CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HOMER’S PHOENICIANS: HISTORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, OR LITERARY TROPE? [A PERSPECTIVE ON EARLY ORIENTALISM]

In what I like to call the serendipity of scholarship, it sometimes hap- pens that responding to a framework set for a conference or volume brings one to the unexpected: a new perspective on one’s own material occasioned by an unusual lens, or, more rarely, by an unanticipated view of the lens itself. It had been my intention to proceed from the evocative accounts of Phoenician merchant-seamen in the Odyssey to the realia of evidence for Phoenician trade—an interest that stems from work done on ivo- ries from Spain and the westward expansion of the Phoenicians in the eighth–seventh centuries b.c.1—and, by so doing, to pay tribute to the inspiring work of Emily Vermeule, who has done so much to bring the world(s) of “Homer”—that putative individual to whom we attri- bute the Iliad and the Odyssey—alive. As research for the present article proceeded, however, I became more and more interested in the texts themselves: specifi cally, in how to account for anomalies between the historical evidence and the way Phoenicians are represented. Seductive though it may be to move from eloquence in a given text to mental image to historical reconstruction, recent work in literary and cultural studies has shown that one can no longer read the Homeric poems, or indeed any literary work, with an innocent assumption of transparency between “the world” and “the word”; archaeological data

* This article originally appeared as “Homer’s Phoenicians: History, Ethnography, or Literary Trope? [A Perspective On Early Orientalism],” in The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule, Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris, eds. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995, pp. 247–271. 1 I. J. Winter, “The Carmona Ivories and the Phoenicians in Spain,” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Chicago, 1966)—presented as a talk at the annual meetings of the AIA, December 1970, an abstract of which was published in AJA 75 (1971) 217. 598 chapter fifteen and other textual studies are necessary as corroboration or corrective. With respect to the Phoenicians, at issue is whether and to what degree one can distinguish historical and ethnographic description from liter- ary construct—“fact” from fi ction—in the epics. I hope my classical colleagues will permit me this foray into their territory, and see in it a response to Professor Vermeule’s passionate commitment throughout her career to the enduring life in those texts.

Phoenicians in Homer

The generic Phoenicians (Phoinikes) and the specifi c Sidonians (Sidones) are synonymous in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the city standing for the people as a whole.2 References in the Iliad are but two, both associ- ated with luxury production. In the fi rst case, embroidered garments described as the handiwork of Sidonian women (Iliad 6.288ff.) are said to have been brought from Sidon by Paris himself on the same sea voy- age in which he brought Helen to Troy. They were kept in the treasure chamber of Priam’s palace, and were clearly highly valued, the most beautiful of them selected by Hekabe, queen of Troy, as an offering to Athena. The second passage recounts the large, “richly wrought” silver bowl (krater) of surpassing beauty that was set by Achilles as a prize in the funeral games of Patroklos (Iliad 23.740ff.). We are told that it was made cunningly by Sidonians well-skilled in deft handiwork (Sidones poludaidaloi) and brought over the sea by Phoenicians as a gift—pre- sumably a royal gift—to Thoas, whose grandson gave it to Patroklos as ransom for a son of Priam. In other words, the bowl is not only described as being of superb craftsmanship; it has also had a complex history of elite ownership. Inclusion of the krater’s previous owners both attests to and establishes the bowl’s quality and value; it also provides us with an example of the circuit of royal gifting well known in the Levant in both the Late Bronze

2 See on this the general discussions in J. D. Muhly, “Homer and the Phoenicians: The Relations between Greece and the Near East in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age,” Berytus 19 (1970) 19–64, and P. Wathelet, “Les phéniciens et la tradition homerique,” in E. Gubel et al., eds., Studia Phoenicia I/II: Sauvons Tyr/Histoire phénicienne (Leuven 1983) 235–243.