἀρά ασθαι σπονδῆι, μή τιν’ ἔτ’ ἄ λλον [ἄ]νευ ἕθεν ἄλλα πένεσθαι ἀμφὶ γάμωι κούρης εὐ[ω]λ[ένο]υ· ὃς δέ κεν ἀνδρῶν αὐτὸς ἕλοιτο βίηι, νέμεσίν τ’ ἀπ[ο]θεῖτο καὶ αἰδῶ, τὸν μέτα πά ντας ἄνωγεν ἀολλέας ὁρμηθῆνα[ι ποινὴν τεισομένους. τοὶ δ’ ἀπτερέως ἐπίθον[το ἐλπόμενοι τελέειν πάντες γάμον·

He [Tyndareos] demanded a great oath of all the suitors and ordered them to swear . . . In a treaty, that not anyone without him would act otherwise, concerning the marriage of the fair haired girl. But whoever of men should take her by force, and should put aside shame and righteousness, he ordered the entire crowd to set out after him, obtaining a punishment. And swiftly they all obeyed, hoping to achieve the marriage. (fr. 204.78 85)

Here, the suitors’ desire for the marriage of Helen acts as an explicit binding between them, a moment in the text of class cohesion. This aristocratic grouping, of course, will result in the pan-Hellenic army for the war at Troy, which ultimately leads to the end of the age of heroes. But in the moment of their marriage competition, what matters most is that all of the eligible suitors become part of a social whole with a common purpose and common understanding. That common understanding, moreover, becomes a necessary precondition for participating in the competition for Helen’s hand. The overarching function of that competition, beyond establishing who is the most desirable bride, and who the most worthy bridegroom, is to mark its participants as members of the heroic aristocracy, bound across and beyond the borders of their poleis by membership in the elite.

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CONCLUSION

The Catalogue presents a view of hedna that forms a coherent whole with the social practice that can be inferred from the Homeric poems. The Catalogue, however, is even more internally consistent than the Iliad and Odyssey: in every case where a direction can be determined, the hedna travels from the groom to the bride’s father. There is no indication that the goods are then transferred to the bride’s new household (an “indirect dowry”), and the story of Mestra (fr. 43a) will work only if this is not the case. Even more important, however, are the social implications of this remarkably consistent and persistent textual practice. While not every marriage mentions hedna, in those that do, hedna indicates two modes of valuation. First, the hedna is, to a greater or lesser degree, explicitly a measure of the value of the bride, often as a correlative of her beauty (frs.17a.7 8, 22.7, 180.10, 198.11). At the same time, an unspoken rule operates: hedna are given only by social equals. In several cases, a competition arises in which a group of aristocrats vie for preeminence in their ability to give generously. Such marriages are, of course, exogamous from the point of view of individual poleis; the suitors come from far and wide, especially when the bride is particularly desirable. This practice creates a closed system (Morris’ “class in-marriage”) in which the elite define their circle specifically by their ability to marry in competition with other aristocrats. From marital competition comes a coherent social grouping. We have, then, a social institution that exists for us only in literature and that serves to define, in part, those heroes who belong to the aristocratic class. Moreover, the text that contains the highest percentage of references to this institution is one that allows aristocrats living at the time of its production to trace their lineage to these hedna-paying heroes. I suggest that the Catalogue provides us with a text similar in its ideological force to the symposiastic literature of Archaic Greece, a literature that helps define the values of the noble elite against the rising egalitarian values of the polis. It is no accident, then, that the Works and Days does not use the word hedna, even when it discusses marriage; the preeminent middling text of the Archaic period does not valorize this aristocratic practice.

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With these principles in mind, we should note that there is exactly one extant fifth-century author who uses the word hedna: Pindar. The outstanding poet of aristocratic values within the fully developed polis, carefully negotiating space for elite excellence in the context of competing city-states, Pindar speaks twice of hedna (once using hednon, the singular form of the noun).69 Troublingly, in both instances Pindar uses the word explicitly of gifts given by the bride’s father to the groom. Both instances, not surprisingly, take place in the heroic past. Here is the clearer of the two occurrences, Pythian 3.92 7 (speaking of Peleus’ marriage to Thetis): ὁ δὲ Νηρέος εὐβούλου Θέτιν παῖδα κλυτάν, καὶ θεοὶ δαίσαντο παρ’ ἀμφοτέροις, καὶ Κρόνου παῖδας βασιλῆας ἴδον χρυ σις ἐν ἕδραις, ἕδνα τε δέξαντο· Διὸς δὲ χάριν ἐκ προτέρων μεταμειψάμενοι καμάτων ἔστασαν ὀρθὰν καρδίαν.

And he [married] Thetis, the famous daughter of wise counseling Nereus, And the gods feasted with both [Peleus] and Cadmus and they saw the children of Kronos, kings in golden thrones, and they received hedna. By the gift of Zeus they were changed in state from their former difficulties, and they set up straight hearts.

Despite the difficult syntax, it can be only the mortal suitors, Peleus and Cadmus, who are the subject of dexanto, “they received.” My concern here is not to untangle Pindar’s usage of what, by his time, must have been an archaic wedding term rarely in use.70 Rather, I wish to suggest that the reason that only Pindar uses the term in extant fifth-century literature is that Pindar’s concerns are with the negotiation of elitist ideology in the 69 70

See Kurke 1991, 133, for a brief discussion of Olympian 9.5 10. A scholium on Pindar Olympian 9 states: ἄκυρόν ἐστιν ἐπὶ τῆς Ἱπποδαμείας τὸ ἕδνον· ἕδνα γὰρ διδόασιν οἱ ἄνδρες, φερνὴν δὲ αἱ γυναῖκες, παρὰ τὸ φέρειν μεθ᾿ ἑαυτῶν (“It is not right what he says about the hedna of Hippodameia. For husbands give hedna, and wives give phernê, from ‘to carry (pherein) with themselves’”).

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age of the polis. Like the Catalogue, Pindar also looks back to the heroic past as a source of values for the current aristocracy. When describing those heroic, elitist weddings, Pindar calls up the social institution of hedna as one marker of the community of nobles here, remarkably, even a part of the heroes’ communion with the gods. A troubling difficulty remains in our lack of evidence for hedna as a historical practice. In fact, we have no evidence for hedna in historical times, beyond its appearance in the literary texts discussed here. Some scholars, however, have seen a parallel to the Catalogue’s depiction of the suitors of Helen in the case of the marriage of Agariste, daughter of Kleisthenes of Sicyon, and this episode may shed some light on the difficulty.71 In this episode, Kleisthenes invites nobles from all over the Greek world to come to his house for a year, during which time he inspects their suitability as future sons-in-law. Clearly, then, we have a moment of aristocratic competition not unlike those of the hedna competitions of the Catalogue. But none of the suitors is required to give or promise hedna; in fact, in the course of the story, a kind of anti-hedna appears. The father compensates the suitors for his daughter’s hand at the end of a year with a payment of a talent of silver (Herodotus 6.130).72 The text of Herodotus, however, does not prove that hedna did not exist at the time of Homer, the Catalogue, or even Kleisthenes. On the contrary, the story of Agariste’s marriage (written, we should note, mid-fifth century) must negotiate exactly the same ideological conflict that the Catalogue does, but from the other side of a historical divide. The marriage is inherently aristocratic, and the competition that Kleisthenes sets up recalls the wooing of both Helen and of Penelope. If there is any historical truth to the story, the tyrant may well have been using literary precedent in order to invest the marriage with an elitist structure. At the same time, however, the narrative looks to the future of the Athenian polis. In compensating the suitors for their time wasted in aristocratic idling, the story seems determined to mediate between the aristocratic context of the marriage and the emerging structures of the Athenian state. 71

72

For the suggestion, see West 1985, 133; following Schwartz 1960, 488. A full discussion of political implications can be found in Irwin 2005a, 65 66. I discuss the relationship between the Catalogue and the suitors of Agariste at length in Chapter 7.

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If my reading of the Catalogue’s use of hedna is correct, then, it helps us to understand what has long been a riddle, namely, the disappearance of hedna from literary texts in the fifth century. As a marker of aristocratic marriage, as a form of gift-giving that, like other forms of xenia, helps form the bonds that tied nobles together, hedna had no place in the democratic forms of literature especially tragedy that flourished after the reforms of the later Kleisthenes in 508/7. We find hedna most frequently, and used most consistently, in the Catalogue, a reactionary text of the volatile sixth century, and traces of it as a literary form in the aristocratic poetry of Pindar. The Catalogue is, I suggest, more Homeric than Homer in its portrayal of hedna exactly because it is an aristocratic text in the face of an emerging ideology of the middling man, and of all the polis-centered ideas that come with him.

3 Marriage, Identity, and the Story of Mestra

In a ground-breaking article more than thirty years ago, Ann Bergren argued that in the Theogony and Works and Days, as well as in archaic poetry more generally, women become a trope for social and discursive instability.1 Just as the muses are able to tell either the truth or a story that is indistinguishable from the truth, so wives are capable of falsifying the paternal bloodline through acts of infidelity, producing sons who are not “true” (etumos).2 Part and parcel of this characterization is the fact that women are particularly associated with mimesis, with imitating something that, in truth, they may or may not be. So Pandora, the world’s first woman and wife, is not simply an unmarried young woman, but a παρθένῳ αἰδοίῃ ἴκελον, an “image of a chaste virgin” (Hesiod, Theogony 572).3 Another set of myths takes this anxiety about mimesis to heightened levels: some women in ancient myth can literally change shapes at will and become someone (or something) else. We have various myths about shape-shifting women and men dating back to Homer and forward to the Roman period and beyond. One such is the story of Mestra (daughter of Erysichthôn, also called Aithôn) in the Catalogue. With the exception of three lines (41 43) that are important for legal history, but so damaged as to be virtually untranslatable, this story has received little 1

2 3

This chapter is a revised version of “Marriage, Identity, and the Tale of Mestra in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women,” AJP 125 (2004): 303 338; my thanks to Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing its reproduction here. Bergren 1983, esp. 75 77. Brilliantly discussed by Loraux 1993, 81 83. See also Pucci 1977, 100 102. On female mimesis in general, see also Zeitlin 1981. 85

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scholarly attention.4 The text is complete enough, however, to reconstruct a lively story and to posit several theses about the aims of the narrative. I suggest that this episode demonstrates anxieties about the shifting nature of marriage in sixth-century Greece, and in particular about the relationship of the oikos (“household”) to the emerging polis. To properly understand this story, we need to consider it in two contexts, and this chapter treats the story in two distinct sections. In the first, I discuss the way that the story of Mestra corresponds with other myths of female shape-shifters. In the second, I argue for a specific historical context that meshes with contemporary social institutions. As with much of our knowledge of the Archaic period, and especially of women in that period, the data I have to draw on, particularly for this latter section, are sketchy. The texts I discuss cannot be securely dated; some of the myths I discuss may plausibly be Archaic in origin but are found only in later texts; the laws that I use to establish social context are similarly difficult to fix in time. While some readers may find that I push the evidence beyond what is certain, my method is to find a probable set of consistencies in the data that we have. Let me start with the myth. The story of Mestra belongs to a set of myths about female shape-shifters and, like them, represents wide-ranging but specific anxieties about women’s sexual power in ancient Greece. Shape-shifting myths are, as it turns out, keyed to gender. In the case of male shape-shifters, the character’s ability is not linked to a single moment or phase of their lives. For these men and minor deities, the power is a constant attribute, one that is present throughout their narratives, and it does not seem to point to any particular social structures. Women, by contrast, have the ability to shape-shift only before marriage; the stories about their shape-shifting always take place in the context of trying to avoid marriage, and the marriage itself is concurrent with the loss of (or merely textual silence about) their supernatural powers. These myths specifically address an anxiety about the instability of female identity, and they propose marriage as an institution that can fix that identity. 4

Recent exceptions are Rutherford 2005 (who reads the fragment as an attempt to link Athenian genealogical material with the Aeolid traditions in Thessaly) and Irwin 2005a, 67 73, who links the story to the marriage of the daughter of Megakles to the tyrant Peisistratos in Herodotus.

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Beyond these large mythic structures, the Hesiodic story of Mestra contains elements unique to its particular telling. Both the form of Mestra’s narrative and her reasons for shape-shifting are different from other versions of this particular tale and from myths of other female shapeshifters. The story of Mestra uses the trope of female instability in ways that, as I will argue, reflect concerns about women’s social mobility that we can locate in the specific social milieu of Archaic Athens.5 These ideas are discussed at length below. For now, let us turn to the story itself.

THE HESIODIC STORY OF MESTRA

The story of Mestra exists in several versions, though none before Ovid is as detailed as that of the Catalogue. Erysichthôn (called Aithôn in the Hesiodic version) is plagued with endless hunger because of an offense to Demeter.6 For a while, he supports his insatiable appetite by repeatedly selling or marrying his daughter Mestra to various rich men. Once sold or married, Mestra changes shape and slips away, while her buyer (or husband), apparently goes on his way, befuddled.7 Mestra is then resold (or remarried) on a later day, thus bringing in a constant income. The repeated nature of the transactions involving Mestra is crucial to the logic of the story and is present in all extant versions. In fragments 43b and 43c of the Catalogue, these transactions are 5

6

7

Both West 1985 and March 1987 place the poet who collected and wrote the Catalogue of Women in Attica in the mid sixth century, in part because of the Athenian nature of this fragment. While I am not certain that the final redactor of the Catalogue worked in Athens, it is clear that this story has Athenian ties. This part of the story is told in detail in Callimachus, Hymn 5 (where no mention is made of Mestra). Ovid’s version of the story (Metamorphoses 8.738 878) deals humorously with the buyer’s confusion over Mestra’s disappearance: he asks Mestra herself (now in the form of a fisherman) if she has seen her (8.850 870). See the discussion in Fantham 1993, 30 31. In Ovid’s version, as in the other fragments of the Catalogue (43b and 43c), the transaction is one of slave sale rather than marriage. Fantham 1993, 30, suggests that the practice of “bride price” would have been unthinkable in Ovid’s day, but it appears that the transaction has turned to sale earlier in the tradition. On bride price (hedna) in the Catalogue, see Chapter 2.

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clearly commercial rather than marital: Philodemus gives us the least amount of narrative (fr. 43c of the Catalogue): τὴν μὲν ἱστορε[ῖ γ᾿ Ἠο αι]ς Ἡσίοδος δια[ π]ρασθῆναι χάρ[ιν τοῦ δι]ατρέφεσθ᾿ Α[ἴθω να]

Hesiod wrote in the Êoiai that she [Mestra] was repeatedly sold for the sake of nourishing Aithôn.

Similarly, a scholium to Lycophron tells of Aithôn repeatedly selling Mestra (fr. 43b):8 Ἐρυσίχθων τις υἱὸς Τριόπα ἐξέτεμε τὸ ἄλσος τῆς Δήμητρος. ἣ δὲ ὀργισθεῖσα ἐποίησεν αὐτῷ ἐκφυῆναι λιμὸν μέγαν, ὥστε μηδέποτε λήγειν τῆς πείνης. εἶχε δὲ οὗτος θυγατέρα Μήστραν φαρμακίδα, ἥτις εἰς πᾶν εἶδος ζῴου μετεβάλλετο, καὶ ταύτην εἶχε μέθοδον τῆς λιμοῦ ὁ πατήρ. ἐπίπρασκε γὰρ αὐτὴν καθ’ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν καὶ ἐκ τούτων ἐτρέφετο· ἣ δὲ πάλιν ἀμείβουσα τὸ εἶδος φεύγουσα πρὸς τὸν πατέρα ἤρχετο. ὁ δ’ Ἐρυσίχθων Αἴθων ἐκαλεῖτο, ὥς φησιν Ἡσίοδος διὰ τὸν λιμόν.

Erysichthôn, one of Triops’ sons, chopped down the grove of Demeter. And she, being angry, implanted in him a huge hunger, so that he could never stop his desire for food. He had a daughter, Mestra, a sorceress, who used to change into every form of living thing, and her father had in her a treatment for hunger. For he sold her each and every day and from this was nourished. But she, changing her form back again, and fleeing, used to return to her father. But Erysichthôn was called Aithôn, as Hesiod says, because of his hunger.

Again, the transaction is repeated daily. In both of these versions the verb used (piprasko, diapiprasko) makes it clear that Mestra is sold, and not married. The scholium to Lycophron, moreover, suggests a different narrative structure altogether. As I read the passage, Mestra is sold as an animal, then changes back into human form to return home. The passage is 8

So printed in Merkelbach and West 1967. The 1990 edition includes only the last sentence. It is most likely correct that the story told by the scholiast does not come from Hesiod (see below). It is useful, however, as evidence for the general structure of the story.

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ambiguous, but the order of events in the scholiast’s presentation suggests this view.9 The version as we have it in the papyrus fragment of Hesiod’s Catalogue is unique in this one respect: the narrative clearly concerns a marital transaction, and not a purely economic one. As a result, Hesiod’s version presents information about marriage, and the way that marriage fixes a woman’s identity, in a way that later versions of the myth do not. Because the text of this story is not well known and is distressingly fragmentary, I present a full text, translation, and brief exegesis here. Given the poor state of preservation of the text, the exegesis will serve as a basis for the two interpretive sections that follow. I use, throughout, the text of Merkelbach and West (1990), with an important addition by Most (2007). (43a) P. Cairensis Instituti Francogallici (P.I.F.A.O.) 322 fr. B, C, F, A; P. Oxy 2495 fr. 21, 25, 30; P. Berol. 7497; P. Oxy 421 [

ἐ]υστέφανος Πολυμήλη.

ἠ’ οἵη θυγάτηρ Ἐρυσίχθονος ἀντι]θέοιο

[

]ου Τριοπίδαο Μήστρη ἐυπλόκαμος, Χαρίτων ἀ]μαρύγματ’ ἔχουσα· τὸν δ’ Αἴθων’ ἐκάλεσσαν ἐπ]ών[υ]μ[ο]ν εἵνεκα λιμοῦ αἴθωνος κρατεροῦ φῦλα] θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων [ αἴθω]να δὲ λιμὸν ἅπαντες [ θ]νητο[ῖ]ς ἀνθρώποις [ πυκι]νὰ [φ]ρεσὶ μήδε’ ἰδ[υι [ ]θεα..[.]ν.γε περν[ [ γυ]ναικῶν (desunt versus duo) (12 13) [ ].[ [ ]..[. . . .]ετο τε[ [ ]γειν[. . . κ]ούρη[ [ ]σι κλ.[. . . .].οισ[. . . . .]σι [ ἀπά]τησε πολύφρονά [πε]ρ μάλ’ ἐόντ[α [ κού]ρην ἑλικώπιδα κ[αλλ]ιπάρηον [ ]τ’ ἄλοχον θυμαρέ’ ἄ[γε]σθαι [ ]γαρο[. . . . ὑπέσ]χετ[ο] μυρία ἕδνα 9

5

10

15

20

First pointed out to me by Jenny Strauss Clay after I delivered an early version of this chapter at the annual meeting of CAMWS.

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Marriage, Identity, and the Story of Mestra [ ἑ]κατὸν[. . . . . . . . . . . .].ημερα δω[ [ ].ων[..]βοῶν ἀ[γέλα]ς ἐριμύκω[ν [ ]ὀΐων .[. . . . .]σα. αἰγῶν[ [ εδέ]ξατο[. . . . . .]ε θυμῶι (desunt versus viginti tres) ]ν δ᾿ αυ[ ἣ]ρως10 δεσμῶι δ]ήσας κρ[ατερῶι π]εφυλαχθαι ] σ ἐπέτ[ελλ’· οὐδ᾿ ἐν νόωι εἶχε[ν ὡς ῥ᾿ἑτέ]ρη τε γέ[ν]οιτο καὶ ἐκ[δύσειε]ν ἑωτῆς μορφ]ήν· ἣ δὲ λυθ[εῖ]σα φίλου μ[ετὰ δώματα πατρὸς ὤιχετ’] ἀπαΐξασα, γυνὴ δ’ ἄφαρ α[ὖτις ἔγεντο πατρὸς ἐ]νὶ μεγάροισι· μετῆλθ[ε δὲ [ ]δη παρὰ μητρὶ ἐπο[ ]ης ἀ]μφ[ὶς] δ’ ἤθελ’ ἄγειν κούρην[. . . . . . ]υ[ αἶ]ψα [δ’ ἄ]ρ’ ἀ[λλ]ήλοισ[ι]ν ἔρις καὶ ν[εῖκος] ἐτ[ύχθη Σισύφωι ἠδ’ Αἴθωνι τανισφύρο[υ εἵ]νεκα [κούρης, ο]ὐδ’ ἄρα τις δικάσαι [δύ]νατο βροτός· ἀλλ’ αραπ[ ..... . ἐπ]έτρεψαν καὶ ἐπήινεσαν· ἣ δ’ ἄρα τοῖ[σιν ἀ]τρεκέως διέθηκ[ε] δίκην δ.[ “ε]ὖτέ τις ἀντ’ ὤνοιο χατίζηι χ [ρῆ]μ’ ἀνελ[έσθαι, ἀ]μφὶ μάλα χρῆν ὦν[ον .......]. τῖμον [ οὐ γ]ὰρ δὴ μεταμειπ[τόν, ἐπὴν τὰ] πρῶτ’ [ἀποδώηι.” ...]αι[.]φη ταύτηι δεδ[..... .....]ητα[ ...].ε.[..] οὐρήων α.[ ..]ε μεθ’ ἡμιόνους τ[ ..... ..].[..]μωνα[ .....]σενδ[.]..το[ ....]τοι μα[κ]άρων[ ...]εν ελασσωνουν[ ἀ]νδρῶν δὲ προὔχεσκε νοήματά τε πραπ[ίδας τε, ἀ]λλ’ οὔ πως ἤιδει Ζηνὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο,

25

30

35

40

45

50

ὡς οὔ οἱ δοῖεν Γλαύκωι γένος Οὐρανίωνες ἐκ Μήστρης καὶ σπέρμα μετ’ ἀνθρώποισι λιπέσ[θαι. καὶ τὴν μέν ῥ’ ἐδάμασσε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθ[ων 10

55

The following four lines and their translation are taken from the reconstruction in Most (2007).

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τῆλ’ ἀπὸ πατρὸς ἑοῖο φέρων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόν[τον ἐν Κόωι ἀ[μ]φιρύτηι καίπερ πολύιδριν ἐοῦσα[ν· ἔνθα τέκ’ Εὐρύπυλον πολέων ἡγήτορα λαῶ[ν Κω...α γείνατο παῖδα βίην ὑπέροπλον ἔ [χοντα. τοῦ δ’ υἱεῖς Χάλκων τε καὶ Ἀνταγόρης ἐγένο[ντο.

60

τῶι δὲ καὶ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ὀλίγης Διὸς ἄλκιμος υἱὸς ἔπραθεν ἱμερόεντα πόλιν, κε[ρ]άϊξε δὲ κώμας εὐθὺ[ς ἐπ]εὶ Τροίηθεν ἀνέ[πλε]ενηυσ[ὶ] θ[οῆισι

..[......]λαιων ἕνε[χ’ ἵπ]πων Λαομέδοντος ἐν Φλέγρηι δ]ὲ Γίγαντας ὑπερφιάλους κατέπεφ[νε. Μήστρη δὲ προ]λιποῦσα Κόων ποτὶ πατρίδα γαῖαν νηῒ θοῆι ἐπέρ]ησ’ ἱερέων ποτὶ γουνὸν Ἀθηνέων [ ἐ]πεὶ τέκε παῖδα Ποσειδάωνι ἄνακτι. [ αἰν]όμορον πατέρα ὃν πορσαίνεσκεν. [ ]υ θυγάτηρ Πανδιονίδαο [ ἣ]ν ἔργα διδάξατο Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη

65

70

Translation: . . . well crowned Polymêlê. Or such as the daughter of godlike Erysichthôn, . . . son of Triops, Lovely haired Mestra, who had the bright charms of the Graces. But the tribes of mortals called him “burning” because of his powerful burning hunger. . . . and all men . . . burning hunger . . . for mortal men . . . knowing clever schemes in her mind . . . . . . [goddess?]11. . . . . . of women . . . (two verses missing) (traces) . . . young woman . . . ... . . . He [Erysichthôn?] tricked him though he was very clever 11

5

10

11 15 16

περν may be from πέρνημι “to sell,” as Merkelbach and West suggest. I am

grateful to an anonymous reader for bringing this to my attention.

92

Marriage, Identity, and the Story of Mestra . . . his glancing eyed lovely cheeked daughter . . . to make her his delightful wife. . . . He promised a huge bride price . . . a hundred . . . day . . . . . . herds of bellowing cattle . . . of sheep . . . of goats . . . . . . he received . . . in his heart (twenty three verses missing) the hero binding with a strong bond to guard ] he ordered; [but he did not] bear in mind that she would become [different] and [would take off] her form;] she, released, went to the home of her dear father, darting away, and again immediately became a woman in the halls of her father. And he [Sisyphos?] came after [her] . . . . . . beside her mother . . . He wished to lead the young woman away, and straightway strife and quarrel arose between them, between Sisyphos and Aithôn on account of the slender ankled girl And no mortal was able to judge. But to [Athena?] they turned it over, and they approved of her. And she rendered for them the judgment precisely . . . “When someone wishes to take some goods in exchange for the price Certainly the price must . . . value. . . For it clearly cannot be exchanged, once he has sold it.”12 . . . to her (?) [he gave?] . . . . . . mules . . . . . . along with the mules . . . ...

12

20

25

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40

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West’s loose translation of the judgment (West 1963, 754): “If a vendor, instead of accepting the agreed price, wants to take his goods back, there must be a re sale (?), and a new valuation may be made (?); for once the goods have changed hands, they cannot be re exchanged for the money originally tendered.” Casanova 1978, 26 29, argues that anelesthai cannot mean “take back,” but must mean “take for oneself.” I take the words this way, and see the judgment addressed to Sisyphos, who must be the petitioner. Irwin 2005a, 69 70, provides a good discussion of these lines, as does Rutherford 2005, 107. See Appendix B.

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... . . . of the blessed . . . . . . lesser (?) . . . 50 He was outstanding among men in thought and in understanding, but he did not know the mind of aegis bearing Zeus, that the Ouranids would not grant him birth to Glaukos [Sisyphos’ son] from Mestra, or to leave his offspring among people. And then the earth shaker Poseidon tamed her, 55 carrying her far from her father on the wine dark sea, In Kos, surrounded by water, although she was very clever. There she bore Eurypylos, leader of many people, Ko . . . she bore a child possessing overbearing violence. Of this one were born the sons Chalchôn and Antagores. 60 And the stout son of Zeus though for little cause, sacked his [Eurypylos’] lovely city, and he despoiled the villages at once when he was returning from Troy in the swift ships . . . because of the horses of Laomedon. And in Phlegra he killed the arrogant giants. 65 Mestra, leaving Kos for her fatherland in a swift ship crossed to the hill of sacred Athens, . . . when she had borne a child to king Poseidon. . . . her ill fated father whom she continued caring for . . . . . . the daughter of the descendent of Pandion . . . 70 . . . whom Pallas Athena taught skills

Commentary and Exegesis13 Lines 1 15: We learn here about Erysichthôn’s other name, Aithôn (probably the line referred to in fr. 43b), and about his insatiable hunger. Lines 16 25: Aithôn tricks Sisyphos into taking Mestra as a wife for his son Glaukos. For this he is promised hedna (“bride-price”) that consists of cattle, sheep, and goats, which are all edible animals. There is some question whether Sisyphos actually pays the hedna at this point, or merely promises it (hupescheto, 21). Steinrück believes that 13

For a similar reconstruction of the text, with a discussion of various possible variations in the plot, see Casanova 1978, 21 24; Steinrück 1994.

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he does not pay and that this sets up Sisyphos’ later victory over Aithôn (implied in line 51); he later negotiates a much lower hedna, involving only mules.14 But it seems unlikely to me that Mestra would return to her father’s home (31) before the hedna had been paid otherwise, her suitors would have little reason to keep their end of the bargain.15 There are further problems with Steinrück’s reconstruction, on which see Appendix B. Lines 26 27: West suggests that either one or twenty-six lines have dropped out here. Steinrück argues that it is only one, on the basis of this story’s parallel structure to that of Eurynome, which follows.16 But in that story there is no element of Sisyphos first being tricked (as here, 18). Moreover, it is in this lacuna that we must hear of Mestra’s shapeshifting prior to returning to her father’s home (implied by 32). Most has now proposed the restoration of four additional lines, which necessitates a longer lacuna; he states that twenty-three verses are missing (accepting West’s original assessment), and I have modified my text accordingly.17 Lines 27 30: These lines have been provided (with his conjectures) in Most’s edition. If the placement is correct, the reconstruction is particularly valuable, as these lines preserve the only direct mention of Mestra’s shape-shifting. Lines 31 34: Mestra, having worked her way free, returns to her father’s home. Once there, if we accept West’s reconstruction of line 34, she goes back to work at the loom with her mother entirely appropriate behavior for a young unmarried woman. In this reading, however, the word gunê (32) is a problem, since it can be translated as “wife” rather than “woman.” The point here is that she is not a wife; she has effectively annulled the marriage by returning to her father. The word is troubling. It seems that we must take it here in the sense of “became a 14

15

16 17

Steinrück 1994, 297 298. In this reading, the subject of edexato (25) is Sisyphos, and this refers to his receiving Mestra. This may be right in any case, but the subject of the verb could also be Aithôn. See the discussion in Chapter 2. Finley 1981, 238, argues that hedna are paid before the wedding has been secured and that the potential groom risked losing such gifts. That seems to be the case here. Steinrück 1994, 292 n. 5. Most 2007, ad loc.

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woman (as opposed to the animal she just was),” though this cannot be regarded as certain.18 Lines 35 44: Sisyphos returns to get Mestra back, and quarrels with Aithôn. A goddess, probably Athena, is chosen to settle the dispute between them.19 Her judgment is missing just enough words to make it tantalizingly untranslatable.20 Of the passage, we can confidently say the following: (1) a judgment, probably by Athena, goes in favor of Sisyphos. (2) As a result, Sisyphos leads Mestra away again. (3) As part of the same deal, mules trade hands in which direction is not clear. Lines 45 50: While it is not clear if the mules mentioned here are part of a newly negotiated hedna or a “refund” offered by Aithôn to Sisyphos, we should note that unlike the previous exchange, they are not edible animals. It might make sense, therefore, for them to move from Aithôn to Sisyphos (since Aithôn has no use for them). Lines 51 54: Although Sisyphos evidently wins the dispute in lines 41 43, he does not accomplish his larger objective, that of obtaining grandsons. Lines 55 65: Abruptly, Poseidon takes Mestra for his own. We should note that he takes her from her father, not Glaukos. The verb damao (linguistically related to damar, an Archaic word for “wife”) is often used of brides and indicates here a successful change of social status, unlike 18

19

20

So Steinrück 1994, 292 n. 4. He cites there Odyssey 10.228, where Polites asks if Circe is divine (theos) or human (gunê). He goes on to suggest that the word here prefigures her eventual (successful) marriage. This seems to me to push the point. Irwin 2005a, 72, argues that the word “must be understood with all its meanings: it is not only a statement about her resuming human form, but about her sexual status she is definitely not a parthenos.” It is not clear, however, that the word parthenos indicates a sexual rather than social status, particularly in Archaic poetry: see Loraux 1993, 224 n. 183; Sissa 1990, 342 343. In any case it is hard to see how Mestra is here a gunê in the sense “wife.” See also Rutherford 2005, 106. West suggests Athena, which is plausible, since the story takes place in Athens (West and Merkelbach 1990, ad 38). Casanova 1978, 23, suggests Pytho; Kakridis 1975, 21, favors Mestra herself (highly unlikely). On the problem, see West 1963, 753 754; Merkelbach 1968; Kakridis 1975; Casanova 1978; Gagarin 1986, 35 36; Steinrück 1994, 294 298 (who sum marizes previous attempts). A good brief discussion is now provided by Irwin 2005a, 69 70. I propose my reading of this passage in Appendix B.

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Mestra’s previous marriage. Poseidon carries Mestra to Kos, and we learn immediately that she produces a son, whose exploits are briefly described.21 Lines 66 71: In the final lines of the story, Mestra returns to Athens to care for her father. This unexpected conclusion is discussed at length below.

PUTTING MESTRA IN CONTEXT: MYTHS OF SHAPE-SHIFTERS

Mestra’s story belongs to a class of stories about female shape-shifters that appear repeatedly in ancient Greek literature and art. Her story is similar to that of Mêtis, Nemesis, and Thetis, though there are important structural differences in the form of Mestra’s shape-shifting. Wherever possible I draw on versions contemporary to the Catalogue to sketch this mythic pattern, but my concern here is less with historically specific issues than with a broad and long-ranging pattern of thought. A more historically grounded discussion follows in the next section. Simply put, every narrative of women who shape-shift in Greek myth presents a young, unmarried woman (or goddess) who has and uses this power specifically in the context of avoiding marriage with a man and/or rape by a male god. That such women shape-shift in this context (and only this context) reveals an anxiety about the fact that for women, social identity is relational and therefore unstable.22 That is, women are relentlessly 21

22

This part of the story was apparently well known in antiquity. Herakles’ voyage to Kos and battle with the sons of Eurypylus is told at Iliad 14.249 262, Pausanias 7.4.1, Apollodorus 2.7.1, Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae 58, and in the scholium to Iliad 14.255, which claims to be derived from Pherecydes. These sources all focus on Herakles, and when the mother of Eurypylus is named, she is Astypalea. Only in the Hesiodic fragment is she named as Mestra. For the association of Erysichthôn with Cos, see Sherwin White 1978, 306 307; on Herakles and Eurypylus, 317 318. It is possible, though by no means certain, that the author of the catalogue is here combining two Coan traditions, by making Erysichthôn’s daughter the mother of Eurypylus. Of course, all social identities are relational to some degree. Odysseus is not merely Odysseus, but Odysseus, Laertes’ son. Women’s public lives were more carefully controlled than men’s; as a result, they tended to be publicly known through their male relations. Nearly every woman in the Catalogue is introduced with a patronymic.

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identified in ancient Greek myth as “the wife of” or “the daughter of.” Only in rare cases do their identities exist independently of the men who have authority over them. The moment of marriage, then, is a crucial moment in the progress of a woman’s social identity; it is the moment that she begins to devalue one set of relations (her natal family) and value another set (her marital family). It is at this moment of crisis, therefore, that women who can magically change their identities by shape-shifting do so. In some of the stories I consider, the woman in question is in danger not of marriage, but simply of her first sexual experience, in the form of rape by a god. It might therefore be objected that being raped by a god (as are Nemesis and sometimes Mêtis) is not the same thing as socially and legally sanctioned matrimony, especially as I wish to argue that Mestra’s story is specifically concerned with marriage. In sketching out the broad pattern of this type of story, however, I collapse these two types of events. I do so for two reasons: first, scholarship has shown that the ancient Greeks viewed abduction of a young woman as a quasi-legal form of marriage.23 More important, from the bride’s point of view these two experiences may be indistinguishable: whether raped or married, the bride undergoes a transformation often terrifying, in either case from the status of parthenos to gunê and finally matêr. When I speak, therefore, of Mestra’s marriages as successful or unsuccessful, it is important to remember that it is not the establishment of a happy home that is at issue, but rather her removal from her father’s house and transformation to the status of adult woman. It is true that gods as a rule do not marry mortal women in Archaic myth, at least not in the sense of founding a household with them to which the god feels tied and beholden.24 But when raped by a god, mortal women in Greek myth virtually always become pregnant and undergo a change of state. In the first two myths I discuss, this change of state takes place, though little in the stories suggests marriage. In the last two, the narratives are explicitly concerned with the changes in social state that take place when a young woman has been married. 23

24

The most important work on this topic is Evans Grubbs 1989, which, despite the title, deals with ancient Greek as well as later Roman evidence. See also Jenkins 1983, Sourvinou Inwood 1987. See, however, Burgess 2001, 224 n. 148, on Thetis’ possible returns to Peleus’ house even after she has left him.

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I begin with the story of Mêtis. In the Theogony, Zeus is said to marry Mêtis, and the word alochos (“wife,” 886) suggests legitimate matrimony. Mêtis poses a danger, however, of too-powerful offspring as a result of her marriage to Zeus, a theme that returns with the story of Thetis.25 Here, however, instead of fobbing Mêtis off on a mortal as he does with Thetis, Zeus eats her, thus making her part of himself and successfully coopting her dangerous procreativity.26 The act of swallowing takes place swiftly and without overt violence: we hear simply that Zeus, “having deceived her mind with a trick, with wily words put her in his belly” (τότ’ ἔπειτα δόλῳ φρένας ἐξαπατήσας/ αἱμυλίοισι λόγοισιν ἑὴν ἐσκάτθετο νηδύν, 889 890). Though not a shape-shifter in this narrative, other (perhaps later) versions make Mêtis into one.27 It is worthwhile to consider the version told in Apollodorus (1.3.6): μίγνυται δὲ Ζεὺς Μήτιδι, μεταβαλλούσῃ εἰς πολλὰς ἰδέας ὑπὲρ τοῦ μὴ συνελθεῖν, καὶ αὐτὴν γενομένην ἔγκυον καταπίνει φθάσας, ἐπείπερ ἔλεγε γεννήσειν παῖδα μετὰ τὴν μέλλουσαν ἐξ αὐτῆς γεννᾶσθαι κόρην, ὃς οὐρανοῦ δυνάστης γενήσεται.

And Zeus slept with Mêtis, who changed into many forms because she did not want to have sex (with him), and Zeus, anticipating, swallowed her once she had become pregnant, since said that a child would be born (after the girl who was about to come out of her) who would be the ruler of the heavens.

The story is interesting for several reasons, not least because it seems to be aware of the Hesiodic version as well as another, perhaps competing version, in which the conflict centers around Mêtis’ unwillingness as a bride. The suggestion of not one but two offspring is directly parallel to Theogony 894 898, where the first child is specified as Athena, with whom Mêtis becomes pregnant just before Zeus swallows her (888 892). (It is curious that in both versions Zeus swallows Mêtis when she is pregnant with Athena, not with the second, father-killing child.) In Apollodorus’ version, however, there is no mention of marriage or of Zeus tricking her into compliance. Instead, the story presents only Mêtis’ resistance to the 25 26 27

Theogony 886ff. For a full discussion, see Arthur 1982, 77 79. Arthur 1982, 77. Discussion in Forbes Irving 1990, 184 187. For versions of her transformations (sources listed in Forbes Irving 1990, 184 n. 63), see Apollodorus 1.3.6, scholium to Theogony 886, scholium to Iliad 8.39.

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idea of Zeus sleeping with her. And of course, Mêtis’ resistance takes the form here, and only in this context, in extant narratives of shapeshifting. This is her moment of identity crisis. There is no way to know how late the source for Apollodorus’ version is; like much of Apollodorus, it may be early, but it may not.28 Unfortunately, we cannot take the parallel to Mestra much further, but one other fact is worth noting. A fragment that may be from the Catalogue (fr. 343, which West and Merkelbach place among their fragmenta dubia) describes Mêtis’ marriage to Zeus without mentioning any transformations, but in terms that are curiously parallel to those used to describe Mestra’s marriage to Poseidon (see further below) in fragment 43a. In the category of female shape-shifters we must also consider Nemesis.29 We have two sources for her shape-shifting: one, the ubiquitous Apollodorus, but the other, the lost Cyclic epic, the Cypria. The two versions are thematically related but do not appear to spring from the same source. Apollodorus says (3.10.7): λέγουσι δὲ ἔνιοι Νεμέσεως Ἑλένην εἶναι καὶ Διός. ταύτην γὰρ τὴν Διὸς φεύγουσαν συνουσίαν εἰς χῆνα τὴν μορφὴν μεταβαλεῖν, ὁμοιωθέντα δὲ καὶ Δία κύκνῳ συνελθεῖν.

But some say that Helen was (born) of Nemesis and Zeus. For she (Nemesis) fleeing from sex with Zeus turned her form into a goose. But Zeus, also making himself like a swan, had sex with her.

In the lost Cypria a similar tale was apparently told. Fragment 10 of the Cypria (formerly fragment 8, taken from Athenaeus 8.334b)30 relates Helen’s birth as follows: τοὺς δὲ μέτα τριτάτην Ἑλένην τέκε, θαῦμα βροτοῖσι· τήν ποτε καλλίκομος Νέμεσις φιλότητι μιγεῖσα Ζηνὶ θεῶν βασιλῆϊ τέκε κρατερῆς ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης· φεῦγε γὰρ οὐδ’ ἔθελεν μιχθήμεναι ἐν φιλότητι πατρὶ Διὶ Κρονίωνι· ἐτείρετο γὰρ φρένας αἰδοῖ καὶ νεμέσει· κατὰ γῆν δὲ καὶ ἀτρύγετον μέλαν ὕδωρ

28

29 30

West 1985, 44 45, demonstrates that Apollodorus knew and used the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, but we cannot know if he did so for this particular myth. See the discussion in Forbes Irving 1990, 187 191. I follow here the new text of West 2003 in the Loeb Classical Library.

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λαβεῖν δ’ ἐλιλαίετο θυμῶι

ἄλλοτε μὲν κατὰ κῦμα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης ἰχθύϊ εἰδομένην πόντον πολὺν ἐξοροθύνων, ἄλλοτ’ ἀν’ Ὠκεανὸν ποταμὸν καὶ πείρατα γαίης, ἄλλοτ’ ἀν’ ἤπειρον πολυβώλακα· γίνετο δ’ αἰεί θηρί’, ὅσ’ ἤπειρος αἰνὰ τρέφει, ὄφρα φύγοι μιν.

And after these, she bore Helen third, a marel for mortals, whom lovely haired Nemesis bore having mixed in love with Zeus, King of the gods, under powerful necessity. For she fled, and did not wish to mix in love with father Zeus, son of Kronos. For she was disturbed in her mind (phrên) by shame and indignation. Over the land and over the barren dark water she fled, but Zeus pursued and he wished in his heart (thumos) to seize her now (she) through the waves of the much roaring sea, in the form of a fish, as he (Zeus) stirred up the great sea now along the stream of Ocean and the limits of the earth, another time over the fruitful land. And she became repeatedly (aiei) fearsome animals, as many as the land nourishes, in order to escape him.

It is striking that the two versions share only the notion of a resistance to Zeus’ advances and the technique of shape-shifting. In Apollodorus, Nemesis’ trick of turning into a goose is perhaps suggested by the well-known tale that Zeus raped Leda while he was in the form of a swan. (Indeed, this is the other version of Helen’s birth that Apollodorus tells in this section, and the narrative of Nemesis is presented as a variant.) In the Cypria, her transformations seem geographically rather than thematically motivated: she is a fish when fleeing over the sea, and various beasts (thêria) when going over land. If Apollodorus knows of this version, it has left no evident traces in his text. It is impossible to date the Cypria. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that the poems of the epic cycle are not necessarily late, and may even pre-date the Homeric texts as we have them. Burgess argues that they developed throughout the Archaic age and were perhaps written down by the end of that period.31 Here we have, then, a myth 31

See Burgess 2001, esp. 8 12. On the role of Thetis in Zeus’ plan in the Cypria and the Iliad, see 137, 149 150.

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that is probably contemporary with the story of Hesiod’s Mestra. The paradigm presented by the myth is now familiar. In both versions of the myth that posit Nemesis as a shape-shifter, she has this ability specifically, and only in the context of avoiding a sexual encounter. In the Cypria, moreover, Nemesis’ resistance is the occasion for a bit of important wordplay, since she is motivated by shame and nemesis, or “indignation.” Her rape by Zeus veers toward an aition for her name, a suggestion of her future identity. In the previous two versions, the young goddess is simply trying to avoid rape by a more powerful male when she shape-shifts. In the story of Thetis we have evidence for a shape-shifting narrative that is more closely tied to the idea of marriage, though not without certain layerings and complications. The story of Thetis as a shape-shifter does not appear in our literary sources earlier than Pindar, and the version in Apollodorus (3.13.5) does not necessarily point to an Archaic source.32 It is useful, however, for its depiction of the typical shape-shifting narrative. In literature Thetis always resents the fact that she has had to marry a mortal, Peleus. In nearly every version (including pottery) she is depicted as struggling against this marriage or the rape that seems to be a prelude to that marriage.33 She does not always shape-shift, but all the stories of her shape-shifting take place in this context. Her shape-shifting always fails to hold Peleus off in the end. While no text explicitly says that the marriage ends her shape-shifting, the ability is never mentioned in any of the later (or earlier) phases of her life. Marriage here is antithetical to metamorphosis. So, in Apollodorus, the story goes: Χείρωνος οὖν ὑποθεμένου Πηλεῖ συλλαβεῖν καὶ κατασχεῖν αὐτὴν μεταμορφουμένην, ἐπιτηρήσας συναρπάζει, γινομένην δὲ ὁτὲ μὲν πῦρ ὁτὲ δὲ ὕδωρ ὁτὲ δὲ θηρίον οὐ πρότερον ἀνῆκε πρὶν ἢ τὴν ἀρχαίαν μορφὴν εἶδεν ἀπολαβοῦσαν. γαμεῖ δὲ ἐν τῷ Πηλίῳ, κἀκεῖ θεοὶ τὸν γάμον εὐωχούμενοι καθύμνησαν. . . . Ὡς δὲ ἐγέννησε Θέτις ἐκ Πηλέως βρέφος . . . .

32

33

Forbes Irving 1990, 181 n. 49, lists the sources for the transformation story. Pindar Nemean 4.62 65 alludes to her transformation into fire and a lion while Peleus held her; the other literary sources are Hellenistic or later. March 1987, 11; Forbes Irving 1990, 182 183. On Thetis’ resentment, see, esp., Iliad 18.433 434.

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And so, Cheiron having advised Peleus to seize her and to hold on to her as she changed forms, he looked out for her and grabbed her, and although she became first fire then water and then a beast, he did not release her until he saw her taking on her original shape. And he married her on Pelion, and there the gods sang the wedding song, feasting. . . . And when Thetis gave birth to a child from Peleus . . . . (3.13.5 6)

The narrative moves swiftly from shape-shifting to marriage to childbirth. Implicit in this narrative structure is the notion that before marriage, Thetis’ identity is not stable; she is shifty. But once Peleus holds her until she returns to her “original shape” (archaia morphê), this instability comes to an end. After marriage, her identity and social role are fixed. Although Apollodorus provides the most cogent narrative of this episode, it is clear that Thetis’ story includes her shape-shifting early in the tradition. Pindar alludes to the shape shifting at Nemean 4, lines 62 68: πῦρ δὲ παγκρατὲς θρασυμαχάνων τε λεόντων ὄνυχας ὀξυτάτους ἀκμάν τε δεινοτάτων σχάσαις ὀδόντων ἔγαμεν ὑψιθρόνων μίαν Νηρεΐδων. εἶδεν δ’ εὔκυκˈλον ἕδραν, τὰν οὐρανοῦ βασιλῆες πόντου τ’ ἐφεζόμενοι δῶρα καὶ κράτος ἐξέφαναν ἐγγενὲς αὐτῶι.

Having put down34 the all powerful fire, and the very sharp claws, and the point of the most terrible teeth of the fiercely fighting lions he (Peleus) married one of the high seated Nereids, and saw the well circled bench sitting in which the rulers of heaven and sea revealed gifts and powerful offspring to him.

While this ode probably belongs to the first quarter of the fifth century, the way in which Pindar alludes to Thetis’ transformation suggests that the narrative of her shape-shifting is already well known. Indeed, were it not so, the mention of fire and lions here would be deeply mysterious. Again, we note that here the shape-shifting is explicitly the prelude to 34

See LSJ σχάζω 7.

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Thetis’ marriage and that once the shape-shifting is over, marriage and a child (presumably, Achilles) follow immediately. More explicit evidence for an early version of Thetis’ transformations and, incidentally, confirmation of her transformation into fire and lions comes from the world of vase painting. As Barringer and March discuss, the capture of Thetis by Peleus is a popular theme on pottery, beginning as early as 650.35 This theme appears with increasing frequency in the mid-sixth century, and becomes quite standard by the end of the black figure period. Numerous pots show Peleus grasping Thetis by the waist, while her transformations are depicted by the presence of small animals (lions, snakes) and/or flames nearby.36 Barringer argues, moreover, that the other iconographic motifs on these vases suggest, if not an actual marriage ceremony, the social transformation enacted by marriage: the fellow-Nereids on the vases look as if they are dancing (not, as is often asserted, running away), and occasionally a palm tree suggests the setting of a sanctuary.37 She concludes that the transformations undertaken by Thetis represent the notion of Thetis as a wild, unfixed entity who must be “tamed” by marriage, a notion to which I will return.38 Also germane to this question of fixing Thetis’ identity are the reasons traditionally given for her marriage to Peleus. There are two versions: in one, Thetis refuses Zeus out of consideration for Hera, and Zeus forces her to marry Peleus as punishment. In the other, Zeus and Poseidon are vying for Thetis’ hand until they are warned (by Themis or Prometheus) that Thetis will produce a child greater than his father. She is then forced to marry Peleus, the best of mortals, in order to safeguard the cosmic order. The first version is evidently the one told in the Cypria and, it appears, in the Hesiodic Catalogue (see fr. 210). The second version is not found explicit until Pindar (cf. Isthmian 8.27 45).39 March, following 35 36

37 38 39

March 1987, 11; Barringer 1995, 69 94. See also Osborne 1998, 19. Barringer 1995, 72, 74. See in particular plate 71 (Munich 1415.WAF), plate 72 (Naples, Museo Nationale H2535), and plate 73 (Naples, Museo Nationale H874 (RC207)), all dating to the last half of the sixth century. Barringer 1995, 84 88. Barringer 1995, 90 94. Also alluded to in [Aeschylus’] Prometheus Bound, 790, 794, 952 954.

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Farnell, argues that the version in Pindar is a late invention, possibly by Pindar himself.40 Mythic variants are notoriously difficult to pin down, however, and it is possible that the Pindaric version belongs to a much earlier date. Laura Slatkin argues that it underlies the role of Thetis in the Iliad. Because Thetis married a mortal and not Zeus, the cosmic order was maintained, and this is the source of Zeus’ obligation to her.41 Slatkin’s reading provides a cogent explanation for the preface to Achilles’ prayer to his mother at Iliad 1.352 4: μῆτερ ἐπεί μ’ ἔτεκές γε μινυνθάδιόν περ ἐόντα,/ τιμήν πέρ μοι ὄφελλεν Ὀλύμπιος ἐγγυαλίξαι/ Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης· (“Mother, since you bore me, although fated to be short-lived, surely high-thundering Olympian Zeus ought to grant me honor”).42 Achilles is mortal because Thetis married a mortal. Hence Zeus owes him (and Thetis) a great favor in return. In the terms of my argument, of course, Thetis and Peleus are hardly a model for a stable marriage. In many versions (including, evidently, the Iliad) Thetis leaves Peleus after the birth of Achilles. But again, the point of the myth is not the establishment of a stable home. Rather, the emphasis is on the fact that Thetis is now identified as the wife of Peleus (and not Zeus or someone else) and, perhaps more important, as the mother of Achilles. Indeed, in a purely abstract reading of the story it is not clear why Zeus should be relieved of concern after Achilles is born; after all, Thetis could sleep with Zeus later, and the prophecy could still come true. But the logic of the myth is focused on the woman’s first childbirth particularly in the case of this child as an event that fixes her identity. In this version of the myth, once she is married to Peleus and produces Achilles, she cannot be married to Zeus.43 Her son will be Achilles, the greatest of mortals, but not (as was Zeus) a divine overthrower of the Father of Gods and Men. Thetis’ story becomes, then, an inverted mirror of typical anxieties about female infidelity: the danger is not that Thetis will cause a deviation 40

41 42 43

March 1987, 8 11, 11 n. 50, and 23. A useful discussion of all the literary and artistic evidence for the various versions can be found in Barringer 1995, 69 74. Slatkin 1991, 97 105. See Slatkin 1991, 102 103. This is true of the other variant as well she married Peleus instead of Zeus but in that version the fixing of her identity does not have the same cosmic implications.

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in the paternal bloodline by sleeping with more than one man, but rather that a single paternal bloodline going through her may be too potent. And again, once the appropriate husband has succeeded in marrying and impregnating her, two things disappear: the threat of her uncontained procreative power and all mention of her shape-shifting. Despite the fact that she seems to maintain a high degree of autonomy after her “marriage” to Peleus, in this one critical aspect Thetis is now under control.44 This, I argue, is the mythical pattern against which we should read the story of Mestra, and here one of the unique features of Hesiod’s version comes into play. In Hesiod’s version of the story, as we saw earlier, Mestra earns her father’s bread by being married, not by being sold. All but the final marriage (to Poseidon), however, are unsuccessful as transitions. After her marriage to Glaukos, Mestra does not separate from her father and integrate herself into the household of her husband, but rather uses her shape-shifting ability to escape and return to her mother’s side. As Vernant has argued, Archaic Greek myth posits women as the “mobile element” in marriage, and the moment of transference from one household to the next is fraught with the possibility of disruption.45 A new wife is a stranger in her husband’s home and must be carefully integrated into his oikos. In the stories of female shapeshifting, we see this instability written on the body: the woman literally becomes something else just before or, in the case of Mestra, at the moment of marriage. Structurally, her physical transformations of self are an attempt to avoid the social transformation of self that is marriage, and she must be held tightly, or bound, until she can be led through the proper transformation. Mestra’s motivation for avoiding marriage is not that of Thetis, Mêtis, or Nemesis; I return to this in the next section. But like these three goddesses, Mestra changes shape in order to avoid the transition that

44

45

Unfortunately, we cannot tell if the story of Peleus’ marriage to Thetis in the Catalogue contained a version of her shape shifting avoidance techniques. March has argued, however, that Hesiod told the story of Peleus in considerable detail, including the story of the wedding. For a full reconstruction of the story of Peleus in the Catalogue, see March 1987, 19 20. Vernant 1983, 133 134, 141 142.

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marriage would bring about.46 Like the struggles of Thetis and Mêtis, in particular, her shape-shifting is not only the means to avoid matrimony but is emblematic of that avoidance.47 Like Thetis struggling against her captor, Mestra simply will not stay fixed as a wife. Eventually, it appears, her trickery is found out and she is forced to return to Glaukos’ household (51 54). But even then it seems that she maintains a somewhat liminal status. We are given the crucial detail that she does not produce children with her husband. As King has argued, ancient Greek culture viewed childbirth as an important step in female development, without which a woman was not quite complete.48 Immediately after we learn that Mestra did not produce children with Glaukos, however, we hear of a final, more successful marriage (or, at least, transformation): καὶ τὴν μέν ῥ’ ἐδάμασσε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθ[ων τῆλ’ ἀπὸ πατρὸς ἑοῖο φέρων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόν[τον ἐν Κόωι ἀ[μ]φιρύτηι καίπερ πολύιδριν ἐοῦσα[ν· ἔνθα τέκ’ Εὐρύπυλον πολέων ἡγήτορα λαῶ[ν Κω. . .α γείνατο παῖδα βίην ὑπέροπλον ἔ [χοντα. τοῦ δ’ υἱεῖς Χάλκων τε καὶ Ἀνταγόρης ἐγένο[ντο.

And then the earth shaker Poseidon tamed her, carrying her far from her father on the wine dark sea, In Kos, surrounded by water, although she was very clever. There she bore Eurypylos, leader of many people, Ko . . . she bore, a child possessing overbearing violence. Of this one were born the sons Chalchôn and Antagores. . . .

46

47

48

(55 60)

Forbes Irving does not consider Mestra a “true” shape shifter, because her transformations do not come in rapid succession in one episode (Forbes Irving 1990, 173). As I argue below, however, her transformations take place in the same context as that of other female shape shifters. Barringer 1995, 93, suggests a similar notion with regard to Thetis: “the physical transformations that Thetis undergoes represent the taming and trans formation of the wild virgin, the wild animal, into a docile and willing bride.” I argue instead that these transformations prefigure, but are antithetical to, Thetis’ eventual transformation into a bride. King 1983, 121 124.

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This narrative is more than a simple instance of divine rape. Gods frequently rape young women (virtually always resulting in pregnancy) in myth, and then move on with little or no future regard for either the woman or the resulting offspring. There are some reasons to view this abduction in the context of marriage, however. First is the narrative situation, in which Poseidon’s “taming” of Mestra takes place immediately after we hear of the failed marriage of Glaukos. Perhaps more important is the fact that Poseidon does not leave Mestra in Athens, but takes her over the sea to the island of Kos, where she evidently spends some time. This movement corresponds to a bride’s transition to her husband’s home. Finally, the use of the word damao (“tame”) calls to mind a standard image in wedding stories, as Forbes Irving notes.49 A woman who has never been married is likened to a dangerously undomesticated animal. Once tamed, she can be part of a civilized household; so here, the emphasis is on Mestra’s transformation. This bride has proven unusually difficult to manage, but at this point in the narrative she is “tamed.” Indeed, Poseidon has little trouble with Mestra: in five swift lines, the god takes this most problematic of brides far overseas, and she bears a distinguished son for him. Although there is no explicit mention of a struggle against Poseidon, one may be buried in line 57, kaiper poluidrin eousan (“although she was very clever”).50 A similar line is used of Mêtis in fragment 343.4 6: αὐτὰρ ὅ γ’ Ὠκεανοῦ καὶ Τηθύος ἠυκόμοιο κούρηι νόσφ’ Ἥρης παρελέξατο καλλιπαρήου ἐξαπαφὼν Μῆτιν καίπερ πολύιδριν ἐοῦσαν·

But he [Zeus] lay with the daughter of Ocean and fair haired Tethys apart from Hera with the beautiful cheeks, deceiving Mêtis although she was very clever.

In both of these myths, the god’s final, successful rape/seduction of the goddess takes place after some sort of battle of wits. Metamorphoses may 49

50

Forbes Irving 1990, 190. See further Sourvinou Inwood 1987, passim; King 1983, 111. Barbara Gold points out that this line may refer only to Mestra’s past cleverness, and not to a struggle at the time of her rape by Poseidon.

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or may not be involved. But in any case, the end of the struggle is simultaneous with the act of sex and production of a child.51 Curiously, that is nearly all. These stories end quickly and move on to other subjects (a child, the child’s exploits). Once again, it is important to take note of what the text does not say, apparently does not need to say: that after this we will hear no more of Mestra’s shape-shifting. That was a feature of her unmarried life, even as it was what enabled her to remain unmarried. Now that she has been successfully “tamed” by a male figure and has produced a child (significantly, also male), her instability as a parthenos has been overcome, and her identity as gunê and matêr fixed. I have been arguing that these sorts of myths work in a certain way when the subject of the myth is a woman. It will be instructive to look, for comparison, at those myths that concern male shape-shifters. In the Catalogue we have a fairly lengthy fragment about a little-known shape-shifter, Periklymenos (fr. 33a).52 An unusual hero, Periklymenos changes into an eagle, an ant, a swarm of bees, and a terrible snake (33a.14 17). Eventually, however, Athena and Herakles team up to end his aristeia, and he is killed despite his powers (33a.22 36). The notable aspect of Periklymenos’ shape-shifting for us is that it seems to hold no particular social resonance. It is merely an attribute, one that is useful on the field of battle but eventually fails him. A more pointed example is the famous story of Proteus, already well known in the Odyssey (4.351ff.) and popular throughout Greek and Roman literature. In the Homeric version, Menelaos tells Telemachos that he was instructed by Proteus’ daughter to sneak up on the old man and hold him tight while he went through his repertoire of forms: animals, fire, water. When Proteus “himself” (autos, 420) spoke, assuming the same form that he had when he was sleeping, then Menelaos could release him and listen to what he had to say. Here we see a defeat similar to that of Thetis (above), whose loss in a wrestling contest with Peleus was marked by a return to her original form. Having become too tired to shape-shift, Proteus is forced to assume his “real” identity. 51

52

The next lines of the story of Mêtis detail Zeus’ act of swallowing her, followed by the birth of Athena. Briefly discussed by Forbes Irving 1990, 180 181. For a fuller discussion of this hero, see now Ziogas 2013, 211 217.

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Although the form of this story closely resembles that of Thetis, however, the meanings of these two myths divide, again, along gender lines. For a male shape-shifter like Proteus, defeat means that he will give his captor information. Speaking as himself, he can be trusted implicitly; he is “ever-truthful” (nêmertês in line 542). In other words, the assumption of his true identity is emblematic of the truth that he will produce. When a female shape-shifter like Thetis or Mestra is defeated, “becoming herself” means that she can be married and that she will produce children rather than discourse. As Bergren notes in her study of women in the earlier Hesiodic poems, it is crucial that these children be “true.”53 Here, I argue that truth is represented and guaranteed by the fixing of the woman’s identity, marked by the end of her shape-shifting.

PUTTING MESTRA IN CONTEXT: MARRIAGE IN SIXTH-CENTURY ATHENS

Women in Greek myth often seek to avoid marriage. Their reasons vary: sometimes the suitor is strange and horrible to the frightened young bride, as is the case for Persephone or Deianeira. Sometimes, as is the case for Thetis, the husband is far below her in social rank and thus despicable. In the case of Mestra, her unwillingness to marry is directly tied to her dedication to her starving father. She will not be married because she will not leave her father’s household. Each of these reasons, related in myth, represents a different historical and social reality. Helene Foley has argued, for example, that the story of Persephone’s marriage in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter represents contemporary tensions concerning the move from exogamy to endogamy in Archaic Greece.54 I would argue for a similar interpretation of the Thetis myth, her disgust at marrying a mortal a coded preference for marriage within social groups. The myth of Mestra clearly revolves around a different set of tensions, namely, anxieties concerning a young woman’s loyalties to both

53

54

Bergren 1983, 75, 78. In the just city, Hesiod notes, children will resemble their fathers (Works and Days, 235). Foley 1994, 104 112.

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husband and father.55 Bluntly, this is a question of both property and identity: to whom does Mestra belong? And more basically, who is she, Aithôn’s daughter or Glaukos’ wife? In the tragedies of Classical Athens anxieties over these questions are readily apparent: Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra both center on daughters who cannot or will not marry because of their devotion to their paternal families. The daughters of Danaos kill their husbands on their wedding night in obedience to their father’s orders, dramatized in Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy. Indeed, as Seaford has shown, the tension between marital family and natal family is an almost constant feature of marriage myths, dramatized particularly in Athens but common to myths from all over the Greek world.56 I suggest that these issues developed particular resonance during the period when the Hesiodic Catalogue was taking its final written form and that we should read Mestra’s shape-shifting and eventual, miraculous marriage to Poseidon against this specific historical background. In the previous chapters, we discussed briefly some of the legislation ascribed to Solon and its effects on the developing notion of citizenship in sixth-century Athens. As I discussed in the previous chapter, it is clear that among his reforms were several laws regarding rights of inheritance. These laws had several effects, including the creation of a means (through adoption) for continuing an individual household in the event that a man had no natural sons and the institution of categories of sons with inheritance rights (gnêsioi) and sons without those rights (nothoi). Solon is also generally credited with passing laws 55

56

Irwin 2005a, 67 73, argues that the story of Mestra may have influenced the narrative of Peisistratos’ marriage to the daughter of Megakles, and sees here a comment on the negative results of marriage for personal profit, rather than according to aristocratic values. The difficulty with this interpretation, however, is that the marriage of Megakles’ daughter fails because of Peisistratos’ sexual mistreatment of his wife. It is essential to the story of Mestra that her marriage fails because of her dedication to her father. Seaford 1990; see 166 168 for examples (in the Euripidean corpus) of daughters who are loyal to their fathers to the detriment of their husbands. For the general theme, see also Gould 1980; Ormand 1999, 9 18. Seaford 1994, 211, suggests that the Classical structure of marriage “may also have magnified the contra diction in the loyalty of the wife between natal and marital family.”

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concerning the epiklêros, and it is this institution that I take as a key to understanding the Hesiodic myth of Mestra.57 It is possible to reconstruct the status of the epiklêros in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries from citations in legal speeches (sometimes attributing the law to Solon), particularly those of Isaeus and Demosthenes. A woman was an epiklêros if her father died without natural-born sons. In that case, the family property would be transferred with the woman on marriage, under the condition that she was to marry her kurios, a male relative generally from the paternal line.58 In this way, the paternal property would stay in the family; as a number of commentators have suggested, the institution seems designed to ensure the continuation of each paternal oikos in Athens.59 Perhaps surprisingly, it appears that the law in Classical Athens allowed a man to claim a woman as an epiklêros even if she was already married to someone else.60 A passage from Isaeus 3.64 makes this explicit: Τὰς μὲν ὑπὸ τῶν πατέρων ἐκδοθείσας καὶ συνοικούσας ἀνδράσι γυναῖκας περὶ ὧν τίς ἂν ἄμεινον ἢ ὁ πατὴρ βουλεύσαιτο;

καὶ τὰς οὕτω δοθείσας, ἐὰν ὁ πατὴρ

αὐτῶν τελευτήσῃ μὴ καταλιπὼν αὐταῖς γνησίους ἀδελφούς, τοῖς ἐγγύτατα γένους ἐπιδίκους ὁ νόμος εἶναι κελεύει, καὶ πολλοὶ συνοικοῦντες ἤδη ἀφῄρηνται τὰς ἑαυτῶν γυναῖκας.

And as for those women who, having been given away by their fathers, and being married to husbands (concerning whom, who would take more careful consideration than her father?), even those who have been given in marriage in this way, should

57

58

59 60

For this reason it would be convenient if the Catalogue reached its final form in Athens in the sixth century, as suggested by West (see Chapter 1). Even if the Catalogue poet is not Attic, however, the poem may be reflecting social trends that are seen across Greece at this time. See the full discussion in Harrison 1968, 9 11, 133; Cox 1998, 94 99; Patterson 1998, 91 103. Harrison 1968, 11; Vernant 1983, 142 146; Just 1989, 98. See the discussion in Harrison 1968, 11 12; Just 1989, 96. Patterson 1998, 256 n. 70, believes that a woman in such a situation would not necessarily have needed to divorce and remarry, citing Isaeus 10.19. She would be required to divorce only if she chose to sue for the full estate.

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their father die, not leaving them gnêsios brothers [i.e., sons with full inheritance rights], the law orders them to be contested (epidikos) by those closest in kinship, and many men, being married, have already lost their own wives (in this way).

What this meant for the husband of a citizen woman, then, is that his wife was never fully “his.” Indeed, in various ways she continued to belong to her paternal family.61 In particular, when push came to shove in cases of inheritance, and when there was no other way to continue the paternal bloodline, she was found to belong to her father and not her husband. So much can be said with confidence for the Classical period. What of the sixth century? It is difficult to specify exactly what the Solonian law on epiklêroi was. Although Aristotle speaks of “the law on inheritable land (klêroi) and epiklêroi” (Ath. Pol. 9.2), and Plutarch records a number of laws which he finds “strange and laughable” regarding a husband’s sexual duties to his epikleros-wife (Solon, 20.2 7), no single text lays out the law as I have described it. We do, however, have a law quoted by Demosthenes that assumes the structure described above and that is generally agreed to be Archaic, and possibly Solonian. F 48b, cited at Demosthenes 46.14, reads as follows: Ἣν ἂν ἐγγυήσῃ ἐπὶ δικαίοις δάμαρτα εἶναι ἢ πατὴρ ἢ ἀδελφὸς ὁμοπάτωρ ἢ πάππος ὁ πρὸς πατρός, ἐκ ταύτης εἶναι παῖδας γνησίους. ἐὰν δὲ μηδεὶς ᾖ τούτων, ἐὰν μὲν ἐπίκληρός τις ᾖ, τὸν κύριον ἔχειν, ἐὰν δὲ μὴ ᾖ, ὅτῳ ἂν ἐπιτρέψῃ, τοῦτον κύριον εἶναι.

Whatever bride is betrothed according to the law, either by a father, or by a brother from the same father, or by a paternal grandfather, from such a bride come gnêsioi sons (i.e., sons with full inheritance). But if none of these relatives exists, and if she is an epiklêros, her guardian (kurios) is to marry her; if not, whomever she entrusts herself to, that one is to be her guardian.

The law as stated is not about marriage, but rather about how to produce sons with inheritance rights. It presumes, however, the institution of the epiklêros in stating that the offspring of an epiklêros and her kurios will be gnêsios. Significantly, the law looks to be genuinely Archaic.62 In particular, the word damar is not used in prose after the sixth century, 61

62

Wolff 1944, esp. 48 53. Wolff has been followed in this observation by most scholars of the Athenian family. See, e.g., Harrison 1968, 5; Seaford 1994, 207; Ogden 1996, 38.

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and the curiously nonparallel logic of the three provisions of the law suggests Archaic origin. The story of Mestra has nothing to do with inheritance, and I do not mean to suggest in any way that the Hesiodic narrative is a reaction to or reflection of the laws just discussed. Rather, I argue that the laws and Hesiod’s text are reacting to the same social pressures. That is, as the concept of citizenship begins to develop in sixth-century Athens, we see increasing concerns at the level of the polis and its laws for the continuation of each individual oikos. Implicit in this concern is a question of women’s identity: Do they belong to their fathers or their husbands? The law on epiklêroi answers this question in a “boundary condition” test. If there are no brothers, and the father dies, the woman belongs to the paternal line. The story of Mestra, on the other hand, investigates the division of loyalty from a husband’s perspective. Underlying Mestra’s trickery is the serious social question: How is a husband successfully to separate his wife from her father and integrate his wife into his household? This formulation also sheds some light on one of the more confusing aspects of the myth. As we have seen, Mestra marries Glaukos. But when she returns to Aithôn’s home, and Sisyphos comes to claim her, the ruling that is made treats the marital transaction as a purely economic one.63 In light of these problematic lines it is important to note again that, in Hesiod’s narrative, Mestra brings in goods through marriage (hedna), in contrast to every other extant version of the myth. Several aspects of diction guarantee that we are looking at a marriage here, in addition to the general context of the Catalogue: Mestra is described with epithets fitting for a parthenos (helikôpida kallipareon, “glancing eyed, fair cheeked”). Alochon thumare’ (“delightful wife,” 20) suggests a bride;64

63

64

Casanova 1978, 33 35, discusses this tension. He suggests that Sisyphos tries to recover Mestra according to a law about fugitive slaves similar to the one in the law code of Gortyn. While Casanova is correct to note the conflict of two systems here (matrimonial and commercial), his interpretation of Sisyphos’ justification strikes me as far fetched. The phrase appears twice in Homeric epic: it is applied to Penelope as Odysseus embraces her (just after their passionate recognition scene), Odyssey 23.232; Achilles applies it to Briseis at Iliad 9.336 where, arguably, Achilles is treating her as an object of personal affection rather than a captured slave.

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the verb agesthai (“to lead,” 20) is standard for weddings. The word hedna (21) always refers to wedding gifts.65 We have some evidence though it must be approached with caution that at the time of this poem there was a growing concern that marriage should not be viewed as a purely economic transaction. Romanticizing, Plutarch ascribes this motivation to Solon: τῶν δ’ ἄλλων γάμων ἀφεῖλε τὰς φερνάς, ἱμάτια τρία καὶ σκεύη μικροῦ τιμήματος ἄξια κελεύσας, ἕτερον δὲ μηδέν, ἐπιφέρεσθαι τὴν γαμουμένην. οὐ γὰρ ἐβούλετο μισθοφόρον οὐδ’ ὤνιον εἶναι τὸν γάμον, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ τεκνώσει καὶ χάριτι καὶ φιλότητι γίνεσθαι τὸν ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς συνοικισμόν.

And from all other marriages he removed wedding gifts, ordering a bride to bring three cloaks and furnishings of small value, but nothing else. For he did not wish marriage to be a matter of gain or profit, but that a man and woman living together should be for the sake of childbearing, and kind feeling, and affection. (Solon 20.6)66

We need not take Plutarch’s moralizing at face value here. Solon may well not have cared about affection between husband and wife. But his laws do clearly indicate a concern for the bringing forth of gnêsios (“legitimate”) children and for formulating ways to continue each paternal bloodline. Another law cited by Plutarch in this same passage requires the husband of an epiklêros to have intercourse with her three times monthly (Solon 20.4 = F 51a), presumably in the interest of producing gnêsioi heirs. Since these inheritance laws become a civic issue at just this time, these objectives may have been in tension with aristocratic arrangements of marriage, in which aristocratic women might have been married outside their polis, with more regard for class structure than civic membership.67 In the case of Mestra, however, Sisyphos clearly petitions on economic terms; the ruling of Athena in lines 41 43 indicates some sort of 65 66 67

On hedna, see Chapter 2. The first sentence is part of Ruschenbusch F 52a. Casanova 1978 sees this story, similarly, in an “epoca di transizione,” though he sees the transition in economic terms, when the rules concerning the return of purchased property were in flux (37 38). See Duplouy 2006, Chapter 2, for a full discussion of marriage and negotiations of status in Archaic and Classical Athens.

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revaluation after the initial exchange.68 It appears that Sisyphos wins the petition, but here he proves himself too clever by half. Ironically, the more strictly economic the exchange is, the less socially secure a transaction becomes. In effect, Sisyphos’ petition has transformed his son’s marriage to Mestra into the short-term transactional order: items that are bought and sold can be bought and sold again. What Sisyphos should want is not a better bargain but a transaction more carefully bound by the social rules of the long-term transactional order, so that Mestra will stay his son’s wife rather than becoming (again) her father’s daughter. This failure of comprehension is borne out by the story’s conclusion. By treating his son’s marriage to Mestra as a sale, Sisyphos wins the immediate court case, but we learn in the line immediately following that Mestra would not bear sons for Glaukos.69 She will not be the means of continuing Sisyphos’ bloodline (51 54). Nor, apparently, will she stay with Glaukos, though the story does not waste even a single line on her removal from his household.70 Why is Glaukos’ marriage a failure? The successful abductionmarriage to the god Poseidon that immediately follows this episode offers several clues, pointing again to the tension between husband and father. Before Poseidon makes Mestra pregnant, we learn that he took her across the sea to the island of Kos, “far from her father” (56), and it is this journey as much as the coupling with Poseidon that Mestra seems to resist (“although she was very clever,” 57). To get this transition to work, Mestra must first be removed far from the influence of Aithôn, and then she can safely begin bearing children.71 68

69

70

71

On the translation of these lines, see Appendix B. I suspect that this text is meant to be funny two of the world’s cleverest men arguing about money when what is at stake is the continuation of Sisyphos’ bloodline (54). Part of the effect of this blunt economic treatment is to render marriage even less stable than otherwise. This passage, then, supports the thesis of Irwin 2005a that the Catalogue is, in part, critical of valuations of nobility (agathoi) that depend on wealth rather than birth. See, esp., 62 64. As Casanova 1978 points out, Poseidon takes her far from her father (55), not from Glaukos. Glaukos is evidently not a threat. Seaford 1990, 152 153, discusses the need for a bride’s separation from her family and points to Plutarch’s Moralia 271d, where we learn that in Boiotia, the axle of the cart that carried the bride to her new home was burnt after the wedding, indicating the need for her to stay put.

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Indeed, her child-bearing follows in the very next line.72 Hesiod’s text, then, is a normative one: in order to fix a woman’s identity in marriage, she must be separated from her father and impregnated as soon as possible. Bearing children is what matters in marriage, and here Poseidon proves himself a superior suitor. Once she is pregnant with his child, Mestra’s identity stays fixed, just as the paternal bloodline will be fixed with the birth of an heir. Myths, moreover, are able to resolve social tensions in ways that law courts are not. When a mortal (or semi-mortal) woman produces a child with a god, the child has a convenient double parentage. Herakles is the son of both Amphytrion and of Zeus; normally, such a situation would be disastrous, creating a conflict because the son does not legitimately continue the paternal bloodline. But in this case, the hero’s illegitimacy, because it comes from a god, confirms his worth, and the hero, paradoxically, benefits from the fact that he is not gnêsios.73 We see a similarly convenient resolution at the end of Mestra’s story. Let us look at the final lines of Mestra’s narrative: Μήστρη δὲ προ]λιποῦσα Κόων ποτὶ πατρίδα γαῖαν νηῒ θοῆι ἐπέρ]ησ’ ἱερέων ποτὶ γουνὸν Ἀθηνέων

[ [

72

73

ἐ]πεὶ τέκε παῖδα Ποσειδάωνι ἄνακτι. αἰν]όμορον πατέρα ὃν πορσαίνεσκεν.

It is a vexed question whether, in Classical Athens, an epiklêros could be made to marry her nearest relative if she had already borne her husband a male child. Harrison 1968, 309 311, believes that she could not. Just 1989, 96, thinks that she could. Cox 1998, 95 96, points out that in several cases, a father who had no sons circumvented this possibility while still alive by marrying his daughter to an outsider before dying and adopting his grandson. We have insufficient evidence either way, and I suspect that the situation does not come up because it would be socially more difficult to enforce an epidikasia in such circumstances. If bearing children made a woman ineligible to be claimed as an epiklêros, then this is an exact parallel for the situation in Hesiod’s story: once having borne children, the woman’s marriage is secure. Aristophanes’ Birds 1155 is just one of many ancient texts that play comically with the suggestion that Herakles is a nothos. I discuss the birth of Herakles in the Catalogue in Chapter 6.

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Mestra, leaving Kos for her fatherland in a swift ship crossed to the hill of sacred Athens, . . . when she had borne a child to king Poseidon. . . . her ill fated father whom she continued caring for.

At the conclusion of this narrative, it appears that Mestra does return to Athens. But this return home is structurally different from that after her marriage to Glaukos. The narrative is ordered such that the child she bore to Poseidon is, in some, unclear connection, thrust into the middle of the homecoming story. Most important of all, we learn that she “continued to care for her ill-fated father,” but the iterative form (porsainesken) seems to refer only to ongoing, normal care, not to repeated marriages and transformation. Here Mestra’s transition to the status of mother is abnormally unproblematic: though the point of her marriage to Poseidon has been a successful separation from her paternal family, here she is able to both bear a child to Poseidon and remain in her natal oikos. Her child, presumably, will also be considered a continuation of Aithôn’s line. The rupture from her paternal family that marriage normally entails is here circumvented. In Mestra’s case, the usual difficulty appears to be avoided because there is no mortal husband for her father to contend with. Just as Herakles’ divine parent counts (he is the son of Zeus) and does not count (that fact should make him a nothos, an illegitimate son, but it does not), Poseidon both counts as Mestra’s husband (he successfully impregnated her) and does not (he does not threaten her dedication to her father). Here in the world of myth, the real social problem of an epiklêros achieves a utopian resolution.74 Once again, the typical structure of the myth comes into play in these final lines as well. As was the case for Thetis, Nemesis, and Mêtis, once Mestra has given birth to Poseidon’s child, we hear no further mention of her abilities as a shape-shifter. She continues to care for her father, but not, at least not in the narrative, through further magical 74

We might also adduce in the context the example of Kreusa, from Euripides’ Ion. Raped by Apollo as a young girl, she produces a son who, in the course of Euripides’ play, comes to be accepted as the legitimate son of Kreusa and Xuthus, and so the heir to the kingship of Athens. For discussion, see Loraux 1993, 184 236.

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transformations. Having given birth, her essential identity is fixed, and at the same moment all anxieties about her familial loyalties simply melt away. I have suggested a specific historical background for this version of a particular myth. As Athenian citizenship developed, I argue, women’s status as citizen brides began to become more crucial: it became increasingly important for fathers who might have no sons, or whose sons might die in battle to maintain some tie to their daughters, so that individual oikoi could always be preserved.75 In such a time, the “divided loyalty” that Mestra initially embodies would necessarily become more problematic. And equally problematic indeed, really just the other side of that coin would be the need for mobile, marriageable women whose identities could nonetheless be made secure. This is obviously a paradox: in a state where citizen-women’s names could not be spoken in court, women’s identities would always seem a bit shifty. We see, therefore, a series of attempts to control this radical instability of character and of identification, some at the level of law and others at the level of poetic discourse. From this confluence of social forces, I suggest, comes both the epiklerate and the Hesiodic telling of the story of Mestra.

75

See Patterson 1998, 65, for an argument from historical evidence that elite families would have been increasingly concerned with lineage in the emerging democracy.

4 Atalanta Reflects the Iliad

In the previous two chapters I have argued that the Catalogue interacted in specific ways with political and social currents in the Archaic Greek world. In the next two chapters, I shift focus and analyze some passages in which the Catalogue appears to interact intertextually with other Archaic hexameter poetry. As I discussed earlier, such interaction does not presuppose that the final redactor of the Catalogue had a text of, for example, Homer’s Iliad in front of him as he composed. Rather, I believe that the poems of Homer, the Theogony, and the Works and Days, as well as the Cyclic epics, were composed in performance, drawing on a common reservoir of well-known mythic and linguistic material. Given this scenario, it becomes possible to see the Catalogue as drawing on, and obliquely referring to, material that had already become associated with other heroic tales and specific epics. As will become clear in this chapter, I tend to read the Catalogue as responding to the Iliad and Odyssey, rather than the other way around. In truth, if we assume a “fluid performance tradition” (to borrow Burgess’ phrase) that draws on traditional material predating any of the hexameter poetry’s emergence into written form, it is quite possible that influence went in both directions. In other words, I cannot rule out the possibility that a performer of the Iliad also drew on material from a proto-Catalogue in creating unique and particularly moving scenes in that epic.1 But two 1

So Tsagalis 2008 argues that the Iliad self consciously responds to, and excludes the possibility of, the romantic Achilles of the Cyclic epics. Burgess 2004, 4 5, similarly argues that the Iliad and Odyssey depend on, and greatly expand, material from the Cyclic epics. 119

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considerations seem to me to obviate the necessity of analyzing crossfertilization in both directions at once. First, I believe that the Iliad and Odyssey had been written down and were largely (if not completely) fixed in form by the time of the final redaction of the Catalogue.2 Second, when looking at instances of “motif transference” (again, borrowing Burgess’ useful terminology), it seems to me that the Catalogue has more to gain by referring to the Iliad than the Iliad does by invoking stories from the Catalogue. In other words, the stories that we encounter in the Catalogue do not, in themselves, have the deep poetic resonance that, by the sixth century, the story of the Trojan War did. By recalling a moment from that well-known epic, the poet of the Catalogue creates an amplitude of meaning that would, perhaps, be otherwise lacking in the narrative. This does not mean, of course, that these moments of interaction with the text of the Iliad whether we think of that as an oral tradition or an already written version leave the latter epic untouched. Any good intertextual reading should cause us to also reconsider the passage that is referred to in the “original” text and to take into account the new implications and resonances that have been created by the performance of the later, referring text. My focus in these chapters, however, is primarily on the meaning that is produced in the Catalogue by these intertexts.

ATALANTA IN THE CATALOGUE AND WIDER GREEK MYTH

Atalanta is the quintessential liminal figure in Greek myth: as a young woman, she participates in masculine activities, all of which have initiatory overtones (for men). In an effort to perpetually avoid marriage, she forces her suitors to compete with her in a footrace with potentially deadly consequences, and when she eventually loses, this event forces her 2

This is a hotly debated topic. On the gradual fixing of the Homeric text, see, e.g., Nagy 1996; Janko 1998; Graziosi 2002; Burgess 2004; Tsagalis 2008, xi xxv; Jensen 2011, ch. 7. Jensen in particular argues for a written version of the Iliad and Odyssey relatively early in the tradition. For a specific argument about the relatively late development of specific episodes in the Iliad and Odyssey pertaining to the story of Nestor, see Frame 2009.

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own transition to the role of gunê, wife. She seems, in other words, to represent both the female “other” with whom young men must have an encounter in their own transitional rites and the female self who must give up an androgynous adolescence in order to become an adult woman. All of these elements are present in the version of Atalanta that we find in the Catalogue, but the poet of the Catalogue also chose to present the story of Atalanta’s marriage in a radically different context. The most astonishing aspect of the narrative about Atalanta in the Catalogue of Women is the highly literary way that it interacts with the story of Achilles and Hector in the Iliad. Though the erotic elements in the relationship between Achilles and Hector have, to some extent, been explored, the Catalogue brings the subtext to the foreground; the episode creates in Atalanta an eroticized version of Achilles.3 Though curiously masculine in her abilities, through this intertextual narrative Atalanta also becomes the ideal bride, rewriting for a moment the inevitable violence inherent in Achilles’ destruction of Hector. Achilles’ ferocity in battle is turned into a wild but transitory resistance to marriage, and his swiftness of foot is, in this story, allowed to give way to the gifts of Aphrodite.4 As in all intertexts, however, it is not only that the Catalogue draws from the Iliad; the Atalanta narrative in the Catalogue rereads the Iliad, and in so doing underlines the erotic possibilities in that text, highlighting what must ultimately be suppressed in order to maintain the narrative trajectory of the Catalogue that ends with the war at Troy. Properly speaking, Atalanta belongs to the generation of heroes and heroines before that of Achilles and his comrades at Troy. Some sources suggest that there are two different Atalantas: the Arcadian daughter of Iasos and the Boeotian daughter of Schoeneos. These two heroines, however, are often conflated, and at various times each is said to participate in mythical events such as the Calydonian boar hunt, without any 3

4

See, e.g., MacCary 1976, esp. 137 148; Van Nortwick 2001. Van Nortwick points out that in Iliad 22 it is Hector who imagines, briefly, a more feminine mode of life for himself than the death on the battlefield he faces with Achilles. As I was finishing this chapter, I learned of the work of Ziogas 2011, who has anticipated my reading in several respects. I am grateful to Prof. Ziogas for sharing his article with me in pre published form (I cite from the published version here).

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suggestion that two Atalantas are present;5 some scholars have suggested that there was originally only one Atalanta, whose story was split across two genealogies and then recombined later.6 In all of the myths surrounding (either) Atalanta, however, two elements remain consistent: she participates alongside young men in traditionally masculine activities, and there is an erotic relationship, either implicit or explicit, with some of those young men. There are three major events in the narratives of Atalanta: she participates in the Calydonian boar hunt; she wrestles with Peleus at the funeral games of Pelias; and she engages her suitors in a deadly footrace, in which the suitors who lose are killed, and only the one who wins can marry her. In an important and perceptive article, Judith Barringer argues that in each of these stories, Atalanta plays a double role. On the one hand, she imitates the young men who surround her and, as a liminal figure, engages in the kind of initiation rituals that were undergone by Athenian ephebes.7 Her experience seems to stand in for that of the young men, whose assumption of full masculinity depends on the successful completion of these rites. At the same time, Atalanta is not a typical male ephebe; she can become only an adult woman. Thus, she brings to each of these episodes a dangerous and disruptive element of sexual tension and is herself the object of men’s desire. Eventually, Atalanta is “tamed” by marriage, not as an ephebe but as a young woman.8 As far as we can tell from extant fragments, Atalanta appears in the Catalogue only as the daughter of Schoeneos and only in the narrative of her 5

6

7 8

Both Atalantas are said separately to participate in the hunt by Apollodorus; see Apollodorus 1.8.2 and 3.9.2. See Barringer 1996, 48 49, for a useful summary of versions and scholarly treatments of them. For a detailed listing of the Classical sources, see pp. 48 49, nn. 2 and 3. The major literary works, in addition to frs. 72 76 of Hesiod, are Apollodorus 1.8.2 3 (Calydonian boar hunt) and 3.9.2 (marriage race); Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.560 707 (marriage race); and Hyginus, Fabulae 174 (Calydonian boar hunt) and 185 (marriage race). Barringer’s work is especially useful for the detailed analysis of the treatment of Atalanta on vase painting, evidence that has otherwise been largely ignored. See also Scanlon 2002, ch. 7, for a detailed discussion of the visual evidence as it relates to Greek athletics. See Barringer 1996, esp. 56 58, 69 70. Barringer 1996, 50. See also Scanlon 2002, 178.

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marriage race.9 The very meager fragments dealing with Meleager and the story of the Calydonian boar hunt do not mention her, though so little remains of this story that nothing definitive can be said about the participants in the hunt in the Catalogue.10 Textual versions of her wrestling match with Peleus are scanty, in any case, and this does not appear to be part of her story in the Hesiodic text. Nonetheless, a brief analysis of Atalanta’s role in the other two myths will help make the Catalogue’s treatment of her footrace particularly clear. There are several aspects of the Calydonian boar hunt that mark it as an initiatory hunt: in most vase-paintings of the event, the young men are beardless and “nude except for a chlamys.”11 It is, moreover, Meleager’s first hunt in most versions of the narrative, and one “in which he participates in the company of heroes and his maternal uncles.”12 Atalanta’s physical person is marked in narratives of this hunt by various forms of otherness, appearing often as either a maenad or an Amazon. As Barringer points out, the hunt goes terribly wrong for the supposed initiate, Meleager: he kills one of his uncles, and ends up dead himself. Atalanta, on the other hand, appears as a quintessentially successful initiate: she is the first to strike the boar (though with an arrow) and is awarded the animal’s pelt as a result.13 This last event, however, also introduces the problem with Atalanta’s participation in the hunt, namely, that she is an erotic object for Meleager as well as a hunting subject alongside him. In the body of Greek myth, Atalanta’s participation in the Calydonian boar hunt does not appear to be necessarily an erotic moment. On many black-figure vases, she simply appears as one of the members of the hunt, distinguished by her white skin and the fact that she often (though not always) hunts with a bow and arrow rather than a spear.14 At some point in the narrative tradition, however, Meleager and Atalanta become 9

10 11 12 13 14

Curiously, in Theognis 1283 1294, we are led to believe that we will hear a narrative of her race, but in that poem, that narrative is replaced by the story of Atalanta living alone in an uncharted wilderness until she is eventually married. See Ormand 2013. On the hunt in the Catalogue, see March 1987, 41 42. Barringer 1996, 57. Barringer 1996, 58 and n. 50. Barringer 1996, 61; see Apollodorus 1.8.2 3. Barringer 1996, figs. 1 17b.

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erotically intertwined perhaps no earlier than Euripides’ lost play Meleager.15 They are clearly so involved in Apollodorus’ version, where Meleager’s love for Atalanta destroys the solidarity of the men on the hunt and leads indirectly to Meleager’s death: Μελέαγρος δὲ αὐτὸν εἰς τὸν κενεῶνα πλήξας ἀπέκτεινε, καὶ λαβὼν τὸ δέρας ἔδωκεν Ἀταλάντῃ. οἱ δὲ Θεστίου παῖδες, ἀδοξοῦντες εἰ παρόντων ἀνδρῶν γυνὴ τὰ ἀριστεῖα λήψεται, τὸ δέρας αὐτῆς ἀφείλοντο, κατὰ γένος αὑτοῖς προσήκειν λέγοντες, εἰ Μελέαγρος λαμβάνειν μὴ προαιροῖτο. ὀργισθεὶς δὲ Μελέαγρος τοὺς μὲν Θεστίου παῖδας ἀπέκτεινε, τὸ δὲ δέρας ἔδωκε τῇ Ἀταλάντῃ. Ἀλθαία δὲ λυπηθεῖσα ἐπὶ τῇ τῶν ἀδελφῶν ἀπωλείᾳ τὸν δαλὸν ἧψε, καὶ ὁ Μελέαγρος ἐξαίφνης ἀπέθανεν.

Meleager, having struck it in the flank, killed the boar, and taking the hide he gave it to Atalanta. But the sons of Thestios, not thinking it right that a woman take the prize when men were present, took the hide from her, saying that it belonged to them by birth, if Meleager did not choose to take it. And Meleager, angered, killed the sons of Thestios, and gave the hide to Atalanta. But Altheia, grieving over the killing of the brothers, lit the brand [which was magically linked to Meleager’s life] and Meleager suddenly died. (Apollodorus 1.8.2 3)

Thus Atalanta’s presence at the hunt essentially destroys, as Barringer argues, its initiatory function. By introducing an element of erotic competition into the hunt, she disrupts the rules of prize-giving and short-circuits the necessary relationship that should exist between the young men who were engaged in a communal activity. We see this double function as a competitor with men, but also as a disruptive erotic partner for them somewhat less clearly in the story of Atalanta wrestling Peleus. Nonetheless, I believe that the Catalogue poet knows this myth and uses it, in a way, to link Atalanta to Achilles in his version of the footrace. Curiously, there are few narrative versions of Atalanta wrestling with Peleus, though it was a particularly popular theme on black-figure vases in the second half of the sixth century.16 Atalanta is regularly depicted wrestling with the father of Achilles, often in a face-to-face pose with potential wrestling prizes (a cauldron or tripod) between them or behind them (see Figure).17 Again, wrestling was a 15 16 17

Barringer 1996, 53 and n. 22. Barringer 1996, 67. Barringer 1996, figs. 19 27.

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Figure 1. Atalanta wrestles with Peleus. Attic black figure amphora from Nola, Diosophos Painter (sixth to fifth century BCE). The tripods in the background represent the prizes for the competition. Atalanta is distinguished by her short pants and white glaze, which is used to represent her skin tone. Peleus is rendered in black figure and wrestles nude, as is normal for representations of male athletes. Antikensammlung, Staatlich Museen, Berlin, Germany. INV 1837. Photo: Johannes Laurentius/Art Resource, New York.

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common activity for young men and is particularly associated in the fifth century with education (cf. Aristophanes’ Clouds 961 985). There is little in these scenes from vase painting that seems overtly erotic. But the fact that Atalanta is wrestling Peleus, in particular, is suggestive in itself. Peleus is more famous for wrestling with another female, the divine Thetis.18 That wrestling match, also depicted on vases, always has an erotic connotation, since the purpose of Peleus’ wrestling Thetis is that he wishes to subdue and marry her. Some of the evidence from vases, moreover, suggests that Peleus’ competition with Atalanta may have had a similar overtone: a red-figure vase from the mid-fifth century appears to show Atalanta in a wrestling competition, but her opponent is identified by inscription as Hippomenes, the man who (in Hesiod and other versions) will race with her and marry her.19 Though Beazley suggested that the potter erred in identifying him as Hippomenes rather than Peleus, Barringer argues that “it is risky to assume that vase painters have made mistakes when their depictions of myth differ from the versions we know and expect to find.”20 It is equally possible that the two are conflated because both Peleus and Hippomenes were thought of as suitors for Atalanta one wooing by wrestling, the other by footrace.21 Atalanta, then, has a tendency to compete with young men in contests that are typical of rites of passage for those young men. Her own role in such competitions is double and complicating: as a young woman, liminal in various ways, she appears to represent an ephebic ideal herself, a youth who has not yet fully become a man. But at the same time, as an erotic object for those young men, she also has the potential to disrupt their masculine competition and successful transition to adulthood. She is both a participant in and an object of the contest. 18 19

20 21

Barringer 1996, 69. See also my brief discussion in Chapter 3. Ferrara, Museuo Archeologico Nazionale T404; ARV21039, 1679; Barringer 1996, fig. 24. Briefly discussed by Scanlon 2002, 189. Barringer 1996, 69. A still later vase shows Peleus and Atalanta in a clearly erotic scene: Cabinet des Médailles 818; ARV21512, 23; Barringer 1996, 69 70, fig. 26. Scanlon 2002, 190 198, discusses a series of fifth century vases that show Peleus and Atalanta in a gymnasium setting either before or after the wrestling match, and argues that these later vases have clear erotic overtones.

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All of this is particularly true in the story of Atalanta’s marriage footrace with Hippomenes (or Melanion, in some versions). As Barringer has carefully shown, footraces were also often associated with initiatory rites, and prenuptial races are known from both myth and ritual practice.22 Unlike other races before a marriage, however, such as that of Pelops with Oenomaus (the father of Hippodameia), Hippomenes here races with the bride herself, not with her father or with other suitors. At the same time, the race contains, in some versions, aspects of a hunt, and in this way also conforms to the idea of initiatory rites for men. Remarkably, however, when the race has these elements of hunt, it is always Atalanta who is hunting, and the suitor who is the hunted. Thus Atalanta “acts as model hunter, as a pre-adult engaged in the initiatory hunt.”23 In the course of her race with Hippomenes, however, Atalanta gives up the hunt in order to accept her suitor, effectively becoming the pursued rather than the pursuer. Her race, then, also functions in part as a female rite of passage, a ritual through which Atalanta’s wild, unmarried, and deadly nature is tamed through acceptance of erotic gifts leading to marriage. But as we will see, the poet of the Catalogue does more with the story than simply tell us how this dangerous parthenos is eventually defeated, tamed, and married by her opponent. The poet also draws on another branch of Atalanta’s traditional tales her role as a predecessor and quasiparent of Achilles and in so doing presents us with an Atalanta whose successful marriage to Hippomenes also predicts and provides an eroticized reading for the competition between Achilles and Hector in the Iliad. Thus, the Catalogue’s version of this story is concerned with much more than the wildness of a parthenos who must be tamed; it also uses this highly attractive Artemis-figure to cast light on the inevitable and deadly end result of what Osborne has called the “plot of attraction.”24 22 23

24

Barringer 1996, 71 73. Barringer 1996, 73. Barringer also suggests that the race may function as an initiatory hunt for Atalanta’s suitor, Melanion, but I know of no version in which the suitor literally pursues Atalanta, however much he may pursue her as an erotic object. Osborne 2005.

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Atalanta Reflects the Iliad

THE STORY

The narrative of Atalanta’s race is preserved for us in three significant papyri, as follows: (73.) P. Lond. 486C, post Mahaffy ed. Milne; P. Oxy. 2488B, ed. Lobel [ ]ιτοιο ἄνακτος [ ]σι ποδώκης δῖ’ Ἀταλάν[τη [ Χαρί]των ἀμαρύγματ’ ἔχο[υσα [ πρὸς ἀνθρώπων ἀ]παναίνετο φῦλον ὁμιλ[εῖν ἀνδρῶν ἐλπομένη φεύγ]ειν γάμον ἀλφηστάων[. [ ]τανισφύ[ρ]ου εἵνεκα κού[ρης [ ].αμ[ ]νον εννε[ [ ].[.]ρδ[ (75.) P.S.I. 130 col. i, ed. Vitelli [ ]οπαζε[ [ ] [ ]ασιππ[ [ ]σσι [ ]ἔνθα· ..... ..... ..... ..τ]ανίσφυρ[ο]ς ὤρνυτο κούρη ..... ..... ..... ...]α· πολὺς δ’ ἀμφίσταθ’ ὅμιλος ..... ..... ..... ..θ]άμβος δ’ ἔχε πάντας ὁρῶντα[ς ..... ..... ..... .πν]οιὴ Ζεφύροιο χιτῶνα ..... ..... ..... .πε]ρὶ στήθεσσ’ ἁπαλοῖσι ..... ..... .... πολ]λὸς δ’ ἐπεγείρετο λαός ..... ..... .....Σχ]οινεὺς δ’ ἐγέγωνε βοήσας “κέκλυτέ μευ πάντες, ἠμ]ὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες, ὄφρ’ εἴπω τά με θυμὸς] ἐνὶ στήθεσσι κελεύει. ..... ..... ..... ..] ἐμὴν ἑλικώπιδα κούρην ..... ..... ..... ..]οι εἰρημένος ἔστω ..... ..... .Ζεὺς δ’ ἄμ]μ’ ἐπιμάρτυρος ἔστω ....................].ήσεται· εἰ δέ κεν οὗτος νικήσηι καί οἱ δώηι Ζεὺς] κῦδος ἀρέσθαι ἄλλοί τ’ ἀθάνατοι, οἳ Ὀλύμ]πια δώματ’ ἔχουσι, ..... ..... ..... ..φί]λην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν

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The Story

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..... ..... ..... .ὠκυ]πόδων σθένος ἵππων .................κε]ιμήλια· καί νύ κε θυμῶι ..... ..... ..... ...]α ἀνιηρὸν ἄεθλον. εἰ δέ κε μὴ δώηισι πατ]ὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε

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(76.) P.S.I. 130 col. ii, ed. Vitelli .].[.]..... .αρ[ δεξιτερῆι δ’ αρ. . .ει[ κ]αί μιν ἐπαΐσσων επ[ ἦχ’ ὑποχωρήσασ’· οὐ γὰρ ἴσ[ον ἀμφοτέροισιν ἆθλον ἔκειθ’· ἣ μέν ῥα π[οδώκης δῖ’ Ἀταλάντη ἵετ’ ἀναινομένη δῶρα [χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης, τῶι δὲ περὶ ψυχῆς πέλε[το δρόμος, ἠὲ ἁλῶναι ἠὲ φυγεῖν· τῶι καί ῥα δολο[φρονέων προσέειπεν “ὦ θύγατερ Σχοινῆος, ἀμ[είλιχον ἦτορ ἔχουσα, δ]έξο τάδ’ ἀγλα[ὰ] δῶρα θε[ᾶς χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης .....]πό.μ[. . .]ωεθο[ ..... ..... ..]ρων πα[ ..... ..... ..]ν κάββαλ[ε ..... ..... ..]εις χρυ[ς .[..... ..... ..].[.]κηπα[ τυφ.[.......].[.]χαμα[ αὐτὰρ ὃ [.....πό]δεσσι μ[ ἣ δ’ αἶψ’ ὥσθ’ Ἅρπυια μετ[αχρονίοισι πόδεσσιν ἔμμαρψ’· αὐτὰ[ρ ὃ] χειρὶ τὸ δεύτερον ἧ[κε χαμᾶζε· ... καὶ δὴ ἔχεν δύο μῆλα ποδώκης δῖ’ Ἀτ[αλάντη· ἐγγὺς δ’ ἦν τέλεος· ὃ δὲ τὸ τρίτον ἧκε χ [αμᾶζε σὺν τῶι δ’ ἐξέφυγεν θάνατον καὶ κῆ[ρα μέλαιναν, ἔστη δ’ ἀμπνείων καὶ [..]..[..]..σομ.[

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Fragment 73 ] of the king25 ] swift footed godlike Atalanta ] possessing the twinklings of the Graces 25

Most 2007 plausibly reconstructs the name Schoeneos at the beginning of this line.

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she refused to mingle with the tribe of men hoping to flee marriage with men who eat bread ] because of the slender ankled girl (traces of two more lines) Fragment 75 (traces of 5 lines) ] the slender ankled girl arose26 ] a great crowd stood around ] astonishment held all as they saw ] the breath of Zephyros . . . the chiton ] around her tender breasts ] a great crowd was gathered ] Schoeneos declared, speaking loudly, “Let everyone hear me, both young and old, so that I can say what the spirit in my breast orders me: ] my glancing eyed daughter ] let it be as stated. ] Let Zeus be our witness. ] . . .. But if somehow he wins, and Zeus grants to him to win glory, and the other immortals who have homes on Olympos, ] to his dear fatherland ] strength of swift footed horses ] treasures; and now in his spirit ] grievous contest. But if he does not grant it, the father of gods and men . . .” (lines missing here) Fragment 76 (trace of one line) on the right and he, rushing toward her

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The verb ornumi here could mean “rushed” (so Most 2007, ad loc.), but since the race with Hippomenes seems not to have started yet, I prefer to think that this line refers to Atalanta coming forward where the crowd can see her.

The Story having retreated a little.27 For the prize was not equal for them both: for she, swift footed godlike Atalanta ran refusing the gifts of golden Aphrodite but for him the race was a matter of life, either to be taken or to escape. And so, planning a trick, he said, “Daughter of Schoeneos, having a pitiless heart, receive these shining gifts of the goddess, golden Aphrodite . . .” (traces of two lines) ] threw down [ ] golden [ (traces of two lines) then he ] with feet [ She, straightaway like a harpy with feet flying behind overtook; but he sent groundward the second with his hand (there may be lines missing here) And now swift footed godlike Atalanta held two apples; the finish line was near; he threw the third groundward and with this he escaped death and dark fate and he stood breathing and [ ] (?) [

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The narrative is fragmentary, but surprisingly lively. It appears that the Catalogue poet not only chose to narrate the story of the various suitors for Atalanta’s hand, but also told the story of the race itself in considerable detail. The final remaining lines of fragment 76 demonstrate a sense of narrative tension that we do not often find in the Catalogue, where marriages are often accomplished in a single line. Certain details about the story are tantalizing, but uncertain. Perhaps most important is that we do not know the way that the race itself was run. In some versions of the story, the two contestants run a simple race, 27

As printed, the participle is feminine and goes with Atalanta. It is difficult to know, however, what “retreating” means in this context, unless we picture Atalanta as pursuing Hippomenes, which seems to contradict the preceding line. If we take the participle as masculine (without elision), then we must read Hippomenes as slowing down as part of his deception. See Hirschberger 2004, ad loc., for a brief discussion of the possibilities. It is possible that the participle hupchôrêsas here anticipates the implied comparison to Achilles and Hector (on which, see below); it makes more sense in a battle than in a race.

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and we must imagine that Hippomenes throws his apples forward (and perhaps to the side) in order to distract Atalanta long enough to allow him to overtake her. In this scenario, the race itself is purely a contest, with the unfortunate proviso that Hippomenes will be killed in the event of losing. In other versions, however, the race itself is set up as a mock hunt: the man begins running from the middle of the race course, and Atalanta pursues him, fully armed. In this variant, it is possible to imagine that she herself kills the man who would wed her.28 Of these two options, which is depicted here? I am inclined to suggest the second model, in which Hippomenes is being hunted, for several reasons. First, there is the fact that Atalanta is often depicted as a paradigmatic huntress herself, a devotee of Artemis and participant in the Calydonian boar hunt. In addition, we are told in fragment 74 (Scholium to Iliad 23.683b1) that Hesiod introduced the idea that Hippomenes was nude when he competed with Atalanta. It is not entirely clear when nudity became the norm for men in footraces, but it had probably been established as regular practice in the mid-seventh to early sixth centuries. The peculiar specification here may, then, be a reference to contemporary but relatively recent practice.29 The poet might also have highlighted Hippomenes’ nudity for erotic effect; but in any case, his lack of clothing would certainly increase his vulnerability. More telling are the final lines of fragment 76, in which it appears that Atalanta is trying to overtake Hippomenes, and is in that act likened to a harpy, a threatening and grasping figure. Hippomenes’ arrival at the finish line also seems to have a sense of immediacy, as if he has avoided death right then and not after some summary judgment. This sense is further supported by the implied comparison to Achilles and Hector, discussed below. One other line might support such a reading. Fragment 76, line 16, has been read by Merkelbach and West as beginning with the letters τυφ; 28

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Detienne 1979, 33; Barringer 1996, 71; Scanlon 2002, 178. This version is followed by Apollodorus 3.9.2 (though he leaves vague the question of who does the killing). See also Hyginus, Fabulae 185. A point made by Andrew Stewart in a recent unpublished talk, “The Wardrobe Malfunction That Shook the World: Nudity, the Olympics and Greek Self Fashioning.” Oberlin College, October 7, 2013.

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Hirschberger, however, prefers the reading τυψε and records Franz’s suggestion of τυψέ[μεναι μεμαυῖα, “(she) desiring to strike.”30 Against this suggestion, however, is fragment 76, line 3, in which a masculine participle (ἐπαΐσσων) suggests that Hippomenes is rushing toward someone, his object indicated by the indeterminate pronoun μιν. The easiest reading of this line is that Hippomenes is trying to catch up to Atalanta, who must be understood as running ahead of him, toward the finish line. Further complicating the issue is the participle in the following line, ὑποχωρήσασ’, “having retreated” or, perhaps, “having avoided.”31 As printed, the participle is an elided feminine, referring to Atalanta, but it could just as easily be an unelided masculine nominative, referring to Hippomenes. All of this begins to sound more like a battle than a race, with one party rushing the other, and the second initially giving way. Who is retreating or, perhaps, avoiding whom? The text is too fragmentary here to know. What is certain, however, is that the story of Atalanta challenges the normal social structures of marriage. She is presented to the assembled crowd (and thus to the reader) as a paradigmatic beautiful bride like Mestra, and like Helen later, she too has the “twinklings of the Graces,” and the image of her chiton blowing lightly against her soft breasts (fr. 75.9 10) is clearly meant to evoke an erotic response. But instead of allowing her suitors to compete with one another for her hand, her father sets up a competition in which Atalanta is herself a contestant. The losing suitor, moreover, risks much more than his honor: his life itself is forfeit, perhaps at Atalanta’s hand. Atalanta here possesses a rare subjectivity.

MARRIAGE AND FAMILIAL STRUCTURES

We cannot tell from the extant fragments of the Catalogue why Atalanta wishes to avoid marriage, though her iconographic depiction, particularly in scenes showing participation in the Calydonian boar hunt, suggests that she is something of an Artemis figure. According to a 30 31

Hirschberger 2004, ad loc. Cf. LSJ ὑπωχωρέω I.3.

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badly mutilated fragment of Philodemus that ascribes Hesiod as the source, moreover, she is a “derivative or servant of Artemis.”32 In general, then, her avoidance of marriage should be understood as an aspect of her dedication to Artemis, the youthful goddess who, though she oversees the transition of marriage for young women, is never married herself. At the same time, the identification with Artemis helps us to understand the element of eroticism that enters into each of Atalanta’s quasi-ephebic deeds.33 We can safely say a few things about Atalanta’s unusual marriage arrangements. First, it appears that Hippomenes is not the only man interested in wooing her (though he may have been the only one to go through with the race, in the Hesiodic version). Fragment 75, lines 6 and 11, make it clear that Atalanta is admired by a substantial crowd of people. Hippomenes, then, appears to be engaging in competitive wooing, even before Schoeneos’ proclamation. The rules for the race, though not fully extant in our fragment, seem straightforward enough. The man who defeats Atalanta will take not only her to his fatherland, but probably some horses as well, and almost certainly some treasures (fr. 75.20 23). Thus marriage gifts (though without the legal trappings of dowry) travel with the bride to her husband’s new home. The consequences of the “grievous contest” should the man lose the race are not spelled out in what remains of Schoeneos’ proclamation, but are clear from the description of the race itself. It is interesting that the winner of the race does not appear to be required to offer hedna; the competition with Atalanta seems to have replaced the competitive aspect of hedna offering, and we might think of this story as one in which the completion of a heroic deed replaces the offering of material goods. It is unusual, however, in that the footrace cannot be said to constitute a heroic favor that the bridegroom does for the bride’s father; the heroic deed becomes conflated, instead, with the act of marrying the bride. Atalanta’s role as both contestant and prize confounds the issue, here as elsewhere. The treasures that go with 32

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See Hirschberger 2004, 462, referring to Merkelbach and West 1967, fr. 72. As Merkelbach and West point out, however, the papyrus is badly mangled, and they have printed the extensive reconstruction of Phillipson. See Burkert 1985, 150 151.

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Atalanta to the successful suitor are denoted by the word keimêlia (fr. 75.23), a general word for stored-up goods that have no particular marital connotation and can travel in either direction. The fact that Zeus and the gods are invoked as granting the victory (or not) is further indication of the heroic nature of the competition. Hippomenes wins the race, of course, because he has the help of Aphrodite, in the form of three golden apples. These apples, as Christopher Faraone has shown, fall within a well-known and widespread tradition of using apples as aphrodisiacs. Faraone analyzes a series of texts dating from Assyrian incantations of the ninth century BCE to Augustan magical papyri and shows that such magical texts provide material background for various literary narratives.34 In these literary texts, a lover either inscribes an apple or says a few words over it before throwing it at the beloved; if the love object accepts the apple, then he or she is understood to also accept the overture that it represents. The story in the Catalogue fits this pattern precisely: just before throwing down the first apple, Hippomenes asks Atalanta to accept it, as a “gift of Aphrodite” (fr. 76.10). This passage also demonstrates one of the more literary aspects of the story, in that Hippomenes’ apples confound the categories of the metaphorical and the real through a figure of syllepsis. Just a few lines before Hippomenes throws the first apple, we learn that Atalanta ran “fleeing the gifts (dôra) of golden Aphrodite.” Here as elsewhere the “gifts of Aphrodite” are understood as a euphemism for the pleasures of sex that is, Atalanta runs in order to avoid marriage itself.35 That Hippomenes intends the apples as aphrodisiac and is not merely distracting Atalanta with pretty, shiny gifts is clear from the speech that he utters before throwing down the first of the apples. Hippomenes publicly offers the apples to Atalanta “planning a trick” (fr. 76.8); that is, he understands that the apples are not just apples but will enact and represent Atalanta’s 34 35

Faraone 1990. This syllepsis noted by Scanlon 2002, 179. See also Theognis 1283 1294: in the final line, Atalanta receives “the gifts of Aphrodite,” apparently meaning that she is sexually subdued by her pursuer. Ziogas (2011, 256 257) points out that there is a further play of literal and figurative meanings throughout this passage (and in Ovid’s imitation of it): through the figure of syllepsis, Atalanta both “flees” (pheugô) marriage and “flees” (pheugô) from her suitors.

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willingness to marry him. This double meaning is driven home by the offer itself: “receive these shining gifts (dôra) of golden Aphrodite” (fr. 76.10). When she pauses to pick up the apples, Atalanta accepts these “gifts of Aphrodite,” and thus signals her willingness, as Faraone suggests, to accept the more usual “gifts of Aphrodite,” that is, marriage to Hippomenes.36 At the same time, the act of stopping to pick up the apples causes Atalanta to lose the race, thus ensuring that Hippomenes will be accepted as a suitor. The apples, then, operate on three levels at once: as a metaphor for the acceptance of sexual union, as gifts meant to charm the young woman, and as physical instruments that guarantee the marriage. In some later versions of the myth, Atalanta is charmed not only by the apples but by Hippomenes himself.37 It is not entirely clear if that is the case here. That is, does Atalanta pick up the apples because she has fallen in love with Hippomenes, and is that the meaning of the troubling phrase “having given way a little” (fr. 76.4)? Or is she tricked by Hippomenes into accepting the apple, not realizing that doing so is also to accept a proposal of marriage from him, a fact that is further compounded by the fact that accepting the apples causes her to lose the race? The latter interpretation receives mild support from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in which Persephone is offered pomegranate seeds by Hades: αὐτὰρ ὅ γ᾽ αὐτὸς ῥοιῆς κόκκον ἔδωκε φαγεῖν μελιηδέα λάθρῃ, ἀμφὶ ἓ νωμήσας, ἵνα μὴ μένοι ἤματα πάντα αὖθι παρ᾽ αἰδοίῃ Δημήτερι κυανοπέπλῳ.

But he gave to her secretly sweet seed of pomegranate to eat, Thinking for himself, so that she would not remain always again with august, dark robed Demeter. (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 371 374)

Though there are no specific verbal echoes, the situations are similar enough: in both cases, a young woman wishes to avoid marriage and is 36 37

Detienne 1979, 41 42; Faraone 1990, 238; Barringer 1996, 74. Barringer 1996, 71. Theocritus 3.40 42 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.609 637, both suggest that Atalanta falls in love with Hippomenes.

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tricked into accepting it through the stealthy offering of fruit.38 Her acceptance of the fruit both signifies her acceptance of the marriage and, in both stories, is presented as causing that acceptance, perhaps without the woman’s full knowledge of the import of her actions. The difference between them is that Persephone can and does claim that she does not know what eating the pomegranate seed will do; Atalanta, presumably, could win the race if not for her desire for the apples. Her willingness to stop and pick them up implies more clearly some complicity on her part. The story of this marriage, then, falls into the general patterns of aristocratic marriage and behavior that we have seen earlier. The woman’s beauty marks her out as a particular prize and the object of competition between worthy aristocrats. In this story, Atalanta herself shifts the nature of that competition by acting as both object and competitor at once. In the end, however, her acceptance of Hippomenes is signaled by, in effect, a willingness to lose the competition to him (and probably only him). Having won the race, Hippomenes will take the bride to his fatherland (fr. 75.21). Like Helen in the Iliad, Atalanta will also bring with her a certain number of valuable possessions. We do not know what the outcome of this marriage was in the Catalogue. In Apollodorus 3.9.2, the winner of the footrace was one Melanion, and Atalanta bore the Arcadian hero Parthenopaeos to him. In the Catalogue, it appears that the story falls into the category of the descendants of Aiolos and belongs in a Boiotian context.39 Since the end of the narrative is lost, it is impossible to tell what specific family or hero the story might have supported. It is clear, however, that the story of the footrace falls into the general pattern that Barringer has so clearly outlined. The race, like the hunt and the wrestling competition, can be read as a

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Faraone 1990, 236 238, discusses the Persephone episode in this context. As he points out, when Persephone tells her mother of these events, she adds the detail that Hades forced her to eat the seeds. It is unclear whether this is a matter of the perspectives of different narrators or if this is a face saving device on Persephone’s part. See also Perkins 1996. Barringer 1996, 74, discusses the connection of Atalanta to the Persephone myth, and Detienne 1979, 42 44, discusses apples, Cydonian apples, and pomegranates as fruits particularly associated with Aphrodite, Hera, and weddings. West 1985, 49, 67.

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prenuptial rite for Atalanta, in the course of which she is transformed from a wild huntress to the willing bride of the young Hippomenes. Beyond these elements, however, the story as told in the Catalogue also conjures up an entirely different context in the course of the race. Far and above the most interesting thing about the story is the way that it references, retells, and provides a “prequel” to the story of Achilles’ battle with Hector in Book 22 of the Iliad. In this retelling, Atalanta is both the object of the battle (i.e., a Helen figure) and a participant in it (i.e., an Achilles figure.) This doubling, so typical of Atalanta in myth, transforms the Catalogue’s version into a careful rereading, indeed a reinterpretation of the closing books of the Iliad. In so doing, this highly literary episode also reinforces the Catalogue’s general theme of an end to the heroic age, with all its aristocratic overtones. ATALANTA AS ACHILLES

Early in the extant fragments Atalanta is identified as podôkês di’ Atalante, “swift-footed godlike Atalanta” (fr. 73.2). The epithet must call to mind the most famous of swift-footed heroes, Achilles.40 The epithet is repeated at least once more (fr. 76.20) and has been plausibly reconstructed in another instance (fr. 76.5). While the epithet is certainly appropriate for this particular parthenos, it is clear that the poet of the episode has chosen to highlight the identification between hero and heroine. The fact that Atalanta also seems to have wrestled with Peleus in early myth the story is recorded by Apollodorus (3.9.2) and depicted on numerous black-figure pots is also intriguing. In the narrative versions that we have of this wrestling match, it is only that. As I discussed above, however, the other woman whom Peleus wrestles is Thetis, prior to subduing her and marrying her (Apollodorus 3.13.5 6).41 Though such a suggestion can be only tentative, I propose here that the Catalogue poet 40

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knows of this tradition and that this may have led to drawing a connection between Atalanta and the hero of the Trojan War. In this reading, Atalanta appears as a double for Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and while Thetis’ gift to Achilles is the possibility of immortality, it may be that he has received his swift-footedness from his other “mother,” Atalanta.42 In any case, the parallels soon become more explicit and in fact refer to a remarkable moment in the Iliad. During the dangerous footrace between Atalanta and Hippomenes, we are told: οὐ γὰρ ἴσ[ον ἀμφοτέροισιν ἆθλον ἔκειθ’· ἣ μέν ῥα π[οδώκης δῖ’ Ἀταλάντη ἵετ’ ἀναινομένη δῶρα [χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης, τῶι δὲ περὶ ψυχῆς πέλε[το δρόμος, ἠὲ ἁλῶναι ἠὲ φυγεῖν·

. . . For the prize was not equal for them both: for she, swift footed godlike Atalanta ran refusing the gifts of golden Aphrodite but for him the race was a matter of life, either to be taken or to escape.

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While it is true that for Hippomenes “the race was a matter of life,” this particular formulation is also a clear reference to that most famous of grim footraces, when Achilles chases Hector before the walls of Troy. But because Achilles and Hector are in a war, not a race, the “prize” of this “race” is not the usual prize, but the life of Hector himself:43 τῇ ῥα παραδραμέτην φεύγων ὃ δ’ ὄπισθε διώκων· πρόσθε μὲν ἐσθλὸς ἔφευγε, δίωκε δέ μιν μέγ’ ἀμείνων 42

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Heroes often have two fathers, one divine and one mortal. For obvious reasons, they can have only one mother. But it is interesting to note that Herakles also has a near double maternity. Though he is the son of Alcmene, he seems to be named after Hera, who in some versions also suckles him as a baby (Diodorus Siculus 4.9.6). The parallels were noted by Laser 1952. Laser, however, assumes that the lines have been interpolated in the Iliad, since they are not as appropriate there as they are in the Catalogue episode, and he posits a common early source for both works. See Ziogas 2011, 258 261, for a brief but illuminating discussion of the relation between these two passages. Scanlon 2002, 179, briefly notes the parallel.

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So there they ran about, the one fleeing and the other pursuing from behind, and a noble man fled in front, but behind a much better man pursued, swiftly, since they did not strive for a sacrificial animal, nor an ox hide, which are prizes for races run by men, but they ran for the life of Hector, tamer of horses. Thus when single foot horses that bear away prizes run very lightly around the turning posts; and a big prize is at stake, a tripod, or a woman, when a man has died, thus three times the two whirled around the city of Priam with swift feet. (Iliad 22.157 166)

In the Iliad, the comparison to a footrace creates pathos through the contrast between sport and war. The footrace that the chase is compared with is, indeed, a serious one but even a race where the prize is a woman is trivial compared with the grim conditions of Hector’s running. To lose the race is, for Hector, to lose his life a “prize” only in the blunt devaluation brought about by the metaphor. In the Catalogue, however, this same metaphor has been made literal: Hippomenes is actually in a race, structured as a race, in which the prize, if he loses, is his life. As Ziogas has put it in a recent and perceptive analysis, “Hesiod synthesizes Homer’s simile and narrative proper, turning the Iliadic fatal race of the greatest Achaean and Trojan hero into a contest for a maiden’s hand.”44 At the same time, as Ziogas’ comment makes clear, the prize of Hippomenes’ race is doubled: the other possible trophy is “a woman,” one of the potential prizes in the imagined race described in the Iliad namely, the other contestant,

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Atalanta. The race draws seriousness from its Iliadic precedent, even while it presents itself as a precursor to that event. The Catalogue poet, moreover, has picked up on the notion of inequality between the contestants in the Iliad and has transformed it. The Homeric passage has a compressed logic. We learn that the one chasing (Achilles) is better than the one fleeing (Hector), and this is a simple statement of fact. The next phrase confirms this fact: Hector’s life is the prize, and among other things this means that the battle, for which the race is a momentary substitute, is already a foregone conclusion. Both racers are fighting for Hector’s life, not Achilles’; there is no need to specify that it is Achilles who is chasing, and Hector fleeing. Achilles will win both the race and the battle that it briefly delays. In the Catalogue, by contrast, the two characters are not thus marked as better and worse (though presumably Atalanta is normally the faster). Indeed, since the outcome of the race will be marriage, the poem presumably does not want to emphasize the difference in the participants’ abilities as an expression of nobility. But the race is unequal in that the prize, and so the contestants’ motivation, is split: Hippomenes can win or lose his life, while Atalanta can avoid, or fail to avoid, her marriage. One of the curious results of this splitting of motivations is that both runners are portrayed as fleeing, and neither pursuing. Hippomenes could easily be portrayed as pursuing marriage with Atalanta, as seems to be the import of Schoeneos’ speech in fragment 75. Indeed, in other versions of the myth, Hippomenes clearly pursues Atalanta, as we might expect; that is, his erotic desire is aligned with his role in the footrace.45 Here, by contrast, Hippomenes runs the risk of being caught, or escaping, and Atalanta runs, trying to avoid marriage. Neither character is said to desire anything, although we know that desire motivates the race: Hippomenes would not risk his life if not for his passion for Atalanta, and he tricks Atalanta into accepting the “gifts of Aphrodite.” If, as may be the case here, Atalanta pursues Hippomenes in order to kill him, this active chase runs the

45

Such pursuit is necessary for the comparison in Theognis 1283 1294, in which the speaker claims that he will catch the boy who is the object of his desire just as Atalanta was caught. See Ormand 2013.

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implicit risk of turning into another kind of pursuit, an admission of erotic desire that would guarantee Atalanta’s eventual defeat. This doubling of motivations and obscuring of desire does not, however, completely erase the dark overtones that the Iliadic passage conveys onto the footrace. In a recent study of the concept of “overtaking” in Homeric poetry, Alex Purves has shown that the vocabulary used for overtaking in battle is usually different from that used for overtaking in a race, as the different objects of the two kinds of pursuit might suggest.46 When Homer describes warriors chasing a target in battle, we see verbs of pursuit, notably διώκω (“to chase”) and catching up, such as μάρπτω and καταμάρπτω (“to seize”). The person running away is typically the subject of the verb φεύγω (“to flee”) and its compounds. In actual footraces in the Iliad, by contrast, the act of running a race is marked by a series of verbs that are concerned with the act of overtaking in the sense of passing by: φθάνω, παρέρχομαι, παραφθάνω, παρατρέχω, παρελαύνω, παρεξελαύνω (all of which can mean “to pass” or “to pass by”). In the passage from the Catalogue above, it is clear that the vocabulary corresponds to that in Achilles’ pursuit of Hector, and, as a result, the stakes for Hippomenes are no less serious than for the Trojan hero (φεύγω, 76.8; μάρπτω, 76.19; ἐκφεύγω, 76.22). If he is not successful in the act of fleeing, Hippomenes will die just as Hector does. A second verbal parallel to the Iliad appears toward the end of our extant fragment, just as the race ends: ἣ δ’ αἶψ’ ὥσθ’ Ἅρπυια μετ[αχρονίοισι πόδεσσιν ἔμμαρψ’· αὐτὰ[ρ ὃ] χειρὶ τὸ δεύτερον ἧ[κε χαμᾶζε·

... καὶ δὴ ἔχεν δύο μῆλα ποδώκης δῖ’ Ἀτ[αλάντη· ἐγγὺς δ’ ἦν τέλεος· ὃ δὲ τὸ τρίτον ἧκε χ [αμᾶζε· σὺν τῶι δ’ ἐξέφυγεν θάνατον καὶ κῆ[ρα μέλαιναν, ἔστη δ’ ἀμπνείων καὶ [..]..[..]..σομ.[

She, straightaway like a Harpy with feet flying behind seized; but he sent groundward the second with his hand (there may be lines missing here) 46

Purves 2011, esp. 526 528, 532 533. I am grateful to Prof. Purves for allowing me to see her work in an unpublished version.

Atalanta as Achilles And now swift footed godlike Atalanta held two apples; the finish line was near; he threw the third groundward and with this he escaped death and dark fate and he stood breathing and [ ] (?) [

143

(fr. 76.18 23)

These lines clearly parallel a moment in the grim race between Hector and Achilles when Apollo gives Hector just enough assistance to keep him alive, and the poet suggests that this “race” is like a race in a dream:47 ὡς δ’ ἐ ν ὀνείρῳ οὐ δύναται φεύγοντα διώκειν· οὔτ’ ἄρ’ ὃ τòν δύναται ὑποφεύγειν οὔθ’ ὃ διώκειν· ὣς ὃ τὸν οὐ δύνατο μάρψαι ποσίν, οὐδ’ ὃς ἀλύξαι. πῶς δέ κεν Ἕκτωρ κῆρας ὑπεξέφυγεν θανάτοιο, εἰ μή οἱ πύματόν τε καὶ ὕστατον ἤντετ’ Ἀπόλλων ἐγγύθεν, ὅς οἱ ἐπῶρσε μένος λαιψηρά τε γοῦνα;

As in a dream, one is not able to pursue the one fleeing, nor is the one able to completely escape the first, nor the other to pursue; Thus the one was not able to catch the other with his feet, nor the other to escape. And how could Hector have escaped the fates of death, if not that Apollo, for the last and latest time came to him nearby, and roused his strength and his swift knees? (Iliad 22.199 204)

We should, perhaps, not make much of the verbal echo of marpsai (Iliad 22.201) in the description of Atalanta pursuing like a harpy overtaking (emmarps’, fr. 76.19). But clearly Hippomenes’ avoidance of “death and dark fate” is an echo of Hector’s similar though temporary escape, using the same verb to mark the escape (exepheugen, fr. 76.21; Iliad 202).48 In both cases, the two heroes avoid death through the assistance of a divinity, though Hippomenes’ help has the more concrete form of the 47 48

Ziogas 2011, 259. Ziogas 2011, 259, also sees in this passage a parallel to the temporary “escape” of Lycaon in Iliad 21.64 66, as he supplicates Achilles; there the verbal formula is identical to the phrasing in the Catalogue. In both of these cases, of course, the escape is of limited duration; both heroes will be cut down. Ziogas’ careful lexical analysis supports his conclusion that this is a true intertextual moment and not merely a case of shared epic diction. He points out, further, that Achilles is twice described as “swift footed godlike Achilles” in this episode.

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golden apples. Significantly, the Catalogue takes a temporary, provisional moment in Hector’s flight from Achilles and makes it into the successful conclusion of Hippomenes’ story. Just as the basis for the Catalogue’s literal race is the metaphorical one in the Iliad, the Catalogue takes a momentary pause in the Homeric epic (itself phrased as a rhetorical question) and makes it concrete and permanent. Unlike Hector, Hippomenes really has escaped from the fate of death and, we presume, will go on to marry Atalanta. What, then, is the literary effect of this complex invocation of the most famous footrace of the Trojan War? Certainly, it puts Hippomenes’ marriage of Atalanta into a heroic context, though the fact that Hippomenes is Hector to Atalanta’s Achilles in this scenario should give us pause. The Catalogue narrative takes place in a lighter, more comic register, despite the potential for serious consequences.49 As a result, Hippomenes is able to win, but by a trick, by means of seducing Atalanta with the “ballistic aphrodisiac”50 of Aphrodite’s apples. The Achilles figure is able to lose here because loss for Atalanta means marriage rather than death; the lighter register in the story lowers the stakes of competition. At the same time, since the swifter figure in the Catalogue is a woman, her defeat by Hippomenes restores the narrative to a normal social order. Even so, Atalanta’s remarkable abilities, and indeed her erotic appeal, are amplified by the comparison to Achilles. The basic mode of the narrative is to take moments of fantasy, of potential, and of wishful thinking in the Iliad and to render them literal. In that regard, I would like to suggest that Hippomenes’ experience is also presented as the realization of one of Hector’s fantasies, one that occurs before the metaphor of the race begins in the Iliad. Hector speaks to himself early in Book 22 and wonders if he could approach Achilles unarmed and negotiate a settlement with him; he then realizes that such thoughts are pointless: ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός; μή μιν ἐγὼ μὲν ἵκωμαι ἰών, ὃ δέ μ’ οὐκ ἐλεήσει οὐδέ τί μ’ αἰδέσεται, κτενέει δέ με γυμνὸν ἐόντα

49

50

Tsagalis 2009, 167, identifies a “light tone” as one of the characteristics of the Catalogue as a whole. This felicitous phrase is Faraone’s.

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αὔτως ὥς τε γυναῖκα, ἐπεί κ’ ἀπὸ τεύχεα δύω. οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠΐθεός τε παρθένος ἠΐθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλοιιν.

But why does my heart debate these things with me? May I not go, supplicating him, and he will not pity me, nor will he respect me, but kill me while I am naked, like a woman, since I have put aside my armor. There is not now any way to talk lightly with him from an oak or a rock, as a parthenos and a youth a parthenos and a youth talk lightly with one another. (Iliad 22.122 128)

Hector’s imagined, but rejected, scene with Achilles casts a surprising erotic light on their relationship. Not only does Hector suggest that he would, in such a situation, be “nude” (gumnos, 124), but, as Richardson points out, “Hektor has just referred to being killed ‘like a woman,’ and this is perhaps what gives rise to the idea of the two lovers conversing.”51 The verb oarizein (“talk lightly”) in line 128 also seems to have erotic connotations: Hector is described as conversing with Andromache, using this word at 6.516.52 It is the kind of talk that husbands and wives, or perhaps young lovers, share. Unlike Hector and Achilles, Hippomenes and Atalanta are exactly a youth and a parthenos, and if we accept the information that Hippomenes ran literally nude in the Catalogue’s version of his tale, then there is a further point of similarity between Hippomenes’ real and Hector’s imagined moment of negotiation. But in the Catalogue the impossible suggestion of a lover’s chat becomes reality: Hippomenes’ combination of verbal appeal and fruitful offering convinces Atalanta, despite her “pitiless heart” (fr. 76.9). Atalanta accepts the apples, and Hippomenes escapes dark death. Hector imagines, briefly, a different resolution to his conflict with Achilles, one in an erotic register. The Catalogue enacts that resolution. 51

52

Richardson 1993, ad loc. Richardson 1993, ad 123 125, argues that gumnos “must mean ‘unarmed,’” but it is entirely possible that the Catalogue poet has picked up on this term’s more usual primary meaning. See Richardson 1993, ad 22.127.

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All is not light and happiness in the Catalogue, however. Hippomenes’ experience can only be traumatic, as he has nearly been hunted down by his future bride. Moreover, by playing the kind of double role that she has in this race, Atalanta not only echoes Achilles in the Iliad; she also functions as a harbinger of the horrors of the war at Troy. That is, in the race Atalanta may be a double for Achilles. But before the race, she is more like Helen than anyone else in the Catalogue. Her beauty causes a large crowd of people to admire her, and her physical charms are described in erotic terms even for the reader (fr. 75.5 11). Like Helen, she receives the formulaic compliment that she “possesses the twinklings of the Graces” (frs. 73.3, 196.6). It appears likely that she was wooed by many men. Moreover, the announcement that Schoeneos makes regarding the rules for her marriage has only one structural parallel in the extant fragments of the Catalogue, and that is the oath that Tyndareos extracts from the suitors of Helen (fr. 204.77 85). That oath, of course, has a different form and a different purpose, but the dramatic scenes appear to be much the same: a group of suitors, a beautiful parthenos, and a public announcement of the rules of wooing. Atalanta’s race with Hippomenes, then, does not simply recast the ultimate battle between Achilles and Hector in the Iliad; it prefigures it. Atalanta is the sort of woman that Helen will be in the mythic future a woman over whom men will fight and for whom virtually all men have desire. The reason, in other words, that Atalanta’s swiftness of foot is borrowed from Achilles is that she is both subject and object in this race, both the running Achilles and the desirable Helen, and with her remarkable beauty she foreshadows both aspects of the deadlier race that will end the Trojan War. Hippomenes may win this race, but the larger problem remains: so long as men are willing to risk their lives in order to marry women of remarkable beauty, the Trojan War, and with it the end of the generation of heroes, remains on the horizon. As Clay has argued in another context, it appears that the stories in the Catalogue “continually point to the event that brings the heroic age to its conclusion.”53 Though Atalanta’s story is too early to end at Troy, through reference and invocation it still serves to highlight the drift of the narrative in that direction. 53

See Clay 2005, 29; see pp. 28 34 for the argument that the Catalogue appears to be structured toward this end.

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This reading of Atalanta receives a subtle but significant support in one of the phrases used to describe the crowd’s reaction to her. At fragment 75.8 we are told that θ]άμβος δ’ ἔχε πάντας ὁρῶντα[ς, “astonishment held all who were watching.” The formula is one that is familiar from the Iliad; variants of it appear there four times and once more in the Odyssey.54 In the Homeric epics, it is a formula used to describe the reaction of onlookers to a terrific battle. It appears first, for example, as Menelaos strides out to fight Paris in Book 3: Οἳ δ’ ἐπεὶ οὖν ἑκάτερθεν ὁμίλου θωρήχθησαν, ἐς μέσσον Τρώων καὶ Ἀχαιῶν ἐστιχόωντο δεινὸν δερκόμενοι· θάμβος δ’ ἔχεν εἰσορόωντας Τρῶάς θ’ ἱπποδάμους καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιούς.

These two, when they had put on their breastplates on each side of the crowd they marched into the middle of Trojans and Achaians glaring fearfully; astonishment held those who were watching, horse taming Trojans and well greaved Achaians. (Iliad 3.340 43)

The only time that the formula is used in the Iliad in a nonbattle context is the remarkable scene in Book 24, when Priam walks into Achilles’ tent. The formula arises in a simile: Priam is compared with a man who has killed another, gone into exile, and entered into the house of a rich man, and “astonishment held those who were watching” (Iliad 24.480 484). Ιn every instance of the formula in Homer, there is an element of highly charged danger, of violence that is just below the surface or about to happen. Atalanta evokes this same atmosphere of imminent violence by her very appearance. In other words, the Catalogue poet has achieved in this story a remarkable compression through intertextual play with the Iliad. 54

As is typical for the Catalogue, the words in the Atalanta narrative appear to be variants of two formulaic expressions in Homer, without reproducing either exactly. At Iliad 3.342 and 4.79, the formula is θάμβος δ’ ἔχεν εἰσορόωντας; with a grammatical variation, the same appears at 24.482. At 23.815, however, the expression appears as θάμβος δ’ ἔχε πάντας Ἀχαιούς (repeated, with the change of the verb from ἔχε to ἕλε at Odyssey 3.372); the Catalogue preserves both the πάντας and the idea of those watching in the participle ὁρῶντα[ς.

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Wonder seizes the crowd when they see Atalanta on one level, because of her remarkable beauty. On another level, wonder seizes them because the race itself is a precursor to, and reminds us of, the battle over Helen that will end in a horrible footrace between Achilles and Hector. Atalanta is the vehicle for this reading, I suggest, not only because of the idea of a footrace, but because of her oblique connection to Achilles in myth. Atalanta is not only an unusually swift young woman, but also the woman who wrestled with Peleus before he wrestled, subdued, and married Thetis. She is also a woman of Helen-like beauty, the sort of woman whom men will compete for, even at risk of death. The Catalogue, then, provides an eroticized version of the battle between Achilles and Hector and compresses the difference between the erotic and agonistic stories; what is fantasy in the Iliad is made literal here, both in the instance of Hector’s wish for peaceful conversation and in the larger context of the footrace for a hero’s life. In this light it is worthwhile to consider briefly two other texts about Achilles, who is himself eroticized in the Catalogue. The first text probably does not come from the Catalogue but is a story related by a scholium to the Iliad: Πήδασον αἰπεινήν. Ἀχιλλεὺς, ὑπὸ τὸν Τρωϊκὸν πόλεμον πορθῶν τὰς περιοίκους τῆς Ἰλίου πόλεις, ἀφίκετο εἰς τὴν πάλαι μὲν Μονηΐαν, νῦν δὲ Πήδασον καλουμένην, βουλόμενος ὁμοῦ ταῖς ἄλλαις καὶ ταύτην ἑλεῖν. Ἀπογνόντος δὲ αὐτοῦ τὴν εἰς τέλος πολιορκίαν, διὰ τὴν ὀχυρότητα τοῦτόπου, καὶ μέλλοντος ἤδη ἀναχωρεῖν, φασὶν, εἴσω τῶν τειχῶν οὖσαν παρθένον ἐρασθῆναι τοῦ Ἀχιλλέως· καὶ λαβοῦσαν μῆλον, ἐπιγράψαι, καὶ αὐτὸ ῥῖψαι εἰς μέσον τῶν Ἀχαιῶν. Ἦν δὲ ἐν αὐτῷ γεγραμμένα· Μὴ σπεῦδ’, Ἀχιλλεῦ, πρὶν Μονηΐαν ἕλῃς. Ὕδωρ γὰρ οὐκ ἔνεστι· διψῶσι κακῶς. Τὸν δὲ Ἀχιλλέα, ἐπιμείναντα, οὕτω λαβεῖν τὴν πόλιν, τῇ τοῦ ὕδατος σπάνει. Ἡ ἱστορία παρὰ Δημητρίῳ καὶ Ἡσιόδῳ.

Lofty Pêdasos. Achilles was destroying the cities around Ilium at the time of the Trojan War when he arrived at the ancient city of Monêia, which is now called Pêdasos, wishing to take this city along with the others. In the end, when he had given up the siege because of the difficulty of the area, and as he was about to leave, they say that a parthenos inside the walls fell in love with Achilles, and having seized an apple, she wrote on it and threw it into the middle of the Achaians. This was what was written on it: Do not hurry, Achilles, before you take Monêia; for there is no water; they are badly thirsty. And they say that

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Achilles stayed and thus took the city because of the scarcity of water. This story is in Demetrios and Hesiod. (Scholium “D” to Iliad 6.35)55

Another scholium to the same verse, shorter and more corrupt, adds the intriguing detail that καὶ Πήδασον ὠνόμασε διὰ τὴν παρθένον (“and he named the city Pêdasos because of the girl,” Scholium veterum to Iliad 6.35a). Though the statement that “this story is in . . . Hesiod” is intriguing, it is difficult to imagine this episode in the Catalogue. Nonetheless, the story is highly suggestive in that Achilles here is a clear reflection of Atalanta herself. Like Atalanta, he is seduced by an apple and delayed from his intended purpose. In this narrative, however, his acceptance of the apple results not in a forestalling of death but in the immediate destruction of the town of Monêia. Though the young girl’s desire is clearly described, the text does not make clear whether Achilles returns her desire or merely uses the information she has given him. The form of that information an inscription on an apple should call for an erotic response, but here as often Achilles’ desire appears sublimated into violence. This story, then, is the mirror image of Atalanta’s: there the Iliadic violence is turned on its head, sublimated to the story of Atalanta’s seduction. The second story is securely in the Catalogue and constitutes one of the more interesting moments in the narrative about the suitors of Helen: ἀλλ’ ἄ[ρα πάντας Ἀτρε[ίδ]ης ν[ίκησε]ν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος πλεῖ [στ]α πορών. Χείρων δ’ ἐν Πηλίωι ὑλήεντι Πηλείδην ἐκόμιζε πόδας ταχύν, ἔξοχον ἀνδρῶν, παῖδ’ ἔτ’ ἐόν[τ’·] οὐ γάρ μιν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος νίκησ’ οὐδέ τις ἄλλος ἐπιχθονίων ἀνθρώπων μνηστεύων Ἑλένην, εἴ μιν κίχε παρθένον οὖσαν οἴκαδε νοστήσας ἐκ Πηλίου ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς. ἀλλ’ ἄρα τὴν πρίν γ’ ἔσχεν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος·

But war loving Menelaos, son of Atreus, defeated them all, Providing the most [i.e., hedna]. Chiron was on wooded Pelion 55

Preserved as fr. 214 of Hesiod in Merkelbach and West 1967 (not included in Merkelbach and West 1990). See Hirschberger 2004, fr. *4 ad line 10, for a discussion and text.

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Atalanta Reflects the Iliad with the son of Peleus, swift footed, outstanding among men, though still a child. For war loving Menelaos would not have defeated him [Achilles] nor would any other of the men who walk the earth, wooing Helen, if he had happened on her while she was still a parthenos as he returned homeward from Pelion, swift Achilles. But indeed war loving Menelaos obtained her first. (fr. 204.85 93)

The text at some length explains why it is that Achilles, admittedly the best of the Greeks, was not the one to win Helen’s hand. But it goes well beyond merely explaining: in the last three lines, the explanation allows itself to imagine the contrary-to-fact possibility.56 What if Achilles had met her on Pelion while she was still a parthenos? In this imagined scenario Achilles is not competing with other suitors, but rather stumbling across Helen, herself as yet sexually inexperienced, as he returns from the wilds of Pelion where he was undergoing a mythic version of ephebic training. I discuss this complex passage in greater detail in Chapter 6; here, it is sufficient to note that the fantasy of Achilles as a young lover is that last thing, the final moment, that might prevent Menelaos from marrying Helen and prevent all the disastrous consequences that follow. Once this remarkable fantasy is dismissed, the path is paved for the events that will become the story of the Iliad. This erotic Achilles, the swift-footed hero training with Cheiron, then, is the ideal bridegroom and the man who should have married Helen. Atalanta becomes his ideal literary and erotic precursor, a Helen figure herself whose swiftness of foot is defeated by her acceptance of the erotic over the violence of hunt and war. Achilles, alas, has no chance to accept an erotic mode, either with Helen or (later) with Hector. His only option is the deadly competition that arises for the woman whom Menelaos obtained before Achilles had his chance. In this regard, 56

Hirschberger 2004, ad 204.87; Schmidt 1996, 29 34. In some other versions, Achilles is one of the suitors of Helen (Euripides’ Helen 98 99, Pausanias 3.24); more important, some traditions seem to have explored the possibility of Achilles and Helen becoming erotically involved, either in a dream or becoming married in the Islands of the Blessed after death. See Schmidt 1996, 29 30; Hirschberger 2004, fr. 110 [204 M. W.] ad line 87.

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again, Atalanta’s invocation of Achilles prefigures both his erotic possibilities and their inevitable failure.

CONCLUSIONS

The story of the marriage of Atalanta contains various elements of aristocratic marriage that we have seen before. Her marriage is managed by her father, who sets up special provisions for those princes from other poleis who would woo her. The man who successfully races against her (and presumably marries her) will win significant material goods along with the bride. Finally, the race itself appears to be a form of “taming” a wild, unmarried woman, as she is convinced by Hippomenes to accept the “gifts of Aphrodite,” in both literal and metaphorical form. In this regard, the story in the Catalogue conforms to the general pattern of stories about Atalanta, in which she undergoes a transition to female adulthood parallel to that of the ephebic males with whom she appears and competes. The Catalogue’s version of Atalanta, however, also demonstrates the inherent danger of the plot of attraction. Desire for a woman like Atalanta can, and will, result in competition that ultimately threatens the aristocratic young men who participate in it. The remarkable thing about Atalanta, of course, is that she is both the object of the competition and a competitor in it herself. She becomes, through a series of verbal parallels, an Achilles figure, alluding to the force that will destroy not only Hector and Troy but ultimately the race of heroes altogether. The fact that Atalanta loses the race and that Hippomenes is able to live out the erotic fantasy that Hector briefly imagines with his foe is, perhaps, a temporary reprieve. Just so Hector receives a temporary reprieve from Apollo and pauses in the race for his life long enough to breathe. But on just the other side of this story is the story of Achilles and the city of Monêia, and the impossibility of Achilles stumbling across Helen before she marries Menelaos. The sexual attraction embodied by Atalanta hints at an erotic accord but leads inevitably to the sublimation of the erotic in epic, and so to the conflict that will end the race of heroes.

5 Then There Was the One Who Was Alkmene

Herakles is not like every other hero in the Catalogue of Women. His story spans the length of the text as we have it: he is mentioned even in the very first fragment, and his history seems to go backward, with the story of his birth told near the end of the last book, preceded by several important episodes from his life.1 His exploits show up in other heroes’ genealogies, most frequently as a destroyer of cities and hosts and as an abductor of young women (he is given the epithet ptoliporthos, city-destroyer, at fr. 25.23). In his function as a hero who intervenes in other heroes’ stories he seems almost like the Herakles of the Argonautica, always popping up but never the focus of the main narrative.2 The story of the wooing of Alkmene and the resulting birth of Herakles, however, takes center stage at a crucial moment in the Catalogue, just before the story of the suitors of Helen. This late placement presents a curious problem, which has recently been analyzed by Johannes Haubold.3 Building on Haubold’s perceptive argument, I hope to show three things about the narrative of Herakles’ birth. First, although the story here conforms to the large social patterns that we have seen in other narratives of aristocratic marriage and heroic birth in the Catalogue, certain features of the story point to the unique qualities of 1

2 3

Haubold 2005. Haubold’s analysis suggests that the development of Herakles’ story throughout the Catalogue provides an index for the paradigmatic changes that this text is negotiating. I find Haubold’s argument brilliant and persuasive, and this chapter should be viewed primarily as an expansion of the views expressed there. Martin 2005 makes the connection to Apollonios, p. 174. Haubold 2005. See also Ziogas 2013, 217.

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Herakles as a hero who will, in the end, retain his divinity. More important, several aspects of the narrative here as in the story of Atalanta, treated earlier point to the impending end of the heroic era, even though Herakles’ birth might be thought to belong to an early stage in that era. And finally, just as the Atalanta narrative engaged in a complex intertextual game with passages of the Iliad, it appears that Amphitryon and Alkmene are here created as literary precursors to Odysseus and Penelope, though in a comic register; as a result, the birth of Herakles is tied, inevitably, to that era of heroic existence known as the “returns,” which is to say, the waning moments of epic and aristocratic heroism. As in my reading of the Atalanta narrative, reading the story of Herakles’ birth in this way requires that we allow the Catalogue poet a certain type of literary sophistication. We must assume that he is engaged in an intertextual exercise with the epic and didactic traditions of hexameter poetry and, in particular, with the picture of Herakles that is presented in the Theogony. Such a reading is, I believe, supported by the narrative structure of Herakles’ story in the Catalogue. By the time we read about his birth, in which we are told that Zeus intends him to be “protector from destruction” for gods and men a role that he plays in the Theogony we have already met him in a more typically epic role, as an abuductor of women and destroyer of cities, several times.4 As Haubold argues, “Heracles in the Catalogue invites us to read between the lines and in more than one direction at once. Nowhere is this more palpable than at the moment when he is born: we need two stories, not one two protagonists, two births, two narrative registers.”5 In agreement with Haubold’s reading, this chapter explores in fuller detail the careful construction of those two narrative registers. The Catalogue poet presents us with a heroic birth that is socially the same as many others in the larger narrative but cosomologically more complex. Herakles’ doubled birth is used both to initiate a moment of divine-human interaction (a notional, 4

5

Ziogas 2013, 206 217, provides an excellent discussion of Herakles’ role throughout the Catalogue as a force of disruption. See especially 216: “In fact, the structure of the Catalogue invites us to read Hercules as an intruder who disrupts the genealogical flow of the work. He is not the main hero, he is actually the one who fights against and kills the main heroes of the poem.” Haubold 2005, 98.

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if not temporal, beginning of the age of heroes) and to point to its inevitable decline and end.

THE TEXT AND THE BACK STORY

The text of Herakles’ birth in the Catalogue is preserved for us through a curious set of circumstances. We are told in a hypothesis to the Hesiodic poem the Aspis (also known as the Scutum, or the Shield of Herakles) that the first fifty-six lines of the Aspis are in the fourth book of the Catalogue.6 And indeed, two papyri confirm that the first lines of this segment were present in what is now fragment 195 (M-W).7 Some of the information in this opening to the Aspis is repeated in a later section of that poem, in the form of a speech of Herakles to Iolaos. This repetition suggests that a section of the Catalogue was simply appended to the start of the Aspis, perhaps displacing the original opening of that poem, though scholarly opinion is divided as to who did the appending.8 As a result of this curious transmission history, the fifty-six lines that make up the story of Herakles’ birth comprise one of the longest continuous passages from the Catalogue and one of the few passages with no gaps. It is worth noting from the start that the passage begins with an ἤ οἵη formula and goes immediately into the story of Alkmene, Herakles’ mother.9 The first ten lines give the impression that this is, in nearly every respect, a typical marriage between a hero and a well-born mortal woman: 6

7

8

9

Mazon and Wilamowitz thought that lines 55 56 were spurious, but the lines are defended by Russo 1965, ad 55 56, and are attested by Aristophanes of Byzantium. See also the discussion of Schwartz 1960, 461. This is well discussed by Hirschberger 2004, 362. See also Schwartz 1960, 458 466; Davidson 1998, 1 n. 3; Martin 2005, 155. Janko 1986, 39, suggests that the author of the Aspis added the passage; West 1985, 136 n. 2, suggests that it is a later redactor. Recently, Martin 2005 has suggested that the poet of the Catalogue is the same as that of the Aspis and, moreover, that all of the Aspis might have existed in some copies of the Catalogue as an expanded episode. I am inclined to disagree with this last suggestion on the basis of the Hypothesis to the Aspis (a point made by Most in the Cambridge seminar on the Catalogue; see Martin 2005, 173 n. 56). Davidson 1998 provides a useful discussion of the characterization of Alkmene in this passage.

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Ἢ οἵη προλιποῦσα δόμους καὶ πατρίδα γαῖαν ἤλυθεν ἐς Θήβας μετ’ ἀρήιον Ἀμφιτρύωνα Ἀλκμήνη, θυγάτηρ λαοσσόου Ἠλεκτρύωνος· ἥ ῥα γυναικῶν φῦλον ἐκαίνυτο θηλυτεράων εἴδεΐ τε μεγέθει τε· νόον γε μὲν οὔ τις ἔριζε

5

τάων ἃς θνηταὶ θνητοῖς τέκον εὐνηθεῖσαι. τῆς καὶ ἀπὸ κρῆθεν βλεφάρων τ’ ἄπο κυανεάων τοῖον ἄηθ’ οἷόν τε πολυχρύσου Ἀφροδίτης. ἣ δὲ καὶ ὣς κατὰ θυμὸν ἑὸν τίεσκεν ἀκοίτην, ὡς οὔ πώ τις ἔτισε γυναικῶν θηλυτεράων.

10

Or the one who, having left her home and fatherland went to Thebes with warlike Amphitryon Alkmene, daughter of the rouser of people, Elektryon; Indeed she surpassed the tribe of female women in form and in size; but with her mind nobody would contend 5 of those whom mortal women, having been bedded, produced to mortal men. From her head, and from her dark eyebrows, such wafted as also from much golden Aphrodite. And she also honored her husband so in her thumos as not anyone of female women have ever honored. 10 (Aspis 1 10)

As Davidson points out, “in a few short brush strokes, Alkmene’s essential attributes of beauty, stature, intelligence and sexual allure have been established.”10 There are, however, a few aspects of these appealing qualities that are worth pointing out. The first line sounds as if it should be formulaic: Alkmene, unlike brides such as Mestra, seems to leave her father’s home without difficulty and make the transfer to Amphitryon’s household. But in fact the line is unique in the corpus of the Catalogue as we have it, and the later exposition of the story will explain why.11 Alkmene does not, as we will learn, simply leave her

10 11

Davidson 1998, 4. The nearest parallel I can find is in the story of Mestra (fr. 43a.66) when she returns to her home and fatherland: Μήστρη δὲ προ]λίπουσα Κόων ποτὶ πατρίδα γαῖαν (“But Mestra leaving Kos for her fatherland . . .”).

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father’s home, but leaves with Amphitryon into exile, after Amphitryon has killed her father;12 Thebes is not Amphitryon’s own home (never mentioned in the narrative), but the kingdom where he goes as a suppliant, seeking purification and reconciliation for his deed (discussed further below). So Alkmene’s departure from home and fatherland is not simply that of an aristocratic bride going to her husband’s new home and country, but a more complex departure in which both bride and groom are forced to leave and seek absolution in Thebes. Even so the plot of attraction is still clearly at work, and Alkmene’s essential attributes are used to place her in an implied competition with other mortal women. As each heroine does in her own narrative, Alkmene wins this competition, exceeding all other women in beauty, size, intelligence, and a crucial detail the high regard with which she holds her husband. Now, this is a somewhat curious list. As Davidson notes, intelligence would not seem to be a necessary quality for the mother of Herakles.13 Even more intriguing is the observation that Alkmene is preeminent in megethos, size. No other woman in the Catalogue is singled out for this quality. It does make a certain narrative sense, since we know that Alkmene will give birth to Herakles, who will be known for his strength and size, but the phrase carries with it another set of associations. A number of heroes are noted for their size in the Homeric epics:14 Agamemnon sees a figure in his dream in Iliad Book 2 who resembles Nestor “in form (eidos) and size (megethos)” (Iliad 2.58). Odysseus comments that some god has made Laertes greater in form (eidos) and size (megethos) in their reunion scene (Odyssey 24.374). But when the phrase is used of females, it is used exclusively of goddesses: Demeter is so distinguished in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (275), as is Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (85). The one exception occurs when Odysseus addresses Nausikaa in Book 6 of the Odyssey, and there he praises her as resembling Artemis εἶδος τε μέγεθός τε φυήν τ’ (“in form 12

13 14

In later versions Amphitryon does not kill her father or does so accidentally, so we cannot assume that the audience would know this about Amphitryon on hearing or reading these first lines. Davidson 1998, 4. Hirschberger 2004, ad line 5.

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and size and nature,” Odyssey 6.152). The comparison, there, is to divine size. Though Alkmene is not herself divine, there is a strong suggestion in the language used to describe her that she is closer to divinity than most women, an impression that is heightened by the suggestion that sexual allure wafts from her as from Aphrodite. She is, then, appropriate in nature to be the mother of Herakles, the most divine of mortal heroes. Moreover, as we read further, we learn that the story of Alkmene’s marriage has been curiously truncated. Indeed, the description of her fine qualities does not lead to a competiton of hedna, as is the usual narrative development. Instead, the final element in her list of attributes presupposes that, at the beginning of the story, she is already married to Amphitryon, since we learn that her devotion to her husband is greater than any other woman’s. The reason for Alkmene’s exile from her home and fatherland becomes, in fact, further proof of her remarkable dedication to Amphitryon: he has, in this version, actually killed her father, as we learn in the next lines of the poem. ἦ μέν οἱ πατέρ’ ἐσθλὸν ἀπέκτανε ἶφι δαμάσσας, χωσάμενος περὶ βουσί· λιπὼν δ’ ὅ γε πατρίδα γαῖαν ἐς Θήβας ἱκέτευσε φερεσσακέας Καδμείους.

Indeed, he killed her noble father, taming him with strength, having been angered concerning some oxen; and he, having left his fatherland, supplicated the shield bearing Kadmeians in Thebes. (Aspis 11 13)

The logic here is important and contains a compressed narrative. The fact that Amphitryon killed Elektryon immediately follows the statement about Alkmene’s dedication to her husband. The killing and Alkmene’s response to it serves, then, as proof of that dedication. Buried just below the surface is a narrative of quarrel between groom and father, and one in which, in the event, the bride’s devotion remains with her husband rather than her natal family, even to the extent of going into exile with him. At this point, however, the story takes another surprising narrative turn, and the events that follow lead to such logical confusion that it appears that later versions have resorted to desperate rearrangements in order to make sense of the motivations behind them.

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ἔνθ’ ὅ γε δώματ’ ἔναιε σὺν αἰδοίῃ παρακοίτι νόσφιν ἄτερ φιλότητος ἐφιμέρου, οὐδέ οἱ ἦεν

15

πρὶν λεχέων ἐπιβῆναι ἐυσφύρου Ἠλεκτρυώνης πρίν γε φόνον τείσαιτο κασιγνήτων μεγαθύμων ἧς ἀλόχου, μαλερῷ δὲ καταφλέξαι πυρὶ κώμας ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων Ταφίων ἰδὲ Τηλεβοάων. τὼς γάρ οἱ διέκειτο, θεοὶ δ’ ἐπὶ μάρτυροι ἦσαν

20

τῶν ὅ γ’ ὀπίζετο μῆνιν, ἐπείγετο δ’ ὅττι τάχιστα ἐκτελέσαι μέγα ἔργον, ὅ οἱ Διόθεν θέμις ἦεν.

Then he lived at home with his revered wife, far from desirable love making, for it was not for him 15 to go into bed of the fine ankled daughter of Elektryon, before he avenged the death of the great hearted brothers of his wife, and burned with ravening fire the villages of the heroic men of Taphia and Teleboa. For thus it was arranged for him, and the gods were witnesses 20 And he revered their anger, and hurried as quickly as possible to complete the great deed, which was lawful for him from Zeus. (Aspis 14 22)

Three separate, but related, events take place in all versions of this part of the narrative: Elektryon’s cattle are stolen by the Taphians; Elektryon and his sons are killed; and Amphitryon must avenge the death of Elektryon’s sons (Alkmene’s brothers). In some way, Amphitryon’s marriage to Alkmene is made dependent on this act of vengeance. But the method of each of these events shifts from version to version; most notably, the killing of Elektryon is here committed by Amphitryon himself, in a dispute over some cows. As narrated in the Aspis, it is difficult to know exactly which cows are referred to; it is even possible to imagine that Amphitryon and Elektryon entered into a dispute over the hedna for marriage to Alkmene, resulting in the groom-to-be killing the bride’s father. More likely, however, the reference here is to the cattle of Elektryon that were stolen from him by the Taphians and Teleboans, which, in some versions, Amphitryon undertook to return to his father-in-law. Why, however, should Elektryon and Amphitryon have had a dispute about these cattle, such that Amphitryon should

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“tame him [Elektryon] with force”? It is possible, though not certain, that the return of the cows was a heroic task undertaken in place of hedna; in any case, some dispute over the cattle came to a tragic end and resulted in Alkmene leaving town with Amphitryon. The narrative in Apollodorus’ version is significantly different, and by looking at those differences we can see the distinctive elements of the Hesiodic version more clearly. In Apollodorus (2.4), the cattle of Elektryon were stolen by the sons of Pterelaos. Elektryon’s sons went on a rescue mission, but all except Likymnios were killed. Amphitryon then ransomed the cows from Polyxenos (to whom they had been entrusted). In a confused sequence, we then learn that Elektryon was about to mount an expedition against the Teleboans to avenge his sons’ deaths, and had entrusted his kingdom and his daughter to Amphitryon, but with the provision that he should respect Alkmene’s virginity until his return. At that moment, one of the cows rushed at Elektryon, and Amphitryon threw a club at the cow; the club bounced off the cow’s horn and, tragically, killed Elektryon. A more wildly contrived accidental killing of the father-in-law can hardly be imagined. Sthenelos, Elektryon’s brother, then used this event as a pretext to exile Amphitryon and seize power in Mycenae himself. In the next bit of narrative, it appears that Alkmene, who went into exile with Amphitryon, was not yet married to him. After Elektryon’s death, we learn the following: λεγούσης δὲ Ἀλκμήης γαμηθήσεσθαι αὐτῷ τῶν ἀδελφῶν αὐτῆς ἐκδικήσαντι τὸν θάνατον, ὑποσχόμενος ἐπὶ Τηλεβόας στρατεύει Ἀμφιτρύων, καὶ παρεκάλει συλλαβέσθαι Κρέοντα.

As Alkmene said that she would marry him when he avenged the death of her brothers, Amphitryon promised, and campaigned against the Teleboans, and called on Kreon to help. (Apollodorus 2.5)

Even here the sequence of events is not certain: the suggestion that Alkmene had promised to marry Amphitryon specifically is dependent on an emendation by Wagner (changing τῷ to αὐτῷ in the quotation above). Without this emendation, the narrative makes even less sense, since Elektryon has already extracted an oath from Amphitryon to respect his daughter’s virginity until he should return from the planned

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expedition, which in the event was cut tragically short. This seems to presuppose that the two are, if not married, at least formally engaged. Alkmene’s declaration of future marriage, then, seems out of place, perhaps an invention to explain why Amphitryon must still avenge her dead brothers. Still another version goes even further in simplifying the plot and eliminating the tension between groom and father. According to a scholion to the Argonautica 1.747:15 ἡ Τάφος νῆσός ἐστι . . . ἣν . . . οἰκοῦντες ἄνδρες ληιστρικώτατοι ετυγχανον τὸν τρόπον καὶ εἰς Ἄργος ποτὲ ἐλθόντες τὰς τοῦ Ἠλεκτρύωνος βόας ἀπήλασαν τοῦ πατρὸς Ἀλκμήνης. γενομένης δὲ μάχης καὶ ὁ Ἠλεκτρύων καὶ οἱ τούτου παῖδες ἀνηιρέθησαν. διὸ Ἀλκμήνη μετέστη καὶ ἀνεκήρυξεν τὸν ἑαυτῆς γάμον τῶι τιμωρησομένωι τὸν πατρῶιον φόνον. ἡ ἱστορία σαφῶς ἐν τῆι Ἀσπίδι παρ᾿ Ἡσιόδωι.

Taphos is an island where . . . the most piratical men happened to live; and once, having gone to Argos they drove off the cattle of Elektryon, that is, of the father of Alkmene. A war broke out, and Elektryon and his sons were killed. Therefore, Alkmene stood forth and announced her marriage with whoever should avenge the murder of her father. This story is clearly in the Aspis of Hesiod.

Despite what the scholiast says, this version is clearly not in the Aspis, and it is not known what his source is for this version though it seems nearly to correspond to the version in Apollodorus if we reject Wagner’s emendation of the text (above). Even in the later passage of the Aspis, when Herakles tells Iolaos of Amphitryon’s travel to Thebes, the hero makes it clear that Amphitryon was Elektryon’s killer (Aspis 82). But what is particularly interesting about this version is that the scholiast provides a much cleaner and more comprehensible narrative than does the Aspis. Here, the Taphians are responsible for deaths of both Elektryon and his sons, and this also provides an aition for the marriage of Amphitryon and Alkmene. In Hesiod’s version, by contrast, Amphitryon must avenge the sons’ (Alkmene’s brothers’) deaths, simply because of an oath that he took possibly in the form of a promise to Elektryon, despite the fact that after taking the oath (but apparently before fulfilling it) he killed his father-in-law. Amphitryon and Alkmene seem to be already married when 15

Text in Hirschberger 2004, ad 16 17.

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they arrive in Thebes, but unable to consummate their marriage until Amphitryon fulfills the oath. The sequence of events, moreover, is particularly troubling; though mentioned after the fact, if Amphitryon made this oath to Elektryon, we have to assume that the promise preceded the dispute over cattle that led to Elektryon’s death. In other words, the episode in the Catalogue revives the social tensions that we have seen elsewhere in that work. As Davidson notes, Alkmene “stands framed, as it were, by husband and father.”16 Where do her loyalties lie? Amphitryon is required to respect her blood relations, to the extent of not consummating his marriage until he has avenged her brothers’ deaths. On the other hand, Alkmene remains with Amphitryon even though he has killed her father, apparently in outright combat. The tensions between marital and natal family simply lie bare on the surface of the narrative. The version in Apollodorus, on the other hand, reads like an attempt to reconcile these tensions: Amphitryon is a dutiful son-in-law who has performed a heroic deed for his bride’s father, which goes wildly, almost comically, wrong.17 In Hesiod’s version, in stark contrast to those of Apollodorus and the scholiast, Alkmene’s thoughts and motivations for marriage remain a mystery. Not only does Alkmene not speak, we never hear if she is the agent behind any of Amphitryon’s actions. Hirschberger suggests that the task of avenging the death of Alkmene’s brothers is laid on Amphitryon by Alkmene herself, as a kind of compensation for having killed her father.18 But the fact that in later versions the promise to stay clear of Alkmene’s bed is made not to her but to her father, and is, in Apollodorus, not initially tied to avenging the brothers’ deaths, should give us pause. Indeed, the Hesiodic version does not tell us who required this task of Amphitryon or who prevented him from having sex with his wife until he had done so; and as Davidson points out, “it is the influence of the gods which is again stressed in the text.”19 More specifically, the promise is protected by Zeus himself. And though Zeus is a god who oversees oaths, in this story he is also a participating character: the fact 16 17 18 19

Davidson 1998, 3. See Davidson 1998, 5. Hirschberger 2004, ad 16 17. Davidson 1998, 5 6.

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that Amphitryon must go on a military expedition before he has sex with his wife works to Zeus’ advantage, and in fact provides Zeus with an opportunity to sleep with Alkmene. Immediately after we hear of Amphitryon’s expedition, in fact, the narrative turns to Zeus’ seduction (discussed at greater length below): ἦρχε δὲ τοῖσιν ἐὺς πάις Ἀλκαίοιο κυδιόων λαοῖσι. πατὴρ δ’ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε ἄλλην μῆτιν ὕφαινε μετὰ φρεσίν . . .

And he led them, the noble son of Alkaios, urging on the people. But the father of men and gods was weaving another plan in his mind . . .

(Aspis 26 28)

By considering what the later versions of the myth have done in order to mitigate the apparent inconsistencies in the Hesiodic version, then, we can also see where the points of narrative tension reside in the latter. The Hesiodic version assumes, but does not fully narrate, a strong conflict between father and husband; a dispute, possibly over the terms of the marriage; and the bride’s choice, perhaps after the fact, of marital over natal ties. The episode begins with her going into exile with her husband, and the remarkable dedication that she feels for Amphitryon is supported by the fact that she stays with him after he kills her father.20 The curious side plot about abstinence until Amphitryon avenges his wife’s dead brothers is not, as in Apollodorus and the scholion to Apollonios, a part of the marriage contract, but rather appears to be either the fulfillment of a promise to Elektryon or part of Amphitryon’s absolution for his murder. More important, it sets in motion and guarantees the plot of seduction that Zeus develops for this little episode.

THE PLOT OF ZEUS, ANOTHER PREVIEW

The plot of Zeus always has cosmic implications, and this story is no exception. In the following chapter, I discuss the episode of the 20

See Hirschberger 2004, ad 11.

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suitors of Helen, and the ways that that section of the Catalogue figures the end of the age of heroes. The story of the birth of Herakles also points to that eventual development, though there is no compelling narrative reason for it to do so. As Haubold suggests, this helps explain the curious placement of this episode late in the Catalogue. That is, the birth of Herakles seems to come last (or nearly so) of all the episodes of Herakles’ life as they are told in the Catalogue.21 In any case, the story of his birth appears to have been artificially delayed until the Pelopid stemma, rather than falling in with the Inachids in Book 2.22 In a wide-ranging and engaging argument, Haubold suggests that this displacement has everything to do with a shift in narrative sensibility, as we move from the Herakles of the Theogony to the world of heroic epic. In the Theogony, as Haubold argues, Herakles is a force for civilization, roaming the world and killing off monsters. In the Catalogue, by contrast, Herakles seems always to be busy sacking cities and abducting or falling prey to women.23 In Haubold’s view, then, the unfolding plot of Herakles enacts a shift in “narrative register,” from the Herakles who acts as protector of the cosmos in the Theogony to the more troubled, perhaps more human Herakles of heroic epic. This shift in narrative register suggests a reason for delaying the story of Herakles’ birth: The narrative of Heracles’ birth is not simply postponed but rather juxtaposed with that of the Trojan War near the end of the text. Together they mark the climax of the cosmogonic process that started at Theogony 116.24

21

22 23 24

Haubold 2005, 85 86. This observation is dependent, of course, on the highly provisional ordering of the fragments as we have them. Nonetheless, the frag ment that was appended to the Aspis does seem secure in its late location. It is, moreover, worth pointing out that Ovid narrates Herakles’ life in reverse order, ending with the story of his birth (as, in Haubold’s reading, the Catalogue does). See Metamorphoses 9.1 323. Ziogas 2011 has recently shown that Ovid’s Metamorphoses imitates the Catalogue in overall design as well as in specific episodes. See West 1985, 144 n. 39; Haubold 2005, 97. Haubold 2005, 91 94. Haubold 2005, 96.

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That is, Zeus maintains his spot in the Olympian cosmological order in part through the production of Herakles, a “protector from ruin.” At the same time, that cosmological order suffers a break, at least from the human perspective, when the end of the age of heroes comes about. The remarkable narrative trick of the Catalogue is to signal both moments in this one narrative. To see the connections between the birth of Herakles and the end of the age of heroes, we need to consider carefully the language that is used to describe Zeus’ seduction of Alkmene: ἦρχε δὲ τοῖσιν ἐὺς πάις Ἀλκαίοιο κυδιόων λαοῖσι. πατὴρ δ’ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε ἄλλην μῆτιν ὕφαινε μετὰ φρεσίν, ὥς ῥα θεοῖσιν ἀνδράσι τ’ ἀλφηστῇσιν ἀρῆς ἀλκτῆρα φυτεύσαι. ὦρτο δ’ ἀπ’ Οὐλύμποιο δόλον φρεσὶ βυσσοδομεύων, ἱμείρων φιλότητος ἐυζώνοιο γυναικός, ἐννύχιος· τάχα δ’ ἷξε Τυφαόνιον· τόθεν αὖτις Φίκιον ἀκρότατον προσεβήσατο μητίετα Ζεύς. ἔνθα καθεζόμενος φρεσὶ μήδετο θέσκελα ἔργα· αὐτῇ μὲν γὰρ νυκτὶ τανισφύρου Ἠλεκτρυώνης εὐνῇ καὶ φιλότητι μίγη, τέλεσεν δ’ ἄρ’ ἐέλδωρ·

And he led them, the noble son of Alkaios [i.e., Amphitryon], exulting among the people. But the father of men and gods contrived another plan in his mind, so that for gods and for men who work for bread he should engender a protector from destruction. And so he rushed from Olympos, brooding deeply on a trick in his mind 30 desiring the love of the lovely girdled woman, at night. Quickly he reached Typhaonion; from there again Zeus the counselor approached highest Phikion. Settling there, he plotted in his mind wondrous deeds. For on that very night he mixed in bed and love 35 with Elektryon’s slender ankled daughter, and he accomplished his wish. (Aspis 26 36)

While Amphitryon is off on his mission to avenge Alkmene’s brothers a mission that was made “divinely right (themis) by Zeus” (22) Zeus

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contrives a plot, mêtis, which he accomplishes by brooding deep in his mind a trick, dolon.25 This plan is specifically for the birth of Herakles, who will be a protector of gods and men, a role that Herakles in fact plays at length in the Theogony.26 But this is, perhaps, a somewhat inauspicious beginning to Herakles’ career, brought about as it is by Zeus’ cuckolding Amphitryon via a series of underhanded tricks. In fact, Zeus here sounds remarkably like Odysseus, as he narrates his own story in Book 9 of the Odyssey: αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ βούλευον, ὅπως ὄχ’ ἄριστα γένοιτο, εἴ τιν’ ἑταίροισιν θανάτου λύσιν ἠδ’ ἐμοὶ αὐτῷ εὑροίμην· πάντας δὲ δόλους καὶ μῆτιν ὕφαινον, ὥς τε περὶ ψυχῆς· μέγα γὰρ κακὸν ἐγγύθεν ἦεν.

But I was planning in what way it should turn out best, if I could find some release from death for my companions and for me. I plotted all the tricks (doloi) and plan (mêtis) since life was at stake; for a huge evil was near. (Odyssey 9.420 424)

Zeus is not, here, in a situation parallel to that of Odysseus, and I do not mean to suggest a connection in terms of plot. But it is significant that Zeus in this episode takes on the role of trickster, the clever manipulator who weaves plans, rather than being the all-powerful ruler of gods and men.27 There is, I would argue, a deep ambivalence here: on the one hand, Zeus has a plan for the betterment of humankind and maintaining the current divine order. On the other hand, Zeus’ plan for bringing about this result seems more like a scheme to seduce a beautiful woman; it looks, in other words, a great deal like the “plot of attraction” that runs 25

26 27

In later versions of the story, this trick is specifically that he comes to Alkmene in the form of her husband in order to seduce her, and it is possible that this is what the narrative here has in mind. Indeed, given Alkmene’s remarkable devotion to her husband, it seems likely enough. But again it is worth noting that the text is not clear on this point. See the useful discussion by Davidson 1998, 6 7. Gantz 1993, 374 376, also considers the possibility that the word dolon here refers to Zeus’ deception of Amphitryon in seducing his wife. See Haubold 2005, 89, 93. The Odyssean language here may also serve to set up the parallels between Amphitryon and Odysseus; see further below.

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like a red thread through the Catalogue of Women.28 Zeus will of course outmaneuver his human competitor for Alkmene’s affections, but even so, what he does here is fall prey to his own desires (line 31) for a woman who has all the usual attributes: she is “lovely-girdled” and “slender-ankled.” Indeed, the results of that plot of attraction are also signaled in this episode. For when Zeus is on his way to Alkmene’s bed a route described with curious geographic specificity he mêdeto theskela erga, “plotted wondrous deeds” (Aspis 34). This seems like a simple enough phrase, but it is used in the extant fragments of the Catalogue in only one other place: at fragment 204.96, during the story of the suitors of Helen.29 This passage receives full discussion in the next chapter, but here it is sufficient simply to note that in fragment 204 the phrase is used specifically to mark the beginning of the end of the age of heroes: δὴ γὰρ τότε μήδετο θέσκελα ἔργα Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης, †μεῖξαι κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν τυρβάξας,† ἤδη δὲ γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων πολλὸν ἀϊστῶσαι σπεῦδε, πρ[ό]φασιν μὲν ὀλέσθαι ψυχὰς ἡμιθέω[ν..... ..... .]οισι βροτοῖσι τέκνα θεῶν μι[...].[..]ο.[ ὀφ]θαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶντα, ἀλλ’ οἳ μ[ὲ]ν μάκ[α]ρες κ[.......]ν ὡς τὸ πάρος περ χωρὶς ἀπ’ ἀν[θ]ρώπων[ βίοτον κα]ὶ ἤθε’ ἔχωσιν το[..]ε.εαλ[ ἀθα]νάτω[ν τε ἰδὲ] θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων

...[ Ζεὺ[ς

]καλ ἄλγος ἐπ’ ἄλγει ]κ[..]ε. ἔκερσε

For then Zeus the thunderer planned amazing deeds, to mix and stir up the boundless earth, and already he hurried to annihilate the great race of bread eating mortals, an excuse to kill the lives of the heroes . . . . mortals 28

29

See Sammons 2010, 63 73, for a similar reading of Zeus’ catalogue of lovers in Iliad 14. See esp. 66: “What Zeus in his ignorance presents as evidence of his unique prowess in the erotic sphere becomes for us, acquainted as we are with Hera’s plan, mounting evidence of his greatest weakness.” Noted by Hirschberger 2004, ad 34; Haubold 2005, 97.

The Plot of Zeus, Another Preview children of the gods . . . seeing with his eyes but the blessed . . . as before apart from men they had means of life and customs pain upon pain Zeus destroyed

167

(fr. 204.96 106)

Those wondrous deeds in this case, of course, are the events of the Trojan War, the inevitable result of the competition for Helen’s hand and her eventual marriage to Menelaos. Though Herakles may be intended to be a protection against destruction, the method of his creation parallels the mode by which the era of semi-divine heroes will be brought to a crashing end.30 We should, in fact, see this deep ambivalence in the very moment of conception that this episode narrates. Zeus conceives a plan in his mind to engender Herakles; he contrives a trick to bring this about; and finally, we are told, he “plots wondrous deeds.” Immediately afterward, we learn what those wondrous deeds are: For (gar) on that very night he mixed in bed and love with Elektryon’s slender ankled daughter, and he accomplished his wish. (Aspis 35 36)

Somehow in Zeus’ desire for Alkmene, engendering Herakles as the protector from destruction seems to have become somewhat lost. The connective between lines 34 and 35 (gar) suggests that the “wondrous deeds” are nothing other than mixing in love. And when we learn at the end of line 36 that Zeus “accomplished his wish,” what are we to understand? As Hirschberger notes, the word eëldôr is used frequently in the Homeric epics by mortals, when they ask divinities to bring their “wishes” to pass. As she suggests, then, we may well see a light humor in this line, since Zeus himself is bringing his own “wish” to pass.31 But the humor is also clouded by ambiguity: does the line, in this context, mean that Zeus has successfully engendered Herakles as a protector? Or merely that he had sex with Alkmene? From Zeus’ all-powerful perspective there may be no difference between the two, 30

31

See Haubold 2005, 97, for a useful discussion of the ways that Amphitryon’s expedition resembles a miniature version of the Trojan War. Hirschberger 2004, ad 36.

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but for us, the ambivalence marks exactly the gap between the Herakles of the Theogony and the Herakles of the Catalogue, the protector of order and destroyer of monsters, or the sex-hungry crusher of cities. As Haubold aptly remarks: If it was indeed the text’s aim to combine the world of cosmogony with that of heroic and post heroic epic, there could hardly have been a better character to think with than Heracles. He was always a complex figure god and man, savior and monster, sufferer and buffoon.32

HERAKLES’ OTHER FATHER

If Zeus’ begetting of Herakles seems in itself deeply ambivalent, the story of Herakles’ birth becomes even more convoluted when we consider the role of his mortal father, Amphitryon. On the one hand, Amphitryon is a suitable father for Herakles: a rouser of people, warlike, and a man who keeps his word. At the end of this fragment, he is described as “the best [mortal] by far in seven-gated Thebes” (48 49). At the same time, at the moment of Herakles’ conception, Amphitryon is off doing the sort of thing that Herakles does too much of, especially in the Catalogue. He is on a mission, not only to kill the Taphians and the Teleboans but to destroy their cities with ravening fire, and he is motivated to do so in a great hurry by the desire for his wife that possesses him. We are told at lines 21 22 that “he hurried as quickly as possible/ to complete the great deed,” and this last phrase (ektelesai mega ergon) is repeated immediately after the lines in which we learn that Zeus has slept with Alkmene: ἐκτελέσας μέγα ἔργον ἀφίκετο ὅνδε δόμονδε (“[Zeus] having completed the great deed he returned to his home,” Aspis 38).33 The clause itself should perhaps remind us of Zeus “plotting wondrous deeds” (theskela erga) and “fulfilling his desire” (Aspis 36), so that Amphitryon becomes a 32 33

Haubold 2005, 98. As Hirschberger 2004 notes, the one place in Homeric epic where the exact phrase ektelesas mega ergon appears is Odyssey 3.275, where Nestor is telling Telemachos about the fate of Agamemnon. In this case, the deed refers to Aegisthus having killed Agamemnon; the parallel is certainly suggestive, but I do not want to push the correspondence too far.

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devalued double of Zeus, just as their two children will be reflections of their greater and lesser fathers, respectively. Amphitryon’s campaign against the Taphians and the Teleboans, however, does not only foreshadow Herakles as a city-sacker. It also contains a phrase that points toward the end of the age of heroes. As we saw earlier, Amphitryon is charged to “burn with ravening fire the villages/ of the heroic men, the Taphians and Teleboans” (μαλερῷ δὲ καταφλέξαι πυρὶ κώμας/ ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων Ταφίων ἰδὲ Τηλεβοάων, Aspis 18 19). The phrase andres herôes (in the genitive case) is not uncommon by any means; it appears, for example, at fragment 25.11 as a collective noun of the men who do not dare to fight against Meleager. But it is also a phrase that occurs specifically when Hesiod speaks of the need to end the race of heroes. We see it, for example, in the Works and Days: Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε, δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον, ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται ἡμίθεοι, προτέρη γενεὴ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν. καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνὴ τοὺς μὲν ὑφ’ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ, Καδμηίδι γαίῃ, ὤλεσε μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’ Οἰδιπόδαο, τοὺς δὲ καὶ ἐν νήεσσιν ὑπὲρ μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης ἐς Τροίην ἀγαγὼν Ἑλένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο.

Zeus son of Kronos made another race, more just and better, the divine race of heroic men, who were called half divine,34 an earlier race on the boundless earth. Some of these evil war destroyed, and terrible battle din, under seven gated Thebes, the land of Kadmos, as they fought for the flocks of Oedipus; others also when war drove them in ships across the huge depths of the sea against Troy, for the sake of lovely haired Helen. (Works and Days, 158 165) 34

Clay 2005, 99 100, points out that the term hemitheoi “always seems to convey not only their hybrid nature, but also a distancing perspective on the heroes that assigns them to a bygone era. The word thus suggests a retrospective vision, looking back at the legendary past from the vantage of the present.” I discuss this passage in more detail in the following chapter.

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Even more telling, however, is the occurrence of the phrase in the narrative of the suitors of Helen that follows shortly in the Catalogue.35 ..... ..... ..... .]Διὸς νεφεληγερέταο .....] __ι[.].α..υ.η.......φράσσασθαι ἔμελλεν οὔτε θ]εῶ[ν] μακάρων οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων· ... π]ολλὰς Ἀΐδηι κεφαλὰς ἀπὸ χαλκὸν ἰάψ[ει]ν ἐν δηϊοτῆτι πεσόντων· ἀν]δρ̣ ῶν ̣ ἡ̣ρώων ̣ ἀλλ’ οὔ πώ ποτε πατρὸς ἐπηισθάνετο φρενὸ[ς] ὁρμῆ[ς· of Zeus the cloud gatherer he was about to say neither of blessed gods nor of mortal men. . . . the bronze would throw many heads to Hades of heroic men falling in combat. But he did not understand the desire of his father’s mind . . .

(fr. 204.115 120)

These lines follow closely after the lines quoted above, in which we learn of the plan of Zeus to end the line of heroes, and apparently refers to the Trojan War as a means of doing just that. Lines 117 118 (quoted above), as has long been recognized, echo the beginning of the Iliad: πολλὰς δ᾿ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν/ ἡρώων . . . (“and sent many strong souls to Hades/ [souls] of heroes,” Iliad 1.3 4). Here again, the andres herôes make an appearance just at the moment that we hear of the plot of Zeus and just as the narrative turns to the idea that these heroes are no longer with us. In other words, the expedition of Amphitryon is more than just the plot event that allows Zeus to have sex with Alkmene. At the same time, his expedition bears a resemblance to those other epic expeditions to Thebes in the time of Oedipus and to Troy in pursuit of Helen, both of which are part of the cosmogonic plan to put an end to the age of heroes. We are moved here not just from the cosmogony of the Theogony to the less happy time of epic, but specifically to the time of epic that marks its eventual end. Herakles is, in a sense, also Amphitryon’s son, and in the Catalogue his epithet of “city-destroyer” 35

Again, this passage receives more thorough treatment in the chapter that follows.

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(ptoliporthos, fr. 25.23) is prefigured by his mortal father’s war against the Taphians and Teleboans a war that, ironically, Amphitryon must undertake in order to be allowed to have sex with his wife, but that also allows Zeus to make his own “wondrous plans” for sleeping with Alkmene. The entire cosmogonic plan, in a sense, collapses into this single moment.

RECALLING ODYSSEUS

Amphitryon goes on a military campaign and returns home, anxious to reunite with his wife. Alkmene, famous for her beauty, is also famous for her intelligence and her remarkable dedication to her husband. All of this might remind us of the Odyssey, a story that takes place later in mythological time, but the text of which probably predates the Catalogue. And indeed, it seems that the Catalogue poet has gone to some pains to give Amphitryon’s return an Odyssean feel. There are few passages that directly imitate the Odyssey and no direct quotations. But at several points, the phrasing of the narrative and the depiction of Amphitryon’s emotions call to mind the later hero. Alkmene, as we noted earlier, is rather curiously praised for her intelligence (Aspis 5 6), and in the Odyssey the suitor Antinoos names her (as one of three women) as an analogue to Penelope with regard to noêmata, thoughtfulness: . . . ἅ οἱ περὶ δῶκεν Ἀθήνη, ἔργα τ’ ἐπίστασθαι περικαλλέα καὶ φρένας ἐσθλὰς κέρδεά θ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τιν’ ἀκούομεν οὐδὲ παλαιῶν, τάων αἳ πάρος ἦσαν ἐϋπλοκαμῖδες Ἀχαιαί, Τυρώ τ’ Ἀλκμήνη τε ἐϋστέφανός τε Μυκήνη·

. . . concerning which Athena gave her, to be skilled at very beautiful works and noble thoughts, and cleverness, such as we have not heard of anyone, even of old, of those fair haired Achaean women who lived before, Tyro and Alkmene and fair wreathed Mykene. (Odyssey 2.116 120)

Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth comment that Antinoos “selects three great names from the past, but there is no reason to regard any of these

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heroines as particularly clever.”36 While we see little evidence of Alkmene’s cleverness in the Aspis, I do think that the comparison to Penelope is telling, and it is possible that this comparison in the Odyssey led the author of the Catalogue to model some aspects of Amphitryon and Alkmene on Odysseus and Penelope.37 In the first place, we are given a considerable amount of detail about how Amphitryon returned home: αὐτῇ δ’ Ἀμφιτρύων λαοσσόος, ἀγλαὸς ἥρως, ἐκτελέσας μέγα ἔργον ἀφίκετο ὅνδε δόμονδε, οὐδ’ ὅ γε πρὶν δμῶας καὶ ποιμένας ἀγροιώτας ὦρτ’ ἰέναι, πρίν γ’ ἧς ἀλόχου ἐπιβήμεναι εὐνῆς· τοῖος γὰρ κραδίην πόθος αἴνυτο ποιμένα λαῶν.

On the same night, Amphitryon, rouser of the people, the shining hero, having accomplished the great deed, arrived at his home, and he did not set out to go to his slaves or to his rustic herdsmen before he went up into bed with his wife. Such desire in his heart took hold of the leader of the people. (Aspis 37 41)

On the one hand, lines 37 41 are perhaps a bit comical, emphasizing as they do the overwhelming nature of the lust that Amphitryon feels for his beautiful wife. Here, as in the later comic tradition, he appears to be a bit of a dupe. But on the other hand, they seem rather too specific to mean simply that. Indeed, Schwartz found the details in this verse patently absurd: “Can we believe that these verses . . . needed to specify that the hero ‘had not gone first to find his servants or his herdsmen’? These verses are entirely ridiculous, and their elimination in no way disrupts the narrative.”38 I suggest, however, that these details are here for a reason: namely, that we are meant to think specifically of the return of Odysseus to Ithaka. Considerably more circumspect than Amphitryon, Odysseus begins his return home, of course, by visiting the rustic swineherd, Eumaeus, and only gradually works his way back into 36 37 38

Heubeck et al. 1988, ad 2.120 See Davidson 1998, 4. Schwartz 1960, 463 (“croit on que les vers . . . avaient besoin de préciser que le héros ‘n’avait pas été d’abord trouver ses serviteurs ou ses bergers au champs’? Ces vers sont plutôt ridicules et leur elimination ne rompt nullement le récit”).

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his house proper, after he ascertains, among other things, Penelope’s fidelity.39 Odysseus’ return, of course, must be circumspect, in part because of the warning that he has received about the faithfulness of women from the ghost of Agamemnon (Odyssey 11.441 461). Here, Amphitryon is given Agamemnon’s epithet, “shepherd of the people” (poimena laôn).40 Since this designation shows up just two lines after we learn that Amphitryon has not visited his “rustic shepherds,” we are perhaps filled with a momentary sense of foreboding. Having ignored the sensible behavior of his literary predecessor, will Amphitryon end tragically, as does the other, more famous shepherd of the people? But no; here, the negative consequences despite Alkmene’s real, if unavoidable infidelity are all washed away. A few lines later we learn: παννύχιος δ’ ἄρ’ ἔλεκτο σὺν αἰδοίῃ παρακοίτι τερπόμενος δώροισι πολυχρύσου Ἀφροδίτης.

And all night he lay with his revered wife, taking delight in the gifts of much golden Aphrodite.

(Aspis 46 47)

We might even see in the adjective pannuchios (“all night”) a reference to Odysseus and Penelope’s famous lovemaking and chatting, aided by Athena holding back the dawn (Odyssey 23.241 245).41 Between Amphitryon’s curiously rushed return and his enjoyment of Aphrodite are four lines that present us with a Homeric simile quite rare in the extant verses of the Catalogue42 that I believe are meant to recall Odysseus’ return home:43 39

40 41 42

43

Hirschberger 2004, ad 39 40, suggests that the contrast here is to Telemachos in Book 15 (cf. esp. 504 505). But the comparison to Odysseus seems more immediately appropriate. Haubold 2005, 97. Suggested to me in private correspondence by Alex Purves. In fact, the only other such extended simile that I can find appears in fr. 204, again in the passage that tells of the forthcoming end of the age of heroes (fr. 204.121 122), a considerably less elaborate simile. These lines have been variously thought spurious or out of place; cf. Merkelbach and West 1990, ad loc. Mazon deletes them, and Schwartz thought that they were interpolated (Schwartz 1960, 463). They are accepted without comment by Most 2007 and Hirschberger 2004. I see no reason to view them as spurious,

174

Then There Was the One Who Was Alkmene [ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀνὴρ ἀσπαστὸν ὑπεκπροφύγῃ κακότητα νούσου ὑπ’ ἀργαλέης ἢ καὶ κρατεροῦ ὑπὸ δεσμοῦ, ὥς ῥα τότ’ Ἀμφιτρύων χαλεπὸν πόνον ἐκτολυπεύσας ἀσπασίως τε φίλως τε ἑὸν δόμον εἰσαφίκανεν.] [As when a man gladly escapes out from under some evil, from harsh disease, or also from powerful bonds, thus indeed then Amphitryon having completely ended his harsh toil, gladly and happily arrived in his own home.] (Aspis 42 45)

The passage calls to mind several in the Odyssey. The passage from which this one seems most clearly derived takes place when Odysseus is adrift in the ocean, just before he arrives on Phaiakia; words that also appear in the passage in the Aspis are set below in boldface: ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀσπάσιος βίοτος παίδεσσι φανήῃ πατρός, ὃς ἐν νούσῳ κεῖται κρατέρ’ ἄλγεα πάσχων, δηρὸν τηκόμενος, στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔχραε δαίμων, ἀσπάσιον δ’ ἄρα τόν γε θεοὶ κακότητος ἔλυσαν, ὣς Ὀδυσῆ’ ἀσπαστὸν ἐείσατο γαῖα καὶ ὕλη. . .

As when the life of a father appears, welcome, to his children, a father who lies in sickness suffering strong pains, and wasting away, and a hateful daimon was attacking him, but then the gods freed him, gladly, from evil, thus to Odysseus appeared the welcome land and forests . . . (Odyssey 5.394 398)

The emphasis on the welcome result (aspasios, aspaston) and the escape from evil is particularly striking. The metaphor is perhaps more appropriate in the case of the Odyssey, since Odysseus is himself near death, and of course his return will be welcome to his child. In the Aspis, the idea of being “welcome” is used specifically to emphasize only Amphitryon’s overwhelming sexual desire. This seems a clear case of “motif transference”: here the passage takes on a lighter, more comic tone, and indeed, the consequences that await him are less fraught than those that await Odysseus. and if they are, they must have already been in place by the time of Aristophanes of Byzantium, who speaks of fifty six lines from the Aspis in the Catalogue.

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Another passage from the Odyssey, however, seems to me more clearly apposite to Amphitryon’s return, though the verbal parallels are not quite as strong: ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀσπάσιος γῆ νηχομένοισι φανήῃ, ὧν τε Ποσειδάων εὐεργέα νῆ’ ἐνὶ πόντῳ ῥαίσῃ, ἐπειγομένην ἀνέμῳ καὶ κύματι πηγῷ· παῦροι δ’ ἐξέφυγον πολιῆς ἁλὸς ἤπειρόνδε νηχόμενοι, πολλὴ δὲ περὶ χροῒ τέτροφεν ἅλμη, ἀσπάσιοι δ’ ἐπέβαν γαίης, κακότητα φυγόντες· ὣς ἄρα τῇ ἀσπαστὸς ἔην πόσις εἰσοροώσῃ, δειρῆς δ’ οὔ πω πάμπαν ἀφίετο πήχεε λευκώ.

As when welcome land appears to swimming men, whose well built ship Poseidon has destroyed in the sea, the ship pounded with wind and heavy wave; And a few escaped landward from the salt sea, swimming, and much salt has grown on their skin, and happily they go up on the land, having escaped evil. Thus welcome was her husband to her as she looked at him and from his neck she did not at all release her white arms. (Odyssey 23.233 240)

This simile, as Helene Foley pointed out, is one “of a group of similes of family or social relationship clustering almost exclusively around the incident in Phaeacia and the family of Odysseus as it struggles to recover peace and unity on Ithaca.”44 It is remarkable in its subtlety, as it positions Penelope as the sailor lost at sea, and her husband as the welcome land, a “reversal” (in Foley’s terms) of the way that we expect the simile to work. It takes place at a moment of high emotion in the epic and is justly famous. Moments later, Odysseus and Penelope retire to bed, and each tells the other the stories of their last twenty years. It is perhaps not surprising that the Catalogue poet should allude to this moment in describing Amphitryon’s return to Alkmene. 44

Foley 1978, 87. Foley also sees this simile as echoing the one from Book 5 cited just above (5.394 398).

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At the same time, of course, we are reminded that Alkmene is not circumspect Penelope and that perhaps Amphitryon should have been a bit more like Odysseus in returning home; after all, when Amphitryon returns, his wife has just been having sex with Zeus.45 In her perceptive work on Penelope, Felson-Rubin suggests that Odysseus’ wife knows the story of Alkmene and is as circumspect as she is because “she knows that gods can come in human guise and seduce gullible mortals like herself, as Zeus seduced Alkmene.”46 Here, then, we have the Catalogue poet operating as he did in the story of Atalanta: the connection to Penelope is present in the Odyssey, and our poet refers to it by calling up the return of Odysseus in a pair of verbal echoes. Unlike circumspect Penelope and crafty Odysseus, however, their precursors are a bit of comic negative, happily falling into bed together despite a sexual transgression. And significantly, although we know that Alkmene is guilty of exactly what Odysseus feared most sexual infidelity here, the potential for disaster in that earlier story is turned to comic resolution. A hero goes off to war, he returns home to his wife, they have sex, and then she gives birth to two heroes, with no negative consequences. As in the story of Atalanta, the Catalogue allows us to imagine an earlier period in mythic time, when these sorts of moments were not so laced with peril. At the same time, this comic version carries overtones that demand our attention. One phrase in this set of lines does not seem to come from the Odyssey, containing an image that appears most vividly in another context. Amphitryon, in addition to being compared to a man who has escaped from “harsh disease” (nousou argaleês), is also like a man who has escaped from “powerful bonds” (kraterou hypo desmou, 43). These sorts of bonds are often, in Hesiod, the sort of punishment that is reserved for gods. Zeus, for example, releases Briareos, Kottos, and Gyges from the “strong bonds” (kraterôi desmôi) that Ouranos has kept them in at Theogony 45

46

In Apollodorus, something of the awkwardness of the situation is admitted: Amphitryon asks Alkmene why she is not more pleased to see him and is told that he (here, Zeus in disguise) had returned the previous night, and eventually Amphitryon learns the truth from Tiresias (2.4.8). In the Aspis that entire situation is glossed over: the couple enjoys the “gifts of Aphrodite” and the narrative then turns to an explanation of how and why Herakles is different from his mortal brother, Iphikles (Aspis 48 56). Felson Rubin 1994, 152 n. 13; see also Davidson 1998, 10 11.

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616 626. But there is one episode in the Theogony involving Zeus’ rule, bondage, and mortality that seems particularly apposite here: δῆσε δ’ ἀλυκτοπέδῃσι Προμηθέα ποικιλόβουλον, δεσμοῖς ἀργαλέοισι, μέσον διὰ κίον’ ἐλάσσας· καί οἱ ἐπ’ αἰετὸν ὦρσε τανύπτερον· αὐτὰρ ὅ γ’ ἧπαρ ἤσθιεν ἀθάνατον, τὸ δ’ ἀέξετο ἶσον ἁπάντῃ νυκτός, ὅσον πρόπαν ἦμαρ ἔδοι τανυσίπτερος ὄρνις. τὸν μὲν ἄρ’ Ἀλκμήνης καλλισφύρου ἄλκιμος υἱὸς Ἡρακλέης ἔκτεινε, κακὴν δ’ ἀπὸ νοῦσον ἄλαλκεν Ἰαπετιονίδῃ καὶ ἐλύσατο δυσφροσυνάων.

He [Zeus] bound crafty counseled Prometheus in fast bonds, in harsh chains, driving through the middle of a column. And to him he sent a slender winged eagle. This fed on his liver, which was immortal; but this grew back equally at night, as much as the slender winged bird ate all day. The son of lovely ankled Alkmene, Herakles, killed this bird, and drove away the evil disease, and freed the son of Iapetos from cares. (Theogony 522 528)

Not only does this passage contain both the crucial ideas of bondage and disease (with the epithet “harsh” used here for the bonds rather than the disease), but it is also a critical moment in the life story of Herakles in the Theogony. He appears here as exactly the sort of person who is promised in the Aspis, that is, a protector from destruction, here releasing from bondage the other great benefactor of humankind, namely, Prometheus. As has been well discussed in scholarly literature elsewhere, this is hardly an unambiguous moment: Prometheus is put in bonds specifically because of his attempts to deceive Zeus, that moment of sacrifice at Mekone that results in the permanent separation of gods and humans.47 In that regard this passage is a perfect intertext for the story of Amphitryon’s return: he is like someone who has been released from such bondage, and though his return is therefore welcome, a source of gladness, it also contains in it the germ of the end. The birth of Herakles here looks forward to his later role as a 47

See Clay 2003, 100 128, for an excellent discussion.

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benefactor, but the sort of benefactor who will despite his own successful negotiation of the split between humans and gods help enact a permanent rift between them, by releasing Prometheus from sickness and harsh bonds. We have already seen that this sort of prequel-writing is a technique of the Catalogue poet. Less clear, however, is the exact function of the parallels to the Odyssey in this instance. That is, why make the birth of Herakles prefigure albeit comically the return of Odysseus? The answer, I think, has already been suggested by Haubold: Herakles is that hero who inherently bridges the gap from the cosmogonic viewpoint of the Theogony to the human world of heroic epic.48 This, as Haubold argues, is the reason that the Catalogue postpones the story of his birth: “The birth of Heracles, then, happens early and late at the same time: it is set both in the world of the Theogony and in the heroic world of Homer.”49 I would like to push this set of ideas one step further. In the remarkable simile at lines 42 46, what is particularly emphasized is Amphitryon’s mortality. He returns home like a man who has escaped from harsh disease, and the passage echoes a passage from the Odyssey in which land is welcome to Odysseus as a father is to his children, when he recovers from harsh disease. This is, in a sense, the most mortal moment in the narratives of these heroes, the point at which they seem less like the children of gods and more like ordinary men. Here, at the moment of conception of the most divine of the Greek heroes, and one who lives in the generation previous to the generation of Troy, is already the prefiguring of the difficult world of sickness and shipwreck that awaits the final generation, the battered remnants who must return after the glory of the Iliad and establish some sort of mortal family life. The end is there, right at the beginning. With Amphitryon’s “bondage” slipped quietly into a metaphor, we are reminded that the moment of Herakles’ birth takes place after the separation of gods and men, after the golden age, in a time of disease and limited life span.

48 49

Haubold 2005, 96 98. Haubold 2005, 98.

Conclusions

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CONCLUSIONS

The story of Herakles’ birth ends with a typically aristocratic, though in this instance also comically complicated, insistence on the solidity and stability of paternity as a guarantor of personal worth: ἣ δὲ θεῷ δμηθεῖσα καὶ ἀνέρι πολλὸν ἀρίστῳ Θήβῃ ἐν ἑπταπύλῳ διδυμάονε γείνατο παῖδε, οὐκέθ’ ὁμὰ φρονέοντε· κασιγνήτω γε μὲν ἤστην· τὸν μὲν χειρότερον, τὸν δ’ αὖ μέγ’ ἀμείνονα φῶτα δεινόν τε κρατερόν τε, βίην Ἡρακληείην, τὸν μὲν ὑποδμηθεῖσα κελαινεφέι Κρονίωνι, αὐτὰρ Ἰφικλῆα δορυσσόῳ Ἀμφιτρύωνι· κεκριμένην γενεήν, τὸν μὲν βροτῷ ἀνδρὶ μιγεῖσα, τὸν δὲ Διὶ Κρονίωνι, θεῶν σημάντορι πάντων.

And she, having been tamed by the god and by her husband, the best by far in seven gated Thebes, gave birth to twin sons, the two not of one mind; and yet they were brothers. The one was inferior, the other a much better man, terrible and powerful, the strength of Herakles, whom she bore having been tamed by the black clouded son of Kronos, but [she bore] Iphikles [tamed] by spear shaking Amphitryon. A divided birth, the one having mixed with a mortal man, the other with Zeus, son of Kronos, commander of all the gods. (Aspis 48 56)

There is a bit of a pile-up in the last six lines, and indeed, Wilamowitz wanted to delete lines 55 56 as the work of a later interpolator, since they seem to repeat the information of the previous four lines. But I would suggest that this repetition stems at least in part from the necessity of establishing how naturally different Herakles and Iphikles are and why. Alkmene is here impregnated according to the usual formulas: she is “tamed” (dmêtheisa), but twice, by different husbands, and she “mixes” (migeisa), but twice and with different husbands. We are being told in the most careful possible terms that this is a marriage like any other, except for its problematic doubling, and the result is a really pretty good hero, Iphikles, and his greatly superior indeed, eventually

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divine brother Herakles. The doubled birth of Herakles and Iphikles serves to emphasize the split between divine and mortal. As Haubold suggests, “The stark comparison of Aspis 50 1 brings home the fact that this story has been unfolding on two narrative planes at the same time. The difference between them is not merely one of quality (divine versus human) but rather . . . one of narrative perspective.”50 In the midst of this precursor to the division of gods and mortals we find the character of Alkmene, herself cryptic, a cipher. As Davidson suggests, “there are ambiguities surrounding Alkmene’s motives throughout the narrative and her role in accepting a returning husband who is not a husband followed by a returning husband who is a husband.”51 Even more important, we see in Alkmene’s remarkable dedication to her husband even after he has killed her father another enactment of that concern that seems to grow in prominence with the rise of the polis, namely, the tension between a woman’s natal and marital families. Here this tension results in Amphitryon’s absence as he goes to avenge Alkmene’s brothers, which leads directly to Zeus’ opportunity to be the first male to sleep with Alkmene, and hence engender Herakles. Dedication to her husband notwithstanding, infidelity occurs (as, mythically, it must) in order to create the ambivalent hero, Herakles. Even that divinely inspired moment, moreover, seems rife with intimations of the end. Amphitryon succeeds in his miniature expedition, to return home like a man escaping from harsh disease. He is careless and driven by lust, and yet suffers no consequences for falling heedlessly into bed with his wife. But in so doing, he calls to mind the figure of Odysseus, and the whole tradition of returns from Troy that spell the end of the age of heroes. Even the moment of Zeus’ impregnation of Alkmene is described in language (theskela erga) that will also be used to describe his plot to return things to a pre-heroic era, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ, “as things were before” which is to say, a time when mortals and gods did not engage in friendly intercourse.

50 51

Haubold 2005, 98. Davidson 1998, 11.

6 The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

A set of fragments (frs. 196 204) provide us with some of the longest continuous narrative in the extant Catalogue. As it happens, these fragments contain much of the story of the marriage of Helen, surely the most famous and distinctive of all the women featured in the work. These fragments have been placed, I believe correctly, at the end of the Catalogue; West argues that they began some two hundred lines into the fifth and final book, and he has been followed by most modern scholars.1 The narrative suggests in various ways that the work is coming to a close and that the marriage of Helen not only is the beginning of the Trojan War, but also brings to an end the epoch of heroes.2 These fragments have received more attention than other parts of the Catalogue, not least because they are extensive enough to allow a sense of their structure and meaning.3 They also provide particular challenges to interpretation, however: the list of suitors appears to have a complex relationship to the heroes listed in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships, as well as to other lists of the suitors of Helen (notably, those in Apollodorus and Hyginus).4 More problematic still is the abrupt shift in the middle of 1 2 3

4

West 1985, 115. See Schwartz 1960, 416; Cingano 2005, 120. Clay 2005. See, esp., West 1961, Heilinger 1983, Schmidt 1996, Clay 2005, and Cingano 2005. Most recently, see Ziogas 2013, ch. 1. On the suitors and their relationship to the heroes of the Iliad, see Schmidt 1996; Cingano 2005. On the various lists of the suitors of Helen in Hesiod, Apollodorus, and Hyginus, see Heilinger 1983. On the entry of Ajax in the Hesiodic catalogue as contrasted to his entry in Iliad 2, see Finkelberg 1988, but she is now countered by Cingano 2005, 143 152; cf. also Edwards 1980, 90 n. 24. 181

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fragment 204 immediately after the marriage of Helen and the birth of her first and, in this text, evidently only child. The narrative begins, suddenly and without warning, to speak of the plan of Zeus to destroy the race of heroes and with it much of humankind. From there the story rapidly devolves into a description of that end, bearing many similarities to narratives of the end of the Golden Age. This sequence leaves somewhat ambiguous what the Catalogue poet’s cosmological view was, and, more important, how exactly the marriage of Helen brought about this catastrophe. The story of the suitors of Helen was previously placed by scholars earlier in the sequence of narratives that make up the Catalogue than it appears in all modern editions.5 Wilamowitz placed it, not without reason, in the second book of the Catalogue, where it would have followed on the genealogy of Leda, Helen’s mother (frs. 23a 24). He was followed in this placement in the Loeb edition of Evelyn-White.6 Merkelbach and West’s edition, as Cingano points out, “has brought about a radical change.”7 Arranging the genealogies in five groupings, based on the order in the Library of Apollodorus, Merkelbach and West separated the story of Helen’s suitors from her genealogy in Book 1 (where it is part of the Aeolidae) and put it with the genealogy of Tyndareos in Book 5 (as part of the descendants of Atlas). It may well seem odd to divide up Helen’s story in this way, and Heilinger has recently provided a challenge to scholars who wish to do so. He argues that the generally matrilineal structure of the Catalogue provides a strong case for keeping the story of Helen’s marriage with the genealogy of Helen, that is, following fragments 23a 24. While Heilinger’s arguments are not without merit, there are several contextual 5

6

7

The following two paragraphs are heavily indebted to the fine discussion of Cingano 2005, 120 121. To his structural and papyrological arguments, I add a few stylistic considerations. In part this placement was due to the observation of a large beta in the margins of the papyrus; earlier scholars took this to indicate the beginning of the second book. Schwartz suggested, however, that this mark indicated the two hundredth line of the fifth book, and he has been followed by West. Hirschberger and Most also place this episode at the end of the fifth book. Cingano 2005, 120 121, provides a useful discussion. Cingano 2005, 120.

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and stylistic considerations that weigh heavily in favor of the current placement of the fragment. Perhaps the most important of these is that the various genealogies in the Catalogue seem to come to an end with the heroes who woo for Helen’s hand; as Clay argues, A good many fragments, apparently from early parts of the Ehoiai, allude to characters and incidents involved in [the Trojan War]. It would then be plausible that the war itself did not form part of the narrative, but that its various genea logical strands concluded with the generation of heroes who fought around Troy.8

This makes the Catalogue of Suitors, in which it appears that all the major characters of the Iliad play a part, a particularly satisfying ending for the Catalogue. Once the genealogies have reached this point, all that remains is to point to the end of the production of such heroes. In the event, this is exactly what the text does. I discuss the sudden shift at line fragment 204.95 in greater detail below, but here it is sufficient to simply note that after the birth of Hermione, the narrative changes direction abruptly and rapidly to tell of the plan of Zeus to return to “the way things were before,” ὡς τὸ πάρος περ. As Clay has effectively argued, this phrase must refer back to the beginning of the Catalogue, in which we learn that this poem presents a narrative about a limited and particular time, that time not only during which gods and humans shared meals and councils, but also in which gods had sex with mortal women (fr. 1.5 6). The end of this heroic period is a return to the post-Promethean age.9 If that state of affairs follows quickly on the marriage of Helen, then it is difficult to see how this sequence could appear anywhere but the end of the book as a whole.10 Indeed, Heilinger is forced to argue that lines 95 and following of fragment 204 are fundamentally separate from what went before, perhaps as a result of lines being lost.11 As Clay comments drily, “This would, of course, simplify our lives.”12 But in fact there is no physical 8 9 10

11 12

Clay 2005, 29. See also Scodel 1982, 35. Clay 2005, 34. Cf. Tsagalis 2009, 170 n. 177: “It is clear that with this section, the CW reaches its telos, i.e. both its end and its purpose.” See also Ziogas 2013, 20 21. Heilinger 1983, 24. Clay 2005, 29 n. 22.

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indication in the text to indicate such a break, and, as I hope to show, there are good stylistic reasons for keeping fragment 204 whole as we have it. In brief, then, the story of the suitors of Helen comes at or near the end of the Catalogue of Women. It also leads to both the Trojan War and the forceful end of the age of heroes, and this piling up of changes of state is not accidental but part of the overall architectural plan of the Catalogue. In the sections that follow I discuss, first, the ways in which the story of the suitors of Helen builds on and provides a fitting end to the sequence of marriages that has made up the previous work. As much as Helen seems in some ways the culminating figure of the women who have come before her, however, a close analysis demonstrates that this episode contains unique elements in the story of the wooing of a bride, elements that, I argue, provide some clues as to how this marriage leads to the disasters that follow. In the following chapter, I compare this story on a detailed level with the story of the marriage of Agariste in Herodotus’ Book 6 (a comparison that has been made by several scholars before me).13 Unlike previous readings of these two events, however, I find that their differences point up the essentially aristocratic, Archaic view of the Hesiodic text and the essentially forward-looking and democratic nature of the Herodotean episode at least as it is related by the fifth-century historian.

THE HEROES AS WOOERS, HELEN AS BRIDE

The contest for Helen’s hand in marriage is in many ways typical of such aristocratic competitions, as they appear in the Catalogue. The most noticeable difference is one of scale: instead of having only one or two suitors for her hand, Helen has a large number, from all over the Greek world. As Osborne points out, unlike most of the wooing stories, Helen’s is

13

See Schwartz 1960, 488 491; West 1985, 133; Cingano 2005, 127. Irwin 2005a, 65 83, treats several episodes from the Catalogue in relation to a number of Peisistratid marriages. Her analysis is perceptive on several points, although my own reading differs from hers.

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“geographically promiscuous.”14 The closest parallel is Dêmodikê (fr. 22), who, we are told, attracted an unusually large number of suitors promising gifts (dora): ..... ..... ..... ..... Ἀ]γήνο[ρ]ος ἰσοθέοι[ο Δημοδίκη,] τὴν πλεῖστοι ἐπι⌋χθονίων ἀνθρώπ⌊ων μνήστευον, καὶ πολλὰ⌋ [περ]ικλυτὰ δῶρ’ ὀνόμ⌊ηναν ἴφθιμοι βασιλῆες, ἀπειρέσ⌋ιον [μ]ετὰ εἶδος. [daughter] of godlike Agênor Dêmodikê, whom most of the men on the earth wooed, and they promised many very famous gifts (dôra) the strong kings, in pursuit of [her] immeasurable beauty.

(fr. 22.4 7)

The wooing of Helen similarly involves numerous suitors, but unlike Dêmodikê’s competition, for Helen each suitor is individually named and described. In this the Catalogue poet follows a common principle of epic composition, namely, that the more important the event, the more elaborately it is told, resulting in greater detail and greater space on the page. As the most beautiful and arguably most important woman in the Greek epic cycle, Helen’s wooing not only includes large numbers of important suitors; it specifies each of them and the gifts that each offered. In Helen’s case, as in that of other women who are the object of men’s attention in this poem, there is an implied competition of beauty. Though the papyrus is badly damaged, this is most clear in the first section of this sequence, fragment 196: [ ]της ἀγὸς ἀνδρῶν [αἰχμ]ητάων [ ]ης πάντων ἀριδε[ίκετ]ος ἀνδρῶν· [ ]ας τε καὶ ἔγχεϊ ὀξ[υόε]ντι· [ ].ου λιπαρὴν πόλι[ν ε]ἵνεκα κούρης [ἣ εἶ]δος ἔχε χρυσῆς Ἀφ[ροδί]της· [ ]ν Χαρίτων ἀμαρ[ύγμ]ατ’ ἔχουσαν· [ ]Τυνδαρέου βασ[ιλῆ]ος [ ]ροισι δόμοις [.....] κυανῶπις·

14

Osborne 2005, 22.

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].....μεγε[..... ..]..τ..[ ]κῶνσ[ ].[

leader of the warriors the most renowned of all men and with sharp spear; the shining city because of the korê she had the form of golden Aphrodite having the radiance of the Graces of king Tyndareos in the house dark eyed

(traces of three more lines)

Like Mestra and Atalanta, Helen is described as having the “radiance of the Graces,” but in addition she is described as having the “form of golden Aphrodite,” a phrase that is unique to Helen in the Catalogue.15 Helen, then, might legitimately be said to be the most beautiful of women in the Catalogue, imitating as she does the goddess of sexual attraction. If the adjective kuanopis (“dark-eyed”) also applies to Helen, it may also be an indication of her beauty.16 Elsewhere she receives standard epithets of beauty, including tanisphuros (“slender ankled,” fr. 198.4)17 and eukomos (“fair-haired,” fr. 200.11). But the most important indication of Helen’s beauty, of course, is the fact of the suitors who came to her “shining city” for her sake. The suitors themselves are somewhat remarkable, of course, because they must be the heroes who, by virtue of the oath that they take, will go on to fight at Troy. While we do not have all of the heroes named in this sequence, we know of at least twelve: Alkmaôn, Amphilochos, Odysseus, Thoas, Podarkes, Protesilaos, Menestheus, Menelaos, Lykomedes, Telamonian Ajax, Elphenor, and Idomeneus. In addition, both Agamemnon and Achilles are mentioned in this catalogue, the former as wooing on behalf of his brother, the latter specified as not 15

16 17

I accept that West and Merkelbach have reconstructed the first three letters of line 5 correctly. The exact phrase appears only once in Homer, at Odyssey 4.14, in reference to Helen’s daughter Hermione. It is likely that the Catalogue poet repeats the formula here deliberately. The adjective is used of Amphitrite at Iliad 12.60. Elsewhere used of Mestra (fr. 43a.37), Europa (fr. 141.8), and Alkmene (fr. 195.35).

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wooing in an unusual sequence (discussed below). Another six suitors are partially described, but their names are not extant.18 It is remarkable that of the names that are preserved, so many play a significant role in the Iliad; and the Atreidae, Odysseus, Ajax, and Idomeneus, are the heroes singled out by Priam and identified by Helen from the walls of Troy in Iliad 3.191 242. The gifts that these various heroes bring are in some ways also typical of the lists of gifts elsewhere in the Catalogue. The heroes offer women (fr. 197), sheep (frs. 197 and 204), cattle (frs. 198 and 204), gold (fr. 200), and cauldrons and tripods (fr. 200), in addition to general “bridewealth” (hedna). The sense of competition is keen; Menestheus, for example, sees the contest as one of pure wealth, and one that he has a reasonable chance of winning: ἐκ δ’ ἄρ’ Ἀθηνέων μνᾶθ’ υἱὸς Π[ετεῶο Μενεσθεύς, πολλὰ δ’ ἔεδνα δίδου· κειμήλια γ[ὰρ μάλα πολλὰ ἔκτητο, χρυσόν τε λέβητάς τ[ε τρίποδάς τε, καλά, τά ῥ’ ἔνδοθι κεῦθε δόμος Πε[τεῶο ἄνακτος· οἷς μιν θυμὸς ἀνῆκεν ἐεδνώσ[ασθαι ἄκοιτιν πλεῖστα πορόντ’, ἐπεὶ ο[ὔ] τιν’ ἐέλπε[το φέρτερον εἶναι πάντω]ν ἡρώων κτήνεσσί τε δω[τίναις τε.

And of the Athenians, Menestheus the son of Peteos wooed, and he gave much hedna. For he had acquired a great deal of goods (keimêlia) gold, and cauldrons, and tripods, good ones, and the home of king Peteos hid them. With these his spirit urged him to offer hedna (hednoumai) for the wife, providing the most, since he hoped that no one would be more powerful of all the heroes in goods and in gifts. (fr. 200.3 9)

In all of these respects, then, Helen seems like the culmination of the “plot of attraction” that drives the Catalogue. There are, however, a number of irregularities in the process of wooing that point to the difficulties posed by Helen as a potential bride. First and foremost, it is not entirely clear who is in charge of deciding who will win Helen’s hand. Helen does not seem to have much say in the matter, any more than she does in the Iliad, when a contest is proposed 18

This fairly conservative list is taken from Schmidt 1996, 25 26.

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between Menelaos and Paris.19 For most of the episode, it appears that Helen’s brothers, Kastor and Polydeukes, are in charge. It is to them that various suitors send messages (Odysseus, fr. 198; unnamed suitor, fr. 199). And it appears from fragment 197 that, ultimately, the decision is up to them: τοσσαύτας δὲ γυναῖκας ἀμύμονα ἔργ’ εἰδυίας, πάσας χρυσείας φιάλας ἐν χερσὶν ἐχούσας· καί νύ κε δὴ Κάστωρ τε καὶ ὁ κρατερὸς Πολυδεύκης γαμβρὸν ποιήσαντο κατὰ κράτος, ἀλλ’ Ἀγαμέμνων γαμβρὸς ἐὼν ἐμνᾶτο κασιγνήτωι Μενελάωι.

So many women skilled in blameless works all holding golden cups in their hands. And now Kastor and the powerful Polydeukes would have chosen him as brother in law according to power but Agamemnon, as a brother in law, wooed on behalf of his brother Menelaos. (fr. 197.1 5)

This passage contains a number of problems, all of which are well discussed by Cingano.20 I agree with Cingano that the first two lines belong to the description of an unnamed suitor and that it is to this suitor whom Kastor and Polydeukes would have awarded Helen, if not for the intervention of Agamemnon. Kastor and Polydeukes must be understood, then, to be running the contest, but even so, it is not clear that the rules of the competition are fully stated or fully followed. In the passage quoted just above, the phrase, “as a brother-in-law” strongly suggests that Agamemnon is wielding familial and personal influence on behalf of Menelaos and that that, perhaps, is why Menelaos wins.21 In the midst of all this, however, one wonders what the role of Tyndareos is. Just before Menelaos is announced as the winner of the 19 20

21

Kakridis 1971, 26. Cingano 2005, 133 140. Particularly vexing is the phrase kata kratos, “according to power.” Does it mean “according to the power that Kastor and Polydeukes had” or “according to the power (wealth) shown by the suitor”? Or something else? As Cingano notes, the phrase has no parallel in epic, and we cannot be sure of its meaning here (Cingano 2005, 136 137). Cingano 2005, 139.

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contest, Tyndareos demands an oath of all the suitors, which sets the stage for the Trojan War: πάν]τας δὲ μνηστῆρ[ας] ἀπ[ήι]τεεν ὅρκια πιστά, ὀ]μνύμεναί τ’ ἐκέλευσ[ε] και [..]π.. ἀράασθαι σπονδῆι, μή τιν’ ἔτ’ ἄλλον [ἄ] νευ ἕθεν ἄλλα πένεσθαι ἀμφὶ γάμωι κούρης εὐ[ω]λ[ένο]υ· ὃς δέ κεν ἀνδρῶν αὐτὸς ἕλοιτο βίηι, νέμεσίν τ’ ἀπ[ο]θεῖτο καὶ αἰδῶ, τὸν μέτα πάντας ἄνωγεν ἀολλέας ὁρμηθῆνα[ι ποινὴν τεισομένους. τοὶ δ’ ἀπτερέως ἐπίθον[το ἐλπόμενοι τελέειν πάντες γάμον· ἀλλ’ ἄ[ρα πάντας Ἀτρε[ίδ]ης ν[ίκησε]ν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος πλεῖ[στ]α πορών.

He demanded a great oath of all the suitors and ordered them to swear . . . In a treaty, that not anyone other than himself to act otherwise, concerning the marriage of the fair haired girl. But whoever of men should take her by force, and should put aside shame and righteousness, he ordered the entire crowd to set out after him, obtaining a punishment. And swiftly they all obeyed [i.e., in swearing the oath], hoping to achieve the marriage. But war loving Menelaos defeated them all, the Atreid, providing the most [bridewealth?]. (fr. 204.78 87)

We do not know if, as recounted by Apollodorus, Odysseus suggested the idea of the oath to Tyndareos.22 But in any case, it seems clear that here Tyndareos has some official authority over the contest. It must be admitted that nothing in the passage about his oath indicates that he will choose the winner; perhaps that task was relegated to Helen’s brothers, while Tyndareos maintained authority over the contest as a whole (not unlike Schoeneos, the father of Atalanta).23 22 23

See Cingano 2005, 127, for a discussion. Cingano 2005, 134, points out that in other wedding competitions, brothers of the bride sometimes share authority with the father.

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Questions of personal authority aside, there are a number of passages in the narrative that suggest that the wooing of Helen is extraordinary, that it is not simply a matter of quantity of gifts, quantity of famous suitors, or her excess of beauty that marks this contest as unusual. I have already mentioned the apparent interference of Agamemnon in the judging. While it is not unprecedented for a man to woo on behalf of his brother,24 Agamemnon here seems to be trading on his marriage to Clytemnestra and not merely representing Menelaos. We find also an ambiguous and troubling line at the start of fragment 198: ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἦν ἀπάτης ἔργον παρὰ Τυνδαρίδηισιν (“But there was no work of deception among/before the sons of Tyndareos”). Since the next line begins the description of Odysseus’ somewhat half-hearted wooing, this appears to be the last line of another suitor’s entry, but again, the meaning is difficult to determine. The line could mean that the Tyndareids did not engage in deception themselves, in which case one wonders why this needs to be specified. Or it could mean that nobody engaged in deception in the presence of the Tyndareids, in which case one wonders if there was mention of deception when Kastor and Pollux were not present. Still more remarkable is the fact that, of the heroes who play a major role in the Iliad, a majority of them engage in wooing practices that are specifically marked as unusual. Odysseus, as has been noted, chooses not to send any gifts (dôra, not hedna), because he is aware that Menelaos is going to win. This does not, however, stop Odysseus from continually sending “messages” to Kastor and Polydeukes. Given Odysseus’ reputation for skill with words, perhaps he hopes to win Helen purely by means of persuasive rhetoric. Even more remarkable is Ajax, who, as recent commentators have argued, promises hedna that he does not yet possess: Αἴας δ’ ἐκ Σαλαμῖνος ἀμώμητος πολεμιστὴς μνᾶτο· δίδου δ’ ἄρα ἕδνα ἐ[ο]ικότα, θαυματὰ ἔργα· οἳ γὰρ ἔχον Τροιζῆνα καὶ ἀγ[χ]ίαλον Ἐπίδαυρον νῆσόν τ’ Αἴγιναν Μάσητά τε κοῦρο[ι] Ἀχαιῶν καὶ Μέγαρα σκιόεντα καὶ ὀφρυόεντα Κόρινθον,

24

Melampous woos Pero for his brother, Bias (fr. 37); cf. Cingano 2005, 135 136.

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Ἑρμιόνην Ἀσίνην τε παρὲξ ἅλα ναιεταώσας, τῶν ἔφατ’ εἰλίποδάς τε βόας κ[α]ὶ [ἴ]φια μῆλα συνελάσας δώσειν· ἐκέκαστο γὰρ ἔγχεϊ μακρῶι.

And blameless warlike Ajax of Salamis wooed. And he gave a fitting bridewealth, wonderful works, for the sons of the Achaians held Troizen and Epidauros by the sea, and the isle of Aegina, and Maseta, and shady Megara and majestic Corinth and Hermione and Asia, both dwelling by the sea. Of these he said they would give shambling footed cattle and fat sheep, driving them together. For he excelled with the great spear. (fr. 204.43 51)25

Here, it appears, Ajax boasts that he will make a raid on the cities of the Argolid and Saronic gulf in order to gather up enough cattle and sheep to provide a suitable hedna.26 That is, he hopes to win Helen on credit a truly unprecedented procedure. Cingano has argued cogently that this passage serves in a compensatory fashion, perhaps as a response to Ajax’s somewhat stingy holdings in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships. While that may well be true, it also indicates, I believe, the extraordinary measure of Helen’s desirability. Ajax is well known as one of the great heroes of the Iliad, though one who is (surprisingly) without much in the way of resources in the earlier epic; he responds to this situation by promising wedding gifts that he does not have. We should read a certain desperation in this measure. Helen also goes beyond the other women in the Catalogue, in that her beauty becomes the subject of both mythos, “story,” and, more important, kleos, “heroic fame.”27 This comes out most clearly in fragment 199:

25

26 27

On this passage and its relation to Ajax’s entry in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships, see the influential article of Finkelberg 1988. Cingano 2005, 144 152, argues, however, that we need not accept Finkelberg’s proposition that Ajax rules over a larger territory in the Catalogue of Women than in Homer, if we realize that he does not actually possess these lands, but only boasts of a plan to raid them. I note that this suggestion was made earlier by Edwards 1980, 90 n. 24. Cingano 2005, 144 152. See Ziogas 2013, 25 27, for a useful discussion of Helen’s kleos.

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The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue [ἀγγελίην δ’ αἰεὶ Λακεδαίμονάδε προΐαλλεν] Κάστορί θ’ ἱπποδάμωι καὶ ἀεθλοφόρωι Πολυδεύκει, ἱμείρων Ἑλένης πόσις ἔμμεναι ἠυκόμοιο, εἶδος οὔ τι ἰδών, ἀλλ’ ἄλλων μῦθον ἀκούων. ἐκ Φυλάκης δ’ ἐμνῶντο δύ’ ἀνέρες ἔξοχ’ ἄριστοι, υἱός τ’ Ἰφίκλοιο Ποδάρκης Φυλακίδαο ἠύς τ’ Ἀκτορίδης ὑπερήνωρ Πρωτεσίλαος· ἄμφω δ’ ἀγγελίην Λακεδαίμονάδε προΐαλλον Τυνδαρέου π[οτ]ὶ δῶμα δαΐφρονος Οἰβαλίδαο, πολλὰ δ’ ἔεδν[α δίδον,] μέγα γὰρ κλέον [ἔσκε γυ]ναικός, He [unknown] was always sending messages to Sparta, to Kastor the horse tamer and to prize winning Polydeukes desiring to be the husband of beautiful haired Helen, not having seen her beauty at all, but hearing stories from others. From Phylax two men wooed, outstanding nobles, the son of Iphicles, Podarkes of the line of Phylax, and Protesilaos the brave superman of the Aktorids. Both sent a message to Sparta to the home of skillful Tydareos the Oibalid and they gave great bridewealth, for great was the fame of the woman . . . (fr. 199.0 9)

On the one hand, the first, unknown suitor is remarkable because he, like Odysseus, is willing to send messages (but perhaps not gifts) to the Dioskuroi purely because of the stories that surround Helen’s beauty. That is interesting enough, but at line 9 we learn that Podarkes and Protesilaos send messages and gifts because of Helen’s kleos. In the world of epic heroes it is unusual for a woman to achieve kleos, and here the idea suggests that Helen’s beauty is on par with the excellence of the heroes who will fight and die for her at Troy.28 Indeed, as Nagy has shown, kleos 28

Tsagalis 2009, 174, points out that “we do not possess any epic poem dealing with female κλέα.” Helen is here the exception specifically because her kleos consists of that which will motivate the Trojan War, which is to say, the kleos of male heroic epic. Ziogas 2013, 27, points out that none of the suitors in the Catalogue is said to have obtained kleos: “Actually, the suitors seem to try to appropriate Helen’s κλέος by marrying her.”

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is the very stuff of epic poetry, both the thing that occasions its coming to being and the form of the poetry itself.29 Its attribution to Helen here indicates her role in the production of that poetry. She has kleos, in other words, because the marriage of Helen is the real beginning of the epos that is the Iliad. The use of the word here is also part of a larger pattern in which Helen’s beauty becomes dangerously powerful. Not all heroes trust this report, however. In fragment 204.56 64, we learn that Idomeneus woos in person, rather than by intermediary, so that he can see her himself, rather than hear the mythos (“story”) from others. Helen’s kleos, then, must be linked directly to her physical appearance; it is her beauty specifically that makes her the subject of epic. Even here, Idomeneus is singled out for his unwillingness to rely on the reports of others. He is presented, in other words, as singular (although he is not unique) in that he wants to see Helen’s beauty for himself.30 And that, in a sense, is the whole point: Helen’s beauty is not just greater than that of other women; it is different in kind. It demands to be seen, it results in extraordinary suitors doing extraordinary things, and it is, itself, the material that creates epic poetry. It is not merely Helen’s kleos that marks her as unique in this way. Rather, her kleos is one of a series of signals telling us that Helen is unusually powerful, especially for a woman. Throughout most of the Catalogue, there are a limited number of formulas that are used to indicate that a man wishes to marry a particularly desirable woman. Two of these formulas place the woman, as a blooming or beloved bride, in the accusative case: (1) θαλερὴν ποιήσατ’ ἄκοιτιν, “he made her his blooming bride”31 (2) πρὸς δῶμα φίλην κεκλῆσθαι ἄκοιτιν·, “[he led her] to his house to be called his beloved bride”32 29

30

31 32

Nagy 1979, 15 18. Nagy’s study as a whole shows that kleos in epic is over whelmingly the province of men. See Ziogas 2013, 26, for a helpful discussion of Idomeneus’ need to see Helen’s beauty for himself. Frs. 14.5, 190.6, and 251a.8. This formula appears with slightly different line beginnings at frs. 105.3 and 195.4.

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(3) A third instance combines elements of both formulas, when Poseidon gives Stratonike to his son Melaneos as a wife (fr. 26.24): δῶκε δὲ π[αι]δὶ [φί]λωι θαλ[ερ]ὴν [κ]εκλῆσθαι ἄκοιτιν, “And he gave her to his own son to be called his blooming bride.” In all of these instances, the man is the active subject, and the woman is both the grammatical object and the object of masculine desire. When it comes to the suitors of Helen, however, a new formula appears: μάλα δ’ ἤθελε ὃν κατὰ θυμοὸν/ ᾿Αργείης ῾Ελένης πόσις ἔμμεναι ἠυκόμοιο (“For greatly he wished in his heart to be the husband of fair-haired Helen”). This formula appears three times in the narrative, once with a slight variant in the first line due to a different line beginning.33 At one other point it appears in compressed form: ἱμείρων ῾Ελένης πόσις ἔμμεναι ἠυκόμοιο, “desiring to be the husband of fair-haired Helen” (fr. 199.2). This formula appears in the Catalogue only when dealing with Helen; in fact, it is only in the narrative of the suitors of Helen that the word posis, “husband,” appears at all. The obvious implication of this shift in the way that the suitors’ desires are portrayed is that the suitors have become less active as subjects. Rather than wishing to make Helen his wife, each suitor wishes to become her husband, a subtle indication that in the marriage, Helen might be the more important partner. For contrast, we might consider the situation in Book 3 of the Iliad, when Menelaos and Paris are about to engage in single combat for Helen’s hand. There the Iris, disguised as Helen’s (Trojan) sister-in-law, Laodike, says simply: αὐτὰρ Ἀλέξανδρος καὶ ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος μακρῇς ἐγχείῃσι μαχήσονται περὶ σεῖο· τῷ δέ κε νικήσαντι φίλη κεκλήσῃ ἄκοιτις.

But Alexander and war loving Menelaos will fight with long spears over you. And you will be called the dear wife of the one who wins. (Iliad 3.136 138)

It is worth noting that the third line of this statement ends with one of the formulaic line-endings that other women in the Catalogue receive, that is, “you will be called the dear wife.” In the Iliad, Helen is figured as an 33

Frs. 200.1 2, 204.42 43, and 204.54 55.

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object of desire; in the Catalogue, she inspires the desire to become her husband. This dangerous inversion of power finds further support, and provides a further link to the Trojan War, when we look at the use of the phrase “fair-haired Helen” in the Iliad. As Linda Clader notes, the phrase ᾿Αλέξανδρος ῾Ελένης πόσις ἠ ϋκόμοιο (“Alexander, husband of fair-haired Helen”) appears six times in the Iliad.34 The only other male figure from the Iliad who is repeatedly identified as the husband of his famous wife is, interestingly, Zeus, several times with the formula ἐρίγδουπος πόσις ῞Ηρης (“high-thundering husband of Hera”).35 In one instance, Zeus is described as Hera’s husband, and Hera receives Helen’s epithet of fair-haired: at Iliad 10.5, he is πόσις ῞Ηρης ἠ ϋκόμοιο (“husband of lovely-haired Hera”). Clader argues, rightly I think, that in all of these instances the husband’s position relative to that of his wife is one of an inferior: The parallel is striking, particularly when one considers the relative importance of the πόσις and his lady; Helen is certainly the stronger figure in her context, and grammatically Zeus, too, loses out to Hera (after all, he is being identified by means of her). The expression would seem to be rooted in a period when Hera was still the earth goddess and Zeus was her consort, or was taking the place of her consort.36

In looking at the instance of the remarkable formula in the Catalogue, however, we can go further. In an earlier chapter I argued that the Catalogue poet made creative and deliberate use of the Iliad in crafting the story of Atalanta. Here, I suggest, something similar takes place. In the list of the suitors of Helen, we repeatedly see the phrase “desiring to be the husband of the lovely-haired Helen.” For readers who know the Iliad, however, this phrase not only indicates the potential strife between the suitors who are here named and who must be forced into cooperation by the oath of Tyndareos. The phrase also points to the man who eventually will be formulaically known as the “husband of lovely-haired Helen,” namely, Alexander, so designated six times in the Iliad. This marriage is already marked by its failure. Just as the oath of Tyndareos 34 35 36

Clader 1976, 45 46. Iliad 3.329, 7.355, 8.82, 11.369, 11.505, and 13.766. Iliad 7.411, 10.329, 13.154, and 16.88. Clader 1976, 46.

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serves as a prequel to the Iliad, in all its inevitability, the desire to be Helen’s husband already signals her eventual abduction.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE AGE OF HEROES

The emphasis placed on “lovely-haired Helen” takes us to another important aspect of the story of Helen in the Catalogue, namely, the figuring of her marriage as the beginning of the end of the age of heroes. As Cingano notes, another, parallel formula links Helen and her fair hair to the plan of Zeus to lighten the earth’s population. The brief passage of fragment 200 describes the wooing of Menestheus of Athens (discussed briefly above): οἷς μιν θυμὸς ἀνῆκεν ἐεδνώσ[ασθαι ἄκοιτιν πλεῖστα πορόντ’, ἐπεὶ ο[ὔ] τιν’ ἐέλπε[το φέρτερον εἶναι πάντω]ν ἡρώων κτήνεσσί τε δω[τίναις τε.

.....]τείδαο δόμους κρατερὸς [ ..... ..... . Ἑλένη]ς ἕνεκ’ ἠυ[κόμοιο With these [gifts] his heart urged him to promise much bridewealth for the wife, presenting the most, since he hoped not one of all the heroes would possess more of prizes or gifts. ... houses powerful ... for the sake of lovely haired Helen (fr. 200.7 11)

Though perilously fragmentary, the phrase in the last line, Ἑλένης ἕνεκ ’ ̣ (“for the sake of lovely-haired Helen”) calls to mind two ἠ̣υκόμοιο ̣ important literary predecessors.37 The first is from Hesiod’s Works and Days and talks of the fate of the race of heroes (the fourth race in the Works and Days’ description of the five races of humanity, falling between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age): ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται ἡμίθεοι, προτέρη γενεὴ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν. καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνὴ τοὺς μὲν ὑφ’ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ, Καδμηίδι γαίῃ, 37

Cingano 2005, 126.

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ὤλεσε μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’ Οἰδιπόδαο, τοὺς δὲ καὶ ἐν νήεσσιν ὑπὲρ μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης ἐς Τροίην ἀγαγὼν Ἑλένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο.

. . . a godlike race of men, heroes, who are called half gods, an earlier race on the boundless earth. And some of these harsh war and the dreadful battle cry destroyed, some under seven gated Thebes, the land of the Kadmids, where they went, fighting for the sake of Oedipys’ descendants, while others (battle) led in ships over the great depth of the sea to Troy, for the sake of lovely haired Helen. (Works and Days, 159 165)

Helen, as a number of ancient sources have shown, is a crucial figure in this plan of Zeus, which is sometimes merely a plan to end the race of heroes and sometimes is linked (as in the Catalogue) to a larger plan to wipe out a large portion of humanity.38 So, as Cingano also notes, Achilles blames “fair-haired Helen” for the woes that have befallen the Greek heroes in Book 9 of the Iliad: τί δὲ δεῖ πολεμιζέμεναι Τρώεσσιν Ἀργείους; τί δὲ λαὸν ἀνήγαγεν ἐνθάδ’ ἀγείρας Ἀτρεΐδης; ἦ οὐχ Ἑλένης ἕνεκ’ ἠϋκόμοιο; ἦ μοῦνοι φιλέουσ’ ἀλόχους μερόπων ἀνθρώπων Ἀτρεΐδαι;

But why must the Argives fight with the Trojans? Why did the son of Atreus gather the people, and lead them here? Was it not for the sake of fair haired Helen? Do the Atreids alone of mortals love their wives? (Iliad 9.337 341)

When Helen is described as fair-haired, it refers to two things: her own abduction by Paris and the subsequent death of heroes at Troy. The fact that many of her suitors in the Catalogue wish to be the “husband of fair-haired Helen,” then, creates another intertextual moment, in which the Catalogue poet deliberately calls up the literary consequences of Helen’s marriage. It is also instructive here to consider the sequence of events, particularly toward the end of Helen’s wooing. In terms of narrative sequence, we 38

See, esp., fr. 1 of the Cypria and the useful discussion by Mayer 1996.

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might have anticipated that Tyndareos would exact his oath before the contest for Helen’s hand began, as Schoeneos establishes rules for wooing Atalanta at the beginning of that story. On the contrary, Tyndareos does not exact the oath from the suitors until just before the announcement of the winner. The result of this narrative delay, however, is a rapid succession of significant events: Tyndareos exacts the oath from the suitors; Menelaos is immediately announced as the winner; a brief explanation is given as to why Achilles is not the winner (a point discussed below); and Helen gives birth to Hermione, unexpectedly. And then, in the very same line that finishes the birth of Hermione, we learn that the gods were driven apart in strife and, following in rapid sequence, that Zeus plans to relieve the earth of humans and separate mortals from gods, as they were before. All of this takes place in about twenty continuous lines, with no obvious gaps or breaks in the papyrus (204.78 98). This entire sequence, then, seems designed to link the marriage of Helen not only to the war at Troy, but to the war at Troy as a mechanism for bringing the age of heroes to an end. This design also explains the curious passage at fragment 204.87 93, in which the poet tells us at some length that Achilles was too young to be among the suitors. Had Achilles been a suitor, the poet implies, he would naturally have won the contest. Who, after all, could be better than Achilles? And had that happened, there would have been no competition for Helen’s hand, no suitors, and, of course, no Trojan War. It is only an accident of timing that things worked out as they did, for Achilles was at the time still a child. Though I discussed this passage as an example of the erotic Achilles in Chapter 4, it is worth considering again in a larger context. For convenience, I repeat the quotation here: ἀλλ’ ἄ[ρα πάντας Ἀτρε[ίδ]ης ν[ίκησε]ν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος πλεῖ[στ]α πορών. Χείρων δ’ ἐν Πηλίωι ὑλήεντι Πηλείδην ἐκόμιζε πόδας ταχύν, ἔξοχον ἀνδρῶν, παῖδ’ ἔτ’ ἐόν[τ’·] οὐ γάρ μιν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος νίκησ’ οὐδέ τις ἄλλος ἐπιχθονίων ἀνθρώπων μνηστεύων Ἑλένην, εἴ μιν κίχε παρθένον οὖσαν οἴκαδε νοστήσας ἐκ Πηλίου ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς. ἀλλ’ ἄρα τὴν πρίν γ’ ἔσχεν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος·

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But war loving Menelaos, son of Atreus, defeated them all, Providing the most [i.e., hedna]. Chiron was on wooded Pelion with the son of Peleus, swift footed, outstanding among men, though still a child. For war loving Menelaos would not have defeated him nor would any other of the men who walk the earth, wooing Helen, if he had happened on her while she was still a parthenos as he returned homeward from Pelion, swift Achilles. But indeed war loving Menelaos obtained her first. (fr. 204.85 93)

One might well ask why this passage is here at all. As Schmidt has argued, there is an inherent fascination in the idea of the best of the Achaeans marrying the undisputed most beautiful woman in the world, thus creating a “fantasy couple” (Traumpaar). Indeed, Euripides’ Helen mentions Achilles as a suitor (Helen, 98), and several later sources imagine Achilles married to Helen in the afterlife.39 We might also see it, as Cingano suggests, as necessary to explain Achilles’ absence from the suitors of Helen, given his prominence in the Iliad.40 That is, this passage becomes a way to include Achilles in the prequel to the war, even though he is not technically one of the suitors for Helen’s hand. The form that this alternative reality takes on is also important. The passage does not, as it might, imagine Achilles taking part in the contest as it has been set up; he apparently does not need to compete with the other suitors in a contest of hedna. Rather, we are invited to imagine a scenario in which Achilles, returning home from training, runs across a still unmarried Helen. Such a meeting not only suggests that Achilles would have won the contest, but replaces the contest altogether. Marg saw in this passage an implicit criticism of the contest for Helen’s hand: the winner, as he must be, will be Menelaos, but only because of wealth. Achilles, in the poem’s imagined contrary-to-fact scenario, would clearly 39

40

See Pausanias 3.24.10, and the discussion of Schmidt 1996, 29 31. Tsagalis 2008, 102, argues that this passage “may be an argumentum ex silentio demonstrating that archaic epic was ‘familiar’ with a possible erotic connection between Achilles and Helen.” He also discusses Philostratus Heroicus 54.8 13, which tells of Achilles’ later marriage to Helen on the island of Leuke (103 104). Cingano 2005, 129.

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defeat Menelaos in a contest of true nobility.41 If that is true, then the passage also anticipates the Iliad in another significant way, pointing to the conflict between Achilles, whose abilities as a warrior are second to none, and Agamemnon, who rules by virtue of his superior wealth and status. It all works together to imagine an entirely different economy: had only Achilles been a little older, then the marriage of Helen would have been decided in terms of inherent worth, and so decisively that there would have been no competition at all.42 That, in turn, would have prevented her flight to Troy, and the war itself, which the Greeks nearly lose because of Agamemnon’s unwillingness to recognize Achilles’ worth as a warrior. More than simply recalling the Iliad, I would argue that this passage also reflects the poet’s concern with the inherent lack of stability in the qualities that are supposed to define the aristocracy.43 The failure of this competition to measure true worth as it would have, if only Achilles had been there, somehow reminds us of the conflict between wealth and inborn greatness referred to in various aristocratic texts and most clearly distinguished by Theognis.44 Menelaos is not, of course, ignoble by any stretch of the imagination. He is here distinguished by the epithet arêiphilos, “war-loving,” an indication of his heroic status. But even so the terms of the contest itself have been compromised. Instead of choosing the best of the Greeks to be her husband, Helen will have the suitor who is simply 41

42

43

44

Marg 1970, 509. Schmidt 1996, 32 33, instead sees this passage as one of “uneasiness and appeasement” (Unbehagen und Beschwichtigung) and suggests that it is the result of a rhapsode responding to the demands of a feminine audience, who would have wanted to know about the “ideal couple” (Traumpaar) of Achilles and Helen. I find this suggestion both less likely and less interesting. See also the fine comment by van Wees 1992, 358 n. 84: “Akhilleus’ superiority clearly lies in his prowess, not in his wealth.” In this paragraph I follow the interpretation of Irwin 2005a, 62 64, who also draws the parallel to Theognis 183 192. As Irwin puts it, “The Catalogue, like the Iliad, focuses on the conflict between natural ability and inherited power and wealth, but with a different emphasis. Here is demonstrated what amounts to the destruction of an era, a race, through the privileging of the ‘wrong’ . . . attributes for marriage” (quotation from p. 63). Ziogas 2013, 20 23, has also argued that this competition is one purely of material wealth among the suitors. See Theognis 183 192, discussed in Chapter 1.

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richest, and the point is that this is Menelaos’ only mode of superiority in the context. This is the first crack in the ideal of an aristocracy based on merit, and it can lead only to the devaluation of the whole system.45 In other words, the narrative of the suitors of Helen presents a compromise of values that resonates with contemporary modes of competition in the aristocratic era. Helen should go to the best of the Greeks, and, as Duplouy has argued, that determination might be made in terms of birth, prowess, accumulation of wealth, or ability at speaking. Here, the prize goes to the richest man, but the passage clearly indicates his inferiority in other, supposedly more stable, categories. The nobility itself, which took its lineage from these very heroes, is seeing its principles undermined by an overvaluation of wealth.46 This reading finds confirmation in the results of the competition for Helen’s hand; immediately after the passage quoted just above, which ends with the declaration of Menelaos’ victory, Helen gives birth to Hermione “unexpectedly.” In the very next line, we are told, the gods were divided in strife, for Zeus was hatching a plan to eliminate the heroes from the earth.47 In this regard, we recall that both in the scholium that gives us the first fragment of the Cypria as well as in Eustathius (Ad Iliadem 1.33.15) the marriage of Thetis and the birth of Helen are the two immediate causes of the Trojan War.48

45

46

47

48

As van Wees 1992 points out, these competitions are only notionally based on “personal excellence,” even in the earlier Homeric epics: the “best man” always turns out to be the one with the most money. The fragment from the Catalogue here, however, makes a direct point of this apparent conflict in values. There really is a better suitor here, but he simply does not get to compete. See also Ziogas 2013, 22: “Menelaus is not the bravest, but the one who brings the most.” Recently, Hall (2007a, 127 128) has argued that the basileis of the Homeric epics did not constitute a proper aristocracy. My concern, however, is with the later use of these epics as a model and a validation of elite status. See also Ziogas 2013, 22 23. On the Trojan War as a mechanism of Zeus to end the race of heroes, see Scodel 1982, 40 47; Mayer 1996. Both Scodel and Mayer see the age of heroes as coterminous with the Golden Age; for the view that the age of heroes falls after the Golden Age, see Clay 2005. See Mayer 1996, 1 3.

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The importance of this passage in the Catalogue, then, is as Cingano suggests: Even though he was not involved in the oath, clearly the name of Achilles could not be omitted because of his status and major rule in the Trojan epics, which by far transcends all other heroes. . .. his presence is fitted between the episode of the oath and the mention of Helen’s wedding (v. 93 4), so that the two main causes for the Trojan War are effectively displayed next to each other.49

Helen and Achilles are briefly imagined to have met each other in another time, another place, a world without the plan of Zeus. But this imagined meeting can take place only in a contrary-to-fact condition. Since they did not meet in that other time and place, Helen married Menelaos, Achilles became an unparalleled warrior, and the Trojan War and the end of the age of heroes is the inevitable result.

THE END OF THE AGE OF HEROES

Scholars since Wilamowitz have worried about why it was that Hermione was born to Menelaos aelpton (“unexpectedly”).50 The fragment shifts gears here quite abruptly: ἀλλ’ ἄρα τὴν πρίν γ’ ἔσχεν ἀρηΐφιλος Μενέλαος· ἣ τέκεν Ἑρμιόνην καλλίσφυρ[ο]ν ἐν μεγάροισιν ἄελπτον. πάντες δὲ θεοὶ δίχα θυμὸν ἔθεντο

95

ἐξ ἔριδος· δὴ γὰρ τότε μήδετο θέσκελα ἔργα Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης, †μεῖξαι κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν τυρβάξας,† ἤδη δὲ γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων πολλὸν ἀϊστῶσαι σπεῦδε, πρ[ό]φασιν μὲν ὀλέσθαι ψυχὰς ἡμιθέω[ν ..... ..... .]οισι βροτοῖσι 49 50

100

Cingano 2005, 129. For useful discussions, see Kakridis 1971, 51; Hirschberger 2004; González 2010, 391 398. Heilinger 1983, following Wilamowitz, Merkelbach, and others, suggests that something has been displaced between lines 94 and 95, in part because of the lack of correspondence between this fragment and fr. 175 (a scholium to Sophocles’ Elektra). There is no indication of a break in the papyrus of fr. 204, however.

The End of the Age of Heroes

203

τέκνα θεῶν μι[...].[..]ο.[ ὀφ]θαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶντα, ἀλλ’ οἳ μ[ὲ]ν μάκ[α]ρες κ[.......]ν ὡς τὸ πάρος περ χωρὶς ἀπ’ ἀν[θ]ρώπων[ βίοτον κα]ὶ ἤθε’ ἔχωσιν51 τῶ[ι θ]ῇ[κ᾿] ἀθα]νάτω[ν τε ἰδὲ] θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων52

...[

]καλ ἄλγος ἐπ’ ἄλγει

105

But first war loving Menelaos obtained her. She bore him Hermione the beautiful ankled in his halls, unexpectedly. And all the gods were driven apart in strife in their hearts. 95 For then Zeus the thunderer planned amazing deeds, to mix and stir up on the boundless earth, and already he hurried to annihilate the great race of bread eating mortals, a reason to destroy the lives of the heroes .... for mortals 100 children of the gods ... seeing with his eyes but the blessed ... as before apart from men they would have means of life and customs thus he established for immortals and mortal humans pain upon pain 105 (fr. 204.93 105)

I will turn to a discussion of the end of the age of heroes shortly, but first we should consider the nature of this abrupt and unmotivated transition. There are two difficulties here, the first textual and the second contextual. The textual problem stems from the fact that fragment 175 appears to repeat the first part of line 94, and then to diverge from it irrevocably: ἣ τέκεθ’ Ἑρμιόνην δουρικλειτῶι Μενελάωι· ὁπλότατον δ’ ἔτεκεν Νικόστρατον ὄζον Ἄρηος

She bore Hermione to spear famed Menelaos; and last of all she bore Nikostratos, the descendent of Ares. 51

52

González 2010, 411 418, would read either εὐνάς or φιλότητα instead of βίοτον in this line (along with other minor changes). I am generally sympathetic to González’s arguments here, though the end result is not greatly different in meaning. The central point of these lines is the separation of gods from humans, on which see more below. I adopt the text of Most 2007 here.

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The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

If, as numerous scholars have believed, this fragment comes from the Catalogue, there is no easy way to reconcile it with the narrative of fragment 204.94 96. Heilinger, who would like to see fragment 204 moved from the end of the Catalogue to Book 1 with the rest of the genealogy of the Tyndarids, argues that somehow lines 95 and following have “displaced” the second verse of fragment 175 and thus suppressed “the anchor point of the catalogue of suitors.”53 This, however, leaves us with an insoluble difficulty, as even Heilinger admits: there is, under this reconstruction, no link whatever to lines 95 and following and no way to integrate the remarkable passage that follows into Book 2. Moreover, as Clay has definitively shown, this passage belongs at the end of the Catalogue, as each of the lines of genealogy in the previous work ends with the heroes who will die in the Trojan War; the marriage of Helen is, then, the logical end (or at least beginning of the end) of the various narrative strands in the Catalogue.54 Accordingly, Most relegates fragment 175 to some other work in the Hesiodic corpus, as incompatible with the fragments that make up the story of the wooing of Helen.55 We are, it appears, stuck with aelpton and the lines that follow, and it would be best to try to make sense of them. Next, why would Hermione be born unexpectedly? She is not unexpected, in terms of the epic tradition: she must be born to Helen and Menelaos in order to get married in Book 4 of the Odyssey. We do learn there that Hermione is Helen’s only child with Menelaos, and a scholium to Odyssey 4.11 adds the fanciful detail that the gods gave Helen no more children after Hermione so that she would maintain her beauty, necessary to seduce Alexander and begin the Trojan War.56 Kakridis attempts to tie this tradition to the troubling line 95: “I believe that Hesiod’s statement as to the unexpected birth of Hermione must in some way be connected with the statement in the Odyssey about the determination of the gods not to let Helen give birth to another child another child or no

53 54 55

56

Heilinger 1983, 24. Clay 2005, 29, 34; 2003, 168; see also West 1985, 118 119. Most 2007, 320 321 n. 33, tentatively suggests that it might come from the Great Ehoiai. Text and brief discussion given in Hirschberger 2004.

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child at all?”57 This, however, seems to be grasping at straws. It is the next child who is not given to Helen. The point of a child who is aelpton, moreover, is that she is unexpected by the parents, not by the gods who seem, in any case, to be able to prevent these sorts of events. We must look to human motivation for a lack of expectation. There is only one good epic parallel for a child who is aelpton, and it turns out not to be much help. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we learn that the gods sent Metaneira her child, Demophoon, opsigonon kai aelpton, “late-born and unexpected.” As Hirschberger points out, however, the reason that Demophoon is unexpected is precisely that he is late-born; Metaneira is approaching the end of her child-bearing years.58 The same cannot be true of Helen. It is, perhaps, best to retreat to what the text says, as Hirschberger does: “In any case, the birth of Hermione appears to be for them an immediate motive for further separating the ties between gods and humans.”59 Why this should be the case is not immediately apparent, but a further analysis of this separation provides a clue. With the marriage of Helen and subsequent plan to return to things to “the way they were before,” the Catalogue parallels but does not duplicate the end of the Golden Age in Hesiod’s Works and Days. This parallel puts Helen in a position structurally similar to that of Pandora, whose own actions are tied irrevocably to elpis, “hope” or “expectation.” There has been considerable discussion of this passage and debate about what, exactly, is coming to an end with the Trojan War. Interpreters have rightly seen parallels to Cypria fragment 1, Works and Days 161 173, and Iliad 1.3 4.60 All of these texts contain language 57 58 59

60

Kakridis 1971, 52. Hirschberger 2004; González 2010, 392. Hirschberger 2004, 416 ad fr. 110 (204 M. W.), line 95: “In jedem Fall scheint die Geburt Hermiones für ihn der unmittelbare Anlass zu sein, weitere Verbindungen zwischen Göttern und Menschen zu unterbinden.” Similarly, González 2010, 394: “what I can say with greater certainty is that the birth of the girl . . . emphatically punctuates the beginning of the end of the heroic age.” For parallels with the Cypria, see Mayer 1996; Works and Days, see Koenen 1994; Iliad, see Scodel 1982. I agree with the interpretation put forward by Clay 2003, 169 174, and 2005 (with full discussion of bibliography), who sees the end of the age of heroes as separate from the end of the Golden Age, pace Koenen, Mayer, and others. See, esp., Clay 2005, 28.

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The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

that describes the death of heroes as part of a “plan of Zeus” to lighten the earth of its burden of humanity, and that certainly seems to be the case in the passage from the Catalogue. What is not entirely clear is exactly who is being separated from whom: δὴ γὰρ τότε μήδετο θέσκελα ἔργα

96

Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης, †μεῖξαι κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν τυρβάξας,† ἤδη δὲ γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων πολλὸν ἀϊστῶσαι σπεῦδε, πρ[ό]φασιν μὲν ὀλέσθαι ψυχὰς ἡμιθέω[ν ..... ..... .]οισι βροτοῖσι

100

τέκνα θεῶν μι[...].[..]ο.[ ὀφ]θαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶντα, ἀλλ’ οἳ μ[ὲ]ν μάκ[α]ρες κ[.......]ν ὡς τὸ πάρος περ χωρὶς ἀπ’ ἀν[θ]ρώπων[ βίοτον κα]ὶ ἤθε’ ἔχωσιν το[..]ε.εαλ[ ἀθα]νάτω[ν τε ἰδὲ] θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων

...[ Ζεὺ[ς ο[

]καλ ἄλγος ἐπ’ ἄλγει ]κ[..]ε. ἔκερσε ]ερζει[ ἐ]πὶ μαστῶι ]α [μη]δέ τις ἀν[δ]ρῶν

[ [ ..... ... νηῶν δὲ] μελαινάων ἐπιβαίη· ..... ..... ..... .β]ίηφί τε φέρτατος εἶναι ..... ..... ..... .]ε καταθνητῶν ἀνθρώπων ..... ..... ..... ἔ]στι καὶ ὁππόσα μέλει ἔσεσθαι ..... ..... ..... ..]α μήδεται ἠδὲ γεραίρει ..... ..... ..... .]Διὸς νεφεληγερέταο .....] __ι[.].α..υ.η.......φράσσασθαι ἔμελλεν οὔτε θ]εῶ[ν] μακάρων οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων· ... π]ολλὰς Ἀΐδηι κεφαλὰς ἀπὸ χαλκὸν ἰάψ[ει]ν ἀν]δρῶν ἡρώων ἐν δηϊοτῆτι πεσόντων· For then Zeus the thunderer planned amazing deeds, to mix and stir up the boundless earth, and already he hurried to annihilate the great race of bread eating mortals, an excuse to kill the lives of the semi divine .... for mortals children of the gods ... seeing with (their) eyes but the blessed ... as before apart from humans they had means of life and customs

105

110

115

96

100

The End of the Age of Heroes ] of immortals and mortal humans pain upon pain Zeus destroyed [ ] on the breast but not anyone of men would go upon the black ship to be outstanding in violence as many are and as many as are about to be he plans and celebrates of Zeus the cloud gatherer he was about to consider neither of blessed gods nor of mortal men. . . . the bronze would throw many heads to Hades of heroic men falling in combat. (fr. 204.96

207

105

110

115

119)

The fragments of lines 100 103 are particularly vexing, in that we do not know if the “semi-divine” (hemitheoi), “children of the gods,” and “blessed ones” are all references to the heroes themselves or to different groups of varying divinity.61 In particular, most reconstructions of line 101 suggest that somehow the “children of the gods” should be separated from the mortals in the previous line.62 If, as would seem normal, the “children of the gods” are the heroes themselves, in what sense does Zeus’ plan separate them from mortals?63 Koenen has suggested that the answer to this conundrum is to see in these lines a removal of the heroes from the realm of earth to the Isles of the Blessed.64 The difficulty with this solution, however, is simply that there is no mention of the Isles of the Blessed or such a removal anywhere in the extant Catalogue 61

62

63 64

Koenen 1994, 28 29, e.g., sees the “children of the gods” in line 101 as the younger generation of Olympian gods. This seems counterintuitive. See Hirschberger 2004. West proposes supplements to Merkelbach and West’s Oxford text, e.g., μὴ ὁμοῦ θνητ[οῖσι βροτοῖσιν/ τέκνα θεῶν μι[νύθ]η[ι φά]ος [ὀφ]θαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶντα, “so that the sons of the gods should not be diminished along with mortals, seeing the light with their eyes (i.e. being alive).” See, however, González 2010, 382 391. González argues that there is no distinction of kind between ordinary mortals and hemitheoi (“heroes”). See González 2010, 392. Koenen 1994, 29 30.

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(as Koenen notes).65 As González has recently pointed out, moreover, there is nothing in the Catalogue to suggest a distinction of kind made between the semi-divine heroes who run through its pages and “ordinary mortals.”66 Still more troubling, as Clay has pointed out, is that such a reading makes hash of the phrase ὡ̣ς ̣ τὸ̣̣ πάρος περ, “as in former times” (fr. 204.102).67 This clause must refer back to the time before the Catalogue began its narrative, which is to say, after the separation of mortals from immortals at Mekone but before the remarkable time when gods slept with humans and produced a race of heroes who have populated this text. In other words, the Catalogue positions itself, through this episode, as complementary to the Theogony and Works and Days. The former narrates the separation of gods from humans; the latter discusses the results of that separation and also includes the remarkable narrative of the five races of humans (gold, silver, bronze, heroes, iron). The Catalogue represents the strange intermediary step in that narrative, the age of heroes that falls between the ages of bronze and our present age of iron, and narrates it in a clearly demarcated moment.68 Indeed, the perspective of the Catalogue is indicated for us by the word hemitheoi in line 100: for as Clay notes, “In early Greek poetry, the term hemitheoi always seems to convey not only their hybrid nature, but also a distancing perspective on the heroes that assigns them to a bygone era.”69 Zeus’ plan to destroy the hemitheoi is not only a destruction of heroes, then, but an end of their moment on 65

66 67

68

69

Koenen 1994, 26 n. 62. See also González 2010, 376 n. 3, who argues that that removal to the Isles of the Blessed does not preclude mortality. González 2010, 382 391. Clay 2005, 31 n. 29; see also 27 n. 9; González 2010, 412. For an extended discussion, see Cerutti 1998. I rely here on the perceptive reading of Clay 2003, esp. 101 105, 166 169. This reading does not, in my view, rely on making a distinction in kind between heroes and “ordinary mortals.” As Clay writes (2005, 28): “The heroic age thus stands in the Catalogue as an exceptional and ephemeral period of human proximity to the divine against a backdrop of more ‘normal’ alienation from the gods” (emphasis added). There is no suggestion here of difference of kind. Cf. González 2010, 386 387. Clay 2003, 169; cf. Scodel 1982, 34.

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earth, a permanent separation of gods and mortals after the brief hiccup represented by the time of hemitheoi.70 This reading, significantly, brings the Catalogue in line with the narrative of the end of the age of heroes in the Works and Days, quoted earlier:71 Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε, δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον, ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται ἡμίθεοι, προτέρη γενεὴ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν. καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνὴ τοὺς μὲν ὑφ’ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ, Καδμηίδι γαίῃ, ὤλεσε μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’ Οἰδιπόδαο, τοὺς δὲ καὶ ἐν νήεσσιν ὑπὲρ μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης ἐς Τροίην ἀγαγὼν Ἑλένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο.

Zeus son of Kronos made a divine race of heroic men, more just and more warlike, who are called semi divine, an earlier generation on the boundless earth. And destructive war and awful battle cry destroyed them, some under seven gated Thebes, in the land of the Kadmids, fighting on behalf of the flocks of Oedipus; driving others on ships over the huge depths of the sea against Troy, on behalf of beautiful haired Helen. (Works and Days, 157 165)

It is true that in the next few lines the poet states that some of the heroes were whisked to the Isles of the Blessed, but there is nothing in the Works and Days that suggests that this is the point of the destruction of heroes; it is not the case that the heroes need to be separated from humans. Rather, war over Helen is how the race of heroes comes to an end; in the Works and Days some of them are compensated with a better afterlife, a detail that does not appear to be important to the poet of the Catalogue. If the passage in the Catalogue describes specifically the end of the age of heroes, however, there are good reasons why a number of scholars have 70 71

Cf. Nagy 1979, 220. See the useful discussion on this point by González 2010, 385 386, 396 397.

210

The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

thought that it referred to an end of the Golden Age.72 This impression is brought about because the poet of the Catalogue suggests that the end of the heroic age is a momentous break, similar to that which occurred with the first sacrifice at Mekone in the Theogony 535 564. The sequence in the Catalogue begins with a reference to the inscrutable will of Zeus: ἀλλ’ οὔ πώ ποτε πατρὸς ἐπηισθάνετο φρενὸ[ς] ὁρμῆ[ς· ἀ]λλ᾿ ἄτε κῆρ’ ἀλεείνοντες σφετέροισι τέκεσσι τ]έρποντ’ ἄνθρωποι, πραπίδων δ’ ἐπετέρπετ’ ἐρωῆι πα]τρὸς ἐρισθενος, μεγάλ’ ἀνδράσι μηδομένοιο.

But he did not yet understand the thrust of his father’s mind; But as people who, when they avoid death for their children, are delighted,73 he delighted in the force of the thoughts of the powerful father, who was plotting great things for men. (fr. 204.120 124)

Commentators agree that the father in these lines must be Zeus, but who the agent of the active verbs is remains a mystery. Wilamowitz, followed by West, Koenen, and Hirschberger, suggests that it is Apollo;74 this seems unlikely to me, for the simple reason that Apollo has elsewhere the particular divine property of understanding Zeus’ thoughts (cf. Homeric Hymn to Hermes 528 540). Clay, who reads these and the following lines as a kind of preface to the Iliad, tentatively argues for the seer Calchas, which gives good sense to the passage. González abandons the attempt to identify who this person (or god) is and focuses on the typical narrative situation of a character who thinks he understands the mind of Zeus, but ultimately does not.75 While 72

73 74

75

See West 1961, 133; West 1985, 124, suggests that the poem presents a “picture of the heroic period as a kind of Golden Age in which the conditions of life were better than they have been ever since.” Koenen 1994, 26 n. 62, argues that “in contrast to the present day, all previous humankind lived in a single, happy age that corresponded to the Erga’s golden, silver, and heroic ages all combined together.” See also Scodel 1982, 38 39; Mayer 1996, 3. I accept here the reading proposed by Most 2007. West 1985, 119; Koenen 1994, 31; Hirschberger 2004, ad fr. 110 [M W 204], 120. González 2010, 401 402.

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I cannot solve this textual riddle, I would argue that the passage’s primary importance may be that it creates a parallel to Prometheus in the Theogony, who, famously, does not deceive Zeus and in fact impels him to create evils for humans (Theogony 550 552). Just as Prometheus’ fateful sacrificial trick led to Pandora and the inevitable division of mortals and immortals, Zeus’ plan in the Catalogue temporarily pleases someone another god, a seer, perhaps even his son Herakles because that character, like us, cannot fully know the mind of Zeus. And as a result, this unnamed person is pleased with the glory that the Trojan War will bring about, without realizing that it will also bring about the end of the heroes and the age they represent. The results of those plans follow in a set of lines that, as West observed, are “astonishing.”76 Rather than narrating the abduction of Helen and subsequent Trojan War, the story shifts, and the condition of life on earth appears to change directly and disastrously: χεύετο καλὰ πέτηλα, ῥέεσκε δὲ καρπὸς ἔραζε π]νείοντος Βορέαο περιζαμενὲς Διὸς αἴσηι,

.]´λεσκεν δὲ θάλασσα, τρόμ{ε}εσκε δὲ πάντ’ ἀπὸ τοῖο, τρύχεσκεν δὲ μένος βρότεον, μινύθεσκε δὲ καρπός, ὥρηι ἐν εἰαρινῆι. . . And many tall trees, bowing toward the ground poured forth their lovely leaves, and the fruit was flowing to the ground, as the north wind blew violently by the will of Zeus, and the sea . . ., and everything was trembling from this, and it consumed the strength of mortals, and the fruit was diminishing, in the season of spring . . . (fr. 204.124 129)

Again, there is considerable scholarly controversy over the meaning of these lines; West suggests that these lines mark the first autumn, again bringing a radical change to the world.77 Clay, again keeping with an Iliadic reading, suggests that these lines narrate the wind that blew at Aulis, keeping the Greek fleet from embarking.78 Although 76 77 78

West 1985, 119 120. West 1961, 133. Clay 2005, 32 33.

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The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

this idea receives support from Clay’s discussion of the passage that follows, on its own it strikes me as insufficient to explain the apparently cosmic nature of the storm here described. The iterative forms of several verbs (truchesken, minutheske) suggest an ongoing process, a shift perhaps, from a time before to the way things are now, and forever.79 In other words, the various scholars who have seen in this episode some sort of break from the Golden Age are not wrong: there is a break here, and it does mark our time apart from a time before when things were better. Where some scholars have gone astray, I believe, is in not seeing this break for what it is: a sharp division between the age of heroes and the age of iron. As Clay correctly observes, in the story of the ages of humanity in the Works and Days, the shift from the age of heroes to the current age is marked not by a sudden break, but rather by a gradual withdrawal of the gods from intercourse with mortals.80 But the Catalogue is not entirely consistent with the Works and Days on this point: the Catalogue is the narration of the age of heroes, and in this poem that age has a sharp and distinctive end: the marriage of Helen, through which the final generation of heroes forms a political alliance and goes to war, where many of them will die. After that, as part of the “plan of Zeus,” it appears that the gods cease their sexual relations with mortals. The question that remains is how, exactly, Helen brings about this sharp break. While no answer can be given with certainty, it does seem that the narrative here focuses more on the break itself than on the story of the abduction of Helen (mentioned already in fr. 23) and the subsequent war. In a provocative article, Mayer has argued that Helen is, in herself, a figure parallel to that of Pandora: a flawed creation who is a pêma, a “trouble,” for mankind: “Like Pandora she is portrayed as being

79

80

In the passage that follows, there appears to be a completely remarkable extended simile of some thirty seven lines involving a snake and her multi ple broods. I have nothing new to add to other scholars’ interpretations of these lines; for useful discussions, see Clay 2005, 33 34; West 1985, 119 120; Hirschberger 2004, ad fr. 100 [M W 204], 129, 130. Clay 2003, 93.

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bad from birth designed by Zeus to pass onto mankind the myriad of miseries which are their lot.”81 Mayer’s argument is based on large structural parallels between the two stories and on the alternative genealogy given for Helen in the Cypria, with parallels from other near Eastern myths brought in for support. But here we can adduce some more specific evidence. In the first place, Helen is the premier exemplar of what Osborne has rightly called “the plot of attraction”: her beauty has made her the object of intense male competition, leading to disorder. But we know that the man who will win her, Menelaos, will acquire endless trouble for his success; it is not difficult to imagine the famous description of Pandora being applied to Helen: θαῦμα δ’ ἔχ’ ἀθανάτους τε θεοὺς θνητούς τ’ ἀνθρώπους, ὡς εἶδον δόλον αἰπύν, ἀμήχανον ἀνθρώποισιν.

Amazement held the immortal gods and mortal humans when they saw the sheer trick, unmanageable for humans. (Theogony 587 588)

More specifically, the words used to sum up Pandora’s appearance in the Theogony seem to be weakly echoed in this episode of the Catalogue. Hesiod says of Pandora: ὣς δ’ αὔτως ἄνδρεσσι κακὸν θνητοῖσι γυναῖκας Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης θῆκε, ξυνήονας ἔργων ἀργαλέων.

Thus in this way Zeus the high thunderer placed women, an evil for mortal men, partners of troublesome work. (Theogony 600 602)

We are not far here from the lines that refer to Zeus’ plan in the Catalogue, quoted earlier, as reconstructed by Most: τῶ[ι θ]ῇ[κ᾿]{ε} ἀθα]νάτω[ν τε ἰδὲ] θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀργαλέον πόλεμον· τοῖς μὲν τ]εῦχ᾿ ἄλγος ἐπ’ ἄλγει Ζεὺ[ς . . .

81

Mayer 1996, 12; cf. the structural charts on 10, 11.

105

214

The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue Thus Zeus placed troublesome war for immortals and mortal humans; for some he fashioned pain upon pain . . . (fr. 204.104 105)

But where Pandora was the beginning of troubles having to do with women in general in the Theogony and Works and Days, particularly tied to their role as consumers in an agrarian society Helen is the cause of war. And not just any war, but war that, like Zeus’ construction of Pandora, is the result of the “plans of Zeus” (Theogony 572; fr. 204.96 97). Moreover, although the lines are too incomplete to give any sense, West has cogently noted that lines 176 178 seem to reflect the end of the Pandora episode in the Works and Days:82 ζώε[σκ νοσφ[ κηρ[

(fr. 204.176 178)

Πρὶν μὲν γὰρ ζώεσκον ἐπὶ χθονὶ φῦλ’ ἀνθρώπων νόσφιν ἄτερ τε κακῶν καὶ ἄτερ χαλεποῖο πόνοιο νούσων τ’ ἀργαλέων, αἵ τ’ ἀνδράσι κῆρας ἔδωκαν.

For before this the tribe of humans lived continuously on the earth, separate, apart from evils and apart from difficult toil, and from painful diseases, which gave death to men. (Works and Days, 90 92)

While we cannot be certain that the sense of the lines in the fragment is parallel to that of the Works and Days, it is suggestive. It lends further support to the idea that the Catalogue presented Helen as a kind of nextgeneration Pandora. She is not the result of the first separation of gods and humans, but her marriage marks the end of that brief, nobler era when some mortals the hemitheoi, or heroes were being produced by couplings of immortal males with mortal women. Thus, the episode of the suitors of Helen brings to a close the suggestion that, at this point, we can see was so clearly marked at the beginning of the poem: Νῦν δὲ γυναικῶν ⌊φῦλον ἀείσατε, ἡδυέπειαι Μοῦσαι Ὀλυμπιάδε⌊ς, κοῦραι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο,

82

West 1961, 135; 1985, 121.

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αἳ τότ’ ἄρισται ἔσαν[ μίτρας τ’ ἀλλύσαντο .[ μισγόμεναι θεοῖσ[ιν ξυναὶ γὰρ τότε δα⌊ῖτες ἔσαν, ξυνοὶ δὲ θόωκοι ἀθανάτοις τε θε⌊οῖσι καταθνητοῖς τ’ ἀνθρώποις. οὐδ’ ἄρα ἰσαίωνες ομ[

Now sing the tribe of women, sweet sounding Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis bearing Zeus, who then were the most noble and they untied their girdles mixing in love with the gods for then meals were in common, then the councils, between immortal gods and mortal humans. But their lifetimes were not equal . . .

(fr. 1.1 8)

I have italicized the temporal markers in my translation of the passage above to make the point clear: the muses are invoked now to sing of a time then when things were different. Having sung of the suitors of Helen and introduced Achilles into the mix, not as a suitor but as a young warrior in training, the “then” of the poem has all but become the “now” of the poet, the age when heroes are no longer produced. One other point seems suggestive to me. Hermione’s birth is, as we have seen, aelpton, “unexpected” or “unhoped-for.” In the Works and Days, when Pandora opens the storage jar, thus letting out the litany of evils that now plague mortal lives, one quality was trapped in the jar as she let it shut: elpis, usually translated as “hope.” Even here, in a line that is sometimes thought spurious, we are told that elpis is trapped there by the “will of cloud-gathering Zeus, ruler of the aegis” (Works and Days, 96 99). Is this a coincidence? It is difficult to see a direct connection between Pandora’s lucky capture of hope and the unexpected (unhoped-for?) child of Helen. But the fact that the birth of Hermione leads immediately and without break to the conflict between the gods suggests, perhaps, a metonymic relationship. It is not any particular quality of Hermione or even of Helen’s marriage that leads to this strife among gods, or at least not a quality on which the poet cares to dwell. Rather, that strife seems to be caused by the war that Zeus instigates in order to reduce the human population. Once

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The Marriage of Helen and the End of the Catalogue

Helen is married, and married to Menelaos, then these things are inevitable but, crucially, unanticipated by the mortals who must experience them. The Catalogue ends, then, with a story about the end of an epoch, about the end of the production of semi-divine heroes. At the center of this story of an ending is an aristocratic marriage indeed, the paradigmatic aristocratic marriage and the narrative makes it clear that the decision regarding who should marry Helen was not decided on inborn worth or personal merit. It was, rather, a decision based on a somewhat less stable category of elite status, namely, wealth. For the aristocratic families of Archaic Greece, moreover, the end of the production of heroes is not simply the end of one kind of life and the beginning of another; genealogical poetry, as Fowler and others have argued, supports the existing power structure by valorizing the heroic ancestors of those currently in power.83 For a member of the elite, then, the story of the end of the heroic age also prefigures the inevitable decline in bloodlines, the “mixing” of birth between kalos and kakos about which Theognis is so concerned. The Catalogue in its very structure is, I suggest, an aristocratic text, but written from a time when the stability of aristocratic status is perceived as in decline which is to say, from the age of iron.

83

Fowler 1998.

7 Epilogue: Women, Middling Discourse, and the Polis

I have been arguing, sometimes directly, sometimes somewhat obliquely, that we should understand the Catalogue of Women as an aristocratic text at the end of the aristocratic era. That is not to say that the aristocracy ceased to exist or, indeed, to wield considerable power and authority as the Archaic period shifted to the brief Classical era of democracy.1 But as “middling” discourse found increasing prominence in the poleis of the late sixth century, some elitist modes of status came under increased pressure. In concluding this study, I turn to three brief discussions of middling discourse, all involving women, ranging from the seventh to the fifth century. In so doing, I hope to sketch some of ways that the idea of “woman” was used as a trope in literary and political discourse over the long Archaic period. While far from exhaustive, these three moments throw into high relief the distinctive character of the Catalogue as a response to middling discourse.

THE OTHER “CATALOGUE OF WOMEN”

Another poem from the Archaic period presents a “catalogue of women” of sorts, and, like the Hesiodic Catalogue, it also appears to end with Helen. Semonides of Amorgos’ iambic poem satirizes the different types of women in the world.2 This piece, though clearly related to the Hesiodic tradition, 1 2

See, esp., Duplouy 2006. On the connections between this poem and the Hesiodic Catalogue, see the brief but perceptive remarks of Osborne 2005, 22 24. 217

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is of an entirely different sort; as Nicole Loraux argued, this poem takes the genos of women that is created in the Theogony 590 591 and breaks it into its representative phyla, or “tribes.”3 Each of these phyla comes from different animals or elements in ways that are indeterminate, yet apparently distinct. Woman’s sources are the pig, the fox, the dog, the earth, the ocean, the ass, the weasel, the mare, the monkey, and the bee. The poem is relentlessly critical. Only the bee-woman comes in for praise, not, as we might expect, for her hard work and industry, but for giving birth to noble offspring and avoiding gossip about sex (Semonides 7.90 91). And immediately after her entry in the catalogue, “women” return as a single undifferentiated group, identified as “the biggest evil for men” (96 97). Several features distinguish this poem from the Hesiodic Catalogue, and it is not difficult to see these features as tied to the Semonidean poem’s less aristocratic outlook. First and foremost, none of the women in Semonides’ poem is named: they are all representatives of types, not of particular familial lines. There is no concern here with establishing heroic dynasties. There is, however, a great deal of anxiety over the likelihood that, whichever woman a man marries, she may not be faithful to him and so will be a cause of shame and ridicule. This comes out most clearly in the last section of the poem, in which we learn that how one views a woman is largely a question of perspective: ἥτις δέ τοι μάλιστα σωφρονεῖν δοκεῖ, αὕτη μέγιστα τυγχάνει λωβωμένη· κεχηνότος γὰρ ἀνδρός, οἱ δὲ γείτονες χαίρουσ’ ὁρῶντες καὶ τόν, ὡς ἁμαρτάνει. τὴν ἣν δ’ ἕκαστος αἰνέσει μεμνημένος γυναῖκα, τὴν δὲ τοὐτέρου μωμήσεται·

Whichever woman seems especially to be chaste that one especially happens to behave outrageously, for the husband gapes, but his neighbors rejoice, seeing how even this one is mistaken. Each man praises his own wife, remembering her, but finds fault with the wife of another. (Semonides 7.108 13) 3

Loraux 1993, ch. 2. See, esp., 90 91. On the text of Theogony and the question of whether or not line 591 is an interpolation, see 89 n. 100, 90 n. 105.

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In this respect, the poem seems almost a direct echo of the ideas expressed about marriage in the Works and Days of Hesiod at 699 705 (discussed in Chapter 1). There, the speaker advised marrying a neighbor girl “looking carefully around, lest you marry a source of laughter to your neighbors.” Semonides is, if anything, simply more pessimistic: in his world, there is no escape from the laughter of neighbors who know things about a man’s wife that he cannot see himself. Within this world of generic women, each of whom brings her own type of suffering for men, two in particular are worth noting. The first is the woman from the horse, whose description, as has often been pointed out, contains an implicit critique of aristocratic manners.4 She avoids work, will not throw dung out of the house, will not sit near the stove for fear of soot. She washes twice a day, sometimes thrice, and her hair is shadowed deeply with flowers (57 67). All of this adds up to a woman who is more beautiful than practical, belonging to a particular subclass of women who are a joy to their neighbors but not to their husbands: καλὸν μὲν ὦν θέημα τοιαύτη γυνὴ ἄλλοισι, τῶι δ’ ἔχοντι γίγνεται κακόν, ἢν μή τις ἢ τύραννος ἢ σκηπτοῦχος ἦι, ὅστις τοιούτοις θυμὸν ἀγλαΐζεται.

Such a woman is a lovely sight for others, but for the one having her, an evil, unless he is a tyrant or king, someone who cheers his heart with such things.

(Semonides 7.67 70)

To keep such a woman, in other words, is expensive and not to be undertaken by those with modest resources. This is the first and most explicit moment in the poem when the speaker suggests that a difference in class might result in a different response to a particular woman. In so doing, he seems to suggest his own perspective in comparison to that of other men. He does not appear to be someone who can afford to cheer his heart with such things; this poem is written, then, from a “middling” perspective. Another detail is critical to note. It is no accident that when the speaker introduces the mare-woman we are told explicitly that a mare 4

See Loraux 1993, 92 n. 116.

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“gave birth” (egeinato, 57) to her. Most of the other types of women are related to their source, rather imprecisely, by the simple preposition ek (“from”). As Loraux discusses at some length, all these uses of ek may not mean the same thing: “Yet it is not clear that the woman ‘comes from’ a donkey in the same way that she ‘comes from’ the sea, even if ek (‘from’) can be used to indicate both types of origin.”5 But the mare-woman, already endowed with all the common aristocratic associations of keeping horses, is not just derived “from” but born. Here again, in the smallest of subtle details, we see the emphasis that is placed on birth as a guarantor, even in a negative example, of elitist class. One woman of the ten types is praised, however briefly, and the beewoman also requires some careful analysis. φίλη δὲ σὺν φιλέοντι γηράσκει πόσει τεκοῦσα καλὸν κὠνομάκλυτον γένος. κἀριπρεπὴς μὲν ἐν γυναιξὶ γίγνεται πάσηισι, θείη δ’ ἀμφιδέδρομεν χάρις. οὐδ’ ἐν γυναιξὶν ἥδεται καθημένη ὅκου λέγουσιν ἀφροδισίους λόγους. τοίας γυναῖκας ἀνδράσιν χαρίζεται Ζεὺς τὰς ἀρίστας καὶ πολυφραδεστάτας·

Loved, this one grows old with her loving husband, having given birth to a noble and famous named race (genos). She is outstanding among all women, and divine grace surrounds her. She does not take pleasure, sitting among women, when they speak of sexual things. Zeus made a gift of such women to men, women who are the best (aristai) and most thoughtful. (Semonides 7.86 93)

The remarkable thing about this description is how much of the praise of the bee-woman is phrased in terms that recall aristocratic status. She is ariprepês, a word that in Homer is used to describe very bright objects or 5

Loraux 1993, 94 95. The woman from the earth is explicitly fabricated by the Olympians, another exception; Loraux is probably right to see here a parody of the making of Pandora in the Theogony and Works and Days (Loraux 1993, 92).

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noble people; Hector prays that his son will be ariprepês among the Trojans (Iliad 6.477). In addition to her divine grace, her greatest single attribute is that she gives birth to a noble and famous-named race. In this regard, we should see the bee-woman as a skewed inversion, not only of the disastrously sexual women who have come before her, but of Pandora in the Theogony. Pandora, famously, is an evil for men because of whom she gives birth to: θαῦμα δ’ ἔχ’ ἀθανάτους τε θεοὺς θνητούς τ’ ἀνθρώπους, ὡς εἶδον δόλον αἰπύν, ἀμήχανον ἀνθρώποισιν. ἐκ τῆς γὰρ γένος ἐστὶ γυναικῶν θηλυτεράων . . .

Wonder held the immortal gods and mortal humans, as they looked at the sheer trick, unmanageable for humans, for from her is the race of female women . . . (Theogony 588 590)

As the only woman in Semonides’ poem to give birth, the bee-woman is particularly significant and she gives birth not to the inescapable trap that is woman but to a race of noble humans who would be entirely at home in the aristocratic text of the Iliad. In brief, the description of the bee-woman consists almost entirely of a persuasive redefinition of elite status. All of the value-laden words that describe her person refer not to her own noble birth but to proper behavior. Blame, we are told, does not alight on her; perhaps most important of all, she does not engage in sexual gossip with other women (84, 90 91). As the apparent result of this proper behavior, not only does she engender a race of famous offspring the sort of heroes we see repeatedly in the Hesiodic Catalogue but since the poet turns here to a plural, all women like her are themselves aristai, noble. This text, then, is another middling text, and persistently, if subtly, so. It appropriates noble status for the woman who loves her husband (but is not dangerously lustful) and shows self-restraint, rather than for the one who is born well. The naturally aristocratic mare-woman is a bother and not much use, while words that elsewhere mark the noble heroes of the Iliad are here applied to the woman who demonstrates proper behavior and to her offspring. Did Semonides know the material that makes up the Hesiodic Catalogue, and is his poem a response to it? Semonides is generally

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believed to have lived in the late seventh and early sixth century. The Catalogue probably had not received its final form during his lifetime; but if, as I discussed in Chapter 1, we assume that the mythic material of the Catalogue was extant in performance for some decades before its final form, it becomes possible to read Semonides’ poem as a middling response. The Catalogue celebrates the well-born, highly sexualized women who, as aristai (Catalogue 1.3), gave birth to the noble heroes that populate the mythic world of hexameter poetry. Semonides, writing in iambic meter, redefines aristai as the women, nameless but wellbehaved, who avoid aphroditous logous (sexual gossip) and help the household to thrive: θάλλει δ’ ὑπ’ αὐτῆς κἀπαέξεται βίος (“and life blooms and is made to grow by her,” Semonides 7.85). A similar mode of redefinition can be seen in the surprising close to the poem that, as Osborne has noted, ends as does the Catalogue, with a reference to the marriage of Helen: Ζεὺς γὰρ μέγιστον τοῦτ’ ἐποίησεν κακόν, καὶ δεσμὸν ἀμφέθηκεν ἄρρηκτον πέδην, ἐξ οὗ τε τοὺς μὲν Ἀΐδης ἐδέξατο γυναικὸς εἵνεκ’ ἀμφιδηριωμένους

For Zeus made this biggest evil, and placed around (men) a chain, unbreakable bond, from the moment when Hades received those men, having gone to war on account of a woman. (Semonides 7.115 119)

Osborne is quite correct to note here that Helen becomes, as it were, the final perfect example of the wife that each man but her own husband knows is unfaithful.6 But the shift in tone and technique from hexameter poetry is remarkable. In the Catalogue, as we have seen, the marriage of Helen is an extended episode, stretching for hundreds of lines and cataloguing dozens of suitors and their rich array of gifts. Helen’s marriage leads, inevitably, to the war at Troy and the end of the age of heroes who could pursue her. In Semonides’ poem Helen is reduced to pure function, not even named. She is only the start of one thing, namely, our current miserable existence not, however, because she is the end of 6

Osborne 2005, 23.

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an aristocratic age, or the period of regular intercourse with the gods, but because she exemplifies the “plot of attraction” that, in this middling text, all men are subject to, however unwittingly: ἴ̄ σην δ’ ἔχοντες μοῖραν οὐ γινώσκομεν (“We do not know that we all hold the same fate,” 114).7 Helen’s story has been redefined not as the end of the heroic age but as the start of the age in which all men are enslaved to their erotic attraction for women. All men are Menelaos and their wives are all Helen; Helen is Everywoman.

DEDICATIONS AND THE POLIS

If Semonides’ poem has a leveling effect on the notion of aristocratic birth, there is nothing in that poem that refers directly to the polis or its values. In an important and persuasive article some ten years ago, Richard Neer argued that the development of treasuries in panhellenic sites in the sixth century provided a particularly cogent set of materials for understanding the shift from aristocratic display to polis-centered ideology.8 Whereas early in the sixth century some treasuries were dedicated by tyrants, at some point in the latter half of the century, the dedicators became, increasingly, poleis themselves. And while these treasuries were, in a sense, still monuments of aristocratic display they presented wealthy gifts to the gods, at the site of inter-polis competitions they became an offering on the part of the polis itself rather than its wealthy individuals. Rather than a full-scale rejection of aristocratic ideals, then, the sharp growth in treasury building marks an appropriation by the polis of an elitist form: “Where previously a wealthy aristocrat could express his or her own personal relationship with the deity by giving a princely gift, the thesauros neatly excises the dedication from the sphere of elitist Panhellenism and places it es meson, in the middle of the polis.”9 7 8

9

Even the notion of moira, “fate,” has here become mundane rather than cosmic. Neer 2001. See also Neer 2004 for an analysis of the Athenian treasury at Dephi as negotiating this same set of ideological constraints. Neer 2001, 284. See also the discussion of the Athenian treasury in Neer 2004, esp. 86 88.

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Such behavior does not mean, of course, that aristocratic dedications that are separate from those put up by the city cease during this period. Of particular interest in this regard is the dedication of the Alkmeonidai at the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoion in Boeotia, from the second half of the sixth century.10 The text of this dedication, which survives on the base of a statue that is no longer extant, reads: I am a fine statue to delight Leto’s son, Phoibos Apollo. Alkmaionides son of Alkmaion dedicated me after a victory with his swift horses, which Knopiadas . . . drove at the festival of Pallas at Athens.11

As Neer points out, this is an aristocratic dedication, designed to glorify the person and family who dedicated it. There is no attempt in this text to glorify Athens or, indeed, to negotiate for glory within the polis: Note that Alkmaionides identifies himself only by his patronymic, not his ethnic: by his noble birth, not his citizenship. It is not enough, apparently, to be famous at Athens; and Athenian citizenship is not worth proclaiming. In fact, the polis does not figure into the equation at all: for Alkmaionides, the only thing that matters is the dissemination of his deeds and parentage within a larger interstate community.12

Clearly, then, in the sixth century aristocratic display is still operative; we have evidence of competing modes of status and competing contexts in which that status must be maintained. It is not the case that aristocratic discourse ceases, merely that it now must also contend with discourses that glorify, in some contexts and at some times, the wealth or activity that belongs to polis and community. Neer goes on to analyze, in particular, the Siphnian treasury at Delphi as a part of the island’s building program there and as a marker of the growing “middling” ideology within the Siphnian politics in the sixth century. I cannot do justice here to the depth and subtlety of Neer’s analysis of the sculptural program on that dedicatory building, but two points are of particular interest. First, as Neer and Andrew Stewart have 10

11

12

IG i3 1469. This text is discussed briefly by Osborne 2009, 256 257, and Neer 2004, 85 86. Translation provided by Osborne 2009, 258 (with the addition of an ellipsis indicating a blank in the text of the Greek). Neer 2004, 86.

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noted, the north frieze is the only depiction of warriors fighting in phalanx formation in Archaic Greek sculpture.13 As most commentators would have it, the development of phalanx fighting in which every hoplite depends on his fellow for protection, and the whole either stands or falls together was a crucial step in the development of civic identity in the Archaic period. Although Kurt Raaflaub has argued forcefully that massed forms of hoplite fighting are not only present but decisive in the Homeric epics, it is still true that those epics do not valorize the massed fighters in the way that they do the individual heroes.14 The sculptural program on the Siphnian treasury shows an awareness, at least, of the citizen-soldier. Here, however, we are faced with a striking surprise: the hoplites that appear on Siphnian North represent the Giants in a battle between Olympians and Giants; the hoplite phalanx of citizen-soldiers are, in effect, the bad guys.15 In an elegant and complex argument, Neer suggests that the framing of this conflict on the treasury sponsored by the Siphnians as a whole is itself a means of negotiating the conflict between aristocratic and middling ideals within the polis of the Siphnians.16 To paraphrase Neer, the dedication of the building “frames” the ongoing social conflict, and places it in a civic context. Even more important than the careful articulation of Giants as hoplites, however, is the use that the Siphnian treasury makes of gender. Among the most striking aspects of the building is the fact that the front porch is supported by “caryatids” (properly, korai), which is to say young women in the form of columns the earliest known use of this architectural technique on the Greek mainland.17 As Neer argues, these young women negotiate through their bodies the tension between aristocratic and civic display:18

13 14

15 16 17 18

Stewart 1997, 89; Neer 2001, 303. Raaflaub has, however, issued a strong challenge to the idea of a seventh century “hoplite revolution.” See, e.g., Raaflaub 1993, 53 54; Raaflaub 1997, passim. The monumental celebration, however, of phalanx fighting can still be taken as a marker of shifting values in the developing polis. Neer 2001, 303 304. Neer 2001, esp. 313 314. Neer 2001, 315. As Neer notes, these korai anticipate the korai who hold up the south porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens; and as Stieber has suggested, those korai

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Is it possible to be both an aristocratic offering bearer and a working element of a larger architecture? The answer, of course, is Yes. . .. The women are at once sump tuous agalmata and load bearing servants, ideals of the good Siphnian and functional elements within a larger edifice. The result is a remarkably effective political icon: a way to imagine the integration of upper class display into the fabric of the polis.19

Though Neer’s argument has not been universally accepted, I find it a powerful explanation for the presence and form of the Siphnian treasury. It is important to note, moreover, that the korai of the treasury are women for a reason. When male figures are used as architectural support, they are depicted as weighed down by the building they must support.20 These columns, however, function as both aristocratic display and “pillars of the community” who “fuse glory-mongering with civic pride.”21 These idealized women, as part of a sculptural program, neatly bridge the gap between elitist display and a notion of service to the polis.

HELEN AND AGARISTE

Women who are not carved of stone, as I have tried to show in earlier chapters, are also at the nexus of the ideological conflicts that are ongoing in the Archaic period. As objects of exchange, they are precious goods used to create bonds between aristocratic families, but as representatives of the polis itself, increasingly they become seen as points of entry into civic membership. This nexus, this point of conflict between competing ideals, can also be seen in one of the more curious moments of the afterlife of the Catalogue of Women: the comparison between the episode of the suitors of Helen and the historical marriage of Agariste, daughter of Kleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon. In the early sixth century, according to Herodotus, the Sicyonian tyrant Kleisthenes held an overtly aristocratic competition to find the

19 20 21

come into being after the dedication of individual korai by wealthy Athenians comes to an end (Stieber 2004, 38, 136). We might very well see the korai of the Erechtheion, then, as a civic appropriation of an aristocratic form. I hope to explore this idea further in a later work. Neer 2001, 317. Neer 2001, 317, referring to Ridgway on Acragas. Neer 2001, 317.

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most suitable husband for his daughter, Agariste (Herodotus 6.126 130). We should admit at the outset that none of the events of this marriage can be viewed as historical facts.22 As How and Wells noted over a hundred years ago, the central event of the contest of suitors, in which Hippokleides of Athens “dances away his marriage,” seems to be based on an ancient eastern folktale.23 The contest of the suitors itself has curiously literary qualities, and it is impossible to know if these are present because Kleisthenes was deliberately imitating an epic aesthetic, if Herodotus has shaped his account in order reflect such an aesthetic, or both.24 The event, however, is often cited as an example of aristocratic marriage in the sixth century, in which we hear that elite members of different cities regularly married, thus establishing familial ties across lines of civic membership.25 The episode certainly has a Homeric feel, and it is perhaps no surprise that scholars have suggested a link between the event or its telling by Herodotus and the Catalogue’s story of the suitors of Helen. (Which was the model and which the imitation depends on how early or late one considers the Catalogue to be.) How and Wells, in their commentary on Herodotus, note that George Grote made the suggestion in his 1856 history of Greece.26 In modern scholarship on the Catalogue, Schwartz raised the same suggestion, and this idea has been given consideration by West, Cingano, and others.27 Most recently, Irwin has provided a 22

23

24

25 26 27

So the judgment of How and Wells 1912, ad 6.126: “The fact of the wedding of the daughter and heiress of Cleisthenes is doubtless historical, the details are obviously fictitious.” How and Wells 1912, ad 6.130. For a much fuller discussion, see Kurke 2011, 412 426. Morris 1986a, 113, refers to the episode as a “very Homeric ἀγών.” Parker 1994, 423, argues that “[t]his was a deliberately grandiose gesture, designed to remind his contemporaries of the wooing of Helen of Troy in days of yore.” Irwin 2005a, 66 67, provides the fullest recent discussion of whether art was imitating life or vice versa. It would be characteristic of Kleisthenes to try to replace the epic tales of Argive Helen with the marriage of his own daughter in epic form; cf. Parker 1994, 419 422. E.g., Irwin 2005a; Hall 2007a, 142; Duplouy 2006, ch. 2. How and Wells 1912, ad 6.126. See Schwartz 1960, 488 491; West 1985, 133; Cingano 2005, 127. It is worth noting that Schwartz, who seems to have opened up this line of inquiry in recent

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brief but perceptive analysis of this correspondence, as part of a larger argument in which she suggests that several episodes of the Catalogue may have presented a subtle critique of Alkmeonid marriages in sixthcentury Athens.28 Irwin also raises an important point regarding the historicity of the passages in question: namely, that if we accept a midsixth-century date for the Catalogue, it is possible that the Catalogue may be responding to the historical event of the marriage, rather than the marriage-narrative modeling itself on the Catalogue: “But what if the picture is more complicated, the directions of influence more fluid: could the Catalogue have recast the epic wooing of Helen in terms of this recent and destined to be famous historical wooing-contest involving Athenian participants (which no doubt was itself conducted in a way to suggest epic)?”29 The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that there are two distinct ideological moments governing the marriage of Agariste: the moment of the marriage itself, which may have been manipulated by Kleisthenes, and the moment of Herodotus’ narration of the event. Nor is there any easy way to separate these two strands in the narrative that we have. What is apparent, in any case, is that the wedding of Agariste is presented in Herodotus as evoking an elitist ideology that seems to be parallel to that of the Catalogue. We can, however, go a step beyond this observation, and point out that Herodotus’ story of this event also points toward the end of such aristocratic practice. In this regard, the narration of the historical event perhaps parallels the anxieties that we inferred from the Catalogue’s story of the suitors of Helen.

28

29

years, eventually concludes that the marriage of Agariste should be “dissociated” from the composition of the catalogue of Helen’s suitors (491). Parker 1994, 423 424 and n. 114, argues that the entire event was arranged by Kleisthenes in such a way as to evoke the age of heroes. Irwin 2005a. I find Irwin’s suggestions about the marriage of Mestra as a parallel to the marriage of Peisistratos to Megakles’ daughter less convincing. While it is true that both marriages are, in a sense, a sham, and both end without issue, the basic structure of these failures is fundamentally different. Mestra does not stay married to Glaukos because of her dedication to her father, and Zeus prevents issue from the marriage. In the marriage of Peisistratos, the marriage is without issue, and falls apart because the husband (Peisistratos) has sex with Megakles’ daughter ou kata nomon (“not according to custom”). The essential tensions strike me as different. Irwin 2005a, 66.

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To begin, Herodotus starts the story with a genealogy of Kleisthenes going back several generations a typical aristocratic gesture and Kleisthenes himself is clearly motivated by elitist values. He desires “to marry his daughter to the best man of all the Greeks” (Ἑλλήνων ἁπάντων ἐξευρὼν τὸν ἄριστον, τούτῳ γυναῖκα προσθεῖναι, 6.126). He announces the contest at a suitable occasion, the Olympics at which he has just won in chariot-racing, and the terms of the contest are immediately laid out as consisting of personal worth. He invites as suitors “any Greek who thinks himself worthy to be the son-in-law of Kleisthenes” (ὅστις Ἑλλήνων ἑωυτὸν ἀξιοῖ Κλεισθένεος γαμβρὸν γενέσθαι, 6.126). Kleisthenes proceeds to set the time and duration of the wooing-competition (one year, starting 60 days from the announcement) and reserves for himself the right to judge the suitors. It is not difficult to see Kleisthenes in this episode as a sort of Tyndareos-figure. We then get a catalogue of suitors themselves, and it contains a number of suitably well-known people. All the suitors were certainly wealthy, and we hear a bit about their material worth. Of the first suitor, Smindyrides, for instance, we learn that he “had arrived at the height of luxuriousness” (ὃς ἐπὶ πλεῖστον δὴ χλιδῆς εἷς ἀνὴρ ἀπίκετο, 6.127). Smindyrides was, it appears, a something of a watchword for luxury in antiquity (see How and Wells 1912, ad 6.127), and such a lifestyle required considerable economic resources. Two Athenians are among the group: Megakles and Hippokleides. The reader knows that Megakles is wealthy, because he is identified as the son of Alkmaeon, whose visit to Kroesus was narrated just a few paragraphs earlier (6.125).30 Hippokleides, we are told, is “outstanding among the Athenians in wealth and looks” (πλούτῳ καὶ εἴδεϊ προφέρων Ἀθηναίων, 6.127). This last phrase seems similar enough to recall the somewhat formulaic lines from the Catalogue about Menestheus, the suitor from Athens: οἷς μιν θυμὸς ἀνῆκεν ἐεδνώσ[ασθαι ἄκοιτιν πλεῖστα πορόντ’, ἐπεὶ ο[ὔ] τιν’ ἐέλπε[το φέρτερον εἶναι πάντω]ν ἡρώων κτήνεσσί τε δω[τίναις τε.

30

For a perceptive treatment of of Alkmaeon’s visit to Kroesus, see Kurke 1999, 142 146.

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To these [men] his heart urged him to promise much bridewealth for the wife, presenting the most, since he hoped not one of all the heroes would possess more of prizes or gifts. (fr. 200.7 9)

But whereas the passage from the Catalogue makes it clear that the gifts themselves are at stake, in Herodotus, the suitors are not required in any way to make a contribution. Rather, the wealth in question is simply part of the suitors’ personal assets. It is worth noting, moreover, that the line in the Catalogue that is closest to Herodotus’ description of Hippokleides is not of a suitor, but rather of an attractive woman, namely, Alkmene, mother of Herakles: ἥ ῥα γυναικῶν φῦλον ἐκαίνυτο θηλυτεράων εἴδεΐ τε μεγέθει τε

She surpassed the tribe of female women in beauty and in size . . .

(Aspis 4 5)

These lines appear to be a variant on a series of lines in which various women are praised for surpassing all other women in beauty (frs. 96.2, 180.10). The wealth of the women in question would, of course, not be at issue or rather, would not be overtly cited as the reason for the woman’s attractiveness. What is interesting here, however, is that in Herodotus the beauty of the suitor is cited as an attribute something that does not happen in any of the extant fragments of the Catalogue, among suitors for Helen or any other woman.31 Again, what in the Catalogue appears to be a largely economic contest is here a competition that concerns both wealth and inherent qualities, of the sort that aristocratic discourse presented as characteristic of the elite. As the contest continues, these elitist aspects are further emphasized. Kleisthenes learns the fatherland and lineage of each of the suitors (6.128). He tests the “courage, character, education, and manner, meeting with them both singly and in groups” (διεπειρᾶτο αὐτῶν τῆς τε ἀνδραγαθίης καὶ τῆς ὀργῆς καὶ παιδεύσιός τε καὶ τρόπου, καὶ ἑνὶ ἑκάστῳ ἰὼν ἐς συνουσίην καὶ συνάπασι, 6.128). These are exactly the characteristics that a noble Greek should have, and it appears that even the 31

See Ziogas 2013, 24 25.

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manner of testing is appropriate to an aristocratic ethos. The younger suitors are taken to the gymnasium, always a popular leisure-time activity for the rich; but even more important, we are told, were the tests that took place “when they met together to eat” (τὸ μέγιστον, ἐν τῇ συνεστοῖ διεπειρᾶτο, 6.128).32 In other words, what was being tested here was a specifically aristocratic aesthetic: were they skilled at athletic contests, did they converse well, were their manners sufficiently refined? It was at these tests that Hippokleides specifically fails, in the fantastic story in which he begins dancing on the tables, eventually spinning on his head and flailing his legs in the air. After this contest, however, it is important to note that there are significant shifts in the ideological fabric. That is, although Kleisthenes (as Herodotus portrays him) may have Homeric aspirations, this contest is clearly not like those in the Catalogue; further, it looks forward to fifthcentury wedding practices and to a specifically Athenian context. While remaining entirely in an aristocratic vein, it nonetheless points the way forward to Athens’ participatory democracy. It is worthwhile here to cite Kleisthenes’ speech to the collected suitors in full: Ἄνδρες παιδὸς τῆς ἐμῆς μνηστῆρες, ἐγὼ καὶ πάντας ὑμέας ἐπαινέω καὶ πᾶσι ὑμῖν, εἰ οἷόν τε εἴη, χαριζοίμην ἄν, μήτ’ ἕνα ὑμέων ἐξαίρετον ἀποκρίνων μήτε τοὺς λοιποὺς ἀποδοκιμάζων. Ἀλλ’, οὐ γὰρ οἷά τέ ἐστι μιῆς περὶ παρθένου βουλεύοντα πᾶσι κατὰ νόον ποιέειν, τοῖσι μὲν ὑμέων ἀπελαυνομένοισι τοῦδε τοῦ γάμου τάλαντον ἀργυρίου ἑκάστῳ δωρεὴν δίδωμι τῆς ἀξιώσιος εἵνεκα τῆς ἐξ ἐμέο γῆμαι καὶ τῆς ἐξ οἴκου ἀποδημίης. Τῷ δὲ Ἀλκμέωνος Μεγακλέϊ ἐγγυῶ παῖδα τὴν ἐμὴν Ἀγαρίστην νόμοισι τοῖσι Ἀθηναίων.

Men, suitors of my child, I praise all of you, and if I were able, I would gratify all of you, rather than deciding in favor of one chosen from among you, and turning the rest of you away. But, since it is not possible in making plans concerning a single young woman to act according to all of your wishes, to those of you who are driven away from this marriage I am giving a talent of silver to each as a gift, because you thought it worthy to be married to my daughter, and because you have spent time away from home. And to Megakles the son of Alkmeon, I entrust (enguô) my child Agariste, in the custom of the Athenians. (6.130) 32

On the importance of the symposium as a marker of aristocratic status, see Irwin 2005a; Kurke 1999, esp. 175 219.

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In the first place, the central structure of the Catalogue’s story, that is to say the competition of hedna, is entirely missing from Herodotus’ narrative. No suitor offers up hedna, and there is no explicit competition of material resources. What is even more remarkable is that there is a kind of anti-hedna, in that Kleisthenes compensates the suitors of Agariste for the time that they have wasted in Sicyon. It is true that this compensation is declared in the long-term transactional order that characterizes aristocratic exchange. The talent of silver is given “as a gift,” which is to say, not as a one-to-one compensation for lost time and resources but as a symbolic gesture recognizing the suitors’ inconvenience and establishing ties of friendship with them. Even so, this is not the aristocratic social structure of the Catalogue, in which suitors were expected to risk their resources in the hopes of obtaining a particularly desirable bride. Even more interesting is the word that Kleisthenes uses to refer to those suitors who were not successful. He says that he must “find them unsuitable,” apodokimadzô. The verb, at least to Herodotus’ audience, must have called to mind the Athenian civic institution of the dokimasia, in which men who had been appointed to political office were scrutinized for suitability for that office and in which young men were scrutinized for potential citizenship.33 The word apodokimadzô is not very common, but it is used by Lysias (Lysias 13.10) to indicate a man whom the Athenians had rejected as unsuitable for the generalship after his election to that post. Herodotus’ use of the word here is mildly anachronistic, importing a context of fifth-century Athenian citizenship into the story of the sixthcentury Kleisthenes. The clincher, however, comes at the very end. However much Kleisthenes’ competition might remind us of the Catalogue, or perhaps of the suitors of Penelope, there is no doubt at the end that the marriage itself looks forward. Kleisthenes “betrothes” (enguô) his daughter to Megakles, “in the custom of the Athenians.” As I discussed in Chapter 3, it is not entirely clear when the practice of enguê came into being it is referenced in a law that is ascribed to Solon and is probably Archaic (Laws of Solon fr. 48b, cited at Demosthenes 46.14). In any case, it is clearly an element of fifth-century marriage practice, and, as Cox writes, “By classical times, the rite was integrally connected with the notion of legitimacy and 33

On dokimasia for citizenship, see Robertson 2000.

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citizenship.”34 For an aristocrat from Sicyon giving his daughter to another aristocrat, Kleisthenes seems here strangely concerned that this be a legitimate marriage according to Athenian law. Why this concern? I should specify here that this is an element in Herodotus’ narrative of the event, and I make no claims here about whether or not Kleisthenes actually did these things or was concerned in this way. But for Herodotus’ audience, of course, the name of Kleisthenes is hardly insignificant. The offspring of this very marriage, in fact, will be Kleisthenes the reformer, who ushered in the Athenian democracy in 508/7 (as Herodotus tells us in his brief discussion of the Kleisthenic reforms, 6.131).35 And should we miss the significance of this fact, Herodotus goes on to name the subsequent family line of the second Kleisthenes, including his granddaughter, the second Agariste, who married Xanthippus and gave birth to the Athenian general par excellence and author of a far-reaching citizenship law, Perikles. In brief, everything about the end of this story is geared toward the idea that this marriage, however aristocratic, is fundamentally poised at the brink of Athenian democracy and, in fact, ultimately brings it about. All of this takes us back, I suggest, to the hints and implications in the Catalogue that the marriage of Helen will be the end of the heroic age. Here, the comments of Irwin are particularly appropriate: One might only point out that both Herodotus and the Catalogue adopt a similar ironic stance to what each of the hosts no doubt intended to be a grand affair, and both make the consequences of the marriage momentous and (with hindsight) epoch ending. More specifically, two shared details might make one pause: neither Megacles nor Menelaus are the absolute best, and win only by default. . . .36

Irwin is exactly right, and we can go one step further. One aspect of Herodotus’ narrative directly contradicts that of the Catalogue. In the Catalogue, the interjection of Achilles as a better but impossible suitor 34 35

36

Cox 1998, 93; see Harrison 1968, 5. Elsewhere Herodotus plays up the aristocratic, tyrannical nature of the second Kleisthenes; see especially the discussion of Munson on Herodotus 5.66 69 (Munson 2001, 56 59). Irwin 2005a, 66.

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makes it clear that Menelaos wins not because of his superior inborn qualities but because of his superior wealth and, in the form of Agamemnon, family connections. This is exactly what does not happen in the case of Hippokleides: Herodotus reveals that Kleisthenes prefers Hippokleides, in part because of his connections to the Kypselids in Corinth (6.128). But when Hippokleides demonstrates his inferiority of character through his unseemly dancing, Kleisthenes cannot overlook it. And so he chooses Megakles perhaps not the richest or best-connected of the suitors, but better in character than the powerfully connected Hippokleides. In terms of demonstrating inborn worth, Herodotus’ narrative maintains the aristocratic ideal in a way that the Catalogue does not. In both narratives, however, the marriage of the woman in question (Helen, Agariste) represents the culmination of a tradition. Helen embodies the “plot of attraction” that has driven the Catalogue from the start and is, herself, the paramount example of a woman who exceeds the tribe of women in beauty. Agariste’s marriage, however much it is cited as “typical” by historians of the sixth century, is clearly meant to be a Homeric event, surpassing the usual marriage practices of the day. But both narratives also end with pointers that, as a culmination, these marriages signify the end of a social practice. With Helen, we must have Alexander, Troy, Achilles, and many heroes cast down to Hades. With Agariste, we must have the second Kleisthenes, and eventually Perikles, and thus a system of marriage that gives more weight to citizenship in the democracy than to membership in an aristocratic elite. Did Kleisthenes of Sicyon pattern his daughters’ wooing on that of Helen in the Catalogue? It is, in the end, impossible to say. If we give credence to Herodotus’ narrative, we can say that Kleisthenes set up an aristocratic competition that hearkened back to hexameter poetry and the imaginary social structures of the Iliad and Odyssey. With some more assurance, we can say that Herodotus’ narrative of the event highlights its epic pretensions and perhaps has Helen’s suitors as a loose template. But in any case, it is certain, as Irwin notes, that after 508 the reading of the Catalogue may have taken on new meanings and new possibilities,37 37

Irwin 2005a, 67.

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and the grim forebodings that we saw in the story of Helen’s suitors could well have been read as a prognostication of the eroding power of the aristocracy. Everything in the Catalogue points to Helen’s marriage as both the end of that work and the end of the age of heroes; in telling the story of the marriage of Agariste, Herodotus effects a transition from a selfconsciously heroic wedding competition to the Athens that followed Kleisthenes’ reforms. If we take the story of the marriage of Agariste as a reflection of the story of the suitors of Helen, then Herodotus hints at the way an Athenian of the fifth century might have read the Catalogue. We see here, to be sure, a valorization of the idea of nobility of character surpassing that of wealth and even family connections. In the end, however, this inborn nobility can be effective only within the structures of the fifth-century polis: Agariste must be married with enguê, “in the manner of the Athenians.”

Appendix A

Dowry in the Homeric Poems?

In his discussion of marriage practices in the Homeric poems, Ian Morris argues that the practice of dowry as it exists in the fifth century is not present in the Iliad and Odyssey.1 He does so in part to bolster the argument that the social world of Homeric poems is consistent and that it admits only one form of gift transfer with marriage, that of hedna paid by the groom to the bride’s father. If we consider hedna as a form of aristocratic gift exchange, however, rather than as a form of “bride price” distinct from and exclusive of proix (“dowry”) it is also possible to see that the Homeric poems do depict something like the system of dowry that we see in later Greece.2 In re opening this question, I wish to be clear. When I speak of “dowry,” I do not merely mean gifts that are given by the bride’s father to the bridegroom.3 Rather, I mean a system akin to what we see legally defined in fifth century Athens, a “pre mortem inheritance” brought by the bride to her husband’s household and controlled, at least in part, by 1 2

3

See Morris 1986a, 106. Westbrook 2005 mounts a strong argument for the existence of a dowry system at work in the Odyssey and sees the kingship of Odysseus as Penelope’s dowry. Morris 1986a, 110 113, points out that Homeric society in large part matches the pattern of “diverging devolution” described by Goody, which is usually associ ated with dowries. Much of my argument in the following paragraphs depends on Morris’s discussion, and I wish to make only slight modifications to his essential points. Finley points out that he is using the word “somewhat loosely” (Finley 1981, 235). Morris, on the other hand, uses a more rigorous definition: he admits that gifts may travel in both directions but denies that a proix style dowry exists in Homer (Morris 1986a, 106). 237

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the husband during the term of marriage. We should also note that in fifth century Athens, this dowry had to be returned to the bride’s family in the case of divorce.4 I treat this problem in two parts: first, are there cases in which hedna travel in the wrong direction, from bride’s family to the groom? And second, are there cases (not necessarily using the word hedna) in which we see evidence for a dowry, corresponding to the practice as defined by later legal texts? Dôra (“gifts”), as a number of passages from the Homeric poems show, could move in either direction. What of hedna? As Perysinakis rightly points out, the real crux of the matter lies with two passages in the Odyssey that talk about what would happen if Penelope were to return to her father’s house hold to be remarried: μνηστῆρας μὲν ἐπὶ σφέτερα σκίδνασθαι ἄνωχθι, μητέρα δ’, εἴ οἱ θυμὸς ἐφορμᾶται γαμέεσθαι, ἂψ ἴτω ἐς μέγαρον πατρὸς μέγα δυναμένοιο· οἱ δὲ γάμον τεύξουσι καὶ ἀρτυνέουσιν ἔεδνα πολλὰ μάλ’, ὅσσα ἔοικε φίλης ἐπὶ παιδὸς ἕπεσθαι.

Order the suitors to scatter to their own homes, and your mother, if her spirit urges her to get married, let her go to the house of her very powerful father; They will arrange a marriage, and will contrive hedna, very much, as much as is fitting to follow a dear child. (Odyssey 1.274 278)

The difficulty, plainly put, is that these lines read most naturally if we assume that the phrase “contrive hedna” means that Penelope’s family will provide her with a dowry.5 Morris and Perysinakis, however, wish to take the phrase to mean that Penelope’s father will contrive a dowry for himself, that is, “attract rich dowry.”6 While this would certainly make the Homeric uses of hedna more consistent, it runs into some difficulty in the next line (278); in what sense can hedna paid to Ikarios be said to “follow” Penelope? We can make sense of the line only if we take epi plus the genitive in a loose

4 5

6

See Harrison 1968, 45 55, and Cox 1998, 116 129, for useful discussions. So Snodgrass 1974, 121; Finley 1981, 239. Westbrook 2005, 10, argues, however, that the lines must refer to bride price. If Penelope had a dowry in her first marriage, she would retain it and bring it to the second as well. Morris 1986a, 109; Perysinakis 1991, 298.

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causal sense, for example, “in the case of a dear child.”7 The forceful argu ments of Morris notwithstanding, I think we must admit that the exact social definition of hedna on this point is ambiguous in Homer. Even if hedna cannot ever be said with certainty to refer to a payment to the groom in the Homeric poems, however, that does not quite prove Morris’ larger point, that nothing like the Classical dowry system exists in Homer. Two passages are, I think, telling. The first is Telemachos’ answer to Antinoös, when he is urged to send Penelope home to her father: “Ἀντίνο’, οὔ πως ἔστι δόμων ἀέκουσαν ἀπῶσαι ἥ μ’ ἔτεχ’, ἥ μ’ ἔθρεψε, πατὴρ δ’ ἐμὸς ἄλλοθι γαίης, ζώει ὅ γ’ ἦ τέθνηκε· κακὸν δέ με πόλλ’ ἀποτίνειν Ἰκαρίῳ, αἴ κ’ αὐτὸς ἑκὼν ἀπὸ μητέρα πέμψω. ἐκ γὰρ τοῦ πατρὸς κακὰ πείσομαι, ἄλλα δὲ δαίμων δώσει, ἐπεὶ μήτηρ στυγερὰς ἀρήσετ’ ἐρινῦς οἴκου ἀπερχομένη· νέμεσις δέ μοι ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἔσσεται· ὣς οὐ τοῦτον ἐγώ ποτε μῦθον ἐνίψω.” “Antinoös, there is no way for me to push her unwilling from home, she who bore me and raised me, and my father is somewhere on the earth, either alive or dead. And it will be bad for me to pay back a great deal to Ikarios, if I willingly send away my mother. For from her father I will suffer evils, and the daimôn will give other (evils), since my mother will call on the hateful furies, once she is exiled from the house. And there will be revenge against me from people; thus I will never declare this order.” (Odyssey 2.130 137)

Telemachos fears a variety of forms of revenge: political, familial, and in the form of maternal furies. What particularly interests me, however, is the implication of lines 132 133, in which Telemachos anticipates an obligation to pay money back to Ikarios, Penelope’s father. Admittedly, there is little specific here, and it would be pressing the issue to suggest that the legal specificity of fifth century proix is operative. The explanation offered by Lacey and followed by Morris, however that Telemachos refers merely to the kind of dôra typically given as a way of “smoothing

7

Ephepomai regularly takes a dative object when it means “to follow” in later Greek. Epi plus the genitive can have a range of meanings, including direction toward, as well as the loose causal sense suggested here.

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over a rift in the social fabric”8 fails to account for the notion that a return of Penelope to her natal home creates a specific obligation toward her father. This begins to look like a return of goods (one of the possible senses of apotinô) brought to the marriage by Penelope; that is, something like the legally defined structure of later Athenian dowry.9 The second passage has also been much discussed: in the Iliad, Priam speaks of being able to ransom two of his sons, Polydoros and Lykaon: καὶ γὰρ νῦν δύο παῖδε Λυκάονα καὶ Πολύδωρον οὐ δύναμαι ἰδέειν Τρώων εἰς ἄστυ ἀλέντων, τούς μοι Λαοθόη τέκετο κρείουσα γυναικῶν. ἀλλ’ εἰ μὲν ζώουσι μετὰ στρατῷ, ἦ τ’ ἂν ἔπειτα χαλκοῦ τε χρυσοῦ τ’ ἀπολυσόμεθ’, ἔστι γὰρ ἔνδον· ολλὰ γὰρ ὤπασε παιδὶ γέρων ὀνομάκλυτος Ἄλτης.

And now I am not able to see my two sons, Lykaon and Polydoros in the city of the captured Trojans, whom Laothoê bore to me, powerful among women. But if they live in the army, then I can ransom them with bronze and gold; for it is inside. For famous named aged Altês gave it to his daughter. (Iliad 22.46 51)

More than any other passage in the Homeric poems, this looks like a dowry. Although Morris admits that “[t]his is certainly a case of dowry, or pre mortem inheritance,” he goes on to disqualify the gift under that classification: Altes’ gifts to Laothoe are very different from, for instance, Classical Athenian dowry (προίξ), which came under the husband’s control. This case seems more like the Archaic φερνή, or trousseau, than a προίξ.10

The difficulty, however, is that the passage in question does not show, as Morris would have it, a gift to the daughter that stays entirely in her control. 8 9

10

Morris 1986a, 109. See Westbrook 2005, 19 n. 55, however; he argues that the money referred to here is not Penelope’s dowry but a penalty to be paid for forcing his mother out of her marital home. This argument depends on Westbrook’s assumption that the right to rule over Ithaca is Penelope’s dowry, separate from the household properties (for which there is some support in the poem; see Odyssey 1.400 402 and discussion at Westbrook 2005, 14 15). Morris 1986a, 108.

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Priam specifically says that he can use this money to ransom his sons. He proposes using the property that Laothoê brought to their house in order to ransom the sons he had with her, rather than some other property at his disposal. It is certainly possible to imagine that Laothoê has some say in the way that that property is used, but nothing in the lines suggests that Priam must ask her permission to use the property. It is his to dispose of, so long as he does so appropriately. This describes almost exactly the legal definition of dowry in fifth century Athens. Though the husband had use of his wife’s dowry as the head of the household, he also had to be prepared to return it to her in the case of divorce; the property was, in a sense, jointly owned.11 If this understanding of the Homeric passage is correct, then we should understand something like the practice of proix as operative in the Homeric poems, and perhaps historically contemporaneous with hedna.

11

As rightly recognized by Westbrook 2005, 8. See Wolff 1944, 61 62; Foxhall 1989, 30 38; Leduc 1992, 256 257, 278 282. Finley 1981, 240, sees Laothoê’s property as an instance of dowry, controlled by the husband.

Appendix B The Ruling Concerning the Hedna of Mestra (fr. 43a.41–43)

The ruling in lines 41 43 of the story of Mestra (fr. 43a) has posed a considerable problem for legal historians, and it is far from clear what the judgment says about the value of Mestra as an object of transaction. In this passage, it appears that Sisyphos presses a legal claim against Aithôn, either for the return of hedna paid to Mestra’s father or for the return of Mestra (because the hedna has been paid), or both. A ruling is proclaimed by a female, probably Athena. The text, which is distressingly lacunose, runs as follows: ἣ δ’ ἄρα τοῖ [σιν ἀ]τρεκέως διέθηκ[ε] δίκην δ.[ “ε]ὖτέ τις ἀντ’ ὤνοιο χατίζηι χ [ρῆ]μ’ ἀνελ[έσθαι, ἀ]μφὶ μάλα χρῆν ὦν[ον. . . . . . .]. τῖμον [ οὐ γ]ὰρ δὴ μεταμειπ[τόν, ἐπὴν τὰ] πρῶτ’ [ἀποδώηι.”

And she rendered for them the judgment precisely . . . “When someone wishes to take some goods in exchange for the price Certainly the price must . . . value . . . For it clearly cannot be exchanged, once he has sold it.” (fr. 43a.39 43)

West suggests that the ruling deals with what happens when someone wants to take back goods for the purchase price and that the question in hand is whether they command the same value as they did on initial purchase. This runs counter to the narrative situation, however. The legal case must posit Sisyphos as the petitioner, since Mestra is already back with Aithôn. We can avoid this difficulty by accepting the point made by 242

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Casanova and accepted by Steinrück: anelesthai (41) should mean “take for oneself” and ant’ ônoio (41) “in return for the price.”1 This gives us a translation as I present above, and, if correct, we must reconstruct a plot something like the following: Sisyphos comes and asks only for Mestra, having already paid his hedna. Aithôn refuses, suggesting instead that this is a new day, and a new deal will have to be struck. The judgment is rendered that Sisyphos may indeed have Mestra and that Aithôn may not obtain additional payment for her. This leaves the problem of the mules in the following lines; it is difficult to understand their presence unless a new valuation is made. Perhaps they are compensation to Sisyphos for the dispute. Steinrück, however, suggests a different translation of 40 41 based on the assumption that Sisyphos has promised but not paid the hedna specified in 21 24. Agreeing further with Casanova’s reading of anelesthai (41), he suggests that we should translate the two lines as: “If someone wishes that a thing be worth the price which he pays, it would have been necessary that he . . . the price paid . . . the price estimated.”2 In this reading, the difficulty arises because Sisyphos wishes to change the amount of his hedna after having promised it. Since he has not yet paid it, he has some basis for negotiation. Aided by Athena, he negotiates a new, much lower price than originally promised (mules this time, instead of cows, goats, sheep), and walks away the winner. The central difficulty with the reading proposed by Steinrück is that the judgment of Athena in his translation reads like a judgment against Sisyphos. He, not Aithôn, is the person who has failed to sufficiently estimate what Mestra is worth.3 But Sisyphos, a favorite of Athena, evidently wins this contest; otherwise there is no point to the contrast in lines 51 54 (“He was outstanding among men in thought and in under standing,/ but he did not know the mind of aegis bearing Zeus,/ that the Ouranids would not grant him birth to Glaukos [Sisyphos’ son]/ from Mestra, or to leave his offspring among people”). The narrative structure must present Sisyphos as both petitioner and winner. My reconstruction (above) allows for this.

1 2

3

Casanova 1978, 26 29; Steinrück 1994, 295 297. “Si quelqu’un veut qu’une chose soit équivalente au prix qu’il paie, . . . il aurait bien fallu qu’il . . . le prix payé . . . le prix estimé.” As Steinrück 1994 seems to realize, 296 n. 19.

244

Appendix B

Finally, I would like to hazard a further speculation: perhaps meth’ hemi onous refers to a trick by Sisyphos, in which he manages to smuggle off something more valuable along with the mules. The object thus smuggled might even be Mestra herself.4 This would provide motivation for the line describing Sisyphos as outstanding in cleverness (51). But now I am deep in the territory of conjecture, and no other ancient version of the story suggests any such kidnapping of Mestra; it is perhaps best left as unlikely.

4

Irwin 2005a, 79, ties the mules here to the story of Peisistratos’ acquisition of a bodyguard as told in Herodotus 1.59.4.

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Index Locorum

Archilochos fr.114: 17–18 Apollodorus 1.3.6: 98 1.8.2–3: 124 2.5: 159 3.10.7: 99 3.13.5–6: 101–102, 138 Cypria fr.10: 99–100 Demosthenes 46.14: 112 Diodorus Siculus 4.69.3–4: 68 Herodotus 6.126: 229 6.127: 229 6.128: 230–231 6.130: 231–232 Hesiod Aspis 1–10: 155 4–5: 230 11–13: 157

14–22: 158 26–28: 162 26–36: 164 35–36: 167 36: 168 37–41: 172 38: 168 42–45: 174 46–47: 173 48–56: 179 Catalogue of Women fr. 1.3: 37 fr. 1.1–8: 215 fr. 1.16: 37 fr. 2: 9 fr. 4: 9 fr. 17a.6–12: 75 fr. 22.4–7: 74, 185 fr. 26.22–28: 78–79 fr. 30.3–35: 45 fr. 31.1–4: 45 fr. 33.12–36: 46 fr. 33a: 108 fr. 35.1–5: 46 fr. 43a: 89–93 fr. 43a.19–24: 67–68 fr 43a.21: 65

257

258 Hesiod (cont.) fr. 43a.38–43: 73–74 fr. 43a.39–43: 242 fr. 43a.55–60: 106 fr. 43a.68–71: 116–117 fr. 43b: 88 fr. 43c: 88 frs. 73, 75–76: 128–131 fr. 73.2: 138 fr. 75.5–11: 146 fr. 75.6, 11: 134 fr. 75.9–10: 133 fr. 75.20–23: 134 fr. 75.23: 135 fr. 76.4: 136 fr. 76.4–8: 139 fr. 76.8: 135 fr. 76.10: 135–136 fr. 76.16: 132–133 fr. 76.18–23: 142–143 fr. 141.1–6: 41 fr. 141.2–7: 71–72 fr. 175: 203 fr. 180.6–11: 75–76 fr. 196: 185–186 fr. 197.1–5: 188 fr. 198.2–8: 69 fr. 198.10: 65 fr. 199.0–9: 192 fr. 199.9: 65 fr. 200.1–2: 194 fr. 200.3–9: 77–78, 187 fr. 200.4: 65 fr. 200.7–9: 229–230 fr. 200.7–11: 196 fr. 204.42–43: 194 fr. 204.43–51: 66–67, 190–191 fr. 204.45: 65 fr. 204.54: 65

Index Locorum fr. 204.54–55: 194 fr. 204.77–85: 80,146 fr. 204.78–87: 189 fr. 204.85–93: 149–150, 198–199 fr. 204.102: 208 fr. 204.93–105: 202–203 fr. 204.96–106: 166–167 fr. 204.96–119: 206–207 fr. 204.103: 8 fr. 204.104–105: 213–214 fr. 204.115–120: 170 fr. 204.120–124: 210 fr. 204.124–129: 211 fr. 204. 176–178: 214 fr. 215: 3 Fragmentum incertae sedis fr. 343.4–6: 107 Theogony 522–528: 177 572: 85 587–588: 213 588–90: 221 600–602: 213 Works and Days 38–41: 37 90–92: 214 96–99: 215 158–165: 169, 197, 209 164–168: 7–8 699–705: 39 Homer Iliad 1.3–4: 170 1.352–354: 104 2.58: 156 2.211–219: 16 2.244–250: 17 3.340–343: 147 6.234–236: 21

259

Index Locorum 6.516: 145 9.337–341: 197 16.178: 65 16.190: 65 22.46–51: 240 22.122–128: 144–145 22.157–166: 139–140 22.199–124: 143 22.472: 65 24.480–484: 147 Odyssey 1.274–278: 238 2.116–120: 171 2.130–137: 239 5.394–398: 174 6.152: 156–157 6.225–332: 42–43 8.315–320: 72–73 9.420–424: 165 11.282: 65 15.16–18: 55–56 18. 274–280: 69–70 18. 281–283: 70 19.259: 65 23.233–240: 175 24.374: 156 Homeric Hymn to Demeter 371–374: 136 IG i3 1469: 224 Isaeus 3.64: 111–112

Lucian Dialogue on Hesiod 1: 44 Menander Rhetor Peri Epideiktikôn 628: 44 Palatine Anthology 9.64: 44 Pindar Nemean 4.62–68: 102 Pythian 3.92–97: 82 Plutarch Solon 20.6: 114 Semonides 7.67–70: 219 7.86–93: 220 7.87: 49 7.108–113: 218 7.114: 223 7.115–119: 222 Scholia Scholium to Argonautica 1.747: 160 Scholium D to Iliad 6.35: 148–149 Scholium to Odyssey 1.276: 52 Solon fr. 5.1–6, 11: 30–31 Theognis 182–191: 28–29

General Index

Achilles in Iliad, 79, 197 meeting with Priam, 147 parallel to Atalanta, 14, 121, 124, 138–151 potential relationship with Helen, 11, 119, 150–151, 186, 198–199, 200, 202, 215, 233 son of Peleus and Thetis, 104 son of Zeus and Thetis, 103 Agamemnon in Iliad, 16–17, 79, 156, 200 in Odyssey, 168, 173 role in wooing of Helen, 186, 188, 190, 234 Agariste, marriage of, 63, 83, 226–235 age of heroes, end of, 7–9, 14, 48, 80, 138, 146, 151, 153, 163–166, 169–170, 178–180, 184, 196–216, 233 ages of humankind, myth of, 7, 208 Aithôn, 85, 87, 93–95, 110, 113, 115, 117, 242–243 Ajax, suitor of Helen, 66–67, 77, 186, 190, 191 Aktôr, 75 Alkmene, mother of Herakles, 152–180, 230

260

Amphitryon father of Herakles, 152–180 parallel to Odysseus, 171–178 parallel to Zeus, 168 Aphrodite gifts of, 121, 135, 141, 151 in story of Atalanta, 135 Apollo, 210 advocate for Hector, 143, 151 father in Catalogue, 47 wooing on behalf of his son, 53, 78–79 Apollo Ptoion, sanctuary of, 224 Apollodorus, relation to Catalogue, 99, 101 apples, as aphrodisiacs, 135–136, 144 Archaic period, social changes in, 4, 15–41, 47–50, 60–64, 86, 109–114, 217, 225–226 Archilochos, representative of middling ideology, 17–18, 20 aristocratic ideology, 10, 15–41, 49–55, 58–60, 63, 76, 82–83, 110, 114, 179, 184, 200–201, 216, 217–235 Aristotle, on marriage laws, 112 Aspis, relationship to Catalogue, 154 Atalanta, 119–151 huntress, 123, 132 masculine, 122–127

261

General Index parallel to Achilles, 138–151 wrestling with Peleus, 122–123, 134–136 Athena, 55, 108 aid to Odysseus, 173 offspring of Zeus, 98 in story of Mestra, 73, 94–95, 114, 242–243 Athens, aspects of Catalogue relevant to, 4, 60, 74, 96, 109–114 Barringer, Judith, 103, 122, 124, 127 Bergren, Ann, 85 birth, marker of social class, 27–32, 39–40, 49, 63, 179, 220 bride-price. See hedna bridewealth. See hedna Burgess, Jonathan, 10, 13 Cadmus, 82 Calydonian boar, hunt for, 121–123 Catalogue of Women as aristocratic text, 38–40 audience of, 11–13, 44, 200 authorship of, 5–9 date of, 3–5 performance context of, 9 women’s speech in, 45 childbirth, and stability of female identity, 104–109, 116, 118 Cingano, Ettore, 188, 191, 202 citizenship, development of, 32–35, 60–62, 72, 110, 118 Clader, Linda, 195 class, social, 15–41, 49, 55, 62, 81, 114, 201, 216, 219 Clay, Jenny Strauss, 6, 9, 38, 183, 204, 208, 211 Cohen, I. M., 43, 46, 64

coinage, 20, 22 Cyclic epics, 8, 13, 14, 99, 119 Cypria, 12–13, 99–100, 201, 205, 213 date of, 100 Davidson, John, 155–156, 161, 180 Dêmodikê, parallel to Helen, 185 Demophoon, 205 Demosthenes, source of marriage laws, 112 Dios boulê. See Zeus, plan of Doherty, Lillian, 11, 44, 46 dôra (gifts), in context of wedding, 52–57, 64, 69–74, 190, 239 dowry. See proix Duplouy, Alain, 26–29, 32 êhoiai, alternate title for work, 42 êhoiê formula, 43, 154 êhoiê-poetry, as archaic genre, 43 êhoios formula, lack of, 49 epikleroi, 61–62, 110–114, 116–117 Erysichthôn, 67, 85, 87, 93 Eustathius, 201 female infidelity, fear of, 48, 85, 104, 180, 218 Finkelberg, Margalit, 77 Finley, Moses, 56, 59, 94 formulae metrical anomalies in, 65 use of in Catalogue, 65, 113, 147, 186, 193–196 Fowler, R. L., 4, 49 genealogical literature, as genre, 42–43, 47–48, 216 genealogy, as structuring principle, 4, 7, 43, 46–47, 182, 204

262 Gernet, Louis, 33 gift-exchange, 21–22, 33, 37, 59, 63, 77, 237 marriage as, 55, 59–60, 84 Golden Age, end of, 205, 210, 212 González, Jose, 203, 207, 210 Goody, Jack, 57–58, 62, 237 Graziosi, Barbara, 2, 5, 13 Hammer, Dean, 24–25, 36, 38 Haubold, Johannes, 2, 5, 152 Hector, pursued by Achilles, 139–148 hedna, 52–60, 64–80 absent in marriage of Agariste, 232 competition surrounding, 74–80, 83, 157, 187, 191, 199, 201 dispute over, 158, 244 frequency in Catalogue, 53 in Homeric poems, 237–241 not present in Atalanta narrative, 134 in Odyssey, 68 in poetry of Pindar, 63 service in place of, 64, 79, 134, 159 in story of Mestra, 67, 73, 93, 95, 244 Heilinger, Kurt, 182–183 Helen alternative genealogy for, 213 birth of, 99–100 cause of Trojan war, 7, 148–150, 167, 170, 198, 201, 214 compared with Agariste, 226–228, 233–234 in Euripides’ Helen, 199 in Iliad, 194 marriage of, 235 mother of Hermione, 215 parallel to Atalanta, 133, 137, 138, 146 potential relationship with Achilles, 11, 150, 151

General Index in Semonides, 7, 217, 222 suitors of, 1, 8–9, 42, 48, 53, 64–68, 76–77, 80, 146, 149, 163, 166, 170, 181–216, 230 hemitheoi, heroes as, 7–8, 14, 47, 169, 207–209, 214 Herakles birth of, 152–180 compared with Iphikles, 179 destroyer of cities, 152, 163, 168–169 divinity of, 4 rescuer of Prometheus, 177 son of Zeus, 116–117, 211 in story of Periklymenos, 46, 108 in Theogony, 163 unique in Catalogue, 152 Hermione, daughter of Helen, 198, 202, 204, 215 heroic burials, 20 Hippodameia, daughter of Pelops, 127 Hippomenes parallel to Hector, 139–148 suitor for Atalanta, 126–127, 132–138 Hirschberger, Martina, 42, 133, 161, 205 Homeric epics, 11, 18, 23, 40, 54–60, 119, 147, 167 in intertext with Catalogue, 138–151, 171–178, 197 relation to Catalogue, 156, 181, 191, 195, 199, 204 society of, 56–60, 70, 225 Homeric similes, rare in Catalogue, 173 hoplite fighting, as cultural development, 225 horses, as aristocratic, 220 Iasos, father of Atalanta, 121 Idomeneus, suitor of Helen, 193

General Index inheritance and family membership, 112 relation to citizenship, 31–32, 49–50, 60–61, 72, 110, 112, 114 intertextuality, applied to oral composition, 11–15, 153, 176 Iphikles, 179 Irwin, Elizabeth, 9, 25, 110, 227–228, 233 Isaeus, source of marriage laws, 111 Isles of the Blessed, 207; see also age of heroes, end of Ixiôn, 68 Janko, Richard, 3 Kakridis, J. T., 204 karyatids, on Siphnian treasury, 225 Kastor and Polydeukes, controlling wooing of Helen, 188 keimêlia, as wedding gifts, 23, 52, 135 Kistler, Erich, 20 Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, 226–235 kleos, obtained by Helen, 191–193 Koenen, Ludwig, 8 Kurke, Leslie, 19–27, 38 Lacey, W. K., 70 long-term transactional order, 20, 22, 29, 59, 79, 115, 232 Loraux, Nicole, 220 Lucian, 44, 46 Manville, P. Brook, 60 marriage absent in Theogony, 53 in African societies, as comparanda, 57–59, 62, 68, 237 in archaic Athens, 109–114

263 aristocratic, 41, 54, 58–60, 63, 74, 83–84, 114, 137, 151–152, 156, 184, 216, 226–235 change of social status for women, 97–109, 151 depicted in Catalogue, 50, 54, 64–80, 134, 244 economic transaction, 115 and female identity, 85–118 in Homeric poems, 54–60, 237–241 marker of social class, 32–34, 37–40, 55, 109 relation to citizenship, 33 relation to shape-shifting, 86 as social exchange, 23, 49 transition to new household for women, 109–118 Mekone, separation of mortals from immortals, 177, 208, 210 Meleager, relationship with Atalanta, 123–124 Menander Rhetor, 44 Menelaos husband of Helen, 150–151, 202, 216 in Iliad, 17, 147, 194 in Odyssey, 108 suitor of Helen, 66, 167, 186, 188, 190, 198–202, 213, 234 Menestheus, suitor of Helen, 77, 187, 196 Merkelbach, Reinhold, 2, 3, 182 Mestra, story of, 85–118 Metaneira, 205 Mêtis marriage to Zeus, 107 parallel to Mestra, 96–99, 105, 117 middling ideology, 15–41, 48, 50, 63, 84, 217–235 mimesis, associated with women, 85, 96–109

264 Molionê, 74 Morris, Ian, 19–27, 57–60, 237, 240 Most, Glenn, 3, 89, 94 motif transference, 174; see also oral composition Nagy, Gregory, 6, 12, 192–193 Neer, Richard, 35, 37, 223–225 Nemesis, parallel to Mestra, 96–101, 105, 117 Odysseus in Iliad, 17 in Odyssey, 11, 42, 44, 70, 156, 165 parallel to Amphitryon, 153, 171–178 suitor of Helen, 66–71, 78, 186–190, 192 Oenomaus, race with Pelops, 127 oral composition, 5, 12–13, 56, 58, 65, 120, 185 Osborne, Robin, 29, 77, 222 Panathenaic festival, 10 Pandora, 9, 72, 85, 211, 214–215, 220–221 parallel to Helen, 205, 212–214 Paris, 147 husband of Helen, 188, 195, 197 in Iliad, 194 Patterson, Cynthia, 63 Peleus, 82 marriage to Thetis, 101–104, 108 wrestling with Atalanta, 122–126, 138, 148 Pelops, race with Oenomaus, 127 Penelope, 53, 55–56, 69–70 in Odyssey, 175, 238–239 parallel to Agariste, 232 parallel to Alkmene, 153, 171–173, 176 Periklymenos, 46, 108

General Index Persephone, 109, 136–137 Perysinakis, I. N., 238 Philodemus, 134 Pindar, 101–103 relation to middling ideology, 34 use of hedna in, 82, 84 Plutarch, 30, 33, 46, 112, 114 polis, development of, 18–21, 33, 38, 49–50, 60–64, 74, 82–83, 86, 110, 223–226 Poseidon, 95, 194 competing for Thetis, 103 father in Catalogue, 45, 47 marriage to Mestra, 107, 110, 115, 117 Priam, meeting with Achilles, 147 proix, 33, 54–64, 134, 237–241 Prometheus, 211 Proteus, 108–109 Purves, Alex, 142 Raaflaub, Kurt, 18 rape, in contrast to marriage, 40–41, 97 Rose, Peter, 27 Rutherford, Ian, 10, 42, 43 Salmoneus, 45 Schmidt, E. G., 199–200 Schoeneos, father of Atalanta, 121–122, 134, 141, 146, 189, 198 Schwartz, Jacques, 172, 182, 227 Seaford, Richard, 22, 115 Semonides of Amorgos, Poem 7 of, 48, 217–223 separation of humans from gods. See age of heroes, end of; Mekone shape-shifting female, 86, 96–109 male, 108–109

265

General Index short-term transactional order, 20, 22, 29, 115 Siphnian treasury, 223–226 Sisyphos, 93–95, 113–114, 242–244 Slatkin, Laura, 104 Snodgrass, Anthony M., 56 Solon laws of, 30–32, 60, 62, 72, 110–111, 114, 232 representative of middling ideology, 18, 20, 30–31 Steinrück, Martin, 93, 243 Stratonikê, 78–9 symposia, relation to Catalogue, 9, 81 Telemachos, 55, 108, 168, 239 Theognis, 26, 28, 29, 36, 39, 200, 216 Theogony, 1, 36, 37–38, 53, 85, 98, 119 creation of women in, 218 date of, 3 Herakles in, 153, 163, 165, 168, 177 relation to Catalogue, 5, 7, 8, 10, 38, 47, 163, 170, 208–213 story of Pandora in, 214, 221 Thersites, 15–18 Thetis, 12, 82, 96, 98, 109 marriage to Peleus, 106, 109, 201 parallel to Mestra, 101–105, 117 wrestling with Peleus, 126, 138, 148 tragedy, 34 depiction of marriage in, 110 relation to middling ideology, 35 Tsagalis, Christos, 11, 43, 199 Tyndareos father of Helen, 42, 182, 188 oath of, 189, 195, 198

Tyro, 11, 45 Tyrtaeus, 18 van Wees, Hans, 22 Virtutes Mulierum, of Plutarch, 46 West, Martin L., 2, 3, 43, 87, 92, 99, 182, 211 Works and Days, 1, 37, 45, 53, 72, 81, 85, 119, 205, 209 date of, 3 marriage in, 219 as middling text, 36, 38 relation to Catalogue, 5–8, 38, 169, 196, 205, 208–209, 212, 214–215 story of Pandora in, 214–215 Zeus conflict with Prometheus, 177 defender of oaths, 161 dispenser of justice, 45 father of Athena, 98 father in Catalogue, 47 father of Herakles, 116–117, 153, 164, 168 father of kings, 37 husband of Hera, 195 intercourse with Nemesis, 100–101 marriage to Mêtis, 98–99 plan of, 162–168, 170, 182–183, 196–216 refused by Thetis, 103–104 seducer of Alkmene, 162–167, 170, 176, 180 suitor in Catalogue, 41, 71, 72 in Theogony, 7, 36, 176 Ziogas, Ioannis, 135, 140, 143, 163