In the Odyssee, after the adventures on sea, there’s the final part when Odysseus comes home and finds that his wife is besieged by suitors. Athena did disguise him as old man, and after revealing himself to Penelope, they hatch a plan on how to defeat the suitors: they all try to string Odysseus bow (and shoot through the ears of a dozen axes lined up in a row) but nobody can. Until Odysseus, who’s at least 20 years older than the rest (Illiad plus his travels so far) and disguised as old man, steps up and strings the bow (with the wonderfully poetic description that when he plucks the string, it twitters like a bird. Never heard a string make that sound, but it’s beautiful image!)
Then he shoots the arrow through the axes (fulfilling the literal part of the test) and starts shooting the suitors and taking revenge.
Back when I read this, I already wondered why nobody else could draw this bow. I assumed it was part of making the hero of the story stronger than anybody else - and the first-rate heroes had gone to Troja with him, so the suitors left behind would have been second-class and softened up from easy living having feasts - but it still sounded overdone.
Then I read an article (on TV tropes?) that mentioned that some people claim that Odysseus bow was a Skythian bow - that is, recurve type - which would require knowledge on how to string it, because it works different from the normal long-bow.
Is this the current major scholar opinion, that Odysseus had a Skythian/ recurve bow? Or an outsider interpretation?
What does the text say to support or contradict it?
What other interpretations among main scholars are there? (E.g. it’s just a story-telling device, not meant literally)?
Did Greeks of that period or of the Homer period when it was written down not know about Skythian bows? Wouldn’t they have seen them during their battles with other people, or learned about them by trade?
I think the idea is that only Odysseus is strong enough to string the bow, not that it is any special kind.
Telemachus, his son, tries first, and “has it all but strung” until his father gives him the high sign not to string it and mess up the plan. The idea is that Telemachus is almost, but not quite, grown up and ready to be the man of the family. (He does other things to show this, like order his mother around, proving he is no longer a boy.)
But the literary idea is that Odysseus is proving his worthiness to come back and take over again, because he is stronger than all the other suitors.
Then comes that wonderfully touching scene when Penelope tries him with the story about their marriage bed made out of an olive tree that is still in the ground. And Odysseus spots this, and proves it is really him.
And he and Penelope go to bed in their special bed, and spend the night making love again and telling of their adventures.
Ever strung a recurve bow? It’s a skill, not a brute force thing. It’s all in the wrist.
All of the Odyssey is about how crafty and cunning Odysseus is, not how strong he is. The point with the bow was not a measure of strength, but yet another demonstration of wits.
All that shows, though, is that they think it’s strength they lack. And surely, even without the proper technique, you could string a recurve bow with enough brute strength-- It’s just that that amount of brute strength is beyond any of the suitors. To the clever competitor, though, it’s not primarily a test of strength, and the brute force required is a much more attainable level.
As with so many things in ancient literature, the story of the Odyssey seems to be a work of accretion by many hands. As the wording of the epic makes clear, it seems to have been a question mainly of strength. But one suspects that there might be vmorebehind this, and it’s entirely possible that in its earliest form it really was a question of skill that the suitors did not have. I have a commentary on the Odyssey that illustrates the point with a period depiction of an archer stringing a recurve bow, bending the bow backwards with both hands and his feet. But it’s undeniable that the language of the poem doesn’t support the idea that this was a question of method rather than strength. I suspect it starte out as the one, then developed to the other, because it resonated better with audiences.
I would think “stringing a bow” would be a pretty normal part of the skill set of any Archaic Age warlord. I don’t really see any reason to believe it was other then what its presented as in the Odyssey, as a feat of strength.
Also note that there is already a skill component to the test, once the bow is strung the suitors are supposed to shoot an arrow between a bunch of axes.
Well, yes, if Odysseus considered that something to which a loyal wife would object.
Even when I first read The Odyssey, I was struck by the cruelty with which they treated women. Even the part I mentioned above, where Telemachus is becoming a man, the sign is that he orders his mother around.
And embedded in the whole homecoming part, after Odysseus has killed all the suitors, he calls out all the servant women who have been sexually involved with the suitors, and hangs them. As if they had a lot of choice about whether or not they were going to sleep with the suitors. They were slaves, for heaven’s sake. But it is presented as part of the “purification” of the house after Odysseus kills the suitors. They have had sex with the suitors, and so they are sort of “spoiled” - not fit to remain as slaves in the newly restored household. And no one thinks twice about it.
And of course the whole Iliad is about who gets the princess, who has been captured in battle and is treated like another of the spoils, like good armor and bars of bronze and all that. Just another trophy to be passed around. Helen doesn’t get that treatment, even though her leaving her husband starts the whole mess. She goes back to Menelaus and her excuse that she was enchanted by Aphrodite.
“Sing in me, o Muse, of the wrath of Achilles”. They might have added “and what an asshole he, and everyone else, even the heroes, is towards anyone who isn’t aristocracy”.
Oh Muse, sing of the rarity with which I am moved by the Gods to agree with Shodan, most regardful of the Dopers, yet like unto a blind squirrel, right twice a day.
There is absolutely nothing in the story to suggest stringing the bow was considered an act of skill, and it explicitly says the suitors lacked the strength. Anyone trying to come up with an alternate version where it was skill and not strength is distorting the facts to have it make more sense in their own heads despite the evidence. Myths already have their own logic.Most of the people trying to interpret them don’t understand that logic, because they are trying to think up some clever (or what passes as clever to modern audiences who don’t know any better) explanation for something that doesn’t need an explanation.
Well, yeah. These aristocrats were the favored of the Gods. After Agamemnon insults Apollo by taking his priest’s daughter, who does the son of Zeus and Leto punish? The common soldiers are felled by Apollo’s arrows while Agamemnon remains unscathed. There’s no concept of equality as we understand it. At least not when it comes to the God’s favored and the rest of the people.
As for the strength of the bow. Well, heroes were generally stronger than the rest of the people. When Patroklos picks up a rock and hurls it at Hector’s driver, knocking his eyes out, the text describes the missile as being so heavy as to require three “modern” men to even lift the thing.
But apparently, scholars also spend their time discussing the Iliad seriously - not only Schlieman, who did discover Troy (not the mythical city - wrong period, but the real ancient one) because he believed it had a kernel of truth.
Apparently, scholars say that the method of fighting and the weapons described in the Iliad were wrong period for the time described, because the Iliad was written much later, so Homer was giving what the audience thought appropriate for that time - kind of like how Hollywood portrays the Middle Ages or Robin Hood with nice costumes and not historically correct things.
Actually, no. That is, if we take the Odysseus of the Iliad together with the Odyssee - which not all scholars do because of the 1000 year gap between them, and because in the Iliad Odysseus is one hero among many, but in the Odyssee, he’s an individual, a modern man. (Despite values dissonance and old-fashioned values).
In the Iliad, he’s shown as cunning - but not the smartest of all, because another guy (Polydoros?) is at least as smart as him, revealing Odysseus’ attempt to get out of the draft with a section 8 as fake. Which gets Odysseus so jealous that he starts a plot to discredit that guy, leading to his death! So not a moral ideal, but a real person with emotions.
Among the heros of the Iliad, he’s strong, but not the strongest. In both epics, his by-name is “the Cunning”, to show that his strength is not his muscles, but his brain. (And he is obviously amoral about lying or deceiving to get his ends - but obviously in the Greek culture, that was not bad. When Athene appears to him when he arrives in Ithaka, he starts telling a tall tale about who he is, and she just pats him on the cheek and says “Well you are the smartest among mortals, but I’m the smartest among the Gods, so don’t try to con me.” She doesn’t rebuke him for lying per se, just for trying it on her.
That’s why the pure strength competition is so odd compared to all the other troubles so far he solved with smarts. Assuming therefore that there is a trick to stringing the bow that the suitors didn’t know, but Odysseus did, (and that Homer’s listeners would pick up on) would make more sense to me in context than just saying “Well he’s stronger than the others because he’s a hero”.
Criticizing the heroes of the ancient Greek epics because of their attitudes to women and the lower classes is a little like bemoaning the fact that they don’t wear suits and ties. It happened a while ago, that’s how things were.
Was the recurve bow a “modern” invention/ introduction to Homer’s audience? Would they think of Odysseus having a “modern” bow because he was smarter than his contemporaries, and knowing how to string it?
Are there different words for (long)bow and (recurve) bow in Homerian Greek?