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MENELAUS’ WOUND (AND LAVINIA'S BLUSH)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

Ellen Oliensis
Ellen Oliensis*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
eolien@berkeley.edu
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Extract

The focus of this note is the simile attached to Menelaus’ wound in Iliad 4 and its Virgilian transformation in Aeneid 12. My goal is to flesh out and specify the sense of the Homeric simile; as the parentheses in my title suggest, I call upon Virgil chiefly as a fellow-interpreter. Since an important part of my argument is that the simile only takes on its full significance when considered in its narrative context, I begin by setting the scene.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , May 2019 , pp. 35 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

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References

1 On the interrupted duel as a recapitulation of the war's origins, see Danek, G., ‘Purpur und Elfenbein (Verg. Aen. 12, 64–69 und Hom. Il. 4, 141–147)’, WS 110 (1997), 91–104, at 96–8Google Scholar. Aphrodite first wheedles Helen in the form of an old woman Helen knew and loved back in Lacedaemon (3.385–8); this suggests a version in which this was the form she appeared in to her back in the day to ensure Paris got his promised reward.

2 Danek (n. 1), 97, with good comments on Pandarus as a double for Paris; I would add that this surrogate is aptly named Pandarus.

3 Though not Homerists, who have had little to say about this simile. Moulton, C., Similes in the Homeric Poems (Göttingen, 1977), 93 n. 14Google Scholar underscores its unheroic implications, while Stanley, K., The Shield of Homer (Princeton, 1993), 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar connects it with its narrative context (see further n. 7 below). It gets a passing mention in Scott, W.C., The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile (Leiden, 1974), 112Google Scholar and Jong, I.J.F. de, Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad (Amsterdam, 1987), 125Google Scholar. Minchin, E., ‘Similes in Homer’, in Watson, J. (ed.), Speaking Volumes: Orality and Literacy in the Greek and Roman World (Leiden, 2001), 25–52, at 46Google Scholar describes the ‘strictly speaking, pointless’ extension of lines 143–5 as a Homeric lapse (the poet ‘has allowed the story of the fate of the ivory piece to distract him’). The particular emphases of two recent books on the Homeric simile—Scott, W.C., The Artistry of the Homeric Simile (Hanover, NH, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ready, J., Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar—do not allow for discussion of this one. While Danek (n. 1) has much to say about the sequence leading up to the simile, he is interested less in the simile itself than in what Virgil makes of it.

4 Tatum, J., The Mourner's Song (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar describes the wounded Menelaus as ‘a kind of martial Adonis’ (at 41); N. Simms, ‘The healing of Menelaus and Aeneas’, in Psychohistory: A Psychoanalytic Approach to History, available online at http://www.geocities.ws/psychohistory2001/Healing_f_Aeneas.html (2005), accessed 17 September 2018, describes the scene as a ‘mock castration’; likewise Felton, D., ‘Thigh wounds in Homer and Vergil’, in Park, A. (ed.), Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought (London, 2016), 239–58Google Scholar, who provides much information on the medical and literary implications of thigh wounds and points to some of the symbolic reverberations here.

5 Cf. the common epithet λευκώλενος (reserved for women). The only other ivory-hued person in Homer is Penelope, λευκοτέρην … πριστοῦ ἐλέφαντος (Od. 18.196). According to a scholiast ad loc., Menelaus’ white skin suggested to the Trojans that he was μαλθακός (since ‘in every living creature the dark-skinned is the stronger’). Janko, R., The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume IV: Books 13–16 (Cambridge, 1994), 147Google Scholar (on 13.830–2) lists examples of warriors with flesh that is ‘white’ and ‘tender’ by contrast with ‘the spear that hungers for it’, but the introduction of hard ivory works against that contrast here. For colour norms in black-figure vase-painting, see Eaverly, M.A., Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt (Ann Arbor, 2013), 83–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 How astonishing is clear from the number of translators (including even the normally faithful Lattimore) who omit the adjective altogether. Eustathius is aware of the problem; in his discussion of 4.147 he insists that ‘it is one thing to have “lovely ankles” and another to be “lovely-ankled”’, and asserts that the former can be said of a hero (though this is the only example in the Homeric poems of this adjective-noun pairing).

7 Cf. Stanley (n. 3) on the relation between the cheekpiece and ‘Helen as an object of boastful possession’; similarly, Lovatt, H., The Epic Gaze (Oxford, 2013), 275CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The resistance to psychoanalysis within Classics derives from many sources, but chiefly perhaps from the widespread sense that the application to antiquity of a theory Freud developed (or simply ‘made up’) in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century constitutes an unpardonable anachronism; see, for example, Schmitz, T.A., Modern Literary Theory and Ancient Texts (Malden, MA, 2007), 195–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on (against) psychoanalysis. For an account of the hostility to psychoanalysis within Classics, coupled with a sophisticated demonstration of its potential value, see Leonard, M., ‘Antigone, the political and the ethics of psychoanalysis’, PCPhS 49 (2003), 130–54Google Scholar.

9 Felton (n. 4) points out that the Homeric resonance effectively identifies the location of Aeneas’ wound, but I think it matters that this information is withheld here (but not in the case of Turnus) and that the elaborate process of penetration, so important in the Homeric episode, is omitted. At Aen. 1.589–93 Venus’ beautification of Aeneas, while modelled on Athena's of Odysseus at Od. 6.229–35 and 23.156–62, includes details, a youthful glow described as purpureum (591) and a comparison with an ‘ivory’ artefact (592), reminiscent of the Menelaus simile. (I am grateful to the anonymous reader for pointing me toward this passage.) In effect, Virgil has siphoned off the problematic dimension of the simile, here safely recontextualized, for his hero's benefit.

10 The classic study is Lyne, R.O.A.M., ‘Lavinia's blush’, G&R 30 (1983), 55–64Google Scholar. I concentrate here on the Iliadic connection; for a more complete picture of the allusive complexity of this passage, see Tarrant, R.J., Virgil: Aeneid Book XII (Cambridge, 2012), 105–8Google Scholar.

11 On Lavinia's symbolic sexual violation, see Fowler, D.P., ‘Vergil on killing virgins’, in Whitby, M., Hardie, P.R. and Whitby, M. (edd.), Homo Viator (Bristol, 1987), 185–98, at 191Google Scholar. Danek (n. 1), 95 points out that Homer's emphasis on the many men who desire the ivory treasure suits Lavinia's situation exactly. For Danek, the ultimate force of the Homeric allusion is to identify Amata's speech (which triggers Lavinia's blush) as an act of ‘sabotage’ (at 102) analogous to Pandarus’ shot.

12 ‘Vehicle’ and ‘tenor’ are I.A. Richards's terms for the two parts of the simile, denoting respectively the figure and what it describes, or in Latin terms the ut and the sic.

13 This metonymy, ‘cheek’ for ‘cheekpiece’, occurs only here in Homeric epic.

14 Whaler, J., ‘Compounding and distribution of similes in “Paradise Lost”’, Modern Philology 28 (1931), 313–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides useful information on simile clusters (confirming the anomalous character of this passage). On the complex intertextuality of the Ovidian passage, see Boyd, B.W., Ovid's Literary Loves (Ann Arbor, 1997), 112–16Google Scholar, with good comments on the ironic contrast between Ovid's guilty partner and the various innocent maidens whose blushes these similes recall. Sfyroeras, P., ‘Like purple on ivory: a Homeric simile in Statius’ Achilleid’, in Augoustakis, A. (ed.), Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past (Leiden, 2014), 235–48Google Scholar surveys the tradition and its transformation by Statius.

15 McKeown, J.C. (ed.), Ovid: Amores: Volume III. A Commentary on Book Two (Leeds, 1998), 96–7Google Scholar.