“incept-date” 2025.08.01 | By Gregory Nagy

About “2025.08.01” … It seems like yesterday, first of August, 1975. So many happy years, and what fond memories ! With loving thoughts on our 50th anniversary, truly golden, from G to H …

Overview: An introduction

§0. This Overview introduces my working translation of eleven Life of Homer texts edited by T. W. Allen (1912). The text of the Translation is interspersed with annotations, to which I will refer simply as Comments. Added at the end is a massive Bibliography that tracks the references made in the Overview here and in the Comments. The Overview itself is based on epitomized selections from a lengthy three-part online essay (Nagy 2023.09.04 in the Bibliography) centering on myths that are relevant to the history and the prehistory of the Greek texts that I am translating and annotating. Each paragraph of the Overview is numbered, with the sign “§” prefixed to each number, followed by the original numbering of whatever paragraph is being epitomized from the original three-part essay. For example, the number “§1” that we see immediately below this initial paragraph here signals the first paragraph of the Overview, and that number is followed by “[I§4],” signaling the fourth paragraph of Part I of the original three-part essay.

§1 [I§4]. In studying the Life of Homer texts, my aim is to reconstruct the history and the prehistory of myths that shaped the stories told in these texts. To say this, however, is not the same thing as saying that history can be reconstructed from myth. Rather, it is a matter of reconstructing myth itself—and thereby reconstructing the history of mythmaking, that is, of thinking in terms of myth. Such reconstruction, I insist, has much to tell us about the history and the prehistory of the people who found these myths “good to think with.” The expression that I just quoted is relevant, I should add, to my argumentation. The wording itself, commonly used but all too seldom attributed to any published source, derives from the thinking of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962; English translation 1963 by Rodney Needham, Totemism).

§2 [II§1]. My point of departure is an argument concerning Aeolians, native speakers of a Greek dialect known as Aeolic. The argumentation centers on the general idea of an Aeolian Migration that moves out of an old geographical space that we now know as Europe and moves into a newer geographical space that we now know as Asia Minor.

§3 [II§2]. What I argue here about a so-called Aeolian Migration aligns in many ways with a superbly detailed book by Roger Woodard, Aeolic and Aeolians: Origins of an Ancient Greek Language and its Community of Speakers (2025). In that book, which is focused on the Aeolic dialect, spoken by the Aeolian people, the author argues that the Aeolians were inhabitants, already in the second millennium BCE, of coastal lands and outlying islands in Asia Minor. That is to say, they lived already then in territories situated on the east side of the Aegean Sea, not only in territories situated on the west side, which is the so-called European side. And the presence of Aeolians on the Asian side of the Aegean would contradict the myth about an Aeolian Migration. In terms of this myth, as we will see, the original homeland of the Aeolians was supposedly on the European side, as it were, and they migrated from there to their new homeland on the Asian side only sometime after the Trojan War. The contradiction here can be formulated as a question: If the Aeolians had really migrated from East to West only after the Trojan War, which is what the myth claims, then how can it be that the Aeolians were already inhabitants of Asia Minor in an era before the Trojan War?

§4 [II§3]. The era before the Trojan War is of course what is known to archaeologists today as the Mycenaean era. So, to restate the argument of Woodard in archaeological terms, the Aeolians were inhabitants of Asia Minor already in the Mycenaean era. But the fact is, the Aeolians were also, already then, inhabitants of Europe as well. In his book, Woodard tracks in detail the evidence for an Aeolian presence on both the European and the Asian sides of the Aegean Sea already in the Mycenaean era, and I will be considering this evidence in the course of my own argumentation here. But first I will need to make some general comments on Aeolians and the Aeolic dialect from the standpoint of the post-Mycenaean first millennium, starting with an era known today as the “Dark Age,” which extends into a later “historical era” that historians today try to reconstruct on the basis of written sources such as the History of Herodotus, whose writings are dated to the second half of the fifth century BCE.

§5 [II§4]. I find it essential to emphasize from the start, already here, a driving argument about the first millennium BCE. Basically, I will be arguing that speakers of the Aeolic dialect during that general frame of time were Aeolians not just linguistically, that is, from the standpoint of dialect only. As we are about to see, speakers of Aeolic actually defined themselves sociopolitically as Aeolian people. Such sociopolitical self-definition, as we are also about to see, was a matter of mythmaking. The Aeolians, just like speakers of other dialects, such as the Dorians, speakers of the Doric dialect, defined themselves in terms of myths about their origins.

§6 [II§6]. In terms of their own mythmaking, as attested in the historical period that came after the so-called Dark Age, the Aeolians originated from the European side of the Aegean Sea, and their homeland was located primarily in Aeolian regions known as Thessaly and Boeotia. But then, some of these Aeolians migrated from their old homeland by crossing the Aegean Sea, sailing from West to East in their quest for a new homeland, an apoikiā or ‘home away from home’ that was situated on the coastland and outlying islands of Asia Minor. Since the old homeland, again in terms of myth, was situated on the west side of the Aegean, in such regions as populated by Aeolians known as Thessalians and Boeotians, the identity of the Aeolians could be linked to these regions as their claimed place of origin. And such a place of origin, once again in terms of myth, had been part of an empire once ruled by people who called themselves Achaeans or, to say their name in Greek, by the Akhaioi. As we will see, these Achaeans were the equivalent of the Mycenaeans, as archaeologists today would call them. And what I have just said here is relevant to my extended three-part essay, cited at the beginning (Nagy 2023.09.04), where I analyzed in detail not only the Aeolian myths about migrations—that analysis happens there in Part II—but also, in Part I, various Dorian myths about invasions. I argue in Part I of that three-part essay that the same empire of the Mycenaeans, which was claimed as a prestigious place of origin for the Aeolians, could also be claimed as a prestigious place of destination for the Dorians—in terms of their own myth about a “Dorian Invasion,” known to the Dorians as the Return of the Hērakleidai. In terms of Dorian myths, as documented in Part I of the three-part essay but not here, these royal Hērakleidai—their name means ‘sons of Hēraklēs’—were Achaean heroes who had led the supposedly invasive Dorians to their new homeland—or, in some alternative versions, to their renewed homeland. In any case, the Dorian myths about a Dorian Invasion are a self-definition of Dorian identity, just as the myths about the Aeolian Migration are a self-definition, I argue, of Aeolian identity. And the myths of both the Dorians and the Aeolians link their origins with a prestigious civilization ruled by a population described in their own myths as Achaeans—who are the equivalent of our saying, in archaeological terms, Mycenaeans.

§7 [II§§7 and 8]. From the standpoint of both Dorian and Aeolian mythmaking, as attested in the historical era that followed the so-called Dark Age, there was one single event that separated the era of the Achaeans from the era of the Dorians and Aeolians themselves in the later era of their own historical reality. That single event was the Trojan War, which was then followed by the so-called Dark Age. And, by the time of the historical period that in turn followed such a Dark Age, there had already existed a wide variety of divergent myths about a Trojan War that had led to the destruction of Troy—and these destroyers were the so-called Achaeans. Myths about the Trojan War need to be analyzed for their relevance to the identity of these Achaeans who figure in myths as the destroyers of Troy. Before I can turn to such an analysis, however, I must first concentrate on one detail in myths about the war itself. That one single detail, as we will now see, is a singular point of agreement in myths about the Trojan War: these myths agree that the Trojan War was a primal event that preceded the so-called Dorian Invasion, and that it also preceded another event, the so-called Aeolian Migration. As I will argue, the mythologized memory of the Trojan War as some kind of primal event is a screen memory that screens out an alternative event or set of events that really did happen in prehistory—as we know from the empirical evidence of archaeology. That alternative event was the collapse of the Mycenaean Empire, marked by the burning of its administrative centers, that is, of its palaces.

§8 [II§9]. Even though the collapse of this Mycenaean Empire cannot be precisely dated, it is essential to add that such a collapse happened at roughly the same time when another empire collapsed. That other empire was the Hittite Empire, a “superpower” that dominated most of Asia Minor around the second half of the second millennium BCE. So, the era of the Hittite Empire corresponds closely to the era of the Mycenaean Empire, as I call it, and the time of Hittite collapse, as we can see clearly from the detailed study of Woodard (2025), likewise corresponds to the time of the Mycenaean collapse. Also, as in the case of the Mycenaean collapse, signaled  by the archaeological evidence of burned administrative centers, the Hittite Empire came to an end with a comparable burning of its own administrative center at Hattusa, residence of a dynasty of successive Hittite over-kings who, as we will see, were in active contact with successive over-kings of a rival empire, which, as we will also see, was the Mycenaean Empire.

§9 [II§10]. Although the precise date for the collapses of the Hittite Empire and the Mycenaean Empire cannot be determined, at least we have direct textual evidence for understanding the imperial politics of the over-kings who ruled one of these two empires, as we are about to see. That evidence comes from the archives that survived the burning of the administrative center at Hattusa, the nerve center of the Hittite Empire. By contrast, the imperial politics of the Mycenaean Empire cannot be described with any precision, since this empire—I will persist in calling it that—must have been far more loosely structured than its Hittite counterpart. What I call the Mycenaean Empire can best be described, I think, as a federation of kingdoms, made most visible by palaces built for kings who ruled their own kingdoms. But at least there is evidence for thinking that these various kingdoms, ruled by various kings, were dominated by one central kingdom ruled by one over-king who presided over the citadel of Mycenae.

§10 [II§11]. At this point, it could be expected that I should turn immediately to the testimony of myths encoded in epics attributed to Homer—especially in the mythmaking of the Homeric Iliad. After all, it is in the Iliad that we find a master narrative about an eventual destruction of Troy by warriors called the Akhaioi or ‘Achaeans’, many of whom were kings ruling over kingdoms dominated by an over-king, Agamemnon, ruler of Mycenae. But I cannot treat this Homeric narrative as primary evidence about the existence of a Mycenaean Empire. It is no accident that I have so far avoided ever even mentioning Homeric poetry. It is because, although I do think of the myths encoded in Homeric poetry as secondary evidence, I need to stay true to the point I had made at the very beginning of my Overview, where I said that I view myth primarily as evidence for the history of myth, not for history itself. That said, though, I now qualify my formulation: since a history of myth, as I noted earlier, is a history of thinking with myth, such a special kind of history can in fact be viewed as secondary evidence about history writ large—or at least about prehistory. With this qualification in place, I can now say that Homeric mythmaking can in fact be used as secondary evidence for understanding the sociopolitics of mythmaking about invasions and migrations, and I plan to use such evidence at a later point. But for now I decline the opportunity of using Homeric myth even as secondary evidence for confirming a reality in prehistory—which in this case is the prehistory of a Mycenaean Empire. Instead, I rely on primary evidence in arguing for such a prehistory—evidence that comes not from myth but from ancient documents, and these documents were not even composed in Greek, since they are attested as texts surviving from the archives of the Hittite Empire.

§11 [II§12]. Attested are texts documenting interactions between the Hittite Empire and what I call the Mycenaean Empire, starting already around the second half of the second millennium BCE. I study these Hittite-Mycenaean interactions in an essay titled “East of the Achaeans” (Nagy 2023.08.20), where I highlight the textual evidence of selected documents that had been recorded by administrators of the Hittite Empire—documents written in cuneiform script on clay tablets that were stored in imperial archives maintained at administrative centers, especially at Hattusa, the capital city of the Hittite Empire, located in central Asia Minor (the Turkish name of the site is Boğazköy). These documents, written on clay tablets that were sun-dried and then accidentally preserved for archaeological study—in most cases because they got to be fire-baked in the same conflagrations that burned down the structures housing these tablets—contain archived information about a vast variety of matters involving the politics of the Hittite Empire. And among these archived documents was a set of texts, known today as the Ahhiyawa Texts (edited by Beckman, Bryce, and Cline 2011), which recorded correspondences sent by successive over-kings of the Hittite Empire to successive over-kings of what seems to be a corresponding empire, designated as the ‘land’ of Ahhiyawa or Ahhiya. That is how the ‘land’ was named in the Hittite language—as also in a substrate language of the Hittite Empire, known as Luvian, spoken in the western reaches of that empire. In terms of my argument, as we will now see, the Hittite/Luvian expression that means ‘land of Ahhiyawa’ in the archived texts of the Hittite Empire was a generalized way of referring to the Mycenaean Empire—or, in some contexts, to territory that was claimed by that empire. And the Greek equivalent of the Hittite expression would be ‘land of the Akhaioí’, that is, ‘land of the Achaeans’ (further analysis in Nagy 2023.08.12 §§10–14, 15–16).

§12 [II§14–15]. The Ahhiyawa Texts make references to various political and even military conflicts that involved, on one side, the ‘land’ of the Hittites and, on the other side, the ‘land’ that the Hittites called Ahhiya / Ahhiyawa. Also involved—and squeezed into what I would describe as a buffer zone between a loosely-structured Mycenaean Empire in the West and a far more tightly-structured Hittite Empire in the East—were the populations of territories in western Asia Minor, some of whom were speakers of substrate Anatolian languages, especially Luvian, while others were speakers of Greek. And these speakers of Greek, in terms of arguments presented in the book by Woodard (2025), were Aeolians, speakers of the Aeolic dialect of Greek. So, already in the second half of the second millennium BCE, as Woodard argues, there were Aeolians inhabiting the western coastland and outlying islands of Asia Minor. In terms of Woodard’s argument about this territory inhabited by Aeolians, it belonged to the ‘land’ called Ahhiyawa in the Ahhiyawa Texts, which, to repeat, date from the second half of the second millennium BCE. Or, to restate in Greek terms what was written by scribes of the Ahhiyawa Texts on behalf of successive over-kings of the Hittite Empire in their communications, over time, with successive over-kings of Ahhiyawa, there were Aeolians inhabiting a territory claimed by the people of Ahhiyawa as belonging to their realm, that is, to what I am calling the Mycenaean Empire. But the successive over-kings of the Hittites, in their ongoing communications with successive over-kings of Ahhiyawa, evidently had claims of their own in dealing with the populations of this territory.

§13 [II§16]. Having considered the historical realia of what was written in the Hittite Ahhiyawa Texts about the ‘land’ of Ahhiyawa, I am now ready to equate this ‘land’, in ancient Greek terms, with the realm of the Akhaioi or ‘Achaeans’. This name of the Achaeans, as I have argued in a separate essay already cited (Nagy 2023.08.20), is the same name as what we see being written as Ahhiyawa by Hittite scribes. And this same name Ahhiyawa, to say it in modified archaeological terms, is the nomenclature used in Hittite texts with reference to a loosely-structured Mycenaean Empire. That said, I will now proceed to contrast what we know really happened to such a Mycenaean Empire with what supposedly happened, according to post-Mycenaean myths.

§14 [II§17]. In reality, as I already observed at §7 on the basis of archaeological evidence, the Mycenaean Empire collapsed, and a most visible sign of this collapse was the fiery destruction of all the palaces of all the kingdoms of the realm. In myth, however, there is no trace of such a fiery destruction. Instead, there is simply a sequencing of events: Once upon a time, there was a Trojan War, and then there was a Dorian Invasion, and then there was an Aeolian Migration. So, in terms of myth, the Dorian Invasion and the Aeolian Migration, in that chronological order, happened after the Trojan War. By contrast, in terms of the real prehistory, the idea that the Trojan War was followed by the Dorian Invasion and then followed by the Aeolian Migration can be rethought not as an idea about sequencing but as the reality of consequences. And the chain of consequences starts not with the idea of a Trojan War but with the reality of a Mycenaean collapse, which actually leads to what is mythologized as a Dorian Invasion and an Aeolian Migration.  Or, to put it another way, the most significant reality marking the end of the Mycenaean Empire—I continue to call it that, an “empire”—was not the Trojan War but the Big Collapse, as I emphasized already at §7. And another most significant reality, as I emphasized already at §8, was the nearly simultaneous collapse of the rival Hittite Empire.

§15 [II§18]. I will now proceed to argue that the consequences of these two real events—the twin collapse of the Mycenaean and the Hittite empires—shaped later mythmaking about a Dorian Invasion and an Aeolian Migration.

§15a [II§18a]. I start with myths about a Dorian Invasion, which I will treat summarily, since I am concentrating here on myths about an Aeolian Migration. My general argument, in any case, is that the collapse of the Mycenaean Empire, which can be viewed as an archaeological fact, was directly relevant to such myths. The evidence of texts written in Linear B is a reality that tells its own story about the collapse, and these Linear B texts, written on sun-dried clay tablets that were accidentally fire-baked in the conflagrations that burned down the administrative centers of the doomed empire, provide primary evidence that contradicts what we read in post-Mycenaean myths about a Dorian Invasion—if I have succeeded in arguing elsewhere, in Part I of my extended three-part essay (Nagy 2023.09.04 Part I §§17–18), that at least some of the administrators writing on Linear B tablets were Dorians, that is, speakers of Doric. As I argued in Part I there, reality contradicts myth if in fact the Dorians were already an old presence in the Peloponnesus, which was the hub of the Mycenaean Empire, whereas myth speaks of these Peloponnesian Dorians as non-Peloponnesian newcomers.

§15b [II§18b]. Next I turn to myths about an Aeolian Migration. In this case, the collapse of the Hittite Empire—which was a reality parallel to the reality of a Mycenaean collapse—is directly relevant to myths that tell about a crossing of the Aegean Sea, some years after the Trojan War, by Aeolians who left behind their old homeland on the European side of the sea and sailed off to the Asian side, where they achieved dominion over territories that they colonized on the coastland and outlying islands of Asia Minor. By contrast, the evidence of the Hittite Ahhiyawa Texts tells a different story. These texts indicate, as I have noted at §3, that there had been an Aeolian presence in Asia Minor already in the second millennium BCE, and that the Aeolians who inhabited territories there were at times threatened by the dominant superpower of the adjacent Hittite Empire. Thus any true dominion by the Aeolians themselves over their territories in Asia Minor could be achieved only after the collapse of the Hittite Empire. Once again, then, reality contradicts myth—if in fact the Aeolians were already an old presence in Asia Minor, whereas myth speaks of these Asian Aeolians as non-Asian newcomers.

§16 [II§19]. In terms of my overall argument, the Aeolians in the East, whose old homeland was Asia Minor, were faced with two new realities after the twin collapse of the Hittite Empire and the Mycenaean Empire. On the one hand, their dominion over the territory of Asia Minor that they populated could now be consolidated, given the collapse of the Hittite Empire. On the other hand, however, their prestige as ‘Achaeans’ would now be diminished, given the collapse of the Mycenaean Empire. Before the collapse of this loosely-structured empire that was known to the Hittites as the land of Ahhiyawa but known to the Aeolians themselves as the land of the Achaeans, these Aeolians would have had no need to mythologize themselves as prestigious newcomers to Asia from Europe. No, such a need would arise only after the Mycenaean collapse. Once the collapse did take place, however, the prestige of Mycenae as the hub of an empire would have been endangered. Now there would no longer exist an Achaean superpower, centered at Mycenae, for Aeolians to claim as the source of their own power over their territories in Asia Minor. So, the old Aeolian homeland in Asia Minor could now be rethought as a new homeland, still grounded in the old prestige of Mycenae, though the proud old citadel had lost all its power as a former superpower. This way, the Aeolians of Asia Minor could still be ‘Achaeans’, even though the proud old empire of the Achaeans had already collapsed.

§17 [II§20]. But what about the Aeolians who inhabited the other side of the Aegean Sea, the European side, such as the Thessalians and the Boeotians? These European Aeolians, like their Asian counterparts, would likewise have needed to face the threat of losing Achaean identity, once the imperial power of Mycenae had collapsed. But here again, the Mycenaean prestige could still be sustained and even treasured by way of claiming, in myth, that the territory of Thessaly—and of Boeotia and beyond—was the original homeland of the Aeolians. So, by way of myth, there could remain a sociopolitical bonding between East and West Aeolians, without any thought about a collapse of empires. East and West Aeolians could even become enemies in reality, but they would remain bonded as ‘Achaeans’ in myth.

§18 [II§21]. I should note, however, that the prehistory of the West Aeolians on the European side of the Aegean, especially in the regions of Thessaly and Boeotia, is dauntingly complex and cannot be adequately treated in this Overview. Instead, I simply cite here in general the work of Woodard (2025), who offers a thoroughgoing analysis of the complexities we find in traditions about a mythologized Aeolian homeland, conventionally centered in Thessaly but also including Boeotia, immediately to the south of Thessaly. There is one particular aspect of Woodard’s overall work, however, that I need to highlight here in the context of my present argument. As I note in Part I of the essay from which this Overview is epitomized (Nagy 2023.09.04 Part I§19a)—a part that is not included in my Overview here—Woodard argues that some of the writers of texts who were working at the Mycenaean palaces at Pylos, Knossos, and elsewhere were speakers of Aeolic. In other words, Woodard holds that there is linguistic evidence for the presence of Aeolians in the inner workings of the Mycenaean Empire. I find Woodard’s arguments most persuasive, but I would add that there is also room for arguing, as I have done in Part I of my three-part essay, just cited, that some other writers of texts who were working at these Mycenaean palaces could have been speakers of Doric.

§19 [II§33]. Having considered the Aeolians and their myths about the Aeolian Migration, I now turn to the mythmaking of another population. They were the Ionians, speakers of the Ionic dialect. In the first millennium BCE, as we are about to see, the Ionians mythologized themselves in ways that rivaled the self-mythologizing of Aeolians. Just as there existed Aeolian myths about an Aeolic Migration, we are about to see that there also existed Ionian myths about an Ionian Migration.

§20 [III§1]. As I have already argued in §14, ancient Greek mythmaking elided any direct reference to a basic archaeological event that signaled the end of the Mycenaean era and the beginning of the so-called Dark Age. That event was the collapse of what I have been describing as the Mycenaean Empire, and a most visible sign of this collapse was the fiery destruction of all the citadels or “palaces” of all the kingdoms of such an empire. In the attested mythmaking of the Dorians and the Aeolians, however, I have also argued that a narrative was substituted for the burning of the Mycenaean citadels. It was a narrative about the burning of the citadel of Troy in the Trojan War. And the narrative about this substituted event involving a destructive conflagration was regulated by a sequencing of supposedly subsequent events: Once upon a time, there was a Trojan War, and then there was a Dorian Invasion, and then there was an Aeolian Migration. So, in terms of myth, the Dorian Invasion and the Aeolian Migration, in that chronological order, must have happened after the Trojan War. And now we are about to see a continuation of such a regulated sequencing of narrated events. In the attested mythmaking of the Ionians, the sequence was extended: now there was yet another event that was subsequent to the narrative sequence as I have so far been retelling it. Here is the extended sequence according to Ionian mythmaking: Once upon a time, there was a Trojan War, and then there was a Dorian Invasion, and then there was an Aeolian Migration, and then there was an Ionian Migration. So, again in terms of myth, the Dorian Invasion and the Aeolian Migration and the Ionian Migration, in that chronological order, must have happened after the Trojan War. Also again, in terms of myth, there is no trace of any fiery destruction that overwhelmed the citadels of the Mycenaean Empire. And, surely, Greek traditions will not tell about the burning of the citadel of Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire. Instead, the narrative of a fiery destruction overwhelming the citadel of Troy becomes a placeholder—a “screen memory,” as I referred to it earlier at §7, where a single catastrophe becomes a poetic substitution for multiple conflagrations that genuinely signaled the collapse of empires.

§21 [III§2]. Here at long last my focus shifts to Homeric poetry—a focus that is now needed for viewing the realities of mythmaking—Ionian mythmaking—about the Trojan War. This mythmaking, as we will see, is at variance with Aeolian mythmaking about this same mythologically prototypical war.

§22. [III§3]. I must explain why I need to analyze the relevant evidence of Homeric poetry about the Trojan War only now, in such a late phase of my argumentation. My reason for postponing such an analysis till now is quite simple. The evidence to be drawn from Homeric poetry about variations on the mythological theme of the Trojan War is not “history” in and of itself, since this poetry cannot answer such well-meaning questions as the one I hear all too often: did the Trojan War really happen? Instead, I view this poetry as evidence about mythmaking that needs to be studied in its historical contexts. Such study leads to the finding of historical realities that can in fact be reconstructed on the basis of the relevant mythmaking. And the history of such mythmaking requires an understanding of the linguistic archaeology, as it were, of the textual tradition that preserved the underlying oral tradition that went into the making of Homeric poetry.

§23 [III§4]. A linguistic archaeology, unlike material archaeology, requires discovery procedures where the aim is to analyze phases of the past, not physical layers. I make this point in another standalone essay (Nagy 2023.08.22), where I argue, following a model built by Milman Parry (1932), that we can reconstruct three successive phases in the evolution of Homeric diction—like Parry, I use the term diction in referring to Homeric language as a system of formulas operating in an oral tradition. The three Homeric phases were “Mycenaean” followed by Aeolic followed by Ionic. In the case of the first phase, “Mycenaean,” I should note that Parry had actually used the term “Arcado-Cypriote,” since he was writing well before 1952, which was the year when Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris—and proven to be a script developed for writing “Mycenaean” Greek.

§24 [III§5]. Following up on Parry’s model in the essay I just cited at §23, I modify there the idea of a direct succession of three dialects in three phases, arguing that the Ionic dialect of the third phase was not only a continuation from the Aeolic dialect of the second phase. More than that, the language of Homeric poetry as sung by Ionian singers was convergent with an older Homeric language as sung by Aeolian singers. In terms of such an argument, these two dialectal phases were not only sequential but also convergent—because they overlapped. Unlike archaeological layers, linguistic phases can coexist. In other words, although the Ionic phase was preceded by an Aeolic phase in continuation from a still earlier “Mycenaean” phase, there existed a historical context where the poetic language of Homeric song could be shared by singers who were either Ionian or Aeolian, that is, who were practitioners of either the older Aeolic version of Homeric diction or the newer Ionic version.

§25 [III§6]. Before we look at the historical context to which I am referring, I must comment on theories about a relevant phenomenon that is generally described in linguistics as a Sprachbund. In terms of linguistic theories about Sprachbund, whatever changes take place in any given language that makes contact with any other given language need to be viewed within the framework of the overall structures of both languages. And this formulation applies not only to languages in contact but also to dialects in contact. Moreover, as I argue, the methods that linguists use for the study of languages in contact can also be used for studying poetic languages in contact—and even for studying the myths that are conveyed by these poetic languages (Nagy 2006 §6). Such myths, as we will see, include the Ionian myth about an Ionian Migration, which interacts with an older Aeolian myth about an Aeolian Migration.

§26 [III§7]. In terms of Sprachbund, then, I argue for a social as well as a linguistic bonding where the mutual “borrowing” that takes place between two languages that are being “shared” is regulated by the grammatical structures of the two given languages. And such sharing, as sociolinguistic studies have shown, can take place not only between the languages of allies but also between the languages of rivals or even of deadly enemies. Extending this model of a Sprachbund, I argue that such “bonding”—whether amicable or inimical—can take place not only between languages pure and simple but also between poetic languages—in this case, between the older poetic language of an Aeolic “Homer,” as it were, and the newer poetic language of an Ionic “Homer.”

§27 [III§8]. But where do we find a historical context for such a Sprachbund or linguistic bonding between an Aeolian “Homer” and an Ionian “Homer”? And the question extends from where to when. What is the era for such a historical context? With regard to the second question, my general answer is that the era can be dated back roughly to the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE. As for the first question, my answer can be slightly more specific: where this was happening can be located in territories lining the northern and the central coastland of Asia Minor, together with the outlying islands—territories inhabited respectively by Aeolians and Ionians.

§28 [III§9]. Positing a Sprachbund or linguistic bonding between the older Aeolian and the newer Ionian phases of the Homeric language as performed by singers who sang for the Asian Greek populations of Aeolian and Ionian states in what I will now call the “Preclassical” era of the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, I have built a model for describing the history and prehistory of Homeric transmission in a book titled Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009). I now epitomize what I say in “Part II” of that book, at II §278:

The language of Homeric poetry is a system that integrates and thus preserves the following dialects: dominant Ionic integrated with recessive Aeolic integrated with residual Mycenaean. I emphasize the integration of dominant / recessive / residual dialectal components because, following Parry (1932), I view Homeric language synchronically as a working system, not as an inert layering of dialectal components matching the Ionic / Aeolic dialects.

Nagy 2010|2009:148–149 | II §278

(After I finish with my Overview and move on to my Translations, which follow, of the Vitae of Homer, I will use in my Comments there an abbreviated system of cross-references to Homer the Preclassic, which was originally published online, 2009, and then in print, 2010. I will cite in those Comments only the page-numbers of the printed version of 2010, since the page-breaks there are already recorded in the online version of 2009.)

In the formulation that I have just now epitomized, the recessiveness of the Aeolic component of Homeric diction corresponds to what I would describe as the Aeolic default.

§29 [III§10]. Besides Mycenaean and Aeolic and Ionic as respectively residual and recessive and dominant dialectal components of Homeric diction, there is also a fourth component, which is clearly the most recent of all the Homeric dialectal components. This fourth component is Attic, the dialect of the Athenians, which needs to be viewed here in the context of seasonally recurring performances of Homeric poetry at the festival of the Panathenaia in the city-state of Athens during the second half of the sixth century BCE and thereafter , as I argue in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009:233 | II §279). In this newest era, the old language of Homeric diction was now being spoken and heard in the new context of performances intended primarily for Attic-speaking audiences (Nagy 2004:124; for similar arguments, I cite also Cassio 2002:117, 126, 131). It is most significant, as we will see later, that this institutionalized reception of Homeric poetry in Athens was initiated by a lineage of dynasts named the Peisistratidai. These dynasts, retrospectively known as tyrants, held power in Athens during most of the second half of the sixth century BCE. As we will also see later, we know from Herodotus (5.63.3) that there was an ongoing alliance between these dynasts of Athens and the dynasts who ruled Thessaly during that same era.

§30 [III§11]. The relatively later reception of Homeric poetry in the city-state of Athens, during the era of the Peisistratidai, is an essential link for understanding the earlier reception of Homeric poetry by Ionians and the even earlier reception of this poetry by Aeolians. Before I can deal further with Homeric reception in Athens, however, I need first to show that myths about an Ionian Migration are linked with myths about Homer as a native Ionian, born in the Ionian city of Smyrna, while myths about an Aeolian Migration are linked with earlier myths about Homer as a native Aeolian, born in the Aeolian city of Smyrna—before Smyrna had been captured by Ionians and converted into an Ionian city.

§31 [III§12]. I analyze the relevant mythological links in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009:133–134 | II §§6–10), and I epitomize here the results of my analysis:

§31a [III§12a] [II§6]. In the Life of Homer textual traditions (I use here the edition of Allen 1912), we find myths that make references to the dating of Homer, linked directly to the dating of the Trojan War. In Vita 3a (25–44), which draws upon Book 3 of Aristotle’s Poetics as its source (F 76 ed. Rose), it is said that Homer was conceived on the island of Ios but was born in the city of Smyrna, and that all this was happening in the era of the so-called Ionian Migration, led by one Nēleus, son of the king Kodros of Athens (3a.25–27). In Vita 3b (17–22), we are told that Aristarchus and his followers at the Library of Alexandria likewise assigned Homer’s birth to the time of the Ionian Migration, which Aristarchus dated as happening sixty years after the Dorian Invasion, mythologized as the Return of the Hērakleidai, which in turn he dated as happening eighty years after the Capture of Troy. In the same source, Vita 3b (21–23), we are also told that Crates of Mallos and his followers at the Library of Pergamon dated Homer’s birth as happening before the Return, only some eighty years after the Capture of Troy. Such variations in the dating of Homer turn out to be variations in the mythologized identity of Homer.

§31b [III§12b] [II§7]. In the two versions I have just cited from the Life of Homer traditions, the ultimate point of reference for dating the birth of Homer is the Return of the Hērakleidai. The Return is also a point of reference for dating the so-called Dark Age, as I show in Part I of the extended essay, already cited many times, where I study in detail the Greek myths about invasions and migrations taking place after the Trojan War (Nagy 2023.09.04). Following the ultimate “big bang” of the Trojan War, signaling the end of the Mycenaean Empire, the Return is a second “big bang,” signaling the sociopolitical presence of Doric-speaking Greeks in the Helladic mainland and in islands like Crete. This second “big bang” is chronologically linked with a third “big bang,” the Aeolian Migration, signaling the notional relocation of Aeolic-speaking Greeks from the mainland of Hellas to the mainland of northern Asia Minor and to the outlying islands of Lesbos and Tenedos. In the reportage of Strabo (13.1.3 C582; cf. 14.1.3 C632) and in other sources, the Greek word conventionally translated as ‘migration’ is apoikiā, which can also be understood as ‘colonization’. Following the semantics of the Greek word, a better translation, based on the term ‘migration’, would be ‘emigration’. But I will continue to use the more neutral term ‘migration’. According to Strabo, as cited, along with other sources, the Aeolian Migration happened four generations before yet another migration happened—the Ionian Migration. But I interpret this fourth migration as an alternative to the third “big bang,” rivaling the Aeolian Migration. As we will see, the narrative about an Ionian Migration rivals the narrative of the Aeolian Migration. And this rival narrative signals the notional relocation of Ionic-speaking Greeks from the European side of the Aegean Sea to the Asian side, including islands like Chios and Samos.

§31c [III§12c] [II§8]. In some versions, then, of the Life of Homer—as we have seen at §31a above in the case of Vita 3b (21–23)—the immediate point of reference for dating the birth of Homer is the apoikiā ‘migration’ or ‘colonization’ initiated by the Ionians. In the version reported by Aristarchus, Homer was born at the time of this apoikiā. In the version reported by Crates, however, as we read further in Vita 3b, Homer was born well before this time.

§31d [III§12d] [II§9]. By implication, the version of Aristarchus pictures Homer as an Ionian. The same goes for other sources that date the birth of Homer after the Ionian apoikiā ‘migration’ or ‘colonization’, notably Eratosthenes, who dates it one hundred years later (Vita 6.39–40) and Apollodorus, who dates it eighty years later (Vita 6.40). To be contrasted is the version of Crates, who dates the birth of Homer well before the Ionian apoikiā ‘migration’ or ‘colonization’. By implication, that version pictures Homer not as an Ionian but as an Aeolian.

§31e [III§12e] [II§10]. The differences between the Ionian Homer of Aristarchus and the Aeolian Homer of Crates reflect salient differences in the Life of Homer traditions. I will now focus on the narratives of two such Lives, Vita 1 and Vita 2. As I emphasize in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009 chapter 2), Vita 2 shows a distinctly Athenocentric outlook. That is, this narrative traces the unified sociopolitical interests of the Athenian Empire as it evolved in the fifth century BCE. By contrast, Vita 1 shows a pre-Athenocentric outlook. That other narrative traces the competing sociopolitical agenda of Aeolian and Ionian states in Asia Minor and outlying islands. As I argue at length in Homer the Preclassic (again, chapter 2) the pre-Athenocentric version of Vita 1 allows for an Aeolian Homer, while the Athenocentric version of Vita 2 requires an Ionian Homer.

§32 [III§13]. The Athenocentrism of myths that claim an Ionian Homer born in Ionian Smyrna is a topic that now leads me back to what I started to argue at §29 about the relatively late reception of Homeric poetry in the city-state of Athens. This later Athenian reception, as I now continue to argue, is an essential link for understanding the earlier reception of Homeric poetry by Ionians and the even earlier reception of this poetry by Aeolians.

§33 [III§14]. When we view the Aeolian reception of Homer as formalized in the myth about an Aeolian Migration and the conflicting Ionian reception as formalized in the myth about an Ionian Migration, we need to keep in mind that the myth about the Ionian Migration did not apply to all Ionians. The myth was owned, as it were, exclusively by the Ionians who populated the Ionian Dodecapolis, a federation of twelve Ionians states situated in Asia Minor—ten of them along the coastland and two of them on the outlying islands of Chios and Samos. In the paragraph that follows, I summarize, all too briefly, what is said about the Ionian Dodecapolis in an expansively detailed book by Douglas Frame (2011).

§34 [III§15]. The populations of the Ionian Dodecapolis in Asia Minor, who were identifiable as East Ionians by way of their East Ionic dialect, were linguistically distinct from the West Ionians, such as the populations of Euboea, a major island situated across the sea in the West, on the other side of the Aegean, who were speakers of West Ionic, not East Ionic. Even further to the West, separated by a narrow strait from the island of Euboea, was the mainland territory of Attica, likewise populated by speakers of a West Ionic dialect—in this case, a variety known as Attic. Here the spotlight turns, all too brightly, on the principal city of Attica, Athens, which had already in historical times politically absorbed the entire region of Attica, so that the city had become an overarching city-state incorporating all of Attica, homeland of the Attic dialect. In historical times, Athens had already replaced Chalkis and Eretria, the principal cities of the island of Euboea, as the primary representative of West Ionia. And Athens, as the pre-eminent city of the Ionian West, on the European side of the Aegean Sea, possessed a special sociopolitical relationship with the Ionian East, on the Asian side of the Aegean, as represented by the Ionian Dodecapolis. Even though the dialect of Athens, Attic, was a variety of West Ionic, the city itself, as a polis, claimed to be the mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of Miletus, a most pre-eminent city in Asia Minor, which was inhabited by speakers of East Ionic—not West Ionic—and which was in fact the most dominant of the cities boasting of membership in the federation of twelve East Ionian states known as the Ionian Dodecapolis. As the book of Frame (2009) has clearly shown, what is most significant about the mythologized claim of Athens, that it was the mother city of Miletus, is that the polis of Miletus itself claimed to be the daughter city of Athens. Thus the myth about the Ionian Migration, as Frame’s book has also shown, aetiologizes not only the Ionian Dodecapolis but also Athens as the mother city of the Ionians who founded the Ionian Dodecapolis in the distant past, when they had reportedly sailed across the Aegean Sea—from Athens—to colonize central Asia Minor and its outlying islands at the time of the Ionian Migration.

§35 [III§16]. So also, in a more distant past, as we see from the reportage of Strabo (9.2.3 C401) about the Aeolian Migration, as I analyze it an essay already cited (Nagy 2023.08.22 §104), the Aeolians had reportedly sailed across the Aegean Sea from West to East, in this case from Thessaly by way of Aulis in Boeotia, to colonize northern Asia Minor and its outlying islands.

§36 [III§17]. Just as the identity of the Aeolians was defined by way of an Aeolian Migration, an event that reportedly took place before the birth of Homer, so also the identity of the Ionians—though only those Ionians who populated the Ionian Dodecapolis—was defined by way of an Ionian Migration—an event that reportedly took place later than the Aeolian Migration but still earlier than the birth of Homer. By the time Homer was born, a proud old federation of twelve Aeolian cities, the Aeolian Dodecapolis, had already been reduced to an anomalous grouping of eleven, since one of the twelve Aeolian cities, which was Smyrna, the birthplace of Homer, had been captured by Ionian allies of the Ionian Dodecapolis and converted into an Ionian city.

§37 [III§18]. I have analyzed in a self-standing essay (Nagy 2023.08.22 §§65–70) the details about the loss of Smyrna, this catastrophe that befell the Aeolians of Asia Minor, and I repeat here the essentials, by way of epitome, about an ongoing conflict between the Ionian Dodecapolis and an Aeolian Dodecapolis:

§37a [III§18a] [§65]. The Ionian Dodecapolis was a federation of twelve Ionian states situated on the mainland of Asia Minor and on two offshore islands. All twelve are listed by Herodotus (1.142.3): on the mainland were the city-states of Miletus, Myous, Priene, Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedos, Teos, Klazomenai, Phocaea, Erythrai, while the island-states were Samos and Chios. This Ionian Dodecapolis was enaged in direct political and cultural conflict with the Aeolian Dodecapolis, a rival federation of twelve Aeolian cities, all situated on the mainland of Asia Minor. The twelve city-states of this Aeolian federation are listed by Herodotus (1.149.1) as Cyme, Lērisai, Neon Teikhos, Tēmnos, Killa, Notion, Aigiroessa, Pitanē, Aigaiai, Myrina, Gryneia, and Smyrna. Herodotus (1.151.1) says that the Aeolian cities on the mainland of Asia Minor in the region of Mount Ida were grouped separately from the Aeolian Dodecapolis, and he does not list those cities by name. As for the island of Lesbos, offshore from Asia Minor, Herodotus (1.151.2) says that it was politically organized as a federation of five Aeolian cities. This old federation is described by Strabo (13.2.1 C616) as a single unified state that claimed to be the mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of the Aeolian cities on the Asian mainland.

§37b [III§18b] [§66]. A focal point of the political and cultural conflict between the Ionian Dodecapolis and the Aeolian Dodecapolis was the ownership of Homeric poetry, and such ownership was expressed by way of appropriating Homer himself. As I have argued extensively in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009 chapter 6), both federations claimed Homer as their prototypical poet and culture hero, and these claims were expressed primarily in the form of myths about the prehistoric life and times of Homer in Asia Minor. According to the Ionian version of the myth, Homer was an Ionian and a spokesman for all Ionians; according to the rival Aeolian version, by contrast, Homer was an Aeolian.

§37c [III§18c] [§67]. There are traces of these two conflicting versions attested in Life of Homer traditions, already mentioned. I highlight here Vita 1 (in the edition of Allen 1912), better known as the “pseudo-Herodotean” Life of Homer (the dating of which is uncertain), and Vita 2 (in the same edition), an accretive text that stems from the Mouseion of Alcidamas (who flourished in the fifth/fourth century BCE). In terms of the Aeolian version as represented by Vita 1 (p. 194 lines 27–31 ed. Allen), Homer was born an Aeolian in the Aeolian city of Smyrna. In terms of the non-Aeolian version as represented by Vita 2 (p. 226 lines 7–12 ed. Allen), on the other hand, Homer was born an Ionian in the Ionian city of Smyrna, after the era of the Ionian Migration, and I offer an extensive analysis of this non-Aeolian version in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009:134–139 | II §§24–27).

§37d [III§18d] [§68]. But how could the city of Smyrna switch from Aeolian to Ionian status as we switch from our reading of Vita 1 of Homer to our reading of Vita 2? We find an answer by considering the early history of Smyrna. I have already cited a passage of Herodotus (1.149.1) where he lists all twelve cities of the Aeolian Dodecapolis, and, in that list, which I repeated in citing the passage, we can see that Smyrna was one of those twelve cities. But now I add what we also see in that same passage of Herodotus (1.149.1): he says that Smyrna was ‘detached’ (verb para-luein) from the Aeolian federation of twelve cities by the Ionian federation of twelve cities. Thus, as we learn from Herodotus, the Aeolian Dodecapolis was no longer a federation of twelve cities, since one city was now ‘detached’, and that city was Smyrna. To quote Herodotus (again, 1.149.1): μία γάρ σφεων παρελύθη Σμύρνη ὑπὸ Ἰώνων ‘one of them [= the twelve cities], Smyrna, was detached [verb para-luein] by the Ionians’. As Herodotus goes on to report in detail, Aeolian Smyrna was captured by the Ionians and converted by them into an Ionian city.

§37e [III§18e] [§69]. The capture of Aeolian Smyrna by the Ionians, which happened probably as early as 800 BCE or before, and definitely before 688 BCE (Frame 2009:526n21), was a major historical event that destabilized the Aeolian Dodecapolis culturally as well as politically, since it deprived the Aeolians of their native son and culture hero, Homer. In terms of Ionian mythmaking, the status of Homer himself could now switch from Aeolian to Ionian. And even his language could now switch from the Aeolic to the Ionic dialect.

§37f [III§18f] [§70]. The historical fact of this major conflict between Ionic-speaking and Aeolic-speaking communities of Asia Minor is relevant to the Sprachbund of Homeric diction that bonds these two competing communities with each other. The relevance is evident if we focus on the point of contention we have just considered, which is, the ownership of Homeric poetry. Just as the Ionians became culturally dominant over the Aeolians by way of appropriating Homer as their native son, so also the Ionic dialect of Homeric diction became linguistically dominant over the Aeolic dialect.

§37g [III§18g] [epitome from Nagy 2010|2009:211–213 |II §§214–220]. As we read in Herodotus (1.143.3), the state of Smyrna, even after it had been converted from an Aeolian into an Ionian city, was nevertheless excluded from the federation of the twelve states that constituted the Ionian Dodecapolis. The politics of this exclusion are complex, and I see some retrospective thinking at work here, since Ionian Smyrna was destroyed around 600 BCE by the inland empire of the Lydians (Frame 2009:525n19). As I note in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009:212–213 | II§217), the city of Smyrna from that time onward ceased to exist, and it became known as one of the three proverbial extinct cities of archaic Greek poetry, along with Colophon and Magnesia-at-Sipylus (documentation in Nagy 1990a:263–266 = 9§§20–23). Writing many years later, in the overlapping first century BCE/CE, Strabo (14.1.37 C646) reports that Smyrna remained a non-city for hundreds of years (he estimates four hundred, though an estimate of three hundred is more likely)—but then, toward the end of the fourth century BCE, the city was refounded in the era of Alexander the Great. And this new Smyrna was not only admitted into a revived federation of the Ionian Dodecapolis: it also became the dominant Greek city of Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and Roman eras of Greek civilization—and well beyond, until the Catastrophe of 1922 put an end to the city’s Greek identity, in the wake of the Great Burning (comments in Nagy 2018.10.18).

§38 [III§19]. So, since Smyrna had been a non-city for three or more centuries, any mythmaking that promoted the glories of the Ionian Dodecapolis during that lengthy period could best safeguard those glories by occluding, retrospectively, any addition of a thirteenth state that would soon thereafter be destroyed by the Lydian Empire. But there was also a more immediate motivation for the exclusion of Ionian Smyrna from the Ionian Dodecapolis: this federation of twelve states, as an organization, needed to retain its organic integrity as a political body of twelve states, exactly twelve, since that canonical number had been predestined by myth—especially by the myths about an Ionian Migration that emanated from Athens as the mother city. To be contrasted is the catastrophe that befell the Aeolians of Asia Minor, whose identity as Aeolians was irreparably damaged by way of their losing the integrity of their own Aeolian Dodecapolis. By losing the city of Smyrna, the Aeolians also lost the integrity of their myths about an Aeolian Migration that predestined the founding of an Asian Aeolian federation of twelve states, again exactly twelve. And with the loss of Smyrna, the Asian Aeolians lost not only their sociopolitical identity as shaped by the myth of the Aeolian Migration. They lost also their native son, Homer, whose epic poetry would have glorified the identity of the Asian Aeolians by telling their own Aeolian version of the Trojan War, not the Ionian version that was now destined to become the permanent possession of the Ionians. As I show in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009:203–204 | II§§192–193), the Asian Aeolian epic narratives about the overwhelming of Troy by the Achaeans differed significantly from the Ionian narratives, and we can still find traces of the differences as reported by Aeolian sources such as Hellanicus of Lesbos (FGH 4 F 31); according to these Aeolian narratives, Hector fathered a son called Skamandrios whose mother was not Andromache and who survived the destruction of Troy, which was not even a complete destruction, so that Skamandrios not only survived but also founded a dynasty as king of a New Ilion, which was a rebuilt old Troy that had escaped, as I just said, its otherwise complete destruction by burning. As I also show in the same book (II§195), a rival Ionian version is what we see in the Homeric Iliad as we have it. According to this rival version, Skamandrios also had another name, Astyanax, and this Skamandrios / Astyanax failed to escape the total destruction of Troy: he was destined to be brutally killed. In this version, the identity of Skamandrios is merged with the identity of Astyanax as the legitimate son of Hector and Andromache (as we read in “our” Iliad, VI 402), and so there is no trace of an Aeolian son of Hector, since the child gets killed off in the Ionian version that prevailed in the final phases of the evolving narrative of Homeric poetry.

§39 [III§20]. This example, where we see the loss of an Aeolian epic version that tells how the Aeolians continued to inhabit Troy, which was destined to be reconstructed as a New Ilion, shows the consequences of their losing Homer as their native son after the Ionian takeover of the formerly Aeolian city of Smyrna, which figured as the relevant birthplace of Homer in the myths that I have highlighted here (other cities too claimed Homer as their native son, but that is another story—or, rather, those are other stories—which I also track in Homer the Preclassic). For now, I focus on the fact that the loss of Smyrna by the Aeolians—which was a historical fact—triggered a chain reaction of further losses: the Aeolians lost Homer as their favorite son, which was a mythologized way of losing control over the final Homeric version of the Trojan War. And the historical facts of these losses were matched by the linguistic facts of Homeric diction, which shows only a recessive Aeolic phase in its dialectal mix as compared to a dominant Ionic phase. But at least in this case the loss of the Aeolian heritage in epic songmaking was not complete, since the Aeolic dialect remained an integral component of Homeric diction—albeit recessively, not dominantly as in the case of the Ionic dialect.

§40 [III§21]. To make matters worse, the catastrophe that befell the Aeolians in losing the city of Smyrna in the southern zone of Aeolian territory was matched, about a hundred years later, around the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, by their also losing the city of Sigeion in the northern zone of their territory. In a self-standing essay (Nagy 2023.08.22 §§68–71), I analyze in detail the ancient narratives about this loss, and I emphasize there that the Aeolians, by losing possession of this other proud city of theirs, thereby also lost Achilles himself as their primary Aeolian hero. There were two reasons: (1) Achilles now became the poetic possession of the Athenians, who claimed leadership of the Asian Ionians on the grounds that Athens was the mother city of Miletus, and (2) Athens had entered into a political alliance, around the time when Sigeion was converted into an Ionian city, with the European Aeolians of Thessaly, so that Achilles could now be reconfigured as an enemy of the Asian Aeolians and could even be credited with having captured the entire island of Lesbos singlehandedly, as we read in the Homeric Iliad. A summary of the relevant facts is presented in my book Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009 chapter 7), where I argue that Achilles was a premier epic hero of the European Aeolians of Thessaly just as he was a premier cult hero of the Asian Aeolians inhabiting the region of Troy during the era when this epic real estate, as it were, was still being controlled by the Aeolian city of Mytilene as leader of a federation of five Aeolian cities of Lesbos. I have made an epitome of my argumentation in a separate essay (Nagy 2023.08.22 §127abc), and I epitomize even further in what follows.

§40a [III§21a] [§127a]. As we learn from a stylized account by Philostratus in his Heroikos (52.3–54.1), the tomb of Achilles in the region of Troy was the site of seasonally recurring sacrifices offered to the hero by Aeolians. But these Aeolians were Europeans. That is, they were Thessalians, whose sacrifice was performed as an act of ritualized stealth because they were notionally the enemies—according to myth—of Asian Aeolians. Relevant is the fact that the Thessalians were not only enemies of the Asian Aeolians in terms of myth but also allies of Athens in terms of early historical realities in an era when Athens was dominated by dynasts called the Peisistratidai, already mentioned at §§29–30, who held power in Athens during most of the second half of the sixth century BCE. Herodotus (5.63.3) highlights an ongoing alliance between these dynasts of Athens and the dynasts who ruled Thessaly during  that era.

§40b [III§21b] [§127b]. In terms of Thessalian myth, the homeland of Aiolos, a prototypical king who was the notional ancestor of all the Aioleîs ‘Aeolians’, was Thessaly, as we read in the Library of “Apollodorus” (1.7.3 p. 57 ed. Frazer 1921). In other words, myth claims that the royal ancestor of all Aeolians was a prototypical Thessalian. By extension, the Thessalians claimed to be prototypes of the Aeolians on the island of Lesbos and, by further extension, of the Aeolians on the Asian mainland. By even further extension, Thessaly could be viewed as a point of origin for the Aeolian Migration, that is, for the colonization of the Aeolian cities on the island of Lesbos and, by the furthest extension, of the Aeolian cities on the Asian mainland. So also, as we have already seen here at §34, the Athenians figured themselves as prototypes of the Ionians of Asia Minor and of its outlying islands in the context of myths about an Ionian Migration, just as the Thessalians figured themselves as prototypes of the Aeolians of Asia Minor and of its outlying islands, especially of Lesbos, in the context of myths about an Aeolian Migration.

§40c [III§21c] [§127c]. What I have just formulated here can be reconciled with two references in the Iliad to the capture of Lesbos, the whole island, by a single hero, Achilles of Thessaly (IX 128–131, 270–273). I argue that the story of this capture was an old charter myth that accounted for an early claim on Lesbos made by the Thessalians and for a much later claim made in the specific historical context of an alliance between dynasts of Thessaly and the dynasts of Athens, the Peisistratidai, in the second half of the sixth century BCE. In later interpretations of the charter myth, after Athens had already taken possession of Sigeion, the tomb of Achilles could be linked not only with a site called the Akhilleion, located at the southern end of the “Sigeion Ridge,” which had already been a site that was owned and operated by the city of Mytilene from across the strait in Lesbos, but also with the city of Sigeion, located at the northern end of the “Sigeion Ridge,” which was now a site that was owned and operated by the city of Athens. As I show in Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2010|2009:177–189 | II§§ 113–138), Homeric poetry was cited as testimony to validate either of these two rival sites.

§41 [III§22]. But the point is, as I argue in a separate essay (Nagy 2023.08.22 §128), the sharing of myths about Achilles by Asian and European Aeolians meant that each of the two sides accepted the Aeolian identity of the other side, despite their mutual hostility.

§42 [III§23]. Further comment is needed on the parallelism we have just seen between the old claim of the Thessalians, that they were the originators of the Aeolian Migration, and the far newer claim of the Athenians, that they were the originators of the Ionian Migration. In the case of the Athenian claim, it can be dated to the relatively late era of the Peisistratidai, those dynasts who dominated Athens in the second half of the sixth century. And I find it most significant that those same dynasts of Athens had allied themselves with dynasts who ruled Thessaly during that same relatively late era. Also during that same era, public performances of Homeric poetry were being institutionalized by the Peisistratidai at the festival of the Panathenaia in Athens, as we have already seen at §§29–30. Accordingly, I argue for a convergence in the dating of Homeric reception in Athens and the dating of mythologized Athenian claims about their leadership, back in mythical times, of the Ionian Migration. The claim of the Thessalians about their leadership of the Aeolian Migration would have evolved far earlier, but even that old claim could later be appropriated by the Athenians as parallel to their own claim about an Ionian Migration. Such an Athenian appropriation can be dated, again, to the second half of the sixth century BCE.

§43 [III§24]. The lateness of the Athenian claim about the Ionian Migration supports, I think, the argument made by Woodard (2025) concerning the relative lateness of an Ionian presence in Asia Minor. Unlike the myths about the Aeolian Migration, which ignore an Aeolian presence in Asia Minor despite all the evidence indicating that the Aeolians were already there as early as the second millennium BCE, the later myths about the Ionian Migration point to a different historical reality. As Woodard shows, an old Ionian city like Miletus—very old, from the standpoint of the historical period of the first millennium BCE—was still an Aeolian city back when, in the second millennium BCE, and it must have turned Ionian only in the so-called Dark Age—just as Aeolian cities like Smyrna and Sigeion turned Ionian in later years, that is, in the earlier phases of the historical period that followed such a Dark Age.

§44 [III§25]. But the Ionians, imitating the Aeolians, nevertheless held on to the old Aeolian patterns of self-mythologization. In terms of their own mythmaking, Ionians too, like the Aeolians, would have been, long ago, adventurous “Achaeans” who left Europe once upon a time and sailed across the Aegean Sea to Asia. That is what is claimed in Ionian myth, as filtered by Athenian myth. While the Aeolians left behind Achaean homelands like Thessaly by way of Aulis in Boeotia, Ionians would have left behind homelands like Messene by way of Athens in Attica. I see here patterns of mythmaking that stem from the Peisistratidai of Athens, and such patterns are actually attested in fragments of Hesiodic poetry that claim Achaean ancestry for Ionians by way of Athens. As I have argued in a separate essay (Nagy 2011b:43–44), such Hesiodic poetry was performed in Athens during the era of the Peisistratidai and promoted Athenian agenda by way of Athenian mythmaking.

§45 [III§26]. A case in point is a set of fragments where Hesiodic poetry is aetiologizing Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians as notional descendants of heroic prototypes who were supposedly proto-Dorians, proto-Aeolians, and proto-Ionians. I summarize here the relevant contents (F 9 and F 10 [a] ed. Merkelbach / West). According to this poetry, there was once upon a time a proto-Greek—or, better, a ‘proto-Hellene’—whose name was Hellēn and who fathered three sons, Dōros, Aiolos, and Xouthos, who were in turn ancestors of the Dorians, the Aeolians, and the Ionians (F 9 lines 1–2). In the case of Xouthos, he was King in Athens and married Kreousa the ‘Queen’, daughter of Erekhtheus, proto-king of Athens. This couple, Xouthos the King and Kreousa the Queen, were the parents of Ion and Akhaios, who were ancestors of both the Ionians and the ‘Achaeans’ (F 10 [a] lines 20–24).

§46 [III§27]. So, in terms of such mythmaking, it must have really happened, this Ionian Migration, and it happened in the Dark Age. But the migration was more like an invasion, since the Ionians kept crowding out the Aeolians from their old homelands in Asia. Aeolians kept losing their cities to Ionians. As we go backward in time, there was Sigeion, and, further back, Smyrna, and, even further back, Miletus. There was a time, then, a remote time, when even Miletus was not yet an Ionian city, let alone a daughter city of Athens. It was an Aeolian city, thriving in the glory days of empires, looking for some middle way in a world of ongoing conflict between Mycenaeans and Hittites.

Translation of the Vitae or “Lives” of Homer

Comments on the translations are interspersed. These Comments rely heavily on arguments developed in my book Homer the Preclassic, listed as Nagy 2010|2009 in the Bibliography. As I already noted at §28 in my Overview preceding the Translations, I use in my Comments an abbreviated system of cross-references to Homer the Preclassic, the online and printed versions of which were published in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Abbreviating the title of the book simply as HPC,  I will cite in my comments only the page-numbers of the printed version of 2010, since the page-breaks there are already recorded in the online version of 2009.

The “base text”

The original Greek text that I use for my working translations of the Homeric Vitae is the edition of T. W. Allen 1912, with occasional adjustments. Following HPC pages 29–30 note 1, I offer the following system for referring to these Vitae, with page numbers as printed by Allen 1912 (abbreviations like “HPC” are listed in the working Bibliography below)

Vita 1               = Vita Herodotea, pp. 192–218

Vita 2               = Certamen, pp. 225–238

Vita 3a             = Plutarchean Vita, pp. 238–244

Vita 3b             = Plutarchean Vita, pp. 244–245

Vita 4               = Vita quarta, pp. 245–246

Vita 5               = Vita quinta, pp. 247–250

Vita 6               = Vita sexta (the “Roman Vita”), pp. 250–253

Vita 7               = Vita septima, by way of Eustathius, pp. 253–254

Vita 8               = Vita by way of Tzetzes, pp. 254–255

Vita 9               = Vita by way of Eustathius (on Iliad IV 17), p. 255

Vita 10             = Vita by way of the Suda, pp. 256–268

Vita 11             = Vita by way of Proclus, pp. 99–102

Also relevant is Michigan Papyrus 2754, details in HPC pp. 29–30 note 1.

There is an alternative edition of all the Vitae, translated as well as edited by M. L. West 2003, which I have tracked for the few situations where we can find significant differences between his edition and Allen’s. And I occasionally report on relevant details to be found in an important work on Vita 1 and Vita 2 by M.-A. Colbeaux 2005, such as her mention, p. 77, of the Michigan Papyrus.

Vita 1. The Herodotean Vita (paragraph-numbers of the Greek text as edited by Allen will be preceded by the sign “¶”).

¶1. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, about the birth of Homer, about the time of his upbringing, and about his life in general has the following to report-by-way-of-inquiry [historeîn], seeking to come up with something that is as accurate [atrekes] as I can possibly make it. Let-me-show-why-I-say-it-this-way. Back when the city of Cyme, an Aeolian city since ancient times, was-in-the-process-of-being-founded [ktizein], there was a coming together, in that one same place, of all kinds of different populations [ethnos plural] who-were-Greek-speaking [Hellēnika]. Among them were people from Magnesia, and {5} among the Magnesians, there was this one particular person, whose name was Melanōpos, son of Ithāgenēs, son of Krēthōn. A man with not much income, he had limited means to make a living. This Melanōpos, in Cyme, married the daughter of a man named Homurēs, and, from this union, he had a female child whose given name was Krēthēïs. {10} Melanōpos and his wife reached the end of their lives. But before that, he had entrusted his daughter to a man he valued very highly, named Kleanax, a man from Argos.

A side note on my mode of translation. Occasionally, where a Greek “particle” needs special attention, I go out of my way by translating it in context. Such is the case with the particle γὰρ here in ¶1. This word, often translated as ‘since’, is used in the original Greek to indicate why a speaker is saying things the way he or she says things. In the present context, I translate: ‘Let-me-show-why-I say-it-this-way.’ Here and elsewhere, I show particles not in transliteration (in this case, I would be showing “gar”)—which is my practice in the case of all other Greek words—but, rather, in the original font (as here, where I show “γὰρ”).

Comments on ¶1

Here I offer my first comments on Vita 1, where I start my overall commentary by commenting only on Paragraph 1 (=¶1) of this Vita. In my Comments A–D here, I concentrate on the most essential sentence in this first paragraph, where we read: “Back when the city of Cyme, an Aeolian city since ancient times, was-in-the-process-of-being-founded [ktizein], there was a coming together, in that one same place, of all kinds of different populations [ethnos plural] who-were-Greek-speaking [Hellēnika].” …

Comment A

I comment on four interconnected facts that are conveyed in the sentence I have just highlighted:

Comment A1 on ¶1. We see here a mention of a city named Cyme (I use, here and hereafter, the latinized form of what could be transliterated more accurately, from the original form in the Greek language, as Kumē).

Comment A2 on ¶1. The identity of this city was Aeolian.

Comment A3 on ¶1.This identity was linked with what is mythologized here as the original establishing or ‘founding’ of the city of Cyme, and the Greek word that I translate here as ‘to found’ in the sense of ‘to establish’ is the verb ktizein (I customarily cite Greek verbs in their form as infinitives), which, as we will see later in Comment C2, is linked with the derivative noun ktisis, which in turn I will consistently translate as ‘founding’ in the sense of ‘establishing’—although this verb ktizein and this noun ktisis can be understood more specifically in terms of the more easily understandable words colonize and colonizing. These words colonize and colonizing are more open to interpretation, in that they can refer not only to the peaceful occupation of new homelands by new populations but also to the violent occupation, by new populations, of the old homelands of pre-existing populations. With such wider interpretations in mind, I come to the fourth of the four connected facts that are being highlighted by the author of Vita 1.

Comment A4 on ¶1. The Greek word ethnos in ¶1 of Vita 1 is used to designate any population that identified itself with any homeland. In the case of the city named Cyme, our Herodotean author here in ¶1 of Vita 1 is saying, to start things off, that there existed a variety of populations that identified themselves with the founding of the ancient city of Cyme, But then, after such a generalizing start, the author will get specific, focusing on one particular population, on which I now offer my second of three comments (this time, Comment B is subdivided into B1–7).

Comment B on ¶1

Comment B1 on ¶1. The fourth of the four facts that I highlighted in Comment A4 on the language of ¶1 in Vita 1, as composed by the so-called Herodotean author, corresponds closely to the understanding of this same fact by the “real” Herodotus, whose composition of his massive History (also called Histories) dates back to the fifth century BCE.

Comment B2 on ¶1. The “real” Herodotus uses the word ethnos to distinguish any population from any other population in a world where each population is defined by its claims to a homeland. For Herodotus, the most basic kind of distinction is conveyed by the adjective Hellēniko– and by the noun Hellēn– in the sense of ‘Greek-speaking’ as opposed to ‘non-Greek speaking’. The general concept of non-Greek-speakers is conveyed by the noun barbaro-. Thus a primary criterion for distinguishing populations is language (I give just one example for now: Herodotus 1.57). So also in ¶1 of Vita 1, our Herodotean author distinguishes the population of Ancient Cyme as Hellēniko– or ‘Greek-speaking’.

Comment B3 on ¶1. Further, our “real” Herodotus divides Greek-speaking populations into three major dialectal groups: Aeolians, who are speakers of Aeolic, then Ionians, who are speakers of Ionic, and, finally Dorians, who are speakers of Doric. Once again, a primary criterion for distinguishing populations is language. And, also once again, Herodotus uses the same word ethnos, although in this case sparingly, with reference to these distinct populations. The clearest example is at 1.143, where Herodotus refers to Ionians as an ethnos. Our historian here is emphasizing that the most highly politicized era where populations defined themselves as Aeolians or Ionians or Dorians can be dated well before his time. I date that era—as we will see in more detail at Comment C below—around the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Already in that era, as we learn not only from Herodotus but also from other sources, the coastal strip of western Asia Minor and the outlying islands was populated by Aeolians in the northern region, Ionians in the central region, and Dorians in the southern region. This is not to say that it was only in these regions where the distinction of Aeolians and Ionians and Dorians existed, as Herodotus makes clear in his extended description (1.143–151). But it was in western Asia Minor and the outlying islands that the distinction was most highly politicized—in the form of confederations of Aeolian and Ionian and Dorian cities. Herodotus highlights a twelve-part confederation or Dodecapolis consisting of twelve Aeolian cities in the northern coastland of Asia Minor (1.149) and a corresponding twelve-part confederation or Dodecapolis consisting of ten Ionian city-states in the central coastland and two outlying island-states, Chios and Samos (1.142.3–4). Herodotus also mentions a corresponding six-part confederation or Hexapolis of Dorian city-states and island-states situated further south: listed are the city-state of Halicarnassus on the mainland, also the cities of Lindos and Ialysos and Kameiros on the unified island-state of Rhodes, also the island-states of Cos and Cnidus (1.144.1–2). Throughout his account, Herodotus emphasizes the political exclusivism of these confederations of Asiatic Aeolians and Ionians and Dorians at the expense of their non-Asiatic fellow kinfolk further west, across the Aegean Sea. The exclusivism could apply even internally: as Herodotus also reports (1.141.2)—I give here just one example—the confederation of the Dorian Hexapolis eventually became a Pentapolis after the city-state of Halicarnassus was excluded.

Comment B4 on ¶1. Even before Herodotus proceeds, however, with his sketch of Aeolian and Ionian and Dorian city-states as well as island-states, all of which are situated on the east side of the Aegean sea, he goes out of his way to emphasize what he thinks is a grim historical reality. Our historian thinks, and he says it bluntly (1.143.2–3), that all these city-states and island-states turned out to be political failures in the course of time.

Comment B5 on ¶1. Before I delve into the reasons for the thinking of Herodotus here, I need to comment on my use of the term “political” when I paraphrase the thinking of this historian about a “political” failure. This term is derived from the Greek word polis, the eventual meaning of which is state, that is, the political reality of a state. But the word polis is conventionally translated as meaning, more basically, city-state, with reference to the earlier meaning city, which in turn is derived from the even earlier meaning citadel or acropolis, which refers, in earlier times, to the nerve-center of a state. Also, in the usage of Herodotus and other earlier sources, the Greek noun polis can refer not only to city-states but also to island-states controlled by only one city—ideally, from the citadel of that city. So for example this word polis can refer to the Ionian island-states of Chios and Samos, not only to the Ionian city-states situated on the mainland of Asia Minor, the most powerful and prestigious of which had once been the Ionian city-state of Miletus. I will have more to say at Comment C3 about Miletus as the most dominant city of the Ionian Dodecapolis—as also about the general reference to the region of this Dodecapolis as, simply, Iōniã, meaning ‘the region of the Ionians’.

Comment B6 on ¶1. For now, however, I simply return to what Herodotus says (1.143.2–3) about the state of affairs in his own time, the fifth century BCE, by which time, he thinks, everything that qualifies as a polis in Asia Minor, most prominently in the region of Ionia, had already failed politically. As he notes throughout his History, the decline started early, already in the era of the Lydian Empire, which was a mainland power that had dominated the Asiatic Greek cities from early on, already in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, and this decline was accelerated in the era of the Persian Empire that eventually overthrew the Lydian Empire. The culmination of overall failure was signaled by the defeat of the Ionian Revolt against the Persian Empire, which was a complex revolution that lasted from the year 499 BCE to the demoralizing year of utter defeat, 494 BCE. This revolt of Ionians from the Persian Empire—along with its grim aftermath—is documented primarily and in fact almost exclusively by Herodotus (5.23.1–6.42.2), whose narrative highlights the decisive victory of the Persian Empire in the year 494 BCE. With good reason, then, does Herodotus say, already at a far earlier point in his History (that is, already at 1.143.2–3), that the grand old cities of the Ionian Dodecapolis had become powerless—and, yes, pathetically weak—even in the era that led up to the Ionian Revolt in the early fifth century.

Comment B7 on ¶1. In the same context, by contrast, Herodotus adds that the only powerful Ionian city that was left after the defeat of the Asiatic Ionians by the Persian Empire in 494 BCE was the city of Athens, on the European side of the Aegean Sea. And he adds in this context (1.143.3), as I already noted, that the polis of Athens belonged to the Ionian ethnos. As we will see in Comment C overall, the reportage of the “real” Herodotus about the mythologized “ethnicity” of Athens as an Ionian polis will be relevant to the narrative of Vita 1 as also of other Vitae of Homer.

Comment C on ¶1

Comment C1 on ¶1. Although Herodotus does not say it directly, other sources make it clear that the polis of Athens, situated on the European side of the Aegean Sea, claimed to be the Ionian mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of the Ionian cities situated on the Asiatic side of the Aegean Sea, along the coast of Asia Minor. There are many attestations of this claim, surviving in a wide variety of myths promoted over many years by the Athenian polis, but I cite here only the one case where the wording of the claim can be seen in its most explicit form. This wording is attested in a report we find in a relatively late source, the universal history of Diodorus of Sicily, who lived in the first century BCE. In his retelling of historical events that happened soon after the defeat of the Persian Empire’s navy and army by European Greek forces under the leadership of Athens and Sparta in the sea-battle at Salamis and in the land-battle at Plataea respectively—it all happened in the years 480 and 479 respectively—Diodorus (11.37.3–5) reports what was said, in the aftermath of these battles, by legates of the Athenians speaking to legates of the Ionians who lived in Asia Minor and who were considering offers, made by European Greeks, for them to relocate their homelands by migrating across the Aegean Sea from Asia Minor to Europe—where they could resettle, supposedly, and thus be safe from further domination by the Persian Empire. But the Athenians decided, Diodorus tells us, that such an offer of relocation for the Ionians was not necessary. They reassured the Ionians by reminding them that the European polis of Athens was the mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of the Asiatic Ionians, and that these Ionians would not have to worry if they were ever again attacked in their Asiatic homeland by Persian forces. Not to worry… Your mother city of Athens would save you. Surely we would send forces that would cross the Aegean Sea and come to your aid. In other words… no need for these demoralized Ionians of Asia Minor to migrate to Europe—since, supposedly, they would be safe even if they stayed put, where they were, in Asia Minor. I quote the wording of the Athenians, as reported by Diodorus. They were ‘saying’ (λέγοντες)…

… ὅτι κἂν μηδεὶς αὐτοῖς τῶν ἄλλων Ἑλλήνων βοηθῇ, μόνοι Ἀθηναῖοι συγγενεῖς ὄντες βοηθήσουσιν· ὑπελάμβανον δὲ ὅτι κοινῇ κατοικισθέντες ὑπὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων οἱ Ἴωνες οὐκέτι μητρόπολιν ἡγήσονται τὰς Ἀθήνας. διόπερ συνέβη μετανοῆσαι τοὺς Ἴωνας καὶ κρῖναι μένειν ἐπὶ τῆς Ἀσίας. τούτων δὲ πραχθέντων συνέβη τὴν δύναμιν τῶν Ἑλλήνων σχισθῆναι, καὶ τοὺς μὲν Λακεδαιμονίους εἰς τὴν Λακωνικὴν ἀποπλεῦσαι, τοὺς δὲ Ἀθηναίους μετὰ τῶν Ἰώνων καὶ τῶν νησιωτῶν ἐπὶ Σηστὸν ἀπᾶραι.

…that even if none of the other Greeks would come and aid them [= the Ionians], the Athenians, kinfolk that they were, would come, all by themselves, and aid them. The subtext [of the Athenians] was this: if the Ionians were to be settled in new homelands by the Greeks acting in common agreement, then these Ionians would no longer think of Athens as their mother-city [mētropolis]. It was for this reason that the Ionians changed their minds and decided to remain in Asia. Once these things turned out this way, the outcome was that the military force of the Greeks now got split up, with the Lacedaemonians [/Spartans] sailing back to Laconia [/Sparta] while the Athenians together with the Ionians and the islanders [of the Aegean Sea] weighing anchor and heading off to Sestos.

Diodorus 11.37.3–5

Comment C2 on ¶1. Not only did the European city of Athens mythologize itself as the mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. It also mythologized itself, from early on, as the ‘founder’ of these cities, as expressed by the word ktizein. I have already analyzed this word above, in my Comment A3 on ¶1 of Vita 1, where I first translated this word. I will now repeat my initial translation of ktizein, which I write here once again in the infinitive form of the verb. To convey the fact that I am rendering an infinitive, I write once again ‘to found’, that is, ‘to establish’, and I now link this verb, as I already predicted at Comment A3, with the derivative noun ktisis, which in turn I translate as ‘founding’ in the sense of ‘establishing’. Further, I link the abstract noun ktisis ‘founding’ with the agent noun ktistēs, my translation for which is more easily understandable, ‘founder’. And here I arrive at the main point I am making, which is, that the European city of Athens mythologized itself, from early on, as the ktistēs ‘founder’ of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. Our most explicit source is the historian Hellanicus of Mytilene, who lived in the fifth century BCE. In a fragment of his many works—I cite here Hellanicus FGH 328a F 23—the historian reports an old Athenian myth where Kodros, prototypical king of Athens, bequeaths his kingship to an older son, Medon, while his younger son, Nēleus, sails east, across the Aegean sea to Asia Minor, where he becomes the founder of the Ionian Dodecapolis. Here is the relevant wording of the relevant fragment from Hellanicus, FGH 328a F 23 line 18, where the historian is cited as reporting this Athenian claim in terms of the actual word ktistēs. I quote here the wording of the fragment, Hellanicus FGH 328a F 23 line 18: ὁ δὲ νεώτερος αὐτοῦ παῖς Νηλεὺς τῆς δωδεκαπόλεως Ἰωνίας κτίστης ἐγένετο ‘and the younger son of his [that is, of the king Kodros], who was Nēleus, became the founder [ktistēs] of the Ionian Dodecapolis’. In line with a remark I made at Comment A3 on ¶1 about an alternative translation of ktizein and ktisis—beyond ‘found’ and ‘founding’—I now return to using also the terms ‘colonize’ and ‘colonizing’. I find that these terms make it easier to understand the myth we just saw about the claimed founding or colonizing of Ionian cities in Asia Minor by the Ionian city of Athens in its mythologized role as mētropolis or ‘mother city’. These myths about the colonizing of cities in Asia Minor, it needs to be clearly understood, are shaped as aetiologies that are meant to validate the existing identities of these cities. By aetiology, I should add, I mean simply a myth that motivates an institutional reality (I use this term also in HPC 22).

Comment C3 on ¶1. But the identities of the cities belonging to the federation of the Ionian Dodecapolis were more complicated than what we see in the unified vision reported by Hellanicus of Mytilene. The complications, which were deep, have been thoroughly analyzed by Douglas Frame (2009, especially at 620–622, 644–651), and I attempt here only a general summary. Basically, the Athenian claim that Ionian cities in Asia Minor were colonized by the city of Athens in its role as an Ionian city in its own right was shaped primarily by one particular Ionian city in Asia Minor, the city of Miletus, and this shaping was made possible by the historical fact that this one particular Ionian city had politically dominated, over a considerable length of time, the other eleven Ionian cities. Besides this general summary, I also offer here in Comment C3, as I predicted in Comment B5, a more specific observation about Miletus as the most dominant city of the Ionian Dodecapolis: it has to do with the use of the name Iōniã—which is Iōniē in the Ionic dialect. This Ionic name, Iōniē, pervades the diction of Herodotus, whose text was of course composed in the Ionic dialect, and it is even attested once, at line 373, in the Ionic diction of the Herodotean Vita of Homer. Such a name can best be translated as ‘the region of the Ionians’, parallel to the name Aiolis, which means ‘the region of the Aeolians’. I find it most telling that Herodotus, who uses this name Iōniē throughout his History whenever he refers to the region of the Ionians, goes out of his way to describe in the most glowing terms  the city of Miletus in the era preceding the Ionian Revolt (5.23): καὶ δὴ καὶ τῆς Ἰωνίης ἦν πρόσχημα  καὶ δὴ καὶ τῆς Ἰωνίης ἦν πρόσχημα ‘most of all [καὶ δὴ καὶ], it was the ornament [proskhēma] of Ionia’. Miletus was then the crown jewel, as it were, of the Ionian Dodecapolis.

Comment D on ¶1

To summarize, then, the narrative strategy displayed in ¶1 of Vita 1 of Homer… The author, in considering all the populations of the Greek-speaking world, is engaging in a mental processs of going from the most general to the most specific. He narrows things down to one city, Cyme, and to one person, who is described as inhabiting the city of Cyme. Our unknown Herodotean author is imitating here the narrative strategy of his model, the historian Herodotus. For example, he shows, by way of his wording, that he understands an idiom used in the diction of Herodotus to highlight the relative importance of special points that this historian is making. In the diction of Herodotus, as well as in the diction of our author of Vita 1 of Homer, information that I symbolize as “xxx” and “yyy,” placed before and after καὶ δὴ καὶ, indicates respectively what is peripheral on the left and essential on the right. (As I said in the side note that I added immediately after my translation of ¶1 above, Greek particles, such as this set of particles here καὶ δὴ καὶ, are not transliterated.) So, here in ¶1 of the Vita, the “xxx” that we see on the left of “xxx καὶ δὴ καὶ yyy” here refers to all the populations of the Greek-speaking world while the “yyy” refers to the Aeolian city of Cyme and to one particular person who inhabits the city. He is the father of the mother of Homer. So, the Herodotean author of Vita 1 seeks to demonstrate maximum accuracy by choosing the most specific possible details out of a vast variety of other available details to be found in traditional narratives about the life and times of Homer. In the eleven Vitae of Homer that we will be reading, we will find many examples of other such details about Homer’s origins, and most of the Vitae back off from deciding on a single unifying version. But our author of Vita 1, by contrast, does not back off. Though he is well aware that the question of Homer’s origins is a challenge that attracts an overwhelmingly vast variety of different answers, he seeks to begin the overall narrative by trying to sharpen the focus, concentrating on one unified version, hoping to select most judiciously from among the vast variety of different versions. Faced with such an overwhelming challenge, the author makes do by seeking to express, from the start, what he hopes are the best possible solutions for providing a most unified narrative.

¶2. Time went by, and it happened that the girl [pais] had intercourse with a man, secretly, and got pregnant. At first it didn’t show. But when it did get noticed by Kleanax, he was angry about the predicament {15} and, summoning Krēthēïs to a meeting, just the two of them, he blamed her greatly, telling about all the shame [aiskhunē] with regard to the citizens of the city [of Cyme]. So, he was going to make plans about her, proactive plans, as follows. It just so happened that the people of Cyme were at that time in the process of city-founding [ktizein] at the inner curve of the gulf of the river Hermos. And for those who were founding [ktizein] the city [polis] the name that was given to that city was Smyrna [Smurnă], and it was given by Theseus, {20} who wanted to establish a memorial [mnēmeion] with regard to his wife. Her name was the same. It was Smyrna [Smurnă]. Theseus was one of the leading-men [prōtoi] of the Thessalians who founded [ktizein] Cyme. He was a descendant of Eumēlos, son of Admētos. He was very well-off, when it comes to making a living. There [in Smyrna] Krēthēïs was placed by Kleanax into the care of Ismēniās the Boeotian, who was a shareholder {25} among the colonists [ap-oikoi] and who happened to be the closest comrade [hetairos] of his [= Kleanax].

Comments on ¶2

Comment A1 on ¶2

About “intercourse with a man”… In some versions of the Vitae, as here, the father of Homer is pictured as an anonymous man. In other versions, as we will see, the father is a god in disguise, and the divinity of the father is made explicit. In the version of the story that we see here in ¶2, we are now told that Homer, though he was conceived in the city of Cyme, was actually born in the city of Smyrna (a more accurate transliteration of the Greek would be Smurnă).

Comment A2 on ¶2

In ¶1, we saw that Homer’s mother was born in the city of Cyme, and now we see in ¶2 that Homer himself was born in the city of Smyrna. So, by now, Vita 1 has mentioned three cities that are relevant to the life and times of Homer: first we were reading about Cyme and Magnesia in ¶1, and now we read about Smyrna in ¶2. The relationship of the city of Smyrna, birthplace of Homer, to the city of Cyme, the place where Homer was conceived, is matched by a historical detail: Smyrna was a daughter-city of Cyme. But this historical detail, to which we see a clear allusion being made here in ¶2 of Vita 2, is shaded over in most of the Life of Homer narratives that we will be reading—except for Vita 1 here. This exception can be explained in terms of a conflict between Aeolian traditions about the life of Homer, which shape the overall narrative of Vita 1, and Ionian traditions about his life, which shape the narrative of Vita 2, as we will see later, as also of other Vitae. As I showed in a lengthy historical analysis starting at §30 in the Overview above, the Aeolian traditions about the life of Homer were linked with myths about an Aeolian Migration, while rival Ionian traditions about the Poet’s life were linked with myths about an Ionian migration. The three cities mentioned so far in ¶1 and ¶2 of Vita 1—Cyme and Magnesia in ¶1 and Smyrna in ¶2—are all linked with myths about an Aeolian Migration. But there is a big problem for the narrative of Vita 1 in the case of Smyrna. As we see from the historical facts survey in the Overview, Smyrna was transformed from an Aeolian into an Ionian city. As I point out at §37e in the Overview above, the capture of Aeolian Smyrna by the Ionians, which happened probably as early as 800 BCE or before, and definitely before 688 BCE (Frame 2009:526n21), was a major historical event that destabilized the Aeolian of Asia Minor culturally as well as politically, since it deprived the Aeolians of their native son and culture hero, Homer. To complicate things further, as I note at §37g in the Overview, even the Ionian city of Smyrna was destroyed around 600 BCE by the inland empire of the Lydians (Frame 2009:525n19). As I note further at §37g, providing more details there, the city of Smyrna from that time onward ceased to exist, and it became known as one of the three proverbial extinct cities of archaic Greek poetry, along with Colophon and Magnesia-at-Sipylus. As I also note even further at §37g, Smyrna became restored as a city only in the Hellenistic period. I think that the author of Vita 1 is aware of this restoration.

Comment A3 on ¶2

About “Theseus”… But Theseus was king of Athens, an Ionian city in the Helladic mainland. By implication, the wording here acknowledges that Smyrna was founded by the city of Athens in the claimed role of that city as the mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of Ionians. So, what is hinted in the wording here is an almost grudging acknowledgment of a rival mythological tradition: where Smyrna became Ionian after it had once been Aeolian.

About “the Thessalians” … But wait … The narrator now teasingly identifies Theseus as not the Athenian Theseus but rather as a Thessalian Theseus, who would be, as a Thessalian, not Ionian but Aeolian.

About “a descendant of Eumēlos, son of Admētos” … The narrator skips any mention of a father for this alternative Theseus.

¶3. Time went by. One day, Krēthēïs went out, in the company of other women, to a festival [heortē] at the banks of a river called Melēs [declined Melēs, Melētos, etc.]. She was at the point of giving birth and went into labor. Homer was born to her. He was not blind. {30} No, he had his eyesight. And she gave the child the name Melēsigenēs [as if the name meant ‘he whose birth is linked with the Melēs’], getting his epithet [ep-ōnumiā] from the river. To-continue-with-the-telling-of-the-story [μὲν οὖν]… For a while, Krēthēïs was still at the household of Ismēniās. But, as time went by, she went off on her own and started up with work that was handiwork. She sustained [trephein] the child and herself by doing different kinds of work for different people, and {35} she provided-for- the-education-of [paideuein] her boy [pais] by way of whatever earnings she could manage.

Comment on ¶3

About the name Melēsigenēs … It is clear from the narrative that the narrator really thinks of Melēsigenēs as Homēros or ‘Homer’, since he speaks of the birth of ‘Homer’ and then goes on to say that ‘Homer’ as the ultimate Poet was initially named not Homēros but Melēsigenēs at birth. Later on in the narrative, however, he will be renamed as ‘Homer’, which turns out to be the driving idea of the overall narrative about this ultimate Poet in Vita 1 and elsewhere. This is not to say, however, that there had not pre-existed various myths where the overriding name of a mythologized Master Poet was indeed Melēsigenēs.

For example, in the Ionian traditions of Asia Minor, the name Melēsigenēs was traditionally connected with the name of the river Melēs in the environs of Smyrna, as we see in Strabo (12.3.27 C554). The river figures in a story about Homer’s birth, as we just saw in Vita 1 ¶3, where we have read that Homer’s mother gives birth to him on the banks of the river Melēs (Vita 1.28–29; also in Vitae 2.8–12; 3a.18–19, 35; 10.23–24); alternatively, Melēs is the river god who fathers Homer (Vitae 2.20–21, 27–28, 53, 75, 151; 3a.78; 3b.15; 4.2–3; 5.1; 6.29; 8.631; 10.1–2; 11.16). I draw attention to a most relevant detail in Vita 1: the birth of Homer on the banks of the river Melēs happened on the occasion of a heortē ‘festival’ (1.28). As I argue in HPC (52–53), Homer is mythologized as the ultimate Poet who was born to perform at festivals. And, as I argue further in HPC (53n52), the idea of a festival featuring a mythologized Homer as the premier performer is also conveyed by the description of Homer’s mother in Vita 1.39–41 as an accomplished woolworker, since woolworking is central to a climactic moment at a seasonally recurring festival like the Panathenaia in the city of Athens, where a woven woolen robe is presented to the goddess Athena, imagined as presiding over this Athenian festival named after her—and where Homeric poetry is actually performed in her honor.

In terms of the Life of Homer narratives, then, as I argue in HPC (135–136), the meaning of the name Melēsigenēs as an alternative name for Homer is validated by the narrative, as if the name really meant ‘the one who was born by or of the river Melēs’. From the standpoint of historical linguistics, however, we can see that the name Melēsigenēs had once had an earlier meaning that fits more closely the generic role of an ultimate Poet. Morphologically, this earlier meaning can be interpreted as ‘the one who cares about genealogy [genos]’.

In terms of this interpretation, the first component Melēsi– in the compound noun Melēsigenēs is derived from the verb melein, ‘to be of concern to someone’, or ‘to be something or someone that someone cares about’, which can be used to convey the mental effort of a poet in concentrating on a given poetic subject (PH 347–348 = 12§22). As for the second component –genēs of Melēsigenēs, it is derived from the noun genos in the sense of ‘genealogy’ or ‘lineage’. In terms of this etymology, the compound formation Melēsigenēs is a “speaking name” (nomen loquēns) that refers to a kind of poet whose poetry centers on narrating origins—such as the origins of populations like the Ionians and the Aeolians.. West (2003:310) translates Melēsigenēs as ‘caring about his clan’; I propose, however, that the component genos implies not ‘clan’ but ‘genealogy’ in the sense of caring, truly caring, about the origins of populations.

But there is more to the naming of Homer, as I argue further in HPC (135–136). Vita 1 reveals traces of two different sets of myths about Homer, stemming from two different populations. One set of myths stems from speakers of the Ionic dialect, that is, from the Ionian populations inhabiting the coastal strip and outlying islands of central Asia Minor, while a different and earlier set of myths stems from speakers of the Aeolic dialect, that is, from Aeolian populations inhabiting the more northerly coastal strip and outlying islands of Asia Minor.

In Vita 1, the change of Homer’s name from Melēsigenēs to Homēros is signaled by two most telling narrative details. The first detail is the Poet’s departure from the city of Smyrna, which later changed from an Aeolian to an Ionian city, and the second detail is the Poet’s relocation, however temporary, to Cyme, which stayed an Aeolian city. As I argue in HPC 135–136, the name Homēros was associated with the old Aeolian traditions of Cyme, and it is relevant to something that happened to the Poet when he was still in Smyrna (that something, however, is attested not in Vita 1 but in Vita 3a, as my translation and comments there will show). By contrast with the name Homēros, the name Melēsigenēs was associated with the newer Ionian traditions of Smyrna, after that city’s older Aeolian identity was transformed into to its newer Ionian identity.

¶4. There was in Smyrna, at that time, a man by the name of Phēmios, who taught boys [paides] letters [grammata] and every other kind of art-of-the-Muses [mousikē]. This man, being single, hired Krēthēïs to do work for him on the wool that he {40} received as payment from the boys [paides] (for their education). And she would work for him in his household, with a great deal of orderliness and self-mastery [sōphrosunē]. She very much pleased Phēmios. It ended up with his making her a proposition, trying to talk her into living together with him. Among the many things he said that he thought would bring her around, he especially brought up the subject of her boy [pais], saying that he would make him his own son and that the boy, if he were to be brought up by him and {45} educated by him, would become someone who is worth talking about, since he could see that the boy [pais] was smart and a real natural. He kept on trying to persuade her until she finally agreed to do what he was proposing.

Comment on ¶4

About Phēmios… The significance of his name in terms of the narrative will be analyzed in the comments on ¶8 of Vita 1, where we read of another name, Mentēs, with a parallel significance.

¶5. The boy [pais], since he was endowed with natural nobility, added to which were the guardianship and education [paideusis] that he was getting, quickly {50} became outstanding, far superior to all others. As time went by and he reached manhood, he was by no means inferior to Phēmios in his learning, and so, when Phēmios came to the end of his life, he left behind all he had to the boy [pais]. And, not much later, Krēthēis too came to the end of her life. Meanwhile, Melēsigenēs established himself as a teacher. And, now that he was on his own {55} he was getting more and more visibility. People became his enthusiastic-followers [thaumastai]—not only local people but also incoming non-locals [xenoi], since Smyrna was a trade-center, and there was much grain incoming from the fertile surrounding countryside that was being exported from there. So, non-locals [xenoi] too, whenever they would get off {60} from work, would spend their free time just sitting in at the establishment of Melēsigenēs.

Comment on ¶5

About the role of Melēsigenēs as a teacher in his native city of Smyrna: he is not yet a poet, only a teacher. That will change only when he returns to Smyrna after intervening adventures that are narrated in ¶¶6–7.

¶6. Among those people at that time was a shipping captain named Mentēs. Coming from the locale surrounding Cape Leukas, he had sailed his ship to get grain [= in Smyrna]. He was a man who was educated [paideuein], by the standards of that time, and was knowledgeable about many things. And he persuaded Melēsigenēs to sail off with him, telling him to shut down {65} his teaching establishment, also, how he would now be earning wages and would be provided with all the necessities of life—and further telling him that he deserved to have the chance of getting to see regions [khōrā plural] and cities [polis plural] while he was still young. I think what especially persuaded him was what I just said. Maybe he had already at that time set his mind to the making-of-poetry [poiēsis]. And so he shut down his teaching establishment and sailed off with Mentēs. And wherever he went, {70} he always had a good look at all the local-things [epi-khōria]. He would make-inquiries [historeîn] and findings. It is likely that he was getting-things-written-down [graphein]—things-that-were-worth-remembering [mnēmosuna] concerning all these things.

Comment on ¶6

About “getting-things-written-down [graphein]” … The verb graphein here is in the middle voice: so, graphesthai. The middle voice here means that Melēsigenēs had things written down for him, whereas the active voice would have meant that he himself wrote things down. Detailed argumentation in HPC (34).

¶7. On their way back from travels in Etruria and then Iberia, they arrived at the island of Ithaca. And it happened that Melēsigenēs came down with an illness afflicting the eyes, and he was feeling terrible. Mentēs, planning for him to be cared for while he was getting ready to sail ahead to Leukas, leaving him behind, entrusted him to the care of a very close friend, Mentōr of Ithaca, son of Alkimos, asking him to take very good care of him and saying that he would come and fetch him when he sails back [from Leukas to Ithaca]. Well, Mentōr {80} did give him intensive care. He had sufficient means to do so, and he had a reputation far and wide for his righteousness [dikaiosunē] and hospitality [philoxeniā], surpassing by far all other men in Ithaca. And that is where it happened that Melēsigenēs inquired [historeîn] most thoroughly about Odysseus and made his findings about him. Here-is-something-I-just-learned [particle δὴ]… The people of Ithaca say that it was at that time, when he was there with them [= in Ithaca], that Melēsigenēs went blind. But I say that he had recovered his health at that time, and that he went blind only later, in Colophon. And backing me up about this is what the people of Colophon say.

Comment on ¶7

About “the island of Ithaca” … The next stop for both would have been the island of Leukas. About the city of Colophon… The population of this city was Ionian.

¶8. Mentēs, sailing back from Leukas, stopped over at Ithaca and picked up Melēsigenēs, who frequently continued to sail around with him. And what happened then was this… Arriving at the city of Colophon, he came down again with the illness afflicting the eyes, and, this time being unable to escape the illness, he went blind then and there. Leaving Colophon, he made has way to Smyrna, and it was there that he now tried a hand, for the first time, at making-poetry [poiēsis]

Comments on ¶8

About the city of Colophon… to repeat, the population of this city was Ionian.

About the city of Smyrna… As we know from Herodotus and other sources, this city was Aeolian, but it was captured by the Ionians, and it then became an Ionian city. Details at §37e in the Overview above. In terms of the narrative here in Vita 1, by contrast with other Vitae, the city of Smyrna, the birthplace of Melēsigenēs, was still Aeolian during his lifetime. As we will see in later comments, the distinction between an Ionian and an Aeolian identity for the population of a city turns out to be essential in Life of Homer narratives. It is also essential that the Aeolian city of Smyrna is the first place, according to the narrative of Vita 1 here, where Melēsigenēs first gets to practice the craft of poetry. As we saw in ¶2 of Vita 1, where we read the report of his birth in Smyrna, he is said to have been born to be a poet. Born in Smyrna, he now becomes a poet in Smyrna.

¶9. {95} Time passed. Finding himself without the means for a livelihood, he decided to make his way [from the city of Smyrna] to the city of Cyme. As he was on his way, across the plain of the river Hermos, he came to the city of Neon Teikhos ‘New Wall’, which was a colony [apoikiā] οf the people of Cyme. This place was colonized [oikizein passive] eight years after Cyme was colonized. There it is said that he was standing around at a workshop for leatherwork {100} and that he spoke there, for the first time, the following verses [epos plural]:

The Greek text of Homer’s five verses as quoted in Vita 1 lines 101–105

{101}   αἰδεῖσθε ξενίων κεχρημένον ἠδὲ δόμοιο,
{102}   οἳ πόλιν αἰπεινὴν Κύμην ἐριώπιδα κούρην
{103}   ναίετε, Σαρδήνης πόδα νείατον ὑψικόμοιο·
{104}   ἀμβρόσιον πίνοντες ὕδωρ θείου ποταμοῖο
{105}   Ἕρμου δινήεντος, ὃν ἀθάνατος τέκετο Ζεύς.

{101}   Show respect, you-all, for a man in need of hospitality and a home,
{102}   you who occupy the lofty city [polis] that is Cyme—the girl [kourē] with the powerful looks—
{103}   you occupy it, the lowest foothill of [the mountain] Sardēnē, with its high-reaching forests,
{104}   and you drink the immortalizing water of the divine [theios] river,
{105}   the Hermos, surging as it flows, fathered by immortal Zeus.

A variant version (a free-standing five-line “epigram of Homer” (Epigrammata 1 (also known as the Homeric Hymn “Εἰς Ξένους,” in Hymni Homerici, ed. Allen, Halliday and Sikes 1936), as attested in some but not all the manuscripts contained in the medieval transmission of texts known as the Homeric Hymns)

1           αἰδεῖσθε ξενίων κεχρημένον ἠδὲ δόμοιο
2           οἳ πόλιν αἰπεινὴν νύμφης ἐρατώπιδος Ἥρης
3           ναίετε, Σαιδήνης πόδα νείατον ὑψικόμοιο,
4           ἀμβρόσιον πίνοντες ὕδωρ ξανθοῦ ποταμοῖο
5           Ἕρμου καλὰ ῥέοντος ὃν ἀθάνατος τέκετο Ζεύς.

1           Show respect, you-all, for a man in need of hospitality and a home,
2           you who occupy the lofty city [polis] of the numphē with the lovely looks, Hera,
3           you occupy it, the lowest foothill of [the mountain] Saidēnē, with its high-reaching forests,
4           and you drink the immortalizing water of the golden-haired [xanthos] river,
5           the Hermos, flowing beautifully, fathered by immortal Zeus.

An extended commentary on these two versions of five verses attributed to “Homer”

In the text and translation of the first version, as found in Vita 1 and extending from line 101 to line 106 of the text as edited by Allen, I refrain from accepting two emendations by West 2003:362, who reads Σαιδήνης and Σαιδήνη at lines 103 and 106 instead of what we see attested in the textual tradition of this Vita, Σαρδήνης and Σαρδήνη respectively. By contrast, in the edition of Vita 1 as printed by Allen 1912:197, this editor reads Σαρδήνης and Σαρδήνη, not Σαιδήνης and Σαιδήνη as read by West 2003:362, which are emendations. In emending, West has extrapolated from lines 1–5 of the five-line poem known as Homeric Epigram 1, which is the second version as quoted above. This second version, as I already noted, is attested in some but not in all of the manuscripts featuring Homeric Hymns.

At this point, it is essential for me to emphasize that both sets of names, Σαρδήνης and Σαρδήνη as well as Σαιδήνης and Σαιδήνη—names that I transliterate respectively as Sardēnē and Saidēnē—are attested elsewhere in ancient Greek sources. In the work of Herodian (ed. A. Lenz 1867, 3/2, p. 331 line 6), the name Sardēnē is explained as ‘the Amazon’ (Σαρδήνη· ἡ Ἀμαζών); alternatively, in the work known as the Ethnica by Stephanus of Byzantium (ed. A. Meineke 1849, p. 549 line 21), the name Saidēnē is explained as ‘mountain of Cyme’ (Σαιδηνή· ὄρος Κύμης) or, by extension (lines 21–22), as ‘the region’ [named] Saidēnē’ (καὶ Σαιδηνή ἡ χώρα). On the surface, these variant forms Sardēnē and Saidēnē seem to be referring to different referents, since the idea of an ‘Amazon’ seems different from the idea of a ‘region’ defined by a mountain that looms over the city of Cyme. Underneath the surface, however, I propose that there exists here a unifying idea, which is actually attested by Stephanus (p. 392 lines 17–18), where we read that the city that was called Cyme was named after an Amazon who was also named Cyme; here is my translation ‘Cyme: a city belonging to the region of the Aeolians. … [named] from an Amazon named Cyme’ (Κύμη· πόλις Αἰολίδος … ἀπὸ Κύμης Ἀμαζόνος). As we learn from two separate passages in the work of the geographer Strabo (11.5.4 C505 and 12.3.21 C550), at least four prominent cities of Asia Minor were named after Amazons, and, in both passages, Strabo lists the cities in a fixed order: Ephesus, Smyrnă, Cyme, Myrină (Ἐφέσου καὶ Σμύρνης καὶ Κύμης καὶ Μυρίνης in the first passage and Ἔφεσον καὶ Σμύρναν καὶ Κύμην καὶ Μύριναν in the second passage). That is to say, in each one of these four cities, both the Amazon and the city had the same name. Accordingly, I do not agree with West’s rejection of the reading Κύμην ἐριώπιδα κούρην at line 102 of Vita 1, where he emends the wording and reads “νύμφης ἐρατώπιδος ῞Ηρης.” Such a reading is not attested in the manuscript tradition of Vita 1 and is found only in the “Epigram 1” of “Homer” as attested in some manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns. West translates his emended wording as “fair-eyed Hera the Bride.” In terms of his emendation, Hera as numphē at line 102 would be the ‘bride’ of Zeus at line 105. But of course this word numphē can also mean, in non-marital situations, ‘nymph’ in the sense of ‘local goddess’. Which brings us to the word kourē ‘girl’ as actually attested at line 102 of Vita 1, and here, in this context, this word can mean not only ‘girl’ but also something closer to what I have just described as a ‘local goddess’.

To be more accurate here, however, I propose a slightly different description. As I showed in the book Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry (Nagy 2024), hereafter abbreviated as AGHAP, Amazons are comparable to goddesses, yes, since they were worshipped—just as we can say that gods and goddesses were worshipped—but the worshiping of Amazons by local populations can more accurately be described in terms of hero cult. In AGHAP, I analyze the historical evidence for the hero cults of Amazons, and I am about to quote here a relevant observation with reference to three Amazons, most famous for their roles in Athenian myth, whose hero cults are noted by the traveler Pausanias (1.2.1 and at 1.41.7). From the accounts of Pausanias, I have pieced together a central theme in the overall myth that is linked to the hero cults of these three Amazons, named Antiope, Molpadia, and Hippolyte, and here is what I have to say about such a central theme (AGHAP page 10):

In considering the references made by Pausanias to Amazons as cult heroes, I deliberately use the word hero and not heroine in such contexts because I seek to challenge the assumption, common to speakers of English, that only men are heroes. In terms of ancient Greek hero cults, both men and women could become cult heroes after death—whether or not they were primarily warriors. And the wording of Pausanias at 1.2.1 and at 1.41.7 makes it clear that the Amazons Antiope, Molpadia, and Hippolyte were, all three of them, cult heroes.

The traveler Pausanias speaks of these Amazons as cult heroes with specific reference to their tombs, which were the focal points of their being worshipped by local populations. And I can now compare the fact that the geographer Strabo (at 11.5.4 C505) speaks of the taphoi ‘tombs’ of the four Amazons who are named Ephesus, Smyrnă, Cyme, Myrină, and he goes on to say that these four Amazons are linked with local myths about ktiseis ‘colonizations’, that is, ‘foundations’ of the four cities named respectively Ephesus, Smyrnă, Cyme, Myrină. I infer, then, that these Amazons were cult heroes of their respective cities, and that it was their superhuman status as cult heroes that explains why, in each of these four cases, the identity of a given Amazon was equated with the city that embodied the very existence of the city. And that is what we see taking place also, I argue, in what we read at line 102 of Vita 1 of Homer, whose words in his poetry here are saying that the city named Cyme is to be identified with a beautifully fierce-looking kourē ‘girl’ named Cyme the Amazon, who is the very embodiment of the city. Such embodiment is visible in the coinage of Cyme as attested in the Hellenistic period. I show one example:

The linking, as pictured on such coins, of an Amazon with a prancing horse reminds me of an analogous theme involving the Amazon Myrină in the earliest attested passage involving Amazons. In what follows, I merge new comments I am making here with earlier comments I have made about Myrină in AGHAP 44–46.

The linking of Amazons with horses, and of horses with Amazons, is a most ancient idea—an idea we find attested, I as I will now show, already in the verbal art of Homeric poetry. I cite here the wording of Iliad 2.811–815, a passage that pictures an Amazon who is seen in the act of running—but she is not simply running, since she is also exuberantly leaping and bounding as she runs, like some racing horse. Perhaps her motion is synchronized with the running of a racing horse. Or perhaps she herself is running like a racing horse. Either way, the imagery is compressed into a single word. The word, as we read it at Iliad 2.814, is polú-skarthmos, a compound adjective used here as an epithet that describes a speeding Amazon, and I propose to translate this epithet as ‘speeding ahead with many leaps and bounds’. The Amazon who is described by way of this epithet polú-skarthmos at line 814 here in the Homeric Iliad is named Myrină—or, to spell her name more precisely, Múrīnă / Murī́nē (πολυσκάρθμοιο Μυρίνης)— I will continue here to write her name more simply as Myrină. In Homeric diction, the same element skarthmós that we see embedded in the Amazon’s epithet—the element that I render as ‘leaping and bounding’—is built into another Homeric compound adjective, eú-skarthmoi, which I translate as ‘beautifully leaping and bounding’, and which is an epithet that describes the divine horses that draw the chariot driven by the lord of horses himself, the god Poseidon, as we see in Iliad 13.31 (ἐΰσκαρθμοι … ἵπποι). The verb from which these epithets are derived, skaírein, is conventionally translated as ‘skip’ or ‘dance’ or ‘frisk’.

But this Amazon Myrină, so lively in her speeding athleticism as she is seen leaping and bounding ahead, is no longer alive in Iliad 2.811–815. Despite what her epithet says about her—that she is ‘speeding ahead with many leaps and bounds’—she is now dead. But she is not only dead, she is a cult hero. Her body is hidden underneath the earth somewhere inside a tumulus—I am using here a term frequently used by archaeologists in referring to a prominent mound of earth—which is the site of her tomb, and, at this tumulus, we see her being worshipped as a cult hero by the people of Troy. That is how I interpret Iliad 2.811–815 in a cumulative Homeric commentary of mine (Nagy 2022). The word kolōnē here at line 811, which I will translate simply as ‘tumulus’, refers to the place where, as we read further at line 814, the sēma ‘tomb’ of the Amazon named Myrină is located. We may compare the word kolōnē ‘tumulus’, as used here in the Homeric Iliad, with the word kolōnos ‘tumulus’ referring to the tomb of the cult hero Protesilaos in Philostratus On heroes 9.1. (In Hour 14 of H24H, I offer extensive commentary on this hero Protesilaos and on the relevant work of Philostratus, On heroes, dated to the early third century CE.) Elsewhere in On heroes, at 9.3, this same tomb of the cult hero Protesilaos is called a sēma ‘marker’—in the sense of ‘tomb’. Also, the same word kolōnos ‘tumulus’ refers to the tomb of Achilles himself in On heroes 51.12 (also at 53.10, 11). This tomb of Achilles, which marks the site on the Hellespont where he is worshipped as a cult hero, is also called a sēma in On heroes 53.11 (also 51.2, 52.3; further analysis in H24H 14§§23–26).

In the Homeric passage about Myrină in Iliad 2.811–815, she is not described explicitly as an Amazon, but her Amazonian identity is amply documented in two historical sources, Diodorus of Sicily, first centuries BCE, and Strabo the geographer, first centuries BCE/CE. Both sources report on a wide variety of regional variations in the transmission of myths about Myrină the Amazon: Diodorus at 3.54.2 through 3.55.11 and Strabo at 11.5.4 C505, 12.3.21 C550, 12.8.6 C573, 13.3.5–6 C622–623. Especially significant is the reference in Strabo 12.8.6 C573, where the Iliadic Myrină is explicitly identified as an Amazon. For now I simply focus on one particular detail about the cultural identity of this Amazon: Myrină is linked to the Aeolian populations who lived in mainland Asia Minor and on the offshore island Lesbos. Her name even becomes synonymous, as we have seen, with a mainland Aeolian city, Myrină, while she has a sister, named Mutilēnē=Mytilene, whose own name becomes synonymous with the dominant city on the island of Lesbos, Mytilene (Diodorus 3.55.7).

Having made a case for viewing the Homeric passage about Myrină in Iliad 2.811–815 as one of the earliest attestations of ancient Greek hero cult, I will now argue that Myrină is comparable to the Amazons who are worshipped, according to historical sources, as cult heroes at tombs where they are believed to be buried. I have already highlighted three such Amazons whose tombs are mentioned by Pausanias: Antiope, Molpadia, Hippolyte. And I will also argue that the epithet of Myrină in Iliad 2.811, polú-skarthmos, ‘speeding ahead with many leaps and bounds’, is indirectly relevant to these three Amazons in particular and even to Amazons in general.

The extended commentary comes to an end here, and translation from Vita 1 resumes, restarting at line 106.

¶9 continued. {106} And Sardēnē is a mountain that looms over the river Hermos—also over Neon Teikhos. As for the name of the leather-worker, it was Tukhíos. When he [= Tukhíos] heard the verses [epos plural], he decided to receive [dekhesthai] the man [Melēsigenēs], since he felt pity for a blind man who was making an ask-for. And he called on him to {110} come into his workshop and said that he could take part in whatever there was there. So, he went in. And, taking a seat inside this workshop for leatherwork, he was performing [epi-deiknusthai] for them (there were also other people there [besides Tukhíos]), performing for them his poetry [poiēsis]. He performed [the composition known as] The departure of Amphiaraos to fight in the war against Thebes. Also, he performed the Hymns [humnoi] that have been made [poieîn] by him to the gods. And, concerning the things that were being said by those who were attending, {115} he displayed-his-own-thoughts in response to theirs, and he was thus shown to his listeners as one who is worthy of enthusiastic-admiration [thauma].

Comments on ¶9

About “Neon Teikhos” … This afterthought, where Neon Teikhos is said to be visible down below when viewed from up high on the heights of the looming mountain Sardēnē, reinforces the idea that this city, even though it must be far lower than the mountaintop, must be situated in the higher foothills of the mountain. Thus the altitude of Cyme, unlike the altitude of Neon Teikhos, is pictured as close to the ground level of the river Hermos, the waters of which are described in the same quoted words of “Homer” as the life-giving sustenance of the people of Cyme. Another indication that Neon Teikhos is situated at an altitude considerably higher than Cyme is the fact that it is dominated by a citadel: in fact, as I have shown in HPC 180, the ‘New Wall’ that is the citadel of Neon Teikhos was pictured as a replication of the ‘old wall’ that was the Ilion, the citadel of Troy. Strabo (13.1.40 C599) reports a relevant claim (without accepting it) that was made by the inhabitants of the Aeolian city of New Ilion: they maintained that their city had not been completely destroyed by the Achaeans in the Trojan War and that it had never been left completely abandoned. Strabo, in that same context, mentions this claim while highlighting a counterclaim: if Ilion had not been completely destroyed, there would have been no practical reason for the stones of this old citadel’s walls to be transported to the citadels of other cities for the added fortification of their own walls. In HPC 180, however, I argued that there are symbolic as well as practical reasons for the use of stones taken from the old walls of Ilion in order to fortify new walls of new citadels: such a use establishes a symbolic connection between the old Ilion and new Iliadic structures that are being built. Among these structures was the historical reality of New Ilion itself, an Aeolian city founded in the seventh (or possibly as early as the eighth) century BCE, which was built on the ruins of the old Ilion. Archaeologists have successfully identified the old Ilion of the Iliad (whether it be Troy VI or Troy VIIa) as an earlier stratum of this New Ilion (Troy VIII), which was sought out in historical times by world rulers striving to link themselves with the heroes of the epic past. In 480 BCE, for example, Xerxes made sacrifice to Athena, surnamed hē Ilias, in Aeolian New Ilion; he also made libations to the ‘heroes’ (Herodotus 7.43.2); Alexander the Great likewise sacrificed to Athena in New Ilion (Strabo 13.1.26 C593; Arrian Anabasis 1.11.7). And the same kind of symbolism, I went on to argue in HPC 180, is inherent in the name of another Aeolian city on the Asiatic mainland, Neon Teikhos, which means ‘New Wall’. In this case as well, the naming of the new structure is a functional metonym of the old Ilion. That said, I return to my argument that there was a pairing in the visualization of two different altitudes for the location of the two Aeolian cities visited by Melēsigenēs in Vita 1: there was, on the one hand, the city of Neon Teikhos, the citadel of which would have been situated higher up in the foothills of the mountain Sarganē by contrast with the city of Cyme, which is described as situated lower down, in the lowest of the foothills surrounding this mountain. So we see here an indication, I think, of political coextensiveness between these same two cities. As we have read in the verses quoted by “Homer,” Melēsigenēs can speak to the people of Cyme in a context where the framing narrative says that he is standing, as he speaks, at the citadel of Neon Teikhos, which would be gracing the higher foothills of the mountain, not in the lower foothills, where the city of Cyme is situated.

About “he decided to receive the man” … Thus Tukhíos becomes an exponent of the “reception” of Melēsigenēs, who will soon be renamed as Homēros ‘Homer’, once he leaves Neon Teikhos and relocates to the city center of Cyme. We see here, in the reception by Tukhíos, a mythologized impetus for “Homeric reception.”

About “making an ask-for” … I find such a colloquial expression, ‘making an ask-for’, more apt than ‘begging’. After all, Melēsigenēs does have his pride. His five verses, as quoted in the narrative, show that he is too proud to beg directly.

About “[the composition known as] The departure of Amphiaraos to fight in the war against Thebes” … It can be argued that this epic performance is part of what we know as the Thebaid or Seven Against Thebes: Colbeaux 2005:254.

About “that have been made [poieîn] by him” … I analyze in HPC 35–42 all occurrences, in Vita 1, of the word poieîn ‘make’ in the sense of ‘compose-in-performance’ (I say ‘in’ not ‘for’). We see here in Vita 1 the first such occurrence of poieîn. I should add that we never see in Vita 1 the use of the word graphein ‘write’ in the sense of ‘compose’. As we will see later, the same can be said about Vita 2. As for the use of the perfect passive of poieîn ‘make’ here, it shows, I think, that that the content of what is being ‘made’ in performance is already set, as if this content were already composed. We see here, I suggest, the mentality of recomposition-in-performance. Background in PP 16.

About “Hymns … to the gods” … The word humnoi can mean ‘songs’ in general, but here in Vita 1.113–114 it may actually refer to the Homeric Hymns, such as we know them. That said, I need to add that the morphology of these Hymns, even though they are preserved only in textual form, indicates that such hymns, when performed, would be followed by performances of epics or of other forms of poetry, even of song. Background in HC Chapter 2. In other words, we cannot assume that Melēsigenēs here is imagined as performing a series of consecutive Homeric Hymns—as we see them preserved in the textual tradition.

About “he displayed-his-own-thoughts” … I attempt to convey here the idea that the verb apo-phainein ‘display’, when it is used in the middle voice, apo-phainesthai, means ‘display with reference to the self’: the performer here is displaying his own gnōmai ‘thoughts’. Nevertheless, as I suggest in the next note, he attempts to blend his thinking with the thinking of his listeners, and his responding to their thoughts is idealized as a sharing of thoughts.

About “in response to theirs” … With reference to the expression ἐς τὸ μέσον, which literally means ‘aiming at the center’, I analyze in GMP 270n5 (with relevant bibliography) a comparable use of the same expression in Theognis 678—though there the context is more political. I interpret there the idea of ‘aiming at the center’ as referring to “an agonistic communalization of possessions that are marked for orderly distribution by the community.” In the present context of Vita 1, by contrast, I think that the “distribution” centers more generally on a sharing of thoughts, as it were. Such a “sharing,” I think, aims at an idealization of oral performance.

¶10. For a while, then, Melēsigenēs held on to his situation in the environs of Neon Teikhos, drawing on his poetry [poiēsis] as his means of livelihood. Even as recently as my own time, the people of Neon Teikhos used to show off the place where he [= Melēsigenēs = Homer] used to sit and make [poieîn] performance [epideixis] of his verses [epos plural]. They venerated [sebesthai] greatly this site.

Comments on ¶10

About “in the environs of Neon Teikhos” … The wording in the narrative blurs the exact location of the stay of Melēsigenēs in Neon Teikhos, since he is about to relocate to the city center of Cyme, which is some distance away—though not far enough away to be politically distinct from Neon Teikhos—as we have seen in the narrative that frames the words of Homer in the act of speaking to the people of Cyme in general while he is visiting the citadel of Neon Teikhos.

About “They venerated [sebesthai] greatly this site” … The theme of venerating a place that had made direct contact with Homer himself is characteristic of hero cult. On Homer as cult hero, see BA 17§9n3 (= p. 297), citing Brelich 1958:320–321; see also PP 113n34, with references to sites named after Homer in Chios, Smyrna, and Delos. Strabo 14.1.37 C646 emphasizes the special claim of Smyrna on Homer; he notes that the Smyrnaeans in his time have a bibliothēkē and a quadrangular stoa called the Homēreion, containing a neōs ‘shrine’ of Homer and a xoanon ‘wooden statue’ of him.

Bibliography

Adrados, F. R. 1952. La Dialectología griega como fuente para el estudio de las migraciones indoeuropeas en Grecia. Acta Salmanticensia 5/3. Salamanca.

AGHAP. See Nagy 2024.

Allen, T. W., ed. 1912. Homeri Opera (Hymns, Cycle, fragments, etc.). Oxford.

Allen, T. W., W. R. Halliday, and E. E. Sikes, eds. 1936. The Homeric Hymns. 2^nd  ed. Oxford.

Apostolou, S. 2023. “When was Aeolis? The Fluctuating Boundaries of Aeolis, Mysia, and the Troad.” Ancient History Bulletin 37:80–101.

BA. See Nagy 1979/1999.

Bachvarova, M. R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer:  The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge.

Beckman, G. M., T. R. Bryce, and E. H. Cline, ed. and commentary. 2011. The Ahhiyawa Texts. Writings from the Ancient World 28 (Society of Biblical Literature). Atlanta.

Brelich, A. 1958. Gli eroi greci: Un problema storico-religioso. Rome.

Cassio, A. C. 2002. “Early Editions of the Greek Epics and Homeric Textual Criticism in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BC.” Omero tremila anni dopo, ed. F. Montanari, 105–136. Rome.

Chadwick, J. 1963. The prehistory of the Greek language. Originally Vol. 2, Ch. 39 of the Cambridge Ancient History, ed. I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, and N. G. L. Hammond. Issued as a separate fascicle with separate pagination. Cambridge.

Chadwick, J. 1976: “Who Were the Dorians?” La Parola del Passato 31:103–117.

Edel, E. 1994. Die ägyptisch-hethitische Korrespondenz aus Boghazköi in babylonischer und hethtischer Sprache. Opladen.

Frame, D. 2009. Hippota Nestor. Hellenic Studies 37. Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Frame.Hippota_Nestor.2009.

GMP. See Nagy 1990b.

H24H. See Nagy 2013.

HC. See Nagy 2009|2008.

HPC. See Nagy 2010|2009/

HQ. See Nagy 1996b.

Lamberterie, Ch. de. 2024.10.23. “La fête des Achéens.”Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/la-fete-des-acheens/.

Melchert, H. C. 2007. “The Boundaries of Tarhuntassa Revisited.” Belkıs Dinçol ve Ali Dinçol’a Armağan, ed. M. Alparslan et al., 507–513. As the author has kindly informed me, this article may be downloaded from his curriculum vitae (number 88 under “Publications”) at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/publications.html.

Melchert, H. C. 2020.05.06, updated 2020.05.15. “Mycenaean and Hittite Diplomatic Correspondence: Fact and Fiction.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/mycenaean-and-hittite-diplomatic-correspondence-fact-and-fiction/.

Nagy, G. 1990a. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Pindars_Homer.1990.

Nagy, G. 1990b. Greek Mythology and Poetics. Ithaca, NY. Revised paperback edition 1992. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Greek_Mythology_and_Poetics.1990.

Nagy, G. 1994–1995. “A Mycenaean Reflex in Homer: phorênai.” Minos 29–30:171–175. Paired with the article of Willi 1994–1995. See also Nagy 2015.03.01.

Nagy, G. 2004. Homer’s Text and Language. Chicago and Urbana, IL. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homers_Text_and_Language.2004.

Nagy, G. 2005. “The Epic Hero.” A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. J. M. Foley, 71–89. Oxford. For the footnotes that are missing in this edition, see Nagy 2006.

Nagy, G. 2006. “The Epic Hero.” Expanded version of Nagy 2005. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.The_Epic_Hero.2005.

Nagy, G. 2006. “The Epic Hero.” Expanded version of Nagy 2005. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.The_Epic_Hero.2005.

Nagy, G. 2009|2008. Homer the Classic. Printed | Online version. Hellenic Studies 36. Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Classic.2008.

Nagy, G. 2010|2009. Homer the Preclassic. Printed | Online version. Berkeley and Los Angeles. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Preclassic.2009.

Nagy, G. 2011.04.06. “Observations on Greek dialects in the late second millennium BCE.” Proceedings of the Academy of Athens. Volume 86 Second Issue (2011) 81–96. Online version, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Observations_on_Greek_Dialects.2011.

Nagy, G. 2011a. “The Aeolic Component of Homeric Diction.” Proceedings of the 22nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. S. W. Jamison, H. C. Melchert, and B. Vine, 133–179. Bremen. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.The_Aeolic_Component_of_Homeric_Diction.2011.

Nagy, G. 2011b. “Asopos and His Multiple Daughters: Traces of Preclassical Epic in the Aeginetan Odes of Pindar.” In Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry; Myth, History, and Identity in the Fifth Century BC, ed. D. Fearn, 41–78. Oxford. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Asopos_and_His_Multiple_Daughters.2011.

Nagy, G. 2015.03.01. “A second look at a possible Mycenaean reflex in Homer: phorēnai.” http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.A_Second_Look_at_a_Possible_Mycenaean_Reflex_in_Homer.2015.

Nagy, G. 2015.07.22. “East of the Achaeans: Making up for a missed opportunity while reading Hittite texts.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/east-of-the-achaeans-making-up-for-a-missed-opportunity-while-reading-hittite-texts/.

Nagy, G. 2017. “Things Said and Not Said in a Ritual Text: Iguvine Tables Ib 10–16 / VIb 48–53.” Miscellanea Indogermanica: Festschrift für José Luis García Ramón zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. I. Hajnal, D. Kölligan, and K. Zipser, 509–549. Innsbruck. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Things_Said_and_Not_Said_in_a_Ritual_Text.2016.

Nagy, G. 2018.10.18. “‘I’m burning up in flames and I’m drowning’: On the poetry of Nikos Gatsos, inside the music of Stavros Xarhakos, inside the film Rebetiko.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/im-burning-up-in-flames-and-im-drowning-on-the-poetry-of-nikos-gatsos-inside-the-music-of-stavros-xarhakos-inside-the-film-rebetiko/.

Nagy, G. 2019.07.26. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology I, Hēraklēs as athlete.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-i-herakles-as-athlete/.

Nagy, G. 2019.08.02. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology II, Hēraklēs as an ‘Indo-European’ hero.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-ii-herakles-as-an-indo-european-hero/.

Nagy, G. 2019.08.08. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology III, Hēraklēs compared to a hero of the Mahābhārata.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-iii-herakles-compared-to-a-hero-of-the-mahabharata/.

Nagy, G. 2019.08.15. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology IV, Reconstructing Hēraklēs backward in time.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-iv-reconstructing-herakles-backward-in-time/.

Nagy, G. 2019.08.22. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology V, Reconstructing Hēraklēs forward in time.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-v-reconstructing-herakles-forward-in-time/.

Nagy, G. 2019.08.30. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology VI, A Mycenaean phase in the reception of myths about Hēraklēs.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-vi-a-mycenaean-phase-in-the-reception-of-myths-about-herakles/.

Nagy, G. 2019.09.06. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology VII, Greek mythological models for prototyping Hēraklēs.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-vii-greek-mythological-models-for-prototyping-herakles/.

Nagy, G. 2019.09.13. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology VIII, Some rough patches along the way toward a prototyping of Hēraklēs.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-viii-some-rough-patches-along-the-way-toward-a-prototyping-of-herakles/.

Nagy, G. 2019.09.20. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology IX, Further rough patches for Hēraklēs.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-ix-further-rough-patches-for-herakles/.

Nagy, G. 2019.09.27. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology X, A Homeric lens for viewing Hēraklēs.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-x-a-homeric-lens-for-viewing-herakles/.

Nagy, G. 2019.10.04. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XI, Homeric marginalizations of Hēraklēs as an epic hero.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xi-homeric-marginalizations-of-herakles-as-an-epic-hero/.

Nagy, G. 2019.10.11. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XII, Hēraklēs at his station in Mycenaean Tiryns.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xii-herakles-at-his-station-in-mycenaean-tiryns/.

Nagy, G. 2019.10.18. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XIII, with a focus on the role of Hēraklēs as kingmaker.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xiii-with-a-focus-on-the-role-of-herakles-as-kingmaker/.

Nagy, G. 2019.10.25. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XIV, with a focus on the role of Hēraklēs as a leader of fighting men.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xiv/.

Nagy, G. 2019.10.31. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XV, with a focus on Hēraklēs of Tiryns as military leader of the Mycenaean Empire.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xv/.

Nagy, G. 2019.11.08. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVI, with a focus on Dorians led by kingly ‘sons’ of Hēraklēs the kingmaker.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xvi-with-a-focus-on-dorians-led-by-kingly-sons-of-herakles-the-kingmaker/.

Nagy, G. 2019.11.15. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVII, with placeholders that stem from a conversation with Tom Palaima, starting with this question: was Hēraklēs a Dorian?” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xvii-with-placeholders-that-stem-from-a-conversation-with-tom-palaima-starting-with-this-question-was-herakles-a-dorian/.

Nagy, G. 2019.11.27. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVIII, a post-Mycenaean view of Hēraklēs as founder of the Olympics.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xviii-a-post-mycenaean-view-of-herakles-as-founder-of-the-olympics/.

Nagy, G. 2019.12.20. “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XIX, a post-Mycenaean view of Hēraklēs as a performer of his Labors.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-comparatively-about-greek-mythology-xix-a-post-mycenaean-view-of-herakles-as-a-performer-of-his-labors/.

Nagy, G. 2022.08.08. “Twelve Olympian Essays – Essay 8: A Mycenaean Hēraklēs, always a kingmaker and never a king.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/part-i-twelve-olympian-essays-essay-8-a-mycenaean-herakles-always-a-kingmaker-and-never-a-king/. Second edition of Nagy 2019.10.18.

Nagy, G. 2023.08.19, an archived essay dating from 2020.11.03. “Greek dialects in the late second millennium BCE.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/observations-on-greek-dialects-in-the-late-second-millennium-bce-2/. Pamphlet 1 in the series EPOPS-NAF.

Nagy, G. 2023.08.20, an archived essay dating from 2015.07.22. “East of the Achaeans: Making up for a missed opportunity while reading Hittite texts.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/east-of-the-achaeans-making-up-for-a-missed-opportunity-while-reading-hittite-texts-2/. Pamphlet 2 in the series EPOPS-NAF.

Nagy, G. 2023.08.21. Greek: An Updating of a Survey of Recent Work, second edition. Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/greek-an-updating-of-a-survey-of-recent-work-second-edition/.

Nagy, G. 2023.08.22, an archived essay, originally published as Nagy, G. 2011a. “The Aeolic Component of Homeric Diction.” Proceedings of the 22nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. S. W. Jamison, H. C. Melchert, and B. Vine, 133–179. Bremen. Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/the-aeolic-component-of-homeric-diction/. Pamphlet 3 in the series EPOPS-NAF.

Nagy, G. 2023.09.04. “Greek myths about invasions and migrations during the so-called Dark Age.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/greek-myths-about-invasions-and-migrations-during-the-so-called-dark-age/. Pamphlet 4 in the series EPOPS-NAF.

Nagy, G. 2023.09.07. “Yet another look at a possible Mycenaean reflex in Homer: phorēnai.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/yet-another-look-at-a-possible-mycenaean-reflex-in-homer-phorenai/. Pamphlet 5 in the series EPOPS-NAF.

Nagy, G. 2023.09.10, new version, “A ritualized rethinking of what it meant to be ‘European’ for ancient Greeks of the post-heroic age: evidence from the Heroikos of Philostratus.” Classical Continuum.https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/a-ritualized-rethinking-of-what-it-meant-to-be-european-for-ancient-greeks-of-the-post-heroic-age-evidence-from-the-heroikos-of-philostratus/. Pamphlet 6 in the series EPOPS-NAF. This version replaces the online version Nagy 2020.11.03 and the printed version Nagy 2019/2020.

Nagy, G. 2023.09.13, new version,“Signs of Hero Cult in Homeric Poetry.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/signs-of-hero-cult-in-homeric-poetry/. Pamphlet 7 in the series EPOPS-NAF. This version replaces the online version Nagy 2020.11.02 and the printed version Nagy 2012.

Nagy, G. 2024. Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry. Cambridge, MA. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/book/ancient-greek-heroes-athletes-poetry/.

Palaima, T. G. 1996–1997. “po-re-na: A Mycenaean reflex in Homer? An I-E figure in Mycenaean?” Minos 31–32:303–312.

Palaima, T. G. 1999. “Kn02 – Tn316.” Floreant Studia Mycenaea. Akten des X. Internationalen Mykenologischen Colloquiums, ed. S. Deger-Jalkotzy, S. Hiller, O. Panagl, 2:437–461. Vienna.

Palaima, T. G. 2002. “Special vs. Normal Mycenaean: Hand 24 and Writing in the Service of the King?” A-NA-QO-TA. Studies Presented to J. T. Killen = Minos 33–34 (1998–1999), ed. J. Bennet and J. Driessen, 205–221. Salamanca.

1. See Nagy 1990a.
2. See Nagy 1996a.

Risch, E. 1966. “Les différences dialectales dans le mycénien.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies, ed. L. R. Palmer and J. Chadwick, 150–157. Cambridge.

Risch, E. 1979. “Die griechischen Dialekte im 2. vorchristlichen Jahrtausend.” Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici 20:91–111.

West, M. L., ed. 2003. With translations. Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer. Cambridge, MA.

Willi, A. 1994–1995. “do-ra-qe pe-re po-re-na-qe a-ke.” Minos 29–30:177–185.

Woodard, R. 1986. “Dialectal Differences at Knossos.” Kadmos 25:49–74. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:WoodardR.Dialectal_Differences_at_Knossos.1986.

Woodard, R. 2018 (after 2018.02.04). “Further Thoughts on Linear B po-re-na, po-re-si, and po-re-no-.” http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:WoodardR.Further_Thoughts_on_Linear_B_po-re-na_po-re-si_and_po-re-no-.2018.

Woodard, R. 2018.02.04. “Linear B po-re-na, po-re-si, and po-re-no-.” Classical Inquiries https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/linear-b-po-re-na-po-re-si-and-po-re-no/.

Woodard, R. 2021.12.31. “A Draft: Aeolian Origins, and Other Mycenaean Matters.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/a-draft-of-the-forthcoming-book-aeolian-origins-and-other-mycenaean-matters/. See also Woodard 2025.

Woodard, R. 2025. Aeolic and Aeolians: Origins of an Ancient Greek Language and its Community of Speakers. Cambridge.