Editor's note: translation of the book Ninguno es mi nombre
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My Name is Nobody
A summary of the Homer case
Eduardo Gil Bera
Translated by Peter J Hearn
INDEX
What became of Homer? Who wrote the Odyssey?
Crete and the scribes who memorized
Crete and Miletus
The tyrant and the king
Thales there is only one
The wise statesman
Off we go to Crete
The temple and altar of the goddess
The forbidden name
How could the sculpture have been broken?
The perpetrators
How a taboo is negotiated
The most Cretan poem in the world
The title page of the Odyssey
Old-age contest
The first hexameter
The composition of the Odyssey
The versions of the pamphlet
Who was Kreion?
It happened in Samothrace
Nobody rides
The author of the Odyssey re-reads the Iliad
Something unprecedented
What death did Aegisthus devise for him?
Agamemnon’s face
3
4
5
6
7
7
8
9
10
12
13
14
15
16
18
20
20
22
25
24
27
28
29
30
31
1
The divine aoidos
The fate of Clytomnemon the aoidos
God-like Theoclymenus
To say and not to say
What did Thrasybulus know about all this?
Achilles’ shield
Better peace
A tomb for Elpenor
Thales’ legacy
The name of the father
The two Ambrosian sirens
The judge who knows all
Divine director of human heroes
Enlargement of the Iliad and the Odyssey
How to flatter with little effort
The hymn to Apollo
The statue of Thales by Daedalus
Who was Ulysses?
Love from head to foot
Who was Helen?
Naucratis and Pharaoh Psamtic
Seven years
The Homeridae appear
The famous name
The king of Phrygia
Telephus the hero
The Arcado-Cypriot connection
Long echoes of the Cypria
Why Troy?
Hesiod’s journey
Phrygia falls to the Cimmerians
Kingdoms that go, kingdoms that come
Arbiter of the city
35
36
37
39
40
43
44
46
46
47
48
50
52
52
53
54
54
57
58
60
62
65
67
68
70
72
74
76
78
79
80
81
82
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figurine of Opileks
Death of Agamemnon
Statue of Thales by Daedalus
Inscription of Ophelestes
11
33
55
74
CHRONOLOGY
Map
84
85
NOTE
The figurine of Opileks, the relief showing the death of Agamemnon and the statue of Thales are
to be found in the museum at Heraklion (n. Inv. 11,512 – 11,525 -1). The inscription of
Ophelestes is held by the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus.
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My Name is Nobody
For Asun
WHAT BECAME OF HOMER? WHO WROTE THE ODYSSEY?
The questions seemed fine to me. However for there to be any possibility of
answers, it would be necessary to read the Iliad and the Odyssey as if they had
never been understood before. Otherwise, if it was just going to be a matter of
following the accepted reading, these two questions would be irrelevant or
unsolvable, which is not the same thing, but it doesn’t really matter.
The first thing that strikes us about the two poems is the unique way they came
into being. The Iliad and the Odyssey appear all of a sudden and together. In a
very short time, both of them acquire enormous prestige. Just before the year
600 BC, they are known and celebrated from one side of the Aegean to the
other.
It is not possible for such an extraordinary phenomenon to be the consequence
of the quality of the poems. Something else must have happened.
Of course it did. History tells us it was the Homeridae. These were some
gentlemen who went from one Ionian city to another with their rolls of papyrus
and their beautiful singing voices, boasting that they held a monopoly on the
legacy of Homer.
That makes it all clear. If earlier we had one unexplained fact, now we have a
few hundred of them. Because it’s the most normal thing in the world for
hundreds of bards known as rhapsodes to start working all at the same time, on
islands and in cities very far away from each other, armed with good copies of
the Iliad and the Odyssey and, memorably, to recite them for a whole
generation.
Who could have had the power and knowledge required to promote such an
undertaking around the last decade of the 7th century BC? That unknown person
was the first editor of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
But an even greater miracle than that unprecedented promotion would be the
existence of two authors, not just exceptional but in a class of their own, able to
prepare themselves like incredible writing athletes in order to reach such
glorious heights as the Iliad and the Odyssey, because no one creates
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masterpieces without having unusual gifts and training from early childhood. In
the same way we imagine Mozart and Beethoven must have been possessed of
exceptional talents, but we also know that arduous study was essential under
the watchful eye of demanding parents and tutors.
CRETE AND THE SCRIBES WHO MEMORIZED
Seeking snippets of information about the period in which the Iliad and the
Odyssey were written, or at least appeared, I turned to Diogenes Laertius, who
is a chaotic but trustworthy author. It is a typical book that you think you know
because you read it some time ago; but soon you discover that you did not take
in even half of it. Above all, when you take a look at the life of Thales by
Laertius, you read that there was another Thales (38) ―long ago, in the time of
Hesiod, Homer and Lycurgus‖. Another Thales! It could not be better: this other
Thales, so ancient and in such good company, could be the ideal suspect for the
first edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
A careful re-reading of the biography of Thales by Diogenes Laertius was
becoming essential. Maybe he would slip in some news about the ―other‖ Thales,
the contemporary of Hesiod, Homer and Lycurgus.
As soon as we begin, the first revelation hits us. Thales, known as ―of Miletus‖,
was from Crete. From the city of Gortyn, the famous home of poets, legislators
and sculptors.
This is what stands out in his genealogy, according to which he comes ―… from
the Thelidae, who were phoenicists, from the choicest lineage of Cadmus and
Agenor‖.
What is this about ―phoenicists‖? And who are Cadmus and Agenor? Beginning
with the latter: Agenor is the father of Europa, the famous lady who was
kidnapped by Zeus and whom he carried off to Crete, to make love to on the
banks of the River Lethe in a wood that can still be visited in Gortyn. With the
old trick of turning himself into a bull, he gave her three sons, Minos,
Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, who were the kings of the three Minoan palaces
in Crete. All three of them fell in love with a young man named Miletus, and
when he chose Sarpedon, Minos exiled him from Crete, and Miletus founded the
city that bore his name on the Anatolian coast. So Agenor is a character in a
myth from Gortyn which tells the origin of Europe and the founding of Miletus.
And Thales turned up in Miletus claiming descent from Agenor, no less.
Phoenicist means scribe; literally, a ―maker of Phoenician signs‖. The
corresponding Attic-Ionic term is ―phoinikistes‖. We can see that Diogenes
Laertius does not understand it correctly and transcribes it as if it were
―phoinikes‖ (or ―Phoenician‖). Centuries earlier ―phoenicist‖ had become
archaic and was not distinguished from ―Phoenician‖. Herodotus had already
misunderstood the same word when he stated that Thales was of great
―Phoenician ancestry‖ (I, 170), instead of saying he was from ―a line of
Phoenicists‖. And Herodotus himself (V, 58) explains that this is an outdated
term and that the Ionians once referred to writing as ―phoinikeia‖ and he then
cites Cadmus – who is Agenor’s son and Europa’s brother and the ancestor of
4
Thales of Gortyna in the genealogy handed down to us by Diogenes Laertius –
as the inventor of writing or Cadmean letters (―kadmeia grammata‖).
One sign that ―phoenicist‖ has traditionally been misunderstood is the passage
in Anabasis (I, 2, 20) in which Xenophon says that Cyrus ordered the execution
of Megaphernes, who was his phoenicist, or scribe or secretary. Which has been
translated to say that Cyrus condemned to death a man who ―dressed in purple‖,
a misunderstanding which can still be read in the versions of Anabasis.
The importance of the position of official scribe in a city can be understood from
reading the text on a piece of armor, a kind of bronze cuirass, which has the
contract of a ―poinikastas‖ (phoenicist, in the language of Crete) from Datala, a
town to the east of Gortyn in Crete, inscribed on it.
In that text, dated at the end of the 6th century BC, it specifies that a certain
Spensithios is hired as scribe and ―mnamon‖ (memorizer, living archive),
responsible for matters sacred and profane, establishes that he is registered as a
citizen of high standing, specifies his salary in kind, and also points out that the
arrangement is extended to the descendants of the contractee. That is to say, the
city acquires not just an individual, but a whole caste to carry out the profession
of official scribe and memorizer.
The piece of armor would be a clear symbol of his position, and Spensithios the
authorized scribe and memorizer would wear it on holy days of obligation, in the
procession in honor of glorious Apollo and on special occasions.
CRETE AND MILETUS
Two lines after revealing that Thales was from Gortyn and a member of a
distinguished line of scribes, Diogenes Laertius informs us that ―he registered in
Miletus when he arrived, in the company of Neleus, having been removed from
office as a phoenicist.‖
Removed from office as a phoenicist! We have only just discovered the
profession of our hero and he has already been fired. Why would Thales have
been sacked in Gortyn? Might he have made spelling mistakes? Could his
handwriting have been poor?
Laertius, as might be expected, understands ―exiled from Phoenicia‖ instead of
―removed from office as a phoenicist‖, because of the mistake with
―phoinikistes‖, which he perceived as an error for ―Phoenicia‖.
But the idea of being removed from his former high office, of feeling cut off from
his former citizenship and bearing a lineage that begins with himself, is
suggested by Thales himself with a sense of humor very typical of him, when he
says he is of the lineage of the ―Thelidae‖, as if to say he was Thales, ―of the wellknown Thales family‖.
For a Cretan, emigrating to Miletus was rather similar to what emigrating to
America might have been for a European. He was leaving for a land colonized by
5
his forbears. The Cretans had already conquered that part of the Anatolian coast
in the 14th century BC and had given it the name of Miletus after the name of a
Cretan hero. For centuries the city was a Mycenaean enclave on the southwestern edge of the Hittite empire. When Thales arrived there from Crete in the
last quarter of the 7th century BC, Miletus was the metropolis of an extensive
and influential maritime empire and was in conflict with its neighbor, the
powerful Lydia.
THE TYRANT AND THE KING
Now we can take a look at Neleus, the man that history says appeared alongside
Thales in Miletus. Who could he be? He seems to act as a guarantor or sponsor
of the new ―star player‖. After all, Thales had been sacked from a top job. It
must have caused quite a stir. The moment ―when Thales was removed from
office as a phoenicist‖ is alluded to as if to a well-known event in the public
domain, linked to registered information such as the dismissal from office and
registry of a citizen of exceptional rank.
Gortyn and Miletus were two important cities at that time. Also Neleus is a
mythical hero, the founder of Miletus, Phylos and other cities. The Milesian
kings, King Nestor, Peisistratus the tyrant, and many other rulers, both
legendary and historical, boasted of being descendants of his.
This mysterious Neleus appears linked to Thales again in a tale told by
Leandrios (or Maiandrios) of Miletus and set to verse by Callimachus (Fr. 95). It
is about a tripod that Thales received twice, as a prize for being the wisest man,
and which he then handed over to a superior, referred to as ―sovereign of
Neleus’ country‖.
We have no alternative other than to conclude that this ―sovereign of Neleus’
country‖, as well as the Neleus who appears as Thales’ sponsor, are references to
Thrasybulus, a tyrant by profession, based in Miletus.
As a result we are addressing the duo made up of Thrasybulus and Thales, the
victorious strategist and the famed legislator. We are going to attribute to them
the establishment of the tyranny in Miletus and having led the city and the
whole of Ionia itself to the greatest splendor of its history.
By tyranny we should not understand a regime of great brutality or
arbitrariness. A tyrant was someone who took power in a non-traditional
manner, citing clearly the arbitrariness and injustice of the traditional
sovereigns and legislators. For example, the slogan of Cypselus, who made his
debut as tyrant of Corinth in 657 BC, was ―Justice for Corinth‖.
If Thrasybulus was the tyrant of Miletus, what class and treatment would have
been appropriate for Thales? In Theogony (83-92) by Hesiod, there is a
description of how someone who held a similar position was considered:
―He, among kings, the offspring of Zeus, whom the Muses deign to gaze upon at his birth, he
shall have sweet dew poured upon his tongue, and the words shall flow from his mouth as sweet
6
as honey. All shall set their eyes upon him when he sets out what is just with his righteous
judgments. In public he speaks with ease and expertly resolves the most difficult disputes. For
therein lies the role of wise kings: when people are aggravated in their differences, they
expeditiously establish compensation and convince with fine words. When he walks into the
assembly, they look at him with peaceful reverence, as if he were a god, and he always stands out
among those gathered together‖.
Hesiod is referring to a high position known as ―basileus‖. The most usual
translation of that word is ―king‖. In any case, here it is quite clearly a
description of a king-judge arbitrator. What is noteworthy is that Thales knew
and was delighted to quote this passage from Hesiod, which makes us think that
he saw it as a fine description of his mission and status.
THERE IS ONLY ONE THALES
When did this tyrannical pair make their appearance in Greek politics?
Apollodorus points to the first year of the 35th Olympiad as Thales’ date of birth.
As there is a palaeographic transmission error —Θ (9) has been confused with E
(5)—, it has been agreed that the true interpretation is ―the first year of the 39 th
Olympics, in other words, the year 624 BC.
But that is not the year of Thales’ birth, but rather that of his registry as a citizen
of Miletus. In other words, it is the year of his dismissal in Gortyn and his
registry as a citizen in Miletus. Thales was already over forty years old by then,
because he was born around 665 BC.
The fact that one might be removed from high office in 624 BC, and, without
being decapitated or anything, be named as foreign secretary, chief legislator
and supreme judge of another country, indicates the existence of an advanced
civilization with corporations that appoint and dismiss from high office.
Furthermore, it indicates the existence of an extraordinary personality. Thales
was already very famous before he went to Miletus, but afterwards he came to
be so famous that he became a character who eclipsed the previous Thales, the
other one that Diogenes Laertius talks about.
In that way, history came to have news as legend about two Thales’. One, who
was a poet, musician and legislator, native to Gortyn, (the ―very ancient one‖,
according to Laertius) and of whose writings not a single letter remained; and
the other, a celebrated geometrician and scholar of the Milesian skies, who was
of a later generation and who also left nothing in writing, according to the
unanimous opinion of those in the know, because the testimony of Lobon of
Argos, who attributed two hundred hexameters to him and placed him among
the poets, was not worthy of credit.
THE WISE STATESMAN
From the time that Thales moved to Miletus in 624 BC, until the time he died in
581 BC, more than forty years went by. During that time he arranged and wrote
treaties between Miletus and other kingdoms and cities in Ionia and Lydia. He
also encouraged the founding of Milesian colonies on the Anatolian coast, the
7
Black Sea and in Egypt. Among these there were ―Odessos‖ on the Black Sea
coast and ―Achilleios‖ on the banks of the River Meander, upriver from Miletus.
These were the first cities in history to bear names in honor of literary
characters.
In some of those colonies and cities allied to Miletus, Thales promoted the
unparalleled movement of the Homeridae, the rhapsodes who took the Iliad and
the Odyssey to the ears and memory, first of Ionia, and then of the whole of
Greece. The result was that by taking up the profession of reciting the great
epics, those Homeridae spread the technique of writing and placed within reach
of the Greeks wisdom, enjoyment, science and a lifestyle that they would
otherwise never have known.
And so Thales was the first editor of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In him were
combined the power and knowledge necessary to promote, in that hitherto
unknown way, the enlightenment of all Greeks in the final decades of the 7th
century BC.
The solar eclipse of March 16th, 581 BC must have coincided with Thales’ vigil or
the month of his death. Laertius mentions an old tradition in his epigram where
it says that Thales was ―snatched away by Solar Zeus‖. The fact that there was an
eclipse during the time that his soul had only recently set out on its journey, led
to Thales being said to have ―caused‖ it, and was the origin of the legend of his
ability to predict them.
There was a known precedent for this. In a passage in the Odyssey (XX, 356-7),
the sun disappears from the sky and a funereal darkness spreads. It is a
prophetic sign, proclaimed by the seer ―Theoclymenus, like a god‖, who
interprets the sun’s hiding as a herald of the exaltation of Ulysses.
Fortune – apparently a goddess who enjoyed reading – made the same thing
happen at the death of Thales. So fame attributed him with a death with a
celestial apotheosis, the same as the god Asclepius or the prophet Elijah. The
same year as the eclipse, as Demetrius of Phalerum informs us, Thales was
canonized as ―the first wise man and first discoverer‖.
OFF WE GO TO CRETE
―Crete, beautiful and fertile, is a land surrounded by a sea as dark as wine. Upon
her there are many men, gods, and ninety cities‖, the Odyssey (XIX, 172). Thus
says Ulysses, who is going incognito and pretending to be a Cretan, to Penelope,
who does not know him and is in floods of tears.
Off we go to Crete. To see if we can find anything. Everything indicates that
Thales did not leave the island in secret as a result of his expulsion. On the
contrary, his departure for Miletus was rather more ostentatious and theatrical.
Perhaps he left something for us in Gortyn.
8
Crete is the largest island in the Aegean. It measures 250 kilometers in length,
and somewhat more than 50 in width in the center. It lies some 100 kilometers
from continental Europe, 200 from Asia Minor and 300 from Africa. The
Cretan’s influence and the influences on them can be valued in that same order,
since Crete was a hub for trade and maritime traffic during the last three
millennia BC.
Mostly harsh and rugged, half of its landmass is over 400 meters above sealevel. The mountainous area in the center has helped to bring about the
isolation of the interior, so that Crete is like a continent in miniature. The strong
winds from the northwest determine the rainfall and vegetation, which are very
different on the north and south slopes. The persistent north wind also blows in
the Odyssey (XIX, 200): ―they were held back by a north wind which even on
land no man could stand against‖. Ulysses also says the same, still up to his
usual tricks.
Half of all the flat, farming land on the island is in the sheltered fertile plain of
Mesara, south of the central area. And at the top of a peak that looms over that
valuable land, in the place where the River Lethe no longer gurgles among the
rocks and emerges to water the plain, stood the acropolis of Gortyn.
According to the relevant information in the Odyssey (III, 294), the city limits of
Gortyn stretched down to the ―dark sea‖. The landmark was ―a smooth reef
standing out of the water‖, Cape Lithino in the Libyan Sea, some twenty
kilometers as the crow flies from the centre of the city of Gortyn.
The acropolis outcrop stands 250 meters above sea-level and is sheltered to the
north, east and west by other higher points, while it dominates the wide valley
that opens up to the south, offering excellent visual conditions. At the foot of the
acropolis, on the plain, on the left bank of the Lethe, under the stratum where
there are now four villages, lay the extensive Roman city of Gortinia. This was
the capital of Crete and Libya and also a Praetorian headquarters in the time of
Augustus.
The fertile soil and the availability of water caused this fortunate spot in Crete to
have been inhabited uninterruptedly since Neolithic times. It did not even
become depopulated during the so-called ―dark centuries‖, between 1200 and
950 BC, when, after the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, a huge number of
towns and palace enclaves all over Greece were abandoned.
THE TEMPLE AND ALTAR OF THE GODDESS
Just before 800 BC, the highest part of the area of dwellings on the acropolis
outcrop in Gortyn was removed and the land was leveled and excavated for the
foundations of a temple measuring some 200 square meters, rectangular in
shape and standing on a north-south axis, built in a style that reveals an Eastern
influence.
The name of the goddess to whom the temple was dedicated was taboo. For lack
of a better name, archaeologists have called her the great mother goddess, the
9
goddess of animals, of snakes, of fertility, of destiny, and other variants which
indicate the attributes of this extremely ancient all-powerful female divinity.
The orientation of the temple pointed to Ida, the largest mountain massif on the
island, also belonging to the confines of Gortyn. The entrance faced the great
peak, which makes us think of a goddess similar to the one represented on an
ivory jewelry box discovered in Minet el-Beida, where the bare-breasted goddess
can be seen on a mountain top, dressed in traditional Cretan costume, feeding
two goats. It is also possible to imagine a goddess along the lines of the Minoan
statuettes which portray a lady with very expressive large eyes, bare breasted
and holding snakes in her hands.
Some thirty meters away from the temple, on the eastern slope of the outcrop, a
monumental altar was built on top of great retaining walls that formed two
terraced esplanades. This area was set aside for offerings. Votive statuettes in
Minoan, Geometric and Daedalic style have been dug up here. They correspond
to a period that runs from a little before 800 BC to about 620 BC.
After that date the sanctuary was left abandoned for two hundred and fifty
years. During that time, no offerings were left and no religious practices were
carried out in the area where the acropolis stood. The only beings that wandered
around were goats and snakes.
The reason was not plague, earthquake, overwhelming invasion, or any other of
the terrible causes that usually determine the abandoning of temples and cities.
The best proof that it was none of these is the famous Gortyn Civil Code,
inscribed on blocks of stone that made up a large circular-shaped wall. This
monument was erected as a model for the inhabitants of Gortyn and for all
humanity that desired to have laws. Its presence proclaims that at the foot of the
hill with the abandoned sanctuary there were calligraphers in stone, legal
experts with excellent memories, a class-structured citizenry, a desire for
enlightenment, wealth, hierarchy and other marvels characteristic of a populous
advanced city, such as Gortyn was. The city was not abandoned; it was quite the
opposite.
In the middle of the 14th century BC, it would seem that the reputation of the
acropolis hill as a cursed place was forgotten. The altar and terraces were
reconstructed. The votive statuettes reveal that, in this second stage, the
sanctuary was dedicated to Athena, who was called ―Asana‖ in Gortyn, a Cretan
version of the Phoenician snake goddess, ―Sahan‖.
THE FORBIDDEN NAME
Why was the sanctuary of the acropolis at Gortyn suddenly abandoned and left
desolate for two and a half centuries?
Most of the votive sculptures that correspond to the first stage in the use of the
sanctuary represent women. Many of them have one hand over the pubic area.
It seems clear that these were offerings linked to fertility. There are also
representations of livestock here and there in the sanctuary’s classical halls:
10
horses, cattle, sheep and even poultry. Apparently the goddess could heal any
living creature. There are also some terracotta reliefs which represent epic
motifs.
The most modern sculptures from the period before the sanctuary was
abandoned are of the style known as late-Daedalic, which archaeologists date
between 640 and 620 BC.
And in that style there is a curious piece that measures 6 cm in height, and
stands on a rectangular base 10·5 x 8·5 cm, rounded at the front and back. It is
the lower part of a statuette representing a clothed female figure. Only the feet
and the lower border of the dress remain. The feet are parted and the right foot
has the natural angle corresponding to a slightly bent knee. It is the only
sculpture of those dug up at the acropolis that shows this natural, realistic
position of the feet. A detail that represents a turning point in the technique of
sculpture.
The decoration on the skirt was executed in dark varnish and shows geometric
designs on the back and sides. At the front, as if printed on the skirt, three feet
with hooves can be seen as well as signs of a fourth foot. The hooves, painted
with varnish and outlined with a lighter line that makes them stand out, are
those of an animal walking towards the right of the onlooker and they belong,
most probably, to a goat, or perhaps a bull, rather than to a horse, because of the
vestigial toes, more noticeable in ruminants than in horses.
11
At the front of the pedestal, at the figure’s feet, runs a calligraphic treasure four
centimeters in length. There are seven letters, read from right to left. The marks
are inscribed with a firm hand and are well varnished. The second and third
letters look like snakes about to climb their way up the sculpture; the fourth, a
scepter turning into a snake; the fifth, a ship on a sea as dark as wine. And they
could look like many other things, but they are letters, and what they say is
categorical: OPILEKS.
The statuette is hollow, worked on a potter’s wheel, and has very thin
walls. You could say it is a piece of porcelain, not only fragile but rather made to
be broken by holding it by the inscribed base, which is the most solid part of the
sculpture, the part destined to last longer than bronze, and by striking it against
any hard surface.
The break on the statuette runs above the figure’s ankles and is very irregular.
The impact or pressure that broke the sculpture went from right to left, in the
same direction as the forbidden name of the goddess is read, a name that could
not be pronounced or written or communicated in any way, except as an
initiation secret.
HOW COULD THE SCULPTURE HAVE BEEN BROKEN?
Possibility A: the perpetrator of the terrible transgression goes to the altar in the
sanctuary with the figurine in his hand and crash! he smashes it against the
stones. Whether he throws the sculpture or cracks it against the altar, holding it
by the base or wherever, the text with the name remains intact, since it is
written on the strongest, most solid part of the statuette. And, since it remains
intact, it offers a terrible challenge to the goddess. It reveals her forbidden
name, incessantly, because what is written cannot be silenced.
Possibility B: the perpetrator of the transgression takes the figure and leaves it
there, on the altar for offerings, in an ostentatious, public manner. In two and a
half centuries of abandonment, there were enough fortuitous causes,
earthquakes and storms to break the sculpture.
Possibility C, breakage caused by a scandalized worshipper of the goddess. This
one we reject because such a person, as was his creed, could not look upon the
name in writing without being overcome with horror, terror and fury. And, if he
wanted to correct the dreadful offence he would have to break not the figurine,
which was less relevant, but the text, which was the really serious matter. Now,
how could he destroy it without contaminating himself? With eyes closed and
not thinking about what was written there? The least that could happen to the
one who destroyed the text was to be eliminated himself, in turn, as a scapegoat.
It was more prudent and practical to get away from that place, which had
become a focus of terrible luck, and never speak of the matter again.
And the fact is that the text remained intact and the place was abandoned.
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THE PERPETRATORS
The person who formed those letters knew the name as a professional trade
secret. The transgression of writing the forbidden name was a clear reason to be
stripped of office and also for being eliminated as a scapegoat. But it could also
be a drastic action taken for curing plagues and other illnesses if the person who
carried it out had the required prestige and authority.
The only possibility is for someone in high office to write the forbidden name
and then publicize the dreadful deed, someone highly respected who, after his
deed was exposed, would leave Gortyn and Crete, together with his sister, and
head for Miletus where he took up the position of conciliatory king-judge for the
rest of his life.
Neither could the maker of the statuette be just anybody. At that time the school
of sculpture with the best reputation in Greece was in Gortyn. The artist who
formed the effigy, varnished the incisions and fired the piece was a
distinguished necessary accomplice.
But apart from showing off and arriving in Miletus in such a way that everyone
regarded him as a god, what background was there to that daring revelation?
In 624 BC, Thales’ literary pantheon contained three main figures: 1. Homer,
who was the most godlike, and who Thales venerated and admired above all
others, although he was also somewhat overwhelmed by him. 2. Hesiod, who he
always liked more than he wished to admit. 3. The epic poem, Gilgamesh, which
for Thales was really over the top.
The most obvious reading of this poem goes as follows: A king who is more
handsome than anyone else, spends his time using his enormous member on all
the young people in his kingdom. He is also a skilled carpenter and makes
instruments of torture and generally has a great time and carries on regardless,
always up to the same old tricks. He only stops beating up his subjects when he
is allowed to marry a man as handsome and well-endowed as he is, a creature
his mother finds for him. Once married to Enkidu, King Gilgamesh insults and
rudely repudiates the goddess of fertility and destiny, the much-feared InannaIshtar. And he breaks the inveterate tradition of those of his trade, which
consisted of consummating a sacred marriage with the goddess, thus ensuring
that everything would continue to work properly in the universe. In the end
Gilgamesh sees his beloved die, discovers that he cannot reproduce or be
immortal and is finally overcome by the serpent, whose attribute of fertility is
the closest thing to immortality that a human being can conceive of.
Thales, a homosexual and lover of children, could not read the Gilgamesh poem
without intense excitement. Not only, for example, because the scenes in the
cedar forest can be easily interpreted as a phallic orgy; there was also the
controversy of Gilgamesh and the goddess of fertility and destiny. With his
ostentatious attack on the goddess Opileks, Thales emulated Gilgamesh. There
was also professional jealousy involved. Thales was a well-known healer and we
can imagine how tired he must have been of that sanctuary with so many
feminine figures around and so much respectful adoration of the unnamed lady.
13
On the other hand, for some time there had been a trend in the whole area of
Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean that sought the overthrow of the old
fertility cults and the renewal of the pantheon of gods and goddesses. The
Gilgamesh poem shows that the cult to the fertility goddess was already in a
state of crisis in the first centuries of the second millennium BC.
In several late-Daedalic reliefs found on the altar of the acropolis at Gortyn, the
hero Bellerophon is represented, mounted on his steed Pegasus, killing the
Chimera. This monster was born of a snake and had three bodies: a lion, a goat
and a snake. The last two animals were attributes of Opileks.
This same Bellopheron conquered the Amazons, according to the tale told in the
Iliad, in what seems a vindication of the overthrow of the myth of the exclusive
possession of fertility.
HOW A TABOO IS NEGOTIATED
The forbidden name is a problem. In order to obtain some of its immense
power, it has to be named in some way; in order to be protected from its
dangerous power, naming it has to be avoided.
The Greek language presents a more noticeable taboo deformation than any
other Indo-European language when it names the serpent. When writing
became possible, that elemental method of manipulating a taboo which we
could call distorted pronunciation, was overtaken by other more elaborate
procedures.
Let’s take as an example, the anagram or reversal of letters technique, which
produced the name Asklepios, the healer god who is usually portrayed leaning
on a staff entwined with a serpent, the famous rod of Aesculapius. If we remove
the first a and the final s, which are only there to make the name seem normal
and common, and we compare it with Opileks written backwards, we see the
following:
aSKLEPIOs
SKELIPO
It is clear that the name of the healer god Asclepius contains the name of the
goddess Opileks, written backwards. The complication grows with the transsexuality of the person involved, who turned into a man.
There were endless intermediate formulae for negotiating around the taboo. The
name of the seer and healer Polyeidos, who appears in the Iliad, is a taboo
derivate of ―opilexeidos‖. His particular Cretan legend, in which he brings the
son of King Minos back from the dead with a herb whose use he was taught by a
serpent, is inspired by the final part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Also Podaleiros,
who appears in the Iliad as the son of Asclepius, bears an opilexic name.
14
Even Aphrodite is a taboo distortion in Arcado-Cypriot Greek, of the name
Opileks. Aphrodite’s gift was that of irresistible sexual attraction, which in
Greek is called machlosyne and means ―power of Opileks‖. The first part of the
word (mach-) means power, and the second part is the quintessence of the
name of the goddess.
The taboo spread widely. Many names of people and places, such as Cypselus
(the tyrant of Corinth and the district of Athens), Olissipo (Lisbon), Posilipo
(Naples), Scipio (the Roman hellenophile), Posidipo (the Macedonian
conspirator) and even Mount Olympus all tell how deeply rooted and
widespread the fear and veneration of the snake goddess was.
But everything suggests that while the linguistic effects of the taboo were
noticeable in all speakers of Greek, knowledge of the complete, true name of the
goddess was limited to Crete and, within Crete, only to a handful of experts. To
get an idea of how secret the name that Thales revealed to the world was, it is
sufficient to note how, a century later, the highest snake specialist, Pherecydes
of Syros, did not know it, and ventured ―Ophioneus‖, like someone for whom it
rang a bell but without knowing exactly what it was. Hesiod too speaks of
Asclepius with the innocence of someone who is not in on the secret, and avoids
mentioning the serpent by name (Frag. 204).
This point of knowing or not knowing the name of Opileks, and of knowing
about Asclepius, marks a radical difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The admiration of the author of the Iliad for Asclepius and his followers is not
shared by the author of the Odyssey. While the healer is treated with great
reverence in the Iliad, it is not like that in the Odyssey, where the healer has the
same rank as the seer and the carpenter, who share a hexameter, while the
―inspired aoidos who delights with his song‖ takes up a whole hexameter (XVII,
385).
THE MOST CRETAN POEM IN THE WORLD
And while we are in Crete, is there anything more Cretan than the Odyssey?
Whenever the opportunity arises, Ulysses says he is a prince of Crete, the son of
King Minos, and he amuses himself by telling mythological adventures and
describing the ethnic peculiarities of Crete. Old Nestor was never a one for
detail, such as when he explains to Telemachus peculiarities of the coast of Crete
and its inhabitants.
There are passages in which the poet author of the Odyssey seems to be
nostalgic for Crete. And others where you would say he is a legal expert who
knows the code inscribed on the great wall at Gortyn by heart.
For example, when Athena informs Telemachus that his mother, Penelope, is
being pressured into marrying Eurymachus by her father and brothers, she
instructs him (XV, 19): ―Let her not take anything from your house against your
will! You know the disposition of a woman in her heart: she desires to enrich the
15
house of the man who marries her.‖ This is a full-blown legal advice bureau.
The passage is based on the Gortinian law referring to the dowry of a wife who
becomes a widow and remarries (III, 20 of the great wall of jurisprudence). In
two other passages in the Odyssey (II, 336 and XVI, 386) it is patently obvious
that the suitors also know the Civil Code of Gortyn and are quite clear that the
man who marries Penelope will become the owner of the palace if he first
eliminates Telemachus. The verb ―opyio‖ (marry, take to wife), which appears
again and again in the Odyssey narrative and in the Gortinian code, is opilexic.
The Gortyn Code is also fundamental in the tale of Aphrodite’s adultery
(Odyssey, VIII, 266-360). The skilful craftsman, Hephaestus, the deceived
husband, has her chained up together with Ares, the adulterer caught in
flagrante, and says that he will not release them until Poseidon returns the bride
price he paid. In the presence of the gods as delighted witnesses, Poseidon begs
Hephaestus to free Ares, and promises him that once freed, Ares will pay the
debt. Hephaestus replies with a legal proverb: ―the guarantees of a wretch are no
guarantee‖. In other words, as soon as he is free, Ares will be off and running
like a hare. What valid guarantee would he have then, being a poor wretch in
comparison to Ares and Poseidon? Father Poseidon says that, even if Ares runs
and avoids paying the debt, he will deal with it himself. Hephaestus admits that
it is not possible or advisable to reject the word of Poseidon as a guarantee.
The passage is a joke for legal folk, and is only fully intelligible in the light of the
legal inscriptions of the Gortyn Code (II, 20), which established the arrest of a
man caught in adultery with a free woman, as a guarantee of the payment of
damages. If the arrested man did not pay, he was left to the mercy of the one
who had captured him. The relatives of the detained man had five days in which
to ransom him and the information was given to them by means of a warrant
with three witnesses.
THE TITLE PAGE OF THE ODYSSEY
Two lines in Cretan, reproduced by Diogenes Laertius, constitute an
extraordinary example of thaletic tenacity. The integrity shown by these thirteen
words in lasting while remaining aligned and without showing the least sign of
corruption, is incredible. We know that letters inscribed on baked clay tablets
with limewash and painted over with varnish can last for millennia and emerge
from underground like new. But to make that journey as anonymous verses
inscribed on successive papyri, where every copy made endangers and can lead
to erosion, that is an odyssey. And for the letters to end their journey with none
missing and no alterations, is a miracle.
From time immemorial those lines written in Cretan have been read as if they
were epitaphs, to be placed on a tomb, thanks to which, in spite of the stilted
translations, they have never been in the slightest danger of being understood.
Since they are called to fulfill a great destiny, about to be revealed, I reproduce
them below and I invite the reader to take his time and go over them. It does not
matter if the reader does not understand Greek. He will notice that every time
he reads them, he will become a little wiser:
16
ἦ ὀλίγον ηόδε ζᾶμα ηὸ δὲ κλέος οὐρανόμακες
ηῶ πολσθονηίζηω ηοῦηο Θάληηος ὅρη
What is their correct translation? Let’s go to the Iliad to find out. There is a
passage in Book VI, which is enough to make one’s brain explode, where the
poet describes how the hero Bellerophon, the same one who overcame the
Chimera and the Amazons, carries a letter folded in such a way that he cannot
read it. It was given to him by Proetus of Tiryns with instructions to show it to
his father-in-law, the king of Lycia. What Proetus did not tell Bellerophon is that
this is the old trick of ―kill the bearer‖. Homer has to explain it to his audience
and says as follows (VI, 167-170):
The king was angered, but shrank from killing him,
So he sent him to Lycia with lying letters of introduction
Written on a folded tablet, and containing much ill against the bearer.
He bade him show these letters to his father-in-law, to the end that he might thus perish
It is an enlightening passage, not only because it is a tribute by the poet of the
Iliad to his father who, in the Cypria, tells the tale of the vengeance of Ulysses
on Palamedes by means of a false letter, but also because it shows to what extent
people were familiar with alphabetic writing. The fateful, deadly, multiple letters
arrived in Lycia in the hands of Bellerophon. In Lycia he was feted by the king
for nine days, and on the tenth, early in the morning, he asked to read the text.
To express that action of ―reading the text‖ (VI, 176b), which is of interest to us
here, the author of the Iliad uses the same word followed by the same verb that
appears at the end of the difficult Cretan lines. To sum up: read in the light of
the Iliad, the Cretan lines do not speak of a ―tomb‖, but of a ―text‖, or rather,
―poem‖, since the first words refer to the short poem that they themselves make
up. The verb is not ―look at‖ but ―read‖, an action that in later Greek had a
technical term of its own, but not in the epic.
Therefore the translation of the Cretan verses is:
This poem will be brief; but read this one by Thales, a man of a thousand concerns: his fame
reaches heaven.
A famous poem by Thales? Does it really say that?
Not only does it say that, but, just as in any epigram or commercial
advertisement, the words of the original in Greek go in a very calculated order,
and the last three are: ―this [poem] by Thales, read it‖.
This indicates that the poem came next, and that the lines were an introductory
epigraph, a presentation, a title page ... And writing them in Cretan Doric,
Thales’ mother tongue, has the objective of establishing a conclusive indication
of the identity of the author.
17
OLD-AGE CONTEST
Just a moment. For it to be permissible to guarantee the translation of those two
Cretan lines with the backing of the Iliad, it is necessary to prove that they are
old enough. Otherwise, there is room for the hypothesis that a scholarly
hooligan, no matter whether Byzantine, Florentine or Alexandrian, might have
whipped up that pseudo-Cretan junk one afternoon when he was feeling bored.
How can it be proved that the lines are ancient? Can we run an old-age contest
and line them up against any other text? Yes. It could be done, if there were a
word, if possible eye-catching and unusual, one of the kind of words that poets
invent, that might appear in the Cretan epigram and also in a text with
guaranteed antiquity.
At the end of the first line we have an ideal word for our contest: the adjective
―ouranomakes‖, which means ―which reaches heaven‖. In the Cretan epigram it
accompanies ―kleos‖, which means ―fame‖, so the expression ―kleos
ouranomakes‖ means ―fame which reaches heaven‖.
Well, what a coincidence that the same adjective ―ouranomakes‖ appears in the
Odyssey (V, 239), where it refers to the pine tree that Ulysses is going to cut
down in order to build a ship in which to undertake his celebrated voyage. It is a
peculiar imitation of the deed by Gilgamesh (Tab. V), when he cuts down the
great cedar tree that crosses the heavens and makes a gigantic doorway out of it.
In order to transport it, Gilgamesh sits astride it and sails down the River
Euphrates as far as the city of Nippur. This is how he enters his city, and
assumes a long-lasting name, recorded by posterity and the gods.
Also in the Iliad (XIV, 287) appears a pine tree higher than Mount Ida, which
grew through the air until it reached the ether. It was the place where Sleep hid.
But if we stick to the matter of ―ouranomakes‖, the difference between the poet
of the Odyssey, and the authors of the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, the fact is
that the former created an adjective for that characteristic of the great tree. It is
as if he called it ―skyscraper pine‖, while Gilgamesh talks of the ―cedar that
crosses the skies‖, and the Iliad mentions the ―pine tree that crosses the sky and
reaches the ether‖. The thing about inventing an adjective is that it is very
revealing: Thales is bewitched by that image, he has polished it, he has turned it
round and round, he has compressed the term and he is proud of his creation.
Now, for our old-age contest, among Greek authors who have used
―ouranomakes‖, we have to determine which ones did it as a tribute, in
emulation, in admiration or whatever of the Odyssey, and which ones, if there
are any, because they knew the two Cretan lines that speak of Thales.
Aristotle quotes ―ouranomakes‖ in his Rhetoric (VII, 11) as an example of those
composite words, pompous epithets, borrowings and other prattling, only good
for preachers of horrors and he believes that it is excessive, only appropriate in
some cases, such as poetry. But he does not say whether he is referring to the
―ouranomakes‖ in the Odyssey or the one in the Cretan epigram.
18
On the other hand, Isocrates uses ―ouranomakes‖ (XV, 133) to talk about
―success that reaches Heaven‖. An idea taken from the Cretan lines.
It is not that Aristophanes knows the epigram, but rather that he uses it as an
essential part of his farce The Clouds (460), where the most modern testimony
of ―kleos ouranomakes‖ appears. He also laughs at ―polyphrontisto‖, a word that
describes a man ―interested in a thousand matters‖ and which appears in the
Cretan lines with reference to Thales. In The Clouds, the ―Phrontistery‖ or
―Questionatory‖ is mentioned, which is a burlesque term invented by
Aristophanes himself. Not only is it clear that he knows the lines that talk about
Thales and the fame that reaches the heavens but it is patently obvious that
these lines are familiar to the public.
Herodotus uses ―ouranomakes‖ to refer to some trees (II, 138). There is no
doubt that his reference is the Odyssey. Aeschylus also does it (Agamemnon,
92) when he talks about some torches that cross the skies with their light, like
Ulysses’ pine tree, or the cedar tree of Gilgamesh.
Then we come to the oldest one. In one of the fragments of the elegy for the
battle of Plataea by Simonides of Ceos we can read ―ouranom[ak]es‖; while
―kleos‖ can be reconstructed in the same line and again in the following one. A
few lines earlier, we can find traces of a felled tree. It is clear that Simonides
knows the two poems, the short Cretan one that speaks of Thales and the long
one that tells about the return of Ulysses. And it is clear his knowledge goes
even further: it was Simonides who established the official text of the Odyssey at
the end of the sixth century BC, in other words the same text that was read by all
those mentioned earlier, from Aristotle to Aeschylus.
The short Cretan poem was the gateway to the Odyssey, an epigram with the
title of the work, the name of the author and a readme.
So why did Simonides not read it like that? For one insurmountable reason:
nobody reads what it says, just what they suppose it says. The Cretan epigram
can only be read in a world where Thales wrote the Odyssey. In the prior world,
where Homer wrote the Odyssey, it was not possible.
That presentation is a true editorial innovation because it is the first
introduction to the story. It summarizes in two hexameters the majestic start of
the Assyrian version of the Gilgamesh poem which is the model that inspired it.
After presenting he who saw all and knew all, the one who returned from a long
journey and recorded all his adventures on a stone tablet, the Gilgamesh poem
prepares to give his name. Then (I, I, 25-26) it describes the same tablet that the
reader has before him and orders him: ―Read it! So that you may know who he,
Gilgamesh, was.‖
19
THE FIRST HEXAMETER
But we have still not properly translated the epigram. We have not translated
the effect it caused at first sight. For that, we have to imagine it in a text box in
the literary supplement of the Gortyn Gazette, rather like this:
Short announcement:
―Fame that reaches the heavens‖
By Thales, he of the thousand concerns.
Read it without fail!
Such an effect in advertising is due to the fact that ―kleos ouranomakes‖ works
in the epigram as though it were a proper noun, or a title. The tradition of
naming a poem from its opening words is very ancient and some examples of it
are very famous, such as ―Enuma elis‖, the Mesopotamian creation poem, or
―Shanagba imuru‖ (―He who saw it all‖), the Paleo-Babylonian beginning of the
Gilgamesh poem.
As was logical, the first hexameter of the Odyssey was restored according to the
criteria of a world that believed the author was Homer. A government poet
fabricated a stylistic parallel with the first hexameter of the Iliad. The presence
of Simonides’ style – he treats the Muse as if she were a servant of his, he is in
such a hurry to put in an ―I‖ that he almost puts it in at the start of the poem, he
substitutes one of Hesiod’s adjectives for one invented by himself – all this
allows us to measure the extent and depth of the restoration: the first five
words. From then on, the poem is authentic, because the references to the man
who travelled so much, saw and came across so many things, are unequivocally
inspired on Gilgamesh.
Simonides the restorer’s reasons were scientific and incontestable. How could
that ―kleos ouranomakes‖ be by Homer, taken from the absurd Doric epigram
about Thales that some donkey had placed at the start of the Odyssey? How
could the adjective ―polykrotos‖ (a word that means ―very well-known‖ and
which appeared in the first line of the Odyssey, according to the commentators
of Aristophanes, The Clouds, 260), be Homer’s, when even little children knew
it was Hesiod’s?
We should ask how the Odyssey that Simonides handled would begin. ―Fame
that reaches into the heavens of the renowned son of Laertes‖ could be the first
words. The two initial words, ―Kleos ouranomakes‖, made an unprecedented
grouping; next came an adjective known by the entire public as being linked to
Ulysses: polykrotos ―the renowned one‖ or ―he who was so famous‖. So, right
from the first hexameter it was clear who the great poem was about. Because the
name of the main character of the Odyssey does not appear until some twenty
lines later, just like in the Gilgamesh epic.
THE COMPOSITION OF THE ODYSSEY
After placing the name of the goddess in the sanctuary of the acropolis at Gortyn
and leaving the place plunged in desolation, rather like Ulysses ―after destroying
20
the sacred acropolis of Troy‖ (Odyssey, I, 2), Thales left Crete and headed for
Miletus.
With him he carried a poem that corresponded to a third of today’s Odyssey
(from Book V to Book XII). It was about the well-known adventures of Ulysses,
the Trojan horse, the Sirens, the Cyclops and others. There were no suitors.
Penelope and Telemachus had hardly any part to play.
In Miletus, he concentrated on politics. An anonymous compilation of the ninth
century AD, Ekloge Historion, preserves a testimony of his work (II, 263): ―At
that time, in Tenedos, Thales the Milesian broke the rules, and the Erythraean
Sibyl knew it‖. It alludes to the peace treaty agreed on the island of Tenedos and
promoted by Thales, which led to the end of the war between Chios and Eritrea.
The breaking of the rules can refer to nothing other than Miletus’ role as an ally
of Chios during the war. That is to say that Thales was both judge and part of the
conflict and, in spite of these circumstances being known by the Eritreans, he
was accepted as a mediator and writer of the peace treaty.
Later, Chios became the only ally of Miletus in the war against Lydia, and it also
became famous for its singing Homeridae, and for its reputation, shared with
Smyrna and Colophon, for being the true home of the author of the Iliad and the
Odyssey.
Being one of the most powerful men in Ionia, Thales had the means to be
informed about and know the circumstances of the death of Homer, his real
name, the identity of his father, and all the details that he could piously gather.
That knowledge must have had something to do with his decision to edit the
Iliad and the Odyssey as works by Homer, and to keep secret the fact that he
himself was a poet
With this in mind, he tripled the length of the original that he had brought from
Crete until it took on a suitable size for a work that would claim to be the
younger sister of the Iliad. He moved forward the journey of Telemachus who
first seemed to be heading for Crete to ask after his father and then, perhaps
because this destination betrayed the identity of the author, he headed for the
Peloponnese. As he describes this second destination it emerges that Thales
does not know this part of Greece. He has no idea where Sparta is, or Argos or
Pylos. For him they are just names out of the Iliad. He does not know what
distance there is between them or in which lands lie the cities where Menelaus,
Agamemnon and Nestor reigned.
After Telemachus’ voyage, Thales maintained the original poem which told of
the adventures of Ulysses. And, then, for the second half of the Odyssey, he
composed the return and laborious identification of Ulysses and the revenge
and elimination of the suitors.
In the large new poem, although Ulysses now delayed his appearance until after
the first two thousand or so hexameters, Thales used the same opening that he
had already composed for the first version: the careful ten hexameter
introduction which was not inspired by the Iliad, but by the Gilgamesh epic.
21
Traces of the great work of enlargement with its rectifications, testing and
contradictions, can be found throughout the Odyssey. The heroic narration of
the adventures took on an educational tone, descriptive of local customs and
suitable for being the subject of song for a whole country.
Over the years, Thales and his Homeridae launched more than one version of
the Odyssey. Some were copied and had a journey of their own which lasted for
centuries. Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first librarian of Alexandria, owned a copy
where Telemachus’ first destination was Crete. For their part, Aristarchus and
other grammarians knew that there was an older Odyssey which was a book and
a half shorter, because it ended at hexameter 296 of Book XXIII.
The last enlargement of the Odyssey was composed by Thales after 602 BC, for
the celebration of the peace treaty between Lydia and Miletus. When the good
news of peace arrived, after a war that had lasted over a decade, the Odyssey
demonstrated a fundamental flaw: that the suitors, members of the best families
of Ithaca, should be killed by Ulysses and everyone be satisfied could be
admissible in a heroic poem, because on papyrus everything seems fine. But in a
country that was coming out of a twelve-year war, the ones soon to die were a
matter of news, and the Odyssey had to act as an eye-catching, educational
model. The solemn proclamation from Zeus: ―Let loyal pacts be signed [...]
meanwhile, we will spread forgetfulness over the deaths of sons and brothers.
Let us live as before, in agreement, and let there be wealth and peace in
abundance‖ was the foundation of the peace treaty with Lydia, included by way
of example in the new Odyssey (XXIV, 483).
From its birth before 624 BC to its last version after 602 BC, the composition of
the Odyssey lasted over thirty years. Thales completed it with a call for peace
(XXIV, 543): ―Hold [Ulysses]! Halt the conflict of war which makes all even! [...]
Thus spoke Athena, and he obeyed and was glad in his heart‖.
THE VERSIONS OF THE PAMPHLET
At the beginning of the fourth century BC, different versions of the anonymous
pamphlet Homer and Hesiod, the most divine of poets were being circulated.
In the pamphlet, according to the reading of Plato, which is reflected in
Republic (X, 599-600), it said that a certain Creophilus, who is described as a
―hetairos‖ (in the context, in which the author is talking about education and
imitators, it is to be understood to mean ―follower or disciple of a younger
generation‖) ―left Homer abandoned when he was still alive‖.
The passage from Plato is particularly critical of Homer, considered as the
educator of the Greeks. It states that he was not a model legislator, like Lycurgus
in Sparta, or an inventor or discoverer of anything of vital importance, like
Thales in Miletus, and much less a model in his private life because his disciple
Creophilus left him while he was still alive. If Homer had been the educator and
improver of men that his supporters claimed him to be, he would have had
many friends, followers and protectors who would never have abandoned him.
22
As proof of Homer’s deplorable end in the depths of destitution and loneliness
because his disciple Creophilus had left him, Plato used the testimony in the
pamphlet that told of the poet’s death and he came to the same anti-Homeric
conclusions.
Alcidamas, a master of rhetoric and oratory was very sensitive to Plato’s
argument and wrote his own improved version of the pamphlet. In it, we can no
longer read that Creophilus abandoned Homer but quite the opposite, that he
took him into his home when he was old. This version by Alcidamas is the one
that has come down to modern times. The Renaissance editor, Stephanus, made
some unfortunate corrections, divided the text into chapters and gave it the title
Certamen.
For their part, it can be seen that Aristotle and Heraclides Ponticus also knew
the pamphlet, and other details appear in their texts about the problematic
Creophilus. The ―Creophiles‖, which was like saying the firm ―Sons of Kreion‖,
had their headquarters in Samos and held the rights to Homer’s Iliad, or at least
they sent out the most faithful copies.
The poet Calimachus also seems to have read the pamphlet. In his epigram
number 55 he says that Creophilus was the:
... man of Samos who took the divine aoidos into his home
Finally, Iamblichus decided to shed some definitive light on the Creophile
confusion. According to him, Pythagoras studied with Creophilus and then
travelled to Crete with the intention of studying the laws. A complete mess.
When referring to Creophilus, the supposed character in the pamphlet Homer
and Hesiod, the most divine of poets, there are notable differences between
Plato, Alcidamas and Aristotle. This suggests the existence of different versions
of the text of the pamphlet in the fourth century BC which, among other things,
whitewashed to a greater or lesser extent the passage that describes the death of
Homer. In fact it was a matter of a taboo. It was inconceivable for a Greek to do
such a thing to Homer, who was precisely the eldest, best, first teacher of all the
Greeks! That would have been nonsense. The passage must have been written
down wrongly, so it was a matter of changing it for a text that a master of
rhetoric would consider reasonable.
On the other hand, reading Plato is very revealing of the original contents of the
pamphlet. The passage is very ironic, so when it says ―leave him totally
abandoned while he was still alive‖, it can be distinctly understood as ―make
him starve to death‖. This is also suggested by Alcidamas’ reaction, who made
any reference to this event disappear, for the sake of Homer’s prestige.
―Creophilus‖ seems the typical case of a text corruption hidden by a proper
name. Plato says he must have received from Homer an education as ridiculous
as his name, which means ―descendant of the flesh‖. But the correct
etymological breakdown of Creophilus is not ―kreos phyle‖, as Plato interprets
it, but ―Kreion phyle‖, which means ―Kreion’s line‖.
23
So, according to the pamphlet, the family of Kreion of Samos caused Homer to
starve to death and was the owner of the original of the Iliad. So it is better to
leave the pamphlet and those who tried so hard to explain it and ask directly
about Kreion himself.
WHO WAS KREION?
We need to realize that the name, so sonorous and categorical, means nothing
other than ―the most powerful one‖ or ―the chief‖ no less. In the Iliad, Kreion is
the father of the divine Lycomedes (IX, 84) who stands guard with six other
distinguished young men, all identifiable and very prominent. That special
guard of young heroes watches over the moat that runs round the city walls
while the Achaean captains attend a dinner in Agamemnon’s tent. All this
happens by order of old King Nestor.
We should bear in mind that these were not the city walls and moat of Troy, but
the defensive construction that the Achaeans had made to defend themselves
from the Trojans, who were going to attack them. In the Iliad, those aspiring to
conquer Troy take refuge behind their own fortifications and are about to be
wiped out by the enemy; Achilles, their best warrior, refuses to fight; and
Agamemnon, their supreme leader, is only thinking about fleeing as soon as he
can.
At the dinner with the captains, Nestor advises going to Achilles’ tent in order to
placate his anger with soothing words and cool his temper with rich presents.
When, later on, the gifts and a courtesy visit to Achilles’ tent are agreed on, they
choose as ambassadors ―the most select young men of the lineage of the
Achaeans‖, according to Agamemnon’s words (XIX, 193). Among the seven
chosen, once again Lycomedes, the son of Kreion appears.
Another very honorable appearance which the author of the Iliad grants
Lycomedes, son of Kreion, takes place in the middle of battle (XII, 366) where
he stands in for none other than Ajax, who has to go and do something else. But
the most glorious appearance in battle of ―Lycomedes, Ares’ favorite‖ (XVII,
346), is when he hurls his glittering spear and strikes the liver of the leader
Apisaon, the son of Hippasus, who immediately feels weak at the knees.
It is clear that the author of the Iliad treats Kreion and his son Lycomedes with
enormous respect and reverence. The first appearance of the Chief and his son,
in the Iliad, takes place in the Nestorean section. The passages of the poem in
which wise old king Nestor appears are known as such and they contain
portraits, names of sponsors, dedications, clarifications and acknowledgements.
The Cypria is the first work where the figure of Nestor appears as a means of
digression and in the Iliad, he is given the same role. Thales also turned to
Nestor when he decided to enlarge the Odyssey and insert some delicate
information.
24
IT HAPPENED IN SAMOTHRACE
The wall and the moat where the young heroes that are chosen as the
companions of Lycomedes, son of Kreion, stand guard, are structures built
according to Nestor’s instructions. They belong to the framework of what is
appropriate, familiar, and known to the poet and audience of the Iliad. They are
the walls and defenses of their city.
On the other hand, the walls and bastions of Troy are an extremely famous
setting of which everyone has heard in song or word, but which the audience of
the Iliad does not have before its eyes, because that tale took place a lot earlier
in another place.
What those first listeners of the Iliad did know was who Kreion and his son
were, and what vicissitudes the city had undergone since its founding, the
internal divisions that took place, and the war that was necessary to overcome.
Because the Iliad not only narrated beautiful, amazing things that took place far
away, and back in time, but also represented, by means of those heroic acts,
events that were close to the poet and his audience, which had taken place not
so long ago.
There are passages in the Iliad where the poet clearly alludes to that closer
setting. For example, before the meal with the chiefs, Nestor reproaches
Agamemnon for his stinginess (IX, 71): ―Your tents are full of the wine that the
ships of the Achaeans bring you every day from Thrace over the seas‖. Every
day! If this is not the oldest mention of the Alexandria-Samothrace ferry, let
Poseidon come and see it. There were not many places in Homer’s time, apart
from Samothrace, which is thirty kilometers from the Thracian coast, where a
ship could transport wine on a daily basis from that precise coast. To sail to
Troy, every day, from Thrace, might seem possible on a map to the eyes of a
layman, but in the center point was the current of the Hellespont, which
complicated the journey for a Homeric ship.
Another moment when the Iliad alludes to the setting of the poet and his
audience, is to be found a few hexameters before the appearance of the Thracian
wine, when the Achaeans sacrifice some oxen after finishing the wall and are
preparing for the meal. At that moment, the narrator points out that some ships
loaded with wine have docked, but that these had come from Lemnos (VII, 468).
It is immediately stressed that this is a gift to the great leaders, from whom the
curly-haired Achaeans have to buy the wretched wine at an abusive price.
From Lemnos, apart from the exclusive wine for the lords, came one of the
contingents of Greeks who colonized the island of Samothrace in the first half of
the seventh century BC. The other significant group came from Anatolia.
Agamemnon also remembers the origin of one of the contingents that colonized
Samothrace, when he harangues his men (VIII, 230): ―What happened to all
those boastful words you used so vainly in Lemnos, seated around the table
25
overflowing with curly-horned beef and with your goblets full to the brim of
wine? Were you not going to kill a hundred or two Trojans apiece?‖
Before continuing with the credentials of Samothrace, we need to quickly point
out that the allusions in the Iliad to the avarice and abuse of Agamemnon lead
us to think that his character does not represent Kreion, the Chief, so feared and
respected by Homer, but some other earlier tyrant because the Iliad was written
once all that had taken place and it was clearly known who was in charge, and
who could be criticized. On the other hand, Agamemnon ends up very badly in
the traditional saga and would never be a good model to use to flatter someone.
Whenever Samos is mentioned in the Iliad it means Samothrace, except in the
catalogue of ships (II, 634). Samos appears at other points in Classical Greek
letters which also refer to Samothrace. Particularly, ―Creophilus of Samos‖ and
―the Creophili of Samos‖ are expressions from the pamphlet, mentioned by
many authors, which must be read as ―the lineage of Kreion of Samothrace‖.
As is natural, there is a notable Thracian presence in the Iliad. Thracian horses,
weapons and handmade goods are referred to. Ares and his son the Terror are
from Thrace. The first of the enemy killed by Agamemnon is Thracian.
One of the particularities of Samothrace is that it has winds that blow like a
treat. That is due to the fact that Boreas and Zephyr, the winds of the north and
west, live in Thrace and always blow over Samothrace in their professional
comings and goings. The indecision and dread of the Achaeans inside their wall
is described as follows in the Iliad (IX, 2): ―They were paralyzed by superhuman
Panic, the companion of icy Terror; all the most valiant men were struck with
unbearable anguish. Just as the two winds, Boreas and Zephyr, that stir up the
waves full of fishes, blow with violence when they come from Thrace and tear
apart the dark waters with foamy crests, dragging the seaweed up out of the sea,
so were the hearts of the Achaeans torn in their breasts.‖ On their way home,
after setting ablaze the pyre for Patroclus, the two winds blew again ―over the
sea of Thrace and infuriated the waves‖ (XXIII, 230).
But the most notable mention of Samothrace in the Iliad comes at the beginning
of Book XIII. It is, as they all are, an allusion woven together with others that
refer to the mythical setting of Troy. Zeus turns his gaze from Troy and looks far
away from there, to the ―country of the Thracians rich in horses‖ which is the
country from which they come every day to bring wine for Agamemnon. In his
gaze, Zeus also sees, among other things, ―those who milk mares‖ who do not
belong to the mythical tale but to the recent past of the poet and his audience,
because it refers to the Eurasian nomads who invaded Lydia and Ionia at the
end of the eighth century and beginning of the seventh century BC.
Meanwhile, Poseidon, he who shakes the earth, is seated and observes the battle
with admiration from ―the highest peak of Samos, the wooded, the Thracian‖.
Why does he choose such a place from which to observe? The reason the poet
seems to furnish (―from there Ida appeared to him, and also the city of Priam
and the ships of the Achaeans‖) could be, at best, a wildly optimistic description
of the divine views to be enjoyed from the peak of the tallest mountain in
26
Samothrace, but it is no reason for Poseidon to sit precisely in that place. Why
did he then?
NOBODY RIDES
Strabo tells us (VII, 20) that Samothrace was known simply as ―Samos‖, because
the ancient Greeks called ―elevations‖ ―samoi‖. That leads us to think about the
root ―sam‖, present in other Indo-European languages, with the meaning of
―joined‖ or ―single‖. The Greek ―Samos‖ are not only islands, they are also
characterized by having a mountain that gives them their characteristic profile
and which made them suitable for worship of the unnamable goddess.
When in the Iliad it says that Poseidon attends the combat with admiration,
seated on a sacred mountain, taboo because it was dedicated to Opileks, a
controversial and sacrilegious statement is being made from the point of view of
any Samothracian who was a believer in the goddess. The same cultural crisis,
reflected in the Gilgamesh poem in the early centuries of the second millennium
BC and in the terrible offence against Opileks perpetrated by Thales in Gortyn in
624 BC, took place in Samothrace at the beginning of the seventh century BC.
The Greek colonists who arrived in Samothrace from Lemnos and Anatolia
believed in Poseidon over and above the goddess of fertility, more than
sufficient reason for a holy war if that occurs in a holy place, where the
unbelieving newcomers founded a city. In Samothrace, worship of the goddess
had been deep-seated from a long time before. The eastern influence of the cult
is perceptible in the ―kabeiroi‖, ―koribantas‖ and other names of the guardian
gods: they present a Semitic root krb, the same as the cherubim in Biblical
Genesis and the same as the Mesopotamian karibu, who is a guardian god to be
prayed to and who intercedes before the goddess. When Gilgamesh on his
adventures reaches the peak of Mount Masu, he finds it guarded by some
guardian gods whose name also present the krb root.
Poseidon’s high seat in Samothrace is much more suitable for watching the
combat taking place in front of Palaiopolis, the city where the Iliad was written,
than for spying on Mount Ida and the city of Priam. From the peak of Fengari,
the highest peak in the mountain range in Samothrace at a height of 1,624
meters above sea-level, the whole stretch of land can be seen perfectly, land
excellent for agriculture and battle, stretching from the island’s only anchorage,
by Cape Akrotiri, to the walls of Palaiopolis, up against the north-western tail of
the mountainous massif of the island, the most rugged foothills of Fengari, a
place of cult to the goddess of fertility.
In one of the most illustrative passages of the Iliad (IV, 422), the way combat
took place according to the city and the nature of the enemies of the Greeks is
described: ―Just as along the length of the resounding slopes the serried ranks of
waves on the sea break, driven by the Zephyr, rising first out at sea and then
crashing on the beach or rocks and their fervor breaking apart on the crests
leaving behind the salty foam, thus marched into battle, unceasingly, one after
another, the phalanxes of the Danaans. Each chief commanded his men, who
followed him in silence, so you would not say that all those people advancing
27
had a voice in their throats, moving onwards thus, silent and obedient to the
captains, while the engraved armor they wore shone brightly. The Trojans on
the other hand! Just like the sheep in the pens of their wealthy owner in a
countless horde with their udders swollen and ready to be milked, that bleat and
are not silent when they feel the lambs suckling, in the same way the cries of
their vast army rose. Because the voices were not all the same, nor were the cries
the same as each other; the languages were all mixed and the men belonged to
different peoples.‖
You could say it was an army marching in formation to fight a disordered horde.
In addition there is the extremely important reference to the diversity of
tongues. Samothrace was a place of pilgrimage for speakers of Thracian, Iranian
and other languages. Perhaps the scandalized pilgrims were only linked by the
conviction that the city founded by the Greeks was an extremely grave
profanation that it was necessary to extirpate. Archaeological information
reveals that later a certain kind of religious syncretism came about; but, until
that moment arrived, there was war.
The famous hoplite phalanx, described here by Homer, did not require each
soldier to have a horse, an extremely expensive item to transport in considerable
numbers to Samothrace and which also required maintenance. Nobody rides in
the Iliad. But those attacks in formation, contemporary with the poet and his
audience, where the colonists can be seen fighting shoulder to shoulder
defending their city and their property are often followed by a description of an
archaic type of hand-to-hand combat, meticulous and moving, where every
brain shattered and every belly spilled had an illustrious owner with a name,
parents, a kingdom very fertile in sheep or horses, and a corresponding legend
about his high-class lineage.
In the Iliad, an important atavism of that world of palace aristocracy is reflected
in the establishment of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles as a
crucial point of the argument and the demoralization it caused among the
Achaeans, terrified behind their city walls, divided, timid and ineffective in the
face of the enemy’s attack. Apart from criticism made by a man of law to the
disabling old arbitrary style of aristocratic authority, we can perceive the
suggestion that Samothracian Palaiopolis not only underwent a war outside its
walls, but also a split within the city walls, between the colonists from Lemnos
and those from Anatolia, which was on the verge of causing them to lose the city
they had founded.
That danger was what the Greeks called ―stasis‖ and it divided cities.
THE AUTHOR OF THE ODYSSEY RE-READS THE ILIAD
The epic motifs present in the sculptures and reliefs of the altar for offerings in
the sanctuary at the acropolis in Gortyn belong to Hesiod’s Theogony and
Thales’ Odyssey. The absence of the Iliad indicates that this work was unknown
by the general public before 624 BC. The narration of the 51 epic days facing
Troy did not become famous until it was sung by the Homeridae a decade later.
It is true that before 624 BC Thales had read the Iliad and was impressed. But it
28
can be seen that it was a late discovery for him. The writing of the Odyssey
shows that its author knew the Iliad, following Hesiod’s work, the Gilgamesh
poem and the Cypria. It all suggests that the final writing of the Iliad and
Homer’s death occurred in the decade between 660 and 650 BC.
The original poem of the Odyssey, the one composed by Thales in Gortyn,
reveals itself to be the work of someone so impressed by the power of the Iliad
that he proposes to demonstrate the existence of literature beyond it. From the
opening to the descent into Hades and the interview with the dead heroes, the
poem is threaded with a defiant breath contrary to the values in the Iliad.
Thales’ poem was not ―Homeric‖ in its first draft, but rather distanced itself as
much as possible from the world of the Trojan epic.
In Miletus, Thales read it again. He also found out that the author of the Iliad
had held a position similar to his own and, above all, he found out what
happened to him.
Then Thales was motivated to compose a great work, not to compete with the
Iliad, but worthy of standing at its side. In order to transform that daring poem
into the Odyssey, he thought up a plot whose new elements, the behavior of the
suitors, the attitude of Telemachus and Penelope, and the return of Ulysses, was
focused on the subject of justice, and came together by means of a contrast with
the story of the return and the death of Agamemnon.
Ulysses returns late, but with good fortune; Agamemnon returns early and
disastrously. The suitors are evil men who covet Ulysses’ property; they will get
nothing and they will be deservedly punished; Aegisthus betrays Agamemnon
when he is away, has him treacherously murdered as soon as he comes back and
takes his kingdom from him. Penelope, Ulysses’ wife, maintains her
unbreakable fidelity; Clytemestra, Agamemnon’s wife, is a model of treachery.
Telemachus is a very polite young man whose father, Ulysses, lives so long and
is so extraordinary that he does not allow him to come to anything; Orestes
doubly avenges his father, Agamemnon, and becomes particularly famous with
his matricide of Clytemestra.
The strictly adventurous passages also took on moralistic, avenging hues. The
Cyclops, for example, are ―athemistoi‖ (IX, 106): ―they have no divinely founded
legal constitution, they have no council meetings or laws‖. This is a note from a
legislator. That is where Ulysses’ ethical warning in XVIII, 141-142 came from:
―Let no man be ―athemistios‖ (lawless, iniquitous) on any occasion.‖
SOMETHING UNPRECEDENTED
In this entire reworked narrative, the role of old Nestor is fundamental. Since
the story of the return of Agamemnon acquired the importance of an exemplary
counterpoint in the great enlargement of the Odyssey, Thales thought up the
idea that Nestor should tell it to Telemachus, who still did not know it.
In a great epic poem that deals with a known subject matter, any intentional
variation from the traditional tale is a warning and an allusion to the nearby real
29
setting where the audience and the poet live. This happens in the Iliad, when
Poseidon watches the action from an unusual place. And it happens too in the
Odyssey, when Nestor introduces an even more unusual element into his
account of the death of Agamemnon. In passing, and as though not meaning to,
he mentions the death of a certain divine aoidos, endowed with a noble soul,
and who apparently protected the wife of the king of Mycenae. But just where he
mentions his name there is a text corruption which leaves us in the dark.
There where the name of the divine aoidos should be (III, 266), it says
Clytemnestra! In other words, the name of Agamemnon’s wife, but with a
spelling error, a tiny misprint: mn instead of just m.
As is normal in text corruptions and however absurd it may seem, the passage
has been read with no problem since time immemorial. In other words, before
seeing if the corruption can be corrected or if it sheds any light on the matter, it
is necessary to prove that there is a corruption. How can you prove such a thing?
By proving that in the original, written by Thales, it was completely impossible
for him to put Clytemestra, and that any other name from the index of names
would be more likely.
WHAT DEATH DID AEGISTHUS DEVISE FOR HIM?
Before Nestor can make such a sensational revelation, because it was unheard of
for an aoidos to guard a queen while her husband conquered Troy or performed
heroic acts far away from his country, Telemachus asks him how Agamemnon
was killed (III, 249): ―What death did Aegisthus devise for him, being such an
expert with ropes, since he killed one much stronger than he?‖ Thaletic irony
puts the answer in the question itself. What kind of death is an expert with rope
going to devise? Well, death by rope, young man. A little before, Athena also
told him (III, 235) ―just as Agamemnon died, under Aegisthus’ rope and by the
hand of his own wife‖. It was very well publicized, a known event, announced
from the beginning of the Iliad. But no one wrote it down. And in a couple of
generations, the event went from being very well known to totally unknown.
Aegisthus, who does not appear in the Iliad, is repeatedly referred to as a ―rope
expert‖ in the Odyssey. The adjective ―dolometes‖, which is usually understood
in the broad sense as ―specialist in lures and traps‖, is applied here in the strict
sense to define the character, because it alludes to his most famous act.
At the beginning of the Iliad, it says that the quarrel between Achilles and
Agamemnon was provoked by Apollo. The cause was that Agamemnon gravely
offended his priest, Chryses, when he stood before the ships of the Achaeans
and offered a rich ransom for his daughter. Chryses was bearing Apollo’s golden
scepter in his hands and was decked in his symbols, which were ribbons or
garlands. All the Achaeans could see that the priest had come holding the
symbol of his office, and they were in agreement to show him profound respect
and to accept his proposal. All, except Agamemnon. His first words in the Iliad
prophesy his death (I, 26): ―Let me not find you near our rounded ships, old
man, neither skulking here now nor coming back another time. Because then
neither the garlands nor the scepter of the god will help you at all.‖
30
That was it. He said it himself. It does not matter that he gave back Chryses’
daughter; his offense against the symbols of Apollo remains standing. Who
could think that the god might forget it? A dozen hexameters before we are
warned that, enraged by Agamemnon, Apollo stirred up the differences between
the Achaean leaders and unleashed a deadly plague on the army. And did
Agamemnon, the cause of his anger, think he would get off scot-free?
Apollo’s scepter and his hanging symbols were looming over Agamemnon. They
were waiting for his return to Troy. As soon as the rope expert, Apollo’s
symbols, and Agamemnon’s neck came together in the same place the god’s
decree would be carried out.
And now what shall we do? If no one wrote about it, how can we find out? No on
e wrote about it in detail, it is true; but Thales did rather more than that. There
was a reason he was a poet. In two hexameters he put together the murder, how
it was carried out, what Clytemestra did, and how it left Agamemnon looking.
Putting all that together was a huge challenge for the artist who set himself the
task of reflecting it in a sculpture worthy of its model.
AGAMEMNON’S FACE
These were things that could only happen in Crete. For an ambitious poet and
sculptor to coincide. No doubt there was mutual admiration and appreciation
between them, because the sculptor was named in some famous lines by the
poet.
Not only was the Odyssey born in Gortyn, but also the first life-size busts and
statues in Greece were carved there. In this case, given that the model measured
a couple of hexameters, its portrait in sculpture is a relief of 8.4 x 6.2
centimeters, which comes to one square hexameter. It too, like the name of
Opileks, awaited discovery under the rubble of the old altar in the sanctuary at
Gortyn. And this relief must have met with some success, because on the same
site the remains of a copy have been found.
It is a picture that immortalizes the banquet held in Mycenae, to celebrate the
return of King Agamemnon from Troy. The welcome feast takes place in
Aegisthus’ palace. Agamemnon appears with his entourage consisting of his
personal guard and a concubine or two chosen from among the daughters of
kings and high priests that the great king of Mycenae has subjugated. At the
moment of the toast at the banquet, Aegisthus and Clytemestra will place on his
brow the garland of a great celebrated king. The sovereign appears with his
finery and insignia as Head of State. He seems to wear them displayed on his
chest, fanned out, in the style seen in some sculptures of pharaohs like
Akhenaton who carry a couple of scepters of the kind that are shaped like a
small crook in the same way. There is something Egyptian in the Gortyn
sculpture, a vague atavism overcome by the expressiveness and movement of
the figures.
31
But not only is the scepter of Apollo hanging over Agamemnon: there is another
one in the air. The one which, according to the tale in the Iliad (II, 101), was
made by the divine artisan Hephaestus who gave it to Zeus who passed it on to
Hermes who placed it into the hands of Pelops, the horse tamer, who gave it to
Atreus, the village shepherd, who, when he died, passed it to Thyestes, rich in
herds, who allowed Agamemnon to bear it and to reign by means of the
ingenious artifact over Argos and countless islands.
Between Agamemnon and Aegisthus there is a score to be settled, a very old and
complex one. It is said that Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, and Thyestes,
Aegisthus’ father, were brothers. At one time they joined forces to kill their
other brother, Chrysippus, and take over his Olympian kingdom but then they
fell out when Thyestes took up with Atreus’ wife. In the midst of all that
quarrelling, Atreus killed his own son, believing he was killing Thyestes’ son,
and to set things straight he killed, this time more accurately, the sons of
Thyestes and got the latter to eat them. After the meal, once he knew what it was
all about, Thyestes asked the oracle how he could be avenged on Atreus. The
reply was that he would only be avenged through a son he would have with his
daughter Pelopia, who would then become Atreus’ wife. Thyestes had a son
called Aegisthus by his daughter Pelopia who abandoned the child because she
was ashamed. A shepherd found the baby Aegisthus and took him to court,
where he was brought up as a son of Atreus and a brother to Agamemnon. One
day uncle Thyestes told Aegisthus that he was not his uncle, but his father and
grandfather and that Atreus was his uncle, and that there was some vengeance
pending because he had only given the scepter temporarily to his nephew
Agamemnon, son of Atreus and cousin to Aegisthus, and that if he, Aegisthus,
got hold of the scepter he would reign over Mycenae which was rich in gold.
The whole thing is about scepters. But, however much you look for one in the
relief found in Gortyn, and even conceding that there may be one represented in
the drapery over Agamemnon’s chest, you cannot see one clearly. On the other
hand, you can see a beautiful garland.
On top of all this, what Agamemnon does not know is that his wife, Clytemestra,
has an understanding with Aegisthus and lives in his palace with him.
With such antecedents, the artist who carved the relief found in Gortyn sought
to represent the critical moment of the banquet that Aegisthus held for
Agamemnon, according to the suggestive description that appears in the
Odyssey.
In the centre of the picture is Agamemnon, sitting on a carved stool that has
curved legs and no back or arms. His legs and hip are turned to the left, in
profile; his body and face are to the front. Over his chest and shoulders he is
wearing a voluminous cloak draped over his arms as far as his elbows and
falling behind him almost to the floor. On top of the cloak, at chest height, he
carries a sword in its scabbard crosswise; and crossing over that, a spear.
Agamemnon’s left hand is holding the spear which is resting on the tiled floor.
Behind Agamemnon stands Aegisthus; his left hand is holding the spear over
Agamemnon’s shoulder so that he cannot stand up. The spear does not allow
32
him to stretch his left leg out in order to stand up. It is as though he were caught
in a trap.
On the left, Clytemestra, with her body in profile, is leaning slightly towards
Agamemnon. She is wearing a long dress down to her feet with vertical folds, a
high waist and a wide belt; her hair is in very long braids held back behind her
ears and falling over her shoulders and back. She has a triangular face, a small
mouth, prominent and slightly slanting eyes, a straight nose and a sharply
pointed chin.
So many details can be seen because the scene is audaciously staged from the
point of view of Cassandra, the seer. Clytemestra is coming towards her and is
going to kill her right now with the dagger she is pointing at her in her left hand
while with her right hand she is dealing with Agamemnon, who seems
burdened, perhaps with a headache.
Aegisthus’ face, on the other hand, presides over the top right-hand part of the
relief, and appears outlined by the prominent curve of the mass of his hair and
his Egyptian-style beard. He is wearing a cloak with folds that leaves his chest
and arms free. He has his face and torso to the front and his legs are turned to
the left. His right arm is in the position of a happy organ-grinder giving agile
turns to the wheel which cannot be seen because it is behind Agamemnon’s
head. A long ribbon decorated with a series of spherical motifs between two
bands hangs over his right shoulder and arm and runs down his body to the
height of the head of Agamemnon, who is trying to get the ribbon off his head
with his right hand. Clytemestra is preventing him from doing this by holding
on to his wrist. The ribbon does not only go over Agamemnon’s hair, it also goes
very tight round his neck. Aegisthus is strangling him with a garrote technique.
The scepter, with its practical staff-shape, acts like a tourniquet at the back of
his neck.
33
In the Odyssey, when Ulysses goes down into Hades to visit the dead and begins
to see the first dead people, he describes them in the attitude, appearance and
clothing in which they died. It can be seen that everyone goes down into Hades
just as they are caught by death (XI, 38): ―Girls, young men, old people who
have suffered greatly, tender wives with recent pain in their souls, and many
wounded by bronze weapons, men killed in battle with armor stained with dried
blood crowded round the grave with unspeakable cries, and I was gripped with
pale anguish.‖
And the garroted man appears (XI, 387): ―The soul of Agamemnon, son of
Atreus, came, the sad one, and all around him gathered the others who had died
and suffered the same fate as he in the house of Aegisthus. And he knew me
immediately, as soon as he set eyes upon me, moaning loudly, weeping
copiously and he stretched out his hands trying to take hold of me but he no
longer had the strength that he once had in his flexible arms.‖
With his eyes popping out of his head, his mouth wide open, moaning loudly
and with his hands rising and falling, Agamemnon goes around garroted for all
eternity, with the garland tight round his throat and the scepter at the back of
his neck, tied in a pretty bow. As Thales is rather mischievous he suggests that
Ulysses should query him, as if he knew nothing of his fate (XI, 397): ―Most
glorious son of Atreus, Agamemnon, lord of men, what kind of pitiless death
overcame you? Was it Poseidon who overcame you in your ships, after having
called up a harsh hurricane with deadly winds? Or were you killed on land by
hostile men when you were attempting to carry off their cows and beautiful
flocks of sheep? Or were you perchance fighting for a city and its women?‖
Agamemnon replies (XI, 409): ―Aegisthus, having planned my death and
perdition with my wife, killed me after having invited me to dine in his house,
like an ox is killed in the stable. And so I died a miserable death.‖ And regarding
Clytemestra, he points out (XI, 423): ―... then, on the floor, I raised and let fall
my hands, dying with the sword in my chest. And the bitch left me there and, as
I went off to Hades, and did not deign to close my eyes and shut my mouth with
her hands!‖
He was unable to draw his sword and once he was lying dead on the floor it
remained on him, just as he was carrying it, crossways and decorated. Thales’
black humor ends with the complaint of Agamemnon, who, as would be normal
with someone who has been villainously garroted, is left with his eyes popping
out of his head and his jaw wide open. In view of the fact that his wife was not
kind enough to make his face look better, the illustrious dead man was
condemned to forever wander around Hades looking like that. The revenge of
Apollo, who does not miss a trick.
The sculptor of the relief at Gortyn took note of that expressive end and set
himself the challenge of rendering Agamemnon’s face that way since it is the
central topic of the scene where all the actions and attitudes of the figures come
together. We should bear in mind that he was sculpting a face which measures
barely one centimeter from forehead to chin in the relief. The resource he uses is
unique in the history of the plastic arts: Agamemnon has four eyes and two
34
mouths, only the potato-shaped nose remains singular in the midst of all this
exorbitant multiplicity.
With that face, adds the dead man (XI, 432): ―She [Clytemestra], an outstanding
expert in horrors, has poured dishonor upon herself and all women to come,
even if there were an honest one amongst them‖.
THE DIVINE AOIDOS
If Thales presents Clytemestra like this in the most ancient strata of the
Odyssey, it is not possible for him to call her ―divine‖ and ―endowed with a noble
soul‖ when he extends the poem to give her the role of an absolutely ―wicked
woman‖ in contrast with Penelope, the ―good woman‖, with no cracks
appearing.
The expression ―endowed with a noble soul‖, which takes up half a hexameter
and is a special ―extra‖ that Thales reserves for carefully selected characters,
appears three times in the Odyssey. One (XIV, 421) refers to Eumaeus, the
faithful swineherd and another (XVI, 398), to Amphinomus, the ―good‖ suitor,
Penelope’s favorite, the one who tells Ulysses disguised as a beggar of his good
fortune, the one who behaves like a generous hero by preventing the other
suitors from killing Telemachus so that Telemachus can then comfortably kill
him without the young man even having performed any acts of heroism. There
is no doubt: Thales reserves that flattering half a hexameter for characters who
are clearly ―good‖.
The other occasion in which the phrase ―endowed with a noble soul‖ appears is
the strange passage we are discussing where he refers to the divine aoidos,
whose unprecedented intervention in the well-known AgamemnonClytemestra-Aegisthus triangle is an extremely compelling novelty with which
Thales meant to say something very unusual.
Now given the fact that it is impossible for Thales to have written
―Clytemnestra‖ in this hexameter of the Odyssey (III, 266), we must see if the
corruption provides any hints. The curious error of mn instead of m is the only
indication. It is a fossil leftover of the original word that stands out like an
island in the middle of the corruption. At first sight, mn is the only thing we can
know about the name of the divine aoidos endowed with a noble soul to whom
Thales’ wished to pay tribute.
But that stubborn mn root, which has remained incrusted in the middle of the
misunderstanding through several risky copies, means ―remember‖ whenever it
goes, as it does here, accompanied by its corresponding vowel. So the fossil
measures three letters: mne. Furthermore, another one can be seen, in the
initial Clyt... which is part of the appreciative prefix usual in masculine names.
Those two fragments determine the size of the glass shoe that only the name of
the divine poet can fit into.
The restoration can be summed up as follows:
35
Κλσηαιμνήζηρη: ―Clytemnestra‖ the corrupted text that hides the original name.
Κλυταιμνήζηρη: ―Clyt...‖ ―...mne...‖ fragments of the original name legible in
the corrupted part.
Κλυτ#μνή### : Length and structure of the original name determined by the
nature of the fragments and their position in the hexameter.
Κλυτομνήμων: Clytomnemon, ―sublime memorizer‖, the original name
restored.
THE FATE OF CLYTOMNEMON THE AOIDOS
The hexameter scans the same as before, it has the same number of syllables
and the same distribution of long and short syllables. The difference is that now
it makes sense. And, with it, the story of Clytomnemon also makes sense.
Clytomnemon, the divine aoidos who was charged by Agamemnon to watch
over Clytemestra, and who was abandoned on a desert island to be the prey for
the birds to feast on.
The story of Clytomnemon runs barely ten hexameters in Book III of the
Odyssey, from number 265 to number 275. But it is anticipated by the same
number of lines that can be read mixed in among the conversations between
Telemachus and Athena and Nestor and which introduce the funereal, elegiac
tone of the information that the poet is going to offer.
This is how the tale of the fate of the aoidos Clytomnemon goes in the Odyssey
III, 231-275:
231 Even if from afar, a god may, if he wishes, save a man.
[...]
236 But death which levels us all, even the gods
237 cannot prevent, even if it is that of an esteemed man,
238 when he is caught by fatal destiny and pitiless death.
[...]
240 Mentor, let us not speak of these things, however much they afflict us.
241 For him there will be no return, for him
242 the immortals prepared death and dark perdition.
[...]
258 Upon him, once dead, they would not have placed the soil of a grave,
259 but he would have been left to the dogs and birds,
260 outside the city, in the country.
[...]
265 It is true that at first he did not accept the reprehensible act,
266 the divine Clytomnemon, endowed with a noble soul,
267 for next to her was this heroic aoidos, who was earnestly charged by
268 the son of Atreus, when he left for Troy, to take care of his wife.
269 But when fate in the hands of the gods determined that he should die,
270 having taken the aoidos to a desert isle,
271 he was abandoned there, to be prey for the birds to feast on.
272 – For his part, the willing man took the woman willingly to his house. –
273 Numerous ox haunches he burned on the altars of the gods
274 many gifts, and cloths, and also gold,
275 having performed the great act that he never expected in his heart.
36
The name of the person who took the aoidos to a desert isle to die and then
made all that fuss about giving thanks to the gods is not mentioned. The text
only allows us to see that it was ―fate in the hands of the gods‖ that ―abandoned
[him] there, to be prey for the birds to feast on‖ but that underscores even more
the lack of a name.
In the old reading it was supposed that Aegisthus was the unnamed author of all
that extravagance for having carried out ―the great act that he never expected in
his heart‖. However, for an audience contemporary with Thales it was very well
known that Aegisthus’ ―great act‖ consisted of killing Agamemnon and then
ruling for seven years over Mycenae, rich in gold, as Nestor would recall thirty
hexameters further on (III, 305).
Carrying off the lady who was wanting to be carried off is no ―great act‖, and
even less a thing that Aegisthus ― never expected in his heart‖. This evidence is
reinforced by the disdainful expression ―the willing man took the woman
willingly‖ in hexameter 272, which is a legal joke. It belongs to the jargon that is
common in matters of adultery, rape, matrimonial ties, and kidnappings, both
desired and undesired. As can be read on the famous legal wall in Gortyn, the
fine for such a willing adultery was reduced by half. The expression may be
compared with ―he who was unwilling with the willing woman‖ which is used to
describe the way in which Ulysses and Calypso slept together (V, 155).
The final hexameter in Clytomnemon’s story, which says ―having performed the
great act that he never expected in his heart‖ is made up of famous recycled
material: the first half is from Hesiod (Shield, 38) and the second part, from the
Iliad (XVII, 404), where these words refer to the event that Achilles never
expected in his heart: the death of Patroclus.
By ending the story of the fate of Clytomnemon with a hexameter so easily
recognized, Thales shows that he wishes to confer the utmost importance to the
event he narrates and at the same time it demonstrates even more strongly his
intent to silence the name of the tyrant who ordered and celebrated the death of
the divine aoidos as ―the great act that he never expected in his heart‖.
GOD-LIKE THEOCLYMENUS
In Book XV of the Odyssey, Thales introduces ―god-like Theoclymenus‖ with
great pomp and circumstance. With this character the poet behaves in an
unprecedented way in the epic genre.
Theoclymenus is presented as a distinguished fugitive belonging to a very
ancient lineage that is famed in the art of divination and prophecy. Among his
ancestors are the extremely famous Melampus, a seer who knew the language of
animals, the handsome Clytius, who was kidnapped and made immortal by
pink-fingered Aurora, and Polypheides, a celebrated seer by special decree from
Apollo.
37
The exceptional thing is that it is not said by the man himself when he questions
Telemachus, or Nestor, as would be obligatory in normal epic usage, but Thales
himself who shows an unprecedented interest in defending the new arrival.
Once his great proficiency as a prophet has been established, the new character
is taken to Ithaca where he stays in a palace until the poet orders his glorious
appearance in Book XX in the key scene so that god-like Theoclymenus can
make the climax of the crisis more intense by prophesying the outcome grandly
and infallibly .
In fact, in view of such unusual treatment, it cannot be said that Thales
dedicates the Odyssey to god-like Theoclymenus but that he offers it to him with
religious devotion like someone who sacrifices his most valuable goods to a
divinity.
Who could this Theoclymenus be, to be the object of such adoration on the part
of the author of the Odyssey? ―God-like Theoclymenus‖ is an anagram of ―divine
Clytomnemon‖. A venerable urn in which the letters in the aoidos’ name are
gathered together but set in different order out of consideration for religion.
Because Thales does not use the name of god in vain. He says it once and that is
sufficient. The Theoclymenus anagram has an added aspirate T at the
beginning, the same initial letter as ―god‖ (theos) and ―god-like‖ (theoeides), to
give it an even more divine look. Such insistence on the divinity of those letters
is an attempt to attract indirect attention to the name of the divine
Clytomnemon, which is what Thales wishes to transmit, entire and emphasized.
All the unbelieving daring that Thales shows before the unnamable Opileks,
hidden in a complicated way in other names, here becomes the respect and
fervor of someone with real faith in the divine Clytomnemon, piously
represented in the urn ―god-like Theoclymenus‖, to whom the Odyssey is
offered.
With regard to the technique of the anagram, it is necessary to know that in the
seventh century BC, Greek was written from right to left. You began writing
from the top right; if the text was longer than one line, it continued on the next
line, from left to right, and then back again from right to left, coming and going,
just like a plough, when a yoke of oxen is preparing a field. Small letters and
punctuation did not exist and words were not separated. That is how the text of
the Gortyn Code runs and that is how the text of the Odyssey would also go.
Reading and writing words continuously the right way round and backwards,
together with Thales’ particular musical taste, meant that making anagrams
would be a very natural technique for him.
Regarding Theoclymenus in the Odyssey, the anagram is not only an object of
worship which saves the real name from impious use, by preventing donkeys
from defecating on it, it is also a guarantee that the only mention of
Clytomnemon is not wasted, because the wicked Clytemestra is capable of
anything, even of placing herself in front of him.
38
It would have been necessary for there to be not one but nine corruptions
without any hints, eight of them in the same name but in eight widely separated
passages, to invalidate the whole Theoclymenus system which acts as a
custodian and transmitter of the real name.
TO SAY AND NOT TO SAY
For Thales, the sentencing and execution of the divine Clytomnemon
represented a significant event that he never expected in his heart. Because the
eye-catching hexameter partly constructed with well-known material from
Hesiod and Homer is not only of consequence for the one who ordered and
carried out that death but also for the poet himself since everything indicates
that the news came as a shock to him and it changed his writing and his life.
The author of the Iliad, who may be supposed to be of the same generation as
Kreion, must have been condemned during the tyranny of Kreion’s successor. As
far as we know, the colonization of Samothrace took place as a consequence of
the tide of emigration that originated in Anatolia because of the onslaught of the
Cimmerians. During the first half of the seventh century BC, the terror caused
by the successive falls of Phrygia and Lydia at the hands of the city-destroying
Cimmerians made many Greeks return from Anatolia to the Aegean Islands and
continental Greece. At that time Samothrace and Thassos were colonized,
having been places that were previously of little interest to the Greeks in the
past. Homer, so named because his father was a hostage of the king of Phrygia,
belonged to a priestly, memorizer, royal line, for which reason he held a high
position as arbiter in the political order of those who arrived in Samothrace. In
addition, he was long-lived. The tyrant of the next generation must have become
impatient.
The Akrotiri promontory meets the conditions, described in the Odyssey and
the pamphlet, for the place where the abandoning of the poet took place, leaving
him as prey for the birds to feast on. In the formula Thales omits the dogs which
did not reach this place, indicating that the condemned man was classed as
noxious and that there was an order from the tyrant to purify the island of any
of his remains. On the other hand, according to the pamphlet, it was a place
where Homer was seen and heard, and where he begged food from the
fishermen who returned from their labors.
Kreion’s line had no problem in selling authorized copies of the Iliad, whose
original they owned and, as is natural, we immediately notice Lycomedes,
Kreion’s son. But we must not forget that Thales was also the editor of the Iliad.
The communicator of the names of Opileks and Clytomnemon was not going to
be so unwary as to do the same with the name of the tyrant who ordered the
death of the seer. He was not going to make him famous. After all, fame is the
central topic of epic poetry.
The most likely thing is that Lycomedes is a name placed there as a sign and
that the term ―Kreion’s line‖ is all that Thales allows to be known about the one
who ordered the death of the author of the Iliad.
39
Together with the precaution of leaving the tyrant unnamed, Thales shows
extreme interest in preserving and communicating with all certainty the name
of Clytomnemon. With that in mind, he places it in a sealed grave which he
buries in the text of the Odyssey. At first sight, the container that holds the
name is a word that appears to be an errors and exhibits a mistake. But the
passage about the aoidos abandoned on a desert isle is deliberately shocking
and confusing with the purpose of calling attention to that unexpected
―Clytemnestra‖ name and its supposed mistake which is clear enough to offer
the key to find out what name it hides.
Something no real mistake would ever do, no matter how extreme it was.
Furthermore, the ―mistake‖ figures in hundreds of ancient manuscripts, both on
papyrus and on parchment, not only in the passage about the abandoned aoidos
but also extended to the other mentions of Clytemestra, including those in the
Iliad.
Such a proliferation of ―Clytemnestras‖ can only be due to the fact that the
author of the Odyssey deliberately wrote the wrong name in that passage (III,
266) and from there it spread to the others. As that text hides the name at the
same time as it reveals it, something that an anagram repeatedly proves, it is
necessary to conclude that Thales turned to cryptography, not just as a way of
protecting delicate information, but also for poetic emphasis.
Reading the name behind the veil has the effect of making an extraordinary
word appear in the world. A word that the poet wishes to emphasize over and
above all the others.
WHAT DID THRASYBULUS KNOW ABOUT ALL THIS?
That the Odyssey was the work of Thales and that its being attributed to
Homer and the movement of the Homeridae was beneficial for Miletus and
Ionia. Also that the revelation of the real author of the Odyssey would be
detrimental to the prestige and dignity of the important role as conciliator that
Thales fulfilled and would be very prejudicial to the smooth functioning of the
tyranny.
Thales and Thrasybulus were in agreement about everything and their
respective talents matched perfectly for political action. Besides, they lived
together, according to the testimony of Minyes which is reported by Diogenes
Laertius. So they not only formed an efficient duumvirate, but they also loved
each other and made an extraordinary couple.
Certainly when Thales was paying tribute to Thrasybulus in the Odyssey and the
Iliad, he never thought about those wicked things which, according to what is
said, some tyrants do to divine poets.
What do you do to put someone into an epic? It is not easy to find a good
passage into which to insert some showy deed that will not clash with the
gigantic heroes who slice and cut each other up, and you also need a lot of skill
for the resulting figure to appear to have been woven into the picture all the
40
time. In a word, you would have to be a real ―Thales man‖, as Aristophanes says
(The Birds, 1009).
It was lucky that a certain Thrasymedes, who not only is similar, but is also
practically a synonym of Thrasybulus, figured among the sons of Nestor listed
by Hesiod. This Thrasymedes had the interesting quality that neither in the
Iliad nor in the well-known traditional saga was he killed. Only Hesiod credited
him with ability with a spear, which is always useful.
In the first Odyssey, the double-edged axe, the symbol of power, appeared in
Ulysses’ hands in the scene with the pine tree that reached the sky. In that first
text written in Gortyn, Thrasymedes the son of Nestor did not appear. On the
other hand, when he is settled in Miletus and undertakes the enlarging of the
poem, Thales introduces Thrasymedes as a counterpart to Thrasybulus, and
places in his hands the symbolic axe so that he can sacrifice a bull by cutting the
tendons at the back of its neck (III, 448) in a similar way to Gilgamesh when he
kills the Celestial Bull (VI, V, 3). It is the longest and most detailed scene of
sacrifice in the epic and it includes the assistance of Athena. The role of
Thrasymedes is very significant because of his pre-eminence.
But a veteran tyrant like Thrasybulus could not be granted anything but a star
part in the Iliad as he was loved by the only poet capable of creating that part for
him.
Thrasymedes’ first appearance in the Iliad takes place within the list of young
heroes chosen to stand guard between the city wall and the moat that defends
the Achaeans. All of them obey ―Nestor’s son, Thrasymedes, the leader of
peoples‖ (IX, 81), who is the leader of the new generation and whose name
appears first while Lycomedes the son of Kreion, closes the list.
The next appearance seems almost like nothing. It begins carelessly.
Thrasymedes does not even appear, only his shield which his father, Nestor,
takes away without realizing it when he rushes out to survey the battle at the
beginning of Book XIV. Thrasymedes’ shield was in Nestor’s tent, left there by
chance, conveniently at hand for the old king in hexameter 10. Then before
reaching the middle of number 11, ―the son took his father’s shield‖. Which
means that Thrasymedes got hold of Nestor’s shield and never let it go again. He
goes off with it down the hexameters and through the battles, no one says
anything and he becomes the owner of the beautiful object for ever more.
Apart from being made of gold, including the grips, what was it about Nestor’s
shield that it should seem so desirable to Thales, so much so that he sticks his
pen into the Iliad, removes it from its owner and offers it to his favorite as if it
were the most valuable thing in the world? Let Hector, the killer of men, say it,
when he harangues his horsemen and indicates a reference point in the battle, a
valuable object to acquire, because if it falls into their hands they will achieve
victory: ―Nestor’s shield, whose fame reaches unto heaven‖ (VIII, 192). There is
the image of which Thales became enamored and from where he got his ―kleos
ouranomakes‖. In itself, ―kleos‖ (fame) is an acoustic concept, it is what sounds,
what can be heard. In this passage of the Iliad its visual meaning shines forth,
its golden glow that reaches the vault of heaven and finds reflection in
41
everyone’s eyes. A fame which is heard, is seen, and is immortal, because, with
Nestor’s shield, Thales steals primogeniture and turns Thrasymedes, the hero
who will never die, into the heir to the throne of Neleus, the father of Nestor.
There are many indications that the four hexameters in the Iliad (XIV, 8-11)
where Nestor rushes out to survey the battle, takes Thrasymedes’ shield and
Thrasymedes in turn takes Nestor’s, can only be by the author of the Odyssey.
One of the most obvious is the use of a phrase of Hesiod when describing Nestor
as he takes the shield that is not his. Thales does not make it look as if he takes it
by mistake or as if it were an unimportant detail; rather he blows a trumpet to
tell us: Nestor lays hold of Thrasymedes’ shield with the same words with which
Heracles brandishes his famous shield at the high point of Hesiod’s poem (The
Shield, 139). For Thrasymedes to immediately get ownership of Nestor’s shield
seems so logical and natural that it only deserves half a hexameter.
Once he is in possession of the greatly valued shield, Thrasymedes needs to be
provided with the heroism of a man killer. There are so many examples of such
men in the Iliad that it would be easier to insert a dozen that do not attract any
attention, such as that of Lycomedes, than to invent a single one that is really
special and unprecedented.
And were Thales and Thrasybulus not really special and unprecedented? Not
entirely, because they had a very famous literary model, Gilgamesh and Enkidu,
who love each other and perform deeds in close collusion as though they were
singing duets of braveness. But they kill a single extremely ugly monster, either
a giant or a bull, between the two of them; a praiseworthy deed but definitely
possible to better if two good men kill another two bad men.
The preparation for Thraysmedes’ warlike exploits in the Iliad begins in the
Odyssey. Antilochus, Thrasymedes’ brother, already appeared in the early
edition (XI, 468) as one of the dead heroes whose souls are seen by Ulysses in
Hades. But the protagonist of the Odyssey does not address him because
Antilochus is a secondary hero since his deeds in the Iliad are secondary and
always in the shadow of the great ones. In the enlarged version Antilochus is
mentioned with praise. Nestor remembers him as ―my beloved, strong and
intrepid son, Antilochus, so speedy in the races and such a warrior‖ (III, 111)
and later it is stressed that ―he was not the worst of the Argives [...] outstanding
among all others, both in the races and in combat‖ (IV, 199-203).
Antilochus had the interesting quality that his established skill consisted of
having the honor to have told Achilles of the death of Patroclus and, when he
came to the aid of his father Nestor, of being killed by Memnon, the most
handsome hero ever to be seen. He was immediately avenged by Achilles who
killed the beauteous hero. With this role in mind, it was enough to place him
beside his brother Thrasymedes who does not die and, in addition, bears the
shield of Nestor, for him to become the young hero who was not known to have
a wife, a very tenacious fighter and survivor in the sancta santorum of the
Trojan epic. Surely Thrasybulus was going to be pleased with his poet.
In the Iliad (XVI, 321) god-like Thrasymedes – who is only called this in this
passage and in the sacrifice already mentioned in the Odyssey (III, 414) – kills
42
Maris, the brother of Atymnius, who had previously been killed by Antilochus. It
is the only passage in the epic where two brothers kill two other brothers. It is
true that there is another arch-fraternal duel in the Cypria – Castor and
Polydeuces against Idas and Lynceus -, but Castor, one of the good ones, falls
there, and Polydeuces kills the bad ones, so it is not perfect. Furthermore, the
particular achievement of this passage in the Iliad is that by killing the two
brothers the line of Amisodarus, ―he who nurtured the Chimera, the monster
pernicious to very many men‖ (XVI, 329) is exterminated. The deed of
Antilochus and Thrasymedes therefore consists of freeing humanity from the
epigones of opilexic religion which, not by chance, have Cretan names.
The creation of that world of deeds exclusive for two is completed in Book XVII
of the Iliad, where Antilochus and Thrasymedes enjoy a ―battle apart‖ (382) a
term unique in the epic. While they fight in that exceptional and exclusive
limbo, beyond gods and men, they are the only ones who do not know about the
death of Patroclus. Finally, Menelaus tells Antilochus the news so that he can
leave the fight, go to Achilles’ tent and tell him the news that will precipitate the
fate of both of them.
The divine Thrasymedes is left in charge of the men of Pylos, continues the
battle and goes on fighting with nothing further being said about him. He does
not stop, he does not set down Nestor’s shield and thus stays forever in the
monument, that being the poet’s gift.
ACHILLES’ SHIELD
The Iliad also had a new edition corrected and augmented after the peace treaty
between Lydia and Miletus in 602 BC. The main new item was the description of
the prodigious shield of Achilles: a report on the war and the period after the
war in Miletus.
The city that celebrates weddings and festivals on the beautifully engraved
shield represents Miletus during the peace celebrations. In the agora they
discuss the indemnity corresponding to a man who has been killed. One of the
litigants claims his right to pay, and thus leave the debt entirely cleared; the
other will not accept any offer. It is a situation typical of the end of a war, when
the forgetfulness mentioned in the Odyssey was not sufficient, and conciliatory
sentences had to be handed down. In the middle of the circle of elders who
make up the court which will decide on the compensation, can be seen Thales
who is holding the scepter, issuing a just sentence and taking the money.
The second city engraved on Achilles’ shield in the Iliad represents the recent
past of Miletus, which was besieged and attacked by the Lydian troops under
Sadiates for six years, and a for further six by the army of Aliates, the successor
of Sadiates. The first assailants had the intention of carrying out the taking,
sacking and destruction of the city. The others showed their will to negotiate
and proposed to split the riches with the besieged townspeople who would leave
on foot with their lives and the attackers would keep the city.
43
Furthermore, on the shield there is a battle scene engraved, a trick, where those
besieged pretend to be on guard on the wall, but actually come out to break the
siege and start a bloody battle on the banks of the River Maiandros. Miletus
suffered at least two important defeats during the war but the land siege that the
Lydians wished to set up turned out to be useless in view of the great power of
the Milesian fleet. The battles were on land but with no effective result for either
contender except for the many dead. According to Herodotus, the Lydians
slashed and burned the Milesian fields every year.
The country scenes that come next on another border of the shield show the new
prosperous and peaceful situation where people plant crops and get to harvest
them and where people work on the lands belonging to the venerable
conciliator-king.
On the other hand, the recent past of the Milesian peasantry as defenseless
victims of armies that gave them no quarter or even a chance to defend
themselves is represented in the scene where a herd of cows is attacked by two
lions and the cowherds and their dogs are helpless to do anything.
In contrast, in yet another section, the present is engraved with lush vines and
the herds grazing in the meadows of a beautiful valley. Then comes a greeting to
Daedalus, a friend who was doing very well at the time in Gortyn where he ran a
very famous school. All over the shield there are many dances and agile
performers which is what Thales most liked.
The description of Achilles’ shield is inserted into a critical point in the Iliad just
when Achilles is about to put aside his anger, so that it interrupts with the same
literary criterion that Thales uses to cut off the action in the Odyssey (XI, 333)
when Ulysses is telling the Phaiakians about his exclusive interviews with the
dead and interrupts the story.
Not only is it an obvious imitation of Hesiod’s The Shield of Heracles, but it also
develops his doctrine regarding peace and justice (Works and Days, 217 et seq.,
225 et seq.): ―Justice demands an end to unbridled violence but the foolish man
learns this through suffering. [...] The city of those who pronounce fair
sentences on foreigners and on their own citizens is prosperous and the people
blossom therein. Peace which nurtures youth reigns in the country, and Zeus,
who sees all, will never send them a terrible war. Neither ruins nor famines will
ever be among those men of righteous conduct, for they celebrate their banquets
with the fruit of their labors in the fields.‖
The passage seems to be the moral of the historic scenes represented on
Achilles’ shield. In the period after the war in Miletus, Hesiod’s text must have
seemed to Thales to be a wise prophesy.
BETTER PEACE
Around 600 BC, Thales knows that he has promoted a version of the Iliad for
over ten years without a didactic conciliatory shield and also an Odyssey
without Ulysses and the relatives of the suitors he has killed having come to an
44
agreement to rescind the blood debt. So he feels a pressing need to compensate
for that lack of a hymn to peace in his two works.
In the Odyssey the word ―peace‖ did not appear. To make up for this grave
deficiency, Thales ensured it had an eminent place in the new edition because of
the great news that was being celebrated in Miletus. He had it proclaimed by
Zeus as a pious desire for the future (XXIV, 486): ―let there be wealth and peace
in abundance‖.
The Iliad, on the other hand, mentioned peace on three occasions, but always
referring to the past. With the shield of Achilles, Thales introduced into the
poem horizons of time and place that were totally different from those
established until then in the tale. In the new edition, the scene engraved on the
shield, where the litigation can be seen between a man who wants to pay and
another who will not accept any compensation for a man who has been killed,
foretells the meeting between Achilles and Priam at the end of the Iliad.
In that way, the Iliad that Thales edits, after peace is established in Miletus,
ends at a previously announced point which suggests the eternal return of
conciliation and armistice.
In the original end of the Iliad, Achilles feels sorry for old Priam, he accepts the
compensation he is offered for the death of Patroclus and hands over the body
of Hector. The two leaders dine together at Achilles’ invitation and Priam thus
breaks a twelve-day fast. The king and the hero who has killed his sons gaze at
each other in astonishment. Priam notices with admiration how big and strong
Achilles is and how he looks like one of the gods. Achilles is amazed to see such
serenity in Priam’s face and to hear him talk. After the meal, with their hearts at
peace after looking at one another, the old king asks for a bed, since he has not
slept since Achilles killed Hector. Once the beds are ready, Achilles jokes about
the possibility that the Achaeans may find out about Priam’s presence in their
camp and the handing over of the body may be thwarted and then he
immediately asks how many days the Trojans will need to do honor to Hector.
Priam calculates twelve days. Achilles replies that the fighting will stop ―for as
long as you order it‖. Next, the murderer of Priam’s sons has the warmest
gesture of his poetic life: he shakes the right wrist of the old king, ―to remove the
fear from his heart‖. Then, they both retire to their rooms under the same roof
as Achilles plays host to the enemy king and has agreed an armistice with him
without the Achaeans knowing. Then both gods and men sleep. All living beings
in the poem are subject to sweet sleep for two conciliatory hexameters, as if
engraved on a shield (XXIV, 677-78). That was the first ending of the Iliad.
The Odyssey also ended with Ulysses and Penelope going off to bed (XXIII,
296) but peace was declared and the epic had to be extended. With the Iliad the
same thing happened. Hector’s funeral, shorter than Achilles’ shield, was
composed by Thales in honor of the dead man who had been waiting for a
funeral to take place during the last two books of the poem. Seen from the city,
which was only just celebrating peace, Hector was a dead man without a burial
and this was not dealt with in the original version of the Iliad. But the educator
of the Greeks had decided not leave a single body unburied in his works,
45
because due tribute to the fallen was a necessary duty to comfort the hearts of
the survivors.
In the funeral sermon for Andromache it can be noted that Thales has read the
works that continued the action further, after the death of Achilles. When he has
Helen intervene in the funeral he introduces the only mention of the twentieth
year that appears in the Iliad. Helen says she has spent that allotted time away
from home, reciting a formulaic hexameter which is repeated in the Odyssey.
Thales slips that formula into the poem about Achilles’ anger in such a way that
it links it with the one about the return of Ulysses which did not take place
before the twentieth year, according to what is repeated a dozen or so times.
A TOMB FOR ELPENOR
Also the result of the conciliatory poetic work after the war is the passage in the
Odyssey (XI, 51-83) where Thales, on realizing that he also has dead men left
unattended, decides, even if after the event, to honor the deceased Elpenor and
grant him a dignity that he had not given to the character when alive. In the first
version of the Odyssey, Elpenor is presented as useless for combat, a confused
drunk who killed himself with his own ineptitude and who fulfilled the role of
scapegoat in the necromantic rite required to enter Hades. In the post-war
version, Elpenor stands first in line of the most famous dead men and justifies
his drunkenness as being due to the intervention of a god. He asks Ulysses to
build him a tomb to grant him dignity in a scene with clear echoes of the one
that takes place in the Iliad between dead Patroclus and Achilles.
According to the norm, neither his origin his position, his actions, or the death
of Elpenor made him deserve such honors. But with peace having arrived in
Miletus, it changed the rule by superior order. Elpenor thus became an example
of a fallen man who, like all of them, had to be dignified with a proper
conciliatory funeral.
THALES’ LEGACY
After the solemn festivities at Delos in 590 BC, and before the expulsion of the
population of Smyrna and Colophon at the hands of the Lydians in 585 BC, an
anonymous pamphlet appeared in Miletus and the Ionian cities. It began with
the words Homer and Hesiod, the most divine poets.
At that time Thales was over 75 years old. During the last decade, this man of a
thousand concerns had not only dedicated his time to writing new editions of
the Iliad and the Odyssey but had also composed peace treaties, post-war
lawsuits, and diverse public works of commemoration, such as the building of a
temple dedicated to Athena in Miletus and the reconstruction of another temple
in honor of the same goddess which had been burned down during the war in
Assesos, a Milesian territory. He even had time to rent all the olive presses in
Miletus and Chios, just before the great post-war olive harvest.
46
The author of the Odyssey had come to see extraordinary things, as ―a tyrant of
advanced age‖. And he answered delicate questions wittily: ―asked why he had
fathered no sons, he said it was because of his love for boys‖ (Laertius, 26).
The pamphlet is Thales’ ethic and literary testament. With it he starts up an
extraordinary and unprecedented genre. Because when he announces that he is
going to reproduce the reply of the Pythia in hexameters or uses phrases like
―adjusting to the meter‖, he expressly places his text outside metrics, and that
defines it as the first literary work in prose.
The text that has come down to us consists of 338 lines and shows traces of its
lengthy journey on paper through the hands of compilers, inserters and editors.
In spite of all that, the work is substantially in an excellent state of conservation,
so the testament of Thales can be read practically in its entirety.
At the start, the pamphlet names Homer first and then Hesiod, not by chance
but because that order indicates that the former is older in years. The elder
Homer was about fifteen years older than Hesiod, and Homer the son was some
fifteen years younger. Hesiod did not know the Iliad but he did know other
works by Homer, father and son.
The text does not mention the passage from Works and Days (650 et seq.)
where Hesiod says he has won a prize as a poet at a funeral. He only proposes
the narrative fiction of a contest of poets in which Homer is defeated by Hesiod
and, around that literary excuse, Thales writes a biography of Homer.
The three home countries suggested for Homer are Thales’ three favorite
schools for Homeridae: Chios, Smyrna and Colophon. It is significant that
Anaximedes, a Milesian born in 580 BC, should be of the opinion that Homer
was a native of Smyrna, because the famous Homeridae who arrived in Miletus
after being expelled from their city by the Lydians came from there.
The first work attributed to Homer in the pamphlet is Margites: ―When he
taught letters, he started out in poetry and first composed Margites‖. The
passage is authentic because it was read both by Plato and Aristotle and it would
be necessary to conjecture an earlier insertion which is very unlikely. However,
the one who did teach the arts in his time as a young phoenicist in Gortyn was
Thales, the author of Margites, a comic anti-Odyssey where the protagonist
shows unbridled obtuseness. Margites was probably read by way of a jocular
interlude during performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
THE NAME OF THE FATHER
The mention of his father and the explanation of Homer’s name contains
extremely valuable information and says almost everything that Thales knows
about it (29 et seq.):
“According to some [...] he was called Altes (an anagram of Thales). Regarding the name
Homer, some say it was due to the fact that his father was handed over as a homero (hostage) by
the Cypriots‖.
47
At the same time as he reveals his own name, Thales explains the origin of the
most famous pseudonym in history. Half a dozen lines earlier he mentioned the
name of an authorized scribe who is the father of the author of the Iliad. The
profession could only be exercised by a caste, and Homer, as the final epigram
informs us, was also an authorized scribe.
But Thales, who communicates his own name hidden in an anagram and also
the name of Clytomnemon with an even more elaborate technique, cannot
simply write down the name of Homer’s father. Hiding the name has set a
precedent; by now, for the testimony to be trustworthy it is necessary for it to
possess a minimal cover out of respect. In other words, a certificate of thaletic
manipulation as a guarantee of authenticity. That can be read in the pamphlet,
where Mενέματον is the hidden way of writing Mνήματον.
Homer’s father was called Mnemachus. He was the king of Paphos and high
priest of Aphrodite. His name means ―he who fights by means of his memory‖
and he was the author of the Cypria.
A passage in Herodotous (II, 117) shows that at the time, attributing the Cypria
to Homer was an old common opinion, which enlightened men like him
attempted to refute by showing its contradictions with the Iliad and the
Odyssey. In spite of that, that old common opinion was right. The Cypria is the
work of Homer the Elder.
It was Thales who planned and carried out the attribution of the Iliad and the
Odyssey to an ambiguous and vague Homer with the aim of preserving his own
name and that of Clytomnemon.
THE TWO AMBROSIAN SIRENS
After line 32, Thales introduces into the pamphlet a tone of testamentary
solemnity with the use of the future and the first person plural: ―We shall set out
what we have heard about the reply of the Pythia to the most divine autocrat of
torrential eloquence relating to Homer.‖
The ―we‖ refers to Thrasybulus and Thales, the tyrant and the conciliator-king
who wish to publish the verses in their hearts. ―Autocrat‖, a word that first
appeared in Greek letters here, bears the meaning of ―without heirs‖ or ―without
succession‖ in the tyranny and refers to Thrasybulus. The adjective ―adinou‖
(torrential), which presented the error ―adianou‖, was corrected by the editor,
Stephanus, who turned it into ―Adrianou‖, which meant that in this passage it
could be read that the emperor Hadrian had asked the Pythia about Homer, and
a reliable reference was thus obtained to date the text seven hundred years later
than its real date.
There are only two examples in Greek letters where that adjective ―torrential‖,
generally used to refer to the voice, refers to persons in praise of their
eloquence. They are both from Thales. One, in the enlarged Odyssey, because of
the arrival of peace with Lydia, when Ulysses resumes his wandering and tells
48
(XXIII, 326) ―how he heard the voice of the two sirens with their torrential
eloquence‖, and the other in this pamphlet, written shortly afterwards, where it
refers to the eloquence of the tyrant Thrasybulus and of the person who
prepared his speeches for him.
So the most divine autocrat questioned the oracle on the Homeric question and
the oracle replied: ―You ask me about the lineage and country of origin of an
Ambrosian siren. He resides in Ithaca, Telemachus is his father ...‖ The
revelations are piling up. This passage, which seems insignificant, contains the
first declaration that the Iliad and the Odyssey are the works of different
authors and offers a fundamental key for reading in order to understand the
famous passage about the sirens. It does so in such a quick and clear manner
that the narrator immediately warns that those words deserve the maximum
credit as much ―because of who asked the question and who answered them‖,
those being Thrasybulus and Thales respectively, the ones who really knew what
went on.
Ambrosian means ―restoring of life‖. Ambrosia is the food of the immortal gods
and even the fodder for their horses because it repairs life. Its use as a balm
which heals and cleans is due to that same essence that restores the life forces.
For that reason it dispels the stink of carrion in the passage in the Odyssey (IV,
445) where it is used for someone to hide in the skin of a seal without smelling
the stench. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, night is repeatedly referred to as
Ambrosian because it repairs the wear and tear of life during the day.
The power of seduction and persuasion of the song of the aoidos is also
Ambrosian because of its ability to restore life. Fame, epic’s specialty, contains a
vital power, not only because it restores the lives of heroes, but also because it
comforts and encourages vital energies in those who hear them in song.
The revealing thing about the passage is that by calling Ambrosian the poetry of
―one‖ of the sirens who bear the name of Homer and declaring him to be the
author of the Odyssey, the pamphlet indirectly reminds us of the fact that in
that poem there are two sirens. Now we can understand why: the other siren is
the author of the Iliad. For the two poets that he himself has hidden under the
name of Homer, Thales vindicates the power of ambrosia which restores life,
and the virtue of the voice of the siren that ensnares because it suspends time
and space in the heart of the listener.
Both sirens tell Ulysses in the Odyssey (XII, 186): ―No one has passed by here
with the dark ship without listening to the sweet sound of our voices, but he
returns after having enjoyed it, much richer in wisdom. Because we know the
sorrows suffered by Argives and Trojans in the vast land of Troy at the will of
the gods. And we know all that happens on the fertile earth.‖
Both sirens sing the Iliad and the Odyssey! Ulysses wants to hear the song of his
life! He orders the knots that tie him to be loosened but his companions row on
and they move on into the Odyssey, until the voices of the sirens that sing the
Odyssey can no longer be heard. Then they remove the wax plugs from their
ears, free Ulysses from his bindings, and the Odyssey continues. For a moment,
Ulysses listened enchanted to the song that contains him but he has been
49
carried on in the song so that the song may continue. The effect of that eternal
return caused by the voices of the sirens comes back in Book XXIIII, when
Ulysses tells ―how he heard the two sirens with their torrential eloquence‖ who
were singing his song and also in the passage where he gets to hear it himself
and then tells about it.
Those siren effects which suspend time and space are also used in a masterly
way by Clytomnemon in the Iliad. The infuriated Achilles consoles his heart by
singing the glories of the men who sing to comfort their hearts and is astonished
when his song is interrupted by the characters themselves who have come to ask
him to intervene in the song (IX, 189, et seq.). From then on, nothing indicates
which of the songs is the Iliad which follows its own course.
A beautifully woven siren passage occurs when Helen weaves a tapestry of the
innumerable battles that the Achaeans and Trojans fought because of her and
Iris, the messenger of the gods, stops her in her work so that she can see how
the warriors have also called a halt to the battle. Then Helen comes out onto the
walls of Troy, and names the most eminent Achaean heroes, each with his own
special description and biography, as if she were making a picture of them with
her colored threads. And the singular battle between Paris and Menelaus is
interrupted because Aphrodite carries Paris off to a marriage bed with Helen, all
beautifully embroidered in a tapestry.
That passage in the Iliad (III, 125 et seq.) has its partner echo in the Odyssey
(IV, 120 et seq.), when Helen appears with the tools of the spinner, and weaves
the memories and lapses of memory of the narration that follows on.
Helen’s tapestry in the Iliad is described as ―díplaka marmaréen‖: with a double
sheen, which offers one view from the front and another at an angle which is
necessary to understand as a ―double meaning‖, for this is a tapestry and it is
war.
The shield of Achilles which was engraved by Hephaestus, also in the Iliad, but
the work of Thales, is circled by a glowing border ―tríplaka marmaréen‖: with a
triple sheen, understood as ―triple meaning‖ since it is a shield, it is war and it is
peace.
The shield is another Siren effect of the suspension of time and space, and
Thales is careful that the stage note which announces the triple sheen should
appear at the head of the description, just as Clytomnemon warns of the
presence of the double sheen at the start of the passage about Helen’s tapestry.
THE JUDGE WHO KNOWS ALL
Having established in the pamphlet the fiction of the poetry contest, we are told
that among the judges is the outstanding figure of Paneides (―he who knows
all‖). The verdict issued by this judge – also called a ―king‖, like Thales – which
concedes the victory to Hesiod, gave rise to the proverbial expression ―judgment
50
of Paneides‖ as a synonym for a legal decision established by an ignorant, unjust
man.
However, it is necessary to see that Paneides is not only the judge of the
competition, but also the alter ego of the author of the pamphlet which actually
is a full-blown indictment.
The part where the contest of literature and knowledge between the two most
divine poets is explained, is introduced by a clear warning (71): ―They say that
Hesiod won in this manner ...‖ The verdict is anticipated right from the start. So
each overwhelming partial victory by Homer does nothing other than to
highlight the supremacy of the cause mentioned by Paneides when he
pronounces the sentence that gives the final victory to Hesiod.
The foretold winner is the object of all kinds of literary thrusts. There is no area
of specialization where he is not defeated. Thales not only permits himself to
beat him with the toast pronounced by Ulysses in the Odyssey (IX, 6-11) but
also takes the opportunity to let us know the success that the pretty phrase,
known as ―golden lines‖, had and that everyone asked for it in offerings,
banquets and public libations.
Neither, in Homer’s name, does he deprive himself of, of a merciless score at
Hesiod’s expense, first in the contest of ambiguity and then, reaching the height
of abuse by inserting, under the pretext of the contest, a whole breviary of
thaletic sayings about life and morality, while Hesiod can only ask timid
questions. The public roars in support of Homer and asks for him to be given
the winner’s crown.
But Paneides the knowledgeable, orders each of them to recite his best passages.
Hesiod sings to agriculture, Homer intones a prelude about the hoplites.
The audience is impassioned and calls for Homer to be declared the winner. But
the conciliator-king is aware of how much he owes Hesiod, and how much he
has been abused. He grants him the winner’s crown and states that it is right
that the one who sings to agriculture and peace should win and not the one to
sing of war and slaughter.
In the graveside epigram dedicated to Hesiod (250 et seq.) the reason why
Thales declares him the winner over Homer can be clearly read:
... Hesiod, he of the greatest glory among men honed by wisdom.
It is not, therefore, a question of a literary argument, but one of wisdom. Thales
says that Hesiod was wiser because he sang earlier and more clearly than we
two, Clytomnemon and myself, to peace. We learned it later and he himself
prophesied it (Works and Days, 217): ―Justice demands an end to unbridled
violence but the foolish man learns this through suffering.‖
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DIVINE DIRECTOR OF HUMAN HEROES
In the last twelve lines of the pamphlet, Homer, abandoned on the rock in
Samothrace by order of the tyrant of Kreion’s line, begs for food from the
fishermen who are returning from their labors. ―Halieus‖ (fisherman) is a term
exclusive to the Odyssey where it designates the most humble trade. The most
divine one begs from the lowest of the low, the fishermen, who laugh at him
with the joke about the lice, a really old one, which consists of pretending that
one is drowning and raising one’s hands over one’s head, making as if to kill lice
with the thumbs. Homer understands that he is going to die and writes his own
epitaph. Finally he slips and fall on his side and dies two days later on the third
day of his abandonment on the rock, as prey for the birds to feast on.
The text ends with the two lines of the epitaph. ―Here the earth covers the
sacred head of ...‖ It can be compared with the passage in the Odyssey (XI, 554)
where Ulysses laments the death of Ajax: ―the earth covers such a head ...‖ and
with Theoclymenus’ taunt to Telemachus (XV, 262): ―I beg you in the name of
sacrifice, of god, and of your head ...‖ The adjective ―sacred‖ alludes to
Clytomnemon’s profession as a priest.
A little before that, the narrator has warned us that those two final lines were
written by Homer for his own tomb. It is, once again a confession that the
author of the pamphlet is Homer. In other words, the most modern of the three
poets who bore that name: Mnemachus, Clytomnemon and Thales.
It is the author of the Odyssey who wishes to highlight that this is his personal,
definitive sentence:
... divine director of human heroes.
There is no greater literary praise. It is the last line of his testament and it
contains Thales’ final tribute to Clytomnemon.
ENLARGEMENT OF THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY
The size of the Odyssey and the Iliad is expressed in the pamphlet with the
numbers rounded up. The Odyssey is awarded 12,000 lines which correspond to
the 11,920 of Thales’ last edition. It was like the current version minus the
insertion (XXIV, 1-204) included by the editor Simonides in the second half of
the sixth century BC.
For its part, the Iliad is assigned a length of 15,500 lines. The last edition,
inspired by the arrival of peace in Miletus, which included the shield of Achilles
and Hector’s funeral, was over 15,100 lines. It was like the present version
minus Book X which was also inserted by Simonides.
The division of the Odyssey into books, which is a little forced in order to put it
in line with the Iliad, is the work of Thales. The two poems had 23 books in the
editions prior to peace in Miletus.
52
Also the number of days the action covers in the Iliad was imitated by the
author of the Odyssey. Without counting Hector’s funeral, the Iliad’s action
takes place through the 41 days that Achilles’ anger lasts. The Odyssey does it in
the last 40 days of Ulysses’ return.
The two poems were sung in Ionian which was the dialect spoken in Miletus and
its allied cities. But each work maintains the imprint of the mother tongue of its
author. The Iliad has a Cypriot background and the Odyssey, Cretan. It is not
surprising that the grammarian Hellanicus of Alexandria should maintain at the
beginning of the second century BC that the Odyssey had a Doric dialectic
background – he did not say Cretan because he would have been fired –
something that the chief grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace, as was
natural, roundly denied.
HOW TO FLATTER WITH LITTLE EFFORT
The two large pieces added to the Iliad and the Odyssey by Simonides were
written by Stesichorus. It is to this poet that we owe famous pieces of cyclical
imagery, such as Achilles’ heel, the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, or
Helen’s stay in Egypt.
Apart from putting Stesichorus into the Homeric poems, Simonides did not
commit any further evils, and only composed four hexameters to flatter the
Peisistratan tyrants.
Peisistratus is the name of one of Nestor’s sons, a younger brother of Antilochus
and Thrasymedes. He did not go to Troy because of his tender age so he does
not appear in the Iliad; but he is an important character in the Odyssey, the
apple of Thales’ eye. He is the only son of Nestor who is still unmarried and he
becomes very friendly with Telemachus. So much so that Zenodotus expunged
the hexameters (III, 400-1) where it says that Telemachus and Peisistratus sleep
together because it suggested a homosexual relationship.
A Hellenistic legend held that the character of Peisistratus did not exist in the
original Odyssey and was introduced by some government poet in honor of the
tyrant Peisistratus. But Peisistratus has an essential part in the Telemachy and
it would have been necessary to compose the first four books of the Odyssey in
order to justify the insertion. In spite of that, the legend was based on reality.
The list of Nestor’s sons (III, 413-14) has not been made according to the norm,
starting with the eldest, but the other way round. That apparent arbitrariness is
due to the fact that in the accepted order, Perseus and Stratius would have to be
named one after the other, and it would have immediately been noticed that
those alleged sons bear names that correspond to the name Peisistratus, broken
into two parts.
The flatterer has not only taken care to cite them in reverse order, but has also
caused Stratius to be left at the end of a hexameter (413) and Perseus, at the
beginning of the next (414) so that his manipulation would be less obvious. The
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two invented sons of Nestor each have a hexameter (441 and 444) where they
carry out their parts in the sacrifice.
Those two assumed parts of the name of Peisistratus have important meanings
and allusions: Perseus is the hero who killed the Gorgon and Stratius
(―Stratios‖: warrior) is an epithet belonging to Zeus and Ares. In this way the
tyrant was flattered with four lines and not much effort.
As a consequence, Hesiod’s text (Fr. 35, 10), where Nestor’s sons are listed, was
restored in modern times with the inclusion of the false Perseus and Stratius,
while the more authentic Peisistratus was left out and remained dubious.
THE HYMN TO APOLLO
There was also the legend that Cynaethus of Chios had composed the hymn to
Apollo, substantiated by Thales in one of the passages in the pamphlet where he
allows himself to be clearly identified. At least until the burning of the temple at
Delos in 548 BC, the hymn was inscribed in its register under the name of
Thales, or rather under the pseudonym ―Khrysothemis of Crete‖ which in any
case also clearly referred to the author. The attributing of two hundred
hexameters to Thales by Lobon of Argos is based on that register.
The first part of the hymn until hexameter 206, except for Cynaethus’ greeting
to his fans (165-178), is the work of Thales who also speaks of his travels to
Delos in a passage in the Odyssey (VI, 163).
Since the pamphlet declares that the hymn to Apollo is the work of Homer who
was named as a citizen by all the Ionian cities after he performed it standing on
a pedestal, some Homeridae, such as Cynaethus of Chios, included it in their
repertory with personalized innovations, and later others were encouraged to
continue adding hexameters.
THE STATUE OF THALES BY DAEDALUS
On the other hand, a legend that will have to be taken a little more seriously is
that of Lycurgus. A curious temporal indication can be deduced from his
journey: The Homeric poems were already famous so therefore it had to have
taken place on a date after 613 BC. But the poet-legislator Thales is also
mentioned and so is Crete, in which case if he was still on the island it would
have to have been a date prior to 624 BC.
But Thales had no reason to be in Crete for the promotion of his judicial code.
Because in cases such as that of Lycurgus the great legislative wall of Gortyn was
extremely useful.
On the same dates at the end of the nineteenth century AD when the
extraordinary legal wall was found in Gortyn, a few paces away a marble statue
was dug up, two meters in height, representing a man of about forty years of age
in the position of an orator or declaimer who is facing the public. In his left
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hand he holds a rough laurel stick, still with bark, on which we can see all the
knots and shoots. The stick is resting on the ground, and behind it, at the
orator’s feet, we can distinguish two rolls of papyrus tied with ribbon.
Now we understand the layout of the monument. Facing the circular inscribed
wall stood the statue of Thales in a declamatory position as an eternal
communicator, editor, and guarantor of the great code. It is not strange that
illustrious visitors like Lycurgus would be impressed. When Thales left Gortyn
to become a king-conciliator judge in Miletus, he not only left the population
cured of the plague and purged of its old opilexic beliefs, but he also left them
the great code in stone and his own statue which recited the laws.
According to the legend provided by Pausanias, this is the sculpture which
Daedalus sculpted for the first time with eyes open, arms out from the body, legs
apart, and an expression of life that none of the previous ones had. Now, how
can we be sure that Thales of Gortyn is the person portrayed and, even more,
that this is the original statue that was put up in its monumental setting in the
final quarter of the seventh century BC?
The presence of the two rolls of papyrus, the Iliad and the Odyssey, at the feet of
the poet is the first suggestive indication.
As a first piece of reliable evidence there is the fact that on the head and drapery
of the statue, wide use was made of the drill bit, a tool whose use in sculpture
Thales knows very well, as shown in the memorable passage about the carved
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bed which closed the first edition of the Odyssey (XXIII, 184 et seq.). It is widely
known that Daedalus invented the drill bit, or at least received it from Athena.
In sculpture, Daedalus used the drill bit to transfer features from clay or wooden
models onto the marble.
Pliny the Elder refers to the fact that the sculptors Dipoenus and Scyllis,
disciples of Daedalus and native to Gortyn, introduced into continental Greece
for the first time a new technique for sculpting marble in the first half of the
sixth century BC.
Then there is evidence that has the value of a signature. The laurel stick that
Thales is holding in his left hand calls attention to itself because of its
roughness. The artist has worked carefully to recreate in the marble a laurel
stick which has not had its bark or shoots removed, which shows the knots and
recently pruned shoots. It would have been much less work for him to sculpt a
run-of-the-mill stick. However, it is the most carefully crafted part of the whole
piece. Why did he put his sculptor’s art on show to such an extent for such a
strange, marginal and inelegant motif?
Only Hesiod in Theogony 30-32 speaks of such an object: ―They gave me a
scepter, an eye-catching branch cut from a laurel with many knots on it. They
filled me with an inspired voice to make future things famous as well as things
which have been.‖
In the epic there are several models of scepter, apart from the one described by
Hesiod which is the scepter of the aoidos and which Thales had copied for his
statue. There are, among others, the scepter that appears on Achilles’ shield,
corresponding to judges who have the right to be speaking, the scepter that
distinguishes the orator in an assembly, the king’s scepter, and the scepter of the
priests of Apollo, which is a multi-purpose model with garlands.
In the Iliad (I, 234), Achilles swears ―by this scepter which will never again grow
leaves or shoots now that it has been separated from the tree trunk on the
mountainside and will not bud again, for the bronze blade has removed its
foliage and bark‖. On the other hand, the marble scepter in the statue of Thales,
which surely knew a time of blossoming when it had leaves and shoots sprouting
on it, shows its bark and the knots that stand out because it wishes to make clear
its inspiration from Hesiod and the poetic category of the man holding it. In this
regard, also in the Iliad (III, 219), old Antenor speaks about the way Ulysses
held the scepter and says that he held it firmly, without moving it forwards or
backwards, like an ignorant man, so that it would have been easy to take him for
a dull or stupid man until the torrent of words came out of his breast. The rigid
way in which Thales holds the scepter in his statue reminds us of the style of his
hero.
For Thales, that sculptured scepter was the high symbol of his name and
category. The epithet ―eritheles‖ (with many shoots, very leafy all round)
appears in Hesiod’s description of the scepter. It comes from the verb ―thallo‖
which means to grow shoots, to bud. For the author of the Odyssey, those were
not just any words: ―thales‖, which in itself means leafy, has, as a proper noun,
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the meaning of splendid. The sculpture with the stick displaying shoots also
works as a hieroglyph of the name of the man portrayed.
That unsmoothed scepter in the statue of Thales is a real measure of antiquity
and is the element that distinguishes the original from replicas. Because this
sculpture inspired many others, but the men portrayed in them were not there
to say what they wanted the scepter to be like. The result is very different when
it is worked on by a sculptor who knows this is the scepter of an aoidos inspired
on a specific passage in Hesiod’s Theogony, and when it has been crafted by a
person who does not know anything of that.
Thales’ scepter, in effect, followed its own evolutionary path. It became the staff
of Asclepius, the one with a snake entwined around it and Thales, the dictator of
laws and conqueror of Opileks, became the model for Asclepius, the
anagrammatic healer.
After all, the statue of Thales stood a very short distance from a very ancient cult
centre to Opileks, and the man portrayed by the statue had a great reputation as
a healer, prophet and singer of healing charms. Certainly Pindar informed us
that Asclepius cured through song.
But the sculpture portrait of Thales was not the only archetype for the horde of
Asclepius’ and Aesculapius’ that peopled the temples and today throngs our
museums. Another sculpture dug up in Gortyn provided the model for the head,
in particular the band over the hair, then also copied in portraits of gods, heroes
and athletes. This is the first sculptured self-portrait in history, and only the
head remains. It bears an unmistakable signature between the eyes: a triangle,
the letter delta: Δ, the initial of Δαίδαλος (Daedalus).
Not only did Daedalus portray Thales and himself, he also sculpted the figurine
of Opileks. The piece was worked on the lathe and the expert hand of the
craftsman is celebrated by Thales on Achilles’ shield (XVIII, 600-1): ―when the
potter caresses the lathe with his skilled hand to test its speed‖.
WHO WAS ULYSSES?
Thales’ literary valor is shown right from the moment of choice of the
protagonist of the Odyssey. It was no small feat of daring: one of the most
veteran heroes of the Iliad, who was already reigning before the Trojan war and
who tells the other heroes that he has lived, seen and experienced more than
they had (XIX, 219). Thales has that singular hero, who acts as his own Muse,
move outside of the Trojan world and gives him experiences that originally
belonged to other fabulous figures. He sets to with witches and giants, with
monsters and eaters of men. He goes down into hell and holds an exclusive
interview with the dead heroes. He has the resources of a shaman, a wizard and
a priest.
And, as he is good for everything, Thales entrusts him with the invention of the
―I‖ in literature (IX, 19): ―I am Ulysses, son of Laertes, famed among men for my
varied cunning and my fame reaches unto heaven.‖ It is such a barefaced
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appropriation of the characteristics of Nestor’s shield that Stesichorus
attempted to justify it, and in the poem which Simonides inserted into the Iliad
(X, 212) he has Nestor harangue the men and say that whoever goes into the
Trojan battlefield and comes back with one of them captive (something that
Ulysses will do) ―will have enormous fame under heaven‖. Stesichorus recreates
at this point (Iliad, X, 212) a line from the Odyssey (IX, 264).
When Ulysses reveals his name to the Phaiakians, he does it (IX, 17): ―so that
you may know it and then I, the survivor of the implacable day (the day of death,
because Ulysses always escapes that day), will be a guest among you (remain
lodged in your memory forever, that is have eternal fame ...) even though I live
far away.‖
Ulysses is the only first division hero not to die: the others have their fate
already drawn. In the eyes of Thales, this unfinished hero represented a
wonderful way out of that heroic Trojan world where everything was sung.
Where did the character appear from? He behaves curiously, for example in the
Cypria he goes out dressed up as a girl. In the Odyssey his close affinity to
Athena, the goddess who snaked her way into Crete, is particularly remarkable.
It is she who tells him (XIII, 298): ―you are the best of mortals in counsel and
word. I am famous among the gods for my intelligence and cunning‖. Another of
his peculiarities is that he is bald and does not like it. In the Odyssey (XVIII,
353 et seq.) they laugh at his baldness in a passage that can be compared to one
in the Bible where the children laugh at Elisha’s baldness, whose name reminds
us of Ulysses. In Book VI, Athena moderates his baldness with some hyacinth
curls, but in Book XIII, she removes the curls and leaves him bald again; in
Book XVI, he is blue-bearded and in Book XXII, Athena gives him back his
curls. All he needs now is to change his skin like snakes do.
Where does his name come from? Opileks, Olipeks, Olixes, Olisseus, Odisseus ...
Ulysses was also opilexic!
LOVE FROM HEAD TO FOOT
The high density of opilexic characters per square hexameter allowed them to
meet each other. The result could be a monomaniacal nightmare, frozen in time.
In her defense plea for Ulysses before the gods, Athena shows her concern for
the hero held prisoner in the dwelling of the nymph Calypso and remembers
that (V, 13): ―he suffers violent pains‖. Ancient commentators found the
expression to have an unmistakable implication. One could say that the hero
was subjected to terrible physical torment! They hurried to correct the bad
impression given by explaining that they were sufferings of the soul. But the
physical nature of the fearful pains Ulysses suffers in Calypso’s cave, daily and
nightly, becomes even more clear when the poet recounts how the hero spent
the day (Odyssey, V, 82): ―He sat groaning on the shore, tearing his soul with
sobs, lamenting and moaning, always looking out at the sterile sea through his
tears‖. That was during the day, because once night came, the ―violent pains‖
arrived, there in the back of the dark cave (V, 153): ―He no longer liked the
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nymph. True it is that at night he lay with her in the cavernous grotto, but by
force, he who had no desire next to the desiring one‖.
What can happen to a hero with no desire who sleeps with a desirous nymph
who has the power to make him (V, 136) ―immortal and without old age every
day‖? Under her spell, Ulysses gives opilexic services with atrocious pains, every
night for seven years. In Calypso’s pantry there is ambrosia (V, 199). Ulysses
recovers every day. But the ambrosia cannot bring forgetfulness. And Ulysses
wants to die.
Calypso has a clearly opilexic name; Ulysses too, although it is noticeably less
so. Everything takes place on an island situated at ―the navel of the sea‖, where
they are the only inhabitants. Antimachus of Colophon, a poet and editor of the
Homeric poems at the end of the fifth century BC, did not read ―Ogygie‖ in the
passages where Calypso’s island is named, but ―Ogylie‖, the old name for
Antikythera, the small island to the northwest of Crete where the currents of the
Libyan, Aegean and Ionian Seas come together. The centre of the eastern
Mediterranean, the navel of the sea.
The kidnapping of a hero by a goddess was a classic event. The goddess Aurora,
quoted as a model example by Calypso herself (V, 121), kidnapped half a dozen
lovers. The curse of Aphrodite had fallen on the goddess Aurora and she was
irresistibly sensitive to the attractions of handsome mortals. As is natural,
―phileo‖ (to love) is an opilexic verb. The outshot was usually that other gods
became jealous and struck the hero in some way, or sometimes the goddess
herself did it at the least sign of bitterness or discontent. Goddesses who
suffered the curse of Aphrodite, like Helen, Aurora or Calypso, caused the
perdition of many heroes.
Calypso is (VII, 246) ―a fearful goddess, nobody visits her, neither the gods nor
mortal men‖. To liven things up, she spends the day singing with her beautiful
voice (V, 61). And she plans to turn her victim into an ageless creature, so that
he will not fade away. Anyway, the fact is that Thales wished to make Ulysses
start out from a situation of extreme torture and despair. And in fact Ulysses
only gets free from an eternity of love because Zeus feels sorry for him.
Now, when the person who is possessed by Aphrodite is not an unsociable
Calypso but a mortal woman, what treatment is proposed for her in the
Odyssey? Something very original: an exemplary execution. When ordering the
death of the maids suspected of close contact with the suitors, Ulysses specifies
(XXII, 443): ―kill them all with long-bladed swords until they all have the breath
of life snatched from them and forget Aphrodite‖.
A couple of books earlier, still disguised as a dethroned Cretan prince, Ulysses
counts his sorrows and declares he has passed (XIX, 341) ―many sleepless nights
in unworthy beds‖. And he exclaims (XIX, 344): ―No woman shall touch our
feet!‖
Touching the feet is a very old euphemism for touching the genitals. The
unexpected plural ―our feet‖ does not refer to anyone present in the tale. The
solemn execration of women, which at first sight is the sweet memory that
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overcomes Ulysses when he remembers Calypso, the beautiful singer, brings
something more: it has all the signs of a matrimonial proclamation slipped
poetically into the Odyssey, a tribute from Thales to the couple made up of
Thrasybulus and himself.
In the story, it is clear that those women that Ulysses judges abominable are
those who have enjoyed Aphrodite’s favors. Those who must die in order to
forget the goddess. Ulysses has become mortally jealous of them: he uses the
verb ―phthoneo‖, which is usually used to refer to the jealousy that the gods feel
towards mortals, lethal to men. The only woman that Ulysses says he will not
envy if she touches his feet, is Eurychlea, the aged servant who was kidnapped
by pirates and then bought by Ulysses’ father. She has not enjoyed Aphrodite,
but rather ―has suffered in her heart as much as I have‖.
When Telemachus prepares to carry out Ulysses’ order to use his sword to
snatch away the breath of life from the maids who have known Aphrodite, he
reflects that this would be a too honorable death for them. So he creates a mass
execution in which he extracts from the feet of the condemned women the
pleasure they have had by means of compensatory torture. To do this, (XXII,
465) ―He tied a rope from a blue-bowed ship to the great pillar, and stretched it
up high, running all round the yard with its porticos, keeping it tight, so that no
woman should be able to reach the ground with her feet. And like large-winged
starlings or the doves that fall into a net set in a bush when they seek their nests
and they are welcomed by a bitter bed, so the women standing in a line kept
their heads up, and there were ropes round all their necks so that they should
die a dreadful death. And they kicked with their feet for only a little, not a long
time.‖
WHO WAS HELEN?
The name of this most beautiful woman has indications of having had an initial
digamma, a letter that was no longer used in Ionia when the Homeric poems
were written and which in archaic Greek sounded like ―v‖. That indicates that in
archaic Greek, Helen was pronounced Velena, which is very close to Dvelona,
the Roman goddess of war.
Velena and Dvelona are the names of War in archaic Greek and Latin. Among
the Greeks the term gave rise to Helena; among the Romans it became Bellona.
The meaning of the name of War can be seen in its Indo-European root ―uel‖,
which expresses pain through traumatism. It is a root that produces woe (from
Old English, wael ―slain‖); from it come in Latin ―duellum‖ (war), ―doleo‖ (to
hurt), or ―vulnus‖ (injury). The Indo-European goddesses of war, Velinas
(Lithuanian), Varuna (Vedic), Vellaunos (Gallic), Valis (Hittite) have names that
come from the same root.
The personification of War was far from being unusual in epic poetry, where a
whole array of characters swirls, urged on by Tumult, Terror, Flight or
Slaughter. Given the quality of the deeds celebrated in the genre, the goddess
War had to be the moving force behind all the action.
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A little before 800 BC, under the influence of the Phoenicians, the cult to
Opileks was established in Cyprus, spreading among the Greeks under the
advocacy of Aphrodite. In Crete, the same cult gave rise to the god Asclepius.
The two names, Aphrodite and Asclepius, are taboonyms of Opileks, or names
that are the result of the taboo that forbade saying the name outright, and
became famous through alphabetic writing, the adaptation of which into the
Greek language actually began in Crete and Cyprus at that time.
The exaltation of Aphrodite to the category of irresistible goddess and controller
of the will of Helen occurred throughout the eighth century BC and was the
work of poets who were already writing. Around 700 BC, Hesiod still perceived
Aphrodite as a newcomer because he thought it was necessary to explain the
origin of her name (Theogony, 195), something which does not occur in any
other case.
On the other hand, the goddess Velena, the personification of War and
predecessor of the character of Helen, was born and grew in the oral poetry
period of the second millennium BC, and moved on to a better life with the
advent of the written epic.
Amorous Aphrodite took over from the goddess Velena in her role as wife of
Ares, the god of war, according to what is suggested in this passage by Hesiod in
his Theogony (933-36): ―For his part, Ares, the perforator of shields, begat by
Kythira [Aphrodite], their progeny Fear and Terror, the dreadful entities, who
wipe out the tightly packed phalanxes of men in icy war together with Ares, the
destroyer of cities‖.
The Ares-Velena pair has a deep dovetail meaning. While Velena expresses the
pain caused by the wound, Ares means He who wounds and that is underlined
by his epithet, ―perforator of shields‖. So in the background to Hesiod’s writing,
the Ares-Velena pair are profiled: ―The painful Wound gave He who perforates
shields, two terrible sons, Fear and Terror‖.
In the Iliad, Fear and Terror are in effect the sons of Ares, the perforator of
shields, and drive his chariot, but nothing is said about their mother. Aphrodite
appears as Ares’ sister and only wishes Helen ill. She has such hatred of her that
she sends her out to rut, first with one and then another, and with Helen she
spreads warfare. When Aphrodite explains herself, she claims to provoke the
horrors of war out of the loving hatred she has for Helen (III, 415-17).
In the second century BC, poets inherited a picture of Helen with two
characteristic features: being the cause of the death of many men and acting as
an instrument of Aphrodite. The first feature belonged to War but poetic
convention demanded that it should be treated as a consequence of Love.
The Homers, father and son, had a great part to play in promoting the goddess
of Love. They were the last two generations of Cypriot poets to raise Aphrodite
to the highest level in the pantheon of the gods. In the Cypria, Mnemachus
celebrates the power of Aphrodite as the cause of war, not only for giving Helen
to Paris, but also for planning the construction of ships to carry off the riches of
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Sparta and to sack Sidon. Aphrodite manipulates Helen. And war follows Helen
wherever she goes.
A sensational novelty in the Cypria is that Achilles did not know Helen. One
epic day, before Troy, after having devastated the country and ravaged the cities
all around, he says he would like to see her. Aphrodite and Thetis organized the
meeting. We know nothing of what occurred between them or of the words they
exchanged. Only that afterwards Achilles carried on what he had been doing: he
killed heroes, destroyed cities and the Achaeans gave him the beautiful Briseis
as a prize. But instantly, as soon as the Iliad began, Achilles suffered the pain of
war, something he had not known before. First he was deprived of his property,
Briseis. Then he suffered the death of the one he most loved, Patroclus. Finally,
he himself fell in combat.
In his lament for the death of Patroclus, Achilles reveals that the reason for him
being in Troy, fighting, is ―the spine-chilling murderess, Helen‖ (XIX, 325). The
adjective ―rigedanos‖, exclusive to Helen and of which no other example is
known, alludes to the trembling in fear experienced when faced with violent
death. One could say it is an epithet inherited from the ancient Velena, goddess
of the killing wound. Shaking with horror before his torn, butchered Patroclus,
Achilles calls the goddess by her name.
For her part, Helen insults herself with an emphasis that no one contradicts
(Iliad VI, 344). Her speech is only comprehensible as that of war describing
itself. Just as the conduct of Achilles is that of the hero who was immune to the
pain of war but who wanted to get to know it in order to gain greater fame.
Thales was not unaware of the disastrous aspect of Helen dominant in the Iliad.
At Hector’s funeral, Helen ends up saying that now nobody in the vast lands of
Troy feels any affection towards her, or loves her, and ―I make everyone’s hair
stand on end‖ (XXIV, 775). In the Odyssey too, Helen reminds us that she is
―the bitch eyes‖ who caused the war. And her insidious character is manifest
when she calls by name to the warriors hidden inside the wooden horse,
imitating the voices of their wives, to reveal them and cause their perdition.
But there is one of Helen’s roles in the Iliad that Thales admired above all
others: that of goddess of Poetry. When Helen weaves the tapestry that is war,
she composes in an art that symbolizes the written epic and she creates a work
whose dimension exceeds the Iliad and includes the poet and the reader. Helen
is aware of being poetry: ―Zeus prepared a fearful fate for us so that we could be
the subject of song among men to come‖ (Iliad VI, 357-8). That role as a
composer of stories is the one that Thales gave his Helen in the Odyssey. For
that reason she comes out of the marriage bed smelling of incense with her
weaving instruments (IV, 124), and three hexameters later, Egypt is being talked
about.
NAUCRATIS AND PHARAOH PSAMTIC
Egypt shines exotically in the enlarged Odyssey that Thales wrote when he left
Crete. The Egyptian adventures of Menelaus are to be found in Book IV, and
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those of Ulysses in Book XIV; these are the places where the original Odyssey –
the one about the adventures of Ulysses, the youthful poem in which Thales
challenged the Iliad – fits in with the greater Odyssey, where Ulysses returns
with great difficulty.
The main plot of the Egyptian adventures consists of the presents, the
hospitality and the riches that are given to the Greek heroes who sail into the
Delta. It also explains what to do when the pharaoh catches you sacking Egypt,
an important matter on which everything else depended.
The Milesian foundation of Naucratis, the oldest Greek colony in Egypt, was
Thales’ idea. This is how he recalls it in the Odyssey (XIV, 246): ―My heart
inspired me to sail to Egypt‖. In the poem, Ulysses says he leaves Crete in order
to head for Egypt, after fitting out nine ships with a Cretan crew which he
recruited immediately (XIV, 248). As meticulous Strabo speaks of thirty
Milesian ships that arrived in the Delta (XVII, 1), the text in the Odyssey
suggests that the expedition that left Miletus made a stop in Crete, where the
contingent was completed with volunteers prepared to be pirates, merchants or
soldiers in whatever order was necessary in the vastly wealthy land of Egypt.
In five days of favorable winds, they arrived ―without any difficulty, as if sailing
with the current‖ from wide Crete to the mouth of the Nile near Sais (Odyssey,
XIV, 257 et seq.): ―On the fifth day we reached Egypt with its beautiful river, and
in the river Egypt I anchored the ships with curved gunwales. Then I ordered my
faithful companions to remain by the ships and watch over them and I sent out
explorers to spy out the land around us but they gave way to violence, urged on
by their fury, and quickly ravaged the beautiful fields of the Egyptians, stealing
the women and small children and killing the men. Soon the alarm reached the
city, and, as soon as they heard the call to arms, men arrived with Aurora’s first
light, and the whole plain filled with soldiers on foot and on horseback and the
gleam of bronze. Zeus who delights in his lightning sent a fearful shock to my
companions and none dared to resist or face the battle, for everything around
was against them. Then they killed many of our men with sharp bronze and
others were taken away alive to work as slaves for them‖.
Thales calls the river ―Egypt‖, and also the country of the Delta. ―Egypt" is how
the Egyptian name for the city of Memphis sounded to a Greek. Well, what did
the name of the river with the beautiful current matter, when the judge-king of
Miletus and his lads are about to fall under the bronze?
In a tight corner like this, the wise king played his best card. He removed his
helmet and arms, located the pharaoh’s chariot and ran over to it and, saying
words that only one king can say to another, he kissed his knees. There a
pretend king would have thrown himself at his feet or would have tried to get
hold of his hand, unaware that the goddess Thetis kissed the knees of Zeus to
win favor because the knees are the seat of paternity. By kissing the pharaoh’s
knees, Thales venerated him like a father, as if he was saying to him: ―I am the
king of these men, I want to be your vassal and let’s forget about the rest of it‖.
The fact is that Thales immediately saw eye to eye with Pharaoh Psamtic who
would have been at least a generation older than him, and they took no time at
all to make some amazing plans together.
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The knee-kissing encounter and Thales’ Egyptian period appear in the Odyssey
as an adventure invented by Ulysses so as not to reveal his identity. The poet
narrates his life in a lie told by the character he had created (XIV, 276-286):
―Swiftly I removed my strong helmet from my head and took my shield from my
shoulders. I threw down my spear and I ran just as I was towards the king’s
horses, seized him and kissed his knees. He saved me and took pity on me. He
made me sit in his chariot and took me to his home weeping tears. Many men
hurled themselves at me with their ash spears, wishing to kill me and they were
exceedingly angry. He, however, kept them back, fearful of the anger of Zeus the
Hospitable who above all else punishes evil acts. I was there for seven years and
among the men of Egypt I amassed much wealth. They gave me everything‖.
Perhaps it may be pertinent to wonder what language Thales and Psamtic used
to communicate with each other. We may suppose the wise Cretan poet had a
basic notion of Egyptian and some knowledge of Assyrian from Gilgamesh, this
being the language that Pharaoh Psamtic knew from his stay in Nineveh, where
the largest library in the world was at that time. He had been taken there in his
youth with his father Pharaoh Necho, as they were the distinguished hostages of
King Ashurbanipal of Assyria.
This was a century when kings venerated literature. Ashurbanipal not only read
and wrote in Assyrian but, in his palace in Nineveh, he also took pleasure in the
possession and reading of Akkadian and Sumerian tablets, some of which
preceded him by two thousand years. In addition he had ordered a new edition
of the Gilgamesh poem. Soon there were partial versions in other languages,
both neighboring and far away. The shock waves of that literary event affected
many young poets. Ashurbanipal had epigraphic monuments engraved, with the
engraving also on the sections that was buried under the paving, so that the
literate earth and the underground gods should have news.
His vassal kings, among whom figured Pharaoh Psamtic and the kings of Judea,
wished to emulate the literary renaissance in the court at Nineveh. Being very
ancient and having beautiful epics written to prove it was a motive of prestige
and pride.
In Jerusalem in 620 BC, the same year as the meeting between Thales and
Psamtic, they announced the first edition of the Bible attributed to Moses and
sponsored by the young king Josiah, whose grandfather and father,
accompanied by scribes and officials, had been astonished, fearful visitors to the
Assyrian court.
For his part, Pharaoh Psamtic, who had been educated in Nineveh as a prince
hostage to Ashurbanipal, had the old tales and the grandiose past of Egypt
written down, he investigated the origin of the languages, wondered about the
source of the Nile, and promoted the first school of Greek interpreters in
Naucratis.
In spite of everything, before that last item could happen with the arrival of the
Milesians, Psamtic’s political situation was peculiar: he ruled in Memphis and in
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far away Phoenicia, he collected tributes from Cypriots and Philistines but he
lived on the Sais branch of the Delta and did not control the Canopic branch
which was next to him.
The Milesian expedition dropped anchor in the mouth of the Nile on the branch
that went through Sais, Psamtic’s capital. The Egyptians, as Nestor mentions in
the Odyssey (III, 319), had been a closed people until then, hostile to the Greek
colonists that nobody thought would ever be able to return. This is a reference to
the alliance that Thales forged with Psamtic, because the Milesian king-judge
figures in tradition as the first wise man to go to Egypt and return.
What did the alliance consist of? Perhaps something that was of interest to both
parties. From Strabo and Aristagoras of Miletus we know that, after establishing
a fort in the place on the Sais estuary known since then as the ―Milesian Wall‖,
the Greek ships headed down the Canopic branch, the most westerly of the
Delta, rowed upstream some 70 kilometers and fought a naval battle against
Inaros, the local pharaoh. After winning, the Greeks founded their city in Egypt,
which they called Naucratis (―Naval force‖) in memory of the victory.
Naucratis was located on the Canopic branch, some 16 kilometers to the west of
Sais, the pharaoh’s capital. The new Greek city communicated by canal with the
Saite branch and the Nile directly to Memphis. It immediately became a great
port and commercial centre for the interior of the country and abroad.
Psamtic was finally left as the only pharaoh of the Delta. Because out of the four
or five decades of rule that history allows him, if we discount the part that
overlaps with his father’s rule and the part spent in Nineveh as a prisoner of war
and the years he had to put up with the dozen or so minor pharaohs that
Ashurbanipal left all round him so he would not think himself too important, it
turns out that he was only the real sovereign of Egypt during his last decade,
from the founding of Naucratis in 620 BC.
SEVEN YEARS
After recounting the fate of the aoido, left abandoned on a desert isle as prey for
the birds to feast on, Nestor recommends to Telemachus that he should visit
Menelaus, who has just returned from Egypt laden with riches. Menelaus spent
seven years accumulating riches, and on the eighth he came back (Odyssey, IV,
82). Ulysses said he had spent seven years in Egypt, as protégé of the pharaoh,
and he amassed a lot of wealth (XIV, 286). Seven years after founding
Naucratis, Thales returned to the Odyssey in order to complete it.
As Menelaus only claimed a delay of a few days because of contrary winds to go
up the Nile from the Canopic estuary to the port of Naucratis (IV, 360 et seq.),
the poet had him wandering around the world for the rest of the time until the
wretched seven years were up.
One of the proofs that Menelaus carried out his world trip is the news he brings
that in Libya ―the sheep give birth three times a year‖ (Odyssey, IV, 86). It is an
exaggeration the size of a lamb, to which the audience from the countryside
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must have been particularly sensitive for at the time, Greek ewes were still
accustomed to a five-month pregnancy. There follows a report, five hexameters
in length, on the dairy industry, excess meat supplies, and what a good life the
shepherds have as they are able to eat every day. The report that Menelaus
offers reflects the fame enjoyed by Cyrene, a colony founded in 630 BC in Libya
southwest of Crete, for the fertility of its flocks.
Cyrene was at first divided and shared between three Dorian tribes, just like
Crete and Thera where its early founders came from. Everyone in Crete had
news and interest, if not relatives, in fertile Cyrene.
Founding Naucratis had been a very different venture. In Libya there was no
army to oppose the colonists, only some tribes that were gradually expelled. In
Egypt one was going to come face to face with Pharaoh’s army. Cyrene produced
sheep, Naucratis, wealth. The finances for the founding of Cyrene originally
came from shepherds from Thera, a poor island to the north of Crete. The
expedition to Egypt was sponsored by Miletus, a naval power with a great
colonizing tradition, which did not fit and send ships out at random.
The arrival, anchoring and fortification of the Milesian expedition in the Saitian
estuary when, arriving from Ionia, Crete or Greece in general, the first estuary
one came to was the Canopic one, indicates the existence of a plan based on
knowledge of the geographical peculiarities of Egypt and precise information
regarding its political situation. The founding of Naucratis was a very calculated
affair of which Thales had reason to be proud.
And what about the seven years? We have not forgotten them, and the poet,
even less. He attributed Aegisthus with a reign for that length of time in order to
fit it in with Menelaus’ adventures. Also, as in the calculation in the Odyssey,
the seven years Ulysses spent in Egypt as protégé of the pharaoh are false, he
used the seven suffered with Calypso as the truth.
The careful imposition of the seven years is not due to a requirement of the
activities in the Odyssey, but to an adjustment of the times in the poem in
accordance with the present of the poet writing it. For example, Nestor reports
that Menelaus has returned from his journey ―a short time ago‖ (III, 318) but he
has already been in his palace in Sparta for three years and we know this
precisely because of the seven years which, as is repeated, he has been away.
The incongruity is invisible to the poet who provides his heroes with his own
feeling of having recently got back to the Odyssey and Miletus (III, 318-322):
―only a short time ago I came back from foreign lands, the lands of men that
nobody could believe in his heart he would return from, once the winds drive
one from one’s course on the high seas, from a place from which even birds do
not return in the same year because it is distant and terrible‖.
Those birds are the cranes that headed south to Egypt in the autumn and did
not return until the following year. But the bold ships did come back. With those
hexameters, Thales claims to have completed the Miletus-Naucratis route more
frequently than the cranes. But, in 613 BC, the war interrupted the comings and
goings of the judge-king. There ended his seven years in Egypt.
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THE HOMERIDAE APPEAR
Chios had been an important island ally of Miletus since before 620 BC when
the war between Chios and Eritrea took place over the delimitation of the
Mimas peninsula and Miletus backed Chios. That conflict ended through
arbitration on the island of Tenedos. Although that indicates that some judge on
that island was to make the arbitration decisions, we know that it was Thales
who acted as judge for the solution adopted on Tenedos and that was in spite of
the fact that Miletus was one of the opposing sides. The arbitration on Tenedos
indicates that Thales had an outstanding prestige already in his early years as
king-judge in Miletus.
In the Odyssey (III, 159-175), Thales shows that he knows the geography of the
island of Chios and of the Mimas peninsula to the point of detailing the
particularities of the different routes that ran round Chios to the north and
south, according whether one was going to or coming from Tenedos.
About 613 BC, when war broke out between Miletus and Lydia, relations
between Miletus and Chios were excellent, and Thales’ reputation as a man who
brought wealth from Egypt was no worse. Singing the poems by Homer and
copying them on exclusive Egyptian papyrus was a well-paid task for
enthusiasts that a selected few carried out in Chios. The pamphlet tells us that
around 590 BC, descendants of the divine aoidos called ―Homeridae‖ still
survived in Chios.
It is necessary to note that for those first singers and copiers, Homer was a
character as ancient and legendary as King Midas.
During the war with Lydia, Chios backed Miletus and the naval superiority of
the Ionians was so clear that the Lydians gave up fighting by sea and
concentrated on attacking the Milesians by land.
The other two Ionian cities where the Homeridae also appeared were Colophon
and Smyrna, which were on the same land front as Miletus facing the Lydians.
The Homeric poems were an extra source of motivation for the Ionians to be
united in war, the Lydians were barbarians.
So the places where the Iliad and the Odyssey were first published were
Smyrna, Colophon and Miletus, from north to south the three Ionian cities
attacked by land by the Lydians, and Chios, the island with great naval power,
which was the rearguard for Ionia and Miletus during the war.
In 585 BC, three decades after the start of the war during which the Homeridae
appeared, the Lydians took Smyrna and Colophon. The population of the two
cities was expelled and the Homeridae scattered all over the world from the
Black Sea to Magna Graecia. For example, Siris in Italy, was a colony founded by
those expelled from Colophon. By then, according to Thales’ boast in the
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pamphlet, the lines in the passage of the Odyssey IX, 6-11 were celebrated as
―golden‖ and it was traditional to recite them before banquets and libations.
THE FAMOUS NAME
Thales uses the word ―name‖ four times more than Homer and Hesiod together.
For him it is a major matter. Fame consists of transmitting the name.
In the layer of the Odyssey that reflects the state of mind of the poet who
finishes the poem and prepares to publish it in a memorable way there is a
critical point. Thales again hides his truth in Ulysses’ lie. The alleged Cretan
prince reveals his name to Penelope, making a play on words (XIX, 183b):
A. My famous name Aithon [Aethon]
B. My name Klytonaithon [Clytonaethon]
Reading A is the conventional, obvious one; according to this, Ulysses says he
has the famous name Aethon. Reading B is the secret that Thales passes on, to
say his name is Clytonaethon. The two readings revolve around the same
letters: ―klytonaithon‖. At the time, writing did not separate words. To
differentiate between them there was the singing intonation of the Homeridae
or the sharp eye of the reader.
The names of some third or fourth generation Homeridae indicate that the
rhapsodes appreciated that kind of word play and considered it to be one of the
strong points of their performance. Cynaethus of Chios, who read the Homeric
poems for the first time in Syracuse at the end of the sixth century BC, bore a
name, ―Cynaethus‖, which is a syncope of ―Clytonaethon‖ [in Greek, ―Kynaithos‖
is a syncope of ―Klytonaithon‖]. To give the baby a name which is a play on
words from the Odyssey, the Homeridae father and grandfather of Cynaethus of
Chios must have been virtuoso performers of those passages in which reading B
was declaimed as a theatrical aside or by means of a second voice that sang in a
different tone.
Klytonaithon‖ – Clytonaethon – means ―the one famous for his enlightenment‖
and is the name Thales gives as the best description of himself: the poet who is
preparing to carry out the most famous enlightenment ever heard of.
But Thales’ secret is not limited to the name, but extends a line further (XIX,
183-4):
... My name is Clytonaethon,
younger in years; for he was older, and better.
He? Who is he? Who was older and better than Thales?
The allusion to Homer is not only obvious in calling him older brother and in
the respectful redundancy of Clytonaethon rather than Clytomnemon. The
hexameter ―younger in years, for he was older and better‖ is taken from the Iliad
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(II, 707), where it refers to Protesilaus, the first Greek to disembark at Troy,
who died at the hand of Hector and left a desolate widow in Phylace and a
palace only half-built. His men were left under the leadership of Podarces, his
brother ―younger in years, for he was older, and better‖.
The story of Protesilaus does not really belong to the Iliad. He only makes a
brief appearance as invited guest of honor to evoke the epic of his birth, the
Cypria. The author of the Iliad pays a tribute of filial piety in this way to the
author of the Cypria. It is as if Homer the Younger were also to declare himself
―younger in years, for he was older, and better‖.
That line in the Odyssey, where the passage from the Iliad is echoed and which
in turn echoes the Cypria, is introduced by means of a play on words in which
Ulysses says he has the ―famous name Aethon‖, or ―is named Clytonaethon‖,
according to how it is read or sung.
We know that it is a play on words because it can be read in two ways and
because of the presence of the hook ―onoma klyton‖ (famous name). Wherever it
appears it carries a play on words referring to a name. So much so that the name
Onomacritus is typical of descendants of Homeridae. There was an
Onomacritus, a contemporary of Cynaethus of Chios, who was a government
poet and is suspected of having participated in the falsification of the sons of
Nestor inserted into the Odyssey.
Another passage where Thales uses the hook ―onoma klyton‖ to make a play on
words with it referring to a name, is the one about the Cyclops. The two readings
of the same half a hexameter (Odyssey, IX, 364b) are as follows:
A: [Cyclops, you ask my name] famous as it is, and you I …
[...] klyton autar ego toi
B: [Cyclops, you ask my name] I am Clytonauta, and you I will destroy
[...] klytonauta rego toi
The two readings use the same letters: ―klytonautaregotoi‖ – let us remember
that Thales did not separate the words -. Reading A, which is the one accepted
conventionally, requires an anomalous intonation and has no sense without the
following line. In reading B, the line has meaning on its own.
Clytonauta is a proper name invented by the poet, very appropriate for Ulysses
and also for Thales. It means ―celebrated for his navigation‖. As soon as it is
read as a name, it is inevitable that the reader will understand ―rego‖ as the
future of the verb ―regnymi‖ (destroy, smash, break), thus in reading B Ulysses
announces the imminent destruction of the Cyclops’ eye.
The first Homeridae knew this and sang it. The passage about the Cyclops,
inserted in reading B as a theatrical aside or as a second voice that sang in
another tone, runs thus:
364. Cyclops, you ask my name – here am I, Clytonauta,
I am going to smash your face in –
365. I will say it. Give me the guest-gift as you promised.
366. My name is Nobody. Nobody they call me.
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THE KING OF PHRYGIA
Among the wealth that the poet brought back with him when he returned from
Egypt was the no less valuable information about the Homers, in particular with
reference to the father who was born some one hundred years before Thales.
In thepamphlet the identification of the sacred scribe Mnemachus as father of
the author of the Iliad is attributed to the Egyptians and it is understood that
the same authority serves for the explanation of the nickname ―Homer‖,
originating from Mnemachus being handed over as a hostage (―homero‖) by the
Cypriots. The insertion ―to the Persians‖ comes from the same or a similar hand
that inserted the Emperor Hadrian. When Thales wrote the pamphlet the word
―Persian‖ was not yet in use.
Now is it possible that the Egyptians at the end of the seventh century BC were
in a position to provide information about a point of Cypriot politics which
happened over a century before?
Yes it is. Because Cyprus was then under Egyptian administration. The island
was divided into local kingdoms and its kings – between seven and ten of them,
according to the period – had been vassals of Assyria until about 660 BC when
Ashurbanipal reorganized the empire and assigned the collection of tax from
Cyprus and Phoenicia to Pharaoh Psamtic. So at the time of the founding of
Naucratis, there were officials from the court of Psamtic who were able to give
Thales information about the case of a Cypriot king taken as hostage with his
son, more than a hundred years earlier.
We are looking for a king, not just anyone. At that time it was not unusual for a
king to write and for another king to take him as hostage along with his son and
successor. Pharaoh Necho, his son Psamtic, and King Ashurbanipal are good
examples, although not usual ones, of that behavior. Neither was the king we are
seeking usual. The king of Paphos in Cyprus was the only one in the world to
exercise political power and the functions of chief memorizer and priest of
Aphrodite at the same time.
Who would take such a security? We know that it was not the Assyrian kings
before Ashurbanipal, because they would not have hidden it. If one of them had
carried off the poet king and his son as hostages, the event would have been
inscribed on their boastful cylinders just like the names of the couple of dozen
vassal kings that Ashurbanipal took back with him to Nineveh to teach them
some manners.
King Sargon II, Ashurbanipal’s great-grandfather, states on a pillar erected in
Cyprus in 707 BC that he subjugated the seven kings of the country and they
paid him gold, silver and products. Nobody doubts that they paid him but it
does indicate that before then they did not. From that time, Cyprus appears in
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the description of the western limits of the Assyrian empire. And before? Which
other empire subjugated Cyprus in the last quarter of the eighth century BC?
We do not know very much about that time, but we can ask. Precisely during
those days, King Elulaios was returning to his court in Tyre, the capital of
Phoenicia, after subjugating Citium, a Phoenician colony on the island of Cyprus
which had suddenly stopped recognizing its servitude to the metropolis that
founded it.
The refusal to pay tribute to King Elulaios was not due to the fact that the people
of Citium trusted their own forces against the powerful fleet from Tyre but
because they were told to pay twice because the Phrygians, whose empire
dominated most of Anatolia, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, had
burst onto their horizon,.
When he returned to Tyre, King Elulaios must have thought that if Phrygia
could snatch from him Citium, the Cypriot colony he had held all his life, what
good it was being a vassal of Assyria, which was even further away than
Phrygia? So he rebelled against Assyria and refused to pay tribute. The Assyrian
king, Shalmaneser V, did not waste much time in marching on Phoenicia with
his vast army which besieged Tyre, blockaded the port and cut off the water
supply.
The siege of the Phoenician capital by the Assyrians and the earlier expedition of
King Elulaios to subjugate Citium allow us to date the arrival of the Phrygians in
Cyprus around 726 BC.
Almost a decade later, in 717 BC., Assyrian intelligence intercepted a message
which the king of Carchemish was sending to the king of Phrygia, in which he
proposed to resuscitate the Hittite empire and to throw off the Assyrian yoke.
Carchemish had been the second Hittite capital and still remembered the good
times. Phrygia, for its part, was the great kingdom set up in the area of Anatolia
which was occupied by the Hittites and had again given the old capital, Hattusa,
the category of a great city now called Pteria.
The news was alarming for Assyria because Phrygia was getting a foothold on
the Euphrates. It could also have been an Assyrian invention to justify their
policy. Whatever it was, it reflected the image held of the king of Phrygia, his
prestige and his power. The fact is that the Assyrian army marched on
Carchemish, took the city, and then began a campaign against Phrygia which
lasted for ten years. The Assyrians conquered lands in the south-east of Anatolia
which paid tribute to, or were allies of, the king of Phrygia. In a naval battle they
overcame a coalition of Ionians and Phrygians and finally they subjugated
Cyprus.
From Assyrian annals it can be deduced that in the last decades of the eighth
century BC., the king of Phrygia had filled the southern coast of Anatolia, the
Gulf of Cilicia and the coast of Syria with Greeks. His fondness for Greeks was
extraordinary.
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Neither was the speed with which Greek alphabetic writing was introduced into
Phrygia normal. In inscriptions from the last quarter of the eighth century BC
found in Phrygian cities such as Gordion or Pteria, we can see more familiarity
with the new technique than in many Greek cities of the same period. The
Phrygians had dealings with Urartians, Luwians and Ugaritics, who used
cuneiform writing, but adopted the new Greek alphabet. They used it very early
on and without previous trials – on the contrary, they had the audacity to add
two letters–. The system appeared fully functioning from one day to the next,
as if it had come directly from Cyprus.
We must also remember that the Phrygian and Greek languages are related, but
not too closely. For example, ―Kreion‖ in Greek, is ―Mygdon‖ in Phrygian.
King Mygdon II of Phrygia, of the same generation as Homer the Elder, came to
the throne about 740 BC, and reigned for over forty years. In that time, Phrygia
reached the height of its power, influence and prestige. From Mesopotamia to
the Aegean Sea, news spread about the fabulous King Mygdon.
TELEPHUS THE HERO
If the Homers, king and prince of Paphos, were poets at the court of King
Mygdon of Phrygia during the last quarter of the eighth century BC, would that
not be seen in their poetry?
The reigning line in Paphos claimed to be descendants of King Agapenor of
Arcadia, a kingdom situated in the Peloponnese, far away from Cyprus. They
claimed that the king had been turned from his route by a storm at sea and
stopped in Cyprus, where he founded Paphos. The most famous art cultivated by
the kings of Paphos was poetry. Their favorite topic was the deeds of the heroes
of Arcadia, Mycenae and other kingdoms in continental Greece.
It is possible that an author of that particular brand of Arcado-Cypriot poetry
should write his works without allowing the place where he stayed to show
through, in spite of living a quarter of a century as a distinguished hostage
dedicated to writing poetry at the court of a powerful Anatolian king who
admired the Greeks to an extravagant extent. Nevertheless the opposite seems
more natural, that the poet should want to compliment the king and aristocracy
of the country by setting out in the poem the acts of their heroes in places
known to all or by making a list of Trojans where he could slip in his
dedications.
The Cypria, to go no further, had to be composed under those conditions
because Mnemachus, the king of Paphos and high priest of Aphrodite, would
have been about forty years old and his son, Clytomnemon, a little over ten,
when they were taken to Phrygia as hostages by King Mygdon.
According to what we know, the Cypria extends over eleven books which deal
from start to finish with the horde of semi-divine heroes that crowd the earth
and who Zeus, the chief god, and Themis, a goddess who defends the traditional
order of things, plan to exterminate by means of a war in Troy. The plan begins
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to be carried out with a dispute between Aphrodite, Hera and Athena, over
which of them is the most beautiful. Once the argument has been established,
the divine messenger service carries it to Mount Ida in the land of Troy where
Paris is. He is to act as judge and has been bribed by Aphrodite with the promise
that he will be given Helen, an irresistible lure.
After that we have the sack of Sidon, the story of Oedipus, the story of Hercules
and that of Theseus and Ariadne ... Up to this point it all seems to be in
impeccable Arcado-Cypriot.
Then comes a storm which announces a change of tack. Then it happens:
Mnemachus presents an Arcado-Cypriot piece in a contemporary Phrygian
setting. It is the story of Telephus, son of Hercules and grandson of the king of
Arcadia. Telephus is the god who invented homeopathic medicine. The new
piece tells of the Achaeans, confused by the storm and thinking that Teuthrania,
the city where Telephus reigns, is Troy, they sack it in an outburst of anger. But
Teuthrania is not in Arcadia or even in continental Greece but in the southwest
of Mysia, in Anatolia. When Mnemachus wrote the Cypria, Mysia and Phrygia
were all one, and they belonged to King Mygdon.
In defense of his city, Telephus kills several well-known Achaean heroes and is
wounded by Achilles. Wounded! Hands up all those wounded by Achilles. Not
even one. Achilles kills; the men he wounds only last a short time, if they have
something to say. The category of wounded by Achilles and round the world
traveler in search of the man who wounded him, to see if he can invent healing,
is exclusive to the hero Telephus.
The mistaken looters return to Mycenae, without having seen Troy and then
Telephus presents himself dressed up as a Phrygian beggar. He has come from
Anatolia to deal with Achilles regarding the matter of a cure. According to what
he was told by an oracle, the one who wounded him will provide a cure. Ulysses
makes an empirical interpretation of the oracle, and says that it does not refer to
Achilles in person, but to his weapon, which is to be used to make a motion over
the wound that is the reverse of the one that caused it. The cure takes place, the
weapon takes on the ill that it had caused. Homeopathy has been invented.
A great story; but where is Cyprus? It could be conceded that Telephus is an
Arcadian hero that the author of the Cypria transports to a setting as prescribed
by the Phrygian authorities. But to speak of Arcado-Cypriot poetry is to take it
as read that the Cypria, written in the eighth century BC, includes a character
from the oral poetry of the thirteenth century BC adapted to the place where the
author is: the kingdom of King Mygdon, which is almost as far from Arcadia, the
land of Telephus, as from Paphos, the home country of the poet. For that voyage
of heroes and poets to be acceptable we would have to prove the poetic presence
of Telephus in Cyprus, not in the time of Mnemachus, but in times close to the
collapse of palatial civilization in continental Greece. Only then could it be
concluded that his story arrived in Paphos from Arcadia.
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THE ARCADO-CYPRIOT CONNECTION
At the end of the twentieth century AD a venerable piece came to light for
readers. It had lain underground for three thousand years as part of the
offerings placed in a burial chamber at the end of the Bronze Age in Paphos. The
piece was made about 1000 BC and represents a snake stretched out. The
artisan has stylized the body and given it a squarish section, the tail ends in a
long point, as solid and sharp as the best bronze spear, so that the enormous
artifact gives the impression of being the sword of Hercules the bison fighter, or
the roasting spit of the seven against Thebes. But, contradicting those first
appearances, the stylized, metaphysical snake is an altar which not only has the
shape of the divinity but also offers its sacred back and point for roasting the
portions of the offering as is required.
The altar bears an inscription with the name of the god. Five signs carved in
Linear C. It is the first inscription known in that system of syllabic writing,
inspired by Linear A, used in Cyprus from 1500 BC, and Linear B, invented in
Crete and used in continental Greece from 1400 BC.
The inscription reads ―O-phe-les-ta-u‖ and means ―of Ophelestes‖. It comprises
a brief account of the formation of Arcado-Cypriot from the Micene Age: a
Greek from 1200 BC who wrote in Linear B said ―Ophelestao‖; his Cypriot greatgreat-grandson from 1000 BC who wrote in Linear C, ―Ophelestau‖.
In both cases they said ―of Ophelestes‖ who is the god of the altar found in
Paphos. The inscription of the names of gods in the possessive Genitive has
precedents in Linear B, such as ―Di-wo-nu-so-jo‖ (―Dionysoio‖) which means ―of
Dionysos‖ and can be read on a tablet in Pylos, the kingdom of old King Nestor,
bordering on Arcadia in the Peloponnese.
The tomb offerings in Paphos include indigenously made and decorated urns, in
other words the formidable altar of the god Ophelestes is the only literally Greek
item in the burial ground. That suggests a recent arrival in Cyprus, perhaps
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three or four generations before and a very obvious priority granted to the cultreligious question.
The Arcadians who went to Cyprus were great devotees of the serpent. In
Arcadia they had, among other things, a sacred River Ophis (serpent) and a
mythical founding king named Cypselus, a very famous opilexic name. The
tyrant of Corinth at the time of Thales and Thrasybulus was the son of a
Cypselus, the father of another and grandfather of a Psamtic.
The name of the god Ophelestes means ―Dictate of the serpent‖, the same as
Opileks. It is an abstraction turned into a proper name, like Nemesis (Avenging
justice), from whose rape Helen (Painful wound) was born, according to what is
recounted in the Cypria. Later on, Ophelestes was the generic name for wizards
and doctors, the same as Asclepius.
Around this altar to Ophelestes those early Cypriot Greeks carried out a large
part of their social lives: requests and spells for health and fertility,
consultations with the oracle, solemn oaths and festive meals. They were such
important and daily rites that from ―Ophelestes‖ comes the words in Greek
―obelos‖ (roasting spit), ―ophelos‖ (benefit), and even ―obolos‖ which is the first
name for money because it was used in the form of small forks that gave the
bearer the right to a specific portion of the animal sacrificed and roasted on the
altar of Ophelestes. Also the verb ―ophello‖ with a plethora of meanings of
obligation, desire, destiny and prosperity. To make vows for something or to
express an intimate desire for something, is said in Greek ―ophell ...‖, in other
words, ―if the serpent wishes ...‖.
With all this, where has Telephus gone? Before we had Telephus and we were
missing Cyprus. Now that we are in Cyprus we are asking about Telephus. The
hero Telephus can be found on the altar, where else? Telephus is a syllabic
anagram for Ophelestes: ―Tes-les-phe-o‖. The syllabic part is important
because it means it is based on Linear B, if it was done before 1200 BC, or
Linear C, if it was done after. In any case it indicates a negotiation of the taboo
by means of writing. Purely oral, unwritten poetry does not create anagrams,
that must be obvious.
For example, Asclepius is an anagram of Opileks and that is not feasible without
an alphabet. If there are any doubts about that, it is sufficient to attempt to
create it in Linear B or Linear C. Asclepius could not have been created before
the ninth century BC. Just like Aphrodite, the taboonym for Ophelestes which
also requires an alphabet for its creation. The alphabet was provided by the
Phoenicians together with the goddess Astarte, who was the model of virtues for
Aphrodite.
The written presence of the hero Telephus in Paphos throws light on three
hundred years of darkness and makes the altar of Ophelestes the link between
the Mycenic oral poetry and the Cypria, the first work of great inspiration for
Greek literature, and the driving force behind it.
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LONG ECHOES OF THE CYPRIA
If we experiment we can make an alphabetical anagram of ―Ophelestes‖, and
obtain ―Setselepho‖, which immediately reminds us of Selepios, a character in
the Cypria who is sent a greeting from the Iliad.
n the name of Selepios, the ancestor of kings of Anatolian cities, it is clear where
Mnemachus turns in order to invent a prestigious name and what a heavy cultreligious burden it is given. The presence of opilexic names among the leaders of
both sides in the Trojan war proves that the profession of snake wizard was
extremely prestigious and peculiar to those in high office. That is where the
tradition of healing kings comes from.
In the Iliad there is a digression at the culminating point of the Catalogue when
Achilles’ men are named in order to explain that the hero has no appetite for
combat. This is because of his anger that Briseis has been taken away from him
after he won her as a deserved prize for taking her city and killing her brothers
and husband who was the grandson of the illustrious Selepios. In the middle of
the recitation of the Achaean band (II, 691-3), two cities and four kings on the
opposing side are named in order to link the main plot of the Iliad, Achilles’
anger, and the point where the Cypria had left the hero: when the beautiful
Briseis had just been won and he was about to be the victim of Zeus’ plans which
would make him frankly furious.
Because the Cypria recounts that the Achaeans wanted to leave Troy once
Achilles had met Helen. But as heroes are capricious, just then he acquired a
great appetite for pillage and set fire to twenty-four cities in the land, including
those where the beautiful Chryseis and Briseis, who were later the cause of the
quarrel with Agamemnon, lived. Mnemachus honored his audience by having
Achilles sack and destroy their cities with hexametric fury.
It can be seen as natural and almost necessary for the Iliad to refer piously to
the Cypria; after all this is a son paying tribute to his father’s memory. The
astonishing thing, although no less natural, is the amount of literature that the
Cypria immediately generated. It reached such proportions and there was such
a muddle of adventures, that Thales, who no doubt read them all (and it is one
of the reasons that make him seek horizons that are not Trojan) does not take
the opportunity to summarize a list of the dead caused by the son of Achilles and
has Ulysses apologize to his father who is dead in Hades and has not been able
to read the news (Odyssey XI, 517-9): ―[Your son Neoptolemy] killed many men
in the terrible battle. I cannot tell or name all the armed warriors that he killed
in defense of the Argives, only that he struck down the son of Telephus with his
bronze sword‖. This conversation, written in the last quarter of the seventh
century BC, a hundred years after the Cypria, reflects the fact that a literary
cycle had been completed: the son of Achilles had killed the son of Telephus.
There were not only literary consequences. The god Telesphorus, the patron of
convalescence, venerated all over the Mediterranean, also came from the
Cypria. His dress as a Phrygian beggar is what Telephus was wearing when he
stood before the Achaeans to deal with the matter of his cure.
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Even so, a more explicit tribute to the reigning dynasty in Phrygia is missing. It
is not entirely credible that Mnemachus and Clytomnemon should spend half
their lives as distinguished hostages who write poetry to satisfy King Mygdon
and do not compose even a handful of lines to glorify the family and nation of
the sovereign.
To forestall the objection, the author of the Iliad prepared a surprise party for
Aeneas, who came up against the unexpected invitation from Apollo to face
Achilles who was rushing around crazily trying to find Hector. In Book XX, Zeus
has gathered the gods together to give them permission to intervene in the
combat, now that things are getting worse because Achilles has come back to the
battle. All the gods and mortals are watching and Aeneas gets stage fright and
cannot convince himself to face Achilles. Apollo reminds him that he is the son
of Aphrodite, one of Zeus’ children, while Achilles is no more than an offspring
of Thetis, the daughter of the old man of the salty sea.
Aeneas moves forwards to the front line of the combat with his gleaming armor.
Achilles reacts in surprise and seems to wonder what this unreliable man has
come out for, if it is not yet time for him to appear. In effect, he condemns
Aeneas’ behavior, and advises him to withdraw. However, Aeneas replies with a
torrent of hexameters where he compares Achilles’ miserable family tree with
his less well-known but much more elevated origins which not only go back to
Aphrodite on his mother’s side but also hook up on his father’s side with the
venerable Dardanus, the favorite son of Zeus who existed before Troy. After the
speech, the two chosen heroes exchange a few spear thrusts and ceremonial
blows until Poseidon, concerned about Aeneas’ integrity, clouds Achilles’ sight
and carries off Aphrodite’s son, who seems to have had no mission other than to
inform us of his distinguished ancestors.
For his part, Poseidon has been kind enough to reveal what destiny has decided:
that the memorable Dardanus was fathered by Zeus with a mortal woman and,
since the father of the gods loved him more than any other of his sons, his
descendant Aeneas shall survive the disaster and his line shall reign over the
Trojans for evermore.
This triumphal prophecy is dedicated to the Mygdonidae who, in effect,
dominated the lands of Troy, Anatolia, Mysia and Phrygia throughout the eighth
century BC.
The equivalent of the Doric Opileks and the Mycenaean Ophelestes in the
pantheon of Phrygian gods is Anguidistis (from ―anguis‖, which means serpent
in Phrygian, Latin and other related languages). The name of Aeneas’ father is
Anchises, an adaptation into Greek of Anguidistis. So Aeneas is the son of
Aphrodite and of the top Phrygian deity in disguise. That was not a problem for
Anguidistis or for his fans, because just as Opileks presents the feminine figure
and Ophelestes the masculine, Anguidistis is both sexes, and can be personified
as Anchises for whatever is needed.
Among the ancestors of Anchises – there was a reason why Aeneas spoke for so
long -, are Tros, Assaracus, and Capys, Phrygian kings and heroes. Above all the
number one hero named is Dardanus, who harks back to the times when the
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Phrygians went into Anatolia from the Balkans, some time after the fall of the
Hittite empire and probably at the same time as the arrival of the first Greeks in
Cyprus.
Aeneas is glorified in the Cypria. His mother Aphrodite sends him to sea with
Paris in search of Helen and wealth. Following instructions from his mother,
Aeneas provides the raw materials to build the ships: excellent wood from the
pine trees on Mount Ida which reaches Heaven, the place where Aphrodite
found Anchises, a partner to her taste. Axe-blows from the ship’s carpenter on
the sacred pine trees, echo in the Gilgamesh poem, the Cypria and the Odyssey.
WHY TROY?
The Phrygian ancestors presented in the Iliad are older than the Greek ones.
Aeneas was right; his side had more gods and a better pedigree. The Phrygians
also had memorizing poets and a history of how they began to make a space for
themselves in Anatolia until they came to occupy the whole peninsula and a
little more. Dardania came before Troy, because it was founded by Dardanus,
the hero who crossed the sea and arrived in Anatolia from the Balkans.
Afterwards Tros reigned and that is where Troy, the name of his kingdom,
comes from. Then Ilus was king and from there comes Ilios, the name of his
capital. King Priam, who fathered Hector and Paris was descended from Ilus.
Another son of Tros was Assaracus, the father of Capys, who sired Anchises who
was the father of Aeneas. These are the Phrygian ancestral heroes.
It can be seen that Mnemachus put them in the Cypria, with the greatest of
respect. Two insertions of the most select kind, one Arcadian and the other
Cypriot. Between Dardanus, the hero who crossed the sea, and Tros, the great
founder of Troy, he stuck in Erichthonius, the Arcadian god closest to the earth.
And Aphrodite took Anchises, who is Anguidistis in Greek clothing, as a partner.
The poet’s tribute and desire for conciliation are notable.
The archaeology of Troy shows that after the collapse of the Hittite empire
around 1175 BC the place was inhabited until 950 BC by a population that was
not Greek and which came to Anatolia from the Balkan side. The Phrygians of
the time of the Mygdonidae situated their mythical past and their ancestral
heroes in that place. So Mnemachus had to transfer his troop of heroes to Troy
and adapt Arcado-Cypriot deeds to the main setting that consisted of the ruins
of a city abandoned two centuries earlier. Mnemachus gave it the name of Ilios
(the city of Ilus), the capital of Troy (the land of Tros), and there located the war
that was to exterminate the mass of semi-divine heroes that crowded the earth
according to the plans of Zeus and Themis. Because of the fame achieved by the
Cypria, the place was effectively repopulated around 700BC by Greeks who
called it Ilion.
An example of Arcado-Cypriot settings and incidents before contact with the
Phrygians took place, is the sacking of Sidon. That event, inspired by the taking
of Sidon by Tyre around 1000 BC appears in the Cypria. It allows us to imagine
an epic without Troy, where Achilles and Helen would act in Tyre and the
Trojans would be Phoenicians. All that needed to happen was for Mygdon of
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Phrygia not to have taken Mnemachus of Paphos hostage. But he did. And the
Trojan war was created by the Cypriot poet in honor of the Phrygian king who so
loved the Greeks.
HESIOD’S JOURNEY
The most famous writer influenced by the Cypria, apart from young
Clytomnemon, was Hesiod, who was born around 750 BC in Cyme, a prosperous
city on the Anatolian coast. Cyme’s reigning dynasty was related to King
Mygdon of Phrygia.
Cyme is famous for being one of the first places where coins were minted. The
wealth of the city was based on commerce, as it was an important exit to the
Aegean Sea for Phrygia. Hesiod’s father was a merchant and things do not
always go well for merchants. For some motive of self-interest he moved to
Ascra, on the other side of the Aegean Sea, in continental Greece. Hesiod always
resented the move as a great loss of status. His desire to live as a rich man in
opulent, cosmopolitan Cyme was not fulfilled and he had to make do with being
a small landowner living in an ordinary small town and he laments in verse the
fact that humanity goes from bad to worse. One of the reasons for Hesiod’s
resentment is the success of the Cypria.
Hesiod claims to have travelled only once by sea in his life, from Aulis to Chalcis
(Works, 650-1). This is the crossing of the strait of the Evripos which is little
wider than a stone’s throw. Hesiod does not say this, but it is just as well to
know it in order to comprehend the burlesque intentions of the poet. Before
undertaking such a risky crossing, Hesiod recommends ―waiting for a favorable
time for navigation‖.
In Aulis, as the Cypria recounts, the great fleet of the Achaeans gathered on two
occasions, always in honor of Telephus. The first time it was so that the
Achaeans would confuse cities, back in Anatolia, and meet Telephus. The second
time it was to spend the winter waiting for a favorable time for navigation and
for Telephus, now cured of the wound caused by Achilles, to show them the way
to Troy.
Hesiod seeks the greatest possible contrast with the double heroic journey
created by Mnemachus in the Cypria, and he refers to an ostentatiously short
voyage, leaving from the same place. While the poet who composed the Cypria
with the comings and goings of the Achaeans from Aulis to Anatolia obtained
fame and Phrygian gold, Hesiod voyaged a stone’s throw from Aulis, sang his
Theogony at the funeral of the enlightened Amphidamas and won a tripod with
handles.
Thales caught the intention of that passage (Works 630-59) where Hesiod
compares himself with Homer and he took him at his word: in the pamphlet the
stage is set for ―envious Hesiod‖ to beat Homer but to be previously outscored
by him in a contest where, among other poetic things, it was necessary to
legislate and be wise.
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The setting of the pamphlet is so accomplished that ―king Amphidamas‖ –
invented by Thales to give a more heroic touch to the contest by using Hesiod’s
―enlightened Amphidamas‖ – was taken seriously by historians such as
Thucydides and Plutarch, who applied themselves to giving credit and
coherence to a King Amphidamas of Euboea, killed in a naval battle that never
happened during an invented war which was called the Lelantine and came to
have a lot written about it.
PHRYGIA FALLS TO THE CIMMERIANS
King Mygdon II died around 696 BC, when the Cimmerians, who had ravaged
the land of Urartu and defeated King Sargon II of Assyria, were harassing the
borders of Phrygia. Mygdon III had to spend more time containing the invaders
than on poetry and gold. In 680 BC the Cimmerians took and destroyed Pteria,
the Phrygian city that stood on the site of the ancient Hattusa of the Hittites.
The capital, Gordion, was also taken and destroyed shortly after. King Mygdon
III died during the war.
The fall of the Mygdonidae and the collapse of Phrygia shocked the Greeks. The
line of the celebrated King Midas, the king who turned everything he touched
into gold and had so loved the Greeks, ended in a dramatic, abrupt manner. The
Cimmerians, who were the cause of terror and concern for all the inhabitants of
Asia Minor throughout the seventh century BC, caused the re-migration of
people who came back from the coast and interior of Anatolia to the islands of
the Aegean and continental Greece. In that context, the first alphabetized
colonists arrived in Samothrace. The island sanctuary had not been of interest
to the Greeks until then.
In the pamphlet, Thales provides crucial biographical information which dates
the maturity of the author of the Iliad at the date of the death of King Midas, or
Mygdon II, who reigned for over forty years and who took the king of Paphos
and his son to Phrygia as hostages. Not only that. By attributing the Thebaid
and the Epigoni to Homer the Younger, he dates those works as being prior to
the death of Mygdon II, and reproduces the first line of each poem, thus giving
news of a fundamental point.
The Thebaid starts with the same model of first hexameter that the poet will use
in the Iliad: ―Argos sings, O goddess, the dry land where they reigned‖. We
know no more of the original version. But we do have the recreation of the Latin
Tebaidae, which the poet Statius composed in the first century BC. There is a
notable presence of Phrygian and Arcado-Cypriot settings and characters; for
example, Phrygia, Mygdon and Paphos appear. The opilexic elements are very
significant. Outstanding examples, to name only two, are Ophelestes who is the
fateful, dictate of the serpent in the form of a baby who dies, and Polixo, the
blood-thirsty witch who sacrifices her son and incites the women to kill all the
men because Aphrodite has revealed to her in a dream that she will bring new
men to replace them.
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The Epigoni, a poem composed later, has a first hexameter that says:
―Now, of the youngest men let us begin, Muses‖.
Hesiod’s Theogony - what a coincidence! - begins with an inverted replica of the
same model:
―Of the Muses of the Helicon let us begin to sing‖.
The question of who read who does not leave much room for doubt. Hesiod not
only knows the Cypria of Homer the Elder, but also the Epigoni of Homer the
Younger. Since we can deduce from the pamphlet that this last poem is an early
work which was composed at the Phrygian court, before the death of Mygdon II,
it is necessary to conclude that Hesiod read it in Cyme and his move to Ascra, as
well as taking place after reading it, was in all probability related with the threat
from the Cimmerians. That is to say that the re-migration caused by the
onslaught of the Cimmerians which took Clytomnemon from Anatolia to
Samothrace, was the reason for Hesiod’s move from Cyme to Boeotia.
This dating of the Theogony confirms the impression that Hesiod’s poems are
the work of an older man and suggests that when Hesiod speaks about his father
in Works, he is referring to himself in the past. Just as under the name and
figure of his brother Perses (destroyer, waster), he is instructing himself.
In the Theogony, on the other hand, such a consistent Phrygian influence shines
through that it is impossible for it to have been composed by a Boeotian farmer.
It is much more in line with a poet from Cyme, the Aeolian city fascinated by the
Mygdonidae court. The myth of the castration of Uranus, to go no further, is a
Greek adaptation of the journeys of Anguidistis, the hermaphrodite Phrygian
god.
KINGDOMS THAT GO, KINGDOMS THAT COME
Tradition attributes the Cypria to a poet called ―Stasinos‖ of Cyprus. The name
is noteworthy, because ―stasis‖ means secession from a political community.
Mnemachus, king of Paphos and high priest of Aphrodite, taken as hostage to
the court of the king of Phrygia, was bequeathed in Cyprus the title of
―Separated‖ par excellence, that is the king who has been separated from his
kingdom. That meaning of ―Stasinos‖ contrasts with that of a name repeated
among the kings of Paphos at the start of the seventh century BC, those
belonging to a dynasty that took over from Mnemachus’ dynasty. It is
―Eteuandros‖ (he who legitimizes men‖, ―the legitimate one‖), which reminds us
of Sargon II of Assyria, whose name also means ―the legitimate king‖, just
because he took over the throne in an irregular way and not as dynastic
successor of the previous king.
What kingdom and what subjects could Mnemachus have? The Cypria prepared
the world for the Iliad, the poem that Clytomnemon did not start on until after
his father’s days, as though it were an inherited kingdom. After all, the Iliad is
the song of Ilios, the city that Mnemachus created in the Cypria.
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There are clear signs that date the definitive edition of the Iliad to after 680 BC.
Book XII recalls the taking and destruction of Pteria by the Cimmerians, in
particular the demolition of the city wall.
Allusions to the fallen Phrygian empire are numerous. They belong to the past
life of the poet and in the Iliad they usually refer to the time before the Trojan
war. This is how it appears in old Priam’s memory (III, 184): ―Phrygia, the
people of god-like Mygdon, settled on the shores of the river Sangarius‖. Also
Paphlagonians and Cilicians appear, vassals of Phrygia during the good times,
and remote Alybe, ―where the silver comes from‖, the raw material for the
famous Phrygian jewelers.
The Cimmerians did not stop in Phrygia. In the middle of the seventh century
BC, they attacked Lydia which was emerging as a power in the area at the time,
after the fall of Phrygia. The Lydian capital, Sardis, was taken and burned by the
Cimmerians who also killed King Gyges. But the ravaging nomads did not stay
in the cities and, after a decade, Sardis had been rebuilt and Ardys son of Gyges
was reigning. Then the Cimmerians returned, took Sardis again and caused
destruction and death. The fear that the invaders might march at any moment
on Miletus, the rich city closest to Lydia, was a determining factor in Milesian
politics until around 625 BC, when the danger from the Cimmerians became a
thing of the past.
Thales and Thrasybulus’ access to power in the form of an arbitrated tyranny is
linked to the desire to reorganize politics in Miletus when the danger of the
Cimmerian invasion had passed and an interesting economic perspective
opened up for the city and the whole of Ionia.
ARBITER OF THE CITY
Although Thales may like to suggest to us that he was the judge-king himself, his
position had a specific name: aisymnete (αἰζσμνήηης). The word means ―he who
judges what is to be memorized‖, or ―he who decides which rules to apply‖. We
should note the presence of ―mn‖ (which means memory), as in Mnemachus,
and in Clytomnemon, and in ―Mnésomai‖ (I shall remember) the first word of
the hymn to Apollo by Thales.
In the Homeric poems we can perceive sympathy for the figure of that special
arbiter known as aisymnete. When old Priam goes to Achilles’ tent to negotiate
the handing over of Hector’s body, he is guided by the god Hermes ―in the shape
of a young aisymnete‖ (Iliad, XXIV, 347). And when the Phaiakians go to feast
Ulysses, ―nine aisymnetai, all chosen by the people‖ (Odyssey, VIII, 258) rise to
their feet.
Here we could ask who could have been the first Greek to perform that role of
aisymnete, in the sense of arbiter of the city with supreme legal and judicial
attributes? If we compare the different lists of ―seven wise men‖ of Greece, four
names appear which are on all of them: Thales, Solon, Bias and Pittacus. All
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four of them were famed legislators and supreme judges of their cities, and they
were linked to each other. The chief and master of them all was Thales.
Diogenes Laertius (44) reproduces a letter from Thales to Solon, where the
arbiter of Miletus expressly mentions his position:
―If you leave Athens, I think you will find the most appropriate home among your
colonists in Miletus and that there you will have nothing to fear. If that seems insufferable to
you, because we Milesians are under a tyranny and you detest all kinds of aisymnete, bear in
mind rather that all will be pleasing to you because you will live with us, your friends. Bias has
written to you to go to Priene. If you prefer to stay in the city of the Prieneians, then we will go
there, where you are.‖
Solon wanted to take a course in comparative legislation, under the directorship
of Thales, in order to write a new constitution for Athens. The letter deals with
the previous details, in particular Solon’s lodgings, as he was afraid he would
ruin his reputation if he agreed to stay in the home of Thrasybulus. For his part,
Bias, a famed lawmaker in Priene, located some 10 kilometers north of Miletus,
is mentioned as the possible host for Solon, in which case the classes would take
place in Priene. It seems that Solon still gloried in detesting any kind of
aisymnetai, and that dates the letter between 600 and 595 BC, because he
himself was appointed then.
This was a magnificent time in Miletus, the early years of the sixth century BC,
when the war was in the past, and the present was bringing prosperity. Poets
like Solon or Charaxus, Sappho’s brother, made exciting deals in Naucratis,
from where wheat was exported all over Ionia. ―Wealth and peace in
abundance‖ Zeus had ordered in the Odyssey, and the poet, at the same time as
he prepared the definitive edition of the Homeric poems, still had the foresight
to do business.
In the last winter of the war between Miletus and Lydia, when the slashing and
destruction of the Milesian fields by the Lydians had again been accomplished,
Thales rented all the olive presses in Miletus and Chios, then empty and
inactive, for a pittance. He had credit there and was regarded as a god. With the
arrival of peace came the first year without any ravaging and burning of the
crops and, with it, a great harvest. All the olive growers in Miletus and Chios had
to turn to Thales’ presses and he was able to charge whatever he liked.
Afterwards, he wrote the hymn to Apollo and finally the pamphlet. He must
have thought that the next generation would read it and understand it all.
NOTE
Quoted texts are translated by the author
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CHRONOLOGY
Approximate dates in years BC
1180 End of the Mycenic period, destruction of the palatial centres in
Greece.
1175 End of the Hittite empire in Anatolia.
1150 Troy inhabited by Phrygians from the Balkans. Paphos inhabited
by Greeks from the Peloponnese.
1000 Ophelestes’ inscription in Paphos.
950 Troy left uninhabited.
850 – 800 Establishment of the cult to Opileks – Asclepius in Crete, and to
Aphrodite in Cyprus. Adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet into Greek.
765 Birth of Mnemachus in Paphos.
750 Birth of Hesiod in Cyme.
742 Start of the reign of Mygdon II of Phrygia.
736 Birth of Clytomnemon, son of Mnemachus.
726 Conquest of Cyprus by the Phrygians. Mnemachus, king of Paphos
and high priest of Aphrodite, and his son, Clytomnemon, taken as hostages to
the court of King Mygdon II of Phrygia.
717
Maximum extent of power and prestige of Phrygia. Start of the war
with Assyria.
709 Peace treaty and establishment of diplomatic relations between
Phrygia and Assyria. Mygdon II agrees to be a vassal of Sargon II.
705 Death of Sargon II in the war against the Cimmerians, who were
on the eastern borders of Phrygia.
720 – 700 The Cypria by Mnemachus. Thebaid and Epigoni by
Clytomnemon.
700 Founding of Ilion on Trojan lands, under the influence of the
Cypria.
696 Death of Mygdon II of Phrygia.
695 – 675
Re-migration of Greeks from Anatolia towards the Aegean and
continental Greece, because of the invasion by the Cimmerians. Arrival in
Samothrace of the first Greek colonists from Lemnos and Anatolia. Theogony
and Works by Hesiod.
680 – 675 Destruction of Pteria and Gordion by the Cimmerians. Collapse of
Phrygia. Death of Mygdon III.
665 Birth of Thales in Gortyn.
663 Ashurbanipal subjugates Egypt, sacks Thebes, and takes Psamtic
as a hostage to Nineveh.
660 – 650 Final version of the Iliad. Death of Clytomnemon.
650 – 640 Destruction of Sardis and conquest of Lydia by the Cimmerians,
who threaten Miletus.
625 Cimmerians defeated and expelled from Anatolia.
624 Public display of the name of Opileks. Thales of Gortyn settles in
Miletus. Establishment of the tyranny ruled by Thales and Thrasybulus in
Miletus.
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624 – 621
War between Chios and Eritrea. Miletus allied to Chios. Thales
arbitrates in Tenedos.
620 Founding of Naucratis in Egypt.
613 War between Lydia and Miletus. Chios allied with Miletus.
Appearance of the Homeridae in Chios, Smyrna and Colophon. First edition of
the Iliad and the Odyssey.
602 Peace between Lydia and Miletus. Thales rents all the olive presses
in Chios and Miletus.
600 – 590 Corrected and enlarged editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Relationship of Thales with Solon, Bias and other legislators.
590 Hymn to Apollo. Thales named citizen of all the Ionian cities.
590 – 585 Publication of the pamphlet Homer and Hesiod, the most divine
poets.
585 Expulsion of the population of Smyrna and Colophon.
581 Death of Thales.
MAP
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