Beside the tumbling sea December 8, 2008
Posted by Jenny in Ancient Greece, Homer, classical studies, literature.Tags: Homer, Iliad, Trojan War
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This post follows from my earlier one, Wild animals of the Iliad.
The Trojan War had already been going on for ten years, with its ebbings and flowings, its brutal assaults and exhausted retreats, its whimsical interventions by meddlesome gods, when arrogant Agamemnon provoked the wrath of Achilles. And so the Iliad begins its story:
“Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom…”
And so came dark days for the Greeks. This episode of the war was triggered by the capture of a girl who was claimed as booty by Agamemnon. Her father, an elderly priest named Kryseis, came down to the Greek ships carrying ransom for his daughter, saying, “O captains / Menelaos and Agamemnon, and you other /Akhaians under arms! / The gods who hold Olympos, may they grant you / plunder of Priam’s town and a fair wind home, / but let me have my daughter back for ransom / as you revere Apollo, son of Zeus!” And Agamemnon’s comrades said to him, “Behave well to the priest. Take the ransom!”
But Agamemnon harshly orders the priest away: “Let me not find you here by the long ships / loitering this time or returning later, / old man; if I do, / the staff and ribbons of the god will fail you. / Give up the girl? I swear she will grow old / at home in Argos, far from her own country, / working my loom and visiting my bed.”
And the priest turns and walks away. “…The old man feared and obeyed him, / in silence trailing away / by the shore of the tumbling clamorous whispering sea…”
In those three words—”tumbling clamorous whispering”—the minds of the poet and the translator have perfectly fused. The Greek is all in a galloping three-beat rhythm, while the English has gone from two beats to three beats just for those words, just so that we can see the waves tumbling on the shore. Since they are waves created by Homer, they carry one of his epithets, “poluphloisboio,” translated flatly in the Greek-English lexicon as “loud-roaring,” translated by Robert Fitzgerald as “clamorous.” The “tumbling” comes from “para thina,” which means “the heaping of sand on the beach.” The waves tumble, then whisper with the hiss of the foam as the water slides back.
And so the grieving priest walks back beside those living, murmuring waves, and the gods hear his words, and they become angry. And when Phoibos Apollo gets angry, terrible things are about to happen to mortals….
Wild animals in the Iliad November 6, 2008
Posted by Jenny in Homer, classical studies, literature, nature.Tags: Ancient Greece, Homer, Iliad, Trojan War, wildlife
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As the Achaians fought desperately on the shore beside their ships, wielding their spears against furious advances by the Trojans, Zeus decided from his perch on Mount Ida that the Achaians must retreat. Ajax, the big man, slow-witted but brave, glared at the raging Trojans. He was “like a dun lion from a stable yard / driven by hounds and farmhands: all night long / they watch and will not let him take his prey, / his chosen fat one. Prowling, craving meat, / he cannot make a breakthrough.”*
These words from the Iliad do not speak of a lion as a symbol abstracted from its surroundings, but a real-life lion, a nuisance to the farmers of the day. Not until the second century A.D. would lions be gone from Europe and the Middle East.
All through the Iliad, the poet we call Homer used small luminous scenes of everyday life to describe aspects of the battle. The troops turned out “thick as bees / that issue from some crevice in a rock face, / endlessly pouring forth, to make a cluster / and swarm on blooms of summer here and there, / glinting and droning, bright in busy air.” Soldiers could be “timorous as greenwood deer, light fare / for jackals, leopards, wolves….” An army gathers “Like a dark cloud / a shepherd from a hilltop sees, a storm, a gloom over the ocean, traveling shoreward / under the west wind; distant from his eyes / more black than pitch it seems, though far at sea, / with lightning squalls driven along its front.”
These extended similes run parallel to the events of the battle, and in them we see a world of woodcutters in mountain glens, hunters with dogs who encounter a “whiskered lion” as they chase a wild stag, boys and girls harvesting grapes in woven baskets, “while on a resonant harp a boy among them / played a tune of longing, singing low / with delicate voice a summer dirge….”
Poseidon lived here in golden glimmering chambers
The “tumbling clamorous whispering sea” washes the shores of the islands and nourishes these lives. This “cold, fish-breeding sea” is roofed over with “pure space,” the realm of the ideal that seems a foreseeing of Plato: “As when in heaven / principal stars shine out around the moon / when the night sky is limpid, with no wind, / and all the lookout points, headlands, and mountain / clearings are distinctly seen, as though / pure space had broken through, downward from heaven, / and all the stars are out, and in his heart / the shepherd sings….”
*Translation by Robert Fitzgerald.
