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Hellenic Studies 84

HOMER’S THEBES

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HOMER’S THEBES EPIC RIVALRIES AND THE APPROPRIATION OF MYTHICAL PASTS

by

Elton T. E. Barker Joel P. Christensen

Center for Hellenic Studies Trustees for Harvard University Washington, DC Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2020

Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts By Elton T. E. Barker and Joel P. Christensen Copyright © 2020 Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University All Rights Reserved. Published by Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C. Distributed by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England Printed by Total Printing Services, Newton, IL Cover Design: Joni Godlove Cover Artwork: Nikos Engonopoulou, The Poet and the Muse, 1939. Oil on canvas, 120x100cm. Catalogue raisonné no. 247. © Errietti Engonopoulou. Editorial Team Senior Advisers: W. Robert Connor, Gloria Ferrari Pinney, Albert Henrichs†, James O’Donnell, Bernd Seidensticker Editorial Board: Gregory Nagy (Editor-in-Chief), Casey Dué (Executive Editor), Mary Ebbott (Executive Editor), Scott Johnson, Olga Levaniouk, Leonard Muellner Production Manager for Publications: Jill Curry Robbins Web Producer: Noel Spencer Multimedia Producer: Mark Tomasko Names: Barker, Elton T. E. (Elton Thomas Edward), 1971- author. | Christensen, Joel (Joel P.), author. Title: Homer’s Thebes : epic rivalries and the appropriation of mythical pasts / Elton Barker, Joel Christensen. Description: Washington : Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019021516 | ISBN 9780674237926 Subjects: LCSH: Homer--Criticism and interpretation. | Thebes (Greece)--In literature. Classification: LCC PA4037 .B375 2019 | DDC 883/.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021516

Contents Acknowledgements ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................vii Note on Text and Translations ................................................................................................................................................................................................ ix

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Troy, The Next Generation: Politics ................................................................................................................................................. 47 2. The Labors of Herakles: Time ..................................................................................................................................................................... 97 3. Homer’s Oedipus Complex: Form................................................................................................................................................. 131 4. Doubling Down on Strife .................................................................................................................................................................................. 173 5. Theban Palimpsests .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 205 6. Beyond Thebes....................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 245 7. Conclusion: Endgame .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 275

Works Cited .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 287 Index Locorum .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 307 Subject Index ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 315

Acknowledgements

T

he ideas in this book were first launched in a waterlogged basement

in Queens, New York City, in the spring of 2007, although our partnership had first emerged in the similarly watery surrounds of the Venice International University Seminar on Literature and Culture in the Ancient Mediterranean (2003– 2004). There we enjoyed the rare resources of both time and money to hear lectures by and receive advice from Alessandro Barchiesi, Walter Burkert, Ettore Cingano, Irad Malkin, Piotr Michalowski, Dirk Obbink, David Sider, and Richard Thomas (among others). Our first publication together on Archilochus (Barker and Christensen 2006), produced as a direct result of that seminar, set out the beginnings of the methodological framework used in this book. Other articles have appeared over the years. The argument and much of the content of Chapter 1 made a first appearance as “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes,” in Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici no. 66 (2011):9–44; Chapter 2 draws on our contribution (“Even Heracles Had to Die: Homeric ‘Heroism’, Mortality and the Epic Tradition,” pp. 249–277) to the special issue edited by Christos Tsagalis, “Theban Resonances in Homeric Epic,” Trends in Classics 6, no. 2 (2014); and an early foray into Thebes took the form of “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in the Homeric Poems,” Leeds International Classical Studies 7, no. 2 (2008):1–30, which provides the basis for Chapter 3. The form and substance here differ substantially from their earlier incarnations, by virtue of engaging with the latest scholarship, being made to serve the argument of this book, and not least of all reflecting a welcome maturity in our thinking. We have learned much taking our ideas on the road. For the insightful and thought-provoking comments that we have received along the way (and helped shaped this book), we thank our audiences at Columbia University, Texas Tech University, the University of Missouri, the Celtic Conference in Classics, the Academy of Athens, and the universities of St. Andrews, Lampeter, Oxford, and Cambridge. Many colleagues have provided advice and support over the course of this book’s long gestation period. In particular we would like to thank: Justin Arft, Ettore (Willy Boy) Cingano, Erwin Cook, Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, Marco Fantuzzi, Tom Hawkins, Malcolm Heath, Adrian Kelly, Kyriaki Konstantinidou,

Acknowledgements Irini Kyriakou, David Larmour, Don Lavigne, Aleydis Van de Moortel, Sheila Murnaghan, Leonard Muellner, Chris Pelling, Benjamin Sammons, Matthew Santirocco, Giampiero Scafoglio, David Sider, Zoe Stamatopoulou, and Christos Tsagalis. We are extremely grateful also to Zachary Elliott and Taylor G. Mckinnon for their assistance with bibliography and editing. Taylor also helped to produce both indices. We have benefitted substantially from the institutional support and research assistance provided by Christ Church (Oxford), The Open University, New York University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, the University of Siena (Italy), the Center for Hellenic Studies, and Brandeis University. Finally, we owe a large debt to the CHS editorial team, especially Jill Curry Robbins and the rest of the production staff. Finally, and most importantly, we are indebted to the patience, kindness, and love of our partners, Kyriaki and Shahnaaz, and to the inspiration and new life that we have gained from our children Maya, Aalia, and Iskander.

viii

Note on Text and Translations

P

assages from the Homeric poems are quoted from T.W. Allen’s editio maior of the Iliad (1931) and P. Von der Mühll’s Teubner Odyssey (1962) respectively. Those from Hesiod are from M. L. West’s Theogony (1966), F. Solmsen’s Works and Days (1970), and R. Merkelbach’s and M. L. West’s Fragmenta Hesiodea (1967). Quotations from the Theban fragments come from the editions of M. Davies (1989) and A. Bernabé (1996). Unless otherwise stated, translations are our own, for which we have generally opted for usefulness over elegance. In transliterating proper names we have used a hybrid system, preferring Latinized forms for names that are widely familiar but a more precise transliteration of the Greek for those less so: thus Achilles and Oedipus (rather than Akhilleus and Oidipous), but Kyknos and The Ehoiai (rather than Cycnus and The Ehoeae). We ask the reader’s forbearance for any irregularities in this system (e.g. Herakles).

Introduction Why Thebes? You tell the events of Thebes, he tells of the Phrygians’ battle-shouts; but I tell of my conquests. No horse has destroyed me, nor foot soldier, nor ships, but another new army strikes me from its eyes. Anacreontea, fr. 261

W

hen we first started working on this book, just over a decade ago,

very little had been written on the topic of Theban epic and even less on Theban myth in Homer. Since then, however, in addition to our articles of 2008, 2011 and 2014, there has been a spate of publications on non-Homeric archaic Greek hexameter epic, encompassing both the other Trojan War poems (the so-called “epic cycle”: West 2013; Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2014; Davies 2016; cf. Burgess 2001) and the poems related to Thebes and Theban myth (Davies 2014; cf. Tsagalis 2008). As part of this burgeoning interest in Homer’s epic rivals, the mythical archaeology of Thebes has come under particular scrutiny (e.g. Berman 2013; 2015), as well as the use of Theban myth in Homer (e.g. Tsagalis

1

Σὺ μὲν λέγεις τὰ Θήβης, ὃ δ’ αὖ Φρυγῶν ἀυτάς, ἐγὼ δ’ ἐμὰς ἁλώσεις. οὐχ ἵππος ὤλεσέν με, οὐ πεζός, οὐχὶ νῆες, στρατὸς δὲ καινὸς ἄλλος ἀπ’ ὀμμάτων με βάλλων. All translations are our own.

Introduction 2014), which is the central concern of this book. Given this proliferating bibliography, it is fair to ask: why Thebes, why now? The city of Thebes has always been of interest to scholars working within mythographical and literary traditions, precisely because its presence looms large in our corpus of extant textual and especially non-textual sources. Looming even larger is the absence of a monumental epic to encapsulate its story in the manner that the Iliad and Odyssey do for the Troy story.2 Myths set in Thebes or involving Theban characters occupy a significant portion of the surviving plays of Athenian tragedy (as well as testimonies of lost plays), and feature prominently in epinician and lyric poetry from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Yet none of the epics that purportedly detailed the strange origins under Cadmus, the labors of the Theban Herakles, and the two wars for the city walls have survived (save for a few unclear fragments). While the loss of Thebes’ rich epic heritage may be put down to historical accident, given the city’s importance in myth and history, the impact that these epics might have had continues to attract scholarly attention. Some of this attention may be due to the absence itself—we love mysteries, and it is tempting to reframe the fragments that we do have in order to tell the stories that we want to hear about Thebes. In itself, however, this is insufficient to account for the refocusing of a critical lens onto the Theban epic over the past decade. In part, the renewed interest in Thebes relates to a trend in recent scholarship to reconsider fragmentary works more generally, especially with a view to paying due attention to their contextualization in, and reframing by, later sources. More importantly, however, the study of epic fragments has been revolutionized by oral theory. All examples of Greek hexameter epic poetry, whether the ”complete” poems of Homer or Hesiod, or fragmentary remains from alternative traditions (such as those related to Thebes), as well as other performance-based poetry, like lyric or elegy, are now subject to analysis in terms of their shared language and motifs. Before setting out this methodological approach in more detail below, we first want to consider Thebes’ epic credentials. The clearest evidence for thinking about Thebes in epic terms comes from a passage of the Works and Days where Hesiod pairs Thebes with Troy (156–165): Αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ καὶ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖα κάλυψεν, αὖτις ἔτ’ ἄλλο τέταρτον ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε, δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον, ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται 2

2

Willcock 1977:xi regrets the loss of Thebais precisely because it “would have provided the best of all possible parallels to the Iliad.” On reconstructions of the Theban poems, see note 9 below.

Introduction 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῾ Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο. But when also this race he had hidden beneath the earth, again still another, the fourth on the fruitful earth Zeus the son of Cronos made, more just and brave, a divine race of hero-men, who are called semi-divine, the race prior to ours, throughout the boundless earth. Evil war and dread battle destroyed them, some at seven-gated Thebes in the land of Cadmus, when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, others when it had led them in their ships over the great deep sea to Troy for lovely-haired Helen. This passage has long been recognized as disrupting Hesiod’s depiction of a cosmic fall from grace, which charts a serial decline from a golden age society of easy living and righteous behavior to the present day world of his audience, an “iron age” characterized by hard graft and corruption. Prior to his description of that world, Hesiod inserts “a divine race of hero-men, who are called semidivine” (ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται / ἡμίθεοι). Here, Thebes and Troy are paired as a way of denoting this heroic age, as the sites where major conflicts took place. These conflicts, while bearing witness to the characteristic feature of this age—men who were “more just and brave”—also have the instrumental effect of wiping out the race of heroes, which leaves the world populated by mere mortal men. This grim existence of having to scrape out a living is the scenario envisaged and explored in the Works and Days. Hesiod’s poem, then, provides a cosmological frame for thinking about the “generation of hero men” and their relation to the world of the present, where there are no more heroes anymore. At the same time this passage suggests a metapoetic reflection on, and rivalry with, heroic epic as a genre. One of the few remaining fragments from the so-called heroic epic poem the Cypria, apparently from its proem, sets out how Zeus planned to rid the world of heroes through conflict at Troy, in order to relieve Earth of her burden of men (fr. 1.4: κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο γαῖαν). While the Iliad’s proem is conspicuously less explicit, there are hints of such a narrative in the reference to Zeus’ plan, the focus on conflict 3

Introduction (between Achilles and Agamemnon), and the description of the myriad souls of heroes being sent to Hades (Iliad 1.1–9)—heroes here being almost a generic marker for this kind of epic (ἡρώων, 4).3 Later on, at more or less the midpoint of the poem, Homer pans back from the fighting to situate his narrative of the fall of Troy in the context of the disappearance of this heroic world, using the striking description of “semi-divine” (ἡμίθεοι). We say “striking” because the only other occurrence of ἡμίθεοι in the whole of the hexameter epic corpus is in our passage from Hesiod, where it serves to delineate further the generation of heroes. This “divine race of hero men” (ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος) turns out to be only semi-divine (ἡμίθεοι); that is to say, crucially, these heroes are mortal.4 This is the point of the passage in Hesiod, which, as we have seen, describes their annihilation at Thebes and Troy; it is also the force of the passage in the Iliad, where Homer describes the action of his epic from the perspective of a much later age when the heroes of Troy are dead and buried. Along with the evidence from the fragment of the Cypria, the impression is that heroic epic, as a genre, not only celebrated the great deeds of men but also dramatized the destruction of the race of heroes, as if part of some broader evolutionary narrative. What that broader evolutionary system might look like has been articulated by Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold who have shown how Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey fit into a putative cosmic history mapped out by four extant hexameter epic poems. This history begins with Hesiod’s Theogony, which describes the origins of the cosmos itself (including the birth of the gods) and explains how Zeus came to rule supreme (and will rule forever); it culminates in the Works and Days, which provides an epic view of ordinary life in its divine framing of the human business of working hard and pursuing justice.5 In b...