Robin Lane Fox - Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer

ROBIN LANE FOX

Greeks and their Myths
in the Epic Age of Homer

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First published 2008
1

Copyright Robin Lane Fox, 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
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reserved above, no part of this publication may be
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978-0-14-188986-3

For: H.J.L.F.
T.L.F.
M.J.L.F.
C.M.J.G.B.
M.L.F.

Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.

Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (1949)

I like it when somebody gets excited about something. Its nice. You just didnt know this teacher, Mr. Vinson. He could drive you crazy sometimes, him and the goddam class. I mean hed keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just cant do that to, I mean you cant hardly ever simplify and unify something just because somebody wants you to. You didnt know this guy, Mr. Vinson. I mean he was very intelligent and all, but you could tell he didnt have too much brains.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

The travelling heroes of this book are particular Greeks at a particular phase in the ancient world who travelled with mythical stories of gods and heroes in their minds. Its story is one of exploration and foreign contact, creative misunderstanding and brilliant lateral thinking. It intersects with the great masterpieces, Homers epics, and the near-contemporary poetry of Hesiod on whose audience, sources and contacts it aims to throw new light. It also identifies an eighth-century way of thinking, active from Israel to Sicily, and credits it to particular Greeks, the first, but hitherto unrecognized, in a line which I also illuminate by their later heirs, the historian Herodotus or Alexander and his soldiers, constant companions of my mind.

The main ideas of this book have travelled with me too on journeys to almost all the places which it cites. While I have been thinking, travelling and writing, evidence has continued to be found on my main themes and I am glad not to have finished too soon. It was a special moment to stand on the beach beside Al Mina in the Hatay district of modern Turkey and to go into the Al Mina disco, hitherto unmentioned in scholarship, which stands not far from the site. On its inner walls runs a frieze of Egyptian, Greek and Levantine-style mythical figures but its Turkish owner, their painter, assured me that he had never seen any of the originals. He had made them all up, he said, because This is the Al Mina disco. In the Al Mina disco all the stories of the world are welcome. This book aims to prove that they were already welcome in the proto-disco of the eighth century BC.

I have used many types of evidence and I owe a special debt to experts in particular fields. I am not an archaeologist but I am at least aware of the skill of those who are and their knowledge of a finds . Like all who write on the period I owe an immeasurable debt to the years of work in the field by Giorgio Buchner and David Ridgway on Ischia, to the many Lefkandi teams, to those who have now excavated at Oropos and to the initial work on the cemeteries at Torone completed by J. K. Papadopoulos. On Cyprus, Vassos Karageorghis and in ancient Unqi my New College forerunner Leonard Woolley are true Titans whose work underlies my sense of the subject. Across the Mediterranean and the entire period, so many objects have been interpreted and classified by two other Titans, Nicolas Coldstream and Sir John Boardman. Like everyone I owe so much to their clear judgement and I am most grateful to the latter for reading parts of my text and at once seeing weaknesses and errors.

I cite Assyrian sources and even Luwian ones but I cannot begin to read either language. I am most grateful to Stephanie Dalley for . I was similarly helped by J. D. Hawkins, whose superb Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions is the supreme scholarly monument in my horizons. I have written of the Near East or east as a convenience to readers, not as a comment on the nature of these very varied societies.

In my own home pastures of Greek, Latin and Oxford, I gained from work kindly lent me by Nicholas Richardson and from Jane Lightfoots masterly grasp of evidence. I have been kept up to the mark by Robert Parker, Denis Feeney, Peter Wilson, John Ma, Peter Thonemann, Angelos Chaniotis and Bryan Hainsworth. Maria Stamatopoulou has been an invaluable bridge to archaeology in northern Greece and, as ever, kind. I have gained so much from the writings of Walter Burkert, who also sent me important offprints. Above all I am indebted to M. L. West, whose brilliant commentary on Hesiods Theogony inspired me to begin and whose East Face of Helicon is an unsurpassable work of comparison between texts which he, not I, knows in their original languages. I began simply by thinking that his literary work might gain from a fusion with John Boardmans Euboean theories. He has thought of so much else meanwhile.

Nonetheless I have retained this idea and pursued it with many other companions across the world, especially my son Henry in western Asia, my daughter Martha who uniquely had the nerve to drag me to the top of the Jebel Aqra and charm its Turkish soldiers, and Lord Michael Pratt who drove me, without killing us, through many sites and landscapes in the Colline Metallifere where, happily, his wife Janet was able to house us so well. Several sides of my life coincided on Ischia in the fine garden of Lady Walton at nightfall, so close to the Pithecussans settlement and audibly above one of my main subjects. Lord Charles Fitzroy and Jane Rae, Caroline Badger and Aurlia Abate are among those who have caused me to stand on cardinal sites along the trail, clearer to me than to them. William Poole found books not in any British library, no less of a gain.