THE STORY OF SINUHE [after Pritchard 5f]
THE CYLINDERS OF GUDEA
HOMER: THE CITY AND PALACE OF ALKINOUS
THE WORKSHOP OF HEPHAISTOS AND SHIELD OF ACHILLES
THE TYRANNICIDES
*****
THE STORY OF SINUHE [after Pritchard 5f]
Sources: J. Pritchard The Ancient Near East Vol. I An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton 1958)
As P. notes, this is one of the classics of Egyptian literature; the many extant papyri and ostraka (inscribed potsherds) come from a period of some 800 years, from ca. 1800 BCE to 1000 BCE.
The story: An Egyptian official of the Middle Kingdom goes into the Middle East, in voluntary exile in a time of civil unrest (ca. 1960 BCE, death of Amenemhet I). There he prospered and was made head of his own nomad tribe of "Bedu", "Asiatics", but he longed for home. Finally he received an invitation from court and was able to leave behind the tribe he had come to govern and the children he sired there in Asia. He came home in the reign of SenUsert I, ca. 1971-1928 BCE, with an entourage of his Asian followers.
This excerpt [P., 9f] describes his final return, coming down the Nile from the garrisoned frontier, his formal reception at the royal palace and the happy end of his mortal journey. Taken into the court, intimate of the royal household, living again in the material style of a noble Egyptian. Cultural identity is equated with specific forms of material and visual culture: Sinuhe’s good fortune and return to civilization from the nomads’ sandy wastes is mapped out as a list of his new house and his honorific statue and tomb given as royal gift , looking forward to his ultimate journey to the harbor of paradise. Note how important it seems to the narrator, not simply to list these possessions and their materials, but to make a narrative sequence of the process of making them and to visualize the different specialists at their work. Both Sinuhe’s house and his tomb, note well, have exemplary figural decoration (painted house walls, carved -and so painted - tomb walls.)
******
"Then this servant [Sinuhe] came south [from Syria]. I stopped at the [frontier station] "The Ways of Horus". Its commander, who was responsible for the border patrol, sent a message to the Royal Residence to make the news known. Then His Majesty sent an able Overseer of Peasants at the Palace, with loaded ships in his train, carrying gifts from the royal presence for the Asiatics who had followed me as escort to The Ways of Horus, and I called each of them by name [to introduce the two embassies]. Every butler was busy at his duties, and when I embarked and set sail, the kneading and straining of beer was carried on beside me until I got to the town of Lisht.
When dawn had broken, very early, they came and summoned me, ten men coming and ten men going, to escort me to the Palace. Between the Sphinxes, I put my forehead to the ground, as the Royal Children waited in an exedra to meet me. The courtiers who are Ushers into the Audience Hall sent me on to the Private Chambers, where I found his Majesty on the Great Throne in an exedra of fine gold. When I stretched out on my belly, in his presence I did not know myself, though this God greeted me pleasantly - I was like a man caught in the dark, my soul departed, my body was powerless, my heart was not in my body to tell me life from death.
Then His Majesty said to one of these [Usher] Courtiers: "Lift him up, let him speak to me", and then His Majesty said: "Behold, thou art come. ... [Pharaoh invites Sinuhe to speak, and he throws himself at Pharaoh’s mercy.]
Then, the Royal Children were ushered in, and His Majesty said to the Queen, "Here is Sinuhe, come as Bedu, in the costume of the Asiatics". She gave a very great cry, and the Royal Children clamored altogether. Then they said to His Majesty, "O Sovereign, my lord, it is not really him!" - then His Majesty said "It really is him!". Now when they had brought with them their bead-necklaces, their rattles, and their sistra [sistrum=ritual noise-maker], then they presented them to His Majesty. [and they ask Pharaoh to have mercy on Sinuhe, saluting their king as an archer with his bow ready to shoot].
Then His Majesty said: "He shall not fear, he has no cause to be in terror. He shall be a Courtier among the nobles, and be enrolled in the ranks of the Courtiers. Go you to the Inner Chambers of the Morning [‘s dressing ceremony], to make his position".
So I went forth from the midst of the Inner Chambers, with the Royal Children giving me their hands. After, we went to the Great Double Door. I was put into the house of a Royal Son, in which were splendid things - in it was a "cool room", and [painted] images of the horizon. Costly things of the Treasury were in it; in every room were clothing of royal linen, myrrh and prime oil of the King and the nobles whom he loves, and every attendant was busy at his duties. The years were made to pass away from my body - I was plucked, my hair was combed, a load [of dirt] was given to the desert, and my clothes to the "Sand-Crossers". I was dressed in fine linen, anointed with prime oil. I slept on a bed. I gave the sand to them who are in it, and the wood oil to him who is anointed with it. I was given a house which had a garden, that had belonged to a Courtier; many craftsmen worked on it, and all its wood[-work] was newly restored. Meals were brought me from the Palace three or four times a day, besides that which the Royal Children gave me, never ceasing a moment.
There was built for me a pyramid tomb of stone in the midst of the pyramid tombs. Those stone masons who hew a pyramid tomb took over its ground plot, the outline-draftsmen designed in it, the chief sculptors carved in it, and the Overseers of Works for the Necropolis made it their concern. Its necessary materials were made from all the outfittings which are placed at a tomb shaft. Mortuary priests were given to me, and there was made for me a necropolis garden, with fields in it that had reached all the way to the city, like that which is done for a chief Courtier. My statue was overlaid with gold, and its skirt was of fine gold - it was His Majesty who had it made; there is no poor man, for whom the like has been done! So I was under the favor of the king’s presence until the Day of Mooring [= death] had come."
THE CYLINDERS OF GUDEA: [F & R reserve pamphlet]
Sources: Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps that once .... Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven 1987)
Around 2125 BCE, a trilogy of cuneiform cylinders was written to celebrate how Gudea, ruler of Girsu in the region of Lagash (Telloh, excavated 1877 CE) built a new version of the temple called Eninnu for the water god Ningirsu. The cylinder text’s title was "The House of Ningirsu Having Been Built ...". The new temple replaced one made by Gudea’s father. The opening is lost; we have the second (Cylinder A) and third (Cylinder B) sections of the trilogy.
This is a very early version of a standard genre of ruler panegyric, the celebration of temple building (like the Biblical accounts about Solomon and the great temple in Jerusalem). As in the Sumerian and Hebrew accounts of the ark of the great flood, God tells Gudea in a dream how to build this place, and describes the rewards of benevolent weather that will ultimately follow – rain, river floods, and clear skies in their season. The last part describes how the god and his consort enter their new home, and set the pantheon whom they govern to the tasks of a palace bureaucracy- thus, mapping the roles of the temple’s priests. Gudea gives a series of gifts and furniture and a dedication festival, then a "housewarming party" for Ningirsu and his guests, all the great gods of Sumer [ie from the other cities of Sumer - like visiting rulers], and the gods bless the temple and Gudea.
The building sequence is a fascinatingly detailed account of architectural practice and Sumerian forms. Gudea himself plays every role (like casting mud-brick) performed in actuality by a horde of slaves and specialists; and he works to blueprints drawn up for him in his dream by a warrior god writing a plan on a tablet of the precious deep-blue stone lapis lazuli, as a goddess with a silver pen consults in a treatise of astronomy and astrology - [not just for good omens, but to set the cardinal axes for the temple]. The long account of ceremonial appointments and fittings further maps out the artifacts and activities of sanctuary, and also of palace - since the gods live as a human ruler would. (In the Sumerian mind, of course, the gods set the ruler’s protocol!).
Jacobsen’s superb translation is set out to preserve the trilogy’s poetic format; here the poetic diction is condensed into running phrases to make prose paragraphs, but keep in mind that the text was originally thus itself an artifact of stylized, entrancing word patterns.
HOMER: THE CITY AND PALACE OF ALKINOUS
WORKSHOP OF HEPHAISTOS AND SHIELD OF ACHILLES
What we call Bronze Age archaeology was set off by Homer's late 19th c. readers. Heinrich Schliemann believed so strongly that the Ilion/Troy of the Iliad existed, that he went looking for it - and found it. In this century, archaeologists, historians, and literary historians have reached this consensus:
As Milman Parry showed, Homer's 2 verse epics, the Iliad and (probably composed afterwards) the Odyssey, represent the work of an archaic poet who was heir to a long tradition of oral composition , practiced before the Greeks learned to write (again) in the "Dark Age" centuries before the 7th c. BCE. As with sophisticated improvisational musics like jazz where musicians actively create from a stylized language, these oral poets worked with a rich formulaic vocabulary of compositional structures, story situations, and words and phrases.
The single author from Ionia whom the Greeks called Homer made his epics from this tradition but fixed them in what he intended to be an unalterable form, sometime between the 8th and the 6th c. BCE. We know that in the 6th c. BCE in Athens, its tyrants Peisistratos and his sons sponsored some kind of project to get Homer written down in a "pure", "reference library" version, at the same time that they sponsored at their city's annual festival a formal competition event where "rhapsodes" tried to recite all of Home from memory. (These "rhapsodes" represent the kind of performers who must have been transmitting Homer's work from very close to its grand moment of composition. The idea of repeating a masterpiece without changing it, is like our classical music repertoire whose gifted musicians and conductors work with a fixed music script.)
Though scholars fight over just which elements do so, it is very clear that many myths, themes, motifs and names in the two epics derive from earlier centuries, back into the late Bronze Age; and we've come to understand too (thanks especially to Walter Burkert) just how much very early Greek poetry (Homer & Hesiod) and religion has close links to Near Eastern and Anatolian cultures. (It has links too to the great Near Eastern literatures, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, to non-Greek Anatolian poetry, like the fragments of an epic in Luvian that start, "When we came to the towers of high Wilusa [- ?Ilion]"). Many formal terms in Homer can be connected also, to words written in the Mycenean scripts we call "Linear B" [like king = anax = Mycenean wanasa].
In the Archaic age and ever after, for the Greeks of the whole Mediterranean (Italy & Sicily, mainland Greece, the islands and Ionia), Homer set the paradigm for every aspect of culture, not just literature, and was taken as a "true" source for religion, myth, and history. Thus, Homer and his readers founded Greek culture as the ancient world knew it in a lost age of "heroes". And what I've given you has two lives, as it were: poetic set-pieces which mirror dimly the common culture of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Aegean world; and paradigm texts taken as inspiration by the Greeks of the Archaic Age,. Ironically, they would take 200 to 300 years to achieve anything like the magnificent images and architecture their poetry told them that their "ancestors" had achieved, as they believed too, from seeing the ruins of Mycenae. When we discuss Pergamon and Rome (who restored the city "Troy"), we’ll see the appropriation of "Homer" by later imperialist powers who made stories of ethnic connection to the Trojans, in order to make a proud national past and justify their hegemonies over Greeks.
Below are two excerpts from Homer.
- One is from the Odyssey, which tells about the wanderings on his way home, of a Western Greek king from Ithaca who had fought at Troy; here, the shipwrecked Odysseus has come to an ideal community on an island called Scheria, where its princess Nausicaa takes him to her royal father's palace in the city of Phaecia.
- The other is from the Iliad, the story of the Greek siege of Troy. It describes an elaborate shield made for the Greek hero Achilles by the smith-god of the Olympian pantheon, Hephaistos. Note his status in both excerpts, as the supreme maker, and his ability to make statues that look and also act like living beings. In some Greek myths, the first female human was commissioned from Hephaistos, a statue into which Athena and the gods breathed life - the famous Pandora [all-gifts]. To the youths in the palace of Alcinous and the girls in H/'s own smithy compare the kouroi and korai of Archaic Greece; the (wheeled) tripods for cauldrons, which he is making for his own house, are archaeologically known from the Archaic period, and tripods were also used as votives for gods long after.
PHAECIA
I. Odyssey [adapted from W. Shewring trans., Homer. The Odyssey (Oxford, 1980)]
Book VI: [see, how the beginning and end of this Book of the epic are // to one another]
1ff: There then the much-tried hero lay, overcome with labor, and now, with sleep. But [the goddess] Athene went to the land and polis of the Phaecians; these were a people that in times past had inhabited spacious Hypereia near the masterful Cyclops race, who were stronegr than they and plundered them continually. So King Nausithous the Phaecian transplanted his people from Hypereia and settled them in Scheria, far removed from toiling mankind. He ringed the city with a wall, built houses, gave the gods temples, apportioned land for tillage. .... The king now was Alcinous .. and to his palace Athene went, planning return for bold Odysseus. She made her way to the sumptuous bedroom where slept a girl who in form and feature was like the immortal goddesses - Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous. Near her, on either side of the double doors there slept two handmaids whose loveliness was the Graces' gift, and the gleaming doors were shut.
[Athene stands at the bed, and appears, disguised as a friend to Nausicaa in her dreams, to suggest to her to go wash her clothes and palace furnishings at the shore - where Athena plans for her to find and rescue Odysseus. N. wakes up at dawn:]
The girl .. went her way through the palace halls to tell her tale to her dear parents, her father and mother. Her mother was seated at the hearth with her waiting women, spinning yarn of sea-purple color; her father she overtook on his way out to meet the Phaecian lords ar a council for which they asked his presence ...
[most of the Book is Nausiacaa's encounter with the heroic stranger. At the end she sends him on his way to the city behind her, thus giving him instructions:]
Near the road you will find a stately grove of poplars; it is dedicated to Athene. Inside it there is a running stream, and there is a meadow stretching round it. My father's estate with its fruitful orchards begins just there, within hailing distance of the city. .. When you think we are at the palace, then walk further on into the city of the Phaecians, and ask for my father Alcinous' house. It is easy to tell from the rest, and the smallest child could take you to it; among all the buildings of our people there is none to compare with the king's palace
When courtyard and house have closed around you, walk without pausing down the great hall, until you find my mother - she sits in the firelight by the hearth .. she has her back to the great pillar ... near her chair is my father's chair; he sits in it and drinks his wine as a god might do. ...
Book VII: [Palace: walls, courtyard or forecourt, hall]
1.f While patient Odysseus was praying thus, the sturdy mules went on to the town with the princess. Having reached her father's noble palace, she halted the wagon at the forecourt, and her brothers, looking like immortals, gathered round her, unyoked the mules and carried the clothes indoors. She herself went up into her own room ...
Odysseus meanwhile was setting out on his walk to the town. Athene poured a thick mist around him ... [and Athene acts his guide, disguised as a young girl gone to fetch water from a fountain. As he passes through the streets, ..] O. looked wonderingly at the landing-places, the trim shipos, the assembly place of the noble townsmen, and the long high palisaded walls that astonished all beholders. ...
[Athene leaves, for ] Marathon and wide-wayed Athens, and entered Erechtheus' mighty house. [E., king of Athens, is her son.]
Meanwhile O. went on his way to Alcinous' noble palace, and thoughts came crowding to his mind as he halted here, and again there, before he arrived at the bronze threshold. A radiance, like that of the sun or moon, played over the king's high palace.
[outside facade and great gate]
Bronze walls ran this way and that, from the entrance to the farthest end, and they were topped with a frieze of kyanos. [dark blue enamel/ glass paste]. Gold doors closed the palace in, and silver posts rose above the threshhold. The lintel was silver, the door-handle was gold. Each side of the door were gold and silver watchdogs, deathless forever and unaging, which Hephaistos with his wit and cunning had fashioned as guardians for the great house.
[the great banquet hall]
Inside, to left and right from the entrance to the very end, chairs were ranged along the wall; and over these hung tapestries on which women had spent their skill, finely spun and closely woven. Here the leaders of the Phaecians would often sit as they are and drank, for they always had abundance. Standing upon shapely pedestals were statues of boys made of gold - they had flaming torches in their hands and gave their light, all evening through, to the banqueters in the hall ...
[ordered paradise orchard and herbal, vineyard]
Outside the courtyard, near the entrance, is a great garden of 4 acres with a fence running round, this way and that. Here are planted tall thriving trees - pears, pomegranates, apples with glistening fruit, sweet figs, rich olives. The fruit of all these never flags or fails the whole year round, winter or summer. Here the west wind is always breathing - some fruits it brings to birth, some to ripeness. Pear upon pear matures to fullness, apple on apple, grape-cluster on grape-cluster, fig on fig. There too the king has his fruitful vineyard planted. Behind is a warm and level spot, dried by the sun, where the grapes are being gathered and others trodden. In front there are unripe grapes that have scarcely shed their blossom, and others already faintly darkening. There too, bordering the last row of vines, are trim plots of all kinds of herbs that keep fresh all year round.
[fountains: garden channels, and city fountain before palace]
Last there are two springs of water, and one of these is channeled out over the whole space of the gardens; the other, facing it, flows under the entrance of the courtyard to issue in front of the lofty palace, and from this the townspeople drew their water.
Such were the god's sumptuous gifts in the king's demesne. Much-tried Odysseus stood there and gazed; then, having gazed his fill, steeped quickly over the threshold of the house.
*************
WORKSHOP OF HEPHAISTOS AND SHIELD OF ACHILLES
II. Iliad Book 18 [from R. Lattimore transl., The Iliad of Homer (Chicago 1951)] [I've run the lines often together]
[The epic's protagonist is Achilles, the son of the mortal Peleus and the se-nymph/ goddess Thetis. Achilles has lost his armor and weapons; for his dear companion Patroklos borrows them and then is killed and his arms plundered by the Trojans. Achilles’ goddess mother goes to her friend Hephaistos, smith of the gods, to get a new set to cheer Achilles' black grief (shield, helmet, shin guards [greaves] and a helmet, and a cuirass [torso protector]).
ll. 369ff: Thetis of the silver feet came to the house of Hephaistos, imperishable, starry, and shining among the immortals, built in bronze for himself by the [lame] god of the dragging footsteps. She found him sweating as he turned here and there to his bellows busily, since he was working on 20 tripods to stand against the wall of his strong-founded dwelling. And under each base he had set gold wheels, so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and come back to his house - a wonder to look at! So far these were finished, but the elaborate ear-handles were not yet on. he was forging these, and beating out their chains. As he was at work on this in his craftsmanship and his cunning, Thetis of the silver feet meanwhile drew near him. Charis [Grace; H's companion] of the shining veil saw her, .... and made Thetis sit down in a chair that was wrought elaborately and splendid with silver nails, and under it a footstool. ...
[Thetis and H. converse, because she had been so kind to him in his own past distress. He packs up his tools and cleans himself, leaving his forge and coming to where Thetis sits, limping ..]
417 And supporting their master moved his attendants. These are gold, and in appearance like living young women. There is intelligence in their hearts, and there is speech in them and strength, and from the immortal gods they have learned how to do things. These nimbly stirred in support of their master ...
[Thetis begs her friend's help, weeping over her son's fated early death, and asking for H. to make something that will lift her son's grief at his friend's death. H. consoles her, with a moving statement that contrasts the permanence of art with the ephemerality of mortal flesh - but also sets the wonder we gain looking at art, as a consolation against those sorrowful thoughts.]
462 hearing her, the famous smith of the strong arms answered her: Do not fear. Let not these things be a thought in your mind. And I wish that I could hide him away, from death and its sorrow, at that time when his hard fate comes on him, as surely as there will be fine armor for him such as another man out of many men shall wonder at, when he looks on it.
469 So he spoke, and left her there, and went to his bellows. he turned these towards the fire and gave them their orders for working. And the bellows, all 20 of them, blew on the crucibles, from all directions blasting out wind to blow the flames high, now, as he scurried to be at this place, and now at another, wherever Hephaistos might wish them to blow, and the work went forward.
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless, and with it tin, and precious gold, and silver, and next put out upon its stand the great anvil, and gripped in one hand the ponderous hammer, while he grasped the pincers with the other.
478 First of all, he forged a shield that was huge and heavy, elaborating it about, and threw around it a shining triple rim that glittered, and the shield strap was cast of silver.
There were five folds making the shield itself, and upon it he patterned out many things, in his skill and his craftsmanship.
[The world and the universe]
he made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea's water, and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that garland the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion, and the Bear, whom men also call the Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion, and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.
On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men.
[The city at its normal affairs]
And in one, there were marriages and festivals.
They were leading the brides along the city from their maiden chambers under the flaring of torches, and the loud bride song was rising up.
The young men followed the circles of a dance, and among them, the flutes and lyres kept up their clamor, as in the meantime, the women standing each at the door of her own courtyard admired them.
The people were assembled in the market place, where a quarrel had srpung up, and two men were arguing the blood price for a man who had been killed. One promised full restitution in a public statement, but the other refused, and would accept no compensation. Then both made for an arbitrator, to have a decision, and people were calling out on either side, to help both men. But the heralds kept the people in hand, as meanwhile, the elders were in session in the scared circle, on benches of polished stone, and held in their hands the staffs of heralds who lif their voices. the two men rushed before these, and took turns speaking hteir cases, and on the gorund between them lay 2 talents [a vary large standard amount] of gold, to be given to that judge who spoke the straightest opinion in this case.
[The city at war - just like the setting of the Iliad itself!]
But around the other city were lying two forces of armed men, shining in their war gear. For one side, counsel was divided - whether to storm and sack, or whether to share between both sides the property and all the possessions the lovely citadel held hard within it.
But the city's people were not giving way, and they armed for an ambush. Their beloved wives and little children stood up on the rampart to hold it, and With them the men with age upon them, but meanwhile the others went out, and Ares and Pallas Athena led them [god and goddess of war]. These were gold, on both, and gold clothing was on them, and being gods, they were beautiful and huge in their armor, and conspicuous from afar, but the people around them were smaller. [*hierarchic scale!]
These, when they got to the place that was set for their ambush, in a river where there was a watering place for all animals, there they sat down in place, shrouding themselves in the bright bronze.
But apart from these sat 2 men, to watch for the rest of them, and waiting until they could see the herds and the shambling cattle, who presently appeared, and 2 herdsmen went along with them playing happily on pipes, and took no thought of treachery.
Those others saw them and made a rush, and quickly after cut off on both sides the herds of cattle and the beautiful flocks of shining sheep, and killed their shepherds upon them.
But as soon as they heard the roar rising up from the cattle, the other army, sitting at council, suddenly mounted up behind their light-foot horses [on chariots], and went after and soon caught up with them.
These stood their ground, and fought a battle by the banks of the river, and thew were making casts at one another with their long-headed spears.
And among them was Hate, with Confusion, and Death the destroyer - she was holding a live man with a new wound, and another one unhurt, and she dragged a dead man by his feet through the carnage. The clothing on her shoulders showed strong red with the mens' blood.
Like living men*, all closed together and fought with each other, and dragged away from each other the corpses of those who had fallen.
[the agricultural and pastoral landscape, hunting and festival]
He made upon it a soft field, the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-ploughed, upon it many ploughmen, who at the turn wheeled their teams and drove them in either direction. And as these making their turn would reach the end of the field strip, here a man would come up to them and hand them a jug of honey-sweet wine, and they would turn again to the furrows in their haste to come again to the field strip's end. the earth darkened behind them, and looked like earth that has been plowed even though it was gold - such was the wonder of the shield's forging.
He made on it the estate of a king, where the laborers were reaping with the sharp hooks in their hands. Of the cut swathes, some fell along the lines of reaping, one after another, while the sheaf-0binders caught up others and tied them with bind ropes. There were 3 sheaf-binder who stood by, and behind them were children picking up the cut swathes, and filled their arms and carried and passed them on continually - and by them, in silence, the King holding his staff stood happily near the line of reapers.
And apart and under the trees the heralds made ready a feast, and trimmed a great ox they had slaughtered. Meanwhile, for the workmen to eat, the women scattered abundant white barley.
He made on it a great vineyard heavy with clusters, lovely and in gold, but the grapes upon it were darkened, and the vines themselves stood out, through silver poles.* About them he made a field ditch of dark metal, and all around this he drove a fence of tin. There was only one path to the vineyard, and along it ran the grape-bearers for the vineyard's stripping.
Young men and young women, in all their light-hearted innocence, carried off in their woven baskets the kind, sweet fruit, and in their midst a youth with a singing lyre played on it for them charmingly, and sang in a light voice the beautiful song for Linos [a Dionysos chant], and they followed him, and kept time to the music with singing and whistling, and light dance-steps of their feet.
he made upon it a herd of horn-straight oxen. The cattle were wrought of gold and tin, and in speed and with lowing they thronged in speed out of the dung of the farmyard to a pasturing place by a sounding river, and beside the moving field of a reed-bed. The herdsmen who went along with the cattle were of gold, 4 of them, and 9 dogs shifting their feet followed them.
But among the foremost of the cattle two formidable lions had caught hold of a bellowing bull, and he with loud lowings was dragged away, as the dogs and the young men chased after. But the 2 lions, breaking open the great ox's hide, gulped the black blood and the inward guts, while the herdsmen meanwhile were in the act of setting and urging the quick dogs at them. But they turned back from the lions before they could get their quick teeth in, but would come and take their stand very close, and bayed, and kept clear.
And the renowned smith of the strong arms made on it, for the glimmering sheepflocks, a meadow large and in a lovely valley, with dwelling places on it, and covered shelters, and sheepfolds.
And the renowned smith of of the strong arms made elaborate on it a dancing floor, like that which once in the wide spaces of [Cretan] Knossos Daidalos built for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. And on it were young men, and young girls sought for their beauty with gifts of oxen, dancing and holding hands at the wrist. These wore, the maidens, long light robes, but the men wore tunics, of fine-spun work and shining softly, touched with olive oil. And on their heads the girls wore fair garlands, while the young men carried gold knives that hung from silver belts.
Sometimes, on their knowing feet, they would run very lightly, just as when a potter crouching makes trial of his wheel to see if it will run smooth. Another time, they would form rows, and run, rows crossing one another. And around the lovely dancers, a great crowd stood happily watching, while among the dancers, 2 acrobats revolving among them led the measures of song and dance.
He made on it the great strength of the Ocean River, which ran round the uttermost rim of the shield's strong structure.
Then after he had wrought this shield, which was huge and heavy, he made for him a cuirass brighter than fire in its shining, and a helmet, massive and fitting close to his temples, lovely and intricate work, and laid a gold top-ridge along it, and made him leg-armor from pliable tin.
Thereafter when the renowned smith of the long arms had finished the armor, he lifted it, and laid it before Achilles' mother. And she like a hawk came sweeping down from the snows of Olympos [to Troy], and carried with her the shining armor, the gift of Hephaistos.
[here Book 18 ends: Book 19 opens with Thetis flying in to her son's camp, grasping his hand and laying the armor before him - he is lying in his dead friend's arms, to keep the flies from rotting his body. Thetis says, embrace these arms instead:]
9: "My child - now though we grieve for him, me must let this man lie dead, in the way he was killed first, through the gods' planning. Instead, accept from me the glorious arms of Hephaistos, so splendid, and such as no man has ever worn on his shoulders!"
So spoke the goddess, and set the armor down on the ground before Achilles, and all its elaboration clashed loudly.
[Achilles looks]
Trembling seized hold of the Myrmidons [A.'s warriors],- none had the courage to look straight at it. They were afraid of it.
Only Achilles looked; and as he looked, the anger came harder upon him, and his eyes glittered terribly under his eyelids like sunflare. He was glad, holding in his hands the shining gifts of Hephaistos.
But when he satisfied his heart with looking at the intricate armor, he spoke to his mother and addressed her in winged words:
"My mother, the god has given me these weapons - they are such as are the work of immortals, no mortal man could have made them! Therefore, now, I shall arm myself in them. Yet - I am so afraid, during this time, for the warlike son of Menoitios [his dead friend] - that flies might get into the wounds, beaten by bronze in his body, and breed maggots in them, and these will make foul the body, seeing that the life is killed in him - and that all his flesh may be rotted -"
In turn, the goddess Thetis the silver-footed answered him:
"My child, no longer let these things be a care to your mind. I will endeavor to drive from him the swarming and fierce things, those flies which feed on the bodies of men who have perished. And though he lie here til a year has gone to fulfillment, still his body shall be as it was, or firmer than ever.
Go then and summon into assembly the fighting Achaians, unsay your anger against [your king] Agamemnon, shepherd of the people - and arm at once for the fighting, and put your war strength upon you."
She spoke so, and drove the strength of great courage into him, and meanwhile, through the nostrils of Patroklos she distilled ambrosia and red nectar, so his flesh would not spoil.
[*NOTE: this is how in Egypt mummies' heads were cleaned and filled - the contents of the skull drawn out through the nostrils, and preservatives pushed back up and in!]
THE TYRANNICIDES
History-writing, the first Greek form of artful prose, started in the 5th c. as a conscious attempt to explain and make memory of those contemporary wars involving many cities and fates of peoples, which seemed significant enough that they deserved the same epic treatment as the Trojan War had received in Homer's Iliad. Those contemporary and recent events seemed to have the same grandeur and exemplary character, as the legendary history told in myth. Both the great history writers of the 5th c. BC wrote for an Athenian audience: Herodotos, who came from Halikarnassos on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, and wrote the history of the Persian Wars; and Thucydides, an Athenian general exiled in political infighting, who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian Wars. Both the writers believed with their contemprary audiences that history (historia - finding out) had to be based in first-hand investigation of events and the past causes leading up to them. Significantly for us, the narration of "modern" history in art and in drama started too in the 5th c., and in Athens.
Below are excerpts from Thucydides (whose sentences, as you can sense, go on sometimes for half a page). He told the story of how the Greek cities came to fight one another under the leadership of either Athens or of Sparta, and tried to explain the triumphs and eventual tragic downfall of his beloved Athens at the end of those wars, torn by civil strife, revolution, lost campaigns and plague. Thucydides is greatly concerned with the issues of "truth" and of dangerous self-delusion. To talk about false "truths", an example he seizes on at several points is to critique his fellow Athenian's myths about how they came to overthrow their tyrants and become a democracy. Peisistratos was Athens' first tyrant (as Herodotos described), and oversaw its first economic and artistic "golden age"; he was succeeded by his son Hippias, who was assisted to rule by his brother Hipparchos. The rest of the story, about how Hipparchos mortally offended two other Athenian noblemen who were bonded in a lover's pair, and the botched assassination that followed, you see below. Harmodios and Aristogeiton were both killed, and Hippias continues to rule for a number of years after. He was driven out by a combined army; it was led by another noble clan, the Alkmaionids, whom Peisistratos had exiled, allied with the Spartans. Hippias fled to Persia, and when the Persian Empire invaded Greece in 409-10 and Athens was sacked, Hippias was there, hoping to be reinstalled on his throne.
Under its new "democratic" government, the city put up in the Agora among the first true portraits in Greek art, sacred statues by Kritios and Nesiotes of the two assassins Harmodios and Aristogeiton. The city thus honred them as if they were new founders of the city (ktistes) just like the legendary heroes and kings honored with a statue series close to them, the 'Eponymous Heroes" = founders of the 10 tribes to which all Athenians now officially belonged. We know about how they looked because of the replicas made of them for later Romans, who admired the idea of noble friends united to overthrow unjust autocracy, just as their own noble Brutus had killed the tyrannical last king of Rome in the 5th c. BCE. (He had a famous statue himself, with drawn sword, before the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill); what you often see in books is the version now in the Naples Museum.
In the Persian Wars, Xerxes took the first group back to Persia with him as spoils (along with the disappointed Hippias!), but the Athenians immediately put up another pair, by Antenor, to replace it. Thucydides knows this monument well and knows that his readers know it too, even though he doesn't describe it.
The late Roman antiquarian writer Pausanias tells us about the statues, in your last excerpt. The stolen statues were taken back by Alexander the Great in the 4th c. BCE when he conquered Persia; he intended intending to re-install them in Athens, and they seem to have been with him when he died young in Babylon, on his way back to the West. Antiochos, the son one of his generals, Seleukos, who had turned Mesopotamia into his own kingdom, did put them back - next to the original pair.
Thucydides 1.20.2
The mass (or: multitude) of the Athenians, at any rate, think that Hipparchos was killed by Harmodios and Aristogeiton when he was tyrant and they do not know that Hippias, being the eldest of the sons of Peisistratos, ruled, while Hipparchos and Thessalos were his brothers, but on that very day and on the spot suspecting something, that they had been betrayed by their fellow conspirators to Hippias, held themselves off from him as forewarned, but wishing before they were seized to do something and to run the risk, when they encountered Hipparchos, who was marshalling the Panathenaic procession, at the so-called Leokoreion, they killed him.
Thucydides 5.56-58
Then, when Harmodios rejected the attempt, just as he (Hipparchos) was intending, he insulted him; for, having ordered his unmarried sister to come in order to bear a kanoun in some procession, they excluded her and said that they had not ordered her in the beginning because of her unworthiness.
[This seems to refer to the celebration of the Panathenaia, where a group of unmarried upper-class girls selected for their lineage and beauty carried ritual objects and baskets in a group at the head of the procession. You can see them on the Parthenon's east frieze, and they seem to be memorialized in some way in the caryatids of the Erechtheion. The charge of unworthiness insulted the girl’s purity and that of her family - both, effective and vicious public insults to her brother, who had turned down Hipparchos' sexual advances. The attack, similarly, is on the family of the evildoer.]
When Harmodios took the situation badly, Aristogeiton, on his behalf, was even more angered. And the matter was arranged by them with those joining them in the deed and they were waiting for the Great Panathenaia; on which day alone there was no suspicion when the citizens, who were going to take part in the procession, were gathered together in arms. And it was necessary that they themselves begin, while the others (in the procession) would immediately join in dealing with the bodyguard. The conspirators were not many on account of security; for they were hoping that those not forewarned, if however so many would dare, on the spur of the moment and having arms would wish to join in freeing themselves.
[In the Archaic period, in most Greek cities upper-class men were expected to engage in very formal same-sex erotic relationships; an older man (the erastes) would court a beautiful young man (the eromenos), and the ideal was that they should carry themselves in public as a bonded pair of devoted friends, like Achilles and Patroklos. Such friendship was supposed to be a spur to virtue, the older man supporting and encouraging the younger man, and both striving to be excellent for the other's sake - you can see this ideal much discussed in Plato's dialogues. The habit remained one closely associated with the Greek aristocracy, which is why in Thucydides' Athens it carried often in fact "right-wing" connotations; it was till very much encouraged, on the other hand, in oligarchic states like Sparta (now Athens' enemy) and Thebes. Among the many reasons why Alexander will have wanted to be seen to honor the Tyrannicides is that he carried out such a public bonding with his friend Hephaistion.)]
And when the festival came, Hippias, outside the walls in the so-called Kerameikos with his bodyguard, was making arrangements as it was necessary for each part of the procession to go forward,
[The ruler is sending the procession stages forward into the Agora, from where they will eventually ascended to Athena's temple on the Acropolis.]
while Harmodios and Aristogeiton, having daggers, then came forward for the deed. And when they saw one of the conspirators talking in a friendly manner with Hippias, but Hippias was accessible to everyone, they were afraid and thought both that they were betrayed and also that they would now be arrested. Therefore, on the one who grieved them and on account of all the danger, they wished, if it was possible, to be honored before and,
*just as they were, they dashed headlong into the gate and they encountered Hipparchos by the so-called Leokoreion and immediately attacking him thoughtlessly and especially in anger, the lover (erastes) and the one outraged, they struck him repeatedly and killed him.
And immediately one of them, Aristogeiton, escaped the bodyguards when the mob ran together and later, being seized, he was treated not lightly; but Harmodios, in
contrast, was killed immediately.
When the news was announced to Hippias in the Kerameikos, he went immediately not to the scene of the murder, but to members of the procession who were fully armed before they, being far off, learned what had happened and composing his appearance concerning disaster, he ordered them, showing them a certain place, to go there without their arms. And they withdrew, thinking that he
would say something, but meanwhile, ordering his mercenaries to remove the arms, he immediately choose those whom he accused and if anyone was discovered having a dagger; for with shields and spears they were accustomed to make processions.
Pausanias 1.8.5
And not far off stand Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who killed Hipparchos; and what was the cause and in what way they did the deed, is said by others. And of the statues, one group is the work of Kritios while the older ones Antenor made; and because Xerxes, when he gained Athens after the Athenians had abandoned the city, carried off also these statues as spoils, Antiochos later sent them
back to the Athenians.