Iliad 2 is famous for its Catalogue of Ships (and a catalogue of Trojans). So the book is titled by translators, such as Martin Hammond, whose version I use. That long passage is also the reason why the book is notorious: students read through Book 2, realise that it is not on the syllabus, and regret the 'wasted' time. However, there is more to Book 2 than the Catalogue of Ships and the Catalogue itself both merits and repays a more sympathetic reading.
One such commoner is one of the most interesting characters in the Iliad: Thersites. Why is he interesting? Let's start with his name. He is called 'Mr Bold_ite', from θάρσος 'courage' (rarely, 'audacity', it is said), but in its Aeolic form θέρσος. Although Homer, as we have it, is predominantly in the Ionic dialect of Greek, the name Thersites is a residue of the influence of an epic tradition (or traditions) composed in the Aeolic dialect(s). Scholars debate whether the Aeolic tradition was superseded by an Ionic one or whether the two (kinds of) traditions co-existed and fed off each other. Either way, Thersites is Aeolic and may, therefore, reflect a lost epic tradition.
Thersites is presented as exceptional (2.211-220). He is the only commoner who does not accept Odysseus' beatings and beratings ('Too many rulers is a dangerous thing' [2.204], a line oft quoted by tyrants...). Thersites:
was the ugliest man who went to Troy,
was bandy-legged,
was lame in one foot,
had humped shoulders that were bent inward over his chest.
His head 'rose to a point, sprouting thin wisps of wool' (Hammond)
and Achilles and Odysseus hate him especially.
The point is simple. Heroes are handsome. Non-heroes are ugly in appearance and in character alike. Odysseus is praised for beating Thersites: 'this is now far the best thing he has done among the Argives...' (Hammond).
What else do we have in Iliad 2? We have speeches by Agamemnon and Nestor and we see more of the power dynamics of their relationship, but this is really the first time we get to see Odysseus in speech and action, other than as a name who could be deprived of his prize or as the leader of the hecatomb party in Book 1.
Iliad 2 is remarkable for its density of similes: 91 ff., 143 ff., 147 ff., 209-210, 289 ff., 336 ff. (Nestor speaking), 455 ff., 459 ff., 468, 469 ff., 474 ff., 480 ff., 754, 764, 780, 781 ff., 800 (cf. 6.146 ff), and 872.
Let us consider just one simile and, that, briefly.
'Like the great flocks of flying birds -- geese or cranes, or long-necked swans -- in an Asian water-meadow, by the streams of Caystrius, which wheel this way and that in their wings' glory, and the meadow echoes to their cries as they settle in tumult: so the many companies of men poured out from their ships and their huts...' (2.459-465: Hammond)
The point of comparison, the chief 'correspondence', is the numbers (noise, less so, I think: cf. the contrast with which Book 3 opens between the silent Achaeans and noisy Trojans and their allies). Movement seems important too.
More than that, this simile is remarkably localised, and local, at that, to the Aegean coast of Turkey. The Caystrius was a river in Asia Minor and the Greek phrase translated as 'Asian water-meadow' may, in fact, involve a meadow associated with a man named Asius (presumably, a notable landowner in Asia Minor).
We may suppose that the poet who composed this simile was once there and that the tradition(s) that resulted in the Iliad passed through Asia Minor. Perhaps, that is no surprise, given the setting of the epic: around Troy and in Asia Minor. Further, though, a connection between (some of) the Iliad (as we have it) and Asia Minor has been thought to explain the Iliad's interest in Aeneas as well as that of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. The patron(s) of the poet(s) whose work became the Iliad resided, so it is claimed, near to Troy and claimed descent from Aeneas, the prince who somehow to managed to escape from Troy...
What about the Catalogue itself?
Were there 1000 ships, as in Christopher Marlowe's famous question? Wikipedia, s.v. gives a total of 1186. So, no, then.
My Director of Studies likened the Catalogue to the title sequence of a film. After opening with some heated debate that results in the crisis of the epic (Book 1), we have an interlude and meet the various characters whom we shall follow. There is something in that, but the Catalogue is also an intriguing piece of political geography. Debate continues about the period or periods that this passage captures.
Within the Catalogue, some aspects of the portrayals of individual warriors stand out.
Although Nireus from Syme contributed only three ships, he gets a mention because he 'was the handsomest man that came to Ilos of all the Danaans, after the peerless son of Peleus [Achilles]'. 'He was a man of little power, and the people who followed him were few' (2.671-675: Hammond). Three successive lines begin with his name, but he appears nowhere else in the Iliad.
In a similar vein, after the second invocation of the Muse (singular this time): 'Of men by far the best was Ajax, Telamon's son, as long as Achilles kept up his anger...' (2.768-769: Hammond).
The 'best of the Achaeans' is a key problem raised in Book 1 and elaborated further in Book 2.
The Catalogue looks outside the Iliad to the legends about Philoctetes (2.718-725) and, hence, to the Sack of Troy itself, which the Iliad never quite reaches. Look out too for Admetus and Alcestis (2.713-715) among others.
Was this the passage that launched a genre, one that has its own German label 'Kollektiv-gedicht': catalogue poetry? We can say, at least, that Iliad 2 is a very early example of a literary form that was prevalent in Greek and Roman literature, even if it seems strange to us. The catalogue of women met by Odysseus in the Nekuia in Odyssey 11 is one other early example. Hesiod is said to have composed a Catalogue of Women and the wonderfully-named Eoiai Ἠοῖαι (translation: the series of 'or like the woman who...' stories).
From the Hellenistic period, we have the Aetia or Causes by Callimachus, four books of elegaic couplets that give aetiologies or origin stories. (Think, perhaps, of the Just So Stories). One fragment from the Aetia (110 Pf.) also exists in a Latin translation by none other than Catullus himself (Poem 66).
Ovid's Fasti, the month-by-month exposition of the origins of Roman festivals follows in Callimachus' footsteps. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, one of the most influential works of Latin literature, is a loosely-linked catalogue of stories, all involving some kind of trans-forma_ti_on (or, meta-morpho_si_s), from the creation of the world to the deification of Augustus.
For our purposes, the most relevant point of comparison is the following pair of passages.
'Tell me now, you Muses, who have your homes on Olympus -- you are gods, and attend all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge -- tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers. As for the mass of men, I could not tell of them or name them, not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, and in me a voice unbreakable and a heart of bronze, unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis, were to tell over the names of all the many who came to Ilius.' (2.484 ff: Hammond)
'Now goddesses, it is time to open up Mount Helicon, to set your songs in motion and tell what kings were roused to war, what armies followed each of them to fill the plains, the heroes that flowered and the weapons that blazed in those far off days in the bountiful land of Italy. You are the divine Muses. You remember, goddesses, and can utter what you remember. Our ears can barely catch the faintest whisper of the story.' Aeneid 7.641-646 (D. A. West).
There are differences, to be sure, between the Homeric model and Vergil at the start of the latter's catalogue of Italian chieftains opposed to Aeneas that culminates, not with Mezentius or with Turnus, but with Camilla. Note that both poets stress the need for divine inspiration to retrieve from the mists of time their catalogues of commanders. Vergil draws attention to the 'heroes that flowered' (more on warriors and flowers during the Twelve Days of the Aeneid), the weapons, and, true to his kind of pastoral patriotism, the 'bountiful land of Italy'. The business of multiple mouths, multiple tongues, and a metallic voice features instead at the end of the Sibyl's catalogue of criminals in Tartarus (Aeneid 6.625-627).
Did catalogue poems fall out of fashion after Antiquity. I will need the help of English Literature students to answer that question. All I can say is that various pop songs contain catalogue elements. Consider just the Beach Boys' Surfin' U.S.A and Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke and I Just Called to Say I Love You (a month-by-month exposition of American celebrations: 'no giving thanks for all the Christmas joy you bring...').
I fear that this is a case of TL;DR, but so too is Iliad 2.
Iliad 1 ends with the gods sleeping... all except Zeus, that is. He sends a dream to Agamemnon, which, resembling Nestor, tells Agamemnon that now is the time to attack Troy. Agamemnon relays this dream in council. Agamemnon seeks to test the Greek rank and file. He calls for the Greeks to sail home and to cut their nine years of losses. This backfires. The Greeks are all to ready to leave. Hera intervenes by sending Athena to her protégé, Odysseus, who grabs Agamemnon's sceptre (gasp!) and confronts the kings (plural -- note that well...) and the men of importance as well as the commoners.
One such commoner is one of the most interesting characters in the Iliad: Thersites. Why is he interesting? Let's start with his name. He is called 'Mr Bold_ite', from θάρσος 'courage' (rarely, 'audacity', it is said), but in its Aeolic form θέρσος. Although Homer, as we have it, is predominantly in the Ionic dialect of Greek, the name Thersites is a residue of the influence of an epic tradition (or traditions) composed in the Aeolic dialect(s). Scholars debate whether the Aeolic tradition was superseded by an Ionic one or whether the two (kinds of) traditions co-existed and fed off each other. Either way, Thersites is Aeolic and may, therefore, reflect a lost epic tradition.
Thersites is presented as exceptional (2.211-220). He is the only commoner who does not accept Odysseus' beatings and beratings ('Too many rulers is a dangerous thing' [2.204], a line oft quoted by tyrants...). Thersites:
was the ugliest man who went to Troy,
was bandy-legged,
was lame in one foot,
had humped shoulders that were bent inward over his chest.
His head 'rose to a point, sprouting thin wisps of wool' (Hammond)
and Achilles and Odysseus hate him especially.
The point is simple. Heroes are handsome. Non-heroes are ugly in appearance and in character alike. Odysseus is praised for beating Thersites: 'this is now far the best thing he has done among the Argives...' (Hammond).
What else do we have in Iliad 2? We have speeches by Agamemnon and Nestor and we see more of the power dynamics of their relationship, but this is really the first time we get to see Odysseus in speech and action, other than as a name who could be deprived of his prize or as the leader of the hecatomb party in Book 1.
Iliad 2 is remarkable for its density of similes: 91 ff., 143 ff., 147 ff., 209-210, 289 ff., 336 ff. (Nestor speaking), 455 ff., 459 ff., 468, 469 ff., 474 ff., 480 ff., 754, 764, 780, 781 ff., 800 (cf. 6.146 ff), and 872.
Let us consider just one simile and, that, briefly.
'Like the great flocks of flying birds -- geese or cranes, or long-necked swans -- in an Asian water-meadow, by the streams of Caystrius, which wheel this way and that in their wings' glory, and the meadow echoes to their cries as they settle in tumult: so the many companies of men poured out from their ships and their huts...' (2.459-465: Hammond)
The point of comparison, the chief 'correspondence', is the numbers (noise, less so, I think: cf. the contrast with which Book 3 opens between the silent Achaeans and noisy Trojans and their allies). Movement seems important too.
More than that, this simile is remarkably localised, and local, at that, to the Aegean coast of Turkey. The Caystrius was a river in Asia Minor and the Greek phrase translated as 'Asian water-meadow' may, in fact, involve a meadow associated with a man named Asius (presumably, a notable landowner in Asia Minor).
We may suppose that the poet who composed this simile was once there and that the tradition(s) that resulted in the Iliad passed through Asia Minor. Perhaps, that is no surprise, given the setting of the epic: around Troy and in Asia Minor. Further, though, a connection between (some of) the Iliad (as we have it) and Asia Minor has been thought to explain the Iliad's interest in Aeneas as well as that of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. The patron(s) of the poet(s) whose work became the Iliad resided, so it is claimed, near to Troy and claimed descent from Aeneas, the prince who somehow to managed to escape from Troy...
What about the Catalogue itself?
Were there 1000 ships, as in Christopher Marlowe's famous question? Wikipedia, s.v. gives a total of 1186. So, no, then.
My Director of Studies likened the Catalogue to the title sequence of a film. After opening with some heated debate that results in the crisis of the epic (Book 1), we have an interlude and meet the various characters whom we shall follow. There is something in that, but the Catalogue is also an intriguing piece of political geography. Debate continues about the period or periods that this passage captures.
Within the Catalogue, some aspects of the portrayals of individual warriors stand out.
Although Nireus from Syme contributed only three ships, he gets a mention because he 'was the handsomest man that came to Ilos of all the Danaans, after the peerless son of Peleus [Achilles]'. 'He was a man of little power, and the people who followed him were few' (2.671-675: Hammond). Three successive lines begin with his name, but he appears nowhere else in the Iliad.
In a similar vein, after the second invocation of the Muse (singular this time): 'Of men by far the best was Ajax, Telamon's son, as long as Achilles kept up his anger...' (2.768-769: Hammond).
The 'best of the Achaeans' is a key problem raised in Book 1 and elaborated further in Book 2.
The Catalogue looks outside the Iliad to the legends about Philoctetes (2.718-725) and, hence, to the Sack of Troy itself, which the Iliad never quite reaches. Look out too for Admetus and Alcestis (2.713-715) among others.
Was this the passage that launched a genre, one that has its own German label 'Kollektiv-gedicht': catalogue poetry? We can say, at least, that Iliad 2 is a very early example of a literary form that was prevalent in Greek and Roman literature, even if it seems strange to us. The catalogue of women met by Odysseus in the Nekuia in Odyssey 11 is one other early example. Hesiod is said to have composed a Catalogue of Women and the wonderfully-named Eoiai Ἠοῖαι (translation: the series of 'or like the woman who...' stories).
From the Hellenistic period, we have the Aetia or Causes by Callimachus, four books of elegaic couplets that give aetiologies or origin stories. (Think, perhaps, of the Just So Stories). One fragment from the Aetia (110 Pf.) also exists in a Latin translation by none other than Catullus himself (Poem 66).
Ovid's Fasti, the month-by-month exposition of the origins of Roman festivals follows in Callimachus' footsteps. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, one of the most influential works of Latin literature, is a loosely-linked catalogue of stories, all involving some kind of trans-forma_ti_on (or, meta-morpho_si_s), from the creation of the world to the deification of Augustus.
For our purposes, the most relevant point of comparison is the following pair of passages.
'Tell me now, you Muses, who have your homes on Olympus -- you are gods, and attend all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge -- tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers. As for the mass of men, I could not tell of them or name them, not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, and in me a voice unbreakable and a heart of bronze, unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis, were to tell over the names of all the many who came to Ilius.' (2.484 ff: Hammond)
'Now goddesses, it is time to open up Mount Helicon, to set your songs in motion and tell what kings were roused to war, what armies followed each of them to fill the plains, the heroes that flowered and the weapons that blazed in those far off days in the bountiful land of Italy. You are the divine Muses. You remember, goddesses, and can utter what you remember. Our ears can barely catch the faintest whisper of the story.' Aeneid 7.641-646 (D. A. West).
There are differences, to be sure, between the Homeric model and Vergil at the start of the latter's catalogue of Italian chieftains opposed to Aeneas that culminates, not with Mezentius or with Turnus, but with Camilla. Note that both poets stress the need for divine inspiration to retrieve from the mists of time their catalogues of commanders. Vergil draws attention to the 'heroes that flowered' (more on warriors and flowers during the Twelve Days of the Aeneid), the weapons, and, true to his kind of pastoral patriotism, the 'bountiful land of Italy'. The business of multiple mouths, multiple tongues, and a metallic voice features instead at the end of the Sibyl's catalogue of criminals in Tartarus (Aeneid 6.625-627).
Did catalogue poems fall out of fashion after Antiquity. I will need the help of English Literature students to answer that question. All I can say is that various pop songs contain catalogue elements. Consider just the Beach Boys' Surfin' U.S.A and Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke and I Just Called to Say I Love You (a month-by-month exposition of American celebrations: 'no giving thanks for all the Christmas joy you bring...').
I fear that this is a case of TL;DR, but so too is Iliad 2.
PJ
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