Two Ways to Decline Zeus
Paradigm, Text, and Story in Iliad 5
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Book 5 contains several speeches that engage with themes of theomachy and the Iliad’s relationship with the past. A few of them also can help us think about the poem’s composition and its relationship to other poetic traditions. One speech where many of these issues emerge is Dione’s speech to Aphrodite after Diomedes wounds her.
Homer, Iliad 5. 381-416
“Dione, the shining goddess, answered her then:‘Endure my child, and restrain yourself even though you are grieving.For many of us who have Olympian homesHave caused each other hard pains because of humans.Ares once endured when Otos and strong Ephialtes,The children of Aloes, chained him in a powerful bond.He was tied down for thirteen months in a bronze jar.And then Ares, insatiate of war, would have perished thereIf their step-mother, the super pretty EeriboiaHad not informed Hermes. He freed AresWho was in a lot of pain, since his bonds were hurting him.And Hera endured, when the powerful son of AmphitryonStruck her in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow.Then untreatable pain overtook her indeed.And huge Hades endured when the same son of Aegis-bearing ZeusGave him pain by shooting him among the corpses.Then he went to great Olympos to Zeus’ home,Grieving that he had been allotted pain. That arrowWas lodged in his massive shoulder, and suffered in his heart.Paeon relieved his pains by applying medicine,Since he wasn’t mortal in any way at all.The one who doesn’t hesitate at doing sacrilegious thingsIs a violence-doing criminal, that guy who harms the gods with arrows.Athena the grey-eyed goddess sent him against you.The fool. Doesn’t Tydeus’ son recognize in his thoughtsThat someone who fights the gods doesn’t live very long,He won’t ever have children saying “daddy” at his needsWhen he comes home from war and the terrible battle.So now the son of Tydeus, even if he is super strong,Let him not even think about fighting someone better than you,Lest prudent Aigialeia Adrastus’ daughterShould wake her dear servants from sleep, weeping,Longing for her wedded husband, the best of the Achaeans,That strong wife of horse-taming Diomedes.”
This passage has a few interesting things in it. First, while there is some evidence for Dione as a goddess outside of the Iliad, in Hesiod and her Homeric Hymn she is the product of Ouranos’ castrated testicles. By having a mother in Homer, Aphrodite is more neatly fit into an Olympian pantheon as a child of Zeus rather than a goddess from an earlier generation. Dione, coincidentally, has been seen as a feminine version of the alternate root for Zeus, Dios.
A short digression, one of the features of the flexibility of Homeric verse is that it admits formal variants that other dialects would tend to reduce. So, for convenience of metrical shape, there are two ways to decline Zeus:
Zēnos
Zēni
Zēna
Zeus
Dios
Dii
Dia
For those who don’t know an inflected language, the declension of a noun is the set of the forms needed to communicate their grammatical function in the sentence. So, Homeric Greek provides two ways to say “of Zeus” (Zēnos/Dios) or “to/for Zeus”(Zēni/Dii). The rhythmic shape of each pair differs long/short vs. short/short; and, further, the initial consonants can change the length of final vowels that precede them. Complex consonants like zeta (closer to the sound ds) can make short vowels that precede them (what we call “long by position” in contrast to “long by nature”).
Back to Dione’s speech: this is a good example of what I have mentioned before, a paradeigma, an example from the past used to persuade someone in the poem’s presence. This one provides a catalogue of divine suffering at the hands of humans to ‘console’ Aphrodite. Each of these examples have story traditions that are explained in the scholia (on which see below) or appear in other extant texts.
Beyond the details, this passage is also often compared for its structure to an epic fragment ascribed to the poet Panyasis in the 5th century BCE:
Panyasis Herakleia fr. 3 Benarbé = 16 K
“Demeter endured; the famous Lame-god endured;
Poseidon endured; and silver-bowed Apollo endured
to serve a mortal human being for one year
and even Ares strongheart endured under his father’s compulsion,”
τλῆ μὲν Δημήτηρ, τλῆ δὲ κλυτὸς ᾿Αμφιγυήεις,
τλῆ δὲ Ποσειδάων, τλῆ δ’ ἀργυρότοξος ᾿Απόλλων
ἀνδρὶ παρὰ θνητῷ θητευσέμεν εἰς ἐνιαυτόν,
τλῆ δὲ καὶ ὀβριμόθυμος ῎Αρης ὑπὸ πατρὸς ἀνάγκῃ
Note the repetitions in structures (τλῆ μὲν…τλῆ δὲ), themes (immortals harmed by mortals), and even diction (ὀβριμόθυμος in Panyasis is parallel to ὀβριμοεργὸς in Homer). The similarity between this passage and the longer speech in Homer has led to much speculation as to the cause: is this catalogue a common structuring motif in early Greek poetry or is it a case of Panyasis imitating Homer (or Homer imitating Panyasis) or something more complex.
(Elton Barker and I have written about this a little: See our discussion in Homer’s Thebes)
An Issue of Texts
Iliad 5.403 reads σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ' αἴσυλα ῥέζων but there is a scholion that notes that the Hellenistic editor Aristarchus read αἰσυλοεργός.
That would give us a different line σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός ὃς οὐκ ὄθετ' αἴσυλα ῥέζων (Schol. T ad Il. 5.403).. The difference is minor: σχέτλιος ὀβριμοεργὸς is something like a “violence-doing criminal” while σχέτλιος *αἰσυλοεργός is something closer to a “sacrilege-committing criminal”. My guess is that other editors preferred ὀβριμοεργὸς because it is not a hapax legomenon (a word said only once) and because the compound αἰσυλοεργός (aisuloergos) has its sense repeated at the end of the line with αἴσυλα ῥέζων (aisula rezôn).
These two aesthetic criteria–uniqueness of words, close repetition–are not necessarily at home with the basic aesthetics of Greek poetry. Our scholia–the collection of marginal comments culled from centuries of scholarly editing of and commentary on ancient texts–preserve layers of different approaches to Homer. The editor Aristarchus, one of Homer’s earliest editors, is criticized by some modern authors for preserving unique or otherwise uncommon readings. (See this review by Gregory Nagy of Martin West’s edition of the Iliad for more.) My personal take on this is that the kind of repetition in this line is characteristic of something like an intentional archaism, a close repetition that hearkens back to the legendary era the speaker is evoking. While the repetition and unique diction may seem odd from Hellenistic and modern aesthetic perspectives, I think it rings better for the context and is truer to the complexity of Homeric poetry.
I have discussed similar textual differences before in an article about a later scene in book 5, centering around Ares where our common text preserves rather bland vocabulary in preference to exceptional diction.
A World of Stories: Mythographical scholia
Another kind of material preserved in the scholia includes additional information about myth from outside Homer. There are several versions of the story of Diomedes’ wife, Aigialeia, in the scholia to Homer. The scholion in this case seems to read Dione’s comment’s as an allusion or even a coded threat about the impact of Athena’s anger on Diomedes in the long run.
Schol. T Ad Hom. Il. 5.512ex
“They say that Aigialeia, the youngest of the daughters of Adrastus, was Diomedes’ wife and really longed for him and troubled herself over him through the nights as well. But later, thanks to the rage of Aphrodite, she slept with a band of Argive youths and later on, Kometes, the son of Sthenelos, to whom Diomedes had entrusted the affairs of his household. Although she was planning to kill him when he returned home, she spared Diomedes because he fled to the altar of Athena. People say that when he left there he went to Iberia, as some claim, and that he was deceitfully killed by the king Daunus. Others claim that he was killed by Iounios the son of Daunos during a hunt. For this reason, Athena turned him into a god and changed his companions into herons.
The poet does not know of the desire of Kometes and Aigialeia.”
μὴ δὴν Αἰγιάλεια: φασὶν Αἰγιάλειαν τὴν νεωτέραν τῶν᾿Αδρηστίδων γυναῖκα Διομήδους οὖσαν σφόδρα αὐτὸν ἐπιποθεῖν καὶ ἀπολοφύρεσθαι καὶ κατὰ τὰς νύκτας. ὕστερον δὲ κατὰ μῆνιν ᾿Αφροδίτης πάσῃ τῇ νεολαίᾳ τῶν ᾿Αργείων αὐτὴν συγκωμάσαι, ἔσχατον δὲ καὶ †σθενέλῳ τῷ κομήτου†, ὃς ἦν ὑπὸ Διομήδους πιστευθεὶς τὰ κατ' οἶκον. ἥκοντα δὲ αὐτὸν μέλλων ἀνελεῖν ἐφείσατο διὰ τὸ καταφυγεῖν εἰς τὸν τῆς ᾿Αθηνᾶς βωμόν· ὅθεν αὐτὸν φυγόντα φασὶν ἥκειν εἰς †ἰβηρίαν† κἀκεῖ, ὡς μέν τινες, δολοφονηθῆναι ὑπὸ Δαύνου τοῦ βασιλέως, ὡς δὲ ἔνιοι, ἀπολέσθαι ὑπὸ ᾿Ιουνίου τοῦ Δαύνου παιδὸς ἐν κυνηγεσίοις· ὅθεν αὐτὸν μὲν ἀπεθέωσεν ᾿Αθηνᾶ, τοὺς δὲ ἑταίρους εἰς ἐρωδιοὺς μετέβαλεν.
τὸν Κομήτου πόθον καὶ Αἰγιαλείας οὐκ οἶδεν ὁ ποιητής.
There is no way of knowing if this account was written into our out of our Iliad. By which I mean: we can’t really know if ancient audiences had access to this story and part of this is because we don’t have evidence of whether this story was told to flesh out what is said in the speech or if the speech reflects stories that were well known.
The scholiast’s notion that the “poet did not know this story” is a problematic one and one that reflects misunderstanding about Homeric poetic strategy. Homeric narrative tends to suppress stories that don’t support its local and general aims, something I discuss elsewhere in reference to the Homeric treatment of Cassandra.
It does seem peculiar that Dione would bring up Diomedes’ wife as all–but it is likely that she was a well-known part of his story as one of the Epigonoi. Actual evidence from early Greek poetry is limited. As far as I can see (and this is more or less confirmed by Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth, 1993: 699), the story is later than the classical period, although a much later scholion to Lykophron suggests the story was told by the archaic poet Mimnermus:
Schol. To Lykophron, Alexandra 610
“Aphrodite, according to Mimnermus, was wounded by Diomedes and caused Aigialeia to sleep with many adulterers and to be loved by Kometes the son of Sthenelos. When he returned to Argos, she plotted against him. Then he fled to the altar of Hera and left with his companions in the night. Then he went to Italy to King aunos who killed him with a trick.”
ἡ δὲ ᾿Αφροδίτη, καθά φησιν Μίμνερμος (F 22 Bgk), ὑπὸ Διομήδους τρωθεῖσα παρεσκεύασε τὴν Αἰγιαλείαν πολλοῖς μὲν μοιχοῖς συγκοιμηθῆναι, ἐρασθῆναι δὲ καὶ [῾Ιππολύτου] Κομήτου τοῦ Σθενέλου υἱοῦ. τοῦ δὲ Διομήδους παραγενομένου εἰς τὸ ῎Αργος, ἐπιβουλεῦσαι αὐτῶι· τὸν δὲ καταφυγόντα εἰς τὸν βωμὸν τῆς ῞Ηρας, διὰ νυκτὸς φυγεῖν σὺν τοῖς ἑταίροις, καὶ ἐλθεῖν εἰς ᾿Ιταλίαν πρὸς Δαῦνον βασιλέα, ὅστις αὐτὸν <δόλωι> ἀνεῖλεν.
Some things to read
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
BOUCHARD, ELSA. “APHRODITE ‘PHILOMMÊDÊS’ IN THE ‘THEOGONY.’” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015): 8–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44157344.
Contzen, Eva von. “The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History.” Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 241–60. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.50.3.0241.
Cook, Arthur Bernard. “Who Was the Wife of Zeus?” The Classical Review 20, no. 7 (1906): 365–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/695286.
Hadzsits, George Depue. “Aphrodite and the Dione Myth.” The American Journal of Philology 30, no. 1 (1909): 38–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/288458.
Pratt, Louise. “The Parental Ethos of the Iliad.” Hesperia Supplements 41 (2007): 25–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066781.
Sale, W. Merritt. “Aphrodite in the Theogony.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92 (1961): 508–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/283834.
Willcock, M. M. “Mythological Paradeigma in the Iliad.” The Classical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1964): 141–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/637720.
Preparatory Posts
Five Major Themes to Follow in the Iliad
Book-by-book posts
The Plan: Zeus’ Plan in the Iliad
Prophet of Evils: Reading Iphigenia in and out of the Iliad
Speaking of Centaurs: Paradigmatic Problems in book 1
Thersites’ Body: Description, Characterization, and Physiognomy in book 2
Heroic Appearances: What Did Helen Look Like?
Sources for Helen in Early Greek Poetry
A very cool thing about the scene of Dione/Aphrodite is the parallels with a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh! I think it helps explain the choice by the poet to have Dione as Aphrodites mother, because grammatically Dione is to Zeus as the Sumerian Goddess Anu is to Atnu. It goes even further if you examine the links that Aphrodite has to the near eastern Goddess Ishtar who is a character in the Epic of Gilgamesh.