From: Mark Odegard
Message: 355
Date: 1999-11-28
From the Iliad, Book 5.
Text filched from
http://www.perseus.
tufts.edu/cgi-bin/text?lookup=hom.+il.+5.711&vers=english;loeb&
browse=1
[720] Then Hera, the queenly goddess, daughter of great Cronos, went to and fro harnessing the horses of golden frontlets. And Hebe quickly put to the car on either side the curved wheels of bronze, eight-spoked, about the iron axle-tree. Of these the felloe verily is of gold imperishable, [725] and thereover are tires of bronze fitted, a marvel to behold; and the naves are of silver, revolving on this side and on that; and the body is plaited tight with gold and silver thongs, and two rims there are that run about it. From the body stood forth the pole of silver, and on the end [730] thereof she bound the fair golden yoke, and cast thereon the fair golden breast-straps; and Hera led beneath the yoke the swift-footed horses, and was eager for strife and the war-cry. But Athene, daughter of Zeus that beareth the aegis, let fall upon her father's floor her soft robe, [735] richly broidered, that herself had wrought and her hands had fashioned, and put on her the tunic of Zeus, the cloud-gatherer, and arrayed her in armour for tearful war. About her shoulders she flung the tasselled aegis, fraught with terror, all about which Rout is set as a crown, [740] and therein is Strife, therein Valour, and therein Onset, that maketh the blood run cold, and therein is the head of the dread monster, the Gorgon, dread and awful, a portent of Zeus that beareth the aegis. And upon her head she set the helmet with two horns and with bosses four, wrought of gold, and fitted with the men-at-arms of an hundred cities. [745] Then she stepped upon the flaming car and grasped her spear, heavy and huge and strong, wherewith she vanquisheth the ranks of men--of warriors with whom she is wroth, she, the daughter of the mighty sire. And Hera swiftly touched the horses with the lash, and self-bidden groaned upon their hinges the gates of heaven
Whew. This is rather like reading of Queen Victoria hitching up her Pegasuses to a golden chariot to fly from Balmoral to Khartoum to save the day for General Sir Charles Gordon. Cow-eyed Hera as warrior-goddess? I think Homer is having some fun. I find the passage hilarious, and it stands alone when compared to the Hera we are used to. Athena is another story; here, she's wearing Bruennhilde's horned helmet; you can almost hear her hojotohoing.Hera is Pelasgian Hera, the Great Goddess of the Mediterranean. She's supposed to be the barefoot and pregnant conquest of Patriarchal, keep-them-three-steps-behind-you Sky-Father Zeus; is she behaving as a proper Indo-European war-goddess, or has she resumed her more ancient role? Or is Homer engaging in some brilliant satire that must have gone over the heads of his oafish Dorian audience.
Anyway. It's an interesting description of a chariot and I've learned a couple new words:
A felloe (plural, felloes or fellies) is "the exterior rim or a segment of the rim of a wheel supported by the spokes". A frontlet is "the forehead especially of an animal" (both from online Merriam-Webster).
Then there is nave which is an older English word for 'hub', as in the hub of a wheel. Hera's bronze tires would have actually been raw leather, well-wetted, and stretched around the edge and left to dry.
An axle tree is interesting too. If I've got this right, it's the piece, usually carved from a single piece of wood, that includes the nave of the wheel (the part fitting around the axle, held in place with a cotter pin), as well as the carved sockets for the spokes, these latter reaching almost halfway towards the rim; it's a single integral piece, made a strong as possible.
Homer, so I've read, misunderstood chariots. He has the Greeks using them to commute up from the beach to the battlefield before Troy, where they park them neatly all in a row, before charging off afoot to meet the Trojans. In Homer's time (ca. 750 BCE), chariot warfare was obsolete. But the Trojan War, as one scenario has it, is roughly contemporary (by a decade or so) with the 2nd Battle of Kadesh, where a young Pharaoh Rameses II nearly loses everything to Musa-mumble, the Hittite Emperor. Since the Pharaoh of the Exodus is also said to be Rameses II, you've got the makings for a very interesting historical novel here.
Yeah. I'm re-reading the Iliad, rather critically this time, reading even the boring, bloated descriptions of the putatively noble natures of these piratical Achaean thugs. If you want warlike Indo-Europeans, the Iliad is the place to find them, in full glory.
Mark Odegard.