Odyssey 11.225-59

In Greek:

Persephone’s first called witness, and the first soul permitted by Odysseus to drink the sheep’s blood and thus to speak, is Tyro. Once again Odysseus puts front and centre the gory ritual of the blood-drinking from a dug trench, which, one presumes, would have been done on all fours like an animal. Whatever the impact of this foregrounding upon how we take in the series of souls of noble women to follow, it seems most likely to be a reductive and equalising feint from the world of comedy, unsuited to the Boeotian tragedies to which these women and their stories will, one day, pregnantly attach.

There the first that I saw was Tyro, well-fathered,

Who stated that she was the offspring of blameless Salmoneus,

And claimed to be the lady wife of Cretheus son of Aeolus. (Od.11.235-7)

It’s not clear whether Tyro was the original tyro; etymologists connect our word to a Latin tiro, meaning ‘new soldier’ or ‘recruit’, but that -y- needs explaining. Usually representation of a sound by -y- in Latin suggests an origin in Greek short -υ-. It does seem that Homer’s Τυρώ (whose -υ- is long or lengthened in Homer’s verse) was a newcomer to social and political prominence, conspicuous, no doubt, for an extraordinary sexual attractiveness, although she does not appear to merit a ‘fair-tressed’ or a ‘ravishing’. Instead her introductory epithet is εὐπατέρεια, ‘of a good father’ or ‘good parentage’, which amounts to a claim that is strangely, if gently, undermined. At least, it seems a thing to remark on, despite crickets from the commentaries, on the sense of ‘stated’ (φάτο) and ‘claimed’ (φῆ) in the lines that follow. Why should Tyro’s status as either daughter or wife require any sort of assertion on her part? As if she were some sort of nouvelle claimant, a tyro?

Continuing in the spirit of what came to be called comedy, Odysseus decides that the best way to deal with the crowd of women’s souls gathered around the blood was to draw his ‘sharp-edged sword’ from by his ‘firm thigh’ so they could not drink all at once. Hence the women, in the face of the hero’s brandished phallus,

… came on, one before the other, and each woman

Would announce her own lineage fully; while I was for questioning all of them. (233-4)

Though he tells us that the women spoke, he does not say their lines but only gives us reported speech; she ‘stated’ and ‘claimed’. By itself this introduces the element of doubt about their veracity; one wonders to what end? The choice of reported speech is expensive dramatically. It is also not clear if the women actually said anything else but their lineage (γόνος), or indeed if Odysseus asked any other question of them. The story told of them in the third person goes on to begin with a relative clause, ‘she who did such and such,’ which is the style of a catalogue. The details of the story then related are therefore separated in origin from either Odysseus’ question or each woman’s answer. They do not come from the horse’s mouth. The distance thus created rather obtrudes when we are used to Homer delighting in embodying speakers and speeches in his art. None of the souls of the ancient women speaks in their own person before the audience, whereas those of the warriors whom Odysseus had known will later be full of things to say.

It should be noted that only men in Homer’s poems receive epithets which we classify as ‘patronymics’, and which function almost as surnames (Lāertiadēs or Pēlēïadēs, e.g., for Odysseus and Achilles, or Cronidēs for Zeus). Tyro’s reputed husband Cretheus, for example, is Aiolidāo, ‘son of Aeolus’. Tyro herself, however, must be located genealogically by either or both of her father and husband, and it would seem that there can be uncertainty about these attributions in later generations; whereas the certainty seems to be absolute when it comes to male patronymics. This is true even when the Aeolus who is Tyro’s grandfather is thought not to be the same Aeolus who controls the winds and marries his children to each other. Perhaps that is why there is extant a Catalogue of Women in hexameter verses; it would seem the mnemonic reinforcement sometimes aided by musical settings would be more necessary in the case of ancestral women than the men, who live lives with their patronymics ever present. The spirit of Father Cronus, for example, himself long departed with the golden age, is present throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey in the regular sounding of Zeus’s patronymics Κρονίδης or Κρονίων. But Hera is not known as ‘daughter of Cronus’. She is remembered as Zeus’s no.1 wife, not his sister, except of course in titillating Roman or Victorian mythology books.

I say this because the evident cultural certainty about male patrilineal descent is so at odds with human nature and experience. One should have thought that women would have the best guess at who might have fathered their child. The culture of patronymics seems, in light of this fact, to protest too much its certainty. Although Homer has Tyro claim to be a daughter and a wife, she seems altogether free of what those claims may claim on her. She acts fully in the power, and under the power, of her own erotic being. As the relative clause of her listing relates,

ἣ ποταμοῦ ἠράσσατ’ Ἐνιπῆϝος θείοιο,

ὃς πολὺ κάλλιστος ποταμῶν ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἵησιν.

καί ῥ’ ἐπ’ Ἐνιπῆϝος πωλέσκετο καλὰ ῥέεθρα ·

She it was fell physically in love with the river, divine Enipeus,

Who was much the most beautiful of the rivers who move upon the earth,

And she was often coming and going for Enipeus’ lovely currents. (238-40)

What can my readers make of the idea of sexual attraction for, and relations with, a river? I suppose there is a dreamily poetic way to take this, where the river becomes an evocative metaphor for the forces and currents one experiences in sexual arousal and orgasm, coursing within and around the participants. It may help colour the picture that Tyro is at this point a virgin—what is described as her ‘virgin zone’ (παρθενίην ζώνην, 245) is later removed, one should think for the first time—and so her thoughts of erotic rivers may be adolescent or pubescent and involve pink unicorns.

The clue, however, that Homer is not in metaphorical mode, is that more often than not, his allusions to encounters between rivers and women result in pregnancy. The characters in Homer’s poems generally cannot name their human ancestors beyond two generations; at that point divine agents intervene, among them your lusty rivers. The Homeric people are evidently two generations removed from a decimating cosmic upheaval, or emigration under duress; their economies no longer forge weapons, it seems, but only inherit or trade or win them in battle. The present activity of the gods suggests that nothing has yet settled, that cosmic equilibria remain unstable; but that prior to the great generations of the truly World Wars, first involving Heracles or Theseus or Atreus and then Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, there was an Hiroshima, as it were, from beyond which Homer traces no descent. There some time emerged on the nascent Hellenic scene, as if from stage right, the likes of Agamemnon’s grandfather, Pelops for whom the present Peloponnese was named—perhaps when it was still an island (nēsos)—and Aeacus and Arceisias, patrilineal grandfathers of Achilles and Odysseus. And a number of Homer’s present-day heroes trace their ancestry to a river who made love to their grandmother.

In other fora, I have suggested spontaneous pregnancy as a non-miraculous occurrence amongst women and other mammals, the fortunate or unfortunate survivors of cosmic thunderbolts and their associated vorticial winds, earth-shakes, and deluges. It would seem to be impossible, alas, to recreate the conditions of such electrified and radiative environments under experimental conditions, to test their effects on ova and gametes generally. Perhaps it is in such environments that the degenerate, mutant y-chromosome itself first emerged. But what is evident is that fresh water rivers are non-conducting, and therefore can present an oversized insulated obstruction and telluric guide to the extravagant voltages, expressing themselves around them in diverse fantastical rock-melting, mountain-building winds and discharged veins of copper and gold. The following is an experiment conducted by Billy Yelverton, at the request of the late Michael Steinbacher, showing two opposite electrodes suspended over sand, with a channel of fresh water snaking between them. Do not miss the final still images (15:39):

No less than the Grand Canyon in Arizona, with its adjacent catastrophic deposits of uranium, is stupendous testimony to the almost absurd power of an already present fresh water flow on the polarised forces discharging on either side. The banks of a river, in such circumstances, would have been extraordinary places of radiative flux and interaction, and possibly also of safety from the worst effects. Probably they still are. Life hugs the Nile. Lovers take river walks.

Despite all the human reasons to lie about paternity, let us not close our minds to the possibility of riparian parentage. Homer is not speaking of virgin births, nor does he (or Tyro) clumsily attempt to divert gossip about adulterous liaisons. We do not know what we do not know, and I propose it best to suppose that Homer knew something we do not know about the erotic and progenitive power of certain rivers, under special historical circumstances no longer as present in his (or our) present. In the Iliad the river Scamander is shown to be capable of flooding and drowning people, like our rivers; in the past, however, it (he...