10. Praising Kinyras Pindar’s Pythian 2 contains the most elaborate allusion to Kinyras in early Greek literature and is our first explicit source for him as a familiar of Aphrodite and Apollo. [1] The latter relationship by itself readily suggests the musical and prophetic abilities credited to Kinyras elsewhere. [2] This natural inference, I shall argue here,… Read more
11. Lyric Landscapes of Early Cyprus Pindar, supplemented by the scholia and other relevant texts, has established a musical Kinyras some five centuries older than “Our Kenyristḗs Apollo” at Roman Paphos. Three initial forays into Cypriot iconography have indicated earlier horizons still, although such pieces, being mute, can never prove that ‘Kinyras himself’ is intended. Nevertheless the abundant visual evidence for early Cypriot lyre culture can hardly… Read more
I.3. Erotic Images of War Erotic images of war in the Iliad could, by themselves, justify a study of considerable proportion. It is a vast question, this relationship between eroticism and war … I will attempt in this chapter simply to underline a series of associations found in the vocabularies of both war and love. Examining the main scenes linking eroticism and combat, I will seek to… Read more
I.4. The Feminine and the Warrior As a poem of war, the Iliad places at the foreground an intense focus on friendship between companions, as well as between combatants. Yet it is also true that, while women are considered “others,” conjugal love is often evoked in the Homeric epic. Before attempting to locate the imprint of femininity on the heroic figure, we must first consider the ties… Read more
II.1. Women in the Epic Be that as it may, there is no mistaking the fact that Homer fully reveals what remained true for the whole of antiquity, that women were held to be naturally inferior and therefore limited in their function to the production of offspring and the performance of household duties, and that the meaningful social relationships and the strong personal attachments were sought… Read more
II.2. The Specificity of Women Is it possible to bring to light the specifics of feminine nature in the Iliad? Beyond the apparent oppositions that posit femininity as the simple, if not simplistic, negative of masculinity, does Homeric epic paint a feminine world in and of itself? I will attempt to respond to this question by choosing to consider the physical appearance of women (their bodies, their… Read more
II.3. Virile Women … or Heroines? If there were an attempt to perform an analysis of women parallel to the one offered above for men, an admission would have to be made that there are no masculine traits that become derogatory when applied to women. Quite the contrary, in fact. Two levels of masculine conduct in women can be identified: first, when women engage, more or less… Read more
III.1. Crying in the Heroic Space of the Iliad Then we should be right in doing away with the lamentations of men of note and in attributing them to women and not to the most worthy of them either, and to inferior men, in that those whom we say we are breeding for the guardianship of the land may disdain to act like these. … Read more
III.2. Tears in a Different World: The Odyssey The “world of Odysseus” presents us with the disorder in Ithaca, a kingdom without a king, ruled in the interim by a woman, and the strange universe of the journey where “from the Lotus-eaters to Calypso, passing by way of the Cyclops and the Underworld, Odysseus does not encounter a single human being, technically speaking.” [1]… Read more
III.3. The Tears of Women Women do not have it in their nature to compete with the virtue and the greatness of men. On this point, Greek epic does not contradict a universally recognized tradition. Contrary to men, who, through their courage and great deeds, pass from an “ordinary” to a heroic state, women belong, once and for all, to a species that definitively carries within it… Read more
