Aphrodite’s Mom in Iliad 5

Hom. Iliad 5.370-4

Then divine Aphrodite fell to the knees of Diône
Her own mother. She took her own daughter into her arms.
She touched her with her hand, named her, and spoke:
“Dear child, who of the Olympians has done these kinds of things to you,
Pointlessly, as if you were doing something wicked in the open?”

ἣ δ’ ἐν γούνασι πῖπτε Διώνης δῖ’ ᾿Αφροδίτη
μητρὸς ἑῆς· ἣ δ’ ἀγκὰς ἐλάζετο θυγατέρα ἥν,
χειρί τέ μιν κατέρεξεν ἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἐκ τ’ ὀνόμαζε·
τίς νύ σε τοιάδ’ ἔρεξε φίλον τέκος Οὐρανιώνων
μαψιδίως, ὡς εἴ τι κακὸν ῥέζουσαν ἐνωπῇ;

Once Aphrodite tells her the story, her mother then goes on to provide her a catalogue of gods who had to endure wounding by mortals. While the passage is amusing, it produces a little dissonance based largely on the significant detail of Aphrodite having a mother.

Schol. D ad. Hom. Il. 5.374

“Note that according to Hesiod, Aphrodite is the product of Ouranos’ genitals and the sea, but according to Homer, she is from Diône and Zeus.

᾿Ιστέον δὲ, ὅτι, κατὰ μὲν ῾Ησίοδον, ἡ
᾿Αφροδίτη γίγνεται ἐκ τοῦ Οὐρανοῦ τῶν
αἰδοίων, καὶ τῆς θαλάσσης· κατὰ δὲ
῞Ομηρον, ἐκ Διώνης καὶ Διός.

An instructive detail here is that the scholion here doesn’t take a stance about whether either or not Homer or Hesiod are “correct” or one is prior to another, and I think this is pretty important. From a narrative perspective each genealogy makes sense for the story in question: Aphrodite is a powerful elemental force in Hesiod’s Theogony and there is both poetic and political logic behind her birth from Ouranos’ testicles. In the Homeric tradition, this is more complicated. Zeus needs to humiliate Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where he ‘gets back’ at her for infecting the gods with lust by inducing her to have sex with the mortal Anchises. In the Iliad, Aphrodite is rendered subordinate to Zeus as one of his children. Aphrodite is often mentioned as a daughter of Zeus (as G. S. Kirk notes in his Cambridge commentary on the Iliad), but this is the only place we hear about her mother. To make it a little more bewildering, Diône seems top merely be a feminine form of Zeus (cf. the genitive Dios).

Frederick Combellack writes in his 1976 article “Homer the Innovator” that “any person who spends very much time in the study of the Homeric poems will almost certainly find himself involved, perhaps with regret, in the study of Homeric scholarship” (44). He drops this “diss track” by way of introducing an argument against the very idea that Homeric poetry could “innovate” or “invent” new detail, an assertion supported by many scholars in the twentieth century, dismissed by Combellack as being possible, but implausible based on our evidence.

While I don’t necessarily share Combellack’s aversion to reading Homeric scholarship, despite a weighty tradition mocking its pedantry going all the way back to Seneca (and likely earlier, given the evidence of Palladas the Alexandrian poet), I do think the asperity of his comments point to an important problem in thinking about Homeric poetry: making any sense of the relationship between our ‘Homer’ and what may have come before. 

The relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and antecedent ‘traditions’ is not just about mythological narratives: it pervades our view of Homeric language (the formula), devices (e.g. similes), as well as content. Indeed, a great deal of Homeric scholarship of the 20th century was engaged with this question in one way or another. (Sidenote, this is a topic that will always inspire debate: The first 45 minutes of my dissertation defense in 2007 was occupied by my readers debating among themselves the meaning of the word ‘tradition’ in relation to the Iliad.)

I have discussed neoanalytical approaches before, and I don’t really want to recap that. Here I am interested in two problems presented by the nature of Homeric poetry itself: First, Homeric poetry is generically meant to seem old and authoritative, without having to actually be so. Second, Greek poetry and myth in general have a very different approach to veracity or fidelity than a culture immersed in fixed textual traditions like ours might expect.

For the first problem, I always find it useful to flip our belief about Homeric poetry on its head: what if, instead of assuming that Homeric poetry stands as the authoritative origins of Trojan war narratives (and other myths) it stands at the end of a certain kind of flexible tradition, imposing an authoritative order only over time thanks to a privileged cultural position? I find starting from this approach useful especially with other archaic and classical age poets because we can’t actually know what ‘Homer’ they were exposed to and it is strange to think that epic performance was not shaped by other genres as well.

For the second challenge, I often think back to what Hesiod announces before the cosmogonic narrative of the Theogony even begins. The Muses approach ‘Hesiod’ while he is tending his flocks:

Theogony 26-28

“Rustic shepherds, wretched reproaches, nothing but bellies,
We know how to say many lies similar to the truth
And we know how to speak the truth when we want to.”

“ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ’ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ’ εὖτ’ ἐθέλωμεν ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.”

When I teach myth I emphasize that while this passage can be taken as a disclaimer (i.e., you may know different stories than mine!) for communities of divergent, even conflicting narrative traditions, I think it is also a conditioning framework for setting aside concerns about veracity. Hesiod the narrator here attributes poetic authority to the Muses along with the ability to discern what is true from what is false. The result is that mortals simply cannot know and, therefore, probably shouldn’t worry about it.

But I have also taken recourse to ideas from scholars of memory to rethink moments like this. In studying memory systems, Martin Conway suggests that there are two forces in human memory: correspondence, which is about equivalence between details of ‘reality’ (or experience) and details of a story and coherence, which means that details make sense together in a narrative. When it comes to the way these systems operate in the human mind, not only does he argue that the memory systems have different neuro-anatomy, but he suggests that the episodic memory system (which prizes correspondence) developed earlier and is more basic to day-to-day survival than the autobiographical memory system which focuses more on coherence and is essential for the development of a goal or ‘identity’ driven self. The two systems are not exclusive—autobiographical memory selects from episodic memory in the creation of a coherent self.

In expanding these ideas to communities of audiences and narrative traditions, what I think we can say is that ancient audiences were accustomed to making sense of each story on its own terms, nonplussed by details that might conflict with other story traditions, because they belong to those other stories. The force of narrative coherence supersedes correspondence to ‘facts’ in other tales because what matters in each telling is the story in process. To an extent, these forces and the aesthetics they imply are operative throughout early Greek poetry (consider Pindar) and at play as well in the ‘innovations’ we see in Athenian Tragedy.

To return to book 5 of the Iliad: Aphrodite has a mother because it makes sense for the global context of the epic (where Zeus is the “father of gods and men”) and because it makes sense for this scene. Whether or not this is Homeric “invention” is almost beside the point. Certainly the simplicity of the name Diône and the lack of her presence in other narratives implies that this detail is important, even idiopathic to this (kind of) scene, but it tells us nothing about whether or not earlier versions of this theme including this detail or whether similar moments occurred in antecedent or parallel traditions. The challenge, as always, is to make sense of how this passage supports the Iliad we possess.

Cribbing from the Muses here: we cannot know if ‘Homer’ made something up, so should we bother worrying about it?

Short bibliography

Alden, Maureen Joan. “The rôle of Calypso in the Odyssey.” Antike und Abendland, vol. XXXI, 1985, pp. 97-107.

Barker, Elton T. E.. “The « Iliad »’s big swoon: a case of innovation within the epic tradition ?.” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-17.

Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies

Berg, Nils and Haug, Dag Trygve Truslew. “Dividing Homer. 2,: Innovation vs. tradition in Homer : an overlooked piece of evidence.” Symbolae Osloenses, vol. 75, 2000, pp. 5-23. Doi: 10.1080/003976700300005811

Bruce K. Braswell. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 21 (1971) 16-26.

Christensen, Joel P.. “Innovation and tradition revisited: the near-synonymy of ἀμύνω and ἀλέξω as a case study in Homeric composition.” The Classical Journal, vol. 108, no. 3, 2012-2013, pp. 257-296.

Combellack, Frederick M.. “Homer the innovator.” Classical Philology, vol. LXXI, 1976, pp. 44-55.

Martin A. Conway. “Memory and the Self,” Journal of Memory and Language 53 (2005) 594-628.

Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. “« Kyklos », the Epic Cycle and Cyclic poetry.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 1-40.

Bernard Fenik. Homer: Tradition and Invention.  Leiden, 1978.

Ingalls, Wayne B.. “Linguistic and formular innovation in the mythological digressions in the Iliad.” Phoenix, vol. XXXVI, 1982, pp. 201-202.

Jones, Peter. “Poetic invention: the fighting around Troy in the first nine years of the Trojan War.” Homer’s world: fiction, tradition, reality. Eds. Andersen, Øivind and Dickie, Matthew W.. Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens; 3. Athens ; Bergen: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1995. 101-111.

Mueller-Goldingen, Christian. “Tradition und Innovation: zu Stesichoros’ Umgang mit dem Mythos.” L’Antiquité Classique, vol. 69, 2000, pp. 1-19. Doi: 10.3406/antiq.2000.2419

Nussbaum, Alan J.. “The Homeric formulary template and a linguistic innovation in the epics.” Language and meter. Eds. Gunkel, Dieter and Hackstein, Olav. Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics; 18. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2018. 267-318.

Ready, Jonathan L.. The Homeric simile in comparative perspectives : oral traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2018.

David C. Rubin. “The Basic-systems Model of Episodic Memory,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006) 277-311.

M. M. Willcock. “Mythological Paradeigmata in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 14 (1964) 141-151.

—,—.  “Ad Hoc Invention in the Iliad.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977) 41-53.

Book 5 contains several speeches that engage with themes of theomachy and the Iliad’s relationship with the past. A few of them also can help us think about the poem’s composition and its relationship to other poetic traditions. One speech where many of these issues emerge is Dione’s speech to Aphrodite after Diomedes wounds her.

Homer, Iliad 5. 381-416

“Dione, the shining goddess, answered her then: ‘Endure my child, and restrain yourself even though you are grieving. For many of us who have Olympian homes have caused each other hard pains because of humans. Ares once endured when Otos and strong Ephialtes, The children of Aloes, chained him in a powerful bond. He was tied down for thirteen months in a bronze jar. And then Ares, insatiate of war, would have perished there If their step-mother, the super pretty Eeriboia Had not informed Hermes. He freed Ares Who was in a lot of pain, since his bonds were hurting him. And Hera endured, when the powerful son of Amphitryon Struck her in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow. Then untreatable pain overtook her indeed. And huge Hades endured when the same son of Aegis-bearing Zeus Gave him pain by shooting him among the corpses. Then he went to great Olympos to Zeus’ home, Grieving that he had been allotted pain. That arrow Was lodged in his massive shoulder, and suffered in his heart. Paeon relieved his pains by applying medicine, Since he wasn’t mortal in any way at all. The one who doesn’t hesitate at doing sacrilegious things Is a violence-doing criminal, that guy who harms the gods with arrows. Athena the grey-eyed goddess sent him against you. The fool. Doesn’t Tydeus’ son recognize in his thoughts That someone who fights the gods doesn’t live very long, He won’t ever have children saying “daddy” at his needs When he comes home from war and the terrible battle. So now the son of Tydeus, even if he is super strong, Let him not even think about fighting someone better than you, Lest prudent Aigialeia Adrastus’ daughter Should wake her dear servants from sleep, weeping, Longing for her wedded husband, the best of the Achaeans, That strong wife of horse-taming Diomedes.” 

This passage has a few interesting things in it. First, while there is some evidence for Dione as a goddess outside of the Iliad, in Hesiod and her Homeric Hymn she is the product of Ouranos’ castrated testicles. By having a mother in Homer, Aphrodite is more neatly fit into an Olympian pantheon as a child of Zeus rather than a goddess from an earlier generation. Dione, coincidentally, has been seen as a feminine version of the alternate root for Zeus, Dios.

A short digression, one of the features of the flexibility of Homeric verse is that it admits formal variants that other dialects would tend to reduce. So, for convenience of metrical shape, there are two ways to decline Zeus:

Zeus/ Zēnos / Zēni /Zēna

Zeus / Dios / Dii / Dia

For those who don’t know an inflected language, the declension of a noun is the set of the forms needed to communicate their grammatical function in the sentence. So, Homeric Greek provides two ways to say “of Zeus” (Zēnos/Dios) or “to/for Zeus”(Zēni/Dii). The rhythmic shape of each pair differs long/short vs. short/short; and, further, the initial consonants can change the length of final vowels that precede them. Complex consonants like zeta (closer to the sound ds) can make short vowels that precede them (what we call “long by position” in contrast to “long by nature”).

Back to Dione’s speech: this is a good example of what I have mentioned before, a paradeigma, an example from the past used to persuade someone in the poem’s presence. This one provides a catalogue of divine suffering at the hands of humans to ‘console’ Aphrodite. Each of these examples have story traditions that are explained in the scholia (on which see below) or appear in other extant texts.

Beyond the details, this passage is also often compared for its structure to an epic fragment ascribed to the poet Panyasis in the 5th century BCE:

Panyasis Herakleia fr. 3 Benarbé = 16 K

“Demeter endured; the famous Lame-god endured; 

Poseidon endured; and silver-bowed Apollo endured

to serve a mortal human being for one year 

and even Ares strongheart endured under his father’s compulsion,” 

 

τλῆ μὲν Δημήτηρ, τλῆ δὲ κλυτὸς ᾿Αμφιγυήεις,

τλῆ δὲ Ποσειδάων, τλῆ δ’ ἀργυρότοξος ᾿Απόλλων 

ἀνδρὶ παρὰ θνητῷ θητευσέμεν εἰς ἐνιαυτόν, 

τλῆ δὲ καὶ ὀβριμόθυμος ῎Αρης ὑπὸ πατρὸς ἀνάγκῃ 

Note the repetitions in structures (τλῆ μὲν…τλῆ δὲ), themes (immortals harmed by mortals), and even diction (ὀβριμόθυμος in Panyasis is parallel to ὀβριμοεργὸς in Homer).  The similarity between this passage and the longer speech in Homer has led to much speculation as to the cause: is this catalogue a common structuring motif in early Greek poetry or is it a case of Panyasis imitating Homer (or Homer imitating Panyasis) or something more complex.

(Elton Barker and I have written about this a little: See our discussion in Homer’s Thebes).

An Issue of Texts

Iliad 5.403 reads σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ’ αἴσυλα ῥέζων but there is a scholion that notes that the Hellenistic editor Aristarchus read αἰσυλοεργός. 

That would give us a different line σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ’ αἴσυλα ῥέζων (Schol. T ad Il. 5.403).. The difference is minor: σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς is something like a “violence-doing criminal” while σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός is something closer to a “sacrilege-committing criminal”. My guess is that other editors preferred ὀβριμοεργὸς because it is not a hapax legomenon (a word said only once) and because the compound αἰσυλοεργός (aisuloergos) has its sense repeated at the end of the line with αἴσυλα ῥέζων (aisula rezôn). 

These two aesthetic criteria–uniqueness of words, close repetition–are not necessarily at home with the basic aesthetics of Greek poetry. Our scholia–the collection of marginal comments culled from centuries of scholarly editing of and commentary on ancient texts–preserve layers of different approaches to Homer. The editor Aristarchus, one of Homer’s earliest editors, is criticized by some modern authors for preserving unique or otherwise uncommon readings. (See this review by Gregory Nagy of Martin West’s edition of the Iliad for more.) My personal take on this is that the kind of repetition in this line is characteristic of something like an intentional archaism, a  close repetition that hearkens back to the legendary era the speaker is evoking. While the repetition and unique diction may seem odd from Hellenistic and modern aesthetic perspectives, I think it rings better for the context and is truer to the complexity of Homeric poetry.

I have discussed similar textual differences before in an article about a later scene in book 5, centering around Ares where our common text preserves rather bland vocabulary in preference to exceptional diction.

A World of Stories: Mythographical scholia

Another kind of material preserved in the scholia includes additional information about myth from outside Homer. There are several versions of the story of Diomedes’ wife, Aigialeia, in the scholia to Homer. The scholion in this case seems to read Dione’s comment’s as an allusion or even a coded threat about the impact of Athena’s anger on Diomedes in the long run.

Schol. T Ad Hom. Il. 5.512ex

“They say that Aigialeia, the youngest of the daughters of Adrastus, was Diomedes’ wife and really longed for him and troubled herself over him through the nights as well. But later, thanks to the rage of Aphrodite, she slept with a band of Argive youths and later on, Kometes, the son of Sthenelos, to whom Diomedes had entrusted the affairs of his household. Although she was planning to kill him when he returned home, she spared Diomedes because he fled to the altar of Athena. People say that when he left there he went to Iberia, as some claim, and that he was deceitfully killed by the king Daunus. Others claim that he was killed by Iounios the son of Daunos during a hunt. For this reason, Athena turned him into a god and changed his companions into herons.

The poet does not know of the desire of Kometes and Aigialeia.”

μὴ δὴν Αἰγιάλεια: φασὶν Αἰγιάλειαν τὴν νεωτέραν τῶν᾿Αδρηστίδων γυναῖκα Διομήδους οὖσαν σφόδρα αὐτὸν ἐπιποθεῖν καὶ ἀπολοφύρεσθαι καὶ κατὰ τὰς νύκτας. ὕστερον δὲ κατὰ μῆνιν ᾿Αφροδίτης πάσῃ τῇ νεολαίᾳ τῶν ᾿Αργείων αὐτὴν συγκωμάσαι, ἔσχατον δὲ καὶ †σθενέλῳ τῷ κομήτου†, ὃς ἦν ὑπὸ Διομήδους πιστευθεὶς τὰ κατ’ οἶκον. ἥκοντα δὲ αὐτὸν μέλλων ἀνελεῖν ἐφείσατο διὰ τὸ καταφυγεῖν εἰς τὸν τῆς ᾿Αθηνᾶς βωμόν· ὅθεν αὐτὸν φυγόντα φασὶν ἥκειν εἰς †ἰβηρίαν† κἀκεῖ, ὡς μέν τινες, δολοφονηθῆναι ὑπὸ Δαύνου τοῦ βασιλέως, ὡς δὲ ἔνιοι, ἀπολέσθαι ὑπὸ ᾿Ιουνίου τοῦ Δαύνου παιδὸς ἐν κυνηγεσίοις· ὅθεν αὐτὸν μὲν ἀπεθέωσεν ᾿Αθηνᾶ, τοὺς δὲ ἑταίρους εἰς ἐρωδιοὺς μετέβαλεν. 

τὸν Κομήτου πόθον καὶ Αἰγιαλείας οὐκ οἶδεν ὁ ποιητής. 

There is no way of knowing if this account was written into our out of our Iliad. By which I mean: we can’t really know if ancient audiences had access to this story and part of this is because we don’t have evidence of whether this story was told to flesh out what is said in the speech or if the speech reflects stories that were well known.

The scholiast’s notion that the “poet did not know this story” is a problematic one and one that reflects misunderstanding about Homeric poetic strategy.  Homeric narrative tends to suppress stories that don’t support its local and general aims, something I discuss elsewhere in reference to the Homeric treatment of Cassandra.

 It does seem peculiar that Dione would bring up Diomedes’ wife as all–but it is likely that she was a well-known part of his story as one of the Epigonoi. Actual evidence from early Greek poetry is limited. As far as I can see (and this is more or less confirmed by Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth, 1993: 699), the story is later than the classical period, although a much later scholion to Lykophron suggests the story was told by the archaic poet Mimnermus:

Schol. To Lykophron, Alexandra 610

“Aphrodite, according to Mimnermus, was wounded by Diomedes and caused Aigialeia to sleep with many adulterers and to be loved by Kometes the son of Sthenelos. When he returned to Argos, she plotted against him. Then he fled to the altar of Hera and left with his companions in the night. Then he went to Italy to King aunos who killed him with a trick.”

 ἡ δὲ ᾿Αφροδίτη, καθά φησιν Μίμνερμος (F 22 Bgk), ὑπὸ Διομήδους τρωθεῖσα παρεσκεύασε τὴν Αἰγιαλείαν πολλοῖς μὲν μοιχοῖς συγκοιμηθῆναι, ἐρασθῆναι δὲ καὶ [῾Ιππολύτου] Κομήτου τοῦ Σθενέλου υἱοῦ. τοῦ δὲ Διομήδους παραγενομένου εἰς τὸ ῎Αργος, ἐπιβουλεῦσαι αὐτῶι· τὸν δὲ καταφυγόντα εἰς τὸν βωμὸν τῆς ῞Ηρας, διὰ νυκτὸς φυγεῖν σὺν τοῖς ἑταίροις, καὶ ἐλθεῖν εἰς ᾿Ιταλίαν πρὸς Δαῦνον βασιλέα, ὅστις αὐτὸν <δόλωι> ἀνεῖλεν. 

Some things to read

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

BOUCHARD, ELSA. “APHRODITE ‘PHILOMMÊDÊS’ IN THE ‘THEOGONY.’” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015): 8–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44157344.

Contzen, Eva von. “The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History.” Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 241–60. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.50.3.0241.

Cook, Arthur Bernard. “Who Was the Wife of Zeus?” The Classical Review 20, no. 7 (1906): 365–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/695286.

Hadzsits, George Depue. “Aphrodite and the Dione Myth.” The American Journal of Philology 30, no. 1 (1909): 38–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/288458.

Pratt, Louise. “The Parental Ethos of the Iliad.” Hesperia Supplements 41 (2007): 25–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066781.

Sale, W. Merritt. “Aphrodite in the Theogony.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92 (1961): 508–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/283834.

Willcock, M. M. “Mythological Paradeigma in the Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1964): 141–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/637720.

 

Book 5 contains several speeches that engage with themes of theomachy and the Iliad’s relationship with the past. A few of them also can help us think about the poem’s composition and its relationship to other poetic traditions. One speech where many of these issues emerge is Dione’s speech to Aphrodite after Diomedes wounds her.

Homer, Iliad 5. 381-416

“Dione, the shining goddess, answered her then: ‘Endure my child, and restrain yourself even though you are grieving. For many of us who have Olympian homes have caused each other hard pains because of humans. Ares once endured when Otos and strong Ephialtes, The children of Aloes, chained him in a powerful bond. He was tied down for thirteen months in a bronze jar. And then Ares, insatiate of war, would have perished there If their step-mother, the super pretty Eeriboia Had not informed Hermes. He freed Ares Who was in a lot of pain, since his bonds were hurting him. And Hera endured, when the powerful son of Amphitryon Struck her in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow. Then untreatable pain overtook her indeed. And huge Hades endured when the same son of Aegis-bearing Zeus Gave him pain by shooting him among the corpses. Then he went to great Olympos to Zeus’ home, Grieving that he had been allotted pain. That arrow Was lodged in his massive shoulder, and suffered in his heart. Paeon relieved his pains by applying medicine, Since he wasn’t mortal in any way at all. The one who doesn’t hesitate at doing sacrilegious things Is a violence-doing criminal, that guy who harms the gods with arrows. Athena the grey-eyed goddess sent him against you. The fool. Doesn’t Tydeus’ son recognize in his thoughts That someone who fights the gods doesn’t live very long, He won’t ever have children saying “daddy” at his needs When he comes home from war and the terrible battle. So now the son of Tydeus, even if he is super strong, Let him not even think about fighting someone better than you, Lest prudent Aigialeia Adrastus’ daughter Should wake her dear servants from sleep, weeping, Longing for her wedded husband, the best of the Achaeans, That strong wife of horse-taming Diomedes.” 

This passage has a few interesting things in it. First, while there is some evidence for Dione as a goddess outside of the Iliad, in Hesiod and her Homeric Hymn she is the product of Ouranos’ castrated testicles. By having a mother in Homer, Aphrodite is more neatly fit into an Olympian pantheon as a child of Zeus rather than a goddess from an earlier generation. Dione, coincidentally, has been seen as a feminine version of the alternate root for Zeus, Dios.

A short digression, one of the features of the flexibility of Homeric verse is that it admits formal variants that other dialects would tend to reduce. So, for convenience of metrical shape, there are two ways to decline Zeus:

Zeus/ Zēnos / Zēni /Zēna

Zeus / Dios / Dii / Dia

For those who don’t know an inflected language, the declension of a noun is the set of the forms needed to communicate their grammatical function in the sentence. So, Homeric Greek provides two ways to say “of Zeus” (Zēnos/Dios) or “to/for Zeus”(Zēni/Dii). The rhythmic shape of each pair differs long/short vs. short/short; and, further, the initial consonants can change the length of final vowels that precede them. Complex consonants like zeta (closer to the sound ds) can make short vowels that precede them (what we call “long by position” in contrast to “long by nature”).

Back to Dione’s speech: this is a good example of what I have mentioned before, a paradeigma, an example from the past used to persuade someone in the poem’s presence. This one provides a catalogue of divine suffering at the hands of humans to ‘console’ Aphrodite. Each of these examples have story traditions that are explained in the scholia (on which see below) or appear in other extant texts.

Beyond the details, this passage is also often compared for its structure to an epic fragment ascribed to the poet Panyasis in the 5th century BCE:

Panyasis Herakleia fr. 3 Benarbé = 16 K

“Demeter endured; the famous Lame-god endured; 

Poseidon endured; and silver-bowed Apollo endured

to serve a mortal human being for one year 

and even Ares strongheart endured under his father’s compulsion,” 

 

τλῆ μὲν Δημήτηρ, τλῆ δὲ κλυτὸς ᾿Αμφιγυήεις,

τλῆ δὲ Ποσειδάων, τλῆ δ’ ἀργυρότοξος ᾿Απόλλων 

ἀνδρὶ παρὰ θνητῷ θητευσέμεν εἰς ἐνιαυτόν, 

τλῆ δὲ καὶ ὀβριμόθυμος ῎Αρης ὑπὸ πατρὸς ἀνάγκῃ 

Note the repetitions in structures (τλῆ μὲν…τλῆ δὲ), themes (immortals harmed by mortals), and even diction (ὀβριμόθυμος in Panyasis is parallel to ὀβριμοεργὸς in Homer).  The similarity between this passage and the longer speech in Homer has led to much speculation as to the cause: is this catalogue a common structuring motif in early Greek poetry or is it a case of Panyasis imitating Homer (or Homer imitating Panyasis) or something more complex.

(Elton Barker and I have written about this a little: See our discussion in Homer’s Thebes).

An Issue of Texts

Iliad 5.403 reads σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ’ αἴσυλα ῥέζων but there is a scholion that notes that the Hellenistic editor Aristarchus read αἰσυλοεργός. 

That would give us a different line σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ’ αἴσυλα ῥέζων (Schol. T ad Il. 5.403).. The difference is minor: σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς is something like a “violence-doing criminal” while σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός is something closer to a “sacrilege-committing criminal”. My guess is that other editors preferred ὀβριμοεργὸς because it is not a hapax legomenon (a word said only once) and because the compound αἰσυλοεργός (aisuloergos) has its sense repeated at the end of the line with αἴσυλα ῥέζων (aisula rezôn). 

These two aesthetic criteria–uniqueness of words, close repetition–are not necessarily at home with the basic aesthetics of Greek poetry. Our scholia–the collection of marginal comments culled from centuries of scholarly editing of and commentary on ancient texts–preserve layers of different approaches to Homer. The editor Aristarchus, one of Homer’s earliest editors, is criticized by some modern authors for preserving unique or otherwise uncommon readings. (See this review by Gregory Nagy of Martin West’s edition of the Iliad for more.) My personal take on this is that the kind of repetition in this line is characteristic of something like an intentional archaism, a  close repetition that hearkens back to the legendary era the speaker is evoking. While the repetition and unique diction may seem odd from Hellenistic and modern aesthetic perspectives, I think it rings better for the context and is truer to the complexity of Homeric poetry.

I have discussed similar textual differences before in an article about a later scene in book 5, centering around Ares where our common text preserves rather bland vocabulary in preference to exceptional diction.

A World of Stories: Mythographical scholia

Another kind of material preserved in the scholia includes additional information about myth from outside Homer. There are several versions of the story of Diomedes’ wife, Aigialeia, in the scholia to Homer. The scholion in this case seems to read Dione’s comment’s as an allusion or even a coded threat about the impact of Athena’s anger on Diomedes in the long run.

Schol. T Ad Hom. Il. 5.512ex

“They say that Aigialeia, the youngest of the daughters of Adrastus, was Diomedes’ wife and really longed for him and troubled herself over him through the nights as well. But later, thanks to the rage of Aphrodite, she slept with a band of Argive youths and later on, Kometes, the son of Sthenelos, to whom Diomedes had entrusted the affairs of his household. Although she was planning to kill him when he returned home, she spared Diomedes because he fled to the altar of Athena. People say that when he left there he went to Iberia, as some claim, and that he was deceitfully killed by the king Daunus. Others claim that he was killed by Iounios the son of Daunos during a hunt. For this reason, Athena turned him into a god and changed his companions into herons.

The poet does not know of the desire of Kometes and Aigialeia.”

μὴ δὴν Αἰγιάλεια: φασὶν Αἰγιάλειαν τὴν νεωτέραν τῶν᾿Αδρηστίδων γυναῖκα Διομήδους οὖσαν σφόδρα αὐτὸν ἐπιποθεῖν καὶ ἀπολοφύρεσθαι καὶ κατὰ τὰς νύκτας. ὕστερον δὲ κατὰ μῆνιν ᾿Αφροδίτης πάσῃ τῇ νεολαίᾳ τῶν ᾿Αργείων αὐτὴν συγκωμάσαι, ἔσχατον δὲ καὶ †σθενέλῳ τῷ κομήτου†, ὃς ἦν ὑπὸ Διομήδους πιστευθεὶς τὰ κατ’ οἶκον. ἥκοντα δὲ αὐτὸν μέλλων ἀνελεῖν ἐφείσατο διὰ τὸ καταφυγεῖν εἰς τὸν τῆς ᾿Αθηνᾶς βωμόν· ὅθεν αὐτὸν φυγόντα φασὶν ἥκειν εἰς †ἰβηρίαν† κἀκεῖ, ὡς μέν τινες, δολοφονηθῆναι ὑπὸ Δαύνου τοῦ βασιλέως, ὡς δὲ ἔνιοι, ἀπολέσθαι ὑπὸ ᾿Ιουνίου τοῦ Δαύνου παιδὸς ἐν κυνηγεσίοις· ὅθεν αὐτὸν μὲν ἀπεθέωσεν ᾿Αθηνᾶ, τοὺς δὲ ἑταίρους εἰς ἐρωδιοὺς μετέβαλεν. 

τὸν Κομήτου πόθον καὶ Αἰγιαλείας οὐκ οἶδεν ὁ ποιητής. 

There is no way of knowing if this account was written into our out of our Iliad. By which I mean: we can’t really know if ancient audiences had access to this story and part of this is because we don’t have evidence of whether this story was told to flesh out what is said in the speech or if the speech reflects stories that were well known.

The scholiast’s notion that the “poet did not know this story” is a problematic one and one that reflects misunderstanding about Homeric poetic strategy.  Homeric narrative tends to suppress stories that don’t support its local and general aims, something I discuss elsewhere in reference to the Homeric treatment of Cassandra.

 It does seem peculiar that Dione would bring up Diomedes’ wife as all–but it is likely that she was a well-known part of his story as one of the Epigonoi. Actual evidence from early Greek poetry is limited. As far as I can see (and this is more or less confirmed by Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth, 1993: 699), the story is later than the classical period, although a much later scholion to Lykophron suggests the story was told by the archaic poet Mimnermus:

Schol. To Lykophron, Alexandra 610

“Aphrodite, according to Mimnermus, was wounded by Diomedes and caused Aigialeia to sleep with many adulterers and to be loved by Kometes the son of Sthenelos. When he returned to Argos, she plotted against him. Then he fled to the altar of Hera and left with his companions in the night. Then he went to Italy to King aunos who killed him with a trick.”

 ἡ δὲ ᾿Αφροδίτη, καθά φησιν Μίμνερμος (F 22 Bgk), ὑπὸ Διομήδους τρωθεῖσα παρεσκεύασε τὴν Αἰγιαλείαν πολλοῖς μὲν μοιχοῖς συγκοιμηθῆναι, ἐρασθῆναι δὲ καὶ [῾Ιππολύτου] Κομήτου τοῦ Σθενέλου υἱοῦ. τοῦ δὲ Διομήδους παραγενομένου εἰς τὸ ῎Αργος, ἐπιβουλεῦσαι αὐτῶι· τὸν δὲ καταφυγόντα εἰς τὸν βωμὸν τῆς ῞Ηρας, διὰ νυκτὸς φυγεῖν σὺν τοῖς ἑταίροις, καὶ ἐλθεῖν εἰς ᾿Ιταλίαν πρὸς Δαῦνον βασιλέα, ὅστις αὐτὸν <δόλωι> ἀνεῖλεν. 

Some things to read

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

BOUCHARD, ELSA. “APHRODITE ‘PHILOMMÊDÊS’ IN THE ‘THEOGONY.’” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015): 8–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44157344.

Contzen, Eva von. “The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History.” Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 241–60. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.50.3.0241.

Cook, Arthur Bernard. “Who Was the Wife of Zeus?” The Classical Review 20, no. 7 (1906): 365–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/695286.

Hadzsits, George Depue. “Aphrodite and the Dione Myth.” The American Journal of Philology 30, no. 1 (1909): 38–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/288458.

Pratt, Louise. “The Parental Ethos of the Iliad.” Hesperia Supplements 41 (2007): 25–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066781.

Sale, W. Merritt. “Aphrodite in the Theogony.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92 (1961): 508–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/283834.

Willcock, M. M. “Mythological Paradeigma in the Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1964): 141–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/637720.