Memory Shift: Reinventing the Mythology, 100 Bc-AD 100

Ken Dowden

τον δε περί τήν Ελλάδα τόπον μυρίαι μεν φθοραι κατέσχον έξαλείφουσαι τήν μνήμην των γεγονότων (‘But a myriad destructions have fallen upon the region of Greece, wiping out the memory of events.') Josephus, against Apion 1.10

Die Griechen dagegen hätten unzählige Bücher, die sich alle widersprächen.

(‘The Greeks had countless books on this that all contradicted each other.') Assmann 1992: 270, summarizing Josephus, against Apion 1.15¹

In this piece I view mythology as a variety of cultural memory and look at a period in which that memory is challenged. The nature of the challenge is ludic and through virtuoso attempts to rewrite the mythology in more ‘realistic' mode, one's credentials as a participant in the shared culture are affirmed, because to address the mythology is to advertise the power of that shared memory and one's place in maintaining it. Yet there always remained the danger that the nature of the game was not wholly understood and that those who for various reasons adjusted the content of mythology in fact ended up contributing to it.

In a first section, we look at Homer and the mythology, in particular at the deaths of Hektor and Achilles. In the second, we turn to the period 100 Bc—AD 100, and find that the Trojan mythology of Homer is wilfully adapted, in the work of Diktys of Crete, in a showcase epideixis of Dio Chrysostom, and in the work of several others which in a way may be viewed as stemming from the Alexandra of Lykophron and the tradition of commentary on it.

Homer, Myth, Memory

Homer's relationship to mythology, as Fran^oise Letoublon has recently shown, is far from straightforward.² So, for instance, from our perspective there is a myth, part of the larger organism that we call ‘Greek Mythology', whose subject is the death of Hektor and which we find ‘told' in Iliad 22. Another myth is that of Achilles' death, which is strikingly foretold or, rather, briefly referred to (‘forementioned’, maybe) by Hektor himself within Homer's text (Iliad 22.359-60). And we know that if we turn to any modern handbook, a distillation of ancient sources such as Apollodorus' Bibliotheke, we can find ‘the' story. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Homer shows no awareness of the story of the mortal ankle or foot of Achilles (on which see further below). Time and again Homer ‘does not know' some story or fact according to the ancient commentators (it seems to be a formula of Aristarchos'), but there always remains the possibility that he chooses not to know, as I think happens in relation to the sacrifice of Iphigeneia.³ Increasingly we realize that Homer made his choices and that Homer's apparent ignorance should not always be taken to indicate the non-existence of a famous myth in his time. Rather, he establishes the special character of his Muse-guided ‘memory' in relation to the mythology: he does not merely recite the mythology.

Thus from the beginning we are dealing with a mythology that, as I have stressed elsewhere,⁴ is an ‘intertext' - which I now define as a meeting of all tellings of myths in a shared recall, a collective memory. And it is not just the Homeric epics (though they captured something special), but the whole mythological system that constitutes an ‘Organisationsform kulturellen Gedächtnisses' (a format in which cultural memory is organized).⁵ Subscription to this systematic recall does not, however, freeze this material: the intertext can be amplified and moved by new tellings - which will not be ruled out a priori as illegitimate.

As collective memory, Greek mythology therefore occupies the same imaginary space that history does;⁸ and it turns out that it shares many characteristics of what we regard as history, just as history turns out to present the character of a mythology - through selective recall and privileging of its elements, for instance as exempla. When history becomes deep enough it is probably indistinguishable from myth. It is of no consequence whether the Trojan War actually happened, or maybe even whether the kings of Israel actually existed as tradition presents: to insist on historicity is comparable to apologies for the evils of past imperialism - it illegitimately crosses some ‘floating gap’.⁹ But equally any myth happens at a time, or at a point in a sequence, relative to those other myths. It concerns particular places and landscapes, and it has an impact on, or a meaning for, our present. Sometimes this will be dressed up as aetiological, though the real logic may be other than aetiological. And as the logic changes, the myth morphs in the collective memory, if maybe not uncontrollably.

Returning to Achilles’ heel/ankle/foot, Timothy Gantz has examined the evidence for this myth and finds that Achilles is shot in the ankle rather than the heel, and indeed more generally in the foot; but equally it is not clear why such a wound should be fatal unless perhaps once his armour had been impenetrable, or his life-force had, somehow in an earlier version of the story, been concentrated (perhaps hidden) in the ankle or foot.¹⁰ Evidently, observes Gantz, it was in some way necessary for a god to direct the arrow of Paris.

Some story of Achilles’ death must have existed as an entity before Homer and his Iliad. We know further that the author of the Aithiopis, perhaps ‘Arktinos’, took care to ‘tell’ it. In this tradition, to ‘tell’ is to find a point relative to the intertext, the shared memory of teller and audience, that will establish the authority and individual quality of the teller according to the values cherished by that audience and audiences like it. In itself that implies that the story must be realized in a way that tends towards innovation.¹¹

What, then, of Hektor's death? In our present context we do well to recall a startling conclusion of neoanalytic scholarship: Hektor's death and Patroklos' death are both innovations.¹² The figures themselves are either entirely invented by Homer, or extended far beyond any traditional compass they might have had. Indeed, if Homer had not invented, or largely invented, them, he would not have a licence to kill them in his 51 days of history, or if we look at books 3-22, his four days of history. To refer to these stories is to refer to the Iliad.

Thus storytelling works by adjusting and amplifying an agreed stock of cultural material. And this was not just an ephemeral and exploitative event. By engaging with cultural memory, the intertext grew in a non-temporary way, and the cultural memory itself therefore expanded to include the assent of those who carried that memory to the material now proposed - so for instance, Helen never went to Troy but was in Egypt: Stesichoros' Palinode declared that new truth and Euripides could later site his Helen in Egypt.¹³ Thus the works of poets become part of the mythological intertext themselves, that is, constituent parts of the system of mythology.

Radical Realistic Variation (hypolepsis)

Neuheit und Rückblick gehoren zusammen. (‘Modernity and retrospect belong together.')

Assmann 1992: 278

With these preliminaries, we can now turn to the period that is the subject of this chapter - namely, that which extends roughly from 100 bc to 100 ad. In this period there was a penchant for contradicting the by now canonized tradition, which may be seen to come under Assmann's category of ‘hypoleptic' text, new text that serves to bring about controlled change to the system.¹⁴

Some of the texts I am concerned with are little known, certainly within the field of mythological study, and interestingly from the point of view of the preceding section, come from Jacoby's collection of fragments of Greek ‘historians', which is currently being brought up to date with translations and commentary in Brill’s New Jacoby.¹⁵ The first text is the nearest we can get to the Greek original of the account by ‘Diktys of Crete', dating probably from the late first century ad.¹⁶ The arrival of the Amazon Penthesileia tradi­tionally comes immediately after the end of our Iliad, as the text segues into the Aithiopis of Arktinos.¹⁷ In Diktys, this is re-sorted somewhat to create a more plausible pattern of events. Penthesileia represents a much-needed reinforcement that Hektor, not yet dead, is going to meet - but Achilles finds out:

3... Learning that Hektor wanted to meet Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, by night,. Achilles made the first move in secret together with his own army and concealed himself with them, then killed Hektor and all his followers as he crossed the river, leaving only one alive, whose hands he cut off and whom he sent to Priam to report Hektor's death.

BNJ 49 F 7b, tr. K. Dowden¹⁸

So Hektor was ambushed at night and that is how it was possible to kill him. There was a reason Hektor had gone out - to see Penthesileia; the distinctly unheroic ambush, at least for this purpose, sees to his assassination. The dragging of the body is more than mere brutality - it serves a clear and logical purpose. But because it happened at night, no one knew about it in the Greek camp. So Achilles must advertise his death, and does this by dragging his body around in public. Games (those of Iliad 23) celebrate this triumph. The account has taken on a more recognizably realistic character and elements in Homer's story have gained in motivation, once they are reordered.

As we move into the material of Iliad 24, Priam no longer goes alone to the Greek camp but takes family with him, amongst whom we should keep a very careful eye on Polyxena:

5 On the following day, Priam, wearing mourning garb, took with him his maiden daughter Polyxena and Hektor’s wife Andromache and his infant sons Astyanax and Laodamas and arrived at the Greek camp, bringing with him a great quantity of luxury goods, gold, silver and clothing... 6 Priam entered and fell at his feet begging and likewise Andromache with the children. Polyxena embraced [Achilles'] feet and pleaded, weeping, for her brother Hektor, promising to be his slave and stay with him, if he would give back the body. The kings, pitying his old age, appealed on behalf of Priam... [Achilles speaks indignantly]... 7 But they persuaded him to take the ransom and give up the body. And he, giving thought to life's pleasures, turned round and stood Priam up and Polyxena and Andromache too, and told Priam to bathe and to have food and wine with him, because otherwise he would not give up the body to him. After much conversation, they stood up, and, as the ransom was laid on the ground, Achilles saw the quantity of gifts and accepted the gold and silver and some of the clothing. The remainder he gave to Polyxena and returned the body. Priam invited Achilles to keep Polyxena with him. But he said to take her to Ilion, postponing the decision about her for a later occasion.

Meanwhile, the loose end, the near-dead body of Penthesileia, gives rise to some conflict of views:

12 As Penthesileia was still breathing, we debated whether she should be thrown alive into the river or handed to the dogs to eat. Achilles asked us to let her be buried when she died, and when the troops found out they shouted for her to be thrown into the river, and straightaway Diomedes took hold of her by the feet and threw her into the River Skamandros - and she died immediately.

Achilles’ psychology has evolved - and so has that of the army: the army favours brutality to the fallen Penthesilea, whereas Achilles wants the decent thing. This casts a whole new light on the version of Arktinos, no more immune from rewriting than Homer, that Thersites had accused Achilles of falling in love with her at the moment of death - and was killed by Achilles for making that accusation.

Mere days after these events, we move towards the climactic event, the death of Achilles. There is a festival at the temple of Apollo Thymbraios, not far from Ilion, and a truce to allow both parties to make their observances (note that this is a rewritten version of Diktys, in which Teukros tells the story to Achilles’ son Neoptolemos):

19... And as Polyxena came out with Hekabe to go to the shrine, Achilles was stunned at the sight of her. And Priam, seeing Achilles in the grove, sent a person called Idaios to bring proposals to him concerning Polyxena while Achilles was walking alone in the grove of Apollo. Hearing the proposal about her excited Achilles. 20 But when we Greeks saw Idaios spending time with Achilles we were in uproar, on the basis that your father Achilles was betraying us, and we sent him a response through... Aias and Diomedes and Odysseus so that they could pass the message to him not to be confident in the barbarians on his own. They went off and awaited him outside the grove so that they could deliver him the message, but your father Achilles arranged with Idaios to get Polyxena in marriage. 21 After a while Paris and his brother Deiphobos came to Achilles secretly to invite him to marry Polyxena. And Achilles received them privately incognito not suspecting any foul play because they were in the grove of Apollo. Paris then stood by the altar apparently to confirm by oath what had been said between him and Achilles. As Deiphobos embraced him and kissed him as a friend, Paris took the sword he was carrying and put it through his ribs. Paris struck a second blow at Achilles and finally he collapsed and fell. 22 Paris and Deiphobos left the grove by a different exit without arousing suspicion. when [Odysseus, Aias and Diomedes] got into the grove they saw your father Achilles lying by the altar on the ground, bloodied and still breathing. [... Aias speaks...] And Achilles replied, ‘Paris and Deiphobos have finished me off because of Polyxena' and died.

Diktys of Crete BNJ 49 F 7b, tr. K. Dowden

The new Thersitic reading of the soldiery extends to the suspicion of treachery by Achilles. Of course no god intervenes to kill him in this rationalistic world, but he was in the grove of Apollo Thymbraios when Paris and Deiphobos (who will marry Helen after Paris)¹⁹ murder him. And the temple has a reason for being in the foreground as it is actually the time of the festival. The role of Polyxena is even more striking. Achilles has evolved as a romantic figure for post-Hellenistic audiences at the time when the novel of Chariton had probably recently appeared (ad 60/90), whose hero Chaireas blends military success with romantic passion. In the traditional story Polyxena is sacrificed at Achilles' tomb. Now we understand why: Achilles had been cheated in his desire for her and the contract is set right by her sacrifice. Everything makes sense and the impression is given that this is the true story that lies behind Homer's more poetic account.

‘Diktys' adopts an intelligible stance towards the collective memory. He visibly acknowledges the Trojan War mythology, in particular Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Odyssey and above all the mighty Iliad. The dragging of Hektor from Books 22 and 24, the games of 23, and the visit of Priam in 24 (now opened out, more plausibly, to the whole Greek camp) are treated as public facts. We should not imagine that this is a ‘historical novel', a genre which is itself far from unproblematic. In Chariton's novel, the Kallirhoe, it is clear enough that the historiographic agenda is part of an apparatus of plausibility for a clearly fictional plot and Chariton's fictionality is that of mime or elegy. No one will believe that Chariton was actually rewriting history - that Thucydides forgot to mention Hermogenes' daughter in his account of the Sicilian expedition in Books 6-7. Diktys, on the other hand, is not novel, as can be seen from his dull and patchy characterization.²⁰ The entire interest of his work lies in its dialogue with the mythic tradition and the epic instantiations of that tradition. The hermeneutic task of the reader is to compare the modified account with the shared account and to determine whether it rises to standards of realism and historiographical plausibility and whether it does so with sufficient ingenuity. It is an exercise in generic transvestism.

But there is more than this. Coming from modern times, we may assume it is what we call ‘a party piece', that it is ephemeral and has no impact on the intertext, on the collective memory. This way we concede that it is a tour de force, but not that anyone took it seriously. Diktys is not going to change mythology, as Homer had. Is he?

As a point of reference, we may turn to Dio Chrysostom's Trojan Logos.²¹ Dio addresses the Greeks who in his day were the inhabitants of Ilion and treats them as though they might be offended by Homer's account of their city and their ancestors. The unscrupulous inaccuracy and implausibility of Homer is much stressed: how can he report conversations between gods? Why does he so confuse the sequence of events? Why does he fail to describe any significant death (an actual problem, as we have seen above)? Dio now conjures up ‘better' evidence, that of Egyptian inscriptions (§§37-8). It was Paris that was the husband of Helen, not Menelaos. It was Hektor who killed Achilles - how else did he gain the latter's armour (§§96-7)? And the only reason he ends the Iliad where he does, before the fall of Troy, is that the stress of maintaining consistency is too great for this volume of lies. Priam and Hektor in fact lived happily ever after (§124). Nothing could be clearer than this work of Dio's. It is an exhibition of the sophist's art by arguing what is apparently impossible: Homer was completely wrong about the Trojan War. The audience will admire the skill and bravado with which this exceptionally gifted epideictic rhetor constructs plausible argument. But no one will think that the intertext has been moved by this contribution. If anything, it has been confirmed. Is this the effect sought by Diktys?

The test is whether other mythographers incorporate this material. This brings me to Apollodorus' Bibliotheke, more precisely its Epitome (3.16). I have drawn attention elsewhere²² to the curious detail we find there that, while Agamemnon commanded the land army, Achilles at the age of 15 led the fleet. This motif can only be occasioned by the story played out in Dictys Latinus (1.16), the Latin version of the lost Greek Diktys: here the Greeks make arrangements to elect leaders of the land army including Agamemnon, and leaders of the fleet including Achilles. A little earlier (1.14) is the statement that Achilles was in primis adulescentiae annis (‘in the early years of adolescence'). Multiple leaders are needed because later they will have to stand Agamemnon down temporarily as a result of his refusal to sacrifice Iphigeneia. But the key point remains: a detail of this fiction has got into a general mythography, one which I have argued is a conservative product of the second half of the first century ad, the same period to which Dio himself belongs. Thus, modification of the Troy story was very much in the air at the time. Though Dio may treat it only as an opportunity for a virtuoso display, it is not without significance that this was the time at which that virtuoso display emerged.

In fact some of the revised story seems to go back to a reading of Lykophron's Alexandra, a work which (in the second century bc, if the lines on Rome are not an intrusion)²³ enshrined a mass of shared culture and candidate-culture from mythology that had not been widely adopted. His opaque brilliance compelled commentators to write about his work and this is one instance - Alexandra 323-4 and scholiast:

Lykophron: ‘And thee [Polyxena] to cruel bridal and marriage sacrifice the sullen lion [Neoptolemos], child of Iphis [Iphigeneia], shall lead.' (tr. A. W. Mair)

Scholiast: Achilles had fallen in love with Polyxena and because of her had been killed in the shrine of Apollo Thymbraios. So after the sack of Troy he appeared in dreams and asked the best of the Greeks to slaughter Polyxena for him as he loved her even after death.²⁴ (trans. K. Dowden)

Lykophron himself speaks of a ‘cruel bridal and marriage sacrifice' undergone by Polyxena: it may be no more than a colourful way of describing her sacrifice at the grave, but it could be taken to indicate the fulfilment in death of the marriage to Achilles that had been vainly negotiated in life, as explained by the scholiast. In the same breath he goes on to imply that Iphigeneia was the mother of Neoptolemos. This is very much revisionist writing, deriving from Duris of Samos in the fourth or third century bc (BNJ 76 F 88), according to whom Achilles spirited Iphigeneia away from Aulis to Skyros. The ground was already prepared, then, for Diktys' account, and this revision of the story cannot count as ephemeral epideictic display. The scholiast seems specifically to have Diktys' version in mind, and the consequence for us is that Diktys ceases to be isolated and has added to the remembered, and cited, mythology. Similar arguments also apply to the stray detail in Apollodorus about Achilles' youthful command of the fleet.

In all this it is economical to quarantine such innovation to particular sources, in this case Diktys. But that is to overlook the climate of writing and the sustained, shared, interest in renovation of the Troy story from, say, the beginnings of Alexandrian commentary on Homer and Lykophron down to around ad 100. Here we meet with another sample of quarantine: the case of Ptolemy Chennos.

In his New History, which must itself date from the closing decades of the first century ad, Ptolemy presented a whole series of travesties of mythic and historiographical tradition. He purported to collect these from a wide variety of sources, which Hercher denounced (1856) as largely bogus, invented by Ptolemy. Many of these sources end up being entries in Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (FGrH), where their authors are equally denounced as non-existent by Jacoby. However, I have had the opportunity to reconsider this issue in the process of revising some of these entries for Brill’s New Jacoby (BNJ).²⁵ Though there may be invention, and indeed careless citation, many of these preposterous and ingenious stories may indeed be fact manufactured but by genuine authors whose works do not survive. This then transfers responsibility from a wayward individual (such as Ptolemy or Ps.-Plutarch) to multiple authors in a particular era. It becomes an important fact about that era (roughly 100 bc-ad 100) that such startling alterations were proposed to the shared mythology and, more broadly, shared culture. As with Ptolemy's contemporary, as I think, Diktys, it is hard to estimate the degree to which such epideictic contributions are ludic or earnest. They seem to create a parallel culture, an alternative-universe memory, which then seeps through porous boundaries or scholarly wormholes into the real world of commentary. Commentary was not then, as it is now, something which will have no effect on the prevailing culture. Rather, it is like Heissenberg's view of quantum mechanics: the observer himself affects the environment he is observing. Once uttered, these things have become part of the intertext and are sucked into the pool of memory.²⁶

A particularly delightful example of this is provided by the institution of the mnemon. This non-existent institution is first called into existence by a reading, once again, of Lykophron:

... but together with them [Tennes and Hemithea and their father Kyknos] the wretched man [Mnemon], not mindful [mnemon] of [Achilles'] mother's instructions, but tripped by forgetfulness, will die face down, wounded in the chest by a sword [i.e., by Achilles].

Lykophron, Alexandra 240-2, trans. K. Dowden in BNJ 56 F 1a, commentary

A man who should have warned Achilles not to kill Tennes, for otherwise he would be slain by Apollo, fails to do so. His name is Mnemon (‘Mindful') because he isn't. But in the reading of Lykophron, the name becomes a statement of his function and the Bronze Age Greeks are observed in the pages of Cyclic epic and Homer regularly to have appointed ‘rememberers', whose function it is in life to stand around waiting to ‘remind' a hero of something they must not do and notably to fail to do so. This is then reflected in our summary of Ptolemy Chennos:

How Odysseus was given by his father a man called Myiskos, from Kephallenia, as his mnemon. And a mnemon by the name of Noemon, a man originally from Carthage, followed Achilles, and Eudoros followed Patroklos. Antipater of Akanthos says that Dares, who wrote the Iliad before Homer, was the mnemon of Hektor to stop him killing the companion of Achilles. And Protesilaos', he says, was Dardanos, originally from Thessaly, and Antilochos had Chalkon by him as his hypaspist and mnemon at the instigation of his father Nestor.

BNJ 56 F 1b, trans. K. Dowden But this set of stories about mnemones involves quite an industry of scholars, if they are genuine:

1. That this was the Memnon who also killed the fine Antilochos son of Nestor, history tells. An account of it is presented by Asklepiades of Myrlea: an oracle had been given to Nestor to beware of the Ethiopian in the case of his son Antilochos and so the father gave him as his mnemon (minder) and shield-bearer Chalkon from Kyparissos, who fell in love with Penthesilea and who in the attempt to assist her was killed by Achilles - and his body was put on a stake by the Greeks.

2. Other heroes too were given mnemones, for example, Achilles by his mother, as Lykophron too tells. And Patroklos was given Eudoros by Achilles after his wrath, during the battle at the ships, so that he should not go too far. But he was killed immediately in the clash by Pyraichmes. Timolaos (FGrH 798) the Macedonian says this is why he was the first to be slain by Patroklos.

3. Antipater of Akanthos says that Hektor too was given Dares the Phrygian (51T5) as a mnemon, to stop him killing a friend of Achilles (i.e. Patroklos) after Apollo of Thymbra had given an oracle to that effect. But he deserted and was killed by Odysseus...

BNJ 56 F 1a, trans. K. Dowden

It can now be seen that, with a second-century bc preamble, a number of players seem to drop into place in the period 100 bc-ad 100, some of whom we have already discussed and others whom we shall soon mention:

Lykophron, Alexandra

Asklepiades of Myrlea

Scholia to (commentators on)

Lykophron

‘Timolaos’

M. Terentius Varro, Divine and Human

Antiquities

P. Vergilius Maro

‘Antipater of Akanthos’ the education of Statius

Herakleitos, Homeric Problems

Apollodorus, Bibliotheke

Diktys

Ptolemy Chennos

2 c bc? (prophecy of Rome's power, see above)

2/1 c bc

2/1 c bc > (Isaac?) Tzetzes 12 c ad

1 c bc ?

c. 50 bc

died 19 bc

1 c ad? (see BNJ 56)

c. 50-60

ad late 1 c ?, allegorist

ad c. 60-80 ?

ad c. 90?

ad c. 90?

Lykophron heads this procession. Asklepiades of Myrlea, a man who discussed

the concept of truth in history somewhere in the 2/1 c bc, seems in some ways pivotal to the Lykophron scholia (see BNJ 56 F1a) and the concept of the mnemon (in the case of Chalkon) is attributed to him. He must have said more and indeed must have drawn on Lykophron. This recreation of the myth is then elaborated in other hands - those of one Timolaos if we can believe in him, presumably the same one whose existence is doubted in BNJ 798; given his interest in Pessinous at 798 F1, he must presumably be 2/1 c bc - with an absolute terminus ante quem provided by Ps. Plutarch de fluviius (around ad 100) and Ptolemy Chennos (around ad 90), and a terminus post quem of Asklepiades’ invention of the topic of discussion.

Thus, though it has to be patched together, the period of the first century BC-first century ad is a frenetic one for Greek memory and for the consolidation of identity through the post-Alexandrian analysis of culture. The subject of analysis is, above all, mythic culture, where Homer and the Trojan story play so large a part, in a second-level analysis - an analysis of a distant, now canonized and pseudo-scriptural, literary heritage that was itself an analysis of the past.²⁷ Though the intertextuality is conspicuously ‘agonistic’²⁸ and sophistic, it is worth standing back and seeing the common ground. Together with a huge impetus to encyclopedism (and concomitantly paradoxography), writers strove to establish a rational body of cultural detail and history, one that could stand up to scientific inspection²⁹ and so give expression to a newly civilized world in a new context, what Assmann (1992: 284) calls ein neuer situativer Rahmen. This was the world to which Rome was gradually bringing peace, stability and a new self-awareness or Selbstbewusstsein.

Roman Variation

Having established the secure foundations of identity in this newly defined and extended cultural memory, the question then arose of how Romans could incorporate themselves in this powerful alien tradition. By the 50s bc the triumph of predominantly Greek ideas of mythic memory was complete. The matching, native Roman, cultural memory was one that had to be repre­sented as historiographic and ancestral, with a reality-register distinct from Greek myth. This question never arose for Greeks, who remained content to maintain myth as their history.

It is worth considering the place of Vergil in this discussion. The programme for the Aeneid is in some ways set by Lykophron, Alexandra 1226-80.³⁰ It is beyond my present scope to chart it here, but eating tables, prophecies about pigs, the Penates, Aeneas, Anchises, minor characters, Monte Circeo, the Sibyl, all figure somehow here. It is an attractive theory, therefore, though not necessary to what I argue here, that the Alexandra itself belongs to the Pergamene court, that unique conduit between the Greek and Roman worlds.³¹ Be that as it may, Vergil seems to have read Lykophron, and Stephanie West for one has suggested that Aeneas' recall of the prophecy of the eating of the tables is expressed in uncharacteristically turgid language and is meant to send us back to Lykophron.³² Indeed, Nicholas Horsfall has gone as far as to say that ‘It has long been clear that Lycophron was read attentively by Vergil.'³³

Thus Vergil subscribes to a tradition of mythic scholarship and variation in the form characteristic of this period. The world of the commentary on Lykophron and the revisionist writers about the Troy story is his world. And the material we find in the Homeric scholia can be shown to have made its mark on Vergil.³⁴ We need to envisage Vergil working through this material - as Statius later did with his father:³⁵

... tu pandere doctus

Carmina Battiadae latebrasque Lycophronis atri.

... you were learned in unfolding

the poems of Callimachus and the lairs of black Lykophron.

Statius, Silvae 5.3.156-7

This is how memory was manufactured in ancient education with its reliance on memorization of detail and explication of points of difficulty in that detail. To know mythic detail is to be educated and to have grasped the culture.

Thus his account of the fall of Troy and his intermittently realist account of heroic times is a particular type of reconstruction that bears meaningful comparison with Diktys. And though it is familiar to study Vergil from the perspective of Augustus' reconstruction of cultural memory, something Livy found rather difficult, Vergil can in fact be just as interestingly situated in the competition for mythic memory in which Greek writers were simultaneously engaged. Varro too belongs here, given that his project in the Divine and Human Antiquities was evidently to define Roman cultural memory using the latest Greek conceptual tools. It is a tragedy that this major, and influential, work is lost, and that we must turn instead to Livy - or to a Greek, Dionysius of Halicarnassus for his Roman Antiquities. From Dionysius we may learn that Rome only became noteworthy relatively recently: until then it was ούκ άξια ιστορικής αναγραφής (‘not worthy of historical writing', 1.4.1). But now that it is worthy, Dionysius can write about its early history and show that the founders of Rome were Greeks (1.5.1), incorporating them within the mythic system of memory.

Some Conclusions

So we find in the last century bc and first century ad a key moment for the game of what people will remember and who they will be as a result of remembering it. Greeks will acquire that paideia that is synonymous with membership of Greek culture; and opinion-formers - in this case grammatikoi making strange statements about what really happened in Greek mythology - will aspire to cultural leadership, not infrequently thereby gaining access to those who exercised political leadership. Lykophron could have been at the court of the Attalids (Kosmetatou 2000). Varro needed no one's court, but his cultural leadership was recognized by Cicero and Caesar. Vergil had access to Augustus, and Statius in a way to Domitian. John Sullivan (1985) once explored how power lay in the (particularly epic and mythographic) pen in the case of Nero's court; and, earlier, one of Tiberius' special perversions was to discuss on Capri which song the Sirens sang, and such questions, with an entourage of academics.³⁶

It is perhaps better not to ask the question whether anyone believed the new mythography, or whether it had any absolute worth. It is enough that it worked in the dimension of epideixis and the parade of paideia. Revising the history of Troy in Vergil's hands was a significant way of establishing an Augustan ideology; and even in the case of Diktys, it served to establish cultural identity and scholarly aspiration through its revisionism. And eventually Diktys would be taken by Byzantine chroniclers to present an authoritative mythology.³⁷

On the larger scale, movements in the content of mythology and appro­priation of mythology by new constituencies are often defining points in the development of culture. This is what happened when the Romans felt the need to appropriate Greek memories of the past, when Christians worldwide came to adopt the history of Israel, and indeed when, at the formation of Greek mythology as we know it, Greeks who had not been part of the Mycenaean cultural ambit none the less signed up to a version of its mythology.³⁸ The final example is of course our own acceptance of classical philology as an expression of European culture.³⁹

Abbreviations

BNJ I. Worthington (ed.), Brill’s New Jacoby. www.brillonline.nl, 2007-date.

FGrH F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin, 1923-30; Leiden, 1940-58.

Notes

1 η τίς ου παρ' αυτών αν των συγγραφέων μάθοι ραδίως, οτι μηδέν βεβαίως ε’ιδότες συνέγραφον, άλλ’ ώς έκαστοι περί τών πραγμάτων εικαζον; το πλειον γοΰν διά τών βιβλίων άλλήλους έλέγχουσι καί τάναντιώτατα περί τών αυτών λέγειν ουκ όκνοΰσι. (‘Indeed, who could not learn easily from the writers themselves that they wrote without any secure knowledge, but guessed about these matters on an individual basis? Certainly, for the most part they use their books to criticise each other and they show no hesitation in saying exactly the opposite about the same matters’)

2 Letoublon 2011: see 27 on Homer’s non-mythographic character, and 35 on Achilles’ death.

3 On Homer’s ‘ignorance’, see, e.g. scholiast to Iliad 9.145a (does not know the sacrifice of Iphigeneia); 1.396b (Aristarchos); Dowden 1989: 11-12.

4 Dowden 1992, 7-9; Dowden and Livingstone 2011: 4, 497.

5 Adjusting Assmann 1992: 275.

On the issue of freedom to contradict in Greek written culture, see Assmann 1992, 270-1.

The issue of truth, like much else, is illuminated by Paul Veyne (1988: see index s.v.).

It is a ‘Rekonstruktion von Vergangenheit', Assmann 1992: 275.

On the ‘floating gap', see Assmann 1992: 48-9.

Gantz 1993: 625-8.

Telemachos comes close to stating this in Odyssey 1.351.

Dowden 1996: 53 and n. 36.

Cf. Gantz 1993: 663-4.

Assmann 1992: 280-9.

See BNJ and FGrH in the Abbreviations.

See K. Dowden, BNJ 49.

Arktinos is most easily accessed in West 2003: plot at 110-13, F 1 (link of Iliad and Aithiopis) at 114-15

I present an abridged version of this fragment here and in the following paragraphs; the reader should consult BNJ 49 for the full version.

Gantz 1993: 639, seeing the marriage as implicit in the Odyssey. Explicit in the Little Iliad, West 2003: 122-3.

See Dowden 2009 and 2012.

See also Dowden 2012.

Dowden 2012.

1226-82.

Άχιλεύς έρασθεις Πολυξένης και δι' αΰτήν έν τω του Θυμβραίου Απόλλωνος Ιερω αναιρεθείς μετά το πορθηθήναι τήν’Ίλιον ήτήσατο καθ' ΰπνους τούς άρίστους των Ελλήνων τήν Πολυξένην ώς και μετά θάνατον έρών αΰτής σφαγιασθήναι αΰτω τήν Πολυξένην.

See my commentaries on BNJ 46, 49, 52-4, 56-62 and especially on BNJ 56 F 1b. Cf. Assmann 1992: 281-2 on the intertextual impact of written texts and on ‘hypolepsis'. These instances complicate Assmann's model: there is not only variation, but also variation that is playfully offered by the epideictic rhetor, only to be adopted outright from their different generic perspective by chroniclers, scholiasts and their antecedents - learned writers such as Asklepiades of Myrlea. Cf. Assmann 1992: 278.

The term is due to H. von Staden - see Assmann 1992: 286.

I'm not sure whether this is what Assmann 1992: 287 is referring to through his criterion of Wahrheit (‘Wahrheitsanspruch des Textes') and Sache in ‘hypoleptic text'. Certainly these writers competed to assert what was actually true and real as opposed to what Homer, or the tradition, said or appeared to say. Certainly this type of writing is problem-centred (see Dowden on BNJ 56 F 1b), as specified by Assmann 1992: 288.

30 Quite apart from the issue of the capture of Troy itself, for instance the ‘child­devouring’ snakes (347) - called Porkeus and (scholia) Chariboia.

31 Kosmetatou 2000.

32 Aeneid 7.107ff. S. West 1983: 134, and cf. her comments on Cassandra’s upturned eyes at 2.405, on p. 135. Cf. also an etymology which Vergil seems to get from Alexandra 15: David Sansone, ‘Vergil, Aeneid 5.835-6’, CQ ns 46 (1996), 429-33, esp. 429-30.

33 Horsfall 1991: 206.

34 Schlunk 1974, with the review by Nicholas Horsfall (1976).

35 Horsfall 1976: 277.

36 Suetonius, Tiberius 70.3.

37 See BNJ 49.

38 The thesis of Margalit Finkelberg (2005, esp. ch. 8).

39 Assmann 1992: 280.

Bibliography

Assmann, J., 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich.

Dowden, K., 1989. Death and the Maiden: girls’ initiation rites in Greek mythology. London/New York.

—1992. The Uses of Greek Mythology. London and New York.

—1996. ‘Homer’s Sense of Text’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 116, 47-61.

—2009. ‘Reading Diktys: the discrete charm of bogosity’, in M. Paschalis,

S. Panayotakis and G. Schmeling (eds), Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel. Groningen, 155-68.

—2012. ‘Fact and fiction in the New Mythology: 100 BC-AD 100’, in J. R. Morgan and I. D. Repath (eds), Lies and Metafiction. Groningen.

Dowden, K. and N. Livingstone (eds), 2011. A Companion to Greek Mythology. Malden, MA/Oxford.

Finkelberg, Margalit, 2005. Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean prehistory and Greek heroic tradition. Cambridge

Gantz, T., 1993. Early Greek Myth: a guide to literary and artistic sources. Baltimore, MD/London.

Hercher, R., 1856. ‘Über die Glaubwürdigkeit der Neuen Geschichte des Ptolemaeus

Chennus', Jahrbücher für klassische Philologie, Suppl. n.s. 1 (1855/6), 267-93. Horsfall, N., 1976. Review of Schlunk 1974, in JRS 66, 277.

—1991. ‘Vergil and the Poetry of Explanations', Greece and Rome 38, 203-11. Kosmetatou, Elisabeth, 2000. ‘Lycophron's “Alexandra” Reconsidered: The Attalid

Connection', Hermes 128, 32-53.

Letoublon, Francoise, 2011. ‘Homer's Use of Myth', in K. Dowden and N. Livingstone (eds), A Companion to Greek Mythology. Malden, MA/Oxford, ch.2.

Schlunk, R. R., 1974. The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid: A Study of the Influence of Ancient Homeric Literary Criticism on Vergil. Ann Arbor, MI.

Sullivan, J. P., 1985 Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero. Ithaca and London.

Veyne, P., 1988 Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An essay on the constitutive imagination, Eng. tr. Chicago, IL/London.

West, M. L., 2003. Greek Epic Fragments. Cambridge, MA.

West, Stephanie, 1983. ‘Notes on the Text of Lycophron', Classical Quarterly, No. 33, 114-35.