Re: [tied] Ilios

From: Mark Odegard
Message: 4357
Date: 2000-10-15

I'd forgotten the reference (BAR is a nice organization).
 
Indeed. The Wiliusiad. Homer was from Ionia -- in Asia Minor -- not that far down from the Troad. His Greek is usually bracketed as 'Homeric', in that it's heavily literary, and not something anyone ever spoke. But it's close to ancient Attic.
 
Robert Graves praises the Iliad as a Homeric joke. As a matter of fact, he correctly informs us that Homer presents the scions of Troy more happily than he does the thugs of Mycenean Greece.
 
The idea is that Homer was of a higher cultural status than the Doric oafs he sang to, and that the pigs he sang to never got the joke.
 
More realistically, we are dealing with old stories that got sent through the mytho-literary Cusinart. It's like the Arthurian cycle, where a nugget of historical truth (Arthur as an immediately post-Roman dux bellorum) is combined with Celtic mythology (Merlin, Uther Pendragon, Morgana-le-Fey, etc), and then later, combined with the Grail Trail (where Valais in Switzerland gets displaced to Wales, in Britain).
 
The same thing has happened more recently with American Christmas. The Clement Moore poem, the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, and the Gene Autry song about Rudolph, together with Frosty the Snowman et al, all joins with ornate baby Jesus scenes in Japan.
 
I'm saying the Iliad is conflate. We are told there were two Trojan Wars. Trojan War I was the one about Hesione (the face that launched six ships), and how Herakles rescued her a la Andromeda-at-Jaffa. TWII was about Helen -- with two assemblies at Aulis. And ca. 1800 -- well before any Trojan date, the Mediterraneans were into mosiacs that displayed seamen sacking the city from the sea.
 
Homer was like Shakespeare. Both are beyond any historical recovery. They were --so good-- that they probably really do play jokes on us.
 
Mark.
 
 
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2000 3:36 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Ilios

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2000 8:29 PM
Subject: RE: [tied] Ilios
 
 
Here's something more about the identification of Wilusa as Troy. The Luwian poem I referred to (which C. Watkins calls, tongue in cheek, "The Wilusiad") is mentioned there. On the linguistic side, Wilusa = *wi:l-us-a-, where -us- is the same placename-forming suffix that we find in Hattusa-. The corresponding Greek suffix is *-jo-, hence the Greek calque Wi:l-ijo-s > Ilios /i:lios/. I'm not sure what the "wi:l-" part is -- most likely an ethnic name. Hypothetical Hittite *Wi:lumna-, Luwian *Wi:luwanni- (?) would correspond to Greek Ilios 'Ilian = Trojan'. Has anyone heard of such ethnonyms on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor?
 
 
Piotr