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Odyssey 22.474–7: murder or mutilation?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Malcolm Davies
Malcolm Davies
Affiliation:
St John's College, Oxford
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Extract

The treatment of the goatherd Melanthius in these lines received remarkably little animadversion from earlier commentators (who may have been inhibited by the very brutality of the actions described). In contrast, the late Manuel Fernandez-Galiano devoted an extremely full note to the passage. One may wonder, however, whether he was right to base it on the automatic assumption that what we have depicted here is an act of murder. He himself admits that we are not ‘told exactly at what moment the unfortunate Melanthius dies’. (This observation goes back as far as Eustathius' commentary ad loc. (1934.43f.):πότομος αὕτη κα δεινοτάτη ποιν, ξ ἧς εἰκς κα θανεῖν τν Μελάνθιον, εἰ κα ποιητς κα αὐτ σιγι. Such lack of specificness would be most unlike Homer, and the removal of hands, feet, ears, nose and genitalia would be a remarkably laborious and uneconomical mode of instantly killing someone. Since we are not told that Melanthius dies I infer that he did not, any more than Eurytion did at Od. 21.300–2, in similarly trying circumstances: ‘they cut off his ears and nostrils with the sharp brass; but he, injured in his feelings, went about, enduring that calamity with a frantic mind’, to quote the translation by Buckley for which Housman was so grateful.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , December 1994 , pp. 534 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1994

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References

1 As part of the commentary on the Odyssey published first in Italian (1986), then in English (Oxford, 1992).

2 On 474–7: ‘the goatherd's unpleasant death’ and ‘execution’ (cf. on 479: ‘the two executions’). On 478: ‘slaughter’, etc. A swift survey of recent studies of the poem seems to confirm that the murder interpretation is usually taken for granted: e.g. Eisenberger, H., Studien zur Odyssee (Palingenesia 7 [1973]), p. 243 n. 21Google Scholar: ‘sowohl Iros wie Melanthios sollen erst durch die Verstümmelung sterben’; Uvo, Hölscher, Die Odyssee, Epos Zwischen Märchen und Roman (Munich, 1988), p. 259Google Scholar:‘der Martertod des Melanthios’. For a (problematic) exception see below n. 9.

3 Reinhold, Merkelbach, Untersuchungen zur Odyssee 2 (Zetemata 2 [1969]), p. 130Google Scholar and n. 3, seems to suppose that Melanthius is already dead at the start of the passage. The mutilation is therefore performed upon a corpse and is comparable in aim with the notorious act of μασχαλισμός (on which see Kurt Sier's commentary on Aesch. Cho. 439) intended to prevent retaliation on the part of the victim's ghost. But with this interpretation the poet's failure to specify when Melanthius dies is even more bizarre.

4 See Housman, , CR 14 (1900), 232Google Scholar = Classical Papers 2.517. Admittedly the punishment here is not quite so extreme. But see n. 6.

5 In The Poetic Edda, vol. 1, Heroic Poems (Oxford, 1969), p. 173Google Scholar. For the relevant text of stanza 24 (with facing translation) see ibid. p. 166.

6 For parallels Dronke (sup. cit. [n. 5] p. 173 and n. 2) cites Adam of Bremen, Gesta 3.51 (the punishment of a Christian bishop in 1066 who refuses to disown his faith: truncatis manibus ac pedibus in platea corpus eius proiectum est, caput vero eius desectum. Note that this is intended as a joke (as the Latin text has it ad ludibrium). Dronke says the idea is ‘to kill a man by inches… to have cut off the head too soon would have curtailed their amusement’) and (n. 4) two fragments from the Old Norwegian Laws (for an English translation see Larson, L. M., The Earliest Norwegian Laws (Columbia, 1935))Google Scholar. It is interesting that as Dronke observes hendr and fætr in these two passage probably signify not ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ but ‘arms’ and ‘legs’. Likewise in the Odyssean passage χεῖρες and, πόδες usually taken as the former, could convey the latter). For further discussion cf. Karl von, Amira, Die germanischen Todestraffen (Abh. Bay. Akad. d. Wiss. 31 [1922])Google Scholar and Germanisches Recht 4 (rev. Eckhardt: Berlin 1960–1967)Google Scholar; Folke, Ström, The Sacral Origins of the Germanic Death Penalties (Stockholm, 1942)Google Scholar. For more general folk-tale analogies see Lutz, Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit 3 (Stuttgart, 1979) pp. 147ffGoogle Scholar ≏Folktales and Reality, pp. 129ff.

7 See above n. 6. The fates of all of Odysseus' victims are deliberately presented in a way that is lacking in sympathy: see Kullmann, W., Homerische Motive (Stuttgart, 1992), p. 288.Google Scholar

8 This is not to deny that someone who has undergone the indignities that Melanthius has is likely to die sooner than the norm from e.g. exhaustion, malnutrition, gangrene or the like. But the immediate aim of the punishment will have been humiliation rather than death (cf. Dronke as cited in n. 6 on killing a man ‘by inches’), and that a victim can survive such torment is explicitly attested by, for instance, the English law of c. A.D. 1210 (Willelmi Articuli Londoniis Retractali §17: eruantur oculi et abscidantur pedes vel testiculi vel manus ita quod truncus remaneat vivus in signum prodicionsis et nequicie sue) whereby the criminal is to have his ‘eyes gouged out and his feet cut off or his testicles or hands, so that the trunk remain alive as a sign of his treachery and villainy’: translation from Diamond, A. S., Primitive Law, Past and Present (London, 1971), p. 99Google Scholar (see too his Index s.v. ‘mutilatio’). For the Latin text see Liebermann, F., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle, 1903), i.491.Google Scholar

9 Fernandez-Galiano's further idea that the four lines in question are interpolated is unattractive. ‘Blood-thirsty’ interpolations may occur in Greek tragedy (see my note on Soph. Trach. 781–2) but the present passage is perfectly appropriate, once we recognise the primitive custom that underlies it. Likewise, van Thiel, H., Odysseen (Basel, 1988), p. 262Google Scholar takes the passage to be a foreign body of sorts largely because Melanthius is not said to die (‘die sich überschlagende Metzelei an Melanthios, der daran nicht einmal stirbt’). Again, accept the practice implied, and the objection ceases to have any force.

10 This may be compared with a (somewhat different) technique of folk-tale (discussed by Röhrich, sup. cit. [n. 6], p. 156 = p. 133), which brings out ‘the narrator's desire to clear the hero of responsibility for the punishment's severity’ to ‘emphasise that the hero himself would not stoop to such practices’.