Pigs and Ships in the Odyssey (Updated)

(I use Lattimore's translation in what follows.)

As Odysseus approaches the home of the swineherd Eumaios in Book 14 of the Odyssey, we get a description of the property. One of the things we learn is the following:

Inside the enclosure he made twelve pig pens
next to each other, for his sows to sleep in, and in each of them
fifty pigs who sleep on the ground were confined. (14.13-15)

Interestingly, the number of pig pens kept by Eumaios, who functions as a loyal representative and relic of the old Odyssean order (cf. 14.3-4: '...who beyond others/cared for the house properties acquired by noble Odysseus'), is the same as the number of Odysseus' ships (9.159: 'Now there were twelve ships that went with me...'). The number of pigs in each of Eumaios' pens even seems to be close to the Odyssean norm for the number of men per ship if the ship of the Phaiakians is any indication, for Alkinoos, when promising that he will give Odysseus conveyance to Ithaka, says:

Come then, let us drag a black ship down to the bright sea,
one sailing now for the first time, and have for it a selection
from the district, fifty-two young men, who have been the finest
before. (8.34-7)

The Phaiakians, however, perhaps do not provide an ideal indication, since Odysseus' own ships seem to have had slightly more men. When Odysseus and his companions come to Aiaia, they split up into two groups led by Odysseus and Eurylochos, each with 22 men under their command (10.203-8), making for a total of 46 (at this point, only Odysseus' ship is left after the Laistrygonian debacle earlier in Book 10). His ship, along with every other ship, had lost 6 men to the Kikonians in Book 9, along with 6 men to Polyphemus, bringing the total to 58. In addition, one of Odysseus' men from his own ship (cf. 10.95-102 and 116-17) was killed by the Laistrygonian Antiphates, giving us a total of 59.

Update: P.V. Jones, in his companion to Lattimore's translation ad 9.60, makes it clear that a ship in the Odyssey could get by with a much smaller crew, noting that Homer states in 2.212 that Telemachos needed only 20 companions for his journey.

Logic(s)

'It was the myths, above all, that seemed to defy rational analysis and to give rise to the idea that their makers were rambling around in a kind of mystical fog. Yet closer observation, and the whole tendency of anthropologists to treat tribal peoples with increasing respect, have shown that most of the apparently illogical connections in 'primitive' myths are not really so. Rather, the logical systems involved are different from those standardized in western cultures. Levi-Strauss showed in La Pensee sauvage that many simple societies, far from having no category structure at all, have systems of immense range and complexity. That is fact; yet one has to guard against sentimentality at this point, for it is all too easy to add (as many now do) that these alternative logical structures are 'just as good' as the ones we happen to use. After all, they say, even Aristotelian logic has had to be replaced by different kinds in certain conditions, much as the Euclidean system, which once seemed the essence of logical geometry, is now recognized as too restricted for study of the world at large. But the truth is that for many purposes Aristotelian logic, which has established simple and consistent rules of cause and effect, is greatly superior to alternative systems depending on loose grades of symbolic association. Some aspects of myths can be appreciated more fully by these alternative systems, but there are also elements and qualities to which discursive analysis can properly be applied, at least as a preliminary stage.'

--G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, pp. 42-3

Artemis Comparisons in the Odyssey

A female figure is compared to Artemis in both books 4 and 6 of the Odyssey. The first one makes me chuckle. Here it is (Lattimore's translation):

While he was pondering these things in his heart and his spirit,
Helen came out of her fragrant high-roofed bedchamber,
looking like Artemis of the golden distaff. (4.120-2)

Helen, of all people, is liked to the chaste, virgin Artemis. I can't help but picture Homer snickering as he wrote (or recited?) that.

The second is more appropriate. In 6.99-109, we read:

But when she and her maids had taken their pleasure in eating,
they all threw off their veils for a game of ball, and among them
it was Nausikaa of the white arms who led in the dancing;
and as Artemis, who showers arrows, moves on the mountains
either along Taygetos or on high-towering
Erymanthos, delighting in boars and deer in their running,
and along with her the nymphs, daughters of Zeus of the aegis,
range in the wilds and play, and the heart of Leto is gladdened,
for the head and brows of Artemis are above all the others,
and she is easily marked among them, though all are lovely,
so this one shone among her handmaidens, a virgin unwedded.

No Monolithic Theories

'My own conviction, nevertheless, is that there can be no single and comprehensive theory of myths--except, perhaps, the theory that all such theories are necessarily wrong.'

--G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, p. 38

Pre-Zeus Altar in Arcadia

Read the interesting story here.

The lead:

PHILADELPHIA — Before Zeus hurled his first thunderbolt from Olympus, the pre-Greek people occupying the land presumably paid homage and offered sacrifices to their own gods and goddesses, whose nature and identities are unknown to scholars today.

But archaeologists say they have now found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to some pre-Zeus deity on the summit of Mount Lykaion, in the region of Greece known as Arcadia. The remains were uncovered last summer at an altar later devoted to Zeus.

Fragments of a coarse, undecorated pottery in the debris indicated that the sacrifices might have been made as early as 3000 B.C., the archaeologists concluded. That was about 900 years before Greek-speaking people arrived, probably from the north in the Balkans, and brought their religion with them.

West on Passages of Disputed Authenticity

In M.L. West's commentary on the Theogony, he remarks in his introduction to the Typhoeus passage (820-80) that it is 'one of the sections of the Theogony whose authenticity has most often been disputed', and then briefly summarizes and responds to six arguments that it is not by Hesiod. Here is the third, followed by an important critical principle:

Gaia's part in producing an enemy to Zeus' regime is at variance with her benevolence toward Zeus in the rest of the Theogony. Again, comparison of an Oriental parallel (Enuma Elis) helps to explain the anomaly: see p. 24. The assumption of multiple authorship is the most naive of all ways of accounting for contradictions in mythology.

More on Gladstone

A couple of days ago I mentioned Burkert's reference to William Ewart Gladstone's noticing of the connection between the Enuma Elish and Homer in Burkert's article 'The Logic of Cosmogony'. His footnote to that passage directs the reader's attention to a place in his 1992 book The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, an English translation and revision of a work first published in German in 1984. In that book (pp. 92-3), he writes:

Ti-amat is the form normally written in the text of Enuma Elish for the mother "who bore them all." The Akkadian word which lies behind this, however, is just tiamtu or tamtu, the normal word for the sea. The name can also be written in this more phonetic orthography; but in the Enuma Elish we also find the form taw(a)tu. If one proceeds from Tawtu, then Tethys is an exact transcription. The different reproductions of the dentals, t and th, might disturb the purist; but Sophilos wrote Thethys, which, in normal Greek orthography, would automatically yield Tethys. In fact the Enuma Elish became known to Eudemos, the pupil of Aristotle, in translation; here we find Tiamat transcribed as Tauthe, which is still closer to the reconstructed form Tawtu. That the long vowel a is changed to e in the Ionian dialect even in borrowed words has parallels in Kubaba becoming Kybebe, Baal becoming Belos, and Mada known as Medes. Thus the proof seems complete that here, right in the middle of the Iliad, the influence of two Akkadian classics can be detected down to a mythical name.

In one of the footnotes in this passage [14], we find a reference to Gladstone:

The first to see the connection between Enuma Elish and Homer, Tiamat and Tethys was W.E. Gladstone, Landmarks of Homeric study (1890), appendix... .

When Politicians Knew Homer

In his article called 'The Logic of Cosmogony', Walter Burkert writes, in a passage regarding how ancients attempted to tell the tale about 'the beginning' of 'everything' (pp. 92-3):

The most common response...is: in the beginning there was Water. This is not limited to the ancient world: it is also reported from America, e.g. the Popol Vuh of the Quiche/ Maya. The Egyptians developed water-cosmogonies in diverse variants, having the yearly flood of the Nile before their eyes; but Enuma elish too has ground water and salt water, Apsu the begetter and Tiamat who bore them all, as the first parents of everything. Surprisingly enough, this recurs in the midst of Homer's Iliad with Oceanus and Tethys, 'begetting of everything'; this may be direct influence. (It was William Ewart Gladstone, better known as British Prime Minister, who first saw this connection.)

On Mythological Terminology

'Scholars have often found it difficult to distinguish between myth and other kinds of traditional tale: saga, legend, folktale, and fable. It is not always necessary or even possible to draw such distinctions. For speakers of German the term saga (Sage) is more or less synonymous with myth (Mythos): the best known collection of Greek myths is Gustav Schwab's Die schoensten Sagen des klassischen Altertums, and the most influential treatment of Germanic sagas is Jacob Grimm's Germanische Mythologie. In Grimm's usage the two terms are sometimes synonymous, though occasionally he seems to want to restrict myth (Mythus, as he writes it) to antiquity. If distinctions are drawn, they usually have to do with the cultural context in which the tale was generated.'

--Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology (p. 6)

The centaur at the forest's edge

As I work on making my first pot roast and in the lull before my daily workout (summers off are a nice perk for the teacher) I'm reading a bit of Jacob Burckhardt's Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (translated inexplicably as 'Force and Freedom' and later republished by the Liberty Fund as 'Reflections on History'). Burckhardt is perhaps most famous today for the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. He was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and an accomplished art historian who was lampooned by the likes of Wilamowitz for his views on the Greeks, but whom modern historians have followed and vindicated (cf. Oswyn Murray's edition of Burckhardt's The Greeks and Greek Civilization published by St. Martin's).

Early in the introduction to WB he uses the following image in rejecting Hegel's philosophy of history:

Diese ist ein Kentaur, eine contradictio in adjecto; denn Geschichte, d.h. das Koordinieren, ist nicht Philosophie und Philosophie, d.h. Subordinieren, ist Nichtgeschichte.

For the Deutchless (and perhaps the unLatined) among us:

This ('philosophy of history') is a centaur, a contradiction in terms; for history, i.e., that which coordinates, is not philosophy, and philosophy, i.e., that which subordinates, is unhistorical.

Burckhardt objects to the attempt of imposing a system onto something non-linear and unsystematic, and considers the first principals of the philosophy of history to lead necessarily to contradictions, and sees the obsession with origins as futile and necessitating predictions of the so-called progress of history.

The centaur soon reemerges, though, and we find that he isn't all bad:

Immerhin ist man dem Kentauren den höchsten Dank schuldig und begrüßt ihn gerne hie und da an einem Waldesrand der geschichtlichen Studien. Welches auch sein Prinzip gewesen, er hat einzelne mächtige Ausblicke durch den Wald gehauen und Salz in die Geschichte gebracht. Denken wir dabei nur an Herder.

And again a translation:

Still, we are very grateful to the centaur and gladly welcome him now and again at the edge of forest of historical studies. Whatever his principles have been, he has hewn several powerful vistas through the forest and added salt to history. We need only think of Herder.

Herder is best remembered today for his devotion to the notion of die Völker, or peoples, which may have helped pave the way to German nationalism. It's interesting though that Herder was reacting against the nationalism of his own day and was interested in elevating all 'peoples' of the world equally. He did shake things up to say the least.

Bruce Lincoln's Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, which is concerned with what scholars have done with myth throughout history, contains a lot of useful and insightful information on Herder. Not that I endorse Lincoln's conclusions, his own theoretical framework, or especially his shoddy treatment of historical linguistics in the epilogue, but it is definitely worth reading and generally fair (if sometimes bordering on sensational).