Ancient Epic E-Book

Katherine Callen King

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 417

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Ancient Epic offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to six of the greatest ancient epics – Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apollonius of Rhodes' Agonautica.

• Provides an accessible introduction to the ancient epic
• Offers interpretive analyses of poems within a comprehensive historical context
• Includes a detailed timeline, suggestions for further readings, and an appendix of the Olympian gods and their Akkadian counterparts

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Half Title page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Chronologies

Map

Introduction

Overview of the Six Epics

Divine Contexts

The Mesopotamian Divine Succession Myth

The Greek Divine Succession Myth

Cosmic Implications

Notes

Chapter 1: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Further Reading Translations

Notes

Chapter 2: The Context of Homeric Epic

The Trojan War Epic Cycle

The Gods

Note on Spelling of Proper Names

Further Reading

Notes

Chapter 3: The Iliad

The Quarrel

Motivations for War

The Battlefield

Domestic Space: The Women

Temporarily Like Achilles: Diomedes

The Best of the Akhaians: Achilles

The Tragic Arc

Further Reading

Notes

Chapter 4: The Odyssey

Telemakhos

The Suitors

Odysseus

Penelope

Conclusion

Further Reading

Notes

Chapter 5: The Argonautika of Apollonios of Rhodes

The Alexandrian Context

The Argonautika before Apollonios

Apollonios’ Argonautika

Jason

The Gods

Medea

Further Reading

Notes

Chapter 6: The Context of Roman Epic

Rome: Legendary Beginnings

The March to Empire

Civil War

Intellectual Currents and the Aeneid

Homeric and Roman Epic

The Poets

Further Reading

Notes

Chapter 7: The Aeneid of Virgil

The Divine Apparatus

Dido and the Problem of Femininity

Aeneas as Odysseus

Turnus and the Problem of Achilles

Aeneas alius Achilles

Book 12

Further Reading

Notes

Chapter 8: The Metamorphoses of Ovid

Further Reading

Notes

Appendix: Chart of Olympian Gods and their Akkadian Counterparts

Glossary of Greek and Latin terms

Index

Ancient Epic

BLACKWELL INTRODUCTIONS TO THE CLASSICAL WORLD

This series will provide concise introductions to classical culture in the broadest sense. Written by the most distinguished scholars in the field, these books survey key authors, periods and topics for students and scholars alike.

Published

Greek TragedyNancy Sorkin Rabinowitz

Roman SatireDaniel Hooley

Ancient HistoryCharles W. Hedrick, Jr.

Homer, second editionBarry B. Powell

Classical LiteratureRichard Rutherford

Ancient Rhetoricand Oratory Thomas Habinek

Ancient EpicKatherine Callen King

CatullusJulia Haig Gaisser

VirgilR. Alden Smith

OvidKatharina Volk

Roman HistoriographyAndreas Mehl, translated by Hans-Friedrich Mueller

This paperback edition first published 2012© 2012 Katherine Callen King

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

King, Katherine Callen. Ancient epic / Katherine Callen King. p. cm. – (Blackwell introductions to the classical world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-5947-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-118-25534-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Epic poetry–History and criticism. 2. Poetry, Ancient–History and criticism. 3. Heroes in literature. I. Title. PN1307.K56 2009 809.1’32 – dc22

2008036233

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

To Esther and Wallis Pereira for their unfailing support, to the many graduate and undergraduate students from whom I have learned so much, and to research assistant extraordinaire, Catharine Platt McGraw

Map prepared by Cat Buckles

Map prepared by Cat Buckles

Introduction

Why do students compelled to read ancient epics in college classrooms invariably discover that they have learned something valuable? What could a story composed thousands of years ago have to say to us today?

An active-duty Air Force captain who has served four tours in Iraq explains why he intends to tattoo “the wrath of Achilles” in Greek on his right Achilles tendon:

I want to mark the anger on my body for a lot of reasons … I try to imagine what that Myrmidon [Achilles] must have thought, and his frustration [at] serving for a king who did not want to listen to his best fighters to learn how to fight a war. (Email dated April 20, 2008, to the author)

Iraq Veteran Michael Zacchea, who has been slowly integrating himself back into peacetime society, says,

[Odysseus] resolved his issues by killing all the suitors … really the message is that I have to make my peace with people who, you know, did not go to Iraq or insulated [themselves] from the reality of Iraq. (Interview September 28, 2007 with David Brancchacio for PBS news show, NOW)

Achilles’ angry idealism and Odysseus’ difficult return from war clearly still speak to modern readers in urgent and personal ways.

Searing scenes invite questions about modern life, as when Aeneas’ effort to live only for an imperialist future leads him to hug his son goodbye encased in full armor (Aeneid 12. 432–442). In 1974, John Arthur Hanson, professor of classics and a keen observer of the ideological clash between the generation of the fifties and that of the sixties, saw a parallel between this scene and the “Puritan ethic” backbone of American capitalism, and he subsequently transformed it into “Mr Brass Bids Farewell to his Son Julius:”

But after he had buttoned up his heavy Harris tweed overcoat,

and clutched his briefcase,

He surrounded his son with his scratchy sleeves

and made a pass at kissing him – but his hatbrim got in the way.

“Boy,” he said, “from me you have to learn guts,

and where hard work gets you.

Ask some other guy about luck.

It’s because of my own efforts that you’ve got a roof over your head,

and you’re going to come into a big pile.

You just remember that, when you get some real balls on you.

You don’t need to look outside the family,

just be like your old man and your uncle Hector.”

Then he made a break for the carport.

Other epic protagonists generate similarly intense recognition. Gilgamesh’s struggles against the forces of nature resonate both with those who worry about the environment and anyone who has lost a loved one to death. Who could fail to be awed by Medea’s obsession for Jason or to sympathize with Arachne’s artistic rebellion?

The epic poems in which these memorable protagonists appear – the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Argonautika, and Metamorphoses – remain a fount of inspiration for poets, dramatists, and musicians, partly because they tell good stories in an aesthetically beautiful way, but mostly because they wrestle with issues important to generation after generation of readers. They speak to hearts and minds concerned about human potentiality and limitation, about the consequences of passion (righteous anger, sexual love, intense grief, or desire for honor), and about the competing claims of civilization, the environment, and the need to reconcile self-interest with the common good. Their explorations of armed violence – what it achieves, what it costs, and what it serves – have much to impart to everyone who thinks about what heroism might mean today.

Chief among epic themes that are still of deep concern to modern societies are the basic implications of being human: intelligence gives us a godlike potential to master our environment, but we are limited by the deadly consequences of our not actually being gods. Human passions – anger, grief, pride, love – often interfere with intelligence, and while gods can make mistakes without serious consequences to themselves because they will always have a tomorrow, human mistakes can end life or make it permanently unbearable. Worst of all, human beings inevitably grow old and die. What meaning, then, attaches to our existence? Is there anything we can do to make ourselves outlive our ephemeral bodies? The latter is the question most consistently pondered by epic poems.

Another fact of life recognized by all six epic poets is that most people want power but almost all who get it abuse it. Long before Lord Acton talked about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman poets explored the catastrophic effects of a powerful person’s refusal to acknowledge the claims of others, depicting it as stemming from a failure to acknowledge limits. This is what the Greeks called hubris, an extreme type of arrogance. In the epics, abuses of power range from general exploitation of a populace to violence against individuals and even the gods. In the case of violated gods, sometimes their retaliation is limited to the offender; often, however, they send wars, plagues, famines, and other disasters to coerce recompense and teach lessons. How a hero reacts to his own or to another’s power is an important, if not central, interest in all six epics. All are concerned with ways to control the arrogance of power, but some focus more on internal restraints, that is, moral codes and self-control, and others on external ones like social codes and counteractive physical force.

Both the efficacy and effect of violence are concerns for many poets. Physical force is used sometimes to counter abuses of power, sometimes to support or commit them. Often it has unintended consequences. Although all epic heroes must be capable of committing great bodily injury to enemies, none of these six epics celebrates violence. Instead, they are careful to balance their heroes’ violence with the more cooperative virtues of compassion and intelligence, and they invite their audiences to view many of their heroes’ violent deeds with ambiguity even when they are committed in the service of “good” causes.

What exactly is an epic? “Epic” comes from the Greek epos, which means “word,” and, by extension, a “story told in words.” Only certain kinds of stories told in certain kinds of words, however, qualified as epic for the ancient Greeks and Romans. First and foremost, epic stories had to be told in verse, not prose, and they had to be told in a specific kind of verse: the six-beat hexameter line that was considered to be the most stately and dignified of all classical meters. Less discriminating Greeks apparently considered all works written in this meter (scientific treatises, genealogies, martial exhortations, hymns to a god, stories about the gods interacting with each other) to be epics, but Aristotle, fourth-century BCE Athenian scientist and literary critic, is more exacting: epic poetry must tell a long but focused story with the same kinds of reversals, disasters, and recognitions that we find in tragedy; its language must be highly adorned with metaphors and exotic words; and the poet must not speak in his own voice, but must keep himself in the background (Poetics 1447b, 1459–1460). Lastly, the subject of epic must be the deeds of heroes, a criterion so important that Aristotle uses the word “heroic” interchangeably with “hexameter” to designate the meter proper to the genre.

Heroes were a special class of men, superior beings whose deeds earned them a status between a human and god. Most of them had a divine parent or grandparent, and they could do things that no modern man could do. The age in which they lived and fought and died was named the Age of Heroes, a legendary period that preceded the modern age of ordinary people by hundreds of years. Some of them, like Herakles, performed deeds in individual story cycles, but most participated in at least one of the three major story cycles that became cultural touchstones throughout Greece: the Voyage of the Argonauts, the Theban Troubles, and the Trojan War. In archaic and classical Greece, the spirits of long-dead heroes were regularly invoked by priests who hoped they would protect the localities in which they were buried, and their stories were continually evoked by poets and rhetoricians who made them speak anew to modern cultures. In other words, ancient heroes continued to affect religious, political, and cultural life long after their magnificent muscles were thought to have ceased wielding swords and spears.

Since the Babylonian, Greek, and Roman communities were male dominated, epic action revolves around male heroes. Orbiting around the heroes are women and deities, enabling, hindering, motivating. There is a clear differentiation between male and female roles and a tendency to associate the male with cultural progress and the female with repetitious natural cycles. The female is usually more concerned with preserving or perpetuating biological life, the male with preserving his name or enhancing social position. Both sexes can be equally concerned with revenge. Only in the later epics is emotionality per se labeled a female characteristic; in Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, men as well as women love, weep in grief, and suffer moments of despair. The poets of Gilgamesh and the Iliad are even willing to depict their heroes in an agony of fear, clearly not feeling that this detracts from their heroism. In the Aeneid, on the other hand, fear and open lamentation are closely associated with females, as are all strong passions except love of father and country. Achilles’ desire for heroic revenge, which is honorable in the Iliad, in the Aeneid is portrayed as primitive and as the province of the goddess Juno.

Larger-than-life representatives from the Age of Heroes, who illuminate human action through their closeness to the divine, help to create the seriousness that characterizes epic genre. Heaps of dead enemies and conquered monsters are not an end in themselves; only when a hero’s action engages the whole poetic universe, the gods as well as his human community, can it rise to epic status. Presenting it in verse and enriching it with metaphorical language may be important, but they are not enough: epic action must profoundly affect or illustrate important community values.

Some of these values are political. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, explores kingly responsibility via its hero’s monster slaying, city building, and quest for knowledge. The Iliad and the Odyssey use Achilles’ prowess and Odysseus’ multifaceted intellect to explore what kind of man deserves to be at the top of a given political system, who deserves to be the Greek army’s commander in chief or the king of Ithaka. The Aeneid uses Aeneas’ piety to examine not only what kind of man, but also what nation deserves to rule.

Closely related to these political aspects of epic are social and theological, or cultural, ones. Gilgamesh probes the human condition in a universe of both irascible and beneficent gods who must all be respected despite their being sometimes at odds. Achilles’ choices restore the community’s heroic ethic while validating a tragic vision of life in which the gods’ favor ensures glorious death. Odysseus’ success, on the other hand, confirms the idea of hereditary kingship called into question by the Iliad, while it validates a “comic” vision of life in which the gods’ favor secures prosperous survival. The hero’s desire for self-fulfillment is paramount in all three. Aeneas’ achievement, on the other hand, promotes a hierarchical ranking of nations at the same time as it elevates self-sacrifice to supreme worth: in the Aeneid, Jupiter’s favor ensures national survival, and validates – or seems to validate – a superior national character.

The poets of both the Argonautika and the Metamorphoses challenge epic norms by marginalizing the heroes and the heroism of their predecessors and by calling attention to the artifice of their creations. Nonetheless, both offer value systems that could be described as important to their communities. The Argonautika promotes communal cooperation rather than individual heroics, while the Metamorphoses, more negatively, encourages wariness against clinging to or heroizing any story, identity, or power.

Overview of the Six Epics

Just as modern poets are inspired by Greek and Roman epic, Greek poets were inspired by the ancient poetry of western Asia, the area that today includes Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine. The epic poetry that came from southern Mesopotamian civilizations (first Sumer, later Babylonia) was especially influential. After many years of neglect, mainstream English speakers are now beginning to recognize the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh as a masterpiece and its hero, grief-stricken Gilgamesh, as a forerunner of Homer’s Achilles.

Composed in three stages (roughly 2100, 1700, and 1200 bce), this magnificent poem originated in ancient Sumer as five short epics that focused on King Gilgamesh’s extraordinary feats against warriors, monsters, and the obliterating forces of nature. All his deeds were performed in the context of defending and improving his city. These five Sumerian poems evolved first into a long Old Babylonian epic concerned with Gilgamesh’s struggle against human mortality. A final poet created the still longer Babylonian Standard Version, which focuses firmly on the value of cultural immortality as counterweight to biological death. In this final version, Gilgamesh lives on for future generations both in the walled city he built and in the adventures he experienced and “recorded.” The Epic of Gilgamesh celebrates the hero’s extraordinary learning as much as it does his conquering of monsters, his story as much as his city.

The Iliad and Odyssey were most likely composed on the west coast of Asia Minor around 700 bce. Their poet(s), whom we, like the Greeks, will call Homer, emphasized the idea of cultural immortality in epic song as much as did the poet of Gilgamesh. In the Iliad, however, the emphasis is on its potential to compensate for heroic death in battle. City-building, which plays a central role in Gilgamesh, does not become supremely important again until Virgil’s Aeneid, for the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey pride themselves rather on being city-sackers. However, if we define “city” more loosely to include community and its shared values of governance, as opposed to the lawlessness found in nature, we find that “city” values do play a role in the Homeric epics, especially the Odyssey, where the hero’s goal includes not only reuniting with his wife and son, but also reestablishing the proper political functioning of his kingdom. The Iliad’s tragic vision is very much concerned with community, in this case a community of warriors, but more in the sense of showing how vulnerable a human community is when its leader forces its greatest hero to choose between his responsibility to members of the community and his responsibility to its broken ideals, that is, between the ethical self and the unethical community.

The Iliad and Odyssey became the touchstone for all classical literature created in Athens, Alexandria, and Rome, and they are essential for understanding all other classical genres as well as subsequent manifestations of epic poetry. These two universally known monumental poems shaped Greek and Roman concepts of narrative structure, tragedy, comedy, war, marriage, relationships between human and divine beings, and achieving immortality through fame. Aristotle modeled his definition of epic on the Iliad and Odyssey, and all epic poets and readers seem to have regarded the Homeric poems as the standard of epic excellence. Hellenistic and Roman authors could work either with or against the Homeric poems; they could not ignore them.

Apollonios’ Argonautika, written in Greek Alexandria around 260 bce, is interesting both for how it brilliantly reworks Homer and for its extensive influence on Virgil’s Aeneid. This Hellenistic poet celebrates a different kind of literary heroism, one that is collective rather than singular, and one that seems unconcerned with mortality. The Argonauts want fame, but not in the context of compensation for death. Although much of the epic seems like a pure adventure story, a kind of epic seriousness is achieved by the foundational rituals with which the Argonauts transform the landscape and bring a touch of civilization to the “barbarian,” that is, non-Greek, world. Apollonios also interjects into epic a new passion imported from Greek tragedy, obsessive erotic love, and along with it a tragic heroine, Medea, who is more memorable than most of the male heroes.

Virgil’s Aeneid incorporates and reworks not only Homeric epic and Apollonius’ inventions, but the best of Greek and Roman lyric, narrative, and philosophic poetry. The Aeneid deploys a singular heroic protagonist like those of the Homeric poems, but subordinates the Homeric ego to a collective purpose. Perhaps because its author had witnessed both civil war and the ascendancy of an emperor, the Aeneid insists that the truly epic struggle is not for the happiness or immortality of a singular self, but for the perhaps unachievable ideal of dispassionate leadership. The result is an overtly nationalist but profoundly ethical masterpiece whose vast influence on subsequent art and literature makes it, like the Iliad and Odyssey, essential reading for any student of western culture.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses differs in many essential ways from the above five epics, not least in that it has no protagonist. No questing, angry, or foundational king focuses its verses. The “hero” of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is “shapes changing” in an apparently endless progression from the origin of the world to his present-day Rome. Ovid’s poem plays with his predecessors’ ideas of heroism, identity, and immortality while challenging epic norms of unity, heroic singularity, and martial prowess. Because of these challenges, and because of its apparent lack of seriousness, some scholars refuse it the name of epic. Nonetheless, the Metamorphoses is often studied together with Homeric and Virgilian epic, largely because Ovid chose to make it epic in form and also because there is no better way of appreciating this tragicomic masterpiece.

Divine Contexts

Since epic ponders universal questions only within specific cultural settings, it is important to become acquainted with the major gods and goddesses whose myths shaped the poets’ religious and cultural worlds. The gods in Mesopotamia and those around the Aegean Sea lived in similar hierarchies and share many features, but their relationship to each other and to their human worshipers was significantly different. What follows is a brief account of the Greek and Babylonian Divine Succession Myths, which names all the gods important to the epics, and a summary of their major differences. At the end of the book there is appended a list of major gods that may be used for reference as you read about the epics themselves. Although I focus on “national” to the exclusion of local gods, it is important to know that every river was a god and that every beautiful woodland, meadow, or cove was alive not just with trees and plants, but with numerous protective nymphs and fauns.

The Mesopotamian Divine Succession Myth

Sumerian myth tells of a struggle among primal Mesopotamian gods, but the issue is status or class rather than absolute rule. One group of gods, the Anunna, forced another group of gods, the Igiggi, to do all the work of growing and cooking food and building and maintaining palaces to dwell in. When the Igiggi gods rebelled, a war did not ensue. Instead, the Anunna gods created human beings to do the work for all the gods, who can now live in relative harmony.1

Anu (Heaven), the supreme god, together with Enlil (Storm God) and Ea (God of Underearth Waters) ruled the other gods. The goddess Ereshkigal ruled in the Netherworld. Ishtar (Goddess of Sex and War), sister of Ereshkigal, ensured fertile cycles of birth and death, and was nearly as powerful as the three dominant male gods. In some myths she is the daughter of Anu, in others of Sin, the Moon God. Her brother Shamash (Sun God), ruled the skies during the day, bringing injustice to light, while his father the Moon God ruled the sky at night and spoke darkly to humans through oracles.

The Greek Divine Succession Myth2

Gaia (Earth) came into being from chaos, and she bore Uranos (Sky) and Pontos (Deep Sea). Both became her husbands.

Gaia and Uranos are the progenitors of generations of Uranian gods, gods who in the third generation took Olympos as their center of power. Uranos impregnated Gaia, but would not let his children be born because he was jealous of Gaia’s attention. Gaia became angry and formed an alliance with one of the unborn sons held within her womb. She created a sickle out of a stone and gave it to Kronos with instructions to castrate his father the next time he came to lie with her. After Kronos castrated him, Uranos drifted off to become elemental sky, no longer involved in divine affairs. Blood from Uranos’ severed genitals dripped on the earth, where it gave birth to the Furies, who avenge crimes against kin. Where the genitals fell into the sea, sperm mingled with sea foam to beget Aphrodite.

Once Uranos was emasculated, all of Gaia’s children came forth. This generation of gods are called Titans. In addition to Kronos, the most important of them are: Mnemosyne – “Memory,” mother (with Zeus) of the nine Muses; Okeanos, “Ocean,” and Tethys, who together gave birth to all rivers, lakes, springs, and wells, and also to Metis, mother of Athena; Rheia, Kronos’s sister-wife; Themis, goddess of Natural Law, whose name means roughly “What has been established;” Hyperion, “He who moves on high,” who fathered Helios, the Sun, and Selene, the Moon; Iapetos, who is important mostly as the father of Prometheus, whose name means “Foresight;” and Phoebe, “Radiant,” whose daughter is Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis.

Kronos was naturally the Titans’ ruler. He took as wife his sister Rheia, and begot six children, whom he feared because of a prophecy that one of his offspring would dethrone him. At the moment of birth he swallowed each of them, thus angering mother Rheia and causing her, like Gaia before her, to turn to a son for vengeance. When baby Zeus was born, Rhea wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to Kronos to swallow. She reared Zeus in secret, and she and Gaia helped him release his two brothers and three sisters and then overcome Kronos. Kronos, and the Titans who sided with him, were thrown into Tartaros, which lies as far below the surface of the earth as Olympos lies above it. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots to determine their realm in which each would be supreme – sky, sea, and underworld – but they share the earth (see Il. 15. 187–193). Hades took up residence in the underworld, but Zeus, Poseidon, and their sisters Hera, Demeter, and Hestia took possession of Olympos.

The other god of the oldest generation, Pontos, is the progenitor of generations separate from but not warring with the Olympian gods. Pontos fathered Nereus, a sea god who fathered Thetis, mother of Achilles, and forty-nine other daughters, all of whom have names and personalities but who are collectively called Nereids, “Daughters of Nereus.”

The same thing that happened to Kronos and Uranos would have happened to Zeus had he not learned a prophecy and acted in time. Zeus was having sexual relations with his cousin Metis, daughter of Okeanos, when he learned from his grandmother that after bearing the daughter with whom she was now pregnant, Metis was destined to bear a son who would surpass his father. Zeus did not wait to swallow the threatening child at birth, as his own father had done, but immediately swallowed the pregnant mother instead. This secured him a triple advantage: not only would the son who might challenge him never be conceived, but immortal Metis (Shrewd Counsel) now lived inside his own body, and her daughter Athena, subsequently born from his head, would regard him as her sole parent and give him total allegiance.

Zeus’s marriage to Hera produced two sons: Ares, god of war, and Hephaistos, god of fire and the forge.3 Zeus’ marriage did not preclude him from having offspring with many goddesses. With Titan Leto, he fathered twins Apollo and Artemis, divinities of the sun and moon, respectively. With the nymph Maia, he fathered Hermes, god of messengers, hidden treasure, and thievery. With Semele, a minor goddess who comes into recorded mythology as a mortal woman, he fathered Dionysos, god of wine and nature. The Iliad also makes Zeus the father of Aphrodite via the womb of a goddess named Dione, whose name means roughly “Mrs. Zeus.” These eight children of Zeus live with him, Hera, Poseidon, and Demeter above Mount Olympos.

Later, both Zeus and Poseidon courted Thetis, daughter of Nereus and granddaughter of Pontos. Then Themis (or Prometheus) revealed a prophecy that Thetis would bear a son more powerful than his father. Both gods not only withdrew their suit, but also forced Thetis to marry a mortal so that her offspring could never challenge them. Thus the Olympian regime with Zeus at its head was permanently stabilized. And thus Achilles was born half-mortal, to the endless sorrow of his mother.

Cosmic Implications

The Greeks’ violent Succession Myth shows a progression from more elemental gods (Earth, Heaven, Sea) to more anthropomorphic gods who rule various elements (Zeus who rules the heavens, Poseidon who rules the sea). More importantly, it reveals two immense tensions within Greek culture: intense competition between fathers and sons and a related competition between husbands and wives. The wife’s prime goal is to keep her young children alive, even if it means “killing” the father, while the husband’s is to preserve his own power even if it means killing his children (immortality through one’s children is not an issue with gods). From this divine behavior, we can extract what the Greeks would have assumed to be “natural” female and male behavior: that is, women are focused on biological survival and men on power. Homeric epic confirms this inference, but on the human plane, father–son competition for power shifts to brother–brother or simply male-on-male competition. The quarrel between Achilles and the older, sceptered king Agamemnon over who is “best of the Akhaians” is an example of the latter.

Perhaps the most important element in the Succession Myth is the extreme violence by which power is transferred and “progress” is made. Females, too, fully participate in violence, but with this difference: they use cunning to aid a male to commit the physical violence that will effect the transfer of power. The exclusively violent transfers of power seem to indicate that all living beings, including intelligent ones, are programmed to respect physical more than verbal prowess. In the human realm as portrayed in epic, in fact, negotiations mostly fail, and order is established and maintained only by physical force. As Odysseus says in Iliad 14, 85–87: “Zeus has made war our lot, from youth to old age, until each of us dies.”

One thing that is striking to one steeped in Greek mythology is that in the early Babylonian pantheon the generations coexist in power. Anu is parallel to the Greek Uranos, whose name also means heaven, or sky, but he has not been castrated or otherwise ousted from his seat of power. He may be more remote than the other gods, but he is still supreme. Enlil corresponds to Zeus, God of the Lightning Bolt, but he has not overthrown his father nor is he the father of all the Olympian gods who are not his siblings. Both generations of Mesopotamian gods make appearances in epics about Gilgamesh, but only the youngest generation of Greek gods, the ones who make their home on Olympos, are important in Greek and Roman epic. The absence of zero-sum familial competition in the Mesopotamian cosmogony mirrors the relative lack of civil strife in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Succession myths aside, there is often dissension among the gods, dissension that makes it difficult for human beings to achieve success without paying great prices. Tragic epic universes portray heroes caught in this dissension. For example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Shamash and Ea privilege human intelligence and culture, while Ishtar and Enlil promote natural processes and a natural justice that treats human beings as no more important than other elements of the world; Gilgamesh cannot obey the Sun God without violating prerogatives of the Storm God. In the Iliad, opposing groups of gods headed by Zeus and Hera protract the war that makes immortal glory possible; this protraction increases the agonizing loss of life and helps bring into sharp focus the impossible choices human beings must make. The Aeneid privileges the fiercely competitive Greek pantheon over native Italian gods; drawing on succession myths that pitted divine fathers against mothers, it magnifies the Iliadic quarrel between Jupiter (Zeus) and Juno (Hera) into a cosmic opposition between masculine forces of rationality and culture and female forces of irrationality and raw nature, using these forces simultaneously to validate the hero’s achievement and to question the possibility of human progress.

Comic epic universes, that is, those with happy endings, play down cosmic dissension, at least at the highest levels. Zeus and Athena in the Odyssey and Zeus and Hera in the Argonautika are in total harmony; the heroes’ major obstacles in both epics are human wickedness, monsters, and the elements. Poseidon’s one appearance on Olympos marks the Odyssey’s only true tragedy; throughout Odysseus’s trials he is an elemental rather than an Olympian god. Olympian harmony allows the Odyssey‘s poet to work with clear categories of good and evil, justice and injustice, categories that are somewhat muddied in tragic universes.

In the highly self-conscious Argonautika and Metamorphoses, Greek and Roman gods inhabit a purely literary cosmos. They have devolved to divine machinery in an essentially secular world. Not until poets like Dante, Tasso, Spencer, and Milton deploy their heroes in Christian universes do gods again power European epic with the cosmic reverberations it had in its origins.

Notes

1 Later Babylonian myth did recount a divine succession story that is in some ways similar to the Greek, but the decisive battle is not between father and son divinities, but between an older widowed goddess and the young male god who had “killed” her husband. There is no hint, however, that its two major actors, Tiamat and her nemesis Marduk, son of Ea, were known to the poet of Gilgamesh.

2 The Succession Myth is found in Hesiod’s Theogony, which was composed roughly at the same time as the Iliad, and in Apollodorus’s Library 1.1–2, which was compiled during the Roman empire.

3 Such is the parentage given Hephaistos by the Iliad. Later myths make Hera the sole parent of Hephaistos.

Chapter 1

The Epic of Gilgamesh

On the banks of the Euphrates River, not far from what is today known as the Persian Gulf, there once stood the great Sumerian city of Uruk. Its monumental defensive walls and magnificent temple of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, attested to the superlative kingship of its legendary king, Gilgamesh, whom later Sumerians believed to have reigned in 2750 BCE. Over 600 years later, during the reign of an ambitious king who identified closely with his “brother and friend” Gilgamesh, five verse narratives about Gilgamesh’s adventures, which no doubt drew on a long oral tradition, were composed, recorded on stone tablets, and deposited in royal libraries, or Tablet Houses.1 These poems, which apparently ranged in length from 115 lines to over 300, soon became widely known and were translated from the Sumerian into Akkadian, which was now becoming the dominant language throughout Mesopotamia.

We have in the original Sumerian, which was a dead language by 1800 BCE, substantial portions of these epic poems. They establish Gilgamesh as no ordinary king. He has a divine mother, Ninsun, and a royal father, Lugalbanda. His protector gods are Enki, the wise god of the deep waters, and Utu, the sun god. All five epics include his beloved servant and steadfast comrade, Enkidu, but only one, The Death of Gilgamesh, mentions beloved but nameless wives and children. The stories tell of victory in a defensive war (Gilgamesh and Akka); of a deadly quarrel with Inanna, Queen of Heaven, that is resolved by Gilgamesh’s killing the Bull of Heaven and making flasks for her of its horns (Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven); of Gilgamesh’s leading a perilous expedition across seven mountain ranges to cut wood in the Cedar Forest, a task which eventually entails Gilgamesh tricking into submission and Enkidu brutally slaying its monstrous but divinely placed guardian (Gilgamesh and Huwawa). What is most interesting about Gilgamesh and Huwawa in terms of later epic is Gilgamesh’s motive for undertaking the dangerous venture: the need for fame to counteract the inexorable coming of death. Because of this motivation, one ancient copyist made Gilgamesh and Huwawa the sequel to another of the epics, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, in which Enkidu brings back a grim report from the Netherworld after getting trapped there for seven days. Other copyists did not make this link, which leaves open the possibility that Enkidu’s return to upper-world, which Gilgamesh procures through the help of Enki and Utu, is only a temporary reprieve.

The last of the five, The Death of Gilgamesh, conveniently sums up the dying hero’s achievements, which include, first, unspecified combats, deeds of strength, words of wisdom, climbing mountains and traveling all roads, and then, more specifically, journeying to the Cedar Forest, killing its guardian Huwawa, founding many temples of the gods, reaching the impossibly distant home of the immortal survivor of the Flood, and subsequently reestablishing forgotten rituals for worshiping the gods. The gods decree that despite this accumulation of superlative achievements and despite his being part god, Gilgamesh must still undergo death, the fate of all human beings. Although they do reward him with a prestigious judgeship and make him a lesser god in the Netherworld, there are indications that he is not as fully consoled as both the gods and his counselors think he ought to be.2 He does, however, rally enough to make sure that his tomb is prepared correctly, which allows the poem to end with funerary ritual and offer a concrete means (statuary) for ensuring that a man’s name, at least, will survive his death.

These Sumerian stories are the literary antecedent to the epic that was created in Akkadian, or Old Babylonian, around 1700 BCE and was reworked around 1200 BCE by a scholar-scribe named Sin-leqe-unninni. His Middle Babylonian version, which we call either the Standard Version or the Eleven Tablet Version, was preserved in a Babylonian copy made around 700 BCE. Between the different copies, we now have about 60 percent of the epic’s approximately 3,000 lines.3

The Old Babylonian epic was known as Surpassing all other kings from its first line, which in the Standard Version comes after the twenty-eight-line preamble, or proem, added by Sin-leqe-unninni. The Standard Version was known as He who saw into the depths, a title again taken from its first line. Although both epics include basically the same adventures, Sin-leqe-unninni appears to have contracted and expanded some scenes in addition to adding the prologue. All translators fill in lines lost from the tablets of the Standard Version by turning to fragments from the Old Babylonian, some more than others. Some popular translations also use the Old Babylonian fragments to expand what Sin-leqe-unninni contracted. More rarely, a translator will turn to the five Sumerian epics to fill in blanks or add material, a technique that, while aiming at completeness, can undermine the tragic arc of Sin-leqe-unninni’s masterpiece. I will base my discussion here on A. R. George’s translation of the Standard Version, which comes as close as is possible today to revealing the story that its ancient audience knew.

The Babylonian poets kept key elements from the popular Sumerian stories. Gilgamesh is still protected by the god of deep waters (Ea) and the sun god (Shamash), and he has a difficult but enduring relationship with the Queen of Heaven (Ishtar), whose temple is at the center of his city. The roles of these Babylonian counterparts to the Sumerian Enki, Utu, and Inanna, however, are deepened and altered in ways that create new tensions. The expedition to the Cedar Forest, the slaying of Huwawa (Babylonian Humbaba), the killing of the Bull from Heaven, and Enkidu’s vision of the underworld are all reworked to form a tight sequence of action rather than a simple series of adventures. Gilgamesh’s journey to the ends of the earth to talk with the immortalized Flood hero, to which we have only an allusion in the extant Sumerian stories, is elaborated to include a detailed story of the great Flood itself and two tests which Gilgamesh fails. The knowledge Gilgamesh brings back from this journey, especially in Sin-leqe-unninni’s version, centers not so much on restoring lost rituals as on understanding – and coming to terms with – the unbridgeable difference between man and god.

Significantly, the Babylonian epics omit two of the Sumerian stories entirely: that of Gilgamesh’s military victory over an attacking army and that of Gilgamesh’s death, promised deification, and funerary ritual. Although they take Gilgamesh’s prowess in battle for granted, neither the Old nor the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is interested in warfare. The introductory lines of the Old Babylonian version briefly exalt a brave hero who protects his warriors and can smash through walls, but the poem then devotes twice as many lines to praising his cultural achievements: digging wells, opening mountain passes, his immense journey to the distant home of Flood survivor Utanapishtim, and his subsequent restoration of cult centers and their rituals (SV I.31–44). Although violence pervades the epic, Gilgamesh uses it to conquer “monsters,” not cities, and he never kills another human being. As for death and funerary ritual, they are displaced onto Enkidu, and the promised deification is ignored so that the poem’s stark focus on mortality will not be diluted.

The proem created by Sin-leqe-unninni gives his epic an intellectual aura that it did not have in the Old Babylonian version. The first six lines, beginning with “He who saw into the depths,” that is, he who saw into the underground realm of the god Ea, mark the story as primarily one of mental achievement and align its hero, Gilgamesh, with the god of life-giving waters and wisdom, rather than, for example, with the sun god who will help him kill monsters. His immense physical achievement, the journey to Utanapishtim, is described in intellectual terms: he “saw” what had been secret, “uncovered” what was hidden, and brought back a “story” of what happened before the Flood. Not only did he bring Utanapishtim’s story back, he composed his own story, inscribing all his adventures on a tablet of stone (SV I.7–10). As readers discover later at the end of the proem (lines 25–28), the book they are holding in their hands purports to contain the actual words of Gilgamesh himself, an autobiography written in the third person.

There is no real division between brain and brawn here, however. Gilgamesh did not become wise through his ability to read a book, but through the physical stamina and strength that enabled him to complete a heroic journey to the ends of the earth. Immediately after mentioning the story that came out of this journey, Sin-leqe-unninni moves on to a material accomplishment that was made possible by Gilgamesh’s skill: he built the great wall of Uruk and, inside it, a magnificent temple of Ishtar, feats that no one has ever been able to equal. Taking readers on an imaginary tour of the wall, the poet dwells on the solidity of its fired-brick foundations, the large city, date grove and clay pit it encloses, and Ishtar’s huge temple. The wall’s foundations, he exclaims, must have been laid by the Seven Sages, mythic figures who were believed to have taught newly created humankind the arts of civilization.

Let us stop for a moment and think about the word “civilized.” It comes from the Latin word for city, civitas. Let us think also about city walls. What is their function? In Greek and Roman culture, they signify mainly defense against attacking enemies, and that would certainly have been their main function in ancient Sumer. It is not, however, their main function in this text. In addition to human enemies, a city wall keeps out the wild creatures of nature, just as the sheepfold, which is an important metaphor for the city in Sin-leqe-unninni’s version of the epic, keeps wolves and lions away from domesticated animals. City walls separate controlled and civilized society, which includes religion, agriculture, and artifacts, from the uncontrolled world of nature, which contains, as we will see later, beasts, tempests, and the terrifying unknown. Symbolically speaking, the city wall demarcates the human from the bestial. It also encloses gods alongside humans, claiming them for civilization. However, as Gilgamesh will learn to his sorrow, the divine belongs to both sides of the wall.

To Sin-leqe-unninni, these two cultural achievements, the story and the walled city, are what make Gilgamesh “surpass all other kings,” as the opening words of the Old Babylonian poem assert. Gilgamesh is the supreme king because he not only protects his city, but enhances its culture. All the deeds that his story recounts are done on behalf of the city in the sense that they open up the wilderness to exploration and exploitation and bring under control the heretofore uncontrollable. Even his quest to Utanapishtim, which achieves no material gain, produces essential knowledge – of history, of unknown realms, of the nature of the gods – and adds an important story to his people’s culture.

What Gilgamesh learns from his epic journey has to do with his nature as man and his role as king. Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third human. He inherits extraordinary size, beauty, strength, and energy from his mother Ninsun (“Lady Wild Cow”), a minor goddess, and he inherits social position and mortality from his human father. The unlimited potential of the one clashes with the limitations inherent in the other, putting him and his people through much turmoil throughout the epic.

As the story begins, Gilgamesh’s superhuman energy is getting in the way of his being a good king. His energy expresses itself physically in appropriating the energy of the young men, probably for building projects or athletic competitions,4 and sexually