Why Homer Matters (45 page)

“his whole body”: Aeneid
VI.497–99.

“As a woman weeps”: Odyssey
VIII.523–32 (Lattimore, fundamentally).

“Those who had dreamed”:
Simone Weil,
L'
Iliade
ou le poème de la force
. See Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff,
War and the
Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 3.

the word Homer uses: Iliad
XIII.393.

“We did not dare”:
Edwin Muir, “The Horses,” from
One Foot in Eden
(London: Faber, 1956).

Sleep sits: Iliad
XIV.290.

beautiful as a star:
Ibid., VI.399–403.

like cattle stepping:
Ibid., XX.495.

“a snowy mountain”:
Ibid., XIII.754.

Usatovo, near Odessa:
D. Ya. Telegin and David W. Anthony, “On the Yamna Culture,”
Current Anthropology
28, no. 3 (June 1987), 357–58.

a world not of palaces:
Katarzyna Ślusarska, “Funeral Rites of the Catacomb Community: 2800–1900
BC
: Ritual, Thanatology and Geographical Origins,”
Baltic-Pontic Studies
(Pozna
ń
) 13 (2006).

Scholars have pursued:
For many of these references, see M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
108 (1988), 151–72.

as Nestor tells: Iliad
II.362.

phrase that recurs repeatedly: Iliad
II. 159,
Odyssey
III.142.

ep' eurea nota thalasses
:
Ibid., XX.228, et cetera.

“He harnessed to the chariot”:
Ibid., XIII.23ff.

When Aeneas is remembering:
Ibid., XX.217.

“They would play”:
Ibid., XX.225.

“It is by cunning”:
Ibid., XXIII.316–18, 325.

fast-running ships: Odyssey
IV.707–8.

“Just as in a field”:
Ibid., XIII.81ff.

beautiful metal dogs:
Ibid., VII.91–94.

robotic golden girls: Iliad
XVIII.372ff.

“and the spearhead”:
Ibid., V.65ff (Lattimore and Fagles combined/altered).

“Who understands how”: Iliad
V.60ff (Lattimore and Fagles combined/altered).

At this most fundamental level:
For these transitions, see Mallory and Adams,
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
; and Anthony,
The Horse, the Wheel and Language
, 371–411, 452–57.

They can only have arrived:
Thomas F. Strasser et al., “Stone Age Seafaring in the Mediterranean, Plakias Region for Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Habitation of Crete,”
Hesperia
79 (2010), 145–90.

“the colossal vortex”:
For the transforming arrival of the sailing ship, see the concluding chapter of Cyprian Broodbank,
An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

And above all:
Ibid., 345.

Topsail, Riptide:
Fagles,
Odyssey
VIII.130–39.

“Our ships can sail”: Odyssey
VIII.556–63.

“drastically shrunk”:
Broodbank,
An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades,
345.

Menelaus remembers: Odyssey
III.158.

It was fast ships: Iliad
VII.467–75.

It is the ships:
Ibid., XV.502ff.

10: THE GANG AND THE CITY

“the abandoned weapons”: Iliad
X.469.

dog-eyed:
Ibid., I.159.

“the most savage man alive”:
Ibid., I.146.

“shaggy breasts”:
Ibid., I.189.

“black blood”:
Ibid., I.303.

“the wives and daughters”:
Ibid., VI.237–38 (adapted from Murray/Dimock, Loeb).

“that most beautiful house”:
Ibid., VI.242–49 (adapted from Fagles).

“Let no man”:
Ibid., II.354–55 (adapted from Fagles).

formulaic adjectives:
Ibid., II.540; rocky Aulis is at II.496, Eteonus has many ridges at II.479 and Orchomenos is very sheepy at II.605.

They love their land:
Ibid., XIV.120.

phrase that is repeated:
See, for example,
Iliad
XII.243, XXIV.500.

“And now sweeter”:
Ibid., II.450–54.

“Beware the toils”:
Ibid., V.487–88, Fagles V.559–60.

264 people:
C. B. Armstrong, “The Casualty Lists in the Trojan War,”
Greece and Rome
16 (1969), 30–31, gives 238 named casualties and twenty-six unnamed, sixty-one of whom are Greek and 208 Trojan.

“they limp and halt”:
Fagles,
Iliad
IX.502–6.

“Of all that breathe”: Iliad
XVII.441–47, Fagles, XVII.509–15.

“Patroclus keeps on sweeping”: Iliad
XVI.397–98.

“Hah! look at you!”:
Ibid., XVI.745–50.

“Erymas and Amphoterus”:
Ibid., XVI.414–18.

“Next he goes”: Iliad
XVI.401ff, Fagles, XVI.472ff; see Fagles,
Odyssey
XII.271–75.

“Ahead, Patroclus”:
Christopher Logue, “The
Iliad
: Book XVI. An English Version,”
Arion
1, no. 2 (Summer 1962), 3–26.

The first fighting:
Iliad
IV.446.

a cause for rejoicing:
Ibid., VII.189.

“Now the sun”:
Ibid., VII.421–29.

Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright:
Bruce A. Jacobs and Richard Wright,
Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld
, Cambridge Studies in Criminology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

“This desire for payback”:
Ibid., 25.

“urban nomads”:
Ibid., 12.

“maintaining a reputation”:
Ibid., 32.

“Everyone was watching”:
Ibid., 76.

“two lions”: Iliad
X.279.

“like two rip-fanged hounds”:
Ibid., X.360.

The two Greeks:
Ibid., X.400.

“strikes the middle”:
Ibid., X.454.

Odysseus laughs aloud:
Ibid., X.565.

calling them fools:
Ibid., II.870, XI.450–55, XVI.833.

“I got your punk ass”:
Jacobs and Wright,
Street Justice
, 35.

“I felt like I was”:
Ibid., 36.

“When he smiles”:
Colton Simpson with Ann Pearlman,
Inside the Crips
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), 14.

“No one forgets”:
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski,
Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 140–41.

Neither rape nor fighting:
Ibid., 79.

“Troy must have been”:
D. F. Easton, J. D. Hawkins, A. G. Sherratt and E. S. Sherratt, “Troy in Recent Perspective,”
Anatolian Studies
52 (2002), 75–109.

It sat at one:
A city at Troy, at the southern end of the narrows between the Aegean and the Black Sea, might be seen as a strategic alternative to a city on the site of Istanbul, at the other end. Byzantium was founded as a colony by the Greek city of Megara only in 667
BC
, by which time the ruined site of Troy was also occupied by a small number of Greek colonists, probably from Lesbos.

The great Trojan treasures:
D. F. Easton, “Priam's Gold: The Full Story,”
Anatolian Studies
44 (1994), 221–43.

The silver and gold vessels:
Christoph Bachhuber, “The Treasure Deposits of Troy: Rethinking Crisis and Agency on the Early Bronze Age Citadel,”
Anatolian Studies
59 (2009), 1–18; Mikhail Treister, “The Trojan Treasures: Description, Chronology, Historical Context,” in
The Gold of Troy
, ed. Vladimir Tolstikov and Mikhail Treister (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 225–29.

from the very beginning:
Susan Heuck Allen, “A Personal Sacrifice in the Interest of Science: Calvert, Schliemann, and the Troy Treasures,”
Classical World
91, no. 5,
The World of Troy
(May–June 1998), 345–54.

“the ruins and red ashes”:
E. Meyer, “Schliemann's Letters to Max Müller in Oxford,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
82 (1962), 75–105.

“three different sets”:
D. F. Easton, “Heinrich Schliemann: Hero or Fraud?,”
Classical World
91, no. 5,
The World of Troy
(May–June 1998), 335–43.

Schliemann's suggestion:
J. B. Carter and S. P Morris, eds.,
The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to E. Townsend Vermeule
(1995; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 5. Burkert: “The Greeks knew no date for the Trojan war. This makes modern attempts to match ancient Greek dates with archaeological remains an exercise in illusion.”

The Boston treasure:
MFA Boston, Inv 68116–68139, Centennial Gift of Landon T. Clay. The museum bought it in 1968 from George Zacos, a Greek dealer in antiquities, based in Basel, who could not say where he had gotten it from. It may have been looted from an otherwise unknown tomb in Turkey.

four Trojan hammer-axes:
James C. Wright, “The Place of Troy Among the Civilizations of the Bronze Age,”
Classical World
91, no. 5,
The World of Troy
(May–June 1998), 356–68.

stolen by Schliemann:
Susan Heuck Allen, “A Personal Sacrifice in the Interest of Science: Calvert, Schliemann, and the Troy Treasures,”
Classical World
91, no. 5,
The World of Troy
(May–June, 1998), 345–54.

his son Agamemnon:
He became a member of the Greek Chamber of Deputies and briefly the Greek minister in Washington, D.C.

a linen fabric:
Elizabeth Wayland Butler,
Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times
(New York: Norton, 1994), 212.

tiny gold beads:
Ibid., 213.

“a great cloth”: Iliad
III.125ff. The word for cloth can mean “web,” “loom-beam” or even “mast.”

shimmering linen:
Ibid., III.140.

“how terribly like”:
Ibid., III.158.

“Come over here”:
Ibid., III.160.

“The queen herself”:
Ibid., VI.287ff.

women and womanliness:
See ibid., XVI.100, where the Greek warriors refer to the battlements of Troy as its “veil.”

A woman and a tripod:
Ibid., XXII.262–64.

twelve oxen:
Ibid., XXIII.702–5.

Hera … prepares herself for love:
Ibid., XIV.165ff.

“the whispered words”:
Ibid., XIV.217.

“He goes down”:
Ibid., II.870.

kill Trojan babies:
Ibid., VI.57–60.

Zeus accused Hera:
Ibid., IV.35.

“Idomeneus stabs”:
Ibid., XVI.345–50.

“like wolves”:
Ibid., XVI.156–62.

“Patroclus, you have thought”:
Ibid., XVI.825ff.

soaked and clotted:
Ibid., XVII.51.

“mauling the kill”:
Ibid., XVII.64.

“and give the rest”:
Ibid., XVII.125–27, 241.

He promises:
Ibid., XVII.241.

the straps of his shield:
Ibid., XVII.290.

“oozes out from the wound”:
Ibid., XVII.297–98.

under the collarbone:
Ibid., XVII.309.

“so that he claws”:
Ibid., XVII.315.

a spear in the liver:
Ibid., XVII.349.

“with so many pulling”:
Ibid., XVII.389–97.

“as on some lion”:
Ibid., XVII.540–42.

“who though it is”:
Ibid., XVII.570.

“a tawny lion”:
Ibid., XVIII.162.

“cut the head”:
Ibid., XVIII.175.

wants more than anything:
Ibid., V.863. See Tamara Neal, “Blood and Hunger in the
Iliad
,”
Classical Philology
101, no. 1 (Jan. 2006), 15–33.

wants to feast on the body: Iliad
XIX.305.

he pops out death:
Ibid., XX.386ff.

“These bewildered boys”:
Ibid., XXI.29–32 (Lattimore cum Fagles).

“an unlooked for evil”: Iliad
XXI.39.

“Now there is not one”:
Ibid., XXI.125.

“Die on”:
Ibid., XXI.128–29.

“I will not leave off”:
Ibid., XXI.225.

“The aged Priam”:
Ibid., XXI.525.

“fierce with the spear”:
Ibid., XXI.540.

“For they dare”:
Ibid., XXI.608.

“shackled by destiny”:
Ibid., XXII.5.

“Come into the walls”:
Ibid., XXII.57.

“I have looked upon evils”:
Lattimore,
Iliad
XXII.61–76.