Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Chapter 11 The Kings of Athens
Cercrops and his descendants; the story of Adonis
Athene and Poseidon both try to claim Athens as their own; and the 12 gods rule in favor of Athene because she planted the first olive tree. Aphrodite and Persephone both try to claim Adonis as their own; Artemis causes a boar to kill to Adonis.

Three early kings: Cranaos, Amphictyon, and Erichthonios

When Cecrops died, Cranaos [became king]. He was born from the earth, and it was during his reign that Deucalion’s flood is said to have taken place.

How did Cranos and his cohort survive the flood? Pandora opens her jar, Pandrosos opens the chest cotaning Erichthonios and a snake. It seems people named “Pand…” like to open things better left unopened. It also seems important for the early kings to be born from the Earth. I wonder if these myths of being born from the earth led Plato/Socrates to fashion the Noble Lie, (Republic 414b–415d)?

Pandion I and his children; Icarios and Erigone; Tereus, Procne, and Philomela
The introduction of wine gets off to a bad start. Tereus crimes of passion with Procne and Philomela end in all three of them being turned into birds.

Procris andCephalos; Oreithuia and her children
Procris has sex with Minos and gives safe sex new meaning to obtain a fast dog and a javelin that never missed. Ironically Procris is killed in a hunting accident by her husband’s normal javelin.

Eumolopos, and the war with Eleusis; the exile of Pandion II
Once again a father sacrifices a daughter, resulting in the suicide of his other daughters, for victory in battle. Once again, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Aigeus and the conception of Theseus
Wineskins were untied. According to the note here, wineskins are a more literal and less metaphorical than I might have guessed.

mouth of the wineskin: the wineskin stands for his stomach, and its mouth or neck for his penis (cf. sc. Eur. Med. 679, which reports that the Greek word for the mouth of a wineskin, podeon, was often used in such a senst,, i” he sleeps with another woman before he returns to the height of Athens, meaning the Acropolis, he will have a male child by her rather than by his wife.

The war with Minos and the origin of the tribute to the Minotaur
Minos prays for vengeance on the Athenians which results in a famine and plague in Athens and more daughters are sacrificed trying to end it. Finally they negotiate with Minos to send seven boys and seven girls to serve as food for the Minotaur.

The labours of Theseus, and his arrival at Athens
1. Killed corynetes.
2. Killed Sinis, aka, Pityocamptes.

A strange place for a book to end. . .

Epitome (Chapter 11 continued)
Theseus, Ariadne, and the killing of the Minotaur
3. Killed Crommyon the sown known as Phaia.
4. Killed Sceiron by flinging him into the sea.
5. Killed Cercyon.
6. Killed Damastes, aka, Polypemon, better known to us as Procroustes.
Theseus thus cleaned up the road to Athens. He then narrowly thwarts Medea’s attempt to poison him by revealing the sword to his father who recognizes who he is.
7. Kills the Minotaur.
Tragically he loses Ariadne on Naxos where Dionysos falls in love with her and his father throws himself to his death when Theseus forgets to change the ships sails from black to white.

Excursus: Daidalos and Icaros, and the death of Minos
Here we get the tragic story of Daidalos losing his son, Icaros who flew too high. Minos discovers Daidalos’ hiding place by offering a puzzle that only Daidalos could solve. Minos then dies in his bath, either killed by the daughters of Cocalos or when boiling water was poured over him.

Theseus and the Amazons; Phaedra and Hippolytos
Theseus joins Heracles’ expedition or stages his own expedition against the Amazons and has a son, Hippolytos by Hippolyte. When Theseus marries Phaedra, a daughter of Minos, to end the hostilities he kills his ex-Amazonian wife. Phaedra then falls in love with the step son and frames him for rape when he refuses her advances and his killed by Theseus’ prayer to Poseidon. Phaedra kills herself when she is found out.

Theseus and Peirithoos
Theseus and Peirithoos decide they want to marry daughters of Zeus. Theseus kidnaps the 12 year old Helen and then travels with Peirithoos to Hades to help him win Persephone. They are both trapped in Hades until Heracles rescues Theseus. Theseus is then driven from Athens and dies after being thrown into a pit by Lycomedes. This seems a decidedly unglorified end for Theseus.

"A strange place for a book to end. . ."

Very much so.

Unfortunately, this is where the damaged original of all the existing manuscripts ended.

The following section is derived from two independent summaries of the contents, made from complete versions. They are printed separately in critical editions, but Frazer used both texts to create a fairly unified concluding "book," and translators have since used it, instead of going through everything in them twice.

David wrote: "How did Cranos and his cohort survive the flood? Pandora opens her jar, Pandrosos opens the chest cotaning Erichthonios and a snake. It seems people named “Pand…” like to open things better left unopened. It also seems important for the early kings to be born from the Earth. I wonder if these myths of being born from the earth led Plato/Socrates to fashion the Noble Lie, (Republic 414b–415d)?
..."

The Greek flood seems to have been thought of as localized, unlike the Mesopotamian and Biblical versions, but the chronology is still awkward.

You are probably right about Plato.

The Greeks seemed to have like to claim that their local first ancestors were "born from the earth," or, as a second choice, were the offspring of Zeus and a local nymph. When Thebes had to settle for a foreign, albeit royal, founder (Cadmus), they replaced his Phoenician companions with warriors who emerged from the ground, guaranteeing the "authenticity" of the leading families of the historical city.

The Athenians were particularly fond of this approach, claiming that they, unlike many of the other Greeks (notably the Dorian Spartans) had always lived where they still were, and were literally autochthonous, from their "own soil." Plato was turning a popular belief to philosophical account, and could have pointed to it as evidence that people in an ideal state would believe it if they were told that they incorporated different mixtures of metals in their bodies, and were therefore of different value to the city.

A very old observation (I think classical) about the Theseus cycle is that a good deal of it seems to have been devised in emulation of Herakles, who until the birth of the democracy had been an Athenian favorite, at least so far as art was concerned. In the end , however, he was especially associated with the tyrant Peisistatratos and his sons. This may have suggested the need for a patriotic, rather than pan-Hellenic, substitute.

It is notable that most of Theseus' early "labors" involve putting down local tyrants and "robber barons," with only one monstrous animal, which does differentiate him from Herakles.

He was also said (I think most explicitly in Plutarch, but I haven't checked to be sure) to have unified Attica, which until then had been separate "demes," or districts. In popular story this apparently was turned into the idea that he had founded the democracy. The real story of the consolidation of power centered in Athens has been lost, although it is known that Eleusis, that most Athenian of sacred places, was once independent.

Mary Renault did a wonderful job of rationalizing and "historicizing" a Mycenaean (Bronze Age) Theseus in the novels The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea -- so good that it sometimes takes an effort to separate her clear versions of events from the somewhat unsatisfactory ancient sources. I've seen a couple of places on the internet where they have been confused, and there are probably others.

Ian wrote: "about the Theseus cycle is that a good deal of it seems to have been devised in emulation of Herakles, who until the birth of the democracy had been an Athenian favorite..."

Is there anything to be said about Theseus needed to be rescued from Hades and that he was rescued by Heracles? Also, Theseus end is his death by being thrown into a pit while Heracles becomes immortal.

The idea that Herakles had an immortal aspect on Olympus -- even if his shade was seen in Hades by Odysseus -- had Homeric authority for all Greeks, and probably itself reflects a pre-existing cult of Herakles, even if he was never counted among the twelve major Olympians.

The Athenians never managed to promote Theseus to that status.

In fact, they, or some of them, may have had a motive not to. The story of Lycomedes of Skyros killing Theseus -- usually by pushing him off a cliff -- was used as a bit of Athenian imperial propaganda (and may have started out that way). As Wikipedia summarizes it:

"In 475 BCE, in response to an oracle, Cimon of Athens, having conquered Skyros for the Athenians, identified as the remains of Theseus "a coffin of a great corpse with a bronze spear-head by its side and a sword." (Plutarch, Life of Theseus). The remains found by Cimon were reburied in Athens. The early modern name Theseion (Temple of Theseus) was mistakenly applied to the Temple of Hephaestus which was thought to be the actual site of the hero's tomb."

There was a great vogue in classical Greece for claiming to possess the remains of legendary heroes, something like the medieval pursuit of relics of the saints. Athens managed to acquire the bones of its primary hero, in order to establish a hero-cult, while justifying one of their conquests as merely long-delayed vengeance. The Spartans long before had sought, and found, the bones of Orestes, for a similar purpose, as we read in Herodotus.

(Cimon's "discovery" may also have been a piece of intra-Athenian partisan showmanship, but that is another matter.)

Mary Renault noted that Theseus falling from a cliff has an odd likeness to the death of his human father, Aegeus, and related it to a whole series of stories about the deaths of the Erechthids, the original Athenian dynasty to which Theseus belonged. But you'll have to read The Bull from the Sea to find out how she managed it. (Preferably, after first reading The King Must Die.)

I was wondering why this section was called "Epitome". I was aware of the first definition below, but not the second. At the risk of stating the obvious. . .

epitome [ ih-pit-uh-mee ]
1. a person or thing that is typical of or possesses to a high degree the features of a whole class
2. a condensed account, especially of a literary work; abstract.
etymology: 1520–30; Latin epitomē abridgment Greek epitomḗ abridgment, surface incision. See epi-, -tome

Breaking down #2 even further we see:

epi-
a prefix occurring in loanwords from Greek, where it meant “upon,” “on,” “over,” “near,” “at,” “before,” “after” (epicedium; epidermis; epigene; epitome)

tome [ tohm ]
1. a book, especially a very heavy, large, or learned book.
2. a volume forming a part of a larger work.

I enjoy comedian, Brian Regan's show entitled: The Epitome of Hyperbole in which he pronounces epitome: "epi-TOHM". The mispronunciation seems to fit this volume since, as Ian indicated above it is . . .derived from two independent summaries of the contents, made from complete versions.

I am curious if anyone like myself, who is familiar with the Trojan War mostly through Homer was surprised by any of the details given here.

For example, I could have missed it, but I do not recollect the failed first attempt to sail to Troy and the 8 years it took to try again.

I was also surprised that Achilles was only 15 years old at the time of the first attempt.

The first attempt to reach Troy is decidedly non-Homeric, and belongs to later elaborations. In this case, it may have involved alternative versions of the early stages of the war, which were both used by separating them by chronology.

However, part of the motive may have been to explain how Achilles' son, Pyrrhus / Neoptolemus, who would have to have been conceived some indefinite time before the Trojan War, is nevertheless old enough to take part in it during the last year.

At fifteen, Achilles would have been old enough to have fathered a child, who would have been in his late teens when he arrived at Troy.

This still runs into the problem that Achilles has the choice of attaining immortal glory but dying young, or being forgotten after a long life. This doesn't work out quite so poignantly if Achilles is in his thirties (fifteen plus nineteen) in the Iliad.

Phoenix refers to Achilles as a [440] "mere child" in the Murray translation.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/t...

"νήπιον" can be a child, an infant, legally a child, and can refer to children up to puberty.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/m...

That would fit well with the myth of Achilles on Skyros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille...
where he lives disguised as a girl under "the name Pyrrha 'the red-haired', Issa, or Kerkysera."

M. van der Valk suggests that Kerkysera should be Κερκουρᾶς "he who urinates by means of his tail" which is appropriate for that disguise.