The commission of the Homeric epics to writing postdates the fall of the Mycenaean palaces by more than 400 years, but as the oldest examples of Greek literature they are closest in time to the events of a distant past about which the poet sings. Furthermore, the Odyssey is, at least superficially, a seafarer's tale. Although it is well established that Bronze Age survivals in Homer are few (Bennet 1997; Finley 1978; Raaflaub 1996), it might be possible to recognize a mentalite or elements of a maritime habitus that persisted from the LBA into historical times.
Seafaring is not glorified in Homer. Rather, heroes like Menelaus, Nestor, and Odysseus emphasize the ardor, the danger, the terror, and the loss of life at the hands of malignant forces of nature and implacable gods and monsters. The Odyssey abounds in stories of ships blown off course, stranded in windless seas, or wrecked altogether. A recurring theme is that these disasters are visited upon crews that have offended a powerful god in some way. The audience listening to a bard singing these tales could not fail to grasp the implication that seafaring was not for the faint of heart or for the uninitiated. Many would have had personal knowledge of a ship or a person lost at sea.
In the Odyssey, there are three main groups of sea travelers: warrior-heroes and their followers, pirates, and merchants. They are distinguished on the basis of who they are — their status and social identity — rather than on their actions at sea, because their realms of activity — war, trade, and raiding — overlap to a surprising extent. As we have seen, the Trojan War heroes often acted as pirates do, plundering coastal regions for needed supplies or treasure. They also were the beneficiaries, if not the actual agents, of long-distance trade for raw materials and other exotic commodities (Tandy 1997: 75). Pirates pursued organized, “informal" warfare, and their ships and crews must have been fitted out to wage war. Merchants, too, might raid when the opportunity arose.
Odysseus and the rest of the Trojan War heroes formed an elite warrior class that ruled small, dispersed chiefdoms, more analogous politically with an emerging aristocracy of Homer's time — the basileus and his followers of the eighth century — than with the rulers of the Mycenaean world. In Homer, the social and economic structure was based on the oikos, consisting of the extended family (usually three generations living together) and its land, animals, slaves, and all other assets. Ships were owned by prosperous families, whose patriarchs could assemble a crew from among the dependants of the oikos, or hire them from elsewhere. This world is more similar to Viking-era Scandinavia (Ronnby 2007) than to the Mycenaean palatial era.
Eighth-century basileis, like their epic counterparts, constructed and maintained their status by differentiating themselves from the rest of society by means of what David Tandy (1997: 141—65) terms “tools of exclusion." The most prominent of these devices were inter-elite, reciprocal hospitality and giftgiving; councils and feasts; hero cult and warrior burial; and indeed the epics themselves, which can be seen as part of the program of elite self-definition and exclusion (Tandy 1997: 141, 152). A detailed treatment of this program is beyond the scope of the present work (for different perspectives, see Antonaccio 1998; Morris 1987, 1998; Osborne 1996: 70—136; Tandy 1997; Whitley 1991), but a few examples from Homer and from the archaeological record give a sense of it. Telemachus receives a lavish reception at Pylos and Sparta once he is recognized as the son of Odysseus, and thus as a member of the elite warrior class. His arrival at Pylos interrupts a great feast at the seashore for which 81 bulls were sacrificed to Poseidon (Odyssey 3.1—10), obviously well beyond the resources of all but the wealthiest of men. The audience halls of Alcinous, Odysseus, Nestor, and Menelaus find parallels in several large buildings on the Greek mainland and islands (Mazarakis Ainian 1997: 363—67; Tandy 1997: 144—49). Beginning in the later eighth century, cult places dedicated to epic heroes, including the Menelaion at Sparta and possibly shrines to Agamemnon at Mycenae and Odysseus on Ithaca, “. . . paralleled social display and epic poetry as means of legitimating social and economic inequality. . . [t]he cults of epic heroes can be seen as part of that ideology: their worship confirmed social realities for those in power, who claimed them as ancestors" (Antonaccio 1998: 64). For the Homeric leaders, long-distance maritime travel was an essential contribution to the identity of the warrior-chief: to prove one's mettle by warring and raiding in distant lands, to procure exotic material and objects whose possession conferred status, and to establish alliances with other elites.
Those who could be identified as merchants did not belong to the elite class. Homeric heroes display ambivalence toward trade for profit, which was generally left to professional merchants and, especially, Phoenicians. At one point a Phaeacian youth insults Odysseus' fitness for (elite) athletic competition by saying, “You look more like the captain of a merchant ship, plying the seas with a crew of hired hands and keeping a sharp eye on his cargo, greedy for profit" (Odyssey 8.161—64). In Hesiod's near-contemporary Works and Days, a common farmer could take up sailing for part of the year in order to sell his produce for profit (Works and Days 619—94).6 There is no reason to believe, however, that elites of Homer's time did not participate in trade voyages, particularly those involving gift exchanges or luxury materials and products. The apparent disdain of trade among the Homeric heroes may be a bit
Of aristocratic dissimulation aimed at creating social distance from professional merchants.
The sea tales in the Odyssey, the gods, monsters, and natural hazards that Odysseus encounters in his wanderings, are a potentially rich source of information about ancient attitudes toward the sea, but they are notoriously difficult to interpret. Is it possible to find in them traces of a more ancient maritime lore? One way to interpret these stories is as mariners' tall tales, plucked from hoary oral tradition and rendered increasingly fantastical with retelling over time. Exaggeration and dissociation from reality may reflect a combination of conditions inherent to both early seafaring and oral tradition. The terror of encountering storms and hostile natives in uncharted waters would provide a source of vivid recollections and dire cautionary tales. Exaggeration might serve several purposes: the enhancement of a good story; the use of hyperbole to impress upon the listener a visceral sense of danger, whether in a didactic or performative context; or as a way to maintain the secrecy of routes and places by distorting their locations and inflating the hazards associated with them. All manner of anecdotes could be believable given a hazy knowledge of some part of the world. In the Odyssey, once the action moves from the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean westward into the central Mediterranean, places and characters shift from the real and identifiable (e. g., Pylos, Sparta, the Nile River) to an unreal world of monsters, goddesses, and the realm of the dead. The commission of the Homeric epics to writing occurred just as the colonizing movement west to Sicily and Italy was underway; the origins of some of the sea tales in the Odyssey might be traced to the imperfect knowledge about these new worlds.
It is also plausible that these stories contain elements of phenomenological itineraries full of periplus-like sailing directions, mnemonic devices for recalling details of long voyages, and cautionary tales told in metaphorical and possibly encoded terms. If we imagine the Greeks trying to come to grips with new lands and essentially uncharted seas in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, several fragments of sailing instructions can be recognized in the Odyssey: (1) segmented journeys from headland to headland and island to island; (2) storms and gales with realistic effects and reactions by Odysseus' crews; (3) coastal hazards including narrow passages and submerged rocks and coastal shelves; (4) rough seas with currents, waves, whirlpools, and eddies; and (5) potentially hostile natives. Naming and animating these people, places, and forces of nature in the form of narrative stories served practical purposes. They were incorporated into a vital body of maritime knowledge as mnemonic devices to aid in the recognition of a route and the hazards that lay along it. Naming and describing transforms unknown to known, and begins the process of domestication of an unfamiliar part of the world.
It is not particularly useful in the present context to try to chart Odysseus' route or to identify the places where he encountered gods and monsters, as so many “Homeric geographers" have done (e. g., Berard 1927—9; Bradford 2005; Severin 1987; Stanford 1947). To a bard's audience, any explicit association between the fantastical places and characters inhabiting locations beyond the familiar geographical realm and real-world routes and inhabitants would be meaningless detail. The epics are not geographical treatises, after all, and although the audience would expect some adherence to what they knew of the world and the Trojan War story, much of the entertainment value of the performance was in being lifted out of the here and now to journey to times and places literally out of this (i. e., the audience's) world.
Thus, instead of trying to match epic elements to the real world, it makes sense to think of Odysseus' encounters as representative of universal experiences at sea. The proximal impetus for some of the stories might have been the colonizing effort in the central Mediterranean and northern Africa, but the pattern of their construction may be much more ancient. To cite a few examples, the “Clashing Rocks" that appear in the Argonautica (the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts) are often identified with the mouth of the Bosporus, the entrance into the Black Sea (Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2.555—606). These two floating masses of rock crashed together whenever a ship tried to pass between them, demolishing the ship and its crew. The origin of this story may lie in the difficulty of passing from the Dardanelles through the Bosporus into the Black Sea, because of the combination of prevailing northerly winds and the strong current of the Black Sea outflow. Ships could only make headway by waiting for a strong southerly/westerly wind to propel them against the current.7 The danger of being driven against the rocks if the wind failed may have prompted the story of the clashing rocks, but it is easy to see how such an apparition could be inspired by any turbulent narrows. A distinct but similar obstacle, the “Wandering Rocks," was encountered both by Odysseus (Odyssey 12.61—72) and Jason (Argonautica 4.785—88). Similarly, Charybdis, the personification of a treacherous whirlpool, was encountered by these two heroes (Odyssey 12.235—44; Argonautica 4.920—60). It may be significant that once the heroes passed safely, these dangers were effectively neutralized: once Jason had passed between the Clashing Rocks, they became fixed in place (Argonautica 2.606—607); and the Sirens were said to have committed suicide after they failed to entice Odysseus to shore. These resolutions may be metaphors for successfully incorporating these hazards, and the means to overcome them, into the knowledge system of the maritime community.
Into the monstrous appearance and practices of the creatures with whom Odysseus and his men came into contact can be read assorted fears about hostile indigenous people. Again and again, they met inhabitants living in incomprehensibly un-Greek ways, from the Cyclopes who lived in isolation from one another and failed to take any account of the rich agropastoral and maritime potential of their offshore island (Odyssey 9.116—39), to the horrific cannibalism of Scylla, the Cyclopes, and the Lystraegonians. Cannibalism is a virtually universal taboo, which throughout history has been falsely projected by colonizers onto indigenous people, out of ignorance, fear, or a need to regard them as less than human (Biber 2005; Clemmer 1996; Obeyesekere 2005). False or exaggerated representations of the “other" in seafaring lore served to underscore the caution necessary when making incipient contacts with people in the absence of a common language or customs. These concerns were often justified.
Could some of these elements be much older than the period of westward colonization? Richard Martin argues that the Odyssey tells of the end of a heroic tradition; the poem and its characters speak to a vanishing past from a diminished present, and for Iron Age bards performing the tale this heroic age was that much more remote (Martin 1993: 240; Murnaghan 2002: 140—41). In the Odyssey, the Trojan War heroes are now dead or returned home to relatively uneventful lives with no comparably heroic successors in sight. Among the lost traditions was adventure on the boundless sea, and hard men like Odysseus who embraced both its peril and its magic. The death of the old maritime tradition is signaled when the Phaeacian ship returning home from conveying Odysseus to Ithaca is turned into stone by an angry Poseidon (Odyssey 13.125—83). With this act, the maritime life of these consummate seafarers is “fossilized" and passes into the past.
We may bring this discussion back to the Mycenaeans by noting the strong evidence that Mycenaean ships had already arrived in the southern Italy and Sicily at the beginning of the Mycenaean period, by LH I if not a little earlier. They, not the Minoans or the colonizers of Homer's day, were the Aegean pioneers in the region. How did they assemble the information they needed to make the voyage safely, and how did they structure knowledge to instruct and transmit it across generations? I submit that the process must not have changed much over the centuries, and that fragments of maritime lore embedded in the Odyssey were probably drawn from much older traditions of building phenomenological itineraries and structuring narratives of exploration. Obviously, in any long-lived oral tradition there is a process of selection and updating of material that prevents us from retrojecting stories directly and literally back to Mycenaean times. Nevertheless, the Odyssey and other early Greek literature, when examined alongside archaeological and ethnographic evidence, can contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive and practical process of building and maintaining maritime knowledge over periods of centuries.
Conclusions
The environmental conditions of seafaring in the Aegean area are complex outcomes of earth processes in nested scales from global to local. These interactions create patterns of climate, weather, currents, and winds, which are in turn influenced by the Aegean's unique geographical position and topographic configuration, with its profusion of islands and deeply indented coastlines. These parameters undoubtedly shaped the development of maritime life in the Bronze Age, but social factors were also crucial in the formation and maintenance of maritime connections, sometimes in the face of environmental obstacles.
Because of the relatively small scale of the Aegean Sea and the dense packing of islands within it, navigation involved coastal pilotage to a much greater extent than open-sea navigational techniques. Two distinct levels of seafaring expertise existed: a general level sufficient for local fishing and short-range travel to nearby coasts and islands; and a specialized, sophisticated knowledge of environmental conditions, navigational techniques, routes, and distant places for medium - and long-range travel. A landlocked farmer like Hesiod with a basic knowledge of seamanship could make short sea crossings to trade his wares. The professional seaman engaged in longer voyages, on the other hand, drew upon a complex store of maritime knowledge. Such knowledge was systematized within a discrete maritime community as a body of lore, the transmission of which involved hands-on training, formal sailing instructions, and vivid, metaphorical narratives designed as mnemonic devices and in-group esoterica. Because this information was communicated orally, it would not be expected to survive in the material record, but the early Homeric literature may preserve traces of this lore, and ethnographies of modern low-technology seafarers offer enlightening insights into the structure of maritime communities, the content of their knowledge, and the mechanisms of its transmission. The combined evidence of texts, iconography, and archaeological materials shows that maritime communities and their specialized expertise survived relatively intact through stable and unstable periods.
World History
