Boiotia, Athens, the Peisistratids, and the Odyssey's Catalogue of Heroines (Od. 11.225-332)
Citation: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (Duke) 41 2000 (2002) 193-222
Abstract:
In this article Larson argues that the historical and political context of Peisistratid Athens had a formative effect on the Odyssey's catalogue of heroines. It was during the Peisistratid recension that traditional Boiotian and Thessalian figures were juxtaposed with shorter Athenian stories, all of which were familiar from oral tradition. S. West and other commentators have likewise discerned an Attic and likely a Peisistratid influence on the entire Odyssey, most notably in the poem's concern with the Neleid family of Nestor of Pylos (we know from Herodotus that Peisistratos' family claimed descent from the Pylian Neleids). Larson divides her argument into two main sections: an initial treatment of the catalogue and the myths it contains and a second section detailing the material and epigraphical remains from Boiotia that link the Peisistratids to the Boiotians of the sixth century BCE. She concludes that the Odyssey, performed in Athens in the sixth century, perhaps at the Panathenaic festival expanded by the Peisistratids, incorporated traditions of well-known heroines of particular relevance to Thessaly, Boiotia, and Thebes, communities with whom the Peisistratids were involved at the time in politics and cult.