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The Geography of the Iliad in Ancient Scholarship by Cassandra J. Borges

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The Geography of the Iliad in Ancient Scholarship by Cassandra J. Borges The Geography of the Iliad in Ancient Scholarship by Cassandra J. Borges A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Classical Studies) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Richard Janko, Chair Professor Ruth S. Scodel Associate Professor Francesca Schironi Assistant Professor Ian S. Moyer Acknowledgements This dissertation is fundamentally about how nothing scholarly happens in a vacuum. There is nothing like the process of writing a dissertation to bring this truth home. I could not have sustained this project without the help and encouragement of an assortment of people, both within and without the academy. Thanks go first to my committee, who collectively taught me a lot about working within a scholarly tradition. My advisor, Richard Janko, brought an incredible breadth and depth of learning and a rigorous eye for detail to the project; without his initial shrewd guess that what this particular budding Homerist needed was scholia, it never would have happened. It has been a privilege to work with him. Ruth Scodel has provided a number of astute and perceptive comments on the Iliad, and her propensity to get inside the psychology of everyone from Antenor to Zenodotus was tremendously bracing; she has helped to sharpen and focus my thought. Francesca Schironi, a late (and lucky, from my perspective!) addition to the project, was a superb and enthusiastic resource for how to deal with Homeric scholarship. Finally, Ian Moyer has bravely dealt with an unfamiliar mass of material, and I appreciate his enthusiasm for the idea of doing cultural history through the scholia. I owe them all a great deal. Others in the Department of Classical Studies at Michigan and elsewhere have assisted me in small-group discussions of segments of this project: among these are Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Ruth Caston, Benjamin Fortson, Jim Porter, Jay Reed, Mira Seo, Mike Sampson, and Arthur Verhoogt. In addition, Michelle Biggs (administrator ii extraordinaire) has been invaluable on multiple occasions. The support of the Classical Studies department with a D’Ooge fellowship in 2007, for preliminary exams that led to this dissertation, and with two summers of funding for finishing it, is heartily appreciated. Thanks go likewise to the Rackham Graduate School for supporting me on a Rackham Merit Fellowship during my time at Michigan, and for the grants that enabled me to visit Homeric sites in Greece and Turkey in the summer of 2009 for research: the Hammel Research Fellowship and the Brooks Wheeler Memorial Grant, which enabled me to read the teichoskopia on the walls of Troy. I am fortunate beyond words to have colleagues and officemates that I count as friends, who provide support, feedback, and snacks on a regular basis. Thanks to Karen Acton, Evelyn Adkins, Kate Allen, Bram ten Berge, Clara Bosak-Schroeder, Joe Groves, Dina Guth, Beth Platte, Rebecca Sears, Julia Shapiro, and Shonda Tohm—non sine Richard Persky, whose levels of exposure to secondhand scholia have surely reached dangerous levels, and whose consummate skill in recognizing when I need to talk about Strabo and when I need to be distracted from Strabo has enriched the last few years tremendously. Without his support—and that of my family, whose boundless faith in my ability to make this happen had to be justified—I would still be looking for Troy in all the wrong places. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. ii Abstract ................................................................................................................ v Chapter I. Introduction ...................................................................................... v Chapter II. Finding Troy .................................................................................. 17 1. The Greeks in Ilion: history and archaeology ................................................. 19 2. Trojan War Tourism at Ilion ............................................................................... 32 3. Ilion’s Total Destruction .................................................................................... 43 4. Case Study I: The Knees of Athena .................................................................. 46 5. Case Study: Hot and Cold Springs ................................................................... 52 6. Case Study III: True Names ............................................................................... 62 7. Conclusion: The Inevitability of Destruction ................................................... 74 Chapter III. Finding the Trojans .................................................................... 81 1. The Carian barbarophōnoi ................................................................................ 91 2. The Phrygian capitalists .................................................................................. 104 3. The Dardanian watchdogs .............................................................................. 113 4. The allies who weren’t there ........................................................................... 128 Chapter IV. Finding Hellas ........................................................................... 137 1. Salamis and the biographies: Homer’s knowledge ...................................... 144 2. Boeotia and Thessaly: the first and the last .................................................. 159 3. Sparta and the problems with authority ........................................................ 172 4. Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 191 Chapter V. Conclusion .................................................................................. 194 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 199 iv Abstract The Geography of the Iliad in Ancient Scholarship by Cassandra J. Borges Chair: Richard Janko Ancient Greek scholarship on Homer’s Iliad is known largely through scholia: marginalia in medieval manuscripts condensed from classical, Hellenistic, and Roman- period. Among the interpretive issues the scholia cover is geography, particularly where the places described in Homer correspond imperfectly, if at all, to places in the known world. These discrepancies are problematic in antiquity for both geographers and literary critics because Homer’s authority, even on matters outside the realm of poetry, is seldom challenged. This dissertation examines the elaborate strategies used in ancient scholarship to defend the poet’s authority, concluding that the construction of place in Homer is, for ancient writers, an integral part of his reliability. I first focus on the poem’s most crucial location, the city of Troy itself—the nature and location of which has been debated by moderns and ancients alike. The latter ultimately uphold Homer’s description of the city by emphasizing its absolute v destruction: Troy’s canonical doom ensures that it never, in any historical period, has to be exactly as the poet described it. Chapter 3 moves from the geographical center of the poem, Troy itself, outward through the Trojan-allied territories of Asia Minor. I argue that the ancient sources, starting with the notoriously sparse Trojan Catalogue, read these allies as occuping a conceptual, rather than a physical, space along the periphery. Their uneasy relationship to the Trojan ruling elite, as well as their marked barbarianness—a trait ancient Greek readers are eager to maximize—lends them a dysfunctionality that assists the scholia in their reading of Homer as a constant philhellene, even in a poem about Greek dysfunction. Chapter 4 treats the Catalogue of Ships, which describes an exhaustively detailed list of places outside the actual scope of the Iliad—since they are all in the homeland the Greeks left behind them—and yet crucial for its construction of place. The scholia’s admiration of the Catalogue extends to the poet who created it, whose ability to describe Greek places, even though ancient biographies place him outside the Greek mainland, becomes normative for later discussions of these territories. They therefore reinforce Homer’s authority. vi Chapter I. Introduction The scholia to Homer’s Iliad are full of observations that seem banal on first glance, but turn out to have quite a lot going on. Consider, for example, the very first entry in the commentary: ζητοῦσι, διὰ τί ἀπὸ τῆς µήνιδος ἤρξατο, οὕτω δυσφήµου ὀνόµατος… (Σ ΑΤ ad Il. 1.1a) They ask why he began with “wrath”—such an ill-omened noun. Word choice is a problem that takes a leisurely paragraph to resolve, yet the question with which this particular body of commentary on Homer’s epic opens raises a whole set of further questions. For instance, the way the entry is phrased by no means makes it clear just who is doing the asking, and for a thing to become a ζήτηµα Ὁµηρικόν, a Homeric Question, someone must needs be asking it. We therefore get from this sentence a taste of the way sources may or may not be cited in the scholia, revealing a tantalizing glimpse into debates where we are (mostly) barred from entry. The question gets at the heart of interpretation in trying to explain why Homer does what Homer does. In other words, the scholars who wonder about the Iliad’s inauspicious beginning would presumably have picked some other word to start with. They would,
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