Parallel session 4, panel 1: Kleos and Epic Heroism

(Friday 22^nd June, 9-11am)

Local Memory and Ethnic Identities, Kleos and Fame in Rhianus' Epic Fragments
Manolis Spanakis (University of Crete (Rethymno))

Rhianus of Crete is a Hellenistic epic poet and grammarian of the second half of the third century BC. Local memory and ethnic identities along with the concept of kleos and fame run through Rhianus’ ethnographical poetry. Simon Price [Memory and Ancient Greece (2012: 15-36)] studies four contexts in which memories were constructed in ancient Greece: objects and representations, places, ritual behavior and associated myths, and textual narratives. Underlying all four is a longstanding Greek desire to link the present to the remote past. In the Achaica (fr. 13 Powell) Apis’ genealogy and the foundation of Apia (Peloponnese) allude to the revival of the Achaean League by Aratus of Sicyon in 251 BC. This historical event was the first step for the transformation of an ethnic confederacy into a larger body, which would embrace the whole of the Peloponnese under Aratus’ command. In the Eliaca (fr. 19 Powell) the invocation to the Muses help Rhianus sing a song about Elis and Lithesius Apollo (fr. 23 Powell) recalls the Laconian festival of Lithesia [cf. also λίθος μέλας (fr. 58 Powell), a phrase closely connected with Apollo the healer]. In the Thessalica (fr. 47 Powell) Rhianus’ narrative about Itonia Athena underlines the importance of Itonia Athena in the construction of the Thessalian identity. In the Messeniaca, Rhianus’ most celebrated poem, mythical and religious elements define the re-foundation of Messene (fr. 55 Powell) and the Cretan poet gives an epic character to the Messenians similar to the Homeric Trojans. Finally, in a lost epic (or elegiac) poem titled Φήμη (fr. 56 Powell) Rhianus narrates the klea of the Aetolians (κλύθι in a hymnal invocation to Athena Arakynthias), recalling their subsequent victory in Pleuron against Demetrius ΙΙ

Aetolus. In conclusion, it is highly possible that Rhianus chooses places and myths that Greeks of the third century BC, and especially immigrants to Egypt or Syria and Italy, would enjoy reading because they reminded them of mainland Greece and of their Greek identity (cf. Mess. SH 923.16-8, Thess. fr. 48 Powell).

The kleos of Hector and the mneme of Andromache
Konstantina Toumanidou (University of Vienna)

The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse the different meaning of kleos and mneme that appears in the lamentation of Andromache in books 22 and 24 of the Iliad, respectively.

Whereas in Homeric epics kleos is to a greater or lesser extent connected with memory, in Andromache’s speeches it seems to have a contradictory role. In book 22, at the end of her first lament, Andromache wants to burn Hector’s clothes as a kleos from the Trojan men and women (22.514), an act which is very close to the way a hero and particularly Hector conceives the meaning of kleos. After fulfilling her duty, Andromache’s lamentation becomes more personal. In book 24 we observe that she finishes her second lament with a personal complaint: she, as Hector’s former wife and now widow, has nothing to remember from her husband (24.745), which might mean that she has no picture of the two of them as a family.

In my paper, I intend to analyse the meaning of the two terms kleos and mneme in Andromache’s speeches. The most challenging question has to do with the function of memory as it appears in 24.745. Andromache seems to be in a continuing struggle with the duty of kleos that, according to her, extinguishes the memory of a person on a personal level, instead of preserving it. Her general position seems to come to a complete contrast with the general Homeric conventions instead of supporting them, as someone would expect from the wife of the first warrior.

Redefining kleos in the Odyssey: the Orestes myth as a mythical exemplum of political and social reformation
Doukissa Kamini (University of Reading)

In the Odyssey, the Orestes myth serves as a mythical exemplum both to Telemachus’ entry to adulthood and to Odysseus’ homecoming. Zeus has introduced the similarities between the two stories, and Athene has compared Aegisthus to the suitors in the first book of the poem. This first presentation of the myth is brief (1.39-41), while Zeus refers to Orestes as a far-famed hero (τυλεκλυτός). Therefore, the audience of the Odyssey is aware of this myth, although their memory is subject to manipulation. In Telemacheia, they are led to believe that Telemachus has to act like Orestes, although it has already been confirmed that Odysseus is alive. Moreover, a false sense of fear about Odysseus’ fate has been created by the presentation of a misleading similarity between Agamemnon and Odysseus, although what is under consideration about Odysseus’ homecoming is only the way in which he is about to return. At the same time, Orestes has gained his kleos and created his heroic identity in a different way, that is through an act of vengeance. He killed Aegisthus in order both to avenge his father’s death and to prove his political power. Thus, he renewed the political superiority of hereditary kingship over other regimes, while the heroic deed that led him to kleos has taken place within a city and not in a battlefield. Hence, such a type of kleos has a political and social aspect that is based on the resolution of social conflicts. This paper purports to illustrate the contribution of the Orestes myth to the reformation of kleos in the Odyssey and to the reconstruction of fundamental social ideas in times of political turbulence. Furthermore, I shall show that the manipulation of the audience’s memory is a literary device that demonstrates the superiority of the Odyssey over other Nostoi, since it managed to go beyond its mythical exemplum. I shall also argue that the Orestes myth contributes to the construction of Telemachus’ social identity and Odysseus’ reformation of political power.

In the Name of the Father: Neoptolemus and the memory of Achilles in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
Martina Delucchi (University of Genoa)

When Neoptolemus appears for the first time in Greek literature he is painted as Achilles’s substitute, a mirror of his father, sometimes even more violent and bloodthirsty. For the tragedians, he is a difficult character to approach: Aeschylus will never use him in his tragedies, Euripides will completely twist his essence, making his absence heavier than his presence both in Hecuba and in Andromache. It is Sophocles who invents him as a tragic character. We know about six, maybe seven Sophoclean tragedies in which he appeared but the Philoctetes is the only one which survived. Here, the memory of Achilles lingers like a ghost, ever-present in spite of being dead for a long time. This memory, this ghost burdens Neoptolemus since the beginning: his only desire is to be like his father, to honour his name and his memory. At the same time, though, Odysseus, the master of deception, the complete opposite of Achilles, draws him under his wing. The whole tragedy revolves around two main conflicts: Neoptolemus’s one, where the boy is torn between what it is expected from him as Achilles’ son and what he could become following Odysseus, and Philoctetes’s, the last of the heroes. Philoctetes is the Achillean figure par excellence: abandoned ten years before on a deserted island, he embodies all the values of the Homeric hero, values that do not exist anymore, engulfed by the new reality, personified by Odysseus. Through this tragedy, Sophocles approaches the huge diatribe of his time: which didactic method is the best? The old, aristocratic one, memory of an oligarchic world, or a new, relativistic one, mirror of the sophistic revolution? In this paper I aim to explore the relationship between the character of Neoptolemus and the idealized memory of a father whom he never met, through the accurate analysis of his connection with Philoctetes and Odysseus, in the light of Sophocles’s lucid investigation of one of the most complex problems of the fifth century.