Trojan Hero Research Articles

Virgil’s Hercules: Echoes of Civil Strife and Duality

Hercules is cited relatively frequently in Virgil’s Aeneid, especially in the second, Italian half of the epic. Close consideration of the progression of the references to Hercules in the poem reveals a deliberate arrangement of passages that relate typologically to the characterization of both Aeneas and Augustus, in particular with respect literarily to the decision of the Trojan hero to slay his foe Turnus, and historically to the civil war with Mark Antony, in which the victor would surpass the deeds of the storied ancient hero from whom his rival claimed descent. Hercules is shown to have diverse associations for Virgil, and to serve as a cautionary mythological exemplum of the hazards of surrender to fury. The association of the demigod with the dichromatic poplar is interpreted as a symbol of the polar opposite facets of Hercules’ nature.

Repositioning the Sea on the Great Altar of Pergamon: A Demonstration of Hellenistic Boat Construction on the Telephos Frieze

The Telephos frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamon contains a rare testimony of boat construction in the Hellenistic period, portraying specialized tools and working practices in an ancient boatyard. The sculpture documents the building of a small boat, offering rare insight into ancient boatbuilding. The vessel of Auge, mother of the Trojan hero Telephos, is a symmetrical skiff with two rounded ends resembling a coffin, a typology barely evidenced archaeologically. This article notes iconographic idiosyncrasies on the frieze that depart from the principal sources of the Telephos myth in the depiction of the infant accompanying his mother Auge to her watery tomb. To build the boat-coffin shown on the frieze, the trained craftsmen use the bow saw, bow drill, two-handled adze, and mallet and chisel, tools known from shipwrecks but documented only rarely in visual representations. Beyond a close technical examination of these implements, our discussion considers relevant maritime funerary rituals and examines several different ship typologies in relation to the boat depicted on the Telephos frieze. From his mother’s tiny skiff to her son the mythical hero’s mighty warships, their careful portrayal on the altar symbolizes the expansion by Eumenes II (r. 197–159 BCE) of his kingdom into the Aegean.1

Homer's First Battle Supplication and the End of Virgil's Aeneid

One of the less appreciated literary influences on the Virgilian depiction of Aeneas' decision to slay Turnus at the end of the Aeneid is the first battle supplication scene in Homer's Iliad, the encounter of Adrestus with Menelaus and Agamemnon. Close consideration of Virgil's response to the Homeric scene sheds light on the poet's concerns in his presentation of the choice his Trojan hero Aeneas confronts in light of Turnus' appeal. Acrostics at the end of the Aeneid invite further reflection.

Namen auf einer Liste: Aufzählen und Erinnern in der Troja-Tradition

Abstract Lists and catalogues play an integral role in collective memory: since antiquity, victims of acts of violence have been remembered on monuments that list their names. Such lists of victims can also be found in the medieval tradition of the Troy story. At the end of several texts about the Trojan war, there is a list of those who were killed on the battlefields. Building on historiographic practices, these lists become an attempt to complete and thereby close the story of the Trojan heroes in the aftermath of the war. At the same time, they open up a space in which the war and its promise of glory are cast in a critical light – what remains of many battles is not the heroes’ fame but futile deaths. The article is rounded off by an analysis of Alice Oswald’s poem Memorial (2011), which uses the name list of the Trojan war victims to reflect on memory and loss in a similar vein.

Parallelizing Rostam and Sohrab with Achilles and Hector in Matthew Arnold’s Poem “Sohrab and Rustum”

In translating “Rostam and Sohrab”, one of the most delightful stories in Shahnameh, Matthew Arnold did not stay true to Ferdowsi’s version. Instead, he opted to veer more into Homer’s The Iliad. The Homeric atmosphere hovering over the poem is exactly one of the factors that made Arnold’s poem universally famous. One of the scenes that Arnold intentionally, and most cleverly, copied in his rendition of Rostam and Sohrab was the battle between the Greek hero Achilles and the Trojan hero Hector, which he depicted under the heavy influence of Homer’s The Iliad. The present article is an attempt to demonstrate this parallelization which can be found in the overall framework of Arnold’s poem, especially in the battles between Rustum and Sohrab with that of Achilles and Hector.

Interpretación sobre las imágenes del Oinoche de Tagliatella

Pretendemos analizar el Oinochoe de Tagliatella en el contexto del simbolismo que representan sus imágenes, en relación con la mitología griega, con alusión a los poemas homéricos en los que destacaban los héroes troyanos asimilados posteriormente como fundadores de la ciudad de Roma. Esta disposición va más allá de la simple lectura de las ilustraciones del recipiente, pues en el contexto cosmogónico nos muestra el mito de la Creación, con la participación de sus dioses, en relación con el eterno retorno en el que muchas civilizaciones coincidieron en sus relatos. Veremos en su iconografía elementos relacionados con el juicio de Paris y la manzana de la discordia; guerra de Troya y fundación de Roma; rituales y danzas guerreras; asimilación etrusca de la cultura griega y romana de la etrusca; sexualidad y fertilidad; numerología sagrada; presencia de animales apotropaicos; y el laberinto cargado de grandes connotaciones simbólicas.

AENEAS ANCHISIADES I PII FRATRES. KILKA UWAG O KSZTAŁTOWANIU SIĘ WIZERUNKU ENEASZA W MENNICTWIE RZYMSKIM

The article discusses certain aspects of representations of Aeneas in Roman coinage, focusing in particular on the declining period of the Republic and Augustus’ principate. At the time, Aeneas; father, Anchises, would be depicted on the coins as the sole companion of the former. Although later the figure of the parent carried on a shoulder served as an attribute denoting the Trojan hero depicted on the reverses, the early minted representations of Aeneas were not as unambiguous in that respect. This was due to the fact that portrayals of Aeneas did resemble the manner in which the Catanian Brothers were represented, with both serving potentially as allegories of pietas.

Dido, Queen of Carthage by Globe Young Players (review)

Reviewed by: Dido, Queen of Carthageby Globe Young Players Miranda Fay Thomas Dido, Queen of CarthagePresented by the Globe Young Playersat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, England. April 9–18, 2015. Directed by Jacqui Somerville. Design by Mia Fiodquist. Music composed by Olly Fox. Musical Direction by Rob Millett. Choreography by Paul Harris. With Guy Amos (Aeneas), Alexander Clarke (Jupiter/Sergestus), Benjamin Clarke (Cupid), Martha Lily Dean (Ganymede/Ilioneus), Isaac Deayton (Achates), Ed Easton (Ascanius/Carthaginian Lord), Brogan Gilbert (Nurse/Carthaginian Lady), Jasmine Jones (Dido), Ben Lynn (Iarbus), Joseph Marshall (Cloanthus), Sekela Nancy Ngamilo (Anna), Yasmin Prince (Juno/Hermes), and Tamla Tutankhamun (Venus). The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s (SWP’s) second season closed, as its first season had done, with an effort from the Globe Young Players. Featuring the same cast of young actors as last year’s The Malcontent, this latest offering showed a pleasing level of maturation within the company while still retaining a sense of fun and play, despite the play’s generic expectation of tragedy. Clearly growing in confidence within the intimate, candlelit space of the SWP, the youngsters’ performance of Marlowe’s tragedy was, overall, far more successful than their first endeavor. This was largely due to the direction of Jacqui Somerville, who enabled the young actors to play on their youthfulness rather than trying to hide it. As we awaited the play’s beginning, the usual architecture and lighting of the SWP were augmented by the sight of grape vines creeping up the pillars to the left and right of the stage, indicating a more classical source than that of last year’s satirical comedy. All three stage doors were left ajar, tantalizing the audience’s gaze with glittering things in the dark beyond. The performance itself began with the young cast emerging out of the darkness, attired in the grays of school uniform complimented by more playful materials of silver and sequins. One boy, who we later discovered to be Cupid (Benjamin Clarke), had safety pins arranged in a pattern of wings on the back of his blazer, and a sling shot rather than a bow. The production consciously evoked the idea of a school play, and chose to acknowledge the youth of the actors and use it to their advantage. Seen in this light, the fake moustaches worn by the children were witty rather than twee. The musical instruments, from oboes to trumpets, played by the cast during the opening revealed that, unlike in many a school production, some of these youthful players had talent and nous beyond their years. [End Page 531] The direction by Jacqui Somerville was clever and sensitive, with the actors encouraged to make imaginative use of the space. Music composed by Olly Fox was deployed subtly and aptly, and helped unify the production, with chimes used to accompany the gods and goddesses as they executed their powers. The costumes, designed by Mia Fiodquist, were some of the most consistent seen at the SWP this season, with the Trojans entering in swish half capes, camouflage pants, and caps with feathers. They also had mud on their shins, and there was a sense of touching ambivalence as to whether the earth stains were redolent of the toil the soldiers had endured or the playground scrapes in which the children might have been embroiled. Jasmine Jones and Guy Amos more than justified their casting as Dido and Aeneas. Jones, in particular, had real stage presence as the Queen of Carthage: her regal orange satin gown embellished with shells, beads, and sequins supported her impressive sense of gravitas (Fig.12). Amos too showed increasing maturity in his portrayal of the Trojan hero. Aeneas’s woeful tale of Troy speech (see Marlowe, The Complete Plays, eds. Romany and Lindsey [Penguin, 2003], 2.1.121) is a perfect set piece for a young actor, and clearly written for a rising star capable of staring powerfully into the middle distance. Yet despite their ability to play beyond their years, the chemistry of the two remained enjoyably teenaged. Dido’s line, “I love thee not. / And yet I hate thee not” (3.1.170–71) came across as delightfully...

Un provincial dans l’Italie augusteenne : un autre regard sur la « patavinite » de Tite-Live

Livy was born in Padua, among the Venetes, in a part of Italy which received Roman citizenship only in 49 BC and he was very proud of the origins of his little hometown — that could take pride in being, like Rome, a Trojan foundation. Indeed, before telling Aeneas’ arrival on the shore of Latium, he begins his Roman history telling the story of Antenor, the Trojan hero who founded Padova. Later, he insists on the victory of his fellow-citizens in 302 BC over the Spartan Cleonymos, one of the Greek generals who were appointed by the Tarentines to protect them from their enemies — a victory which appears to be a kind of anticipation of that of Rome against Pyrrhus. But Livy was well conscious that, in present times, the leading center in Italy and elsewhere was only Rome: the last time we hear of his native town in the extant books of his work is 174 BC, when the Romans had to restore order and peace in the Venetian town — an event which was considered so important in local memory that it was considered as the beginnig of a new era. The deep attachment of a provincial Roman like Livy to his little hometown did not prevent from feeling himself a member of the larger Roman comunity and resenting a strong attachment to Rome, head of the whole oikoumene and common patria of all Italians. He gives us a good example of the construction of a Roman Italy under Augustus.

The origins of Turnus, Vergilian invention, and Augustan Rome

This article briefly surveys literary sources on the Rutulians and Turnus and finds them to have been neither particularly informative nor plentiful. In fashioning his portrait of Turnus and his people, Vergil exploited that dearth of information by countering it and adding details not found in the earlier traditions. His inventive portrait of the heritage of Turnus, which emphasizes ethnic diversity, creates several parallels between Turnus and Aeneas, and helps make him both a direct counterpart and formidable opponent to the Trojan hero. By making the two warriors more similar than different via their mixed Italian and Greek ancestry, Vergil homogenizes them to the ethnically complex population of Rome during the age of Augustus.

La gloria negata: Deifobo, 'bello clarus' (Verg. Aen. VI 494 sgg.)

The meetings of Aeneas with Palinurus, Dido and Deiphobus in Hades are interpreted as occasions for a gradual exorcism of the past and as a form of purification for the Trojan hero. However evidently his action and his thought are turned to future, to foundation of the new town. Now he must see Anchises for knowing Rome’s future. The took would be belonged to Deiphobus, to whom that glory is denied, because this Priamus’ son and Hector’s brother brought undying dishonour upon himself, owing to the marriage with Helena.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia: a dialogue with Classical Roman epic

Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, Lavinia (2008. London: Gollancz), is a fictional autobiography of the Trojan hero Aeneas's second wife, Lavinia of Latium, with whom Aeneas founded a small village which, three centuries later, became the city of Rome. Several feminist writers have written back, through their fiction, to classical models, and my article argues that Lavinia shares in their creative project. Further, through metafictional irony, the text situates the character of Lavinia in a most unusual position as both inside and outside Virgil's poem. Lavinia's contingency becomes, in Le Guin's revisioning of Virgil's epic, the focus of the text. By insisting on this aspect of Lavinia's ontology, Le Guin skilfully reverses the dynamics of discursive power in the Aeneid, bringing Virgil and Lavinia into a relation of parity.

Nondum Proserpina abstulerat: Persephone in the Aeneid

The underworld goddess Persephone appears infrequently in the Virgilian corpus, but serves as a key unifying figure in the poet’s achievement, an important companion to his depiction of Orpheus in both the Aeneid and the Georgics. Hell’s queen ultimately figures as the third figure in a series of failed sacrifices attempted by Aeneas. The Trojan hero’s attempt to placate the mother of the Furies is answered with the Fury Allecto ; his effort to conciliate Juno brings the ethnographic reality of Troy’s suppression and Italy’s ascendance, and his offering to Persephone is revealed as vain and without effect in light of Virgil’s allegiance to Lucretian eschatology.

"The Kingdom of Heaven within Us": Inner (World) Peace in Gilbert Murray's Trojan Women

I. Prolegomena Pity is a passion, claims Gilbert Murray. Its hand is against strong, against organised force of society, against conventional sanctions accepted Gods. It is Kingdom of Heaven within fighting against brute powers of world; it is apt to have those of of contempt for counting of costs balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, even, in last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often marks paths of doings of of It not peace, but a sword. (1) Thus reads introduction to Murray's 1905 translation of Euripides' Trojan Women, a passage in which, through hints, clues, pithy pronouncements, Murray interpreter directs a reading of Murray translator. (2) (Not that two are quite so distinguishable.) Observe bewildering array of ideas, packaged in author's trademark authoritative-yet-accessible style. First, compassion is supreme virtue, although implies that patronizing regard for one's social inferiors that historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) described as Murray's aristocratic liberalism. (3) Second, radical compassion (rebel passion) opposes conservative--Conservative?--indifference. Third, Murray celebrates specific Liberal endeavors: championing underdogs (against strong), controlling executive power (against organised force of society), supporting individual liberty (against brute powers of world). (4) Liberal pity resists organized strength. Fourth, note Kingdom of Heaven within us Compassion is an internal, quasi-religious response concerning heavenly things children of light. This Kingdom, with its qualities of unreason, encompasses irrational; one's soul dictates one's moral action, even at expense of reason. Finally, pity brings not peace, but a sword. Compassion at any cost does not mean peace at any price. The Kingdom of Heaven, however, contains yet more. Live according to Nature, wrote Murray in introduction to his 1902 Bacchae translation, and Life itself is happiness. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you--here now. You have but to accept it live with it--not obscure it by striving hating looking in wrong place. (5) First, then, acceptance of human(ist) nature happiness. Second, ill-judged speculation hides man's essential goodness. (Contrast Socrates' dictum that unexamined life is not worth living.) (6) Finally, Kingdom allows no hate, even though it may allow violence. Overall, rebel passion motivates compassionate-radical-Liberal-spiritual-humanist-tough-love. As inaugural chairman of League of Nations Union, Murray was never far from international politics; as Hellenist, he was never far from Euripides. In keeping with scope of present volume, then, I would like to discuss treatment of, potential relationship between, war, peace, internationalism in Murray's Trojan Women--its interpretation, performance, translation. How might Murray's optimism contend with a play about prisoners of war, with sordid death of Astyanax, infant son of dead Trojan hero Hector, hurled from walls of Troy by Greeks? If Kingdom of Heaven belongs in soul, which earthly institutions best promote its establishment? The Church of England? The League of Nations Union? The Classical Association? In Murray's hands, Trojan Women may well offer an answer of sorts: it undertakes an autopsy of war, induces pity, performs a metapoetic interrogation of tragic poetry; above all, it Liberal secular humanism to stage. II. Pacifist Performance Let first consider specter--spectacle?--of war. The play certainly lends itself to antiwar readings, (7) with Murray's translation in particular becoming a pacifist touchstone. Murray was first scholar to associate Trojan Women with poet's supposed revulsion for sack of Melos; this became standard antiwar interpretation, Trojan Women has since been dubbed the greatest anti-war literature there is in world. …

Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea' by Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn (review)

MARILYNN DESMOND and PAMELA SHEINGORN, Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea.' Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. vii, 344. ISBN: 0-472-11313-2. $65. £40.50. The Epistre Othea is a text purporting to have been written as a letter from the goddess Othea to the young Trojan hero Hector, actually composed by the late medieval author Christine de Pizan in 1400. The Epistre and its manuscript illustrations are not unknown in recent scholarship (see work by Sandra Hindman and others); the value of Desmond and Sheingorn's volume is that it uses the text and images of the Epistre to propose a new way of understanding late medieval manuscript culture, a way which is consonant with aspects of modern visual culture (the cinematic montage), in that both form the subject in powerful ways. Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture is in fact aptly titled, being a study of medieval retellings of classical myth, the concept of montage (a non-narrative arrangement in which meaning is derived from unexpected visual juxtapositions), and the visuality-common to both late medieval manuscripts and cinema-by which gender and authority are constructed in relation to a light-filled field. These three themes may appear disparate, but they have all arisen through these authors' long and careful consideration of the illuminated Epistre, particularly the manuscripts made for Jean, Duke of Berry (Bibliotheque Nationale MS fr. 606) and for Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France (British Library MS Harley 4431). In the Introduction, Desmond and Sheingorn are concerned to delineate the visuality produced by the Queen's and Duke's manuscripts, to show how this visuality was luminous and intended to shape its subject, how it was intended to be encountered as a private interaction, and how this visuality should justly be described as cinematic. Although this reader was initially skeptical of the relevance of the modern concept of cinema to a fourteenth-century manuscript, the authors make a convincing argument that the cinema itself is heir to the representational tradition of painting (whereas much twentieth-century painting denied the value of the representational), and that, therefore, much of the theorization of the formation of the subject seated before the flickering screen is not irrelevant to the medieval subject poised in front of the shimmering surface of the painted and gilded manuscript page. …

Aeneas or Numa? Rethinking the Meaning of the Ara Pacis Augustae

The “Aeneas” panel, a much-discussed element of the Ara Pacis, is usually interpreted as the Trojan hero's sacrifice of a brood sow on his landing in Latium, a story recounted in Virgil, Varro, and Dionysios of Halikarnassos. This study reexamines the relief and relevant texts and concludes that the scene instead probably portrays the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, as the ideal of the peaceful ruler, in contrast to Romulus, the warlike ruler, on the balancing panel. This interpretation raises broader questions about the relationship of visual art, texts, and modern theory in the study of Roman sculpture.

Aeneas or Numa? Rethinking the Meaning of the Ara Pacis Augustae

The “Aeneas” panel, a much-discussed element of the Ara Pacis, is usually interpreted as the Trojan hero's sacrifice of a brood sow on his landing in Latium, a story recounted in Virgil, Varro, and Dionysios of Halikarnassos. This study reexamines the relief and relevant texts and concludes that the scene instead probably portrays the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, as the ideal of the peaceful ruler, in contrast to Romulus, the warlike ruler, on the balancing panel. This interpretation raises broader questions about the relationship of visual art, texts, and modern theory in the study of Roman sculpture.

I. The Greeks and their Past

Centuries before the first historian put pen to papyrus, Greek poets sang the great deeds of their ancestors. These songs have vanished and what we have is the result of a centuries-long tradition of oral poetry, two massive epics under the name of ‘Homer’, one the story of the events in the last year of the long conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, the other a tale of wanderings and adventure, with the eventual successful homecoming of one of those heroes. The narrator of theIliadalready has a sense of history, a sense that the deeds he narrates occurred long ago, and that those who accomplished them were vastly superior to ‘the men of today’, or ‘such mortals as now live on earth’. Within the epic itself we find a receding mirror effect, since its hero Achilleus sings to himself the renowned deeds of men (κλέα άνδρών), those of an even earlier generation that the Trojan War heroes saw as great. Celebration and remembrance of great action pervade theIliad, establishing a standard against which the heroes can measure themselves and validating the sacrifice of their lives in exchange for imperishable fame (κλέος ἄϕθιтον).

Analgesia and anesthesia: etymology and literary history of related Greek words.

Analgesia and anesthesia: etymology and literary history of related Greek words.

Sophocles At Patavium (fr. 137 Radt)

One of the most interesting of the myths concerning the migration to the West of those Trojan heroes who survived the destruction of their city is that of Antenor and his sons. That Antenor and his family received the embassy of the Greeks, saved them from attack by a group of Trojans and consistently urged peace and the return of Helen is already established in Homer. The consequent decision of the Greeks to spare the Antenorids at the sack of Troy is almost certainly present in the epic cycle. Somewhat later, two further traditions emerge: first the claim that Troy was betrayed by the Antenorids; second, that Antenor and various of his sons travelled overseas and settled in distant lands, notably Cyrene in Libya and Patavium in the Veneto. For anyone concerned with the development of the myth, it is therefore deeply frustrating that so little should remain of what must have been a crucial text: the Antenoridae of Sophocles. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that there is far more to be known about this play than has hitherto been perceived.