Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art

Sarah P. Morris

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691241944
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a major revisionary approach to ancient Greek culture, Sarah Morris invokes as a paradigm the myths surrounding Daidalos to describe the profound influence of the Near East on Greece's artistic and literary origins.

DAIPALOS

AND THE LEVANT

• PART I •

Daidalos and Daidala

in Greek Poetry

CHAPTER 1

Craft and Craftsmen in Epic Poetry

IN ILIAD 18.592, Daidalos makes not only his first appearance in the Greek imagination, but also his only one in the corpus of Homeric poetry. Thus he is born as a hapax legomenon occasioned by a simile, the weakest of links for any epic phenomenon. Given the importance of this passage for his existence, a close examination of its context and epic associations is fundamental to explaining him in the context of poetic language.¹ His name requires reference to the epic corpus of "daidalic" words, since he obviously bears one of those redende Namen bestowed on other Homeric craftsmen and personifies specific qualities manifest elsewhere in cognates. Thus he keeps company with

("the builder"),

("the joiner"), and perhaps even Homer himself, all names for artists derived from their activity.²

An extensive family of words in the Homeric poems derives from a root of undetermined meaning,

reduplicated as

to produce primarily adjectives

less frequently a neuter noun, used only in the plural

twice a verb in the present participle

and, last but not least,

himself.³ The etymology of its root remains unknown: Indo-European sources (*del-) and Semitic *dal- (as in

"writing tablet") have both been proposed, but neither demonstrates an independent connection with its epic manifestations.⁴ No ancient usage that does not derive from its original epic context can be attested for any versions of the words. In poetry they describe, represent, or personify objects of intricate and expensive craftsmanship; expressions such as "well crafted," "intricately worked," or "skillfully wrought" satisfy their meaning, encouraged by two instances as a verb for the activity of a craftsman at work. All ancient glosses and modern understanding of these words can be traced to their epic occurrences, which lend them meaning but also derive their narrative significance from them.

A survey of epic

in terms of metrical, syntactical, and thematic distribution reveals far greater powers of connotation than specific denotation. The most common form of these words in poetry is in adjectives; they account for twenty-eight of thirty-six appearances throughout the Iliad and Odyssey. Their morphology, identified by the

suffix, makes them material- or Stoffadjective, albeit of unfamiliar Stoff.⁵ Neither position nor distribution of these adjectives shows them to be traditional epithets fixed in a metrical formula; they represent morphological units of greater flexibility within the technique of composition.⁶ Since their greatest concentration is in the Iliad, and the artist himself is introduced in that poem, it forms an appropriate departure for this quest for Daidalos.

The most frequent manifestations of this word family involve armor, the man-made barrier between warrior and weapon, and often the outfit accompanying a hero into death and glory—hence their concentration in the narrative of the battlefield rather than in the Odyssey, an epic of return, where

never describes armor. Nor is it surprising to find eight out of twenty-eight occurrences in the Iliad clustered in Book 18, devoted to the armor and arming of the best of the Achaeans, Achilles.

Most frequently qualified as

(five times, of which four are

is the

or cuirass, an outfit once rejected as a historical anachronism until archaeology confirmed its Bronze Age existence.⁷ Paris (Iliad 3.358), Menelaos (4.136), Hektor (7.252), Diomedes (8.195) and Odysseus (11.436) are all endangered, at a moment in battle, by an arrow or spear that strikes them:

and pierced through their much-decorated cuirass.

The practical assembly of armor in each of these passages has troubled scholars, who wonder how to wear

and

(cuirass, belly guard, and belt) together, but their combination is purely poetic.⁸ The adjective is clearly fixed in an iteratum formulaic for signaling a hero's proximity to death: "Despite the excellent workmanship of his armor, it failed to keep an arrow from his body, but prevented a fatal wound." For in all five passages, the hero is rescued from death. The Trojans save themselves: Paris avoids the spear of Menelaos through agility

"turned aside") and Hektor escapes a thrust by Ajax (7.252). The Greeks, in contrast, are saved by Athena: Menelaos is wounded, despite the protection of a

"elaborate belt") and a

"barrier against spears") in addition to his

"much-decorated cuirass," but his skin is only grazed by the arrow, averted by the goddess to his most heavily protected part. As he assures his brother (4.184-87), various components of his armor saved him, and this time the

is praised as

"all-glittering," the

as the work of skilled craftsmen

"bronze-workers made it"), without a repetition of

Likewise, Odysseus skins hi...