2023-08-28 20:16:44
by Livia Capponi
Tuesday 29 August with the newspaper the first of the three volumes on the epic signed by Giulio Guidorizzi: a story of the Odyssey with special attention to female portraits
The Homeric poems shed light on the Dark Age , the dark age so called for our lack of knowledge of it, or the Greek Middle Ages, ranging from the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC to the beginning of a new literary era at the end of the 8th century BC They depict a society which emerged from Bronze Age archeology and which has been confirmed as historical by excavations, from Schliemann onwards; the seventh layer of the Hissarlik-Troy site is the one believed to be contemporary with the war described by Homer, which already in ancient times dated around 1184 BC The decipherment by Ventris and Chadwick, in the 1950s, of the Mycenaean clay tablets written in Linear B confirmed some aspects of the Homeric dialect and its contents, such as the description of chariots, armor and helmets, and names such as Hektor, Achilleus, Aias, Orestes.
The Hittite archives from Bogazköy, the ancient Hattusa, in central Turkey, have reported testimonies on the city of Wilusa, or Ilio or Troy, a vassal of the Hittite empire, and on the kingdom of the Ahhiyavas, i.e. the Achaeans, at the time of king Atarshiyash, perhaps to be identified with Atreus, the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, the kings respectively of Mycenae and Sparta, who were at the head of the Achaean expedition against Troy.
While containing memories of the Mycenaean period, the Homeric poems were handed down orally much later, at the end of the eighth century BC, by singers who weaved more recent stories into the Mycenaean nucleus, improvising and inventing, regardless of any inconsistencies. In 1934 Milman Parry listened to a totally illiterate Serbian cantor recite from memory an epic poem the length of the Odyssey for two weeks, resorting to improvisation and repetitive mnemonic formulas, handed down from generations of bards. Something similar happened in ancient Greece.
The protagonists of the Homeric poems are social relationships, such as the heroism of warriors, the passion for women, friendship and hospitality towards shipwrecked and travellers, and gifts, exchanged or stolen, first of all Helen of Sparta, stolen to Menelaus by Paris-Alexander and taken to Troy. The travels of Ulysses, a veteran returning to Ithaca after ten years, mirror the colonial routes of the Greeks towards the West in the eighth century BC. Together with the trades, the epic was also transmitted in the colonies, hence the many Italian localities that recall Homeric places: the house of Circe at Circeo, the headquarters of Aeolus in the Aeolian Islands, the sirens Partenope, Ligea and Leucosia in Naples and in the gulf of Salerno, Scilla and Cariddi in the Strait of Messina, the cows of the Sun in Trinacria, the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus in the many prehistoric caves, with attached stacks, in Sicily, the island of the goats Aegusa in the Egadi…
It is a game that demonstrates the dense network of connections of the Mediterranean, a receptacle of commercial, colonial and hospitality relations since the dawn of time.
Ulysses by Giulio Guidorizzi, the first of a series of three volumes on the protagonists of ancient literature, to be released on Tuesday 29 August with the «Corriere della Sera», recounts the Odyssey with special attention to female portraits, with a loose and lively, and enriching the story with incursions into Greek mythology necessary to clarify the background and the unraveling of the events narrated by Homer.
Indeed, in the Homeric poems, women are often symbolic figures, allegories, parables, dreams of the unconscious, capable of explaining complex psychoanalytic and ethical concepts. The myth was not a mummified relic, but a living teaching addressed to everyone; after all, the Iliad and the Odyssey were a kind of Bible of the Greeks, present in the education of every Greek in every gymnasium.
Penelope is the personification of marital fidelity, in contrast to the murderous Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon. Women are wives, goddesses, slaves, sorceresses, nurses, daughters, never heroines: heroes are only male. Excluded from glory, women are left with work: all of them, including princesses and queens, are educated to work, and eventually to command other cooks, weavers, housekeepers.
When she meets Ulysses on the beach of Scheria, Nausicaa – the daughter of Alcinoo, the king of the Phaeacians – is doing the laundry with her maids. Penelope finds in weaving the trick to deceive the 108 suitors, untying the warp made during the day at night, for a good three years. This is a world in which the inferior status of women is neither hidden nor idealized, without romance or chivalry.
Ulysses misses his native land, and Penelope is part of it, as the mother of his son and mistress of his house. Marriage, however, does not force Ulysses into monogamous sexuality, nor does it impose any family ideal on him. The relationship between Ulysses and Penelope is strong, but much less in depth and intensity than that between father and son, or between war companions such as Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad.
The Homeric poems teach what has long been the rule of Western civilization: the woman is believed to be an inferior being by nature, destined to procreate and administer the house, while meaningful relationships and strong personal attachments are sought and formed between males; homosexuality has been an integral part of Greek culture for centuries.
The goddesses behave in a similar way to mortal women: Hera and Athena want Troy to be destroyed for the offense suffered by Paris, who had judged Aphrodite more beautiful than them. The case of Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda and favorite of Aphrodite, is exceptional: the woman who unleashes a world war between East and West is not passive war booty, but a conscious adulteress, and once she returns to Sparta from her husband, he receives no punishment, but exercises power through the knowledge of magic learned from the Egyptians. Even Arete, queen of the Phaeacians, Circe and Calypso, distinguish themselves as sorceresses either foreign or of divine origin, freeing themselves from the characteristic submission of the Hellenic tradition.
The next releases on Agamemnon and Aeneas
It comes out on Tuesday 29 August on newsstands with the «Corriere della Sera» Ulisse. The last of the heroes, on sale at 8.50 euros plus the price of the newspaper. It is the first volume of the new mini series of three titles dedicated to the ancient epic. The series is signed by Giulio Guidorizzi, a professor who taught Greek literature and anthropology at the universities of Turin and Milan. At the heart of this first release the hero of the Odyssey, known for his thirst for knowledge and the ingenuity of him. Giulio Guidorizzi has already published Greek Literature (Mondadori University, 2002); The myth of Oedipus (Einaudi, 2004) with Maurizio Bettini; two volumes of Il mito greco (Mondadori, 2009-2012), the introduction of which received the De Sanctis 2013 award for the short essay; The colors of the soul (Raffaello Cortina, 2017); Pity and terror. The Greek tragedy (Einaudi, 2023). The other two monthly releases of the series will be Aeneas, the stranger (Saturday 30 September) and Io, Agamemnon (Sunday 29 October). The volumes can be purchased on newsstands together with the «Corriere» always at the same price. The graphic design is by Valeria Gobbi.
August 28, 2023 (change August 28, 2023 | 20:14)
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