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Iliad 11: Healing, Healers, Nestor, and Medea

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Iliad 11: Healing, Healers, Nestor, and Medea Iliad 11: Healing, Healers, Nestor, and Medea Bruce Louden University of Texas El Paso [email protected] Abstract Iliad 11’s series of wounded Greek chiefs sends the doomed Patroklos to Nestor’s tent, where Heka-mede has just given Neleus’s son and the wounded healer Makhaon a restorative potion and shortly afterward will give Makhaon a bath. Nestor delivers a lengthy account, a Pylian epic, which briefly mentions Aga-mede, who knows all the pharmaka the earth grows. Together these details suggest two meanings for Nestor’s surprising longevity. Within the Iliad it serves as a vector to pre-Homeric epic but also alludes to Medea’s rejuvenation of Aison and to related episodes in her larger myth. Keywords Medea – Nestor – Argonautica – rejuvenation – Kirke As multiple references demonstrate,* the Odyssey and the Iliad are aware of an Argonautic epic.1 While some commentators posit that an earlier Argonau- tica would have been fairly complete, others question whether Medea would have been part of it.2 In the case of the Odyssey, a consensus has formed that * I should like to thank the referees for their comments, which significantly improved this piece, and Joel Christensen for help on an early draft. Translations from Greek are my own. 1 Homeric epic’s explicit mentions of Jason (Il. 7.469, 21.41; Od. 12.72), the Argo (Od. 12.70), Aietes (Od. 10.137, 12.70), and Jason’s son Euneos (Il. 7.468, 21.41, 23.747) point to considerable awareness of the larger contours of the myth. 2 Braswell and West both assume a fairly complete pre-Homeric version: “the poet of the Odyssey seems to know a narrative dealing with the voyage of the Argo” (Braswell 1988: 7); “one of the most certain results of Homeric scholarship, in many scholars’ view, is that some of Odysseus’ adventures owe something to a pre-existing narrative about Jason and the Argo- nauts” (West 2005: 39). Gantz writes, “One can scarcely doubt in any case that she [Medea] is an early part of the story, assisting Jason in an otherwise impossible task as Ariadne does for Theseus” (1993: 358). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/24688487_00201005Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:27:39AM via free access 152 louden it draws upon the traditional figure of Medea for components of three charac- ters: Kirke (Braswell 1988: 306), Nausikaa (Meuli 1921; Crane 1987: 14–15, 19–21; West 2005; Louden 2011a: 136), and, to a lesser extent, Antiphates’s unnamed daughter (10.81–133) (Louden 2011b).3 I will argue that the Iliad also demon- strates awareness of Medea’s character, drawing on her template to fashion two lesser female characters, both of whom interact with Nestor in book 11. In so doing, I will also advance two new interpretations of his exceptional longevity. Nestor’s prolonged existence, more fitting for a Genesis patriarch such as Abraham than for a Homeric warrior, has different meanings in the two epics.4 In the Odyssey his longevity is a sign of his piety. His exemplary hospitality to the disguised Athena and Telemakhos in book 3 reveals him as a man who honors the gods, who, in turn, reward him with extraordinary success in his life, again, rather as a Genesis patriarch. In the Iliad, however, which lacks the Odyssey’s focus on rewarding moral and punishing immoral characters— Aristotle’s double ending (Poetics 1453a30–39)—Nestor’s longevity suggests something entirely different. A prominent speaker in both epics, in the Iliad Nestor makes lengthy speeches less connected with the poem’s immediate action, though obliquely commenting on it, set far in the past. His great tale at 11.670–762 is probably a highly truncated version of a pre-Homeric epic, adapted to fit its present position and circumstances in book 11 (cf. his tale at 7.124–160).5 In the Iliad, then, Nestor, in addition to his other character func- tions, can serve as a vector to pre-Homeric epic.6 His longevity itself can, in the Iliad, be understood as pointing to and instantiating this diachronic epic func- tion. But I will be more concerned with advancing a second reason for Nestor’s preternatural age, also pointing to pre-Homeric epic—that it reflects the influ- ence of narratives in which Medea rejuvenates a character. Book 11 of the Iliad, through Nestor, provides further evidence of Home- ric epic’s interaction with Medea’s character. The episodes virtually name two women as Medea figures. Yet the Medea in the background of Iliad 11 is not the Medea of Argonautic myth per se—no Jason, no Argo, no Golden Fleece—but as she figures in episodes involving rejuvenation. 3 Note also the place name, Artakie, associated with Antiphates’s daughter: “Its name is almost certainly drawn from an older Argonautica, cf. the spring Artakie at Cyzikus in the Propontis, which became an integral part of the Argonaut legend (Ap. Rhod. 1.957)” (The Homer Ency- clopedia s.v. “Artakie” [Finkelberg 2011]). 4 See Louden 2011a: 36–40 on parallels between Nestor and Abraham. 5 See Frame 1978: 86–88 on the tale as a “lost Pylian epic”; cf. Tsagalis 2014: 240–241. 6 Though the same can be true of other characters, such as Phoinix, when he relates the Melea- gros story (Il. 9.524–599). Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:27:39AM via free access iliad 11: healing, healers, nestor, and medea 153 Book 11 sets the stage for this side of Medea in its sustained focus on wounds. Agamemnon, wounded and driven from his aristeia, is the first of a series of six wounded Greeks that includes Diomedes (11.310–400), Odysseus (11.401–488), Aias and Makhaon (11.489–574), and Eurypylos (11.575–595) (see Hainsworth 1993: 212). Of these, Makhaon’s is most significant for the epic’s larger archi- tectonics and for the irony that is central to book 11: the healer himself is wounded.7 When Paris wounds Asklepios’s son, Idomeneus bids Nestor take him to safety: “For a healer is worth many men in return” (ἰητρός γὰρ ἀνὴρ πολλῶν ἀντάξιος ἄλλων, 11.514). Akhilleus, catching a glimpse of Nestor taking the wounded Makhaon back to the safety of his tent, not certain whether the wounded man is Makhaon, sends Patroklos to ascertain this (11.597–643). The Iliad may here, and in the brief sequel at 14.1–7, imply a supernatu- ral reason for Nestor’s preternatural longevity. Two minor female characters, Heka-mede, who here, and at 14.1–8, serves Nestor and Makhaon, by prepar- ing potions and drawing baths, and Aga-mede, whom Nestor mentions in his lengthy narrative and who has surpassing knowledge of drugs (φάρμακα, “drugs/herbs”), both function as instantiations of Medea’s traditional charac- ter. Their names are compounds fashioned on the same root as hers.8 The Iliad, I suggest, draws on a template of the figure of Medea to highlight and explore certain healing and restoration potentials that arise particularly in book 11. I will argue that this is, in effect, an unstated premise that informs Patroklos’s visit to Nestor’s tent. In book 11 the Iliad activates a Medea rubric around Nestor to increase the pathos of Patroklos’s looming tragedy. Let us first consider relevant episodes from Medea’s larger mythology in which she rejuvenates various characters and performs restorative acts. In a fragment of the Nostoi epic preserved in the argument of Euripides’s Medea, she makes Jason’s father, Aison, youthful by boiling many drugs and presum- ably Aison as well in golden cauldrons (Diggle 1989: 88; West 2003: 158–159): 7 To underscore the seriousness of Makhaon’s being wounded, the Iliad depicts it through a pivotal contrafactual (11.504–507), a form of syntax frequent in the two epics, generally tak- ing the shape, “And now x would have happened, had not y intervened.” This construction is generally employed as “an emphatic method for changing the direction of the plot” (Louden 1993: 185). 8 As an anonymous referee points out, given the names Chantraine includes under μῆδος (“thought, counsel”) and μήδομαι (“contrive”) (1990: 693), the root, as a component in a name, may signify “skilled in.” Given gender stereotypes, however, in a woman it may signify “wiles.” Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:27:39AM via free access 154 louden αὐτίκα δ’ Αἴσονα θῆκε φίλον κόρον ἡβώοντα, γῆρας ἀποξύσασα ἰδυίηισι πραπίδεσσιν, φάρμακα πόλλ’ ἕψουσα ἐνὶ χρυσέοισι λέβησιν. At once she made Aison a pleasing, lively youth, having, by her cunning wiles, scraped away his old age, having boiled many drugs in her golden cauldrons. We will later see Heka-mede doing something analogous to γῆρας ἀποξύσασα, “having scraped away his old age.”9 This episode can be seen as the normative instance of her use of this particular form of magic. We can note that the for- mula φάρμακα πόλλ’ (“many drugs/herbs”) is inextricably associated with the larger Medea tradition. Aeschylus’s Trophoi (“Nurses”) or Dionysou Trophoi, a non-tragic (from our perspective) satyr play, depicted a similar incident, also noted in the argument to Euripides’s play. Here Medea is said to rejuvenate Dionysus’s nurses and their husbands by having boiled them: τὰς Διονύσου τροφοὺς μετὰ τῶν ἀνδρῶν αὐτῶν ἀνέψησασα ἐνεοποίησε (“having boiled Dionysus’s nurses with their husbands, she made them young”) (Diggle 1989: 89).Though no pharmaka are mentioned, they may be implied in ἀνέψησασα, as in the fragment from the Nostoi: φάρμακα πόλλ’ ἕψουσα. Alan Sommerstein considers why this act would be depicted in the satyr-play Trophoi, rather than in a tragedy (2008: 248): Rejuvenation—at any rate successful rejuvenation—is a theme for satyr- drama, not tragedy; the role of Dionysus in the story points the same way, and there is virtually no doubt that this play was indeed satyric.
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