William Morris Archive

by Peter Wright

APPENDIX I. ‘DRAMATIS PERSONAE’

Regularly recurring characters, divine and human.

 

OLYMPIAN GODS. the first generation, children of Cronos

 

ZEUS. Mightiest and sovereign of the Gods. Having overthrown his father Cronos and Cronos’ brethren, the Titans, he reigns on Olympus. Zeus’ domain is the sky; he is lord of the storm-clouds, and of the thunderbolts and rains issuing from them. In the Odyssey he is also becoming guardian of the moral order.

 

HERA. Sister and consort of Zeus. Patron of marriage. In the Iliad, often at odds with him, owing to her fierce partisanship with the Achaeans.

POSEIDON. Lord of the sea and its creatures. As ‘Earth-shaker’, also maker of earthquakes.

HADES. Lord of the Underworld, to which go the mindless ghosts of the dead. Wedded to his sister Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, whom he has abducted.

 

THE SECOND GENERATION. children of Zeus.

 

PALLAS ATHENE. Born out of Zeus’ head. A virgin goddess, who furnishes wisdom to rulers and warriors. Also patron of handicrafts, especially those of women, such as weaving. Her main shrine is at her name-city of Athens.

 

Children of Zeus and Leto

APOLLO. Always youthful and beautiful Patron of archery, herding, and healing; of prophecy, music, and poetry. Eventually champion of a reasoned moderation in conduct (sophrosyne). Not yet a sun-god. His chief oracle is at Delphi, named in Homer Pytho, after the great serpent whom he slew to win it.

ARTEMIS. A virgin huntress, ruling the woodland and the wild, and their beasts. Also she protects women in childbirth.1 

 

Children of Zeus and Hera

ARES. The war god; handsome but brutal. His traditional seat is Thrace.

HEPHAESTUS. Lame from birth. Master of the powers of fire, and skilled in smithcraft, metalwork, and building. In the Iliad, wedded to Charis (a Grace), but in the Odyssey to Aphrodite. 

 

Child (in Homer) of Zeus and Dione

APHRODITE. Goddess of beauty, and sexual desire. Her chief shrines are on Cyprus and Cythera.

 

Child of Zeus and Maia

HERMES. In the Odyssey the Gods’ chief messenger. Also, guide of ghosts to the Underworld. Noted from his childhood for skill in theft and trickery.

 

MORTALS. Here their actions are noted only up to the opening of the Odyssey’s narrative.

 

In Ithaca

ODYSSEUS. Son of Laertes. King in Ithaca, ruling the Cephallenians of that and the neighbouring islands. At the Trojan war, noted both for valour and for practical wisdom. Absent from home for twenty years.

 

PENELOPE. Wife of Odysseus. Daughter of Icarius, a brother of the Spartan king Tyndareus. She probably first met and was wooed by, Odysseus while her father was for a time in exile in Aetolia, just across the water.

TELEMACHUS. Son of Odysseus. Born just before his father left for Troy, so just reaching manhood.

LAERTES. Son of Arceisius. He has long since resigned the kingship to his son and lives in retirement in the country.

THE WOOERS (LED BY ANTINOUS & EURYMACHUS). Nobles of Ithaca and surrounding islands, who hope by wedding the apparently widowed Penelope, to obtain her wealth, and that of her vanished husband, and perhaps his kingship.

 

In the Peloponnese

AGAMEMNON. Son of Atreus (’Atrides’), wedded to Clytemnestra (sister of Helen), and father of Orestes. King at Mycenae and Argos, overlord of the surrounding kingdoms, and commander of the Achaean host that attacked Troy.  His cousin Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, has a blood feud against him: Atreus, having expelled his brother and rival Thyestes from the kingship, feigned reconciliation, and invited him to a feast, at which he served to him the flesh of his newly slaughtered young sons.

 

MENELAUS. Brother of Agamemnon. King of Sparta by marriage to Helen.

HELEN. Daughter of King Tyndareus’ wife Leda by Zeus (Homer does not mention the god’s disguise as a swan.) Her abduction by the Trojan prince Paris was the occasion of the Trojan war. Now re-instated as queen at Sparta.

 

NESTOR. Ruling from Pylos to the southwest of the Peloponnese, the later Messenia. At Troy, the wise, old counselor of the Achaeans; is also noted for frequently relating at length the heroic exploits of his youth.

 

Outside the Peloponnese

ACHILLES. Son of Peleus (‘Pelides’) and the sea-nymph Thetis. The most valiant Achaean warrior at Troy. Doomed to die after revenging his friend Patroclus’ death by slaying Hector.

AJAX. Son of Peleus’ brother Telamon. The mightiest Achaean warrior after Achilles. After his cousin Achilles’ death, his god-made arms were awarded to Odysseus rather than to his kinsman Ajax, who then killed himself.

APPENDIX II. HOMERIC GEOGRAPHY AS SHOWN IN THE ODYSSEY

There is a substantial difference in the geographical knowledge presented in this epic between that of Greece itself and the lands to its east and south, in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that of the seas to the west of Greece, in which are set Odysseus’ fabulous adventures related in the books from the Ninth to the Twelfth. Of the lands occupied during the ‘heroic age’ by the peoples of the Mycenaean culture, the epic tradition preserved a considerable knowledge: indeed scholars reckon that the ‘catalogue of ships’ in Iliad, Book II, setting out the various contingents of the Achaean host at Troy with their commanders, provides a substantially correct gazetteer, probably transmitted in verse, of the territories and settlements of that earlier age. The briefer listing of Trojan allies at the end of that book gives an overview of the peoples of the Aegean’s eastern and northern coasts before the Hellenic settlements on those coasts began in the 11th century. In the Odyssey, we find more selective references to places on the Greek mainland, but they are largely consistent with the layout given in the Iliad, both in the narrative of Telemachus’ journeying in Books Three to Five and Fifteen, (with such slightly fuller information about the western coasts as is required by the development of the story) and in the occasional mentions of places in Greece that appear in the various legends alluded to. It should be noted, however, that the poet was perhaps better acquainted with the names of places passed on by tradition than with their relative position or physical shape. Thus in Books Three and Fifteen, he has Telemachus easily ride by chariot from Pylos to Sparta, ignoring the massive barrier of  Mount Taygetus which frowns over Sparta from the west. In Book Nine (lines 21-28) Odysseus, beginning to tell his history to the Phaeacians, says that his beloved home island, Ithaca, lies ‘highest up in the sea ... Towards the dark and the dusk’, while the other islands are ‘towards the east and the sun’; whereas the small isle of Ithaca, embraced by the neighboring islands, actually lies on the eastern side of that group.

The Odyssey shows perhaps slightly less knowledge of the area to the far north-east of Greece, where the Iliad2 had noticed the ‘mare-milking’ nomads (Hippomolgoi) of the steppes north of the Black Sea. But it shares the Iliad’s effective acquaintance with the lands of ancient civilization to the southeast. Homer sends Menelaus on a wide tour ‘To Cyprus and Phoenicia and Egypt,’ and ‘Aethiopia too and Sidon, and Erembian land’ And Lybia (sic) ‘withal.’3 

He, like Paris,4 had brought back beautiful craftwork from Sidon, the great city of the Phoenician merchants,5 and approached the great River of Egypt, up which Odysseus sent one of his fictitious ‘alter egos’ raiding.6 From Egyptian Thebes, whose wealth and military might Achilles noted,7 Helen had obtained a silver basket, and probably the drugs that enabled her to alleviate her guests’ sorrows.8 Further west her husband had learned of the great flocks of the Libyan peoples, supposedly lambing thrice a year.9 However, even though those lands were the subject of general knowledge, the seas leading to them southward of Crete were imagined as alarmingly open: supposedly a bird which flew thither would take a year to win its way back.10 But, beyond them, save for the half-mythical Lotus-Eaters,11 the reliable knowledge derived from tradition expired. From lands further afield only fragments of genuine information had reached over great distances, the report of the crane-hunting pygmies of Central Africa,12 or that of the long Arctic daylight.13 

 

Whatever knowledge of the Western Mediterranean had existed among the Mycenaeans had faded from memory. So, just as early modern atlas-makers felt free to decorate the wide newly discovered oceans with galleons and ferocious sea-beasts (crosses of whale and crocodile), the Ionian poets were able to fill the seas west of Greece with savage and gigantic men and monsters, and with equally dangerous enchantresses. It should be noted that Circe, daughter of the Sun, is also the sister of ‘the man of Aeea’14 who at Colchis at the east end of the Black Sea guarded the Golden Fleece and that the (best-avoided) ’Strayers’, which only the Argo returning from the quest of that Fleece could pass unharmed,15 lay on a potential route home for Odysseus’ ship. So the poet may well have transplanted some marvels for his story from the extreme East to the far West. The encircling River of Ocean, reached on a north wind,16 to which that hero was sent to learn about his return, was probably near the west end of his world. But those unknown western seas might also contain what were virtually ‘earthly paradises’: Scheria, the magical land of the Phaeacians, for whose wondrously swift ships Euboea, just east of the Greek mainland, was apparently close to the World’s End,17 or the extraordinarily fertile and sickness-free Syria, towards the midsummer sunset,18 from which the child Eumaeus was kidnapped. Even to that happy land, however, might venture the Phoenicians, the great sea-farers of the Middle Sea.

 

The poem shows almost no sign that its audience was aware of the penetration into those western seas of Hellenic sailors, whose explorations must have preceded the establishment of Hellenic colonies along the coasts of Italy and Sicily during (according to the traditional dating) the second half of the eighth century. Some of the earliest were settled from cities in Euboea, just across the Aegean from the Ionian coast. (The Ionians’ own explorations and soon colonisations were largely north-eastwards into the Black Sea, of whose southern coast the listing of  native peoples and landmarks before the Hellenes’ coming, given in Book Two of Apollonius’ Argonautica (which Morris in his Jason entirely skipped) may be a reminiscence. Either the Odyssey was substantially complete before that mid-8th century, or its poet took care to avoid including references to recent events that lay outside the epic tradition within which he was working. At most the last book, which may have been later re-handled, mentions the land of the Sicans,19 one of the native peoples whom the Hellenes found in Sicily, and gives Laertes an aged Sicilian slave woman.20 It has, however, been suspected that the description in the Ninth Book of the island facing the Cyclopes’ land, where most of Odysseus’ ships were moored, which might be ‘well-habited’, with ‘soft watery meadows’, and able to let ‘the vine her increase bear’, while the ‘plain … place for plowing’ would yield ‘a deep crop every year’,21 provides an echo of the spread of information at that time which was intended to allure prospective emigrants to such new lands.

 

After the Hellenes had thus voyaged to the West, they began to find traces of Homer’s tales there, along with locations for his legendary places. Offspring of Odysseus, as the first hero to have ventured thither, were credited with founding places there, and his imaginary son Telegonus22 was eventually given a ’Tyrsenian’  brother Latinus, eponymous ancestor of the Latin peoples,23 and the prototype of the ineffectual monarch of Virgil’s last six books, The Sun-God’s three-pointed island, Thrinacrie, had its name borrowed, despite the difference in scale, for the also three-cornered island of Sicily. Homer’s Phaeacians were eventually supposedly settled on Corcyra (the modern Corfu), where Apollonius had Homer’s Alcinous and Arete (reigning a generation before the Trojan war) arrange a shotgun wedding for Jason and Medea to baffle their Colchian pursuers.24 (Morris, having omitted this pursuit, had no need of this episode in Jason.) The settlers of Syracuse possibly chose to name the initially detached islet where they were securest after the legendary Ortygia near Eumaeus’ first home, and the contrary tides of the Straits of Messana provided a site for Scylla and Charybdis. The Romans followed the same practice: by the late Republic sites were found on the Italian coastline south of Rome for Circe25 and even for the Laestrygonians:26 so, almost two millennia later, Gibbon, noting in the reflections which concluded the third volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which Morris liked to read) how the collapse of a grand imperial structure need not exclude the survival of simpler and more basic human skills, could declare that ‘the scythe … still continued annually to mow the harvests of Italy, and the human feasts of the Laestrigons have never been renewed on the coast of Campania’’; from which he derived a. guarded, optimism. (Possibly those man-eaters’ only appearance in ‘canonical’ English literature.)

  1. Women who die suddenly are thought to perish by her arrows, men by Apollo’s: cf. Odyssey,  Book xv, 410-11 [WM 409-11]. About 1860 Morris produced for the set of illustrious women intended for embroidered panels at Red House a drawing (not actually used) of Artemis, probably inspired by a Greco-Roman statue of Diana, showing her as a huntress, short-skirted and bow-bearing. His character of the woodland spirit Habundia who protects Birdalone, in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, though named from the illusion-creating ’Dame Habundia’ in The Romance of the Rose, (as tr. by F. S. Ellis, his co-tenant at Kelmscott Manor: J. M. Dent, Temple Classics, 1900, vol. III, p. 127), has much of her character derived from this classical woodland goddess.

  2. Iliad, Bk .XIII, lines 5-6.

  3. Odyssey, Bk. iv,. lines 83-5.

  4. Iliad, VI, 289-91.

  5. Odyssey, iv,  617-19; Ibid. iv, 477.

  6. Ibid. xiv, 257-65.

  7. Iliad, IX, 381-4.

  8. Odyssey, iv. 125-7, 225-30.

  9. Ibid. iv. 85-9; cf. Herodotus, History, Book 4, ch. 172.

  10. Odyssey, iii, 319-22.

  11. See Note to ibid. ix, 84-104.

  12. Iliad, III, 5-6; cf. Oxford Classical Dictionary (1972 edn.), 902.

  13. See Note on Odyssey, x, 82-6.

  14. Odyssey, x, 135-9.

  15. Ibid. xii, 61-72.

  16. Ibid. x, 507.

  17. Ibid. vii, 321-6.

  18. Ibid. xv, 403-14.

  19. Ibid. xxiv, 307.

  20. Ibid. xxiv, 211, 389.

  21. Ibid. ix, 116-34.

  22. For whom, see Note to ibid. xi, 134-5.

  23. Hesiod, Theogony, 1011-16 (probably interpolated).

  24. Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, Bk. 4, 982-1222.

  25. Virgil, Aeneid, Bk. 7, 10-20.

  26. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, Bk. 2, letter 13; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk. 14, 233.