The young girl and her cicerone were on their way to the gate of the enclosure, so that Winterbourne, who had but lately entered, presently took leave of them. A week afterward he went to dine at a beautiful villa on the Caelian Hill, and, on arriving, dismissed his hired vehicle. The evening was charming, and he promised himself the satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past the vaguely lighted monuments of the Forum. There was a waning moon in the sky, and her radiance was not brilliant, but she was veiled in a thin cloud curtain which seemed to diffuse and equalize it. When, on his return from the villa (it was eleven o’clock), Winterbourne approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum, it recurred to him, as a lover of the picturesque, that the interior, in the pale moonshine, would be well worth a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches, near which, as he observed, an open carriage—one of the little Roman streetcabs—was stationed. Then he passed in, among the cavernous shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One-half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade, the other was sleeping in the luminous dusk. As he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous lines, out of “Manfred,” but before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma. Winterbourne walked to the middle of the arena, to take a more general glance, intending thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The great cross in the center was covered with shadow; it was only as he drew near it that he made it out distinctly. Then he saw that two persons were stationed upon the low steps which formed its base. One of these was a woman, seated; her companion was standing in front of her.
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. This post is part of my plan to share new scholarship on Homer. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Every time the Olympics come around, I find myself talking about ancient Greek athletics, even though the topic is a bit far outside my expertise. As a Homerist, these contests stick out in my mind because they are (1) part of the apparatus of Panhellenic culture with Homer that emerges before the classical period; (2) like Homer, they reflect a growing fantasy of a heroic age that appealed to elite culture in the Classical period; and (3) their spirit of competition and glory resonates with the questions that are posed—if never answers—by the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Both epics have athletic contests as scenes where internal (and external) audiences are invited to consider heroic ‘worth’ based on participation in games. In Odyssey 8, the young Phaeacian princes invite Odysseus to show what kind of a man he is by engaging in after-dinner competition. (He eventually bests them with a discus, after criticizing them for putting too much emphasis on appearances.) That epic’s centering of cleverness and de-centering of the conventional heroic physique is tied to the identity of its hero and the skills he needs to return home (as I try to tease out a bit in an essay on disability studies in Homer).
For the Iliad, the funeral games of Patroklos occupy nearly an entire book. In writing my posts for each of the Iliad’s books, I think I gave short shrift to the funeral games. This is a little ironic, since the final chapter of my dissertation focused almost entirely on the games and the job talk I developed from it certainly helped me get my first academic position! The games are central to the epic’s plot in allowing it to return to the themes of the conflict in book 1. Oliver Taplin has argued that “one of the main poetic functions of the funeral games [is] to show Achilles soothing and resolving public strife, instead of provoking and furthering it” (1992, 253) and other authors who write on politics in Homer have seen these connections explicitly, including, but not limited to, Donna Wilson, Dean Hammer, Deborah Beck, Walter Donlan, David Elmer, Elton Barker, and more!
Games are never just about play and fun! They are opportunities for individuals to compete, but when communities are involved, they are also a form of deferred or transformed strife, nearly always loci of political posturing and the exploration of inter-social hierarchies. One just needs to check out ESPN’s Medal Tracker to note, even if superficially, that individual performance in the games is translated into some sign of collective worth or esteem. Further, we narrativize our own experiences and values through what happens on the screen: games are a place where we negotiate our differences and litigate what they mean. Consider recent controversies about gender, ongoing nationalistic feuds over clothing (though, mostly only what women are allowed to wear), and historical manipulation of the games.
The funeral games in Iliad 23 are an opportunity where Achilles experiments with new ideas about authority and the distribution of goods, resolving in part the conflict between him and Agamemnon lingering from book 1, but creating, I think a dissonance for external audiences about to what extent the solutions offered are available outside of epic.
I am not just reminded of the games because of the ongoing Olympics! In Charles Stocking’s Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, which I have been reading and thinking about, the third chapter, “Force and Discourse in the Funeral Games of Patroclus”, presents an in depth reading of the games that adds to essential reading on the topic (work I have mentioned above, plus articles by Grethlein, Kelly and Kitchell cited below”.
Stocking opens the chapter looking at the “problem of force” in the famous advice Nestor gives Antilochus before the chariot race. The race is the central part of the games and takes the longest amount of story time. It initiates a series of disputes and a pattern. The disputes are about the outcome of the contest where the presumed “best” competitors failed to meet expectations because of adverse luck (or questionable tactics). Achilles intervenes in several arguments and proposes solutions that provide new prizes from his personal store to restore/maintain the positions and honor of the competitors.
This would be the equivalent of an official from the IOC adding new medals to the competition. Imagine if the US Men’s basketball team loses a gold-medal game and a shocked world clamors for them to receive the top prize because everyone knows they have the best players! So, the IOC introduces a platinum medal for the team with the most talent and hype. This is a simplified form of what happens in book 23.
But there are many turns. Stocking’s full-chapter treatment is one of the most extensive and detailed analyses of the conflicts and prizes in the games that I know of. he goes through each of the major conflicts with a careful reading of the context and the language that makes it possible. He also introduces some alter work by Michel Foucault in which he discusses the games as a crucial point in “western” history’s exploration of “the will to truth”. Working with and through Foucault’s frameworks, Stocking provides a fine reading of Antilochus’ dispute with Menelaos as a complex negotiation of the fact that “the final distribution of prizes does not match up with the expectations outlined by the original sequence” (138).
During the chapter, Stocking focuses less on “force” directly than in the hierarchy of status implicit in the notion of who is best and the implications of the tension between assumed ability or excellence and outcomes due to accident or fate. In his words, the games become something of a “non-contest” because Achilles intervenes regularly abandoning “the logic of competition a a means for determining or representing social order” (166). Achilles, Stocking argues following others, replaces the contest by creating or recreating the order through his own “verbal performance”.
In this last detail, Stocking may miss an opportunity to set this Achilles as equivalent to the Odyssey’s Odysseus. Both heroes bend the perception of the cosmos for their audiences to their own liking, but both end up creating additional fantasies that may not have equivalents in the external worlds. Part of the disjuncture is the world of plenty heroes have to deal with: Achilles breaks with Agamemnon in book 1 over a slight to his honor when a distribution of goods is recalled in the king’s favor, yet repeatedly redistributes prizes in book 23, drawing from a store of goods that has no end. Odysseus comes home to punish the suitors for consuming his wealth, but there seems to be no end of meat and wine for feasting on Ithaka either. The worlds of Homer’s heroes approach no material limit.
The absence of this limit has a strange relationship with competition: for a feat to have value, it needs a context—we communicate ours by historicizing records of accomplishments and commemorating with symbolic prizes. In the Iliad’s games, the heroic world seems to always be spilling over its ends. As Edith Hall argues in her forthcoming Achilles in Green, the world of Homer’s heroes is extractive and consumptive to the extreme, perhaps anticipating our own modern fiction of endless expansion, profits without end. Without a limit or canon for the heroic games, they become performances of identities reified by Achilles’ addition of prizes whenever the expected worth doesn’t play out as it is expected.
The tension here—I suspect—is that the goal of epic itself is compromised. While Achilles’ never clearly chooses kleos aphthiton in exchange for his war-shortened life, the Iliad leaves us to assume that he nevertheless receives it. But kleos without end is as problematic as human honors that do not change regardless of what actually happens in the games. As Glaukos says, the lives of men are like the leaves that grow and fall. They—and anything related to them—cannot truly be aphthiton, “unwithered, imperishable” because they are made of perishable stuff.
Perhaps the tension in the games relies in this: it is both about replaying the politics of book 1 and trying to approach the deep disappointment of being an example of human greatness, as yet subject to the failures of human life. Achilles’ management of the games is a navigation through personal as well as political value. It is a prelude to the contemplation of mortality in book 24, rather than an exultation in the variety and wonder of human achievement.
my old overview of the funeral games
Short Bibliography
n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.
Deborah Beck. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005.
Christensen, J. (2021). Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer. Classical World114(4), 365-393. https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2021.0020.
Dunkle, Roger. “Nestor, Odysseus, and the μῆτις-βίη antithesis. The funeral games, Iliad 23.” Classical World, vol. LXXXI, 1987, pp. 1-17.
Ellsworth, J. D.. “Ἀγων νεῶν. An unrecognized metaphor in the Iliad.” Classical Philology, vol. LXIX, 1974, pp. 258-264.
Elmer, D.F. (2013). The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., https://doi.org/10.1353/book.21075.
Grethlein, Jonas. “Epic narrative and ritual: the case of the funeral games in Iliad 23.” Literatur und Religion: Wege zu einer mythisch-rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen. Eds. Bierl, Anton, Lämmle, Rebecca and Wesselmann, Katharina. MythosEikonPoiesis; 1.1-2. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 151-177.
Kelly, Adrian. “Achilles in control ? : managing oneself and others in the Funeral Games.” Conflict and consensus in early Greek hexameter poetry. Eds. Bassino, Paola, Canevaro, Lilah Grace and Graziosi, Barbara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2017. 87-108. Doi: 10.1017/9781316800034.005
Kenneth F. Kitchell. “‘But the mare I will not give up’: The Games in Iliad 23.” The Classical Bulletin 74 (1998) 159-71.
Mouratidis, Ioannis. “Anachronism in the Homeric games and sports.” Nikephoros, vol. III, 1990, pp. 11-22.
Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.
Rengakos, Antonios. “Aethiopis.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 306-317.
Roller, Lynn E. “Funeral Games in Greek Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 85, no. 2 (1981): 107–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/505030.
Scott, William C.. “The etiquette of games in Iliad 23.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 213-227.
Oliver Taplin. Homeric Soundings: The Shape of the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Christoph Ulf. “Iliad 23: die Bestattung des Patroklos und das Sportfest der “Patroklos-Spiele”: zwei Teile einer mirror-story.” in Herbert Heftner and Hurt Tomaschitz (eds.). Ad Fontes! Festschrift für Gerhard Dobesch zum 65 Geburtstag am 15. September 2004. Wien: Phoibos, 2004, 73-86.
Malcolm M. Willcock, ‘The funeral games of Patroclus’, Proceedings of the Classical Association, LXX. (1973) 36.
Donna F. Wilson. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Epictetus’ Dissertationes ad Arriano Digestae (“Treatises Collected and Edited by Arrian”)
Book 1.5 Against the Academics
“Epictetus said that if someone resists what is clearly true, then it is not easy to devise an argument to persuade him to change his mind. This is due neither to the man’s strength or the teacher’s weakness, but instead because once someone has been assailed and hardens to stone, how could anyone prevail upon him with reason?
Men are hardened to reason in two ways: one is the petrification of thought; the other comes from shame, whenever someone is deployed in battle to such a degree that he will not acknowledge what is obvious or depart from his fellow combatants. Most of us fear the necrosis of our bodies and we will do anything to avoid having this happen in anyway; but we don’t think at all about the mortification of our mind. By Zeus, if a man is disposed in such a way concerning the mind itself that he can’t follow any argument or understand anything, we believe that he is ill. But if shame or self-regard hardens a man, we still persist in calling this strength!
Do you sense that you are awake? “No”, he answers, “Not more than when I imagine that I am awake while I dream.” The fantasy of dreaming differs in no way from being awake? “Not at all.”
How do I have a conversation with this man? What kind of fire or iron can I take to him to make him perceive that he has turned to stone? Although he realizes it, he pretends he does not. He is even worse than a corpse. One man does not perceive the conflict—he is sick. The other perceives it and neither moves nor responds—he is even worse. His sense of shame and his self-regard have been amputated and his reason has not been excised but instead has been mutilated.
Should I call this strength? May it not be so, unless I should also it strength when perverts do and say everything that occurs to them in public.”
Frontispiece drawn by “Sonnem.” (?, left bottom corner) and engraved by “MB” (bottom right corner). The artist is likely William Sonmans (Sunman). The engraver is Michael Burghers. (Burghers engraved other portraits by Sonmans in this period).
Marcus Aurelius, Letter to Fronto 4.3 (1.1 Haines)
It seems to me that, in all arts, it is far better to be entirely inexperienced and uneducated than to be somewhat experienced and know a little. Anyone who is conscious of the fact that they are out of their element in a given art will try less and thus screw up less. A lack of confidence is a check to audacity. But when someone shows off something that they have a passing familiarity with as if they had mastered it, their false confidence slips up in various ways. They even say that it is far better never to have touched on philosophy than to have done it lightly and sipped, as the saying goes, with the edge of your lips. Further, they add that people come out with the worst characters when they spend sometime in the antechamber of an art and then duck out before they have penetrated inside. Yet there is in some arts a place where you may lie hidden and be considered for some time an expert in that which you don’t understand. But in the selection and disposition of words, the amateur is obvious and can’t pour out words for a long time without demonstrating that they are ignorant of words, judge them badly, reckon them rashly, handle them ineptly, and make distinctions neither about the mode nor about the weight of words.
“What words for such an occasion?”
Omnium artium, ut ego arbitror, imperitum et indoctum omnino esse praestat quam semiperitum ac semidoctum. Nam qui sibi conscius est artis expertem esse minus adtemptat eoque minus praecipitat: Diffidentia profecto audaciam prohibet. At ubi quis leviter quid cognitum pro conperto ostentat, falsa fiducia multifariam labitur. Philosophiae quoque disciplinas ajunt satius esse numquam attigisse quam leviter et primoribus, ut dicitur, labiis delibasse, eosque provenire malitiosissimos, qui in vestibulo artis obversati prius inde averterint, quam penetraverint. Tamen est in aliis artibus, ubi interdum delitiscas et peritus paulisper habeare, quod nescias. In verbis vero eligendis conlocandisque ilico dilucet nec verba dare diutius potest, quin se ipse indicet verborum ignarum esse eaque male probare et temere existimare et inscie contrectare neque modum neque pondus verbi internosse.
“The majority of kings and rulers are stupid–they imitate those artless sculptors who believe that their oversized figures seem large and solid if they make them with a wide stance, flexing their muscles, mouths gaped open. For these types of rulers seem merely to be imitating the impressiveness and seriousness of leadership with their deep voice, severe glance, bitter manners and their separate way of living: but they are not really any different from the sculpted colossus which is heroic and godly on the outside, but filled with dirt, stone or lead within.
The real difference is that the weight of the statue keeps it standing straight, never leaning; these untaught generals and leaders often wobble and overturn because of their native ignorance. For, because they have built their homes on a crooked foundation, they lean and slide with it. Just as a carpenter’s square, if it is straight and solid, straightens out everything else that is measured according to it, so too a leader must first master himself and correct his own character and only then try to guide his people. For one who is falling cannot lift others; one who is ignorant cannot teach; one who is simple cannot manage complicated affairs; one who is disordered cannot create order; and one who does not rule himself cannot rule.”
“I made it to Laodicea on July 31st: you will start the reckoning of the year from this day. Nothing was lacking or unexpected in my arrival, but it is amazing how much this work wears me out. It provides me far too little space for my intellectual curiosity and the work for which I have earned my position.”
Laodiceam veni prid. Kal. Sext.; ex hoc die clavum anni movebis. nihil exoptatius adventu meo, nihil c<>arius; sed est incredibile quam me negoti taedeat, non habeat satis magnum campum ille tibi non ignotus cursus animi et industriae meae, praeclara opera cesset.
Any reader of a Victor Davis Hanson book is confronted with two facts which the mind struggles to assimilate: (i) he managed to get this published, and (ii) people are actually reading it. One of the blurbs on the back of his most recent book, The End of Everything, describes it as ‘stupendous.’ Latinist readers know that this adjective comes from the verb stupere, which can mean ‘to marvel at’ but also ‘to be benumbed,’ and insofar as this second definition is applied, I could not agree more. The book wore me down into such a stupor that, before the end of the book, I found myself praying (secular prayers) for the end of everything.
The title is singularly infelicitous, because the book hardly deals in the kind of apocalyptic universal eschatology promised either by the title or the cover art. Instead, Hanson explores the destruction or sacking of four cities: Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan. Conservatives are fascinated by the decline of civilizations, a subject which provides an excellent foothold for intellectual judo maneuvers that allow them to argue that progressive impulses bring about the sorts of changes which undermine the virtuous elements of once glorious cultures. The ancients themselves excelled at this sort of thing: every time Nestor opens his mouth, there’s a good chance that he will fault his contemporaries for their suffering by noting their manifest inferiority to their predecessors.
Hanson begins, inauspiciously enough, by framing his conclusion as a rebuff to a preposterous straw man:
“Its conclusions warn that the modern world, America included, is hardly immune from repeating these tragedies of the past.”
Out there on his farm, Hanson may be touching too much grass. The most cursory glance at the psychic cacophony of the internet would suggest that no one believes that any place in the world, least of all America, is immune from tragedy. Contemporary discourse, regardless of one’s politics, is entirely invested in the idea of civilizational collapse. Geopolitical conflict, domestic disorder, climate change, the loss of cultural values mistily glanced through roseate lenses – does anyone today go to bed easily with the smug reassurance of imagined future stability?
For my own part, I have relied for the past several years on a panoply of somniferous consumables, though I now think that I have wasted thousands of dollars on sleep aids which could probably be replaced by a regular dose of Hanson’s soporific writing. Let’s stop touting the study of classical languages as the royal road to excellent prose. At least we know that Hanson isn’t a killer. (Nabokov: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”)Observe:
“As the first-century historian Diodorus put it, most in Greece on news of the revolt were sincerely worried about the Thebans. But their sympathy was not the same as their succor.”
I wonder how proud he felt of the apparent rhetorical balance of the alliteration in the second sentence. But the phrase “most in Greece on news of the revolt” is singularly inelegant. Luckily, Hanson didn’t need to activate too many new neural pathways during the drafting phase, leaning instead on well-worn cliches:
“In fact, the timid allies advanced all sorts of flimsy excuses why discretion was the better part of valor, claiming that a century and a half earlier the Thebans had helped the Persian invaders and thus were unworthy of the sacrifice of their brethren.” [Italics added.]
Sometimes the cliche takes the form of unexamined nonsense expressions:
“…quite in contrast to the one-dimensional hoplite phalanxes of old.”
“…the Thebans, like all Greek armies, remained a one-dimensional militia.”
As Kingsley Amis noted, the standard journalese description of characters as “one-dimensional” reflects muddled thinking. Only a point in abstraction is properly one-dimensional, but somehow “two-dimensional” has never really caught on as a suitable replacement. Sed hae sunt nugae.
Consider this paradox:
“The Thebans were within a single day completely defeated. Their army was routed and erased from history.”
It’s one thing for a group to be “swept into the dustbin of History,” as Trotsky had it, but one might well wonder how an army erased from history finds itself discussed in what is billed as a work of…history. There is much in antiquity which has been entirely effaced from history, but it all takes the form of Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” Anything erased from history is ipso facto not discussed – it’s gone.
Speaking of expressions featuring facto, brace yourself for pedantry: Hanson has a singularly irritating tendency to use the phrase post facto throughout the book, which makes agrammatical nonsense of the phrase ex post facto and seems rather unbecoming of a man who wrote such an impassioned polemic about the value of rigorous training in classical languages. Not that Hanson is afraid of a nice bit of pedantry himself. There is a four-page stretch featuring the use of the rather finicky ultimata where most writers would happily settle for the Anglicized ultimatums.
You might think that Hanson was a millennial blogger in light of his fondness for the adverb apparently. A lot of statements get qualified thus in this book, as in this ghastly little performance:
“That sum was the equivalent of paying more than seven thousand of his soldiers together a year’s worth of wages, apparently a far preferable proposition than providing sustenance for thousands of the helpless in the occupied city.”
What to make of this? “Apparently a far preferable proposition than…”? Have you ever observed the way in which people speak with fawning reverence about Ivy League education? Did you know that Hanson went to Stanford?
If it appears (apparently) that I am belaboring Hanson’s faults as a stylist instead of discussing the content of the book, it’s because there isn’t much there. We have potted histories of four cities, linked only by the fact that they were sacked or extirpated and serve as a synecdoche for broader civilizational collapse. No one with a passing familiarity with any of these narratives will find anything novel or surprising in their treatment here, as this contains no real original scholarship. By itself, this is not a damning criticism. But the theme which binds the tetralogy of destruction together is weak, uninteresting, and not particularly well-managed.
I made two great sacrifices to write this post: I added a few extra cents of pocket lining to America’s most famous raisin farming reactionary and sank some irrecoverable hours into reading it. At some point in the past, Hanson set himself about the task of becoming a classical scholar, but found his real metier in Fox News punditry. He may have once done illuminating work on the phalanx, but even his historical work now savors of Rupert Murdoch’s tailpipe. It turns out that the mind, too, can dry up just like those raisins.
Dio Chrysostom, Oration 11 (“On the Fact that Troy Was Never Sacked”)
“I know with some certainly that it is hard to teach all people, but easy to deceive them. And if they learn anything, they scarcely learn it from the few who do really know, while they are easily deceived by many who know nothing, and not only by others, but by themselves too. For the truth is bitter and unpleasant to the ignorant; a lie, however, is sweet and appealing. In the same way, I suppose, light is unpleasant for those with diseased eyes to see, while the darkness is harmless and dear, even if they cannot see. Or, how else would lies often be stronger than the truth, unless they prevailed because of pleasure? Although it is hard to teach, as I was saying, it is harder in every way to re-teach when people have heard lies for a long time and, even worse, when they have not been alone in their delusion, but their fathers, grandfathers and nearly every forebear has been deceived with them.
For it is not easy to take a false belief from them, not even if someone should refute it completely. Similarly, I imagine that, when children have been raised with superstitious beliefs, it is hard for someone to speak the truth later regarding the very things they would not have accepted if someone had just told them in the beginning. This impulse is so strong that many prefer wicked things and agree that they belong to them properly, if they have previously believed so, instead of good things they hear later on.”
“I would not even be surprised, Trojan men, that you believed Homer was more trustworthy when he told the harshest lies about you than me when I told that truth—since you believe him to be a divine man and wise and you have taught your children epic right from the beginning, even though he has only curses for your city, and untrue ones at that. But you wouldn’t accept that I describe things as they are and have been, because I am many years younger than Homer. Certainly, most people say that time is also the best judge of affairs, and, whenever they hear something after a long time, they disbelieve it for this very reason.
If I were dare to speak against Homer among the Argives and to show in addition that his poetry was false concerning the greatest matters, chances are they would be rightfully angry with me and expel me from the city if I appeared to be erasing and cleansing their fame. But it is right that you have some gratitude towards me and listen eagerly. I have stood in defense of your ancestors. I say at the outset to you that these stories have by necessity already been recited by others and that many have learned them. Some of those men will not understand them; others will pretend to discount them, even though they do not, and still others will try to refute them, especially, I think, those ill-fated sophists. But I know clearly that they will not be pleasing to you. For most men have their minds corrupted by fame to the extent that they would prefer to be infamous for the greatest failures rather than be unknown and suffer no evil.”
“For I think that the Argives themselves would not wish for the matters concerning Thyestes, Atreus and the descendants of Pelops to have been any different, but would be severely angry if someone were to undermine the myths of tragedy, claiming that Thyestes never committed adultery with Atreus wife, nor did the other kill his brother’s children, cut them up, and set them out as feast for Thyestes, and that Orestes never killed his mother with his own hand. If someone said all of these things, they would take it harshly as if they were slandered.
I imagine that things would go the same among the Thebans, if someone were to declare that their misfortunes were lies, that Oedipus never killed his father nor had sex with his mother, nor then blinded himself, and that his children didn’t die in front of the wall at each other’s hands, and the Sphinx never came and ate their children. No! instead, they take pleasure in hearing that the Sphinx came and ate their children, sent to them because of Hera’s anger, that Laios was killed by his own son, and Oedipus did these things and wandered blind after suffering, or how the children of previous king of theirs and founder of the city, Amphion, by Artemis and Apollo because they were the most beautiful men. They endure musicians and poets singing these things in their presence at the theater and they make contests for them, whoever can sing or play the most stinging tales about them. Yet they would expel a man who claimed these things did not happen. The majority has gone so far into madness that their obsession governs them completely.For they desire that there be the most stories about them—and it does not matter to them what kind of story it is. Generally, men are not willing to suffer terrible things because of cowardice, because they fear death and pain. But they really value being mentioned as if they suffered.”
Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary (Chp. 3):
But suddenly one day, in a revelation almost as instantaneous as his conversion at the Comédie Française, the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the inanity of the life he was leading. Making a package of his most loved books – his Plutarch and Rabelais, Montaigne, Hugo, and Musset – he fled from Paris to a farm owned by his grandmother in the Sarthe, and there he stayed alone, with only an old peasant woman for cook and housekeeper, for six months, reading, meditating, riding in the forest, and, above all, plotting in detail the itinerary of a journey to Asia Minor.
On his coming of age he returned to Paris to take over his estate, and then again temporarily quitting his grandmother’s apartment in the fashionable Place de la Madeleine he moved into a garret in the Latin Quarter, where he studied “the institutions of Europe,” thinking it wise to know them better than he did before exploring Asia. Philology interested him particularly, and as his intimacy with Flaubert progressed the two friends talked of undertaking together a vast philological dictionary of European words, to be called Les Transmigrations du Latin. But after Christmas Flaubert did not return to Paris and Max left for the Orient in April as his friend lay convalescent in Rouen.
In Homer, Helen and Menelaos have a single child, Hermione and there is a reference to Menelaos’ son Megapenthes. But there are no mentions of Helen having children with anyone else. The mythographical tradition fixes this.
Jacoby BNJ 758 F 6 = Scholia on Euripides, Andromache 898
“Lysimachus and some others report that Nikostratos was also born from Helen. But the one who gathered the Cypriot tales says that it was Pleisthenes who came to Cyprus with Aganos and that he was the child born to Alexander from Helen.”
“Menelaos fathered Hermione from Helen and according to some others Nikostraos; Akousilaos claims that [Menelaos] fathered Megapenthes with a servant girl who was Aitolian in race (she was named Pieres, or, it was Tereis who was Pierian; according to Eumelos he gave birth to a son named Xenodamos from a nymph named Knossia.”
Menelaus intends to strike Helen; struck by her beauty, he drops his swords. A flying Eros and Aphrodite (on the left) watch the scene. Detail of an Attic red-figure crater, ca. 450–440 BC, found in Gnathia (now Egnazia, Italy).
