PART THREE
Following an old underground track which often narrowed down like a tunnel, we pressed on forwards. Splendid images of calcified rock surrounded us and the white walls shimmered in the light of our lantern…A glance at our burnt-down candle, for which we had no replacement, made clear to us the danger in which we found ourselves. In fact we lost the way and if, when the burning time of the candle had only a few minutes left, Dr Miltner had not found again, by a lucky coincidence, the little entry-hole into the gorge, in all likelihood we would have remained as prey for Typhon in his gloomy, stifling cave.
Josef Keil and the great epigrapher Adolf Wilhelm (who had transferred his researches from Euboea to Cilicia) recalling their experiences in the Corycian cave in 1925, in Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vol. 3 (1931), 215, translated from their German
THE visitor: One group [the ‘Giants’] simply grasp rocks and oak-trees with their hands and…insist that only what admits of contact and being touched exists, because they define ‘body’ and ‘being’ as the same. If one of the others says that something without a body exists, they totally despise him and refuse to hear anything more from him.
THEAETETUS: You do describe dreadful people: I, too, have met quite a few of them already.
Plato, The Sophist, 246A-B (c. 355–350 BC)
11
I
As we turn to these Euboeans’ minds, we need to respect their physical context. On routes from the Levant to the further west they were travelling heroes in a practical way. They coped with the hazards of winds and currents and braved storms and shallows which have defeated many more solid vessels in their wake. In calm weather they rowed, with a sail only as a back-up. Homer gives us hints of what their ships might be like, holding twenty oarsmen on a single level and ‘broad-beamed and black’ with a single mast like the big pole, he tells us, with which Odysseus destroyed the Cyclops’ only eye.1 Unlike a warship, they could carry water and supplies for their crew, but even so they would usually avoid long distances on open seas in unpredictable weather. They crossed from island to island and on the voyage west would prefer to keep the north-west coast of the Greek mainland in view, choosing the sheltered channel on the west side of Ithaca and making use of Corcyra (Corfu), from where the open voyage across to the tip of Italy is only some 40 miles. The uses of a single sail in contrary winds were perhaps not as limited as some have assumed but for much of the time most of the pottery and durable goods we find so far from Greece was brought by human power, pulling day after day on oars.2
The crews had no maps and no compasses. They did not have our cardinal points, ‘north’ or ‘east’, but to judge from Homer and the poets they were partly oriented by the rising and setting of the sun, solstitial directions which vary from our true east and west. They believed the world was flat, and if they took time from a day’s navigation to wonder about the bigger picture, they would think of themselves on a flat disc, surrounded by encircling Outer Ocean. Their day-to-day world-view was shaped by local landmarks, especially promontories and distinctive white cliffs, like the White Rock which they recognized on the southern tip of the heel of Italy, White Island (Leukas) across near Ithaca, the White Cliff by Kommos on south-west Crete or White Harbour, long used beside Betyllion – Ras ibn Hani on the north Levantine coast. Their pilots were the true heroes, crew-members who were often nicknamed after words for cleverness. At night, when some of our handbooks cite ‘land breezes’ as an aid, the pilots would know better and fear increased unpredictability, not least because the white-capped waves, a warning of storms or shoals, would be indistinguishable. ‘From the night’, Odysseus’ crew protest, ‘the fierce winds are born, the wreckers of ships.’3 But night-travel had the advantage of an overhead orientation, the power-points of the stars.
Homer sometimes divides the night into three watches, and when Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island he steers ‘skilfully’, looking up at ‘the Pleiades, the late-setting Ploughman and the Bear which they call the Waggon’. Eighth-century seafarers did the same. On Ischia we have a fragment of a big pottery mixing-bowl which had been scratched, perhaps after being broken off, with a Greek contemporary’s ‘star-map’. A letter b (beta) seems to indicate the Ploughman (Boötes) and implies that the rest of the map included the nearby Bear.4 Homer, unwittingly, makes a multi-cultural observation about the star. Sometimes men called it ‘the Waggon’, because somebody had discovered that the star’s name meant ‘waggon’ in Semitic languages including the speech of Phoenicians. Men also called it the Bear, because its Semitic name sounded like the Greek word for ‘bear’ (arktos).5 These two poles of understanding characterize subsequent contacts between Greeks and non-Greeks: ‘bears’ predominate over well-founded ‘waggons’.
Greeks steered by the Great Bear whereas Phoenicians more advisedly steered by the Little Bear: if Odysseus had been a Phoenician, his course from Calypso would have been more true. No doubt our travelling Euboeans were Great Bear navigators too, but under this friendly canopy the sea was a fickle companion. In the straits, crosswinds would spring up, and between Italy and Sicily the currents changed ‘twice by night and twice by day’, less frequent but more dangerous than the changes in the Chalcidian Euboeans’ own narrow Euripus channel at home. Everywhere lurked the fear of big hungry fish: on the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, the monstrous Scylla, Homer tells us, hunts for ‘dolphins, big dog-fish and whatever monstrous fish, even bigger than them, she may catch from the thousands which deep-sounding Amphitrite feeds’.6 On a fragment of a mixing-bowl found at Ischia, a painter has evoked a travelling Euboean’s worst fears: men swim or float away as corpses beyond their ship, while one of them is disappearing head first down a ‘monstrous fish’. No Greek would swim out onto the deep from a boat for pleasure. The painter shows us twenty-one fish in this one small fragment ranging from ‘maneaters to little spectators’.7
We have no text by any of these travellers, no source for them except landscape and analogy: how best are we to imagine them in terms of those two human constants, sex and class? When Greeks later set out to found new settlements from their homeland, they did not usually take Greek women with them. At most, a priestess or two is attested in our evidence, ‘distinguished mature women’ in the opinion of the modern scholar who has drawn most attention to them, who would preside over women’s cults of the gods in the newly founded towns.8 In an age before organized civic settlement, a trading-boat and a little-known sea were no places for women fellow-travellers, least of all for the distinguished and mature. At Al Mina or Pithecussae the first explorers and settlers were surely men only, able to pull their weight at sea, unless they were shipping captive women to and fro as saleable slaves, like Laertes’ fair Eurycleia, whom he had brought for the price of twenty oxen in the prime of youth but ‘had never yet made love to in bed, for he feared the anger of his wife’,9 or the old ‘Sicilian woman’ of his later years. A few non-Greek women, we have suggested, came west to Pithecussae with the influx of Greeks from Cilicia and the Levant from c. 750 onwards. These particular Greeks may have had a different motive: if they were abandoning their eastern home as the Assyrians began to conquer, they may have taken their women to the west to settle a new home with them. The women were usefully skilled, too, not just in putting amulets on their young children, but in goldwork and jewellery. They were brought west partly because they would be profitable.
The social class of the male crews is less certain. A Phaeacian onlooker, notoriously, insults Homer’s Odysseus as being like a ‘captain of sailors who are men of business, someone who is mindful of his cargo and watches for the goods on board and grasping gain’: in short, not at all like a noble athlete. The people in Homer’s world who imagine themselves on a foreign voyage for trade are usually simple people, too. Rude Melanthius, driving a herd of goats, taunts the unrecognized Odysseus, back home at last on Ithaca, and threatens to abduct his faithful swineherd Eumaeus and ‘take him one day on a black-benched ship far from Ithaca [and sell him] so that he may earn me a good livelihood’.10 Trading, therefore, was not beyond a herdsman’s expectations: we can also cite the poet Hesiod’s father in real life, who ‘would sail in ships, lacking a noble livelihood’, and was forced by poverty to make the long sea-journey to a new home in mainland Greece.11 However, most of these humbler people would be bound by obligation to their social superiors at home. Ideals about ignoble trade were all very fine, but noblemen would be best able to provide sea-traders with a big enough boat for their bigger voyages. Long-distance trading was more adventurous than local cabotage. It shaded over into heroic raiding and fighting and so the younger sons of a nobleman, perhaps a nobleman too, might lead an expedition abroad in uncertain pursuit of gain. There was a practical reason, too, for a nobleman’s presence. If the crews were his social dependants and went off unsupervised, there was the risk of their fraud and desertion as soon as they passed beyond well-known points of call. The question remains disputed without enough evidence yet to settle it, but on long-distance ventures to the east or the west a nobleman’s presence is readily imaginable.12 When Greeks sent out settlers to Cumae or to sites in Sicily from c. 740 to 710 BC, people with noble names like Hippocles or Crataimenes were chosen to lead these ventures. They are unlikely to have been novices in the long sea-voyages which were then required of them.
Other companions, at least, are certain. With the travellers went a sense of the gods and semi-divine heroes, ‘evident helpers’ whose presence is rooted in Homer and Hesiod and in the art, inscriptions and votive monuments of subsequent centuries. They seemed to be ‘manifest’, above all, at moments of crisis, never more so than in storms or perils at sea, forerunners of the Christian saints of seafaring, like St Nicolas of Bari, on these same routes from Greece to Italy or Syria. The goddess Hera has been suggested as one particularly important Euboean companion, on the grounds of her later cults on Euboea, a possible cult on Ischia (only an archaeologist’s guess) and her cult, eventually, at Cumae in Italy. She could protect seafarers, but the most relevant god was Poseidon, the god of the sea and of horses too, who thus united two of our Euboeans’ skills. When Euboeans located the place name ‘Posideion’ on many sites, from northern Greece to the Bay of Issus, the places would have altars to Poseidon, landmarks by which successive travellers would steer.
With the gods and semi-divine heroes there also travelled a mental cargo, the baggage of stories (muthoi) which we categorize imposingly as ‘myth’. They were not yet known through Greek pictures or sculptures and, despite the recent invention of the Greek alphabet, many were not yet known through texts, either. They were known orally, in the many contexts in which stories of gods and heroes circulated. One such context was religious, although cults for the gods did not require the telling of muthoi. The essence of worship was an offering, often an animal, and an accompanying prayer, but stories of the gods and heroes attached to these rites, if only to ‘explain’ what was being done, albeit for quite other reasons. On public occasions choirs of young men and girls might sing a hymn to the god of the moment, an orally learned composition which included stories, muthoi, of the god’s exploits. There were also the social occasions, the festivals or drinking-parties, where oral poets, even the young Homer, would recite on demand a portion of their vast heroic repertoire. There was also much storytelling in families, by the old or by nurses to the young, or in public at times of leisure when the men, at least, would gather in their community’s public leschē, a place for talk and socializing. Theleschē was a matter of concern to Hesiod when warning his brother against idleness in their Boeotian village community.13
There is no such thing as a private myth, but these various contexts meant that stories of the gods were widely shared, especially the hymns or the stories attached to rituals, making them into ‘traditional’ tales which would pass on orally to the next generation. So, stories became myths, varying locally from one community to another, coalescing into clusters or cycles which poets would elaborate, but never becoming entirely fixed or canonical. As a result, poets, artists and others could retell their outlines and patterns in different ways. Travelling Euboeans would certainly know such stories, and as they travelled east and west there were long hours to kill, at night, in hostile weather and even on board ship. From shipwrecks off west Italy in c. 600 BC, dice survive, one way for sailors to pass their time. There were also musical instruments. It was with seafarers in the early eighth century BC that one such instrument, of Syrian–Levantine design, travelled west to Italy and ended up buried under a woman’s elbow in a grave in the territory of the future city of Sybaris.14 On their travels Euboeans would sing and make music and among their songs would be muthoi, or stories, of the gods and heroes.
During their first phase in the west c. 800–740, stories of mythical heroes were not already sited at points on the coasts of Italy or Sicily. It was only later that such stories became located there, as if mythical heroes had been driven westwards or fled from Asia while leaving the sack of Troy. Aeneas is only the most famous of such legendary travellers: mythical Diomede and Philoctetes later received new addresses in the west, as did the humble Epeios, who was said to have settled in south Italy with the very toolkit with which he built the Trojan Horse.15 These legendary travellers were not a dim reflection of real history, when Greeks had been in the west during the distant Mycenaean age (c. 1350–1180 BC). The legends only became sited in the west much later so as to attach western communities (including, eventually, Rome) to a prestigious ancestry in the Greeks’ mythical past. From the 730s onwards other Greek settlements in the west were maintaining festivals, cults and historical memories of the people who had been their real Greek founders. For those who did not have such memories, mythical founders were a neat alternative. They were a claim to an origin which could not be refuted: it gave their communities an even older connection with the Greek world.16 In due course, we know of such Greek legendary travellers above all on Cyprus. The mythical Teucer was credited with founding Salamis on the island; the Arcadian hero Agapenor was claimed by Paphos in the south-west; the citizens of Kourion on the south coast even claimed to be the ‘offspring of Perseus’, the supreme wanderer among noble heroes from Argos.17 Euboeans visited these places from the tenth century onwards, but there is no evidence that any of these legendary heroes were already being claimed by kingdoms on the island, although Greek settlers had arrived there in significant numbers since c. 1125–1075. Stories of the legendary heroes’ arrival were probably exploited by the epic poem the Cypria, which was not composed before the late eighth century BC and is known to us only in outline. They were then maintained by the separate little Greek-speaking kingdoms on the island as part of their mutual rivalries. As in the west, they had not been current when Euboeans first arrived in the east.
There was, however, one hero who was already located on the north-west edge of the established Greek world: Odysseus, king of Ithaca, the Greek outpost on the edge of the Adriatic sea. When Greeks set out for the west in the early eighth century BC, hugging the coastline of north-west Greece and picking their way through the Ionian islands, might they not have thought of him, king of the very Ithaca which lay on their route? Homer’s Odyssey does not need to have existed for Odysseus to have been on their minds. Odysseus’ connection with Ithaca was pre-Homeric and tales of him would have been known before Homer shaped his epic. Unfortunately, no literary evidence survives to ascribe this interest to westward-bound Euboeans in the early eighth century or later. On Ithaca’s western coast we have something else, a variety of iron tripods set in a seaside cave at Polis Bay, which was associated with Odysseus in later centuries.18 We need to be cautious, however, before linking them to Odysseus and early Greek travellers up and down the coast. Some of these tripods were made as early as c. 850 BC and if they were placed in the cave then, they were meant as dedications to a god or hero: Odysseus was perhaps not yet such a one. As Odysseus is connected with this cave only by a votive inscription which dates to the second century BC, people on Ithaca c. 800 may have been dedicating tripods here to another divinity. We do not even know who the dedicators of these tripods were, let alone that they had come up from other parts of the southern or eastern Greek world and had been preparing for sea-journeys to the wilder shores beyond. Homer does not help us, either. When his Odysseus returns home, he is said to deposit a treasure of tripods for safe keeping in an Ithacan cave (not, however, the one on Polis Bay). Perhaps Homer had heard that such objects were being dedicated locally on Ithaca and so he filled out his story with this transposed local detail. He, too, does not connect it with foreign sailors who were travelling on past Ithaca to the further west.19
The Odyssey itself gives no hint that Odysseus had or would become a role-model for Greek contemporaries as they travelled beyond Ithaca to Corcyra and across to Italy. Instead, the geography of its mythical plot shows very well how myths, muthoi, varied in their relation to real places. When the mythical Greek heroes sailed back from Troy, Homer shows them opting for itineraries which ran exactly, and correctly, from Chios back to Euboea. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca Homer describes briefly the position of the island, its features and neighbours. He is precise, and (in my view) often accurate, defying the continuing modern attempts to locate the places which he names on an Ionian island other than modern Ithaki. We have the impression of reality here, but not always the fact.20 In his earlier wanderings, Odysseus passes out of the world of fact altogether into a memorable world of fantasy. His tales of the Cyclops and the Lotus–Eaters, the maneating Laestrygonians or the idyllic Phaeacians cannot be fixed in space. They belong in ‘neverland’.
The urge, after Homer, was to fix as many Homeric items as possible at sites in the real world, and as part of the process ‘neverland’ became located too. The happy Phaeacians came to be sited on Corcyra; monstrous Scylla and Charybdis were placed on the dangerous Straits of Messina between Sicily and Italy; Aeolus, king of the winds, came to rest on the Lipari islands; the Laestrygonians acquired an address near Sicilian Leontini; the Sirens were sited on islands off modern Sorrento. The luxurious Baiae near Naples was even linked to a supposed steersman in Odysseus’ crew, the non-Homeric ‘Baios’. Circe found a home on ‘Monte Circeo’ midway between Rome and Cumae, although the Odyssey seemed to have placed her very far away, in the east.21 The beginning of these attempts to locate Homeric items in the west is still very hard for us to date. Near the end of our texts of Hesiod’s Theogony (the main poem dates from c. 710), two verses mention children whom Circe bore to patient Odysseus: Agrios (‘Wild Man’) and Latinos who ‘ruled over the glorious Tyrrhenians [the Etruscans] very far away in a corner of the holy islands’. Here, Circe, Odysseus and their kin are sited on the western coast of Italy. Increasingly, historians have been tempted to give these verses an early date, but on stylistic grounds literary scholars judge them, rightly, to be additions to Hesiod’s poem.22 At best they may be early additions, perhaps c. 680–650, when a Greek might still refer to the Latin and Etruscan peoples rather vaguely as living inland, ‘where the wild things are’. Agrios is a generic ‘wild man’, not a precise reference to, say, Faunus, the subject of Roman cult or myth.23 Homer had said nothing about a pregnancy for Circe or any children by Odysseus. These fictional kin were invented later and brought peoples beyond the Greeks’ western settlements into the explanatory orbit of Homeric myths.
Can we, nonetheless, take other specific locations of Homeric myth back to an earlier date? Significantly, Hesiod himself does not yet locate Scylla or Charybdis on the western seas. However, knowledge of Greek heroic poetry travelled early to the west and was not confined to the aristocracy: the proof lies in those verses which refer to ‘Nestor’s cup’, inscribed c. 750 BC on that humble cup in the child’s grave at Ischia c. 730. If people in the west were well aware of Homer, surely they would want to locate some of his spellbinding stories in the ‘new world’ which they had found? In due course, most of the Homeric stories came to be placed on the east coast of Sicily or up by the Bay of Naples, along the very routes taken by Euboeans who travelled there from c. 800–780 BConwards. The problem is still how to date these myths’ arrival there. Certainly Euboeans reached the west before the myths did, for although we cannot date the Odyssey with confidence, a date c. 760 is about as high as most scholars would readily accept for it: in the poem, the stories which duly came to be located in the west are not yet sited outside neverland. Did they perhaps come west with a second generation of Euboean travellers, after the Odyssey existed? Again, the problem is that Greeks continued to settle and travel on these routes in later centuries and some of the Homeric locations along them are known to have been made subsequently. The placing of ‘Circeii’ south of Rome implied that Circe’s elusive home Aeaea had been discovered. But this association began at the earliest in the later sixth century BC. The Etruscan king Tarquin the Proud (c. 534–510) was credited with the settlement and in due course the very ‘cup’ of Odysseus was shown at the site.24 It was all a post-Homeric invention, long after our pioneering Euboean age. We cannot as yet point to other Homeric stories which travelled for certain in the earlier Euboean company and found a new home in the eighth century.
In principle, nonetheless, stories of the great legendary heroes might have found new addresses so early: we can see from other examples that stories about them were already moving around freely at that time. In Homer’s Odyssey, we can detect that the poet has connected Odysseus with stories which others had linked to the travels of Jason and the Argonauts.25 Outside Homer, conversely, Jason was brought over to the island of Lemnos and linked there with the myth of one of its local cults.26 For Homer and his predecessors, stories were already movable counters on a poet’s board. The changing social contexts of the eighth century were also causing stories to be re-sited. As the poleis or city-states of early Greece became more established, their ruling classes and the poets whom they patronized filled in their territory’s missing past. This filling in is most evident to us at Corinth, perhaps already by c. 700 BC. In the Iliad, Homer refers to an unidentified place called ‘Ephyrë’ near Argos. Corinth then claimed to be the very place in question and also claimed stories to fill in the void. The sun-god and Poseidon the sea-god were said to have competed for supremacy over its land. Mythical Medea was said to have visited it, as was Nestor’s brother.27 Like polis territories, the family trees of local aristocracies also moved stories around: they became enriched by re-sited myths, as we know best from poems of the sixth century BC. The most spectacular enhancement occurred at Argos. Kinsmen with Oriental names were added into the family line of the mythical Argive hero Inachus and his sons, reflecting a greater Greek awareness of an eastern world, like the Orientalizing imports into Argos which are known to us archaeologically in the later eighth century.28
It is in this general context of mobile stories that the locations of ‘neverland’ belong. As people travelled or settled, they fixed mythical places and stories which had begun by being outside space and time. They were not always being arbitrary. Nowadays we find ‘paradise’ more feebly with the help of advertisers, whether in Bali or the Seychelles, but the Greeks located their myths with the help of evidence. Their findings did not depend on wide learning, although educated writers later made much of them. Simple, practical men contributed too. We can best see how they contributed if we look briefly at the legacy of travellers in a later period, Macedonian Greek and Roman soldiers who also visited unfamiliar lands from c. 330 BC onwards. Writers embellished the stories they told, but underneath lay the reasoning of plain blunt men who were convinced they had found what had hitherto been floating in their minds. These travelling Macedonians and Romans show what was possible. Then we can look for more of the same in the earlier age when our evidence is so much scarcer, the age of travelling Euboeans, bright sparks of the ‘Dark Ages’ with stories, but no texts, as their companions.
II
A muthos, or story, is transferred most directly between two cultures when it is heard and translated in detail. It travels more obliquely when it is partially heard or misunderstood. It leaves a mark, often a distorted one, when items in it are seen, but not heard. This sliding scale of hearing, mis-hearing and seeing will be crucial for the thinking of the travelling Euboeans: we can establish its existence from excellent later evidence and then look for it more confidently in their world.
The most fertile sources for it are Alexander the Great, his historians and soldiers, who were travelling eastwards some four hundred years later, but also through cultures and languages unknown to the Greeks. It is Alexander’s own ‘master of ceremonies’, the Greek Chares of Mitylene, who gives us our best example of a travelling myth. Unfortunately his history book is only known in a few later quotations by other authors, but one of them credits him with telling a remarkable romantic tale which was current among ‘the Persians’.29 One of two brothers, Zariadres, had loved a distant lady, the ‘most beautiful woman in Asia’. He was the son of divine parents and, across a great distance, the two of them dreamed of each other as lovers do, she being ‘sleepless in Scythia’. Her father then ordered her to pick a bridegroom at a festival to be held for the purpose, but Zariadres arrived just in time and the two of them rode off on his horse, last-minute lovers with a happy future. The story, so Chares tells us, was painted in many Iranians’ private houses and in temples too. It is our best insight into the cultural life of Iranians in the fourth century BC, better than anything yet found by archaeologists.
Chares was very well placed to know, being the ‘master of ceremonies’ at a court which included many Iranians, Alexander’s new friends. Evidently he was bilingual, because the story can be followed into later Iranian legend as the tale of valiant ‘Zarir’ in the Persian romantic epic the Shahnameh of Firdausi (tenth century AD): it has roots, too, in the storytelling of the intervening Sassanian age (c. AD 240–63 6).30 We can thus picture Persians, contemporaries with Alexander, holding parties in their houses and drinking and listening to the songs of their invited expert storytellers who would enchant them with the loves of valiant Zarir while pointing to pictures of the story on the walls of their host’s house. In return, we learn, Persians would sometimes name their daughters after its heroine.
Chares had a privileged position at court and a linguistic gift which befitted it, but even so he retold the story in Greek terms: ‘Zariadres’ is a Greek version of Zarir’s name; he is said to be the son of Aphrodite and Adonis, two divine Greek figures of love and romance; the ‘most beautiful woman in Asia’ was an ever-expanding category for Greeks who were happily away from Greek women, and two members of it were to be lovers of Alexander the Great.31
No eighth-century Euboean would find himself as the privileged court butler of a Near Eastern king. Their contacts would be less formal and so language would be more of a problem. Here, too, Alexander and his soldiers illustrate the possibilities. Famously, his expedition located the mythical cave of Prometheus in the Hindu Kush, thinking that these mountains were the distant Caucasus. The ‘locals’ contributed, reportedly showing the cave on a high mountain-crag and the ‘lair of the mythical eagle’, which pecked at Prometheus’ liver, and the very ‘marks of his chains’.32 In Armenia, above all, two of Alexander’s officers, Thessalian Greeks, visited and reported on monuments called ‘Jasonia’, erected, they discovered, in honour of the Greek hero Jason. The monuments were one of several proofs that the Armenians were descendants of a Thessalian like themselves, ‘Armenos’, the follower of Jason. The Armenians wore cloaks and clasps like Thessalians and used similar horse-bits and saddles. Plainly they were Jason’s kin.33
Each of these spectacular fantasies rested on local verbal evidence. The old Persian name for the region of the Hindu Kush meant ‘higher than the eagles’: eagles were visible, as they still are, and there was a typical confusion of the geography, causing this mountain to be seen as part of the Caucasus mountains far to the west.34 It was in the Caucasus, previously, that Greek myths had located the eagle and Prometheus’ rock. The Jason memorials have been brilliantly explained by the local word for the holy places sited on hilltops, what western Iranians called ayezana. To imaginative Greek ears these ay-ez-ana sounded just like ‘Jasonia’, especially when so much else in Armenia appeared to derive from Jason’s visit. A Jason memorial was even located out east in what is now Tajikistan: here, too, a local ayezana presumably underlay it.35
The roots of these discoveries are important for what we, too, need to find in the eighth century BC. The historians who recorded them tend to involve local non-Greek informants, so much so that their role becomes a pattern when such a story is written up. ‘The Indians say…’, or ‘the people of that country say…’, yet sometimes they can have said nothing of the sort. Alexander’s friend and admiral Nearchus recorded that Alexander’s march into the dreaded Gedro-sian desert in south-east Iran in late 325 BC was partly motivated by his rivalry with ‘Queen Semiramis’ and her march into this same region. The locals, he wrote, told of her exploit, but they cannot have said such a thing: Semiramis was an invention of Greek legend only, and none of the ‘locals’ near this remote Makran desert knew Greek.36 At best, they had been misunderstood through a chain of interpreters in answer to questions posed by Greeks. ‘A Greek inquirer in a foreign land’, concluded their acute modern scholar Elias Bickerman, ‘did not feel himself bound by the question of what his informant actually meant.’ Not until Julius Caesar, he pointed out, do we find a classical author not just ‘quoting the indigenous tradition respecting the origins of a people but…accepting it by virtue of its being an indigenous account’.37
For the mind-set of our Euboeans in the eighth century, Alexander’s locations of the god Dionysus are particularly suggestive. Before his march to India, no Greek is known to have connected Dionysus with that distant land. Dionysus was imagined to have come from the east to the Greeks, but only because an ‘eastern’ origin fitted best with the god’s luxury and his effeminate style. As the god of intoxication and altered states, he was represented as a foreign outsider, effete and Oriental. This floating legend then became fixed at points on the Greeks’ eastern horizon. In Lydia, near to the Aegean, they met the Lydian personal name ‘Bakivas’, which sounded to them like ‘Bacchios’, Dionysus’ name, and which they translated as ‘Dionysicles’. It was one reason for siting the childhood of their Dionysus on Lydia’s snow-capped Mount Tmolos; another was that vines, Dionysus’ plants, grew on its lower slopes.38 As Lydia became too familiar, Greeks looked even further afield for their god’s starting point. By the late fifth century Dionysus was said to have come westwards from Bactra, out near the River Oxus at modern Balkh in Afghanistan. But was Bactra his point of origin?
There was good reason for Alexander and his officers to carry this Bactrian location in their minds: it featured memorably in words ascribed to the god himself in the prologue of Euripides’ Bacchae, the very play which the poet had composed while staying in Macedon near the end of his life.39 In the theatre below their royal palace at Aigai–Vergina, Macedonians had heard of Dionysus’ eastern stopping-points. Perhaps Alexander and his officers had learned the play or even acted it in their youth. The notion stayed with them and out in the field they then found new evidence.
Beyond the Jaxartes river, the Syr Darya, in modern Tajikistan, Alexander’s men invaded lands to the north of Euripides’ furthest site for the god. Across the river they made two odd discoveries, stones which they understood to be the very ‘boundary-stones’ of Dionysus, and ivy, Dionysus’ plant, which was growing on the tree-trunks. The stones’ local purpose is unknown to us (perhaps they marked local leaders’ burials) but the ivy was a clue to their interpretation.40 For months and for miles the soldiers had not seen ivy and so they explained its reappearance by the presence of their Dionysus. The far bank of the Jaxartes was the scene of an inconclusive march by Alexander on which he fell sick and had to turn back: did poets and flatterers in his circle begin the story about Dionysus’ presence in order to dignify the unhappy episode? It began, however, in a broader context of misunderstanding. Fir-trees were also visible locally, the first to be seen in the east, and the surveyors with Alexander ‘inferred’ that they were therefore on the borders of Asia and Europe, the ivy and fir’s familiar home. If central Asia was Europe, surely Dionysus could belong there too, at the point from which he had come south to Bactra and joined Euripides’ route for him? No local story is said to have helped with this conclusion, and if it began as flattery it was flattery in the context of a major geographical muddle.
Within two years Alexander’s army was invading India, splitting into two to conquer the Swat Highlands east of the Kunar river and north of the Kabul river. It was here that they heard of an exciting ‘Mount Meros’, towering above a settlement which seemed to be called ‘Nysa’, the very name of Dionysus’ mythical Greek home in childhood. Plainly they had half-understood these names from the replies of local people whom they questioned through interpreters: in the Greeks’ own tradition, Nysa was a mountain but it was never a city.41 Indians had also mentioned their own legendary Mount ‘Meru’, which Greeks understood as ‘Mëros’, the Greek word for a thigh: it was from the thigh of Zeus that Dionysus was said to have been born, so the implications were exciting. According to one of Alexander’s historians, the place’s connection with Dionysus was even explained by one of the local envoys, but his ‘speech’ to Alexander is only a historian’s way of improving the story: in real life the envoy knew no Greek.42 The local botany was more relevant. On ‘Mount Meros’, Alexander went up with his cavalry and here too found ivy in abundance, the yellow-berried Himalayan ivy which is still visible in this part of Nuristan. There were laurels and box-trees and there were also vines, another of Dionysus’ plants; there were thickets fit for hunting, like the sacred groves of a Greek god. There were not, it seems, ripe grapes when Alexander visited, but his companions wreathed their heads with ivy, just as boys in the Nuristan villages still wreath themselves with trailing vine-leaves and long green stems of ivy. They even sang hymns on the hillside to the god Dionysus and called on him by his cultic names. Then there was a sacrifice and a feast in the god’s honour: some said that there were Macedonians who became seized by Dionysiac frenzy, running wild after calling on the god. No doubt there was more than enough to drink.
How much of it all did Alexander believe? Three centuries later, the sceptical geographer Strabo thought Alexander had been filled with mad vanity at his successes and had not been duly critical. But the visit had a context: the mental baggage of the lines from Euripides’ Bacchae, the previous sightings of ivy beyond the Jaxartes, the will to believe that the army was now treading in and beyond the sites of the god. The belief would encourage the troops, but it was not adopted only for that reason.43 There was local evidence, a pre-existing context and some apparent support in what the locals seemed to be saying. For Alexander, the case was strong enough.
For Euboeans in the age of Homer there would often be as little proof, not more. For one rational mind, two millennia later, no more was needed. In the 1890s, up in the same Kunar valley, Sir Thomas Holdich helped to survey for Britain the boundaries of India and north-east Afghanistan. Two separate native sources, in two different places, told the British map-makers of a place named ‘Nusa’ or ‘Nysa’, locating it just to the south of a three-peaked hill called Koh-i-nor, ‘whose outlines’, Holdich reminds us, ‘can be clearly distinguished from Peshawar on any clear day’. Wild vines and ivy grew on this hill, just as they grow on the west bank of the Kunar river where Holdich was ‘astonished at the free growth of the wild vine and the thick masses of ivy which…clung to the buttresses of the rugged mountain-spurs as ivy clings to less solid ruins in England’.44
Like Alexander, Sir Thomas had hit on a truly Dionysiac flora and an evocative place name from local informants. He then capped them both by hitting on a local Dionysiac hymn. Two Kafirs from the Kunar valley ‘submitted gracefully enough to much cross-examination and…sang a war-hymn to their god…and executed a religious dance’. Their words had to pass through two interpreters, but they confirmed that the hymn began most remarkably: ‘O, thou who from Gir–Nysa’s lofty heights was born…’, an ‘obvious reference’, thought Holdich, to the ‘mountain of Bacchus, the Meros from which he was born on the slopes of which stood the ancient Nysa’. For Holdich, the entire verse was a ‘Bacchic hymn, slightly incoherent perhaps as is natural…it only wants the accessories of vine-leaves and ivy to make it entirely classical’. It did not want them for long. West of the Kunar, Sir Thomas was offered the local wine, as Alexander perhaps had been offered wine there from a previous year’s harvest. ‘It is not of a high class,’ he concluded. ‘It reminded me of badly corked and muddied Chablis which it much resembled in appearance.’45
III
Alexander and Sir Thomas arrived in the region with unlocated baggage, for one the eastern travels of the god Dionysus, for the other the unsited exploits of Alexander himself. What they heard was supported by what they saw, encouraging them to ‘find’ stories which had long been important in their minds. The more the seeing and the less the hearing, the more imaginative the conclusions would become. We can follow them through three particular items: women on horseback, sculpted monuments and extraordinarily big bones.
A year before Alexander’s death, about a hundred women rode into his camp near Babylon, armed and mounted on horseback.46 They had been recruited in western Iran, but Greek women never rode and the soldiers could only make sense of them as Amazons, the mounted females of Greek myth. Nobody was encouraging this notion out of flattery or in order to make the troops march on. It was a spontaneous ‘camp myth’: word even spread that the women were exposing one of their breasts, but Alexander sent them away before his soldiers could molest them and find out. In Macedonian minds, before their arrival, the Amazons of myth were still hovering in a homeland yet to be discovered. They were widely believed to live near the Black Sea where their weapons, but not their persons, had been discovered by Greek visitors. Only with Pompey’s campaigns in the area, in the 60s BC , did historians on his staff at last run them to ground, beside the marshy Thermodon river whose lower course was such a fine breeding-ground for horses, the Amazons’ mounts.47 Without this local information Alexander’s soldiers had interpreted what they saw because of what they believed.
It was at ancient monuments, above all, that local details and Greek misunderstandings were particularly likely to combine. We can see this combination best in autumn 333 BC while Alexander’s army was delaying in southern Asia Minor on the coast of Cilicia. While they waited, some of them encountered a big sculpted relief of the Assyrian period, the one which actually showed the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s victory here in the campaigns of 696 BC. Callisthenes, kinsman of Aristotle, was one of the officers in camp who described what the monument signified. In his view it showed ‘Sardanapalus’, who was snapping the fingers of his right hand. It was inscribed with foreign signs which said that Sardanapalus built the nearby cities of Anchialus and Tarsus in one day: ‘eat, drink and make love, for other things are not worth this’ (the flick of the royal fingers).48
This reading by a highly educated man was a brilliant web of error and misunderstanding. Sardanapalus was an existing Greek fiction, a ‘king’ of ancient Assyria who was a legend in Greek for Oriental luxury and hedonism: no such king had existed in Assyrian history. An Assyrian king, Sennacherib, had indeed rebuilt Anchialus and Tarsus (he called them ‘Ingira’ and ‘Tarzu’): about the rebuilding, at least, CaUisthenes had picked up local information surviving across the centuries, although the two cities were not rebuilt in one fantastic day. He had also looked at the monument’s details. On Assyrian monuments, the gesture of snapping the fingers of one hand is indeed attested, but it was meant as a gesture of prayer to the gods. The Greeks took it in our sense, as a gesture of indifference, ‘not worth so much as this’. The relief which the learned CaUisthenes saw is now lost to us, but other surviving Assyrian reliefs depict symbols of the gods above the sculpted ruler. They are uncaptioned, and to outside eyes the symbols resemble cups and plates and even male and female sexual parts.49 ‘Eat, drink and have sex’ (or in polite versions, ‘have fun’) was already a sentiment of Greek popular poetry: we have recently found a text of this saying inscribed in Greek in western Asia c. 400–370 BC, before Alexander’s march.50 His historians looked at the incomprehensible wedge-shaped script and read it as supporting what they already believed.
Among the multi-cultural clamour, the strange monuments and objects of the Near East, Euboean travellers had been ripe for similar misunderstandings in the eighth century BC. There was another dimension: the animal kingdom, ancient and modern. It too was to impress Euboeans and encourage them to brilliant misinterpretation: the best evidence for its possibilities is somewhat later than Alexander. Already in the eighth century Euboean travellers had visited the coast of north Africa and the islands which they named in Greek off the coast of Tunisia. Inland lay landscapes of exceptional curiosity, half-known but never tamed, in which ‘neverland’ and its items might plausibly be uncovered. From c. 630 BC onwards Greeks also settled in Libya further east and sited some of the labours of a great and reassuring predecessor in the adjoining deserts. Heracles, their stories said, had wrestled with the giant Antaeus, the enemy of strangers and travellers: he had defeated him, and where better to locate this important victory over terror than in the north African deserts, potentially so hostile beyond the Greeks’ cities?51 Tamed by Heracles, Antaeus decomposed: in the 80s BC the remains of his body were unearthed by subsequent visitors, including Romans.
When the Roman commander Sertorius crossed from Spain into north Africa he was told by residents of Tingis (modern Tangier) that they knew the very site of Antaeus’ long-lost grave. The elements for a fertile discovery were all present: information from non-Greek, non-Roman locals; famous Greek stories in the visitors’ minds; scope for confirmation, even, by research. Following this lead, Sertorius had a designated grave-mound dug open and inside he found a skeleton 60 feet long, obviously the relic of a giant. In amazement he closed up his dig, made offerings and ‘helped to magnify the tomb’s reputation’.52 His magnifying did not stop a subsequent dispute. Some of our sources, perhaps correctly, placed the actual find on the west coast of Morocco near Lixus. Others made Tingis the site both of the grave and the initial information. The ‘Tingis version’ gained a powerful, but not conclusive, champion, the learned king Juba (c. 47 BC–AD 23), husband of the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra. Juba traced his own ancestry back to a ‘marriage’ between Heracles and the wife of Antaeus, a lady called Tinga (the first known Tangerine).53 Perhaps this ancestry inclined him to favour Tingis’s role in the story.
Impressive though this find of a giant seems, it had been excelled some twenty years earlier. The Argive hero Perseus, the myths said, had confronted a fearsome Gorgon and in due course this encounter too became sited by antiquarians in the trackless deserts of north Africa. During their hard war in north Africa against the Numidian Jugurtha, troops with the Roman commander Marius are said to have met an amazing creature alive and hissing in the African dunes. They saw a Gorgon trotting towards them, though ‘at first they thought it was a wild sheep because its head was bent low and it moved slowly’.54 After a skirmish they ambushed it and their accompanying African cavalrymen shot it dead. The authority for this neglected story is a Greek, Alexander of Myndus, who wrote with knowledge on the local birds of Libya. He was prone to flights of wild fancy, but his tale of the Gorgon had some foundation: the troops flayed the animal and took its skin back to Marius in camp where the other soldiers supported its identification. According to Alexander of Myndus, the local Libyans contributed here too: they explained that they called this sort of animal the ‘downward-looker’, because of the way it held its head.
There was evidence, then, behind this Gorgon’s sighting, the evidence of an actual animal killed in the desert: perhaps it was a mouflon, a variety of sheep with curly horns. But there was evidence, too, behind the discovery of Antaeus’ skeleton. Sertorius was not fantasizing, nor were the locals in Africa who had buried the giant, they said, and enabled the Romans to locate very big bones indeed. Whatever were they? We now realize through recent researches that they were unrecognized bits of an extinct species, one of those ‘Neogene elephants, early African mammoths and giant giraffids’ which we, too, discover in Morocco’s prehistoric soil.55
All around the Greek world, bones of the dinosaurs caused items from mythical ‘neverland’ to be discovered on the ground.56 When found in quantity they established the sites of great battles in mythical stories. On the island of Samos, long before Sertorius’ lifetime, huge bones were discovered in an area of topsoil whose colouring, too, was significant. It was so red that the place was named ‘Panaima’ (‘Utterly Bloody’) and explained as the site of a bitter ancient battle. So big were the bones that the fighters must have been the biggest of combatants, nothing less than war-elephants. In myths, the god Dionysus was said to have brought elephants to a battle against the Amazons. This story can only have blossomed after Alexander the Great’s exploits had linked Dionysus with India, the supreme land of the war-elephant. On Samos, ‘Panaima’ and its bloodstains can still be located, on a plateau near the site of Mytilini whose ‘unique red surface contrasts starkly with the surrounding hills of white sediment, containing masses of chalk-white bones’.57 In the light of Alexander’s exploits, Greeks looked down here and made sense of what they saw, big bones and blood-red topsoil which became intelligible through myth.
Five hundred years or so before these inferences were made, Euboeans had been in the east and the west, witnessing old monuments, strange places and even big bones. They too related them to stories which were already in their minds. These stories were Greekmuthoi, or myths, many of which had formed during the illiterate ‘Dark Ages’. There were also muthoi in the Near Eastern cultures which Euboeans encountered: there was scope for them to amplify or redirect the stories which Greeks brought with them. The study of Near Eastern ‘influence’ on Greek myths has been thoroughly pursued by modern scholars, most massively through lists of apparent ‘parallels’ between texts of the stories in Near Eastern languages and our Greek texts, whether or not a transfer from one culture to the other occurred in each particular case. Such study has been mostly concerned with early Greek poetry, not with actual Greeks and particular places: these points of contact have been left more open. Can we connect Euboeans directly or indirectly with such contacts? They had unusual scope for them. Within some twenty years of settling in the Near East at Al Mina, Euboeans and their kinsmen had travelled west to settle on Ischia. As we have seen, they found themselves in another populous world which was also, to their eyes, an unknown and uncharted wonder. With them on their travels went their gods and heroes and as they settled far from home they set up new local cults in their honour. These settlements in the west then endured as Greek settlements on the map, and from later local evidence we can sometimes work back to cults and heroes which the Euboean settlers may have brought with them to such places. The goddess Hera, Orion the hunter, the giant Briareus are among those who have been proposed, with varying degrees of uncertainty.58
These transfers from a home on Euboea to a new western settlement are not exceptional, because so many colonists and settlers throughout Greek history did much the same, bringing cults and heroes from their mother-cities to their new homes. However, Euboean travellers were special: they spanned not one world but three, their own home culture, the triangle round Cyprus, Cilicia and the Levant, and the west as far as the Bay of Naples. No Roman or Macedonian soldier ever found one and the same myth at either end of his world, but these Euboeans could have done so, finding an apparently familiar story among the stories and objects of their Near Eastern contacts and then going west and finding yet more of it in a second ‘new world’, in the west.
Such a travelling myth would be a spectacular recovery from the past, with a double scope, both east and west. ‘Men celebrate most’, Homer’s young Telemachus tells his mother Penelope, ‘the newest song which circulates for listeners.’59 The Euboeans, however, might have ‘celebrated most’ the old songs, because they were made fresh and new at either end of their world. In the eighth century BC there was a time for Greeks on the move when the world could have seemed to be telling the same story towards both the rising and the setting sun. This trail is the one we can now recover for the first time since the eighth century BC, starting with mythical persons who span both east and west, moving on to channels through which such a trail could have passed, and leading, finally, to the items which demonstrably travelled along it with Euboeans in the eighth century. They are not exactly items which Homer’s contemporary epics would lead us to expect.