Levaniouk, Olga. 2011. Eve of the Festival: Making Myth in Odyssey 19. Hellenic Studies Series 46. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Levaniouk.Eve_of_the_Festival.2011.
Chapter 8. The Pin
διπλῆν· ἐν δ’ ἄρα οἱ περόνη χρυσοῖο τέτυκτο
αὐλοῖσιν διδύμοισι· πάροιθε δὲ δαίδαλον ἦεν·
ἐν προτέροισι πόδεσσι κύων ἔχε ποικίλον ἐλλόν,
ἀσπαίροντα λάων· τὸ δὲ θαυμάζεσκον ἅπαντες,
ὡς οἱ χρύσεοι ἐόντες ὁ μὲν λάε νεβρὸν ἀπάγχων,
αὐτὰρ ὁ ἐκφυγέειν μεμαὼς ἤσπαιρε πόδεσσι.
a two-fold one, and in it was a pin of gold,
with double grooves, and on the front was a marvelous design:
a dog held a dappled fawn in its front paws,
grasping it as it struggled. And everyone admired it,
how, though they were golden, the dog grasped the fawn, strangling it,
while the fawn thrashed with its feet, trying to escape. [1]
Like the cloak, the pin has an obvious role within the dialogue – it is a sign (semata, 19.250) for Penelope. As we feel wonder at the intricate object and the thrilling hunting scene it depicts we may also wonder, along with Penelope, at her guest’s very ability to describe it in such detail. The implication of this ecphrastic feat is surely not that the Cretan stranger has a photographic memory, but that he is none other than the former wearer of the pin. Beyond {136|137} this, however, the description of the pin sends a more complex message to its audiences, both external and internal. Like much else in this densely packed conversation, the pin fits into the mythic and ritual framework of the approaching festival, evoking yet another related nexus of ideas, and interacting with multiple elements both in the Odyssey itself and beyond.
νεβροὺς κοιμήσασα νεηγενέας γαλαθηνοὺς
κνημοὺς ἐξερέῃσι καὶ ἄγκεα ποιήεντα
βοσκομένη, ὁ δ’ ἔπειτα ἑὴν εἰσήλυθεν εὐνήν,
ἀμφοτέροισι δὲ τοῖσιν ἀεικέα πότμον ἐφῆκεν.
to sleep in a lion’s lair {138|139}
and goes to search though the hills and grassy glens,
grazing. And then the lion comes back to his sleeping place
and brings ugly destruction to both of them.
The biologically improbable fact that the doe beds her young in a lion’s den is a distinctive feature of these Odyssean similes, and it reflects specifically the fact that the suitors are in Odysseus’ house (Menelaos, who utters the simile in Book 4, makes this explicit). This seems, however, to be a variation on a traditional theme, since there is also a simile in the Iliad with a lion coming upon a doe’s hiding place and destroying the fawns:
ῥηϊδίως συνέαξε λαβὼν κρατεροῖσιν ὀδοῦσιν
ἐλθὼν εἰς εὐνήν, ἁπαλόν τέ σφ’ ἦτορ ἀπηύρα·
when he comes upon their lair, taking them in his powerful teeth
and ripping out their soft hearts.
In the Iliad, the deer is the quintessential hunted animal, ever fearful and swift, and prey to people with their dogs as much as to lions. When Achilles is chasing Hektor around the walls of Troy he is compared to a determined dog running down a fawn (Iliad 22.188–192). In the Odyssey, Odysseus has a special connection to hunting dogs and in Book 19 he will emerge as a hunter, accompanied by dogs, in the recollections of his youthful boar hunt on Mount Parnassus:
ἴχνι’ ἐρευνῶντες κύνες ἤϊσαν, αὐτὰρ ὄπισθεν
υἱέες Αὐτολύκου· μετὰ τοῖσι δὲ δῖος Ὀδυσσεὺς
ἤϊεν ἄγχι κυνῶν, κραδάων δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος.
searching out the tracks, while behind were the sons of Autolykos.
And among them went godlike Odysseus,
close behind the dogs, brandishing his long spear. {139|140}
It is noteworthy that on two occasions in the Odyssey, one of them on the day of Apollo’s festival, Telemachus also appears with a spear and in the company of dogs, as if to indicate that he too is a hunter and therefore a man, not a child:
ἔγχος ἔχων· ἅμα τῷ γε κύνες πόδας ἀργοὶ ἕποντο
holding his spear. And the swift-footed dogs went along with him.
Moreover, the opposition between the hunting dogs and the other kinds of dogs is active and operative in this part of the Odyssey, and it is articulated by Odysseus himself at the very moment when he enters his household for the first time in twenty years. The scene in question is the only instant and complete recognition of Odysseus on Ithaca – by his dog Argos. Looking at his old hunting companion lying on a pile of dung, Odysseus asks about his speed and in so doing makes a distinction between fast hunting dogs and the decorative dogs who fidget under their masters’ feet at dinner:
ἢ δὴ καὶ ταχὺς ἔσκε θέειν ἐπὶ εἴδεϊ τῷδε,
ἦ αὔτως οἷοί τε τραπεζῆες κύνες ἀνδρῶν
γίνοντ’, ἀγλαΐης δ’ ἕνεκεν κομέουσιν ἄνακτες.
whether in addition to his appearance he is also swift at running,
or whether he is just one of those table dogs men have,
whose masters keep them for the sake of their beauty.
In his reply, Eumaeus stresses Argos’ former hunting qualities, especially his ability to run fast (Odyssey 17.312–317). The expression κύνες ἀργοί, ‘swift dogs’ (used in connection with Telemachus, once with a modification), has {140|141} roots of Indo-European antiquity, and the word used for ‘fast’ in this formula is also the source of the name Ἄργος, by the minimal means of accent shift. [11]
οὔτε ποσὶν θάσσων οὔτ’ ἄλκιμος ὡς σὺ μάχεσθαι.
nor anyone quicker on his feet, nor as brave as you at fighting.
Antilokhos then rushes (ἔθορε, 15.573) out of the front ranks, kills a Trojan with a spear throw, and runs up to despoil him, like a hunting dog. The dog in the simile chases a fawn:
βλημένῳ ἀΐξῃ, τόν τ’ ἐξ εὐνῆφι θορόντα
θηρητὴρ ἐτύχησε βαλών, ὑπέλυσε δὲ γυῖα
whom a hunter has struck as he darted from his lair,
and has loosened the limbs under him.
The animals of this Iliadic simile are the same as those on Odysseus’ pin, confirming the intuition of the scholia that the pin points both to Odysseus’ youth and to his ‘education’ as a hunter: οὕτω γὰρ οἱ εὐγενεῖς τῶν νέων ἐπαιδεύοντο, ‘for this is how the noble young men used to be educated’. [13]
ῥωγαλέα ῥυπόωντα, κακῷ μεμορυγμένα καπνῷ·
ἀμφὶ δέ μιν μέγα δέρμα ταχείης ἕσσ’ ἐλάφοιο,
ψιλόν· δῶκε δέ οἱ σκῆπτρον καὶ ἀεικέα πήρην.
squalid khiton, sullied with foul smoke,
and she clothed him in the large, smooth-worn skin of a swift deer.
And she gave him a staff, and an ugly sack.
Not only are Odysseus’ tattered rags in sharp contrast with the splendid cloak and khiton he recalls, but the deerskin seems to make him the very opposite of his former hunting self. The detail of the deerskin is curious because nobody else in Homer wears such a garment, and even outside of Homer it is extremely unusual for a male: only the bacchants regularly wear the spotted hide of the fawn, nebris. Putting on an animal hide is often a symbolic act equating, fully or partially, the human and the animal. Thus Paris wears a leopard skin and Menelaos a lion skin when they confront each other, and {142|143} the characteristics of the two animals mirror those of the two heroes. [14] Even more clearly, Dolon wears a wolf’s skin in the Doloneia episode, uniquely in Homer, and he is depicted in this attire on vases, sometimes also standing on all fours and plainly playing the wolf. [15] The hide transforms its wearer, literally or metaphorically, into the animal, and the boundaries between literal and metaphorical can be very fluid.
As Nagy argues, this is a way of describing the transformation of Aktaion into a stag. [16] The iconography of Aktaion is such that he is most often depicted not as a deer, but as his human self attacked by the dogs. [17] On some of these depictions he wears a deerskin, sometimes has horns, and on one vase he is depicted in a complete deer costume including a deer-head hat. [18] Rather than {143|144} proving that Artemis in Stesichorus merely dressed Aktaion in a deerskin instead of transforming him, such depictions seem to me to prove precisely the opposite, namely that wearing a deer skin is a way of expressing the notion of transformation. In the Odyssey too, a goddess, Athena, puts the deerskin around the hero’s body, though a different verb is used for the action (ἕννυμι rather than περιβάλλω, 13.436). Odysseus is not transformed into a deer, of course, but I suspect that Odysseus’ deerskin is still related to Aktaion’s and has some of the same meanings. [19]
τόφρα οἱ ἠγάασθε θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες,
ἕως μιν ἐν Ὀρτυγίῃ χρυσόθρονος Ἄρτεμις ἁγνὴ
οἷσ’ ἀγανοῖσι βέλεσσιν ἐποιχομένη κατέπεφνεν.
you, the easy-living gods, begrudged her this, {144|145}
until pure, golden-throned Artemis came
and killed him on Ortygia with her gentle arrows.
Here another human, a youthful hunter like Aktaion, becomes the sexual partner of a goddess, (in this case apparently willingly), and is killed by Artemis. Again, there is no explanation as to why Artemis should object to a union between Orion and Eos. Perhaps there is a clue, however, in the fact that both Orion and Aktaion are hunters. One possibility is that Artemis is acting as a patron deity of the hunters, whose sexual behavior is subject to restriction, (an extreme example is Hippolytus in Euripides’ play, also a hunter, but the one who shuns Aphrodite and devotes himself fully to Artemis). [22] What is unacceptable to Artemis in Orion’s and Aktaion’s behavior may be whom they want to marry, or it may be the fact that they want to marry at all. The version of the myth in which Aktaion’s transgression consists in chancing upon Artemis bathing is first attested in Callimachus’ Hymn 5, and is made famous by Ovid. [23] Apollodorus mentions it as the prevalent version, though he also knows the one with Semele. [24] In Euripides’ Bacchae there is yet another reason for this divine anger: Aktaion boasts that he is a better hunter than Artemis. In all three cases, Aktaion seems to fail to observe the correct etiquette of a hunter, whether by importing sexuality into the hunting sphere or by being arrogant towards the goddess of the hunt.
οἱ μὲν κεκλήγοντες ἐπέδραμον· αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς
ἕζετο κερδοσύνῃ, σκῆπτρον δέ οἱ ἔκπεσε χειρός.
ἔνθα κεν ᾧ πὰρ σταθμῷ ἀεικέλιον πάθεν ἄλγος·
ἀλλὰ συβώτης ὦκα ποσὶ κραιπνοῖσι μετασπὼν
ἔσσυτ’ ἀνὰ πρόθυρον, σκῦτος δέ οἱ ἔκπεσε χειρός.
τοὺς μὲν ὁμοκλήσας σεῦεν κύνας ἄλλυδις ἄλλον
πυκνῇσιν λιθάδεσσιν, ὁ δὲ προσέειπεν ἄνακτα·
”ὦ γέρον, ἦ ὀλίγου σε κύνες διεδηλήσαντο
ἐξαπίνης, καί κέν μοι ἐλεγχείην κατέχευας.
and ran at him baying. And Odysseus
cleverly sat down, and his staff fell out of his hand.
There, by his own farm house, he might have suffered an unseemly pain,
but the swineherd rushed through the gate,
quickly coming to Odysseus on his swift feet, and a piece of oxhide [he was holding] fell out of his hand.
He shouted at the dogs and scattered them in every direction
with a shower of stones, and then he addressed his master:
“Old man, a little more and the dogs would have torn you to pieces right there,
and you would have poured reproach over me.”
These are the dogs that guard Eumaeus’ property, not hunters, and Odysseus is in no immediate danger of losing his life. In comparison with Aktaion’s dismemberment, and indeed in comparison with Odysseus’ own grand adventures of the past, the whole scene seems almost comic: here is Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, coming home after many adventures, about to be badly mauled by some farm dogs. Humor, however, is by no means incompatible with mythic and ritual undercurrents, and Odysseus, dressed in a deerskin, and crouching helplessly as the dogs attack him strikes a curiously Aktaion-like pose. The episode, at any rate, does not seem likely to be simply decorative, since it is the very first thing that happens to Odysseus after he parts from Athena and ventures inland on his island. Moreover, Eumaeus’ dogs receive a lot of attention: we are told, for example, that there are four of them and that Eumaeus brought them up himself. They even deserve a heroic-sounding epithet, ὑλακόμωροι, which occurs in Homer only here and again at Odyssey16.4, when the same dogs greet Telemachus very differently from the way they greeted Odysseus, with tails wagging. [28] For whatever reason, these dogs seem important. Their behavior with Odysseus forms a sharp contrast to that of Argos, who recognizes and greets his old master. The scene with Argos, like the earlier one near Eumaeus’ hut, may involve playing with the themes of Aktaion’s myth, since Argos’ ability to recognize Odysseus even in deerskin is in sharp contrast to the failure of Aktaion’s dogs to do the same. It is interesting, in this regard, that the dogs’ inability to {147|148} recognize Aktaion is commented upon in several sources, which attribute it not just to the fact of his transformation, but also to the madness (lussa) sent by Artemis, as if the deerskin itself were not sufficient. Pausanias opines that the dogs killed Aktaion in madness and without recognizing him (μανέντες δὲ καὶ οὐ
διαγινώσκοντες, 9.2.4), under the influence of the ‘disease lussa’. Apollodorus also blames lussa and says that the dogs commit their ghastly mistake in ignorance, κατὰ
ἄγνοιαν (3.31). [29]
εἰρυσάμην· τὸ μὲν αὖθι κατακλίνας ἐπὶ γαίῃ
εἴασ’· αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ σπασάμην ῥῶπάς τε λύγους τε,
πεῖσμα δ’ ὅσον τ’ ὄργυιαν ἐϋστρεφὲς ἀμφοτέρωθεν
πλεξάμενος συνέδησα πόδας δεινοῖο πελώρου, {149|150}
βῆν δὲ καταλλοφάδια φέρων ἐπὶ νῆα μέλαιναν,
ἔγχει ἐρειδόμενος, ἐπεὶ οὔ πως ἦεν ἐπ’ ὤμου
χειρὶ φέρειν ἑτέρῃ· μάλα γὰρ μέγα θηρίον ἦεν.
and left him right there, laying him down on the ground.
And in the meanwhile I broke off twigs and pliant branches and,
having plaited a rope, well-twisted from both ends, about a fathom in length,
I bound the legs of this great monster,
and went towards the black ship, carrying it on my neck
and leaning upon a spear, for it was impossible to carry him on my shoulder
holding him with one hand – it was a very large beast.
It seems that on Circe’s island Odysseus performs a feat typical of a successful young male and especially a hunter, namely killing and then lifting a large herbivore such as a deer or a goat. In this, as in so many other aspects, he seems to be going through the trials of a youth on his way to becoming a man. On the same island he also, of course, confronts dangerous female sexuality and withstands it, with Hermes’ help. [37] Aktaion stumbles on the same path, whether through an error in timing or in choice of a woman.
ὃν ὠμόσιτοι σκύλακες ἃς ἐθρέψατο
διεσπάσαντο, κρείσσον’ ἐν κυναγίαις
Ἀρτέμιδος εἶναι κομπάσαντ’ ἐν ὀργάσιν.
whom the raw-eating dogs tore to pieces, the dogs he reared himself,
because he boasted in the mountain meadows
to be better than Artemis at hunting.
Learchus and Pentheus are killed by their parents and Pentheus at least is also lamented by the murderers, just as Aktaion is sought and bewailed by his dogs. I wonder if an echo of this last element, the notion of proximity between the victims and the hunters, is not present in the Odyssey, where we are told that Eumaeus raised the dogs himself:
τέσσαρες, οὓς ἔθρεψε συβώτης, ὄρχαμος ἀνδρῶν.
that were like wild beasts, whom the swineherd himself, a leader of men, reared.
There is no direct parallel here, but there is a somewhat chilling confluence of similar elements: Odysseus, unrecognizable in his deerskin, is threatened by the dogs raised by his most loyal servant. [41] Eumaeus remarks on how narrowly he escaped the disgrace of having his dogs harm a guest, adding that he has enough grief already in missing Odysseus (Odyssey 14.37–44). Little does he realize what an outrage he has indeed avoided.
Footnotes