Ephraim Lytle
Abstract
This chapter interprets through the lens of mythical geography a sixth-century BC monument from Ambracia that comprises perhaps our most important evidence for the history of the Corinthian colony and its relationship to the indigenous Epirotes during the Archaic period. The monument included an epitaph consisting of five elegiac couplets lamenting the death of four Ambraciots at the hands of ‘the sons of the Pyraiboi’. Although the inscription has been much discussed by scholars interested in the poem’s literary features, its historical context has received less attention. According to one prominent interpretation, the city, beset by marauding transhumant pastoralists, was unable to guarantee the security of citizens travelling between the polis and its port. That interpretation is implausible for a range of reasons, and I argue rather that the poem’s ‘sons of the Pyraiboi’ marks a deliberate and careful deployment of a mythical geography intended to locate the massacre in the region of Dodona. Every feature of both text and monument can be better explained by positing that the Ambraciots died while escorting a Corinthian delegation to the oracle of Dodona.
Introduction
Since its discovery and initial publication nearly three decades ago considerable attention has been paid to a sixth-century BC funerary monument from Ambracia. This is largely due to its monumentally inscribed epigram, SEG 41.540A, which commemorates the death of four of Ambracia’s citizens. Although comprising perhaps our most important evidence for the history of the Corinthian colony and its relationship to the indigenous Epirotes during the Archaic period, this text has been of interest primarily to scholars interested in establishing the text and discussing its poetic features. The inscription’s historical context has received far less attention, with recent discussions content to reify an interpretation whereby the monument’s reference to the murder of these Ambraciots at the hands of ‘the sons of the Pyraiboi’ while accompanying an embassy from Corinth speaks to the fundamental insecurity of the Archaic polis, which was unable to protect a visiting delegation from marauding bands of transhumant pastoralists. I will argue here that this interpretation, which assumes the historical reality of the inscription’s Pyraiboi and identifies them both with the Homeric Peraiboi and with the Thessalian Perrhaebi, is implausible for a host of reasons. I argue rather that the poem’s ‘sons of the Pyraiboi’ marks a deliberate and careful deployment of a mythical geography intended to locate the massacre in the region of Dodona. Indeed, every feature of both text and monument can be better explained by positing that the Ambraciots died while escorting a Corinthian delegation to the oracle at Dodona, and I conclude by suggesting that this context can explain the public significance of what was a notably monumental and decidedly political memorial.
Text, Context and Interpretation
In the 1980s, rescue excavations in the city of Arta – ancient Ambracia – uncovered a funerary monument built facing the ancient road just outside the city’s southwest gate. This approximately 12-meter-wide Π-shaped enclosure included an epitaph inscribed stoichedon and boustrophedon in impressive lettering along a single course of blocks on its front face. The four surviving blocks preserve eight lines of what were five elegiac couplets. A paucity of epichoric comparanda makes precise dating impossible but the lettering cannot be earlier than about 550 or too much later than 520 BC. Andreou’s editio princeps is unusually problematic, giving rise to a good deal of discussion concerning the text and I give here what seems the most probable version, followed by Day’s precise, yet elegant, prose translation:1
ἄνδρας [τ]ούσδ’ [ἐ]σλοὺς ὀλοφύρομαι, hοῖσι Πυραιβȏν ⋮ →
παῖδες ἐμετίσαντ’ ἀ[λ]κινόεντα φόνον
ἀνγε̣[λ]ί̣αν με (τ) ιόντας ἀπ’ εὐρυχόροι[ο Ϙορίνθου ⋮]
[— — — — — — — — — — — —— — — — — — — —]
[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —]
πατρίδ’ ἀν’ ἱμερτὰν πένθος ἔθαλ̣λ̣ε τότε. ⋮ ←
τοδε δ’ ἀπ’ Ἀνπρακίας, Ναυσίστρατο⟨ν⟩, αὐτὰ παθόντε, ⋮
Καλλίταν τ’ Ἀΐδα δȏμα μέλαν κατέχE
κα|È μὰν Ἀραθθίονα καÈ Εὔξενον ἴστε, πολῖταE, →
hος μετὰ τȏνδ’ ἀνδρȏν Κ̣ὰρ ἔκιχεν θανάτου. ⋮ vacat
I lament these excellent men, for whom, as they accompanied an embassy from [Corinth] of wide dancing places, the sons of the Pyraiboi devised grievous slaughter [---] then in (their?) beloved fatherland grief blossomed. And these two from Ambrakia, Nausistratos and Kallitas, having suffered the same fate, the dark house of Hades confines. Also truly, citizens, know that the Ker of death overtook Aratthion and Euxenos together with these men.
Given its unusual length for a sixth-century epigram and its obvious literary features, including meter, vocabulary and imagery that could be interpreted as prefiguring later elegiac lament, it is no surprise that this text has been the subject of intense discussion among literary scholars, especially those interested in the origins and development of the elegiac and epigrammatic genres.2 A good deal of attention too has been paid to the ways in which the inscribed text is integral to the monument and how it is carefully crafted to elicit emotion.3
Relatively little attention has been paid to the inscription’s historical context and most scholars seem content with an interpretation proposed by Cassio and argued more forcefully by Randone.4 According to these scholars, the otherwise unattested Pyraiboi should be identified with the Peraiboi mentioned by Homer as living in the neighborhood of Dodona, even though these Pyraiboi/Peraiboi are otherwise unattested as an Epirote ethnos by any historical source. Instead, the argument holds, both the Peraboi and the Pyraboi should be identified with the Thessalian Perrhaebi, whose presences at Dodona, Ambracia and in the region of Thessalian Perrhaebia can all be explained by the fact that at least during the Archaic and early Classical periods this ethnos included a significant population of transhumant pastoralists residing seasonally both on the high peaks of the Pindus range and in lowland coastal plains to both the east and west.
The city of Ambracia stood beside the Arachthus River at a distance of approximately 18 km to the north of the river’s mouth on the Gulf of Ambracia. Its territory comprised chiefly of the intervening coastal plain. According to the standard interpretation, the four Ambraciots named in the inscription were all murdered close to home while accompanying (με (τ )ιόντας) an embassy (ἀνγε̣[λ]ί̣αν) as it travelled across this plain from the city’s port on the coast. The murderers were apparently a population of transhumant pastoralists seasonally present in the city’s territory after having brought their flocks down from the high Pindus to the coastal plain. Despite involving numerous doubtful suppositions this interpretation is now often taken for granted by scholars usually more interested in the poem’s literary features. Bowie, for example, states matter-of-factly that in the poem “we learn of the dire death met by the commemorated at the hands of Pyrhaeboi while, it seems, they were escorting envoys who had arrived at the city’s seaport from Corinth.”5
The historical implications of this interpretation demand to be appreciated. Published after Salmon’s Wealthy Corinth and Hammond’s monumental history of Epirus, the Ambracian monument has largely been overlooked in subsequent discussions of both the history of Epirus during the Archaic period and of the nature of Corinthian colonization in the region. Nevertheless, it comprises what is perhaps our most important single piece of evidence for the history of Ambracia and its relationship to the indigenous Epirotes during the Archaic period. The early history of Ambracia remains, like that of Epirus more generally, obscure. Archaic literary evidence is virtually nonexistent and fifth-century sources are not much better. Herodotus collects no Ambracian logoi and for accounts of the colony’s foundation the surviving sources are no earlier than the Late Hellenistic period.6 The fullest account, that of Antoninus Liberalis (Metamorphoses 4), cites both the second-century BC epic poet Nicander of Colophon and the author of an Ambrakika, Athanadas (FGrH 303 F 1). The latter is an otherwise unknown historian, but presumably a local Ambraciot – Jacoby plausibly dates him to the third century BC. Additional accounts of ps.-Scymnus (453–455), Nicolaus of Damascus (FGrH 90 F 57–60, relying on Ephorus) and Strabo (7.7.6; 10.2.8) generally agree in broad outline, suggesting that the colony was owed to Cypselus, who sent his son Gorgus as oikistês in the latter half of the seventh century. That narrative is compatible too with Aristotle’s claim in the Politics that the Ambraciots established a new form of government (according to Aristotle, a ‘democracy’) after they expelled Gorgus’ son Periander (5.1304a 31–33), an event that should perhaps date to approximately a century before the Persian Wars.
Additional details are scarce, but they agree with these late accounts in suggesting that the new colony thrived. Herodotus records the Ambraciots as sending seven triremes to Salamis and 500 hoplites to Plataea (8.45 and 9.28), the largest contributions of any single polis in northwest Greece (only a dozen poleis contributed more hoplites at Plataea). Our earliest detailed historical narratives are owed to Thucydides, whose account clearly suggests that at the outset of the Peloponnesian War Ambracia was the most powerful and influential polis in Epirus. For developments during the late Archaic and early Classical periods, then, we are left with tremendous gaps, but here at least archaeology offers the promise of new evidence and in recent decades archaeological work has produced an increasing abundance of architectural and other material evidence that seems to confirm that already by the Late Archaic period Corinth’s colony on the Ambracian Gulf had grown into a powerful and prosperous polis.7
Randone’s interpretation of our monument, however, would paint a far grimmer picture of Archaic Ambracia and its relations with indigenous populations: the city, beset by marauding transhumant pastoralists, was apparently unable even to guarantee the security of citizens travelling between the polis and its seaport.8 Perhaps more importantly according to this interpretation the inscription would be crucial evidence both for our reconstruction of the nature of Epirote ethnê and as seemingly unambiguous evidence for a mode of long-distance transhumant pastoralism that most economic historians consider unlikely to have been practiced in mainland Greece during the Archaic and Classical periods.
Problems: Historical, Literary and Archaeological
Quite apart from the fact that it suggests a portrait of the polis that seems to be at odds with our other evidence, there are numerous problems with this interpretation and it is not surprising that some historians, including notably Fantasia, have continued to seek alternate explanations.9 Perhaps the most obvious of these is that if the ‘sons of the Pyraiboi’ were pastoralists responsible for the murder of Ambraciots while accompanying an embassy from the city’s port of Ambracus to the polis, the monument itself would make little sense as a public commemoration and find no good analogies in the Archaic or Classical periods. Why preserve this particular memory of an apparently random act of violence and what political purpose could such an elaborate memorial serve?10 How can this apparent portrait of insecurity be reconciled with the materiality of the monument itself, which, with its size and prominent location along an impressively wide avenue, suggests a deliberate manifestation of the polis’ power?11
The imagined historical context too is fraught with difficulties. Not least of these is that while previous discussions confidently identify Ambracia’s seaport as Ambracus and note its distance of approximately 18 km from the polis, there is no evidence or even reason to suspect that any such port existed in the Archaic period. The site of Ambracus is first mentioned only by ps.-Scylax in the latter half of the fourth century BC. Ps.-Skylax describes it not as a commercial port but as a fort, teixos, and a closed harbor, kleistos limên (33). Additional evidence suggests its value was primarily strategic, including especially Polybius’ account of Philip V’s campaign in 219 BC, which makes clear that the harbor was well fortified by outworks and a wall and surrounded by marshes, through which it was connected to the mainland only by a narrow causeway (4.61.4–7). Surveying the site, Hammond found no ceramic evidence earlier than the fourth century BC and so far no additional data has emerged to challenge his theory that Ambracus was only constructed in response to Molossian expansion south to the Gulf of Ambracia through the coastal plain west of the Arachthus River.12 It is perhaps hard to imagine the strategic necessity of such a fort in the Archaic period, but even if we presume that Ambracus already existed there is no reason an embassy arriving from Corinth would have debarked there, since the Arachthus was navigable as far as the city itself. That remained the case throughout later antiquity, as shown for example by Livy’s account of the Roman siege of the city in 189 BC, which makes clear that the Arachthus was not only navigable but also, because it flowed close to the city’s walls, unusually convenient for hauling up necessary materials (38.3.9–11). The Arachthus is no longer navigable as far as Arta, with shallows midway in its course, but we know that in antiquity the river took a more direct course to the sea and that subsequent alluviation has caused the river to jump its banks and shift its course eastwards across the coastal plain. We know, furthermore, that this must be a relatively recent development, since according to the testimony of Cyriacus of Ancona the Arachthus remained navigable as far upriver as Arta even as late as the fifteenth century (Epistle 3, Mehus 1742). There is little reason then to imagine Ambraciots escorting an embassy travelling overland from the city’s seaport across an unstable landscape, since the polis certainly would have had a port on the Arachthus immediately adjacent to the city. Recent discoveries hold out the promise that infrastructure related to shipping on the river may be discovered in the future.
If the existence of a sixth-century seaport already appears improbable, the presence of pastoral Pyraiboi in Ambracian territory seems even more unlikely. These Epirote Pyraiboi are otherwise unattested. Homer’s Catalogue of Ships, however, famously situates a tribe of Peraiboi, with epsilon rather than ypsilon, in the region of Dodona (Iliad 2.748–752). Although many scholars are happy to identify the form Peraiboi as a metrically necessary variant for Perrhaiboi – with double rhos – the latter name was known only for the inhabitants of Thessalian Perrhaebia, and the apparent disjunction between Homeric geography and historical reality – the Perrhaebi lived well east of the Pindus – became during classical antiquity a famous problem of Homeric scholarship. That ancient scholars could find no historically reliable evidence that these Perrhaebi had ever lived west of the Pindus, or indeed anywhere other than in Northern Thessaly, is obvious from the sources attested primarily by Strabo and Stephanus of Byzantium. Ingenious solutions were proposed, including positing the existence of a second, Thessalian Dodona.13 In light of the well-known Homeric problem, early commentators on the epigram were reluctant to identify the Pyraiboi attested in it with the Homeric Peraiboi, even if they saw no better solution.14 Cassio subsequently dismisses their concerns, suggesting that the problem of the identity of the Pyraboi is in fact “much less complicated” than these scholars believed.15 Cassio cites the first four lines of a fragment of Sophocles that he suggests had somehow been overlooked by both ancient and modern scholars interested in the Homeric problem (fr. 271.1–4 Radt):
ῥεῖ γὰρ (scil. ὁ Ἴναχος) ἀπ’ ἄκρας
Πίνδου Λάκμου τ’ ἀπὸ Περραιβῶν
εἰς Ἀμφιλόχους καὶ Ἀκαρνᾶνας,
μίσγει δ’ ὕδασιν τοῖς Ἀχελῴου.
The Inachus flows from the heights of Pindus
and from Lakmos, from the Perrhaebi
to the Amphilochians and the Acharnanians,
and mixes with the waters of the Acheloüs.
Sophocles, according to Cassio, knows a tribe of Epirote Perrhaebi living along the high spine of the Pindus on Mt. Lakmos, and this tribe is identical with both Homer’s Peraiboi and the Pyraiboi attested at Ambracia.
Mt. Lakmos, however, is far from Ambracia (the most direct modern rout from the peak to the city of Arta is well over 100 km) and their presence in our inscription can only be explained by positing that these Perrhaebi were transhumant pastoralists seasonally moving their flocks long distances from the tall peaks of the Pindus range to the lowlands of both Thessaly and the Gulf of Ambracia. This transhumance model had long been proposed for the Epirote ethnê, usually by direct analogy to the region’s more recent Vlachs and Sarakatsani. Hammond argued most forcefully for this model of Epirote and Macedonian ethnicity,16 and although he seems to have remained unaware of our Ambracian inscription he too suggested that the Homeric problem of the Peraiboi should be explained by long-distance transhumant pastoralism. Like Cassio, Hammond focused on the evidence afforded by Strabo, arguing that when the geographer describes the Perrhaebi as a people that migrated (μετανάσται) he refers specifically to the seasonal migration of long-distance transhumant pastoralists. He further proposed linking this hypothesis to the ancient claim that the Perrhaebi resided on Mt. Lakmos:
The particular interest of this passage is that it is impossible for a people and their sheep to live on Pindus during the winter, when the land is covered with snow and it is extremely cold. It follows that the people named by Strabo lived there only in the summer months … We can thus understand the epithet ‘migratory’ as applied to the Perrhaebi; for in the winter they went presumably from western Pindus to the Perrhaebi who were settled in north-east Thessaly near the coast.17
For Hammond, then, the Perrhaebi lived seasonally in both Epirus and Thessaly. More recently, Randone connects Hammond’s model directly to Cassio’s interpretation of our Ambracian elegy.18 The Perrhaebi not only lived seasonally on the high peaks of the Pindus range in Epirus and in the lowlands of Thessaly, but also, at least at some point during the sixth century BC, in the coastal plains of Epirus along the northern shore of the Gulf of Ambracia.
None of this, however, is convincing. Strabo does not use μετανάσται to refer to transhumant pastoralists seasonally living in different regions, a fact made clear in his introduction, when he discusses the Perrhaebi together with other populations traditionally believed to have migrated (again explicitly called μετανάσται), including the Dorians, Ionians, Carians, Cimmerians and Galatians (1.3.21). More importantly, Hammond’s model of Epirote and Macedonian ethnicity is contradicted by virtually all of the relevant evidence – literary, epigraphic and archaeological – and Hatzopoulos is surely correct in concluding that Hammond’s ‘tribal states’ are nonexistent, since “no more in Upper Macedonia than in Epirus is there the slightest vestige of groups united by parentage or descent.”19 These ethnê are rather geographic; they are, according to Haztopoulos, “original groupings of rural communities.”20
Indeed the geographic origin of many of the Epirote ethnê is apparent in some of their attested names, such as the Parauaioi, literally, it seems, “the people [living] along the Aous River.”21 Furthermore, while pastoralism more generally was doubtless of crucial importance for the economies and societies of both Epirus and Upper Macedonia, long-distance transhumance in these regions, like Greece more generally, remains unlikely during the Archaic and Classical periods.22 Even if environmental determinism might suggest that herders would wish to optimize productivity by moving their flocks over long distances, that logic ignores far more important real-world economic considerations – especially risk and particularly risk posed by other humans. In the absence of stable, unitary political regimes long-distance transhumance is rarely a viable economic strategy. Positive evidence for long-distance pastoralism in Early Iron Age and Archaic Greece is almost completely lacking. Epirus, specifically, is no different. In summarizing the results of the Southern Epirus survey project, Tartaron addresses directly this problem of long-distance transhumance, concluding all of the available evidence speaks against it. In his view Epirus in the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age can be characterized by “a subsistence economy based on mixed farming and short-distance, vertical transhumant pastoralism.”23 The ethnê of Epirus no doubt relied heavily on pastoralism, but they would have found both summer and winter pasturage within the same local geographic regions that were at least originally of fundamental significance for the identity formation of particular Epirote ethnê.
There likewise is no good reason to believe that any Perrhaebi (or Peraiboi/Pyraiboi), specifically, ever engaged in long-distance transhumance. Insofar as the Thessalian Perrhaebi engaged in transhumant pastoralism it was likely short-distance and vertical since the region of Perrhaebia itself included both upland pasture on the shoulders of Mt. Olympus and lowland grazing areas in the fertile plains near their principal towns such as Oloosson and Phalanna. More pointedly, Cassio’s characterization of the fragment of Sophocles is misleading. Cassio quotes only the first four lines of the fragment, without acknowledging the existence of additional lines showing that Sophocles not only imagined the Inachus River rising on Mt. Lakmos and flowing to the sea but also then cleaving beneath the waves to somehow reemerge in Argos. This is mythical geography, a fact acknowledged by Strabo, who dismisses Sophocles’ account as mythos (τῷ περὶ τοῦ Ἰνάχου μύθῳ, 6.2.4). Interestingly, Strabo links his citation of Sophocles to a discussion of Hecataeus, whose testimony he seems to recognize as related but considers more reliable (βελτίων). Hecataeus imagines not only the Inachus but also the Aias (Aous/Aoös) flowing from Mt. Lakmos. This suggests that to Hecataeus Lakmos did not designate specifically the series of tall ridges now called by the same name but rather a less precisely defined region of high peaks to both the north and the south of the passes between Epirus and central Greece and Thessaly, including the tall peaks to the north of Metsovo that are the actual source of the Aoös. Based on additional fragments of Hecataeus, Hammond argues that he must have been Sophocles’ source for the claim that the Perrhaebi reside on Mt. Lakmos (and likewise for additional references in Strabo to their residing on Pindus).24 The logic here can only be guessed at, but Hecataeus’ conception of Mt. Lakmos as including the northern Pindus allows us to imagine him locating the Perrhaebi on the peaks immediately to the west of their ancestral homeland in northern Thessaly. It should probably strike us as curious that this geographical claim making the Perrhaebi resident on the high Pindus is similar to modern attempts to rationalize Homer by identifying the Titaressos (or Titaresios) with various rivers with headwaters to the west in the high Pindus and draining into the Peneios, and in so doing trying to bridge the gap between Dodona and Thessaly by allowing the Thessalian Perrhaebi and the Homeric Peraiboi to somehow reside together.25 It is, I would argue, pure fiction. There is no historically reliable evidence that places the Perrhaebi on the Pindus in the Archaic or Classical periods and that solution still would not bring the Perrhaebi to Dodona or, for that matter, to Ambracia.
Finally, Cassio acknowledges yet another historical problem in attempting to explain why the otherwise unattested form Pyraiboi occurs at Ambracia to describe what he posits is in reality a population of the Perrhaebi. He suggests that a form with single rho is owed to the same metrical necessity posited for Homer’s Peraiboi, which is not implausible, but he further attempts to explain the more problematic substitution at Ambracia of ypsilon for the Homeric and Thessalian epsilons as the variant transliteration of a foreign vowel sound in a non-Greek name, analogous to Latin Bruttii and Greek Brettioi.26 The Thessalian Perrhaebi, however, like also all of the ethnê of Epirus, were undoubtedly Greek, and if there were really Epirote Perrhaebi seasonally pasturing their flocks along the Gulf of Ambracia, there is no good reason to believe that the Ambracians would have called them Pyraiboi.
A Novel Hypothesis: Death on the Road to Dodona
There is a better and far simpler solution to the problems of identifying the Pyraeboi and explaining the mysterious circumstances of our Ambracian monument: reference in the poem to the otherwise enigmatic ‘sons of the Pyraiboi’ does not denote real, pastoral Pyraiboi, but is, rather, a carefully chosen and highly poetic allusion. Scholars have frequently noted that the poem is unusually literary for such an early inscribed epigram – in Day’s view everything about the text “suggests professional composition” including the way the poem conveys its meanings with “authority, specificity, emotion and poetic skill.”27 The poem’s epic features too have long been noted. The formula genitive ethnic + παῖδες is not found in Archaic epic, but it is parallel to Homeric formulations like υἷες Ἀχαίων or κοῦροι Ἀθηναίων.28 In the Ambracian elegy Πυραιβȏν occurs in the same position in the hexameter as Homer’s Περαιβοί and as also noted by Graninger, the verb used to describe the Pyraiboi’s devising of murder, μητίομαι, is otherwise only found in epic during the Archaic period.29 Although any claims about Homeric allusion, specifically, cannot hope to sidestep altogether debates about dates of composition and the nature of the early transmission of the epics, for my purposes these issues are not crucial, although I suspect it is not improbable that material found in the Catalogue of Ships regularly belonged to the repertoires of bards in the Late Archaic period. At the same time, there is little reason to doubt the general assumption that in the latter half of the sixth century the transmission of such material would have remained oral. I would suggest that the Homeric Peraiboi living around Dodona were not yet the Thessalian Perrhaebi as established by Homeric scholarship and as such that bit of epic existed untethered to any historical reality. The alteration of ypsilon at Ambracia for the Homeric epsilon is best understood as reflecting the kind of variation that is typical of oral poetic traditions.
Even if it is also a characteristically poetic formulation, that the murderers of the embassy are described as ‘the sons of the Pyraeboi’ is nevertheless striking and commentators have attempted to explain this emphasis, which seems to be deliberate and enhanced by enjambment.30 I would suggest that it acts to signal something of the distance between real and epic geographies – the murderers are not the Homeric P(y/e)raiboi but rather their historical descendants. At the same time, we perhaps should be careful not to place too much emphasis on this distinction between real and mythical geography. The work of scholars like Malkin has highlighted the central role that myth and especially nostoi accounts played in the experience of colonists situating their experiences on the landscapes of Northwestern Greece.31 That dynamic is conveniently illustrated by a well-known dedication made at Olympia by the colony of Apollonia sometime in the middle of the fifth century BC. Pausanias describes the monument and records the accompanying epigram of which a few fragments are also attested archaeologically at Olympia (5.22.2–3). It consists of two elegiac couplets reporting that the dedication is from the spoils taken at the otherwise obscure site of Thronion after the Apollonians had “conquered with the help of the gods the limits of the land of Abantis.”32 No reference is made in the poem to the ‘real’ political geography of the indigenous Epirotes with whom the Apollonians had waged their war. Pausanias assumes the poem’s mythical geography is sufficiently obscure as to require detailed exegesis (5.22.4). Yet it apparently would have been perfectly intelligible to the colonists of Apollonia.
In the Ambracian elegy I suspect that the allusion to Dodona may have been made more concrete in the immediately subsequent lines, which could have included reference to Zeus, or to the oracle, or simply to wintry Dodona. Those lines may have also furnished some additional details about the circumstances of the murders, but unless the missing block is discovered one can really only speculate. On the other hand, presuming that the commemorated Ambraciots died while accompanying a delegation to the oracle at Dodona is sufficient to explain or can better explain virtually every puzzling feature of the monument, including, notably, the apparent absence of the dead. Although frequently described in the literature as a polyandrion the monument appears rather to be a cenotaph.33 For our understanding of the poem’s literary features, this fact is of little concern, since the poem can be read as acknowledging this absence, but for the orthodox historical interpretation the lack of actual burials is more difficult to explain. Surely, if these Ambraciots were murdered while escorting an embassy across the city’s own territory the bodies would have been recovered and buried in what otherwise appears to be a characteristic type of Ambracian funerary enclosure.34 In all probability the bodies of the dead Ambraciots could not be recovered because they remained far from the city, somewhere along the route to Dodona.
This road to Dodona is far from hypothetical. In the Archaic and later periods the easiest and often the only practicable route to Dodona from the poleis of southern and western Greece was by way of Ambracia. A series of rugged limestone ridges running north-northwest to south-southeast made overland travel in Epirus difficult, especially travelling east or west. Its rivers cut deep and frequently impassible canyons through regions of flysch. The easiest land route from the Gulf of Ambracia up to the highland plateau that begins around Ioannina and that gives access to the rest of the Balkans lay on the flanks of Mt. Xherovouni which rises just across the Arachthus river to the north of Ambracia. Likewise, the only convenient land route south from Epirus into Amphilochia and then into Aetolia and Acharnania and from there to southern Greece, passed through the territory of Ambracia along the northern and eastern shore of the Gulf. The route on the shoulder of Mt. Xerovouni ran directly north passing close to Dodona. In his monumental study of Epirus Hammond traces this route in detail and describes its importance in antiquity and it is no coincidence that in the Ottoman period the caravan road from Arta to Ioannina followed the same route.35 During the summer months, after the snow in the high passes around Metsovo melted, Dodona could also be reached from Central Greece to the east, but the only other practical route from the west began far to the north at the coast near Buthrotum (modern Butrint), a fact conveniently illustrated by the reconstruction of Aeneas’ journey to consult the oracle as given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities 1.51.1):
Ἐκ δὲ Ἀμβρακίας Ἀγχίσης μὲν τὰς ναῦς ἔχων παρὰ γῆν κομιζόμενος εἰς Βουθρωτὸν λιμένα τῆς Ἠπείρου κατάγεται, Αἰνείας δὲ καὶ οἱ ἀκμαιότατοι σὺν αὐτῷ τοῦ στρατοῦ διανύσαντες ἡμερῶν δυεῖν ὁδὸν εἰς Δωδώνην ἀφικνοῦνται χρησόμενοι τῷ θεῷ … ἀνελόμενοι δὲ χρησμοὺς περὶ τῆς ἀποικίας … ἐπὶ τὸ ναυτικὸν ἀφικνοῦνται τεττάρων μάλιστα ἡμερῶν διελθόντες ὁδόν.
From Ambracia Anchises took the ships along the coast to Bouthrotum, a port in Epirus, while Aeneas with the strongest men from his army traversing the road to Dodona arrived in two days, intending to consult the oracle … And having received responses regarding his colony … they rejoined the fleet after making a journey of about four days.36
For a delegation from Corinth in the sixth century BC there is little doubt that the road to Dodona would have started at Ambracia. The more arduous and northerly route from Buthrotum required a longer and more dangerous coastal voyage, and perhaps more importantly those sea lanes and likewise a coastal peraia – including in all likelihood the fortified site of Buthrotum itself – were controlled by the Corcyraeans, with whom by the second half of the sixth century BC the Corinthians had long had notoriously fraught relations.37
The importance of Ambracia in providing access to Dodona in the Late Archaic period is not widely appreciated, but Papadopoulos has recently noted the city’s significance for the more general purposes of trade, observing that “any commodities, including pottery, produced in central or southern Greece found at sites such as Vitsa Zagoriou and Dodone in Epirus must have gone through Ambrakia.”38 It is likewise probably no coincidence that there is evidence for a marked increase in bronze dedications at Dodona following the foundation of Ambracia in the late seventh century. Recent scholarship suggests that already by the middle of the sixth century BC Ambracia had an important bronze-working industry and Papadopoulos concludes by describing the city as “a neglected center that played a much more pivotal role in the production and movement of commodities, as well as people and ideas, than is currently conceded.”39
That the Corinthians and her colonists visited Dodona already in the Archaic period can hardly be doubted, and, even if there is no likelihood of recovering the circumstances of the delegation recorded in the elegy, it is hardly a mystery as to why it might have required the accompaniment of Ambraciots who not only knew the route but also would have had opportunities to cultivate necessary relationships with the indigenous Epirotes, both those who lived along the route and also those who controlled the sanctuary itself. I would argue that it is only this essential political context – the relationship between Corinth’s increasingly powerful colony and its indigenous neighbors to the north – that can explain the existence of the Ambracian monument.
Conclusions: Myth, Meaning and Political Memory
The central religious but also political significance of Dodona in the construction of Epirote identity in later periods is well appreciated by historians and noted explicitly by our ancient sources. A fragment of Theopompus owed to Strabo attributes the rise of Molossian power in the late fifth and first half of the fourth century directly to its having gained control of Dodona (7.7.5; FGrH 115 F 382). Previously that control seems to have belonged to the Thesprotians, or perhaps at certain points the Chaonians, whom the same passage of Theopompus describes as having controlled all of Epirus prior to the Molossians. Curiously little attention has been paid to the even less well-understood, but nevertheless important, role that Ambracia must have played in both providing extra-regional access to Dodona and in mediating relations between Epirote ethnê in the Archaic and Early Classical periods. Admittedly we are hamstrung by the lack of literary sources but I would suggest that clues about Ambracian/Epirote relations, and the central significance of Dodona therein can be deduced from Thucydides’ highly selective account of Ambracia’s actions in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Unfortunately, discussing in appropriate detail that evidence would require a second chapter, but in concluding I note here two few key features of this evidence.40
First, it is clear that at the outbreak of the war the Ambracians enjoy a position of leadership relative to the Epirote ethnê, with whose interests their own are clearly aligned. In 430 during the second summer of the war, Ambracia invaded their neighbors to the south, the Amphilochians, “having raised,” Thucydides tells us, “many of the barbarians” (2.68.1–2, τῶν βαρβάρων πολλοὺς ἀναστήσαντες). An additional passage makes clear that these ‘barbarians’ are in fact Epirotes, specifically “Chaonians and some other neighbouring barbarians” (καὶ Χαόνων καὶ ἄλλων τινῶν τῶν πλησιοχώρων βαρβάρων) who, after the campaign is unsuccessful, return home and disperse κατὰ ἔθνη (2.68.9). Thucydides’ account of the causes of Ambracian hostility is highly specious and obscures the evident fact that the Epirotes were willing allies of the Ambracians and motivated by a shared antipathy towards Athens and her allies, including especially the Corcyraeans.41 The role of the Chaonians and the importance of their relationship with Ambracia is made more explicit in Thucydides’ account of the campaigns the following year in 429, when the Ambracians managed to persuade Corinth, her other colonies and Sparta, to undertake a far more ambitious invasion with the goal not only of liberating Amphilochia but of subduing the whole of Aetolia and Acharnania. We need not worry about the details of that campaign which proved to be ill-conceived, but for our understanding of Ambracia’s relationship to the Epirotes Thucydides’ description of the organization of forces (2.80) is, as Hornblower phrases it, ‘very precious indeed’. Historians are probably right in interpreting this passage as suggesting that the Chaonians exercised some degree of authority over many, if not all, of the Epirote ethnê. Of interest too is Thucydides’ mention of the Molossian king Tharyps as not yet of age and the fact that the Epirotes clearly have close relations with the ethnê of western Macedonia, likewise constructed as barbarian by Thucydides.
Second, Thucydides’ construction of the Epirotes as barbarians functions as a kind of narratological device that works to obscure the degree to which in the early years of the war the Athenians pursued what would turn out to be a remarkably effective foreign policy aimed at detaching the Epirotes from Ambracian and Peloponnesian influence. That policy would eventually result in the Athenians promoting the interests of the Molossians over the other Epirote ethnê. More importantly, for our purposes, it is surely no coincidence that the earliest public Athenian dedications appear at Dodona in precisely this same context.
The failed Epirote and Ambracian invasion of Aetolia and Acharnania in 429 was accompanied by a series of embarrassing naval defeats for the Peloponnesians in the Corinthian Gulf. It is almost certain that the earliest public Athenian dedication at Dodona dates precisely to 429, after the battle of Naupactus, since an inscription partially preserved on three fragments of a bronze sheet records the Athenians as having made their dedication “from the spoils of the Peloponnesians” after “having conquered in a naval battle.”42 Scholarship on this dedication is curious – it has most often been explained in the context of Athens’ relationship to Delphi, to which, it was generally held, Athens had limited access in the early years of the war. That view no longer finds universal support; Hornblower, for example, is skeptical, yet the best alternate explanation he can offer is that Dodona happened to be convenient to the site of the battle.43 This cannot be true given that the Athenians would have had to sail first to the Corcyrean peraia and from there take the longer overland route to Dodona. The conclusion seems unavoidable to me that the Athenians’ dedication at Dodona was a politically pointed gesture and part of a wider policy aimed at detaching the Epirotes from Ambracian influence. This foreign policy proved markedly successful. By 426 when the Ambracians again invade Amphilochia and suffer two catastrophic defeats in a mere three days – what Thucydides describes as the worst disaster to befall any single Greek city in the war in so short a time (3.113.6) – they are accompanied by no Epirote allies and contemporary Athenian literary sources suggest that an even more expansive Epirote policy was hotly discussed at Athens in the immediate wake of that disaster.44 The results of that foreign policy in subsequent decades are manifest – Molossian interests were promoted at Athens over those of the other Epirote ethnê and already within the reign of King Tharyps, the Molossians, with Athenian support, gained control of Dodona.
These events are all much later than our sixth-century funerary monument but I suggest that it is in fundamentally similar social and political contexts that our Ambracian monument can begin to make sense. Though ostensibly intended to inspire pity and mourn the dead, as Day notes the monument is also clearly designed to ‘elicit awe and patriotism’ and as such it clearly has a political purpose. For the Ambraciots, allusion to the sons of the Pyraboi was sufficient to locate the murderers on a mythical-historical landscape in which Dodona was of central significance, a fact that would explain too why the city would have been so keen to preserve the memory of this murdered embassy, since guaranteeing the polis’ access to that sanctuary and justifying a policy of active intervention among the Epirote ethnê for whom control of that sanctuary was of immense political importance are what mattered and would continue to matter well into the Classical period.
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Notes
1
SEG 41.540A incorporates various readings proposed by Matthaiou (1990–1991) [1993]; Bousquet (1992), which appeared almost simultaneously soon after the editio princeps, Andreou (1986) [1991]. Additional modifications are owed to Cassio (1994); D’Alessio (1995). The text given here is identical to Day (2019) 238, and the accompanying translation (like also Day [2007] 31) is much superior to attempts to render other versions of the text, e.g. Bowie (2010) 362; Graninger (2014) 226.
2
See e.g. Day (2007) 30–31; Passa (2008); Faraone (2008) 133–136; Bowie (2010) 361–362; Estrin (2020).
3
See, most recently, Day (2019) 241–242; Estrin (2020).
4
Cassio (1994) 104–105; Randone (2013).
5
Bowie (2010) 362.
6
For detailed discussion, see Salmon (1984) and more recently Fantasia (2017).
7
See Andreou (1993), but a good deal of subsequent work still awaits publication or effective synthesis. For the importance of Archaic Ambracia as a center for production and trade, see now Papadopoulos (2009). For a general history of the polis, see Fantasia (2017). For a well-illustrated overview of the Ambracian monument in the context of other burial enclosures south of the city’s walls, see Angeli (2013).
8
Randone (2013).
9
Graninger (2014) offers a different interpretation, but it is based on a less convincing reconstruction of the text. Fantasia (2017) 29–43, which I became aware of only after this chapter had been written, offers a far more compelling reconstruction. I note that although a number of his arguments overlap with mine (which, however, I first presented publicly in 2016), his conclusions – that the memorial commemorates for different political reasons an embassy that was killed on an inland journey perhaps to the colony of Apollonia – remain sufficiently different from my own.
10
If the violence was not random, but targeted, the poem makes even less sense, since nothing in the text suggests these deaths occurred in any regular state of war. I can think of no similarly elaborate public commemorations for deaths occurring in any comparable circumstances. Perhaps the closest analogy is afforded by the elaborate cenotaph at Corcyra honoring Menekrates, who had been lost at sea, but the epigram (CEG 143) makes clear that although a public monument its construction was owed to Menekrates’ status as an elite and to the initiative of his brother Praximenes.
11
See on this point Day (2019) 242: “The cenotaph’s location and size ‘speak’ with the authority of the polis that commanded the resources to place such a monument in such a site. The epigram exudes comparable physical authority with its magnitude, location on the monument, decorative layout, and ethnically resonant script.”
12
Hammond (1967) 137–139.
13
Strabo 7.7.12 with book 7 fr. 1 Radt and Steph. Byz., s.v. Δωδώνη (both cite additional Thessalian authorities). On these sources see esp. Allen (1921) 130–137.
14
See esp. Matthaiou (1990–1991) [1993]; Bousquet (1992) 600–601.
15
Cassio (1994) 104 (“molto meno complesso”).
16
Hammond (1967) 23–33; esp. Hammond (2000).
17
Hammond (2000) 346.
18
Randone (2013) 33.
19
Hatzopoulos (1996) 77–104 (quote at p. 103). According to Hatzopoulos, Hammond himself soon renounced his interpretation through personal correspondence (BE 2001.261).
20
Hatzopoulos (1996) 220.
21
The problem of the nature of the Epirote ethnê becomes much more complex in later periods and a wide range of differing views have been expressed; see e.g. Meyer (2013).
22
See e.g. Halstead (1987); Cherry (1988); Hodkinson (1988).
23
Tartaron (2004) 14.
24
Hammond (1967) 458–459.
25
See esp. Allen (1921) 130–137, or more recently Hope Simpson and Lazenby (1970) 149–150.
26
Cassio (1994) 105.
27
Day (2019) 242. Similar views about the quality and sophistication of the poem are frequently expressed; see e.g. most recently Estrin (2020) 300–301.
28
The epic construction seems to have been similarly echoed at Athens with παῖδες Ἀθεναίον in what appears to have been the city’s first public epigram, commemorating their victory over the Boeotians and Chalcidians in 507/506 BC (IG I3 501; CEG 179).
29
Graninger (2014) 235, n. 30, pointing out an interesting parallel at Il. 15.348–351.
30
See e.g. Randone (2013) 37–38; Graninger (2014) 234–235.
31
Malkin (1998); Malkin (2001).
32
I. Apollonia T303 (SEG 15.251; CEG 1.390): μνάματ’ Ἀπολλονίας ἀ̣[νακείμεθα τὰν ἐνὶ πόντοι] / [Ἰ]ονίοι Φοῖβος ϝοί[κισ’ ἀκερσεκόμας], / [οἱ γ]ᾶ̣[ς τέ]ρ̣μ̣α̣θ̣’ [ἑλόντες Ἀβαντίδος ἐνθάδε ταῦτα] / [ἔστασαν σὺν θεοῖς ἐκ Θρονίο δεκάταν].
33
Andreou (1986) [1991]. Matthaiou (1990/1991) [1993] challenges Andreou’s claim that the monument included no Archaic burials, but here, at least, the excavators seem to have a convincing response (Andreou and Andreou (1988) [1995]). The shaft burials clearly visible in photographs from the original publication report are apparently of a much later date.
34
For the comparanda see Angeli (2013). The conundrum is well demonstrated by Estrin’s recent discussion, which argues that the poem acknowledges the absence of the corpses but without attempting to explain where exactly they died or why they could not have been recovered ([2020] 302). Graninger (2014) offers a different reading, according to which the Ambracians were not accompanying an embassy at all but were rather murdered while “bringing a message from … ” I do not find this reconstruction convincing but I note that it is compatible with my argument that these Ambraciots were killed while on the way to or from Dodona. The absence of the dead is a key focus too for Fantasia (2017) 29–43.
35
Hammond (1967) 33–38 and esp. 154–161. A second, less convenient route from Ambracia followed the valley of the Louros River.
36
My translation.
37
It is often assumed that Buthrotum was controlled by Corcyra already during the Archaic period; see e.g. Hammond (1967) 499; more recently Hernandez (2017) 212–213. For the well-attested enmity between Corinth and Coryca, see e.g. Salmon (1984) 270–272.
38
Papadopoulos (2009) 237.
39
Papadopoulos (2009) 238.
40
On the evidence from Thucydides, see esp. Hornblower (1997), and, most recently, Pascual (2018) 55–57.
41
Thucydides notes that already in 433 at Cheimerion, before the naval battle at Sybota, the Epirotes on the mainland had voluntarily come streaming to the aid of the Corinthians and her allies (1.47.3).
42
IG I3 1462: Ἀθεναῖοι ⋮ ἀπὸ Πελοπον[ν]εσίον · ναυμαχίαι ⋮ νικέσαντες ⋮ ἀ[νέθεσαν … .
43
Hornblower (1997) 370 and 521–522.
44
Hammond (1967) 505.