When he arrives in Odysseus’ household, the seer Theoklymenos gets a little judgy:
Homer, Odyssey 20.351-57
“Wretches! What evil is this you are suffering? Now your heads
Are covered with night along with your faces and legs below.
A wailing burns and your cheeks streak with tears
As the walls and fine rafters are sprayed with blood.
The entryway is filled with ghosts, the courtyard is filled with ghosts
Heading to Erebos under the darkness. The sun has perished
From the sky and a wicked mist rushes over us.”
A suitor’s response is appropriately dismissive: 20.360-362
“A crazy stranger has just arrived from somewhere else.
Come, quick, young men, send him out of the house
To the assembly since he thinks this is like the night!”
“A solar eclipse did not happen but Theoklymenos sees it this way as he tells a prophecy under divine influence since the sun will eclipse for these guys.”
People cite Plutarch (On the Face in the Moon 19), suggesting that he presents this scene as being an eclipse: but he is, in my opinion, satirizing a man who marshals an excess of questionable poetic ‘proofs’ to display his own erudition about eclipses. You can read a free version of this at Lacus Curtius.
From the Dallas Morning News
Peter Gainsford has a great piece about this from 2012 (TAPA 142 1-22). Over twitter, he pointed out that he did not include P. Oxy. 53, 3710 (M.W. Haslam, 1986) which contains a lot of information about eclipses in conjunction with the passage from the Odyssey.
I have read a good deal of scholia and I am not convinced that the passage changes anything about whether or not this part of Odyssey refers to an eclipse. Some ancient scholars may have thought so—and the scholion implies that—but scholiasts also tend to fill commentary with displays of erudition and minutiae. But, here’s my [hasty] translation of a section of the fragment. You can view the whole fragment here. Also, I welcome any suggestions for cleaning up this translation.
“Aristonikos says that it was the new moon then, from which [we get?] Apollo, since he is the sun himself. Aristarkhos of Samos writes that this is because eclipses happen on the new moon. Thales says that the sun goes into eclipse when the moon is in front of it and when the day [….] marks it, on which it makes the eclipse which some call the thirtieth day and others call the new moon.
Heraclitus says as follows: when the months come together [the eclipse?] appears then before the second new moon and then they grow sometimes less and at other times more. Diodorus explains the same thing. For, after the moon is hidden it moves towards the sun during the final [days] of the month until it impedes the rays of the sun and…..makes it disappear and then in turn….”
“The consulship went to Gordian, the boy. But there was a sign that Gordian would be emperor for a short time. It was this: there was a solar eclipse so much like night that it was not possible to do anything without burning torches. And yet, afterwards, the Roman people distracted itself with pleasures and entertainment, in order to soften the memory of the things that had happened.”
Gordiano puero consulatus. sed indicium non diu imperaturi Gordiani hoc fuit quod eclipsis solis facta est, ut nox crederetur, neque sine luminibus accensis quicquam agi posset, post haec tamen voluptatibus et deliciis populus Romanus vacavit, ut ea quae fuerant aspere gesta mitigaret.
Hippocrates of Cos, The Sacred Disease, IV
“If they pretend to know how to summon down the moon and obscure the sun, to make it storm or sunny, to bring rain or drought, to render the sea non-navigable and the earth fallow and other types of miracles, whether they say they can do with from magic rites or from some other ability or practice, which ‘experts’ say are possible, then they seem to me to be impious, to be atheists, without any strength but unlikely to refrain from any of the craziest actions.”
“Even on its own, flames have medical applications. It is known that if fires are set they bring many types of relief to the diseases which are caused by a solar eclipse.”
LXIX. Est et ipsis ignibus medica vis. pestilentiae quae obscuratione solis contrahitur, ignes si fiant, multifariam auxiliari certum est. Empedocles et Hippocrates id demonstravere diversis locis.
Manetho, On Festivals, Fr. 84.( Joannes Lydus, De Mensibus, IV, 87)
“We should note that Manetho in his work On Festivals says that a solar eclipse imposes a wretched influence on people, especially in their head and stomach.”
“So they were inquiring like men who have their heads in the clouds how things were in the city and the world. I said, “All are happy and they will be happy still”. They looked askance and said “If this is true, the city is knocked up with evil”.
I said I was of the same opinion and then: “Because you are raised so high and looking down at everything from a distance, you have noticed these things most perceptively. But how are affairs of the sky? Will the sun go into eclipse? Will the moon rise straight up? Will Mars take a quarter turn toward Jupiter and will Saturn stand directly opposite to the sun? Will Venus share its path with Mercury and bear those Hermaphrodites you love so much? Will they send soaking rain? Will they pour out drifts of snow on the earth? Will they cast down hail, disease, plague, hunger and drought? Is the thunderbolt pail empty? Is the lightning box full again?”
“All along, Phaethon’s father, filthy and bereft
Of his own light, the way he is when the sun is eclipsed,
He hates the light and himself and the day
And he dedicates his soul to sorrow and adds rage
To his mourning as he refuses his duty to the world.
‘I’m done. From the beginning my lot has been restless.
My job without end, without honor for my work, has embittered me.
Let some other, anyone, drive the chariot carrying the light.
If there is no one and all the gods claim they cannot do it,
Let the father himself drive it so that, at some point, as he controls the reins,
And he puts down the bolts that make fathers barren,
Then he will understand, once he knows the strength of the fire-footed stallions,
That he did not earn death just because he did not rule them well.’ ”
Squalidus interea genitor Phaethontis et expers
ipse sui decoris, qualis, cum deficit orbem,
esse solet, lucemque odit seque ipse diemque
datque animum in luctus et luctibus adicit iram
officiumque negat mundo. “satis” inquit “ab aevi
sors mea principiis fuit inrequieta, pigetque
actorum sine fine mihi, sine honore laborum!
quilibet alter agat portantes lumina currus!
si nemo est omnesque dei non posse fatentur,
ipse agat ut saltem, dum nostras temptat habenas,
orbatura patres aliquando fulmina ponat!
tum sciet ignipedum vires expertus equorum
non meruisse necem, qui non bene rexerit illos.”
Gemälde – Sturz des Phaethon, Entwurf für die Decke des Treppenhauses der Eichstätter
Plutarch, Advice to Bride and Groom (Moralia138a-146a : Conjugalia Praecepta)
“These kinds of studies, foremost, distract woman from inappropriate matters. For, a wife will be ashamed to dance when she is learning geometry. And she will not receive spells of medicine if she is charmed by Platonic dialogues and the works of Xenophon. And if anyone claims she can pull down the moon, she will laugh at the ignorance and simplicity of the women who believe these things because she herself is not ignorant of astronomy and she has read about Aglaonikê. She was the daughter of Hêgêtor of Thessaly because she knew all about the periods of the moon and eclipses knew before everyone about the time when the moon would be taken by the shadow of the earth. She tricked the other women and persuaded them that she herself was causing the lunar eclipse.”
Miniature of Alexander the Great consulting his astrologers about an eclipse of the sun after the battle of Arbela: British Library Burney MS 169, f. 69r
“So it seemed to me, he said, that after these travails, since I had come away with nothing while examining reality, that I should be careful not to suffer the very thing which people who gaze at the sun during an eclipse do.
For some of them go blind, I think, unless they examine the sight in water or something like that. I mulled over this sort of thing and I feared that my soul might be similarly blinded should I try to grasp these matters with my eyes and each of my other senses. That’s why it seemed right to me to retreat into ideas and use them to examine the truth of reality.”
“Xenophanes [says eclipses] come from flames going out and that a different one happens again in the east. He reports in addition that there was an eclipse for an entire month and also a total eclipse that made the day seem like night.”
“Xenophanes says that there are many suns and moons arrayed along the earth’s latitudes, segments and zones. At certain times, he says, the disk falls out of the sky to some uninhabited place of the earth and an eclipse appears because it left empty space.”
“Anaximander says that the [moon] is a wheel nineteen times larger than the earth, like the wheel of a chariot it has a hollow rim filled with fire similar to that of the sun, situated at an angle, like that one. It has a single exhalation point like the mouth of bellows. An eclipse happens when the wheel turns.”
“Herakleitos and Hekateios say that the sun is a burning specter from the sea and that it is bowl-shaped and curved on one-side. They say an eclipse happens because of the turn of the bowl shape so that the hollow side turns up and the curved side turns down to our vision.”
“Empedocles says that an eclipse happens when the moon moves under the sun”
D133 = Aët. 2.24.7 (Stob.) [περὶ ἐκλείψεως ἡλίου]
ἔκλειψιν δὲ γίνεσθαι σελήνης αὐτὸν ὑπερχομένης.
Antiphon fr. D21 and D24
“Antiphon says that [the sun] is made of fire that feeds on the wet mist around the earth and that its rising and setting come from it leaving air that has been consumed as it attaches to air with moisture.”
“Anaxagoras says that the moon eclipses when the earth is in the way and sometimes because of the celestial bodies below the moon; the sun eclipses because the moon gets in the way during its new phase.”
D4 (< A42) Ps.-Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II 90a (On Lunar Eclipses)
“What is an eclipse? The stealing of light from the moon by the superposition of the earth. Saying “what is an eclipse” is the same thing as saying “why does the moon eclipse”. Because the light of the sun leaves it when the earth gets in the way.”
“The sun has no audience unless it starts to disappear. No one looks at the moon unless it is eclipsing. Then, cities scream together and everyone makes a ruckus because of silly superstition.”
Sol spectatorem, nisi deficit, non habet. Nemo observat lunam nisi laborantem; tunc urbes conclamant, tunc pro se quisque superstitione vana strepitat.
“And so they were completing the burial of horse-taming Hektor”
῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.
Schol. bT ad. Hom. Il. 21.804
“Menekrates claims that because he sensed his own weakness and inability [to tell their stories] equally, the poet decided to stay silent about the events after Hektor. The rest of the story is served up well in [the stories] told in the Odyssey. There is really only a summary about the house of Odysseus there. The leftovers remain in the stories Odysseus, Nestor, Menelaus, and lyre-playing Demodokos relate. The brief sack of the city is not worth describing”
This photograph shows a section of the GISP2 ice core from 1837-1838 meters in which annual layers are clearly visible. The appearance of layers results from differences in the size of snow crystals deposited in winter versus summer and resulting variations in the abundance and size of air bubbles trapped in the ice. Counting such layers has been used (in combination with other techniques) to reliably determine the age of the ice. This ice was formed ~16250 years ago during the final stages of the last ice age and approximately 38 years are represented here. By analyzing the ice and the gases trapped within, scientists are able to learn about past climate conditions.
“I admit that I now have a bit of a different opinion from what I believed before. Perhaps it would be safest for my reputation to change nothing which I not only believed but also approved for many years. But I cannot endure knowing that I misrepresent myself, especially in this work which I compose as some help for our good students. For even Hippocrates, famous still for his skill in medicine, seems to have conducted himself very honorably when he admitted his own errors so his followers would not make a mistake. Marcus Tullius did not hesitate to condemn some of his own books in subsequent publications, the Catulus and Lucullus, for example.
Prolonged effort in research would certainly be useless if we were not allowed to improve upon previous opinions. Nevertheless, nothing of what I taught then was useless. These things I offer now, in fact, return us to basic principles. Thus it will cause no one grief to have learned from me. I am trying only to collect and lay out the same ideas in a slightly more sensible fashion. I want it made known to all, moreover, that I am showing this to others no later than I have convinced myself.”
Ipse me paulum in alia quam prius habuerim opinione nunc esse confiteor. Et fortasse tutissimum erat famae modo studenti nihil ex eo mutare quod multis annis non sensissem modo verum etiam adprobassem. Sed non sustineo esse conscius mihi dissimulati, in eo praesertim opere quod ad bonorum iuvenum aliquam utilitatem componimus, in ulla parte iudicii mei. Nam et Hippocrates clarus arte medicinae videtur honestissime fecisse quod quosdam errores suos, ne posteri errarent, confessus est, et M. Tullius non dubitavit aliquos iam editos libros aliis postea scriptis ipse damnare, sicut Catulum atque Lucullum et… Etenim supervacuus foret in studiis longior labor si nihil liceret melius invenire praeteritis. Neque tamen quicquam ex iis quae tum praecepi supervacuum fuit; ad easdem enim particulas haec quoque quae nunc praecipiam revertentur. Ita neminem didicisse paeniteat: colligere tantum eadem ac disponere paulo significantius conor. Omnibus autem satis factum volo non me hoc serius demonstrare aliis quam mihi ipse persuaserim.
This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 24. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. This will be the penultimate post on book 24. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Once Hektor’s body is brought back to Troy, Priam and his family prepare for the term of burial promised by Achilles. Following the preparation of the body, three women of the household stand to sing laments in Hektor’s honor. Helen is the last.
Homer, Iliad 24.761-775
“Among them then Helen was the third to take up the lament” ‘Hektor, you were by far the dearest of my in-laws— My husband was actually godlike Alexandros, The one who brought me to Troy. I wish I had died before that. This is the twentieth years since I arrived from there And I left my own homeland. But I have never heard an evil or cruel word from you. But if anyone else in our home would criticize me, One of your brothers or sisters or one of their spouses Or my mother in law—since your father was always as gentle as my own Then you would hold them back by persuading them with words, With your very kindness and your kind words. So, I am weeping for you now and my unlucky self, aggrieved in my heart. No one else in the wide land of Troy will be here for me, As gentle and as dear, and everyone else is rough to me.’ ”
Helen’s speech has the appearance of being rather simple and personal, absent the kinds of rhetorical flourish one might expect from a Periklean funeral oration or a modern eulogy. She offers something of an odd balance between personal reflections and echoes of the larger war. As we saw earlier in book 6, she marks Hektor out for her kindness to him—which has led to speculation among some that she manipulated him or that there is something more going on between them—but notice that Hektor’s character in caring for her is consonant with his identity as a protector. Within Troy, he kept her safe from her in-laws with kind and persuasive words. The softness she recalls may help us imagine a Hektor who was ill-at-ease with the language of rebuke and invective, perhaps centering more the man who spent some of his final moments fantasizing about talking to Achilles the way young lovers do.
The three laments taken up in turn can be seen as the beginning of generating Hektor’s kleos. The language of the speech introduction, “taking turn, or taking lead” (ἐξῆρχε) evokes singers/or speakers taking turns in the telling of the tale. Yet each woman in the series tells a story of Hektor that is not about his martial glory. Instead, they focus on what he provided and what they will miss in their loss. Andromache looks ahead to a future where she and Astyanax are enslaved (or worse) after the fall of Troy. Hecuba laments all of her other dead sons and the way Achilles mistreated Hektor’s body.
As with the laments for Patroklos, we find a tension between mourners lamenting the loss of life and what they see in their own life in the wake of this ‘new’ experience. Andromache, his wife, sees herself and her son in the future, imagining the consequences of Hektor’s absence. Hecuba sees the immediate present and the past, enrolling Hektor into a catalogue of losses in which he is the final entry and the most painful. Helen expands and personalizes: she provides the audience with a different picture of Hektor and then sees their grief as joined: when she says “So, I am weeping for you now and my unlucky self, aggrieved in my heart”(τὼ σέ θ’ ἅμα κλαίω καὶ ἔμ’ ἄμμορον ἀχνυμένη κῆρ) we could imagine her in the vein of Andromache, imagining her own suffering without Hektor their to protect me. But I think we also find a rather direct and significant articulation of the tension we all face in mourning the dead, the tension I mentioned Achilles inhabiting when he laments the loss of Patroklos—navigating the pain of the loss of a loved one from your life while also starting to conceive of the full meaning of a life lost for a loved one.’
Abduction of Helen vase
Helen also provides several phrases that connect her intensely personal testimony to the larger cosmic framework of their shared suffering. She asserts—almost regretfully—that she is Alexander’s (Paris’) spouse, but wishes she had died before he took her from home (ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλον ὀλέσθαι). The language she uses here echoes when Hektor wishes Paris had died unmarried in book 3 (αἴθ’ ὄφελες ἄγονός τ’ ἔμεναι ἄγαμός τ’ ἀπολέσθαι, 3.40), when Helen herself wishes Paris had died on the battlefield in book 3 (ἤλυθες ἐκ πολέμου· ὡς ὤφελες αὐτόθ’ ὀλέσθαι, 3.428), when the trojan Herald addresses the Achaeans in book 5 and similarly wishes Paris had died (ἠγάγετο Τροίηνδ’· ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλ’ ἀπολέσθαι, 7.390) and, less clearly, when Achilles wishes Briseis had died before he brought her to Troy in book 19 (τὴν ὄφελ’ ἐν νήεσσι κατακτάμεν ῎Αρτεμις ἰῷ, 19.59). In echoing these lines, Helen downplays her agency while also prompting the audience to think of the larger framework of the conflict. Helen’s tendency to self-deprecate, as Ruby Blondell argues, is a way to reclaim agency. Book 24
When she says, “this is the twentieth year since I left my homeland”, I think she is invoking the whole arc of the Trojan War, from her marriage to this moment in time. While the scholia take pains to explain the reference to twenty years as including the time it took to muster the Greek army, I would be tempted to read the line “since I went from there and my dear homeland” (ἐξ οὗ κεῖθεν ἔβην καὶ ἐμῆς ἀπελήλυθα πάτρης) as going back to Helen’s marriage and including a reference to the broader world of myth. (to be clear, though, this is not an easy argument to make.
But Helen’s capacity both by her presence and her words to remind audiences of the larger arc of myth remains important regardless of how we count up to twenty. Consider again the wish she makes to have died before she left home: this wish echoes Achilles’ wish that he had never taken Briseis and multiple characters’ wish that Paris had died before he could have caused all this trouble. Epic is deeply interested in considering the causes of things. When it toys with contrafactual statements it invites audiences to consider causal chains and the interdependence of events and our notions of agency and goodwill. Here, instead of wishing for Paris’ death and ascribing him the agency for the war, Helen regrets her own existence and traces Hektor’s death to the moment she left home.
Helen’s function as a sign of the larger story helps also to explain her position in the order of the laments. Typically in early Greek rhetoric, the most important element is reserved for the final position rather than the initial ones. (Johannes Kakridis called this an “ascending scale of affection” (1949, 19-20 So, doublets tend to put greater emphasis on the second entry and tricola feature both increasing length of phrase and amplified importance. This works on the level of phrases and lines, but it also is important in larger structures as well.
nelaus 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).
The clearest parallel to help us understand the oddness of the laments at the end of book 24 are the conversations in book 6 of the Iliad. There, Hektor moves towards the most important conversation and through what appears to be greater degrees of intimacy as he speaks first to Hecuba, then to Helen, and finally to Andromache, who has the longest and most charged exchange in the book. Similarly, Hektor’s death is known last to Andromache in book 22. At the end of the epic, however, we start with Andromache, then hear from Hecuba, and finally end with Helen. The speeches are roughly the same length and, as we have already seen, are all about Hektor in a more-or-less intimate way. The difference this time, I think, is that we move from the most local, intimate relationship, steadily focusing our gaze outward, away from Hektor’s corpse to a view of the larger world. The increasing emphasis, then, is away from the parochial to the bigger picture, away from Hektor’s burial to remind us of the whole of which it is merely a representative part.
In her essay on Helen’s lament, Maria Pantelia notes that Helen’s presence and position in the laments is “problematic” in part because she is the cause of his death and the other women have been characterized as hostile to her. Pantelia notes first that Hektor’s mourning already started in 22 with speeches by Priam, Hecuba, and Andromache (and, to my taste, these speeches are more moving than the rather limited laments in 24). Following the groundbreaking work of Margaret Alexiou on mourning traditions, Pantelia suggest that those first speeches are characteristic of “spontaneous and personal expressions of pain and grief” (24) while those from 24 are similar in shape as well as size to one another.
Helen’s position as the final speaker, emphasizes a move from “the human and the personal to the universal and transcendent” (25). And this works in part because Helen herself has a unique connection to the generation of epic fame: she tells stories to confirm people’s identities in book 3; she is weaving her own story for people to come to learn about in book 6, and she contests and retells stories from the Trojan War tradition in book 4 of the Odyssey. “Helen’s lament”, Pantelia suggests, is not about what Hektor can no longer do for Troy, but about the greatness of a human being who deserves to be remembered”.
And I think it is so very important that she remembers him for his kindness, for protecting her against the anger of others. This is in a way a distinct thing about Hektor’s character: he acts for what is right no matter how much it is going to hurt him. In addition, the focus on his simple, personal glory, leaves the question of heroic renown in the dust of the burial ground. Hektor is memorialized here not as some man-killing hero, but simply as a man. While he predicts in book 7 that the future will know him by the names of the people he killed, the story Helen tells after his death is of the small kindnesses that made life easier to live.
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge
Austin, N. 1994. Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca: Cornell
BLONDELL, RUBY. “‘Bitch That I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 140, no. 1 (2010): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40652048.
Carvounis, Katerina. “Helen and Iliad 24. 763-764.” Hyperboreus, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 5-10.
Due, C. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ebbott, M. 1999. “The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad” In Carlisle, M. and Levaniouk, O. eds. Nine Essays on Homer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 3-20.
Graver, M. 1995. “Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult.” ClAnt 14: 41-61
Groten, F. J. 1968. “Homer’s Helen.” G&R 15: 33-39.
Pantelia, Maria C. “Helen and the Last Song for Hector.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), vol. 132, no. 1/2, 2002, pp. 21–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20054056. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024.
Shapiro, Harvey Alan. “The judgment of Helen in Athenian art.” Periklean Athens and its legacy: problems and perspectives. Eds. Barringer, Judith M. and Hurwit, Jeffrey M.. Austin (Tex.): University of Texas Pr., 2005. 47-62.
“Among them then Helen was the third to take up the lament”
‘Hektor, you were by far the dearest of my in-laws—
My husband was actually godlike Alexandros,
The one who brought me to Troy. I wish I had died before that.
This is the twentieth years since I arrived from there
And I left my own homeland.
But I have never heard an evil or cruel word from you.
But if anyone else in our home would criticize me,
One of your brothers or sisters or one of their spouses
Or my mother in law—since your father was always as gentle as my own
Then you would hold them back by persuading them with words,
With your very kindness and your kind words.
So, I am weeping for you now and my unlucky self, aggrieved in my heart.
No one else in the wide land of Troy will be here for me,
As gentle and as dear, and everyone else is rough to me.’ ”
“The twentieth year? Wrong. This can’t be the twentieth year. From the time Helen went to Troy it is established that the gathering of the army happened but that in the twentieth, Odysseus returned to Ithaka.
There was a lot of time wasted in wandering then too.
It is asserted that they spent ten years getting the army together and then they were slowed down by a storm on their own and then once they came to Aulis. So, now is the 20th year since the theft of Helen.
Ten years for the gathering of the army must be added to the Odyssey.”
