Civilization, Homeric; Epic poetry, Greek -- History and criticism; Homer; Homer -- Homes and haunts -- Greece
Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the
unlearned world, merely because Nestor's is a "character part," very
broadly drawn.
The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of
Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept
the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms
himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a
warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses
to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes
them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory
of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion,
Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when "no man
plucked up heart" to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never
been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and
wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak.
Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!"
and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details
about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage
is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the
history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an
ancient jade _patu_. An objection is now taken to Nestor's geography: he
is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks
of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iardanus, and the walls of
Pheia. Pheia "is no doubt the same as Pheai" [Footnote: Monro, Note on
Odyssey, XV. 297.] (Odyssey, XV. 297), "but that was a maritime town not
near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iardanus anywhere
near it." Now Didymus (Schol. A) "is said to have read [Greek: Phaeraes]
for [Greek: Pheias]," following Pherekydes. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_,
vol. i. 308.] M. Victor Berard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian
topography, says that "Pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the
reading "Phera," the [Greek: Pherae] of the journey of Telemachus,
in the Odyssey. He thinks that the [Greek: Pherae] of Nestor is the
Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of
the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or
burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha.
Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough
and brawling stream." Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf
thinks it Semitic--"_Yarden_, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did
not give the _Yar_ to the _Yarrow_ nor to the Australian _Yarra Yarra_.
The country, says M. Berard, is a network of rivers, burns, and
rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same
river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; [Footnote:
Berard, _Les Pheniciens et L'Odyssee,_ 108-113, 1902] many of them, in
England, are plainly prae-Celtic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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