δούπησεν δὲ πεσών, δόρυ δʼ ἐν κραδίῃ ἐπεπήγει,
ἥ ῥά οἱ ἀσπαίρουσα καὶ οὐρίαχον πελέμιζεν
ἔγχεος·
That’s just gross; straight out of a low budget splatter movie.
Idomeneus’ speech to the dying Othryoneus, while dragging him to the Greek line, is particulary harsh and sarcastic too. Book 13 so far is certainly not for the faint of heart.
Tough ombre this Homer dude.
The Iliad is full of grotesque woundings, and some of them are anatomically impossible.
As I’ve never seen anyone with a spear sticking out of a heart that is still beating, I don’t know whether this is realistic or not. I fear it is.
Bart, have you already read the passage where a warrior’s eyes fall off? That at least is not very realistic, and definitely very much like a modern splatter movie! Some descriptions are more accurate in detail. I think it’s Hector who at some stage has the acetabulum of his hip broken (called κοτύλη in Homer and cotyloid cavity even today in some medical literature).
Homer does this to keep his audience’s attention. He has an endless number of ways to say “warrior A kills warrior B”. I think he prefers pathos to gore, but he can’t avoid the latter, since there’s no war without gore.
A couple more points:
It makes a fitting climax to Idomeneus’ aristeia (echoing Diomedes’, foreshadowing Patroclus’) and a fitting lead-in to the challenge to Deiphobus. It’s not a random uber-graphic death, splatter for splatter’s sake, it’s part of the structurally modulated larger pattern.
Homer certainly doesn’t go out of his way to avoid gore, but here once again, as in that earlier passage you quoted before, there’s pathos too. The helplessly paralyzed victim is first given a backstory—a minibio and a wife, the best imaginable. Many to weep, then, but the poem must leave them behind, along with him, and continue on its inexorable way.
Not yet, looking forward to it.
Don’t think I heard about the cotyloid cavity before, but maybe I forgot.
Some more medicine related tidbits in book 13: 596-597 seems to offer a description of an armsling or mitella. And best of all is the curious bit of anatomy in 546-547
ἀπὸ δὲ φλέβα πᾶσαν ἔκερσεν,
ἥ τʼ ἀνὰ νῶτα θέουσα διαμπερὲς αὐχένʼ ἱκάνει·
A bloodvessel or vein that runs all along the back till it reaches the neck. There’s no such thing of course.
Mmm, Homer and medicine, maybe a good idea for a short monograph (if Paul hasn’t already written one).
I confess I didn’t know cotyloid cavity either, but the word pops up when you google acetabulum (the term I’d usually use and expect), e.g. in the Wikipedia article.
Someone, I suppose it was Janko (can’t look up right now) has suggested that the “vein” in the back is the spinal cord, which seems very credible to me. Homer didn’t know the exact function of nerves, tendons, arteries, veins - blood circulation was discovered only in the 17th century by Harvey, and νευρον/nervus actually mean tendon, as you well must know… So I suppose a continuous structure like the spinal cord might well be called “vein”, especially as you probably have a lot of stuff like blood and cerebrospinal fluid oozing out if you sever it. Not to mention a very dramatic effect on the person affected, like if you severed an important vein.
I wonder what Homer’s source for his information was. Humans were not dissected, so I suppose the main sources are animal anatomy and war wounds.
Interesting. Yes, the spinal cord seems a good guess.
Blood circulation was partially understood long before Harvey. The difference between veins and arteries for instance, and the function of the heart as a pump was known to Galenus and probably much earlier. What wasn’t understood was the closed circuit nature of our blood circulation and the role of the lungs in oxygenating venous blood. Galenus thought that the liver somehow produced and filtered venous blood, which it does of course (the filtering I mean), but not in the way he hypothezised.
I’ve made a note of the Cambridge commentary by Janko (are those the yellow and green ones?) for future use. For the moment I’ll stick to Ameis.
And pure conjecture perhaps. Wasn’t it Aristotle who famously claimed that men have more teeth than women?
the Cambridge commentary by Janko (are those the yellow and green ones?)
No, it’s a six-volume commentary published by Cambridge on the entire Iliad, written by a variety of authors.
Yes, you’re right, the ancient must have known something about blood circulation. Of course, Homer probably knew only a fraction of what Galenus knew. Still, I suppose people must have understood from very early on that an artery is something quite disctinct - put your finger on one, and you feel the heartbeat; slash a large one, and blood spurts out not as continuous stream but in bursts. Veins are more more abstract. Look up φλέψ in LSJ, and you’ll see that it means a number of different elongated structures, including (guess what!) membrum virile! (Is there a single page in LSJ without a Latin euphemism?)
Btw, I checked, it was from Janko I read about φλέψ being the spinal cord. He has nice a discussion of the different interpretations of the passage.
Another interesting thing I remember reading from Janko (though I don’t think it’s his idea originally) is that φρένες means lungs, not the midriff. Again, I find it very plausible. Before that, I’d always wondered why Homer was so obsessed with the midriff…
In that case, why is he so obsessed with the lungs?
Lmao
In Epidemiae book 2 at least the φρένες can only be the diaphragm: Φρένες δὲ προσπεφύκασι τῷ ἥπατι, ἃς οὐ ῥηΐδιον χωρίσαι.
My guess is that later medical writers took up an opaque poetic word and turned it into a technical term. That’s just a guess though.
Anyway, my point with the “obsession” with the diaphragm was that unlike the the lungs the diaphragm is not an obvious anatomic structure to a layman, and it’s strange that it should be so important. For that reason it’s strange, as Janko (p. 379-380) argues, that the Iliadic heroes seem to be repeatedly hit in the diaphragm, but apparently only once in the lungs (4.528). Also he argues that the diaphragm, a taut muscle (“ἃς οὐ ῥηΐδιον χωρίσαι”), is not likely to get drawn out of the wound with the spear, as in 16.504:
ὣς ἄρα μιν εἰπόντα τέλος θανάτοιο κάλυψεν
ὀφθαλμοὺς ῥῖνάς θ᾽: ὃ δὲ λὰξ ἐν στήθεσι βαίνων
ἐκ χροὸς ἕλκε δόρυ, προτὶ δὲ φρένες αὐτῷ ἕποντο:
τοῖο δ᾽ ἅμα ψυχήν τε καὶ ἔγχεος ἐξέρυσ᾽ αἰχμήν.
Someone else somewhere else has argued that φρένες is a more generic term meaning just “internal organs of the thoracic cavity”, a bit like English “innards” and “viscera” mean “internal organs of the abdominal cavity”. Personally I prefer “lungs”, which is what you’d probably use in translation anyway, in lack of a better term.
I looked under φρήν in Chantraine’s Dictionnaire Etymologique Grec. Nothing new there: he discusses briefly the possibilities (diaphragm, lungs, pericard, a group of organs in the upper part of the body), but doesn’t commit himself. Pericard is strange though.
Vaguely related: Homer makes it to the pages of the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery
http://www.cardiothoracicsurgery.org/content/5/1/114
Wherever precisely we’re to imagine the φρενες as being located in Homer (not in the head, for sure), they’re where thinking takes place.
What I really wonder is what are the implications of this line, περὶ especially…
Od. 9.363 αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ Κύκλωπα περὶ φρένας ἤλυθεν οἶνος
Anyway, although I have by no means gone systematically through anything, I think there’s some logic: φρένες, the lungs, is inhabitated by “breaths of life”, θυμός and ψυχή – whatever the distinction between the latter two; I suppose θυμός is a sort of “hot breath”, passion and impulsivity, while ψυχή is “cold”, something that remains even after death and goes to Hades. κῆρ and κραδίη are the heart, of course, and I wonder what is its exact role in this system.
But these are just casual thoughts…
What I really wonder is what are the implications of this line, περὶ especially…
Od. 9.363 αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ Κύκλωπα περὶ φρένας ἤλυθεν οἶνος
You’re wondering whether the wine circulates inside or outside the φρενες? Inside, I expect, but who can tell and does it matter? The significant thing is that the wine going around his φρενες affects his ability to think clearly, just as φρενες-deprived Glaucus is incapable of thinking clearly. That was the point I was making, that it’s thinking that the φρενες relate to (and maybe other mental/emotional activities too). I’d be more interested in exploring their assigned function(s) than in trying to fix their precise physiological identification. Where and what they are has little bearing on what they do.
As your follow-up post suggests, it’s hard to make sense of the φρενες in isolation from the θυμος, πραπιδες, νοος, κηρ, etc., and they need treating as part of an organizational system, coherent or otherwise.
The ψυχη is particularly interesting, of course, and falls quite outside of this system. It’s requisite for life and consciousness, but there’s no activity associated with it during life, nor does it have any location (not in the φρενες, or am I mistaken?—hinc illae lacrimae); it has no role at all, except to leave at the end, leaving behind a σωμα, a νεκρος available for dishonoring or honoring but nothing else. Accordingly it can be used as a metonym for a person’s life, which none of the others can, and also unlike the others it can enjoy (or rather not enjoy) a continuing post-mortem existence.